Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery

by M. Louisa Locke

  So far, she had been able to pretty much rule out the basement areas and the first floor as hiding places. Even with the threat of Miss Nancy or Cartier dropping in to oversee her work, the excuse of giving everything a thorough cleaning had permitted her ample opportunities to systematically look in cupboards, dressers, side boards, and book shelves, behind mirrors, pictures, and under tables, couches and chairs. Miss Nancy had actually been so impressed with Annie’s diligence in dusting that she had been moved to give her a compliment. There had been sufficient occasions as well when Wong wasn’t in the kitchen for her to look through all the cupboards, bins, and boxes in the kitchen and scullery. He had walked in a few times to discover her with her head stuck in the depths of a back cupboard, but he hadn’t challenged her airy excuse that she was just trying to figure out where all the pots and pans went.

  She had been able to check out all the guest bedrooms while stripping their sheets and dusting; she also felt pretty sure she had done a thorough search of Miss Nancy’s room yesterday. Mrs. Voss’s rooms had been more difficult to search, since she went downstairs so seldom. Annie had given her sitting room only a piecemeal investigation, snatching the chance to look in the ornate cabinets and small writing desk when she came in to clean out the fireplace and do a light dusting each morning. Tonight, however, Annie would be attending Mrs. Voss after dinner because it was Cartier’s night out, so she might find some chances to complete her search, particularly in the bedroom. That left Cartier and Jeremy’s rooms on the third floor. Somehow, in the next two days, she needed to get to those rooms because when she left the house tomorrow evening for her night out, she would really like to shed her servant masquerade for good.

  Annie got her chance to examine Jeremy’s rooms in the early afternoon, when Wong offered to spell her at the ironing. She had just dried the last of the lunch dishes and hadn’t been able to suppress a deep sigh as she turned and looked at the mound of shirts, table linens, and petticoats she still had left to iron.

  Wong had smiled gently at her and said, “Miss Lizzie, I think that it might be a more efficient use of our time and talents if I took charge of ironing the more delicate items, while you made up the beds on the third floor and cleaned master Jeremy’s room, now that he has finally left the house. You may have to take over for me when we get closer to dinner time, but by then there should only be table linens.”

  Annie refrained from going over and hugging him but simply said, “Thank you Wong, I think that is a wonderful suggestion, and I will be glad to help in any way I can with dinner.”

  She then went to the corner where the cleaning implements were kept. She put four dust rags, the bar of soap, a scrub brush, and the tin of furniture wax into an empty pail, then picked up a bucket of hot water and a broom, which was leaning against the wall, nodding to Wong as she started up the back stairs. When she reached the third floor, she stood for a minute, undecided about which of the three rooms dedicated to Jeremy’s use she should start cleaning first.

  She wished she were sure Cartier was downstairs with her mistress, so she could try to open her door. She had been able to try twice in the past two days, when she was sure Cartier was occupied, but each time she found the door locked, which was suspicious in itself. With Cartier leaving for her night, Annie hoped for a lot more time to find a way to search the room. Maybe she could get Miss Nancy to agree that she needed to get in the room to tidy it before Cartier came home in the morning. Given the enmity between the two women, she just might be successful. Thinking about this plan, Annie picked up her pails and entered Jeremy's rooms.

  He had the whole south side of the third floor for himself, with just Cartier's room and two guest rooms across the hall. Annie had been in his dressing room at the front of the house last evening, but not his bedroom or the large back room that acted as his studio. The dressing room was easily searched; Wong evidently kept this room in order. Apart from wiping some water drops from the washstand and giving it a good polish, and sweeping the bare wooden floor, there wasn't much to do. She did go through his wardrobe, even taking the time to run her hands through his pants and jacket pockets, and tipping over his hats to see if she could find anything. But either Jeremy had not developed the habit that both John and her father had possessed of depositing any stray bit of flotsam and jetsam into their coat pockets, or Wong was very thorough in cleaning out those pockets when he put Jeremy’s clothes away. She also noted that Jeremy’s shoes came in all styles; and, although most had rounded toes, there was at least one pair of evening pumps that had pointed ones. Annie had a difficult time imaging him wearing these shoes on a rendezvous with Nellie on the beach.

  The next room proved to be equally unrewarding. She dusted, but apart from the usual toiletries on the dresser, there was nothing of interest in Jeremy's bedroom. After stripping off the sheets, she checked under the mattress, finding nothing. Again, Annie had the strong impression that Wong had been there before her. The room was neat, there was very little dust, the clothes in the dresser drawers were carefully arranged, and there was absolutely no clutter in the room.

  In fact, Annie felt little of Jeremy's presence in the room at all; it reminded her strikingly of the guestrooms she had cleaned earlier in the week. Open, airy, fashionably furnished, but sterile, and not a scrap of paper that might represent a piece of evidence.

  Annie was quite curious about Jeremy's artistry. She thought it strange that none of the artwork that hung elsewhere in the house was by him, not even in his mother's sitting room. Even if he were a wretched painter, you would think that a parent would be willing to hang a small example of his work, at least in the private rooms in the house. Presumably Jeremy's art had been such a sore subject with Matthew that Amelia didn't dare exhibit it anywhere, or maybe he just talked about painting, but never actually painted. In any event, Annie opened the door that connected the bedroom to the studio next to it with a great anticipation.

  Her first thought was that Wong had clearly not had free rein in this room. Her second thought was that, although incredibly untidy, the room bore impressive signs that Jeremy was really a working artist, not just the dilettante that Annie expected. Unlike the rest of the house, where dark paneling or fancy wallpaper predominated, these walls were painted plain white and hung with a variety of striking pieces of art. A good number of canvasses, their backs to the walls, were leaning all over the place, and paint tubes, turpentine-drenched rags, and brushes obscured the surfaces of every table in the room. A chaise longue sat against one wall, and an easel containing a blank canvas stood squarely in a shaft of sun. Yet, despite the sunshine, the room seemed rather gloomy and cold, giving off a feeling of abandonment. Apparently no fire had been lit in the fireplace for several days.

  Aware of time passing too swiftly, Annie first looked hurriedly at the paintings and etchings hanging on the walls. She determined that they all had been done by people other than Jeremy, many of them with French names. While most of the paintings were rather small, they were all quite lovely, if unusual. Among the oils, pale pastels predominated, and most intriguing of all, she found that when she came up close to some of the paintings the scenery dissolved into mist or broke up into motes of light. Annie recalled that one of John's uncles had brought a painting like this back from a trip to Paris in '74, by someone named Monet. Sure enough, several of the dissolving paintings bore this signature. All the work hanging on Jeremy's walls was so different from the dark formal paintings to which she was accustomed that she had difficulty tearing herself away from them. But she knew she had to get back to her task, before Cartier or Miss Nancy came in to find out what was taking her so long.

  Despite her initial impression that the room would be difficult to search because it was such a jumble of miscellaneous objects, Annie found there were actually few hiding places. A container with pipe-smoking equipment on the mantel, a handy wooden carrying-box for Jeremy's painting gear, and a large trunk that seemed to hold an assortment of props were all ea
sily ransacked and found innocent.

  Finally Annie discovered that one of the pieces of furniture that she thought was a table was, in reality, a small desk, almost entirely hidden by stacked blank canvasses. This was crammed full of papers, along with two palette knives, charcoal, pencils, chalk, a ruler, a drawing compass, an empty tumbler with a dusty scum on the bottom, sealing wax, and a small photograph of Mrs. Voss, apparently posed along the seaside. Her fingers trembling in haste, Annie shuffled through the papers. Most seemed to be bills for art supplies, or bills from a tailor and a boot maker, including a diplomatically worded request from the former for Jeremy to please pay off some of the debits on his accounts. There were also a few letters, with Paris postmarks, that seemed innocent enough, although Annie's grammar school French was very rusty. But nowhere was there evidence of the thick rectangular sheets of paper that stock certificates were normally printed on, nor of the bank notes issued by the Bank of California, nor any packets of a mysterious powder marked cyanide.

  Annie sighed with relief. She knew that the absence of evidence in the rooms she searched might simply mean that anything incriminating had long since been gotten rid of; it had been, after all, over a week since Matthew Voss had been murdered. Annie had to note ruefully how contradictory it was for her to be relieved that she found nothing, since her reputed goal was to find something that would not only prove who killed Matthew but would restore some of the missing assets. Nevertheless, Annie was pleased that she hadn't found anything suspicious among Jeremy's things. In her heart she knew she wanted the murderer to be a stranger, not one of Matthew’s loved ones.

  This left the paintings themselves as possible hiding places, since she supposed that the back of frames might be a good place to stuff a sheet of paper or bank notes. Trying to be systematic, she first walked around the walls, taking each piece of artwork off of its hook and looking at its back. Thankfully, all of the work was cheaply framed and easy to examine. She dusted as she went, figuring she might as well make herself useful while she was hunting.

  She turned next to the unframed canvasses that were leaning here and there. Annie had left them for last, hoping to discover some sample of Jeremy's own work among them. She started to walk over to a dark corner where she saw a few small canvasses were leaning against a cluttered table that was rammed up against the back wall and then she stopped, gasping. Reality as she knew it had just vanished.

  There was no table, its top littered with objects, there were no blank canvasses leaning up against its legs. Instead, between the two windows, there stood a large oil painting that so accurately reproduced a table and leaning canvases that she had mistaken them for the real thing. She leaned forward, trembling fingers out-stretched, and touched the canvass. Up this close she felt foolish at her mistake. Of course it was a painting; it was flat, the oil surface shiny, the paint strokes obvious. But when Annie stepped back, the illusion reasserted itself. The painter had so cleverly captured each nuance and shadow of reality and so perfectly recreated the lines of perspective that from a distance she once again found herself staring at what looked like three-dimensional objects.

  Annie whirled around to look at one of the tables on the other side of the room that she had searched earlier, and confirmed that it was the original subject of the painting. There it was, the same three canvasses leaning up against the same scarred legs and the same old paint smattered smock hung up on a peg, providing a rich brown backdrop for the dirty rags, tubes of paint, stacked dusty books, scattered candle stubs, rusty knives, a button hook, and the tin of shoe polish that crammed the small table's surface. The only difference was that the real table did not have Jeremy's initials carved into one of its legs; the table in the painting did.

  Unwanted, a thought niggled its way into her mind. Here before her stood the work of a great artist, the work of a man of incredible drive and discipline, a man whose father had called him a fool. Here before her stood an excellent motive for murder.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Tuesday evening, August 14, 1879

  The rest of the day Annie continued to pursue her thoughts about Jeremy and whether he might feel that his father’s plans were such a threat to his art that he was justified in killing him. While she couldn’t reconcile the premeditated nature of Matthew’s murder with her impressions of Jeremy Voss, the precision of his painting revealed a depth in him that she would never have imagined if she hadn’t seen the work itself. It was a puzzle. However, right before dinner something happened that drew her attention away from this line of thought.

  Shortly before seven, Cartier came down to the kitchen to ask Wong to open the door so she could leave for her night out. Annie, who had been chopping vegetables, waited until Cartier was out the door, and then she ran over to Wong. She asked him to keep the door unlocked while she stepped out to look for a missing bag of clothespins she thought she had dropped while taking in the washing. Once outside, she moved to the back of the yard. Having noticed earlier that this put her out of sight of the kitchen window, she then nipped through the back gate and into the alley. She thought that Cartier would certainly have made it to the street by that time, and she simply planned on running down the alley to see if she was waiting for a horse car or was walking up or down Geary. Annie was very surprised when she saw that Cartier was just standing at the end of the alley. She immediately stepped back into the bushes next to the gate, peeping carefully out to make sure Cartier hadn’t seen her. In less than a minute a carriage pulled up, filling the end of the alleyway. The carriage door opened, a man’s arm reached out to assist Cartier inside, the door closed and the carriage was on its way before Annie had a chance to blink.

  Knowing it would be impossible to follow the carriage, she returned to the kitchen, mulling the implications of what she had just seen. Cartier had been meeting a man, a man of some means if the carriage was any indication. This must be the friend she had been planning on meeting on Sunday. Had her message to the delivery boy yesterday arranged for this meeting, or was this something that happened every Tuesday on her night out? Who was he, and could he possibly be involved in Matthew and Nellie’s murders? She so wished she could talk about this with Nate. Annie had half been expecting either Nate or his uncle to arrive all day, given the intrusion of the police yesterday afternoon. As far as she could determine, Mrs. Voss hadn’t sent off a message to her lawyers, so perhaps they were unaware of what had happened.

  The need to begin serving dinner precluded any more thought on the subject, and this was a dreary repetition of the night before. Wong was even more silent than usual during dinner, handing each serving to her wordlessly. The two ladies she served upstairs in the dining room were equally silent. Mrs. Voss ate very little of what Wong had prepared, and, while Miss Nancy ate everything served, it was with no sign of enjoyment. Maybe each was wondering if the other had killed Matthew or Nellie, or perhaps both were worrying that Jeremy was the guilty party.

  Jeremy certainly did his best to act the part of the guilty son when he came home right after dinner. Annie, removing the dessert dishes from the dining room, heard sounds from the front of the house. Mrs. Voss had skipped dessert and already gone upstairs to her sitting room, and Miss Nancy was just crossing into the hall. At the sound of the key in the door, Annie put down the dishes in her hand and slipped over to look out into the hall, doing so in time to catch the sight of the front door banging open and Jeremy staggering in, almost knocking his aunt off her feet.

  Jeremy stepped back from Miss Nancy with a gruffly muttered apology, and then, after fumbling to lock the door behind him, he turned to make his unsteady way upstairs. Miss Nancy took one stride forward, grabbed him by the shoulder, and turned him back to face her. Annie noted how very tall the older woman was, and that her grip looked like it had considerable strength to it. Jeremy stood, swaying slightly, looking sullenly down at his feet, while Miss Nancy began to berate him in her harsh twang.

  "Drunk again, young man. Have you no hon
or? To shame this house, this family, and your father, who is barely cold in his grave? I have held my tongue, Jeremy, forgiven you and forgiven you, as God has commanded. Blamed everyone else, including your father for being so hardheaded about your painting and your mother for her sinful ways, her heartless neglect. But I can keep still no longer."

  Jeremy looked up at this point and sneeringly said, "When have you ever kept still? Oh, yes, Aunt Silence, that's you. You never interfere. All forbearance, the silent martyr."

  Miss Nancy jerked her head as if Jeremy had slapped her. She then pulled him closer to her, and she hissed out, "God said, 'Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler; and who ever is led astray by it is not wise.' Proverbs 20. And the Lord said to the sons of Moses, 'Drink no wine or strong drink, lest you die.' Leviticus 10. Don't you see? You must repent. Confess your sins. Only then will God help you."

  Jeremy pulled sharply away from her grasp and stumbled backwards, his right hand flung upwards as if to ward off further verbal blows. Annie was appalled at the look of agony that contorted his face. Miss Nancy must have been moved as well, because her stance softened, and she muttered, "My poor child," as she moved towards him with her arms outstretched to embrace him.

  But Jeremy shouted, "No, don't touch me!"

  Then he turned and began to stumble up the stairs. Annie had to move closer to the dining room door at this point to keep him in view, so she was only a few feet behind Miss Nancy when his next words came. Halfway up, he had leaned over the railing and in tones of loathing lashed out.

  "Confess? Oh yes I'll confess. Mea Culpa. Mea Culpa. I'm to blame. I'm a drunken loafer. A good-for-nothing. No talent. No ambition. No ability. Except to make everyone miserable and kill my father. I was very good at that. He kept saying it. 'You'll be the death of me. You'll be the death of me.' You heard him."