Madam Sibyl's First Client: A Victorian San Francisco Story Page 3

  *****

  “Oh ma’am, what did you tell him when he said that?” Kathleen stood with the bowl she’d been drying clasped to her chest; her blue eyes round with excitement.

  It was late the next evening, and Annie sat at the kitchen table folding napkins while Beatrice and Kathleen were working on finishing the dinner dishes. Esther had joined them since her husband boarded a steamship that morning bound for Portland, where their oldest son ran the northern branch of the business. She sat knitting in the rocking chair by the stove. This was the first chance Annie had to tell everyone how the consultation with Voss went. She was just at the point in her story where Voss angrily asked her how she could have known that he was one of the hundreds of San Francisco citizens who had lost money to Joseph Duncan.

  “I told him that he was the person who had told me. I simply used the signs I saw in his hand to figure out that he had suffered some recent betrayal. He was the one who actually named Duncan as the source of that betrayal.”

  “Oh, Annie, you didn’t say that,” Esther exclaimed. “No man wants to think he’s been tricked by a woman.”

  “I know; it just popped out. He stared at me for a moment. Then he started to laugh with this sort of wheezy cackle.” Annie smiled. “Finally, he said since I was obviously good at putting two-and-two together, he would give me a chance. Said I had one month to prove I could make him money.”

  Beatrice looked over her shoulder, her hands in the soapy water of the dishpan, and said, “Well, to think that the gentleman got mixed up with that awful man Duncan.”

  “Herman once told me Joseph Duncan could sell a rare book to a blind man, he was that much of a silver-tongued devil. One of the reasons my husband never invested in any of his schemes,” Esther said.

  Annie added, “I remember reading in the paper when the whole scandal erupted that a son-in-law disappeared with him, and that the police questioned one of his sons, accusing him of helping his father get out of town.”

  “That would be Willie, a son from his first marriage,” replied Esther. “The person I feel sorry for is his current wife and her four small children. My oldest daughter, Adela, knows Mary Duncan socially. She said the youngest daughter, Isadora, was born just this past May and there are three other small children at home with her. Adela told me that Mrs. Duncan is practically a prisoner in her own home, between the police and the newspaper reporters. Mrs. Duncan’s father was a state senator back in the fifties, and she has been very prominent in society, on a lot of arts committees. She must be feeling such shame. The papers said that over a million dollars in assets have disappeared.”

  “Shame is right,” put in Beatrice. “What I heard was he robbed a good number of poor widows and orphans of their mites. But the police don’t believe he’s gotten out of town yet. Leastways, that’s what my nephew Patrick told me. He’s just joined the police force, taking after my dear departed husband, don’t you know. Patrick says they’ve staked out some ship in the harbor. Heard rumors that Duncan might be planning on slipping on board.”

  “Well, I never,” said Kathleen. “You mean he’s been hiding out all this time in the city? Do you think his wife knows where he is? And where is the money?”

  “I suspect that most of it has been spent already,” Annie said. “In most cases like this, the men involved live way beyond their means and speculate on the stock market, hoping that they will strike it rich and be able to pay off the people who invested with them. Mr. Voss certainly doesn’t expect to get anything back.”

  “A million dollars. All gone!” Kathleen muttered to herself, shaking her head in disbelief as she turned back to drying the dishes.

  Four years ago, when Annie finally discovered the full extent of her own husband’s disastrous losses at the gambling tables and the stock market, she’d felt much the same way. Her inheritance from her father, the stock certificates his father had given them as a wedding present, their house…all gone. While she felt sympathy for those widows and orphans who’d lost their savings, she also felt some sympathy for Mrs. Duncan. A woman who may not have known what her husband was up to and was now left, as Annie had been, to deal with the aftermath.

  “Well, dear,” Esther’s voice broke into Annie’s thoughts. “Do you think you can come up with something to help Mr. Voss out? One month doesn’t seem like very much time. I don’t think he is being very fair.”

  “I know, but I had a few suggestions ready to give him,” Annie replied. “One tip I had already passed on to your husband. I recommended to them both that that they bid for part of a shipment of flax seed that just arrived in port.”

  “Good heavens, Annie, whatever will Mr. Voss do with flax?” Esther said. “Herman, I can understand. He buys and sells all sorts of things. Last week he was quite excited about a shipment of Proctor and Gamble’s soap he’d imported from Cincinnati. He said their soap was as near in quality to a castile soap as could be, for half the price. But what’s a furniture manufacturer like Voss going to do with flax?”

  “Well, you all know about the flooding that’s been going on up in the Sacramento River Valley the past month? How the levees have all been washed away so that the Delta Islands are completely under water.”

  “Yes, terrible news,” responded Esther. “That nice Mr. Harvey who shares the room across the hall from me, has family in Sacramento. He told me over breakfast that his wife wrote that you had to take a row boat to get to the store, the streets were so far under water.”

  “Well,” Annie said, “I thought of the floods when I saw flax on a list of goods being auctioned off this Monday from a ship newly arrived from New Zealand. I remembered reading an article last month in the California Farmer about imported flax from there. Evidently, New Zealand flax isn’t just good for making things like rope. Because its root system is very dense, it is recommended for planting on the banks of levees to help hold the soil together.”

  Esther laughed and said, “So you put two-and-two together and thought anyone who bought up a supply of this flax seed could make a profit selling it to the farmers who are going to have to rebuild their levees when the flooding is over?”

  “Right you are! Your husband thought it was a good idea, and Voss did as well. I also recommended that Voss prepare a bid to provide furniture for finishing the newest section of City Hall. From the signs I have read in the papers, I think that there is soon going to be a move to fund the completion of the rest of the building. ”

  “Really, Annie, do you think so?” Esther put down her knitting. “I thought from what Herman said that nothing more was going to happen until they finished their investigation into the shoddy plumbing in the sections that are ready done.”

  Annie hesitated for a moment before answering. The construction of the new city hall, plagued from inception with charges of corruption, had come to a grinding halt with the recent depression. The construction was supposed to be funded by selling off city land, but who was going to buy the land with the city’s economy in shambles? However, the persistent high unemployment in the city had recently caused a good deal of labor unrest, including a series of riots in the city and the rise of a new political leader, Dennis Kearney, and his Workingmen’s Party. Annie believed that it was a mutual fear of Kearney and his supporters by Democratic and Republican politicians alike that was behind the move forward on the building of city hall. This initiative would create jobs that would go to Irish workers like Katherine’s uncles in the building trades and provide contracts that would benefit manufacturers like Matthew Voss. But dared she mention this? Her father always told her to avoid politics and religion as topics of conversation if she wanted to keep friends, so she wasn’t sure she wanted to go into any detail on her reasoning on this issue. The friendship of these three very different women had become precious to her in the past five months, and she didn’t want to do anything to upset them.

  After her mother died, her father had really been her best friend, so she’d never become close to the gir
ls at the academy. Then she was married, and her husband discouraged her from making female friends. After he died, and she was shuttled around the various branches of his family, she’d learned very quickly not to confide in anyone, male or female. Her in-laws were a contentious lot, and they saw her as no better than a paid companion who should be seen and not heard. On the other hand, the servants in those households viewed her with suspicion as a possible spy from their employers.

  But, from the moment she stepped into the O’Farrell house, everything was different. Beatrice O’Rourke, who could remember Annie’s birth in that very same house, treated her like a long lost child. Kathleen, not more than a child herself, was a cheerful confiding soul who seemed to find it delightful to work with a mistress who was willing to roll up her sleeves and polish the furniture along side her. Esther simply treated her like a favorite niece, and her willingness to descend to the kitchen in the evenings when her husband was out of town reinforced the lack of barriers between upstairs and downstairs.

  No, the last thing Annie wanted to do was set a cat among the pigeons with her speculation on the political motivations behind the funding of city hall, so she said, “Oh, Esther, this is just an impression I got from a number of editorials on the subject. It won’t cost Voss anything but time to get a bid ready, so I felt comfortable making the recommendation. I am more nervous about the suggestions I am going to make on Monday when he comes in for his second consultation.

  “He’s coming back that soon?” asked Kathleen.

  “Yes, and I spent all of today combing through the back issues of the local and state newspapers to come up with something that I think will provide substantial proof of the effectiveness of Madam Sibyl’s advice. First, I am going to tell him to buy some shares in a particular silver mining stock that hasn’t been doing very well because I believe it is going to go through a brief boom. However, I am afraid it is going to be difficult to sell him on my last recommendation. Esther, if you think that Voss wouldn’t have any interest in flax, imagine how he is going to react when I tell him he should invest in cement!”

  *****

  Only a month had passed since Annie met with her first client as Madam Sibyl, and Mr. Stein’s suggested remedy for her financial difficulties was already a success. Who would have thought that there would be such demand for a new clairvoyant in a city where there were already at least a dozen plying that trade? She suspected that people who believed in such things kept shopping around, hoping to get better results. The same way some people went from doctor to doctor, hoping to get a diagnosis better to their liking. Whatever the reason, every day she got a letter from someone new, wishing to make an appointment for a consultation. Already today she’d consulted with a young woman who wanted to know which of two suitors she should encourage, a notions salesman who wanted to start his own company, and Mr. Porter, Herman Stein’s friend, who wanted to know if she thought the prices of wheat would go up or down because of the severe flooding in the Sacramento Valley.

  For each new client, she did a reading of their palms to get some sense of who they were and what they wanted and asked for the time and date of their birth so that she could cast their horoscopes for their next consultations. Thank goodness for the battered copy of James Wilson’s Complete Set of Astrological Tables she’d brought with her from Boston. Stuffing this and the other books on palmistry into her trunk was a last minute decision. She’d been able to hold onto so little from her life before her husband’s financial ruin and death, she just wasn’t willing to let go of anything more. Wilson made it easy for her to work up a client’s star chart, which evidently was enough to convince most of them of the accuracy of her advice, even though it was all just a bit of “hocus pocus,” as Matthew Voss would say.

  This past week, she brought in thirty-five dollars and as a result was able to order enough wood for the next two months. She’d seriously underestimated what it would cost to address the needs for seven boarders for heat in their rooms and hot water for bathing, much less the voracious demand for fuel to cook the food and do the wash for the household. The money she was making was giving her a bit of breathing room, but she knew how quickly that income could dry up. Clients would soon move on if she didn’t give them what they wanted. For many of the women, what they wanted was a sympathetic ear, but women didn’t have a lot of disposable income, and she couldn’t survive on their clientele alone. For Madam Sibyl to be successful she needed the steady business of the city’s merchants, manufacturers, and professional men. They were the group who could afford to pay her fees, week after week. They were the people who had the resources to best take advantage of the financial advice she gave. Business and professional men, however, wouldn’t pay for regular consultations unless the advice she gave them paid off. And paid off quickly.

  Today, she was going to find out if she had been successful with Matthew Voss. He’d challenged her to make him money in a month, and if he had followed her instructions, he should have. But her father told her that one of the most difficult parts of a broker’s job wasn’t to get a client to buy stock, but to follow the brokers’ advice about when to sell the stock. Some sold off too quickly; others, more unfortunately, held on too long. She’d discovered a specific pattern in the price fluctuations in Nevada silver mine stocks in the five months since she arrived in town. The mining report in the Chronicle would mention that a mine was opening up a new shaft, and the price would start to go up, probably because the Comstock mine owners—who everyone agreed were artificially manipulating prices—bought up just enough shares to push the price up just a bit. They quietly sold off the stock within a day or two, but by that time the money from eastern speculators would have flooded in and pushed the value of the stock even higher. Then, when no new vein of silver was announced—and nothing had developed for the past eight months—these speculators would start to sell and the price would drift back down again.

  She’d seen signs this process was about to start for the stock of the Best and Belcher mine a few days before her second consultation with Voss. He was, rightfully, nervous about sinking any money on Nevada silver, but she advised him to buy twenty shares of this stock, currently selling at $17 a share (half of what the famous Ophir stock was selling.) She told him to sell these shares as soon as they hit $25, or in three weeks, whichever came first. The stock hit that $25 price point on March 1 and then immediately began a steady slide in value. If he followed her instructions, even deducting his broker fees, he would have made around $150. Not a bad return for two dollar’s worth advice. If he had followed her instructions.

  A soft knock at the parlor door was followed immediately by the entrance of Kathleen, carrying some logs in her hands. “Ma’am, I thought I would build the fire back up before Madam Sibyl’s next appointment. It’s raining cats and dogs out there, terrible cold. I thought the older gentleman might appreciate the warmth.”

  Annie watched fondly as the girl took the poker and rearranged the embers on the grate before carefully placing three more logs on the fire. Kathleen had quite embraced Annie’s Madam Sibyl enterprise, cheerfully dropping whatever other task she was engaged in to run and answer the door or usher a client out of the house. Annie hoped that if the new income remained steady she would be able to add a dollar a week onto the girl’s wages to compensate for the extra work.

  “Kathleen, that is excellent. Let’s hope that Mr. Voss is willing to let you take his overcoat this time, so it can dry out. Do you remember how you practically had to pry his hat and gloves off of him the first time he came?”

  “Oh, ma’am. Do you think he was afraid I was going to steal them!”

  The doorbell rang and Kathleen dusted her hands on her apron and went out into the hallway to answer it. She left the door to the parlor open, and Annie heard Voss say gruffly, “I can announce myself, girl. No, I don’t need you to take my coat. Skedaddle, I’m sure your mistress has better things for you to do.”

  Matthew Voss strode into the room
, Kathleen right behind him, her cheeks pink with suppressed irritation, and Annie repressed a laugh. Instead, she said calmly, “That will be fine, Kathleen. I will ring when it is time to let Mr. Voss out.” She watched as Voss stripped off his gloves and pushed them into his overcoat and hung his hat and umbrella on the coat stand. He then shrugged out of his coat, gave it a shake, and hung it up as well. At least it looks like he intends on staying the whole hour. That is a good sign. But he certainly doesn’t sound too pleased. Annie sat up straighter and folded her hands.

  Walking towards her, brandishing a rolled up newspaper, he said, “Well, Madam Sibyl…or what ever your name is…have you determined that the moon and Saturn are directing me to buy up some other outlandish crop? Or do you need to look to see if my palms have sprouted a new line in the past month? Tell me that means I should sink all my savings into some such nonsense as oil wells in the Central Valley?” Voss glared at her, hands on his hips, his mouth compressed to a thin line.

  Annie raised her chin up and stared back. He impressed her as someone who wouldn’t respect anyone he could bully. And, if he had taken her advice, he would have made money, so she resisted the impulse to defend herself.

  “Hah,” he barked out with his distinctive laugh, “I guess I just might take that advice, no matter how hair-brained it sounded!” A large smile lit up his face, and as he pulled the chair out to sit down he thumped the newspaper down in front of her. “I picked up the first edition of the evening Chronicle on the way here, and what do you suppose I read?”

  Before Annie could open her mouth, he said, “After dragging their heels for the past three years, the idiots in the state capital have finally decided to fund the next extension of the harbor seawall. Came up with $100,000 to fund not only the bulkhead, but wharves, piers, and a roadway and sidewalk the length of the sea wall. And they stipulate the money has to be spent within the next year. And that means there is going to be a big demand for what, you may ask?”