Madam Sibyl's First Client: A Victorian San Francisco Story Read online

  Lottie, a healthy woman in her early fifties whose husband had left her very well provided-for, seemed like an easy assignment. In fact, Annie developed a deep affection for the good-natured widow in the six months she lived with her. She soon discovered, however, what John’s parents meant by keeping her out of trouble. Lottie was rapidly throwing her inheritance away on a series of mediums and fortune-tellers who claimed to communicate with her departed husband. It wasn’t the fees she paid these persons that was the main problem. They were certainly no more a drain on Lottie’s substantial income than if her aunt spent her days shopping. No, it was one particular trance medium, who called himself Professor Magnus, who presented the danger. He had convinced Lottie that her departed husband wanted her to invest her capital in a set of very risky investments. Annie feared if the influence of this phony professor wasn’t checked it would mean financial ruin for Lottie.

  Annie initially tried, unsuccessfully, to warn Lottie away from him. Then, out of desperation, she told Lottie that attending all these séances had awakened Annie’s own abilities. She convinced Lottie that she could now communicate with a spirit of her own, Madam Sibyl, who helped her forecast the future. Lottie was delighted. She started hosting small séances in her home, where Annie pretended to communicate with this Madam Sibyl and dispensed advice to Lottie and her friends. Regrettably, Madam Sibyl’s business advice proved so accurate, and Lottie and her friends so pleased, that word reached Annie’s father-in-law. Annie had just been recalled back to New York City by him to “explain herself,” when the letter from Herman Stein reached her, telling her of her inheritance from her Aunt Agatha. Two days later, she was on a transcontinental train to San Francisco, having pawned the last piece of jewelry she owned to pay the fare and baggage costs and leaving her miserable years of dependence on the extended Fuller family behind.

  She thought she’d left Madam Sibyl behind as well. In fact, she had forgotten that she’d ever mentioned her brief career in mediumship to the Steins when she first arrived in town. Consequently, she was surprised three weeks ago when Herman Stein suggested resurrecting Madam Sibyl. The idea came up during a meeting with him to go over her accounts for the first three months the boarding house was in operation. Double entry bookkeeping was no mystery to Annie, but nothing could make the sums add up. The costs of running the boarding house were barely being met by the income she was generating. Even when the remaining large room in the attic was let, this would only provide a tiny margin of safety. She didn’t know what to do, and she hoped Mr. Stein could offer some suggestion of how to better economize.

  The Steins had taken her under their wing from the moment she arrived in San Francisco, and she wasn’t sure she could ever repay them for their support, but the last thing she wanted was to feel economically beholden to them. She felt uncomfortable as it was with their decision to move into her boarding house, knowing that they could afford much grander accommodations in one of the better city hotels. Esther Stein assured her that she was more than ready to leave the home they’d been sharing with their youngest son and his wife and small children. Confiding to Annie that she and her newest daughter-in-law did not rub along well together under the same roof, Esther said, “It wasn’t that I minded handing over the work of running the household, but Myra insisted on asserting her prerogatives as the mistress of the household at every turn. No, it was time for us to move. Our rooms here are just perfect. With Herman off traveling more days than he is home, I would feel so lonely rattling around in some hotel surrounded by strangers. Besides, Mrs. O’Rourke is one of the best cooks in San Francisco.”

  Annie smiled, remembering with what relish both Steins enjoyed Beatrice’s pies, and knew that at least in that last statement Esther was telling the truth. But she worried that her motherly friend might be pressuring her husband to loan Annie money, which is why she was nervous about revealing to him the thinness of her profit margin. However, instead of offering to help her, Herman Stein had pulled out a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle and placed his finger smack dab in the middle of the front page. She’d leaned over and seen that he was pointing to the section headed “Special Notices” that listed the numerous advertisements by people professing to be clairvoyants of one stripe or the other.

  When she realized that he was suggesting she do something similar, you could have knocked her over with a feather! But Mr. Stein was quite persuasive, and after a good deal of discussion, Annie finally agreed that it was worth giving his idea a try. She was adamant that she would not pretend to be communing with the spirit word but would build on the knowledge she had already gotten when living with Lottie on how to read palms and cast horoscopes. Mr. Stein had evidently given the matter some thought, because he already had crafted a draft of the ad he thought she should put into the paper. He recommended that she charge $2 a session, which was higher than any of the other mediums, arguing that this would winnow out the riffraff. He also suggested she schedule appointments, which would give her time to do the necessary research that went into her financial advice.

  Annie thought this was an excellent idea, and it would also make it easier for her to keep her identities as Mrs. Fuller and Madam Sibyl separate. At the last moment, she decided to include wording that implied she would be giving more than business advice. She thought the years she’d spent observing and catering to the complex personalities among the Fuller clan should count for something. The resulting advertisement read: Clairvoyant, specializing in business and domestic advice, consultations by appointment only, fee $2, with the boarding house address listed as the contact.

  What followed was a frantic two weeks of preparation. Deciding on a costume, buying the wig, and locating a copy of the English translation of Rothman’s Chiromantia Theorica Practica and several books on astrology that she had found in a used bookstore off Market Street. Rothmann’s 16th century treatise on palmistry argued that the mounts and lines of the hand were ruled by the planets so that by looking at a person’s hands you could determine their birth chart and vice versa. This conjunction of the two philosophies was useful for her purposes. Not believing in either palmistry or astrology, she didn’t care if his analysis was correct or if contemporary practitioners accepted his argument. All she cared about was getting the terminology that would make her pronouncements sound reasonable to someone who believed in either discipline.

  Two days ago, she finally put the advertisement in the Morning Call and the Chronicle. While she hadn’t yet gotten any response from these notices, Mr. Stein had drummed up a few clients for her from among his business associates, and the first was due to arrive any moment.

  The loud peel of the front door bell sent Annie’s pulse racing, and she walked quickly to the table and sat down, clasping her hands in front of her to keep them from trembling. After a moment, she heard the sound of voices in the hallway. Kathleen, bless her soul, must have been hovering near the front hallway in anticipation of the client’s arrival. The door to the parlor swung open, and Kathleen entered the room, sketched a curtsy, and announced loudly, “Mr. Matthew Voss, for Madam Sibyl.”

  *****

  “I want to assure you that I am not someone you can bamboozle with a lot of hocus-pocus. As far as I’m concerned, Madam, the whole lot of you are just bunch of charlatans, and the men who spend good money on such are fools. And I can promise you, I am not a fool!”

  Mathew Voss, a tall stooped man in his sixties, glared at her from across the room, and Annie felt the heat of anger flush her cheeks. Why ever did Mr. Stein think that this man was going to be willing to take advice from Madam Sibyl? Kathleen even had trouble getting him to hand over his top hat, scarf and gloves, and when Annie had asked him to come and sit at the table in front of her, he’d refused, saying he would prefer to stand. Arrogant old goat. He reminded her unpleasantly of her father-in-law.

  “Well it’s a good thing you aren’t a fool, since I have no desire to waste my time or knowledge on a fool,” Annie said, glaring back at
him. “Now come sit down, deposit your fee in the bowl, and let me get to work. Or you can ring for the maid to escort you out.”

  In the silence that followed, Annie heard the tick, tick of the mantel clock at counterpoint with the blood thumping at her temple.

  “Ha!” Voss suddenly barked out. “Good for you.” He moved across the room in a sort of stiff lope and pulled out the chair. As he sat down, he peered at her shortsightedly and said, “Wearing some sort of get-up are you? Well I don’t expect that Madam Sibyl is your real name, either.” Taking a well-worn leather wallet out of his suit coat and holding it cautiously below the table edge, he removed two bills and tossed them into the wooden bowl on the right side of the table, saying, “Well what do we do now, eh?”

  “If you please, could you put both of your hands on the table in front of you, palms down to begin with?” Annie said quietly. Lottie and her friends had all been experts at what to expect at a séance, so they required a minimum of explanation. She’d decided to start with reading this first client’s palms because she didn’t know his birth date, a requisite for coming up with a horoscope reading. Given his overt skepticism, even palm reading might not work. Maybe, if she could get him talking, she would think of something that would ease his suspicions.

  She leaned forward and asked him why he had come and what he expected from her. He said simply that he’d heard she was the source of Mr. Porter’s recent string of good luck in picking mining stocks, and he wanted in on the secret. While he spoke, she visually examined the tops of his hands. She knew he owned a furniture company, Voss and Samuels, and that the recent depression had hurt his business; Mr. Stein had told her that much. Building construction and factory production was picking up, though. She wondered, did he now have a little extra money he wanted to invest for the long term or did he need something that would give him a quick return, maybe to pay off some outstanding debts? Was he the kind of man who craved the excitement that went along with a gamble on stocks, the riskier the better, or was he more comfortable with a conservative strategy. Her husband John had been one of the former. For some reason he felt putting money into some hair-brained scheme had made him powerful and masculine. At first glance, Mr. Voss did not seem like this sort of man.

  The strong beam of light from the lamp behind her showed her some clues to his character. The light tracery of white scars running over the prominent veins and swollen knuckles of his hands suggested that Voss had spent a good deal of his life as a practicing woodworker. And, while his nails were clipped short and were clean as befitted a gentleman, she saw faint brown lines along the cuticles, which she suspected came from wood stain. This, plus a recently healed cut on his index finger, indicated that Voss was the kind of business owner who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.

  The telltale sheen of the wool at the elbow and knees of his black suit suggested they were decades old, but his shirt had one of the modern-styled collars, his cuffs were nicely starched, and his watch chain and cuff links were solid gold. In addition, his thinning grey hair and modest mustache and beard were freshly barbered. Voss was clearly not a man who was about to throw out a suit if it was still serviceable, but he wasn’t poor by any means, and he probably had a manservant who made sure he went out of the house properly groomed, his clothes neatly pressed.

  “Please, could you turn your hands over now,” Annie responded after he added that he’d give anything a try once, if it would make him money. He barked out another short laugh and complied, staring at her challengingly.

  She’d prepared a whole speech about heart lines and the mount of Saturn, but she knew that this would just sound like some “hocus-pocus” to him. Picking up his right hand and examining the darker vertical and horizontal lines on his palms that intersected with white lines of more old scars, she said, “Mr. Voss, the purpose of our consultation today is for me to assess how your past is going to influence your future. Only then can I adequately advise you.”

  Ignoring his sound of derision, she continued. “As a carpenter, when you have a piece of wood in your hands, don’t you examine it? Determine what kind of tree it came from, read its history in the grain, the evidence of foxing, and the placement of knotholes? And don’t you use that knowledge to decide how to make the best use of the wood, what its future should be? Should it be turned into the back of a chair, the legs of a sofa, an ornate frame for a mirror?”

  Seeing the first glimmer of interest in his slate grey eyes, she went on, using the bits of information she had gotten from the Steins, her knowledge about San Francisco’s history and economy, and her understanding of human nature, to tell Matthew Voss a story that she hoped he would find familiar enough to embrace as his own.

  “Your life line tells me there have been three stages to your life so far. The first part of the line shows decades of steady progress, then the line nearly breaks, which represents an abrupt change in your way of life. When you traveled west, perhaps? This was a time of struggle for you, but it was very short. See there, where the lifeline becomes progressively deeper and darker as it curves towards the base of your thumb. You found your life’s work, I believe. Wait, oh my, Mr. Voss. See where the vertical line of fate connects your heart line to your life line—right there.”

  Annie felt Voss’s hand jerk slightly. She paused, looked into his eyes, and said, “Mrs. Voss came into your life at that point, didn’t she? Tell me about her.”

  As if she had found a secret lever that opened up a locked box, Mathew Voss’s words tumbled out.

  He told Annie about the first time he met his wife, Amelia, who’d been living among the Rincon Hill enclave of wealthy Southerners, and how her gentle beauty instantly charmed him. He described the progress of his courtship in detail. “Her mother didn’t think I was good enough.” Voss frowned at the memory. “Didn’t think this Yankee could treat her precious daughter like a lady. Far as I could find out, Amelia’s father, some shiftless gambler, had left the two of them penniless and they were living off the charity of a rich cousin. You can bet her mother changed her mind quick enough about me when I let slip how much I was worth.”

  He then proudly recounted to Annie how he had made his fortune by taking advantage of the opportunities offered by a city that was growing by over a thousand persons a day in the early fifties. “Every saloon needed a bar and stools, every boarding house a set of tables, chairs, and beds, and every miner that struck it rich wanted a house with all the trimmings. And everything had to be shipped round the Horn in those days, so once my partner and I started producing furniture locally, we could pretty much ask whatever we wanted for our price.”

  Voss leaned back with a grin. Annie knew she needed to get him to talk more about the present, so she picked up his hand again and looked for something else she could use. She saw that near the end of the lifeline that the line split and then came together. She pointed this out to him and said, “Here you ran into trouble, pretty recently.”

  “Damned Panic of 1873. Housing construction stopped. People canceled their orders after we had already paid for the wood, we had to retrench.” Voss stopped and again glared at her. “But doesn’t take much of a clairvoyant to tell a San Francisco businessman he’s recently been in a spot of economic bother. Wasn’t so bad I had to go drown myself like old Ralston.”

  Annie had her own private reasons for why she didn’t like to discuss the possible suicide a William Ralston, the prominent banker and owner of the Palace Hotel, who drowned in the Bay. But she couldn’t help but wonder if it was significant that Voss brought up Ralston, since it was the failure of the Bank of California that supposedly prompted this man’s death. The most recent example of a bank failure in town was the Pioneer Land Bank. The failure of this bank and the Pioneer Safety Deposit Company, both run by a local businessman, Joseph C. Duncan, had been all over the news last October, a month after Annie arrived in San Francisco. No one was sure whether theses businesses had failed because of bad management or embezzlement. In either ca
se, nearly a million dollars in assets had vanished, as had Duncan. Could some of those assets have been Voss’s?

  To test this theory, she pointed to a small patch of fine crisscrosses towards the end of the headline that ran across the middle of his palm. “Mr. Voss, this indicates more than regular economic problems. This suggests that recently you faced a serious financial loss, and the fact that the sign is found on your head line indicates that this was because you had put your trust in someone who betrayed you.”

  Voss gasped and withdrew his hand from her, clenching both hands into fists. “God damned Duncan. He lives on Geary just a few blocks east of me, and I often rode the horse car with him up from Market. He convinced me to invest a chunk of my profits into the Pioneer Safety Deposit Company. Turns out the certificates aren’t worth the paper they were printed on. Thank goodness I hadn’t invested everything. I like to spread my money around. But I can tell you, between the costs of running the business, the new house I built a few years ago, and my wastrel of a son, I can’t afford to throw any more money away.”

  Voss pointed his finger at her and said, “But how did you know? I haven’t told a soul about this.”