Praise for No Comfort for the Lost
“Herriman’s historical details provide a rich framework for a gripping mystery and engaging characters.”
—Alyssa Maxwell, author of the Gilded Newport Mysteries
“Herriman skillfully brings 1867 San Francisco to life in all its beauty and treachery. Weaving together an intriguing mystery and a fascinating clash of cultures, No Comfort for the Lost will keep readers turning the pages long into the night.”
—Anna Lee Huber, national bestselling author of the Lady Darby Mysteries
“You’ll be transported back to old San Francisco as you walk those dangerous streets with Celia Davies, who has dedicated herself to saving lives but ends up seeking justice for the helpless.”
—Victoria Thompson, national bestselling author of the Gaslight Mysteries
OBSIDIAN
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First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,
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Copyright © Nancy Herriman, 2015
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Herriman, Nancy.
No comfort for the lost: a mystery of old San Francisco / Nancy Herriman.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-698-19225-6
I. Title.
PS3608.E7753N6 2015
813’.6—dc23 2015006890
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Praise
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from No Pity for the Dead
About the Author
To Phil, Nathan, and Will— your tireless support means everything to me.
CHAPTER 1
San Francisco, March 1867
The Chinese believed that some days were inauspicious, the ill tidings written in the passage of the heavenly bodies. Celia Davies gazed down at her patient, a delicate Chinese girl whose skin displayed more bruises than unblemished flesh, and wondered if today would prove to be one of those days.
“You heal.” The old woman who’d been watching from the doorway flapped wrinkled hands, causing the lengthy twist of her silver-tinged ebony hair to swing across her chest. “You heal!”
“I shall try,” Celia answered. “I shall try my best.”
Celia leaned over the girl, a bead of perspiration trickling down her spine. It was stifling and gloomy in this airless room no larger than a closet, devoid of any furnishings beyond a washstand, a rickety bamboo stool, and the miserable cot the girl lay upon.
A room as tight and dark as a coffin.
“I have come to help you,” Celia said, though the prostitute likely could not hear or understand. There was a purple bruise along her collarbone, just above the neckband of her blue cotton sacque, and several more along her chin and cheekbone. One skinny arm was wrapped in filthy, bloodstained bandages. The girl’s face was sticky with dried sweat, and she whimpered drowsily. Undoubtedly, she had been dosed with opium for the pain. Celia rested a hand upon the girl’s forehead. Hot but not dangerously so. Not yet.
“She may have inflammation from her wounds. It is bad. Yau peng,” she said to the old woman waiting by the open door with its lattice-barred window.
The brothel owner’s hands had returned to the wide sleeves of her high-necked silk tunic, and her features creased with a frown. How much, Celia wondered, did this girl owe her in exchange for passage from China? Two hundred dollars? Three? Her freedom had been signed away in a contract she probably had not been able to read and might never escape. These girls came here by the dozens, sometimes sold by their own desperately poor families in China who thought they were sending their daughters to a better world, to Gam Saan, the Golden Mountain. Instead they were gathered at the docks and locked in barracoons, stripped and sold at auction, and relegated to the worst servitude a female could endure.
Celia settled onto the bamboo stool and undid the latch on the black leather portmanteau she used as a medical bag. More droplets of sweat collected beneath her collar, in the pits of her arms, and along her ribs where her corset hugged. She longed for a breath of air.
“When did this happen?” she asked, feeling for a pulse in the girl’s wrist. Weak and fast. Not unexpected. “How many days? Yat.”
“Saam yat.”
Did she mean three entire days? Celia wished Barbara were here to talk to the woman. But her half-Chinese cousin had not been home when Celia had been summoned and had rushed to the stews in China Alley with only her portmanteau as company.
“You should have sent for me before now,” she said.
The Chinese woman’s expression, stoic and implacable, hardened. “You heal or you go.”
“I do not intend to let her die.”
Swiping the cuff of her sleeve across her forehead, Celia set out the clean cloth she’d had the foresight to bring and spread her tools upon it—a small pair of scissors and forceps. Fresh muslin and linen for the dressing. Carbolic acid for cleaning the lacerations.
Celia unwound the bandage covering the girl’s arm. It adhered to the wound, which stank when she peeled the last of the cloth away. The wound was extensive, suppurating, its edges jagged. The tissue was brown instead of healthy pink, and clotted with blood. Bits of torn clothing were stuck in the gashes.
Gently, she turned the girl’s arm over, looking for redness along its length, the sign of a dangerous spread of purulent matter in the blood. In the shadowy gloom the extent of the inflammation was difficult to determine, the angry purple bruises too many and too great. She must have attempted to fend off the blows. Celia suspected she would also find bruises on the girl’s torso. The strikes her customer had landed—with a heavy belt buckle, if Celia had to guess—had been unrelenting and could have killed her immediately. Might still kill her, despite Celia’s best efforts.
A young woman had appeared in the doorway. Two long braids hung beneath a dirty gingham handkerc
hief tied over her hair, and her hands plucked anxiously at the hem of her shabby tunic. The girl—small boned, pretty—was another of the many prostitutes imprisoned within this building.
“I need clean water,” Celia said to her. “Ts’eng shui.” Given the stench of sewage wafting through the open door, she might as well ask for the moon.
The prostitute gathered the filthy bandages and scurried off to fetch water.
Celia brushed her patient’s hair away from her face. The girl groaned and twisted away from her touch.
“Shh,” said Celia. “I am here to help you.”
“You heal or you go,” the old woman repeated.
“Yes, I shall try,” she answered firmly. That was all she’d ever sought to do—help, heal. But a brothel in Chinatown was worlds away from her childhood home in England and her youthful attempts to bandage the scrapes suffered by the neighbor’s barn cat or mend the broken wings of birds.
“Here. Water.”
The other young woman had returned with a tin basin, water sloshing over the rim. She set it on the floor next to Celia’s feet and stood back. There were tears in her eyes as she looked down at Celia’s patient. It would be hard to be a friend in this place. Hard when life was so uncertain and far too short.
Celia started to work, first cleaning the wound as best she could, flushing it with generous amounts of water to remove the loose debris and pus. The runoff splashed onto the dirt floor at her feet, splattering her boots, dirtying her stockings. The prostitute standing in the doorway murmured to the elderly woman, sounding distressed. Her anxiety for her friend received a sharp reprimand. There was no pity to be found here, and less room for affection.
“Unh.” The patient’s eyelids fluttered as she tried to open them.
“Hurt?” asked her friend, shuffling forward.
“What I am doing hurts only a little,” Celia reassured her. “The flesh is too decayed to have much feeling in it.”
Using her forceps to grasp the diseased tissue, she retrieved the scissors and cut away as much flesh as she could manage. The wound began to bleed anew, which she took as a good sign. The other prostitute decided she could stand no more and ran off, her footsteps echoing down the alleyway. When Celia finished, she cleaned the gash with the carbolic and packed the wound with a pad of linen. She would not stitch it closed or cover it with a plaster. It needed a chance to heal, and sealing in the putrefaction would only guarantee the girl’s death.
“It must be kept clean. Wash it. Sai,” she said to the elderly woman as she bandaged the arm. “Change the dressing every day.” From her bag, Celia extracted a small envelope. “This is quinine. She must be given a grain every three to four hours.” She held up fingers, trying to explain. “For the fever.”
The woman took the envelope and tucked it into a pocket hidden beneath her tunic.
“Send a message if she worsens,” Celia added.
“You go now,” the brothel owner demanded, and stalked off.
Celia stared at the empty doorway, saw a drunk laborer shuffle past and down the alleyway, heard the call of prostitutes. No matter how long she stared, though, the woman would not be reappearing, her concern limited for a girl she considered little more than damaged merchandise.
Celia washed her hands and returned her supplies to the medical bag. Collecting her bonnet, she glanced at her patient one last time before hastening out into the alleyway.
The incessant spring winds had died down, leaving the air heavy with the reek of clogged sewer drains and the cloying sweetness of incense burning in a nearby joss house. She could hold her breath, but she couldn’t avoid hearing the muffled noises emanating from behind the closed doors that lined the passageway.
The alley widened as Celia walked on, the prostitutes’ rooms replaced by apartments and small shops. Overnight rain had left muddy puddles in the street. Hoisting her skirts, she hopped from one dry spot to the next. A porter squeezed past, the bamboo pole he’d slung over his shoulders curving from heavily laden baskets on either end. She skidded as she attempted to jump out of his path, her feet sinking to her ankles in slimy water.
“Gad!” Brilliant, Celia.
At the sound of her voice, the local constable who always offered to act as an escort straightened from where he had been leaning against a telegraph pole. He pulled the cigarette he’d been smoking from his mouth.
“You done, ma’am?” he asked.
“Yes, Constable.” She stepped up to him, her feet squelching in her boots. “Thank you for waiting.”
They headed for Washington Street, the constable eyeing every Chinese person they passed. “Ain’t smart to come here.”
“I do believe, Constable, that makes the tenth time you have made that observation,” she said, with a slight smile. He meant no harm.
“I keep hopin’ you’ll get some sense.”
“Most of these women are uncomfortable leaving Chinatown, so I have to come to them,” Celia explained. “I do not know what else I could do.”
The look he gave her suggested he could think of a whole host of things a proper lady should be doing besides tending prostitutes, and Celestials at that. It was not the first time he had given her that look, either.
They reached Washington Street. “I will be safe from here, Constable. Again, thank you.”
He nodded and strolled off, his head swiveling as he peered into every doorway, searching for drunks or gamblers to apprehend. The farther he walked without finding any, the more his shoulders sagged with disappointment.
Celia took one last glance back at the alleyway. In the distance, the old woman leaned through a ground-floor window, checking that Celia had left without taking any of the girls with her. As if there were someplace Celia could readily hide a girl from the owner who controlled her life.
As if there were someplace safe for any of them.
• • •
Celia hailed the horsecar running along the rails laid down on Stockton, its yellow coach a bright splash of color against the brick buildings and gray macadam. A ride when she was less than a mile from home was a real treat, but as her housekeeper would say in her Scottish brogue, “We didna come to America to kill ourselves.”
It was nearly seven years to the day since she had arrived in America with a husband and a dream. She had lost one. She clung fiercely to the other.
The driver reined in the horse, bringing the omnibus to a halt. She waited for the steps to clear of departing passengers and idly observed the busy streets around her. Across the way, the corner tobacconist closed his shop, shoving back the awning with a bang, and a newspaper boy called out the last copies of the Evening Bulletin. An elderly Chinese woman clattered past in her satin shoes with thick soles of felt and wood, silver anklets jangling. She disappeared into the shadows of the alley Celia had just left. The day’s activities were winding down, while soon the restaurants, lagerbier saloons, and gambling dens of the Barbary would be in full swing. And in the morning there might be new patients like the girl Celia had left moaning on a filthy cot.
Celia climbed aboard and paid her five cents to the conductor, who recorded her payment with his gang punch. The car was as crowded as ever, having come from the businesses along Market Street, and noisy with voices speaking a myriad of tongues. Several men stood hanging on to straps suspended from the ceiling. One or two eyed her outfit and the portmanteau in her hand. She could almost hear their thoughts: One of that sort of women, looking for rights. Next they’ll be asking for the vote, too, just like the negroes.
Gazing coolly at them, she noticed that a gentleman in a stovepipe hat had risen to offer her a seat. He, apparently, was not alarmed by a woman toting a medical bag. Celia thanked him and sank onto the bench between a matron whose hooped dress spread across two spaces and a man fast asleep. The woman pursed her lips as her regard settled on Celia’s muddy boots. Hastil
y, Celia tucked them beneath the hem of her equally muddy petticoats.
She had closed her eyes for only a second, it seemed, when someone called her name.
“Signora Davies. You come from a patient?”
Her neighbor, Maria Cascarino, occupied the bench opposite. Celia must have been exhausted to have missed her, a stout woman wearing a floral print skirt, her usual bright red shawl tucked around her white blouse. Perhaps Celia had not noticed Mrs. Cascarino without all of her children clinging to her skirts. Today only her youngest boy, Angelo, was at her side, kicking his heels.
“Yes, I have done, Mrs. Cascarino. I am sorry I did not notice you. It has been a very long and tiring day.”
“It is fine. I know you work hard.” She ruffled the mop of dark hair atop Angelo’s head. He must have misplaced his cap again. “We come from the city to buy shoes.” She motioned toward the scuffed brogans on the young boy’s feet. They looked far too large for a six-year-old. “Seventy-five cents. For old shoes! We cannot buy better.”
Celia’s gaze lingered on Maria Cascarino’s hand. It had come to rest upon Angelo’s shoulder, drawing his warm body snug against her side, the familiar itch of his wool jacket beneath her fingers. Celia buffed a thumb across her wedding band and felt an empty, hollow longing, which she quickly snuffed.
“Your shoes look very sturdy and fine, Angelo,” said Celia, making the boy grin and kick his heels faster.
Mrs. Cascarino smiled at her, crinkling the skin around her eyes. She often smiled, though she and her husband both claimed they had seen horrible things during the Risorgimento, the wars of Italian independence from Austria, which were still being fought, and the reason they had fled Italy almost twenty years ago, an infant girl in tow.
“But your patient, she is better?” the other woman asked.
“I have done what I could for her.”
“Sì. You always do the best.” She glanced down at Angelo, whose large eyes blinked at Celia, and her smile faltered. “Do you see my daughter?”
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