Victorian San Francisco Stories

by M. Louisa Locke

  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 he was instantly charmed by her gentle beauty. 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, the two of them had been left penniless by Amelia’s father, some shiftless gambler, 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 life line, 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, and 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 of 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 these businesses had failed because of bad management or embezzlement. In either case, 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 criss-crossed lines towards the end of the head line 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.”

  *****

  “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 had 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 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 w
oman 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. Dare 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 girls 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 alongside 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. However, 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 the price would start to go up, probably because the Comstock mine owners—who everyone agreed were artificially manipulating prices—bought up 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.