Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery

by M. Louisa Locke

  Annie took a pail of water up the back stairs with her and slipped into Miss Nancy's room, putting the pail up against the door that she left just slightly ajar. Now, if anyone tried to enter, they would have to push the door and the heavy pail aside, and Annie would have time to close whatever drawer or cupboard she had been poking into and appear to be conscientiously engaged in performing her proper duties. That was the plan, at least.

  Annie stood for a second surveying Miss Nancy's room, which was across from Mrs. Voss’s bedroom on the second floor. The smallest bedroom on that floor, it served as both her bedroom and sitting room. Annie wondered at this since there were several larger rooms on the second and third floors that were vacant. Well, most likely she didn't want a bigger room. A true old-fashioned Yankee, Miss Nancy probably viewed comfort as a vice and discomfort as a virtue. In fact, never had Annie seen a room where the old Calvinist doctrines had been more rigorously followed. The room was dark; heavy brown velvet curtains drawn across both windows, and the dark mahogany of the hallway continued into this room, with wainscoting that went halfway up the walls. The wallpaper was a light brown, with a narrow darker brown stripe, and the wooden floor was bare of all save an oval rag rug in which grays and blacks predominated. Annie stared at the rug and muttered, "However did she find so many old mourning clothes. She must haunt funerals and beg for scraps!"

  A single bed, with a plain headboard, again in mahogany, was pushed up against the wall to her left. Matching wardrobe and dresser filled the remaining walls, and, on a small table next to the window overlooking the back yard, lay a huge Bible. Open, Annie saw, as she crossed over to it, to Revelations. A rocking chair, with no seductive cushions to mar its wooden seat and back, sat next to the table. The air smelled slightly of camphor.

  Annie pulled back the curtains and pushed up the window a crack to let in light and to make it easier to hear if Miss Nancy returned from her marketing. She then took her dust rag and attacked the bed, being careful to slip her hand between the mattress and the headboard and then under the mattress to discover any hidden banknotes or stocks and bonds. She then wiped clean the mantel over the room's fireplace, noting both the absence of any of the usual knickknacks and the presence of a beautiful Seth Thomas clock. There were no suspicious ashes in the fireplace, but she had already learned that Miss Voss did not believe in having a fire during the summer, which explained the chill in this room that rivaled Annie's attic hideaway. The washstand's only secret was the chamber pot, not surprisingly of plain white enamel to match the equally utilitarian basin and pitcher that stood on its surface.

  Annie continued dusting. The rocking chair revealed no hidden recesses and the wardrobe contained only a depressing number of black old-fashioned dresses, two black hats, and two pairs of black high-buttoned shoes. Such extravagance!

  Annie’s attention swerved back to the shoes. Picking up one of the shoes from the wardrobe floor, she measured it against her own foot. Miss Nancy had significantly larger feet than Annie, which wasn’t surprising, considering her greater height. Her shoes were also slightly pointed. While she had difficulty picturing Miss Nancy struggling with Nellie on the beach, she supposed this was not impossible. And Nellie might have been more willing to meet a woman alone. What she couldn’t imagine was Miss Nancy climbing up the rocky path Annie had found, and there certainly didn’t seem to be any sand or water marks on these shoes.

  At least shoes should eliminate Wong as Nellie’s killer. There was no way that his black cloth slippers could have made the marks she had found in the sand. Unless he had changed shoes! Oh dear, she thought, obviously shoes were not going to provide any definitive answers. Annie put back the shoe she had been holding.

  Startled by the soft quarter chime from the mantel clock, Annie swiftly turned to the last piece of furniture in the room, the dresser, fearful that Miss Nancy would return before she had finished searching. Palms beginning to sweat, she went through each of the drawers, sifting through the neatly piled underclothes, aprons, spare linen and the extra blankets found there. Nothing! No bundles of bank notes, no stashes of stocks, no revelatory packet of old love letters or hidden diary that would reveal all.

  Straightening up, she was again reminded of her tired muscles and a growing sense of futility. This was her third day in the house, and she really hadn't learned anything of substance. As Sibyl it was so much easier to ferret out information because she could ask questions, glean insight from how a person reacted to her predictions. As a servant, she had to be content with what the mute furniture of the place had to tell her. Sighing, Annie pulled her dust rag from her pocket and began to dust the top of the dresser, looking closely at each of the objects on it, a simple bone comb and brush set, with a small matching mirror. Clearly Miss Nancy saw no need for a fuller look at herself. Beyond a button hook and a small pincushion, nothing else was on the top of the dresser but pictures--pictures that proved very illuminating.

  Each was in a heavy silver frame, gleaming with frequent polishing, and worth, perhaps, more than all the other furnishings in the room together. The largest was a faded family portrait, a daguerreotype from the late 1840s, judging by the style of clothing. An older man and woman who looked remarkably like Matthew and his sister sat stiffly on two chairs, and a young man and woman stood behind them. Annie peered closely at these two young people. She knew they must be Matthew and Miss Nancy, but it was difficult to reconcile these images with the images she had of them now. Matthew as a young man had been straight, tall, and broad-shouldered. His biceps appeared to strain the arms of his suit-coat, and the hands that gripped the back of his father's chair looked massive. For the first time, Annie could imagine Amelia Voss falling in love with him.

  As for the young woman in the picture, Annie could see it was Miss Nancy, whose hairstyle and clothing had not changed a whit in thirty years. But her face was so much softer, exhibiting a sweetness that was completely missing in the present.

  Putting this picture down carefully, Annie picked up a second, which contained a city scene. It featured a two-storied building on a steep hill. A sign that read Voss and Samuels-Fine Furniture extended clear across the front of the building and a wagon stood in front piled high with what looked like chairs. Next to the wagon, standing on the sidewalk in front of the building, were three people. Having just seen the family portrait, Annie had no difficulty distinguishing Matthew. A slouch hat on his head and casually dressed in his shirt sleeves, he stood beaming into the camera, with what looked like a chisel and plane clutched to his still powerfully built chest. Next to him was a man more formally dressed, who stood in a swaggering pose; derby cocked back on his head, extravagant mustache, and the suit jacket pulled aside to reveal the tiny line of a watch chain across the vest. Malcolm Samuels was immediately recognizable, even though Annie had only seen him briefly at the funeral. Samuels didn't look like he had aged a day since this old picture had been taken.

  The woman who was the third person in the picture hadn't been so fortunate. Miss Nancy, standing slightly apart from the two men couldn't have been much more than a decade older than in the first family portrait, but time had already begun to carve severe lines on her face, deep enough to be captured by the camera. Miss Nancy, like her brother, seemed to be holding something clutched to her chest. On closer examination, Annie saw that the objects were several large ledgers. This suggested that Miss Nancy kept the books for the company in the early days, an interesting piece of information. But the most startling aspect about the picture was the expression of yearning the camera had captured on Miss Nancy's face as she looked over at the two men to her side. Could it be that Miss Nancy had been in love with Malcolm Samuels? If so, how sad, she thought, because Annie couldn’t imagine the virile, confident man in this picture looking twice at his partner’s spinster sister.

  She gave a final wipe to the rest of the dresser top, noting that all the other pictures seemed to be of Jeremy Voss, and that his mother did not appear in a single on
e of the photographs. This prompted another thought. What if Miss Nancy’s expression had been directed at her brother? From her first glimpse of Miss Nancy at the funeral, everything had pointed to a corrosive jealousy on her part, directed at her sister-in-law. Several times in her work as Sibyl she had encountered marriages poisoned by siblings or parents who were never able to accept their new in-laws. Her own mother-in-law had done everything she could to undermine her relationship with John, and then practically accused her of driving him to his death at his funeral. Remembering that awful first year of widowhood when she was forced to live with John’s parents, battered daily by her mother-in-law’s grief-fueled fury, Annie wondered how Amelia Voss had stood all these years of living under the same roof with a woman who so obviously disliked her.

  Recalling the scene in Mrs. Voss’s sitting room Friday night and Miss Nancy’s chilling biblical quotation, she moved across the room to give the large Bible sitting next to the window a second look. It was one of those Bibles that you would normally find on a pulpit, and Annie wondered if Matthew’s father had been a preacher. Since the Bible was opened to Revelations, the last book of the New Testament, the left side was very high. Too high, Annie realized, as she carefully tried to lift the front cover without letting the pages slide to the right. Underneath were three slim volumes, and when she slid them out they were immediately recognizable as accounting ledgers, very much like the ones Miss Nancy had been holding in the picture on her dresser. However, looking at the front pages of each, Annie saw the dates covered the last year and a half. Voss and Samuels, Fine Furnishings, was embossed on the front cover of each. Annie felt sure that these were the objects that she had seen being removed from Matthew’s study, and that it must have been Miss Nancy who removed them. Miss Nancy, what are you up to? Annie thought to herself. And why did you need to remove these ledgers in the dead of night?

  Chapter Twenty-three

  "Girl, what are you doing on this floor?"

  Annie, who had her back to the hallway as she closed the door to Miss Nancy’s room, was so startled she almost dropped the pail of water. Swinging around she confronted her nemesis, Cartier, who had evidently just come down the stairs from her own room on the third floor.

  Cartier stood in front of Annie, hands on hips in clear disapproval. "I said, girl, what are you doing up here on the second floor? Why aren't you in the kitchen doing the washing? I can’t believe you’ve finished."

  Cartier was wearing a strikingly handsome dress of plain dark green wool, with a tight-fitting long draped overskirt. However did she get the money for such expensive outfits? She can’t possibly afford such an elaborate wardrobe on a servant’s salary! Annie repressed a sudden desire to slap the other woman's face, just to wipe the condescension off of it for a second. Instead, she dropped a short curtsey and answered her, trying to sound as dim-witted and loquacious as possible, which she had discovered infuriated Cartier.

  "Lord and Saints preserve us, Miss! You scared me right out of me shoes. Why I thought the ghost of the dead master had come to catch me. I couldn’t sleep a wink my first night in that attic, all by my lonesome. Last place I worked, I shared my cot with the nurse-maid. Do you think I could come share your bed if I can't sleep? I cleans my feet every night, promise. I..."

  "Don't be impertinent, girl. I don't care if you wash all over, though I doubt the likes of you have ever seen the inside of a tub. I wouldn't share a place at the table with you, much less my bed. Now answer me sharp or I'll take you by your ear straight to the mistress and see what she has to say about you snooping where you don't belong."

  Annie sniffed loudly, remembering to wipe her nose on her sleeve, and then began to whine. "Please Miss, don't crab at me so. I didn't mean no harm. I'm just doing my duty. The old Miss, she said I was to do her room this morning. That's the Lord's truth. Go ask her yourself, if you're not afraid she'll snap your nose off. Me, I'd be afraid to rile her again, what with her already being so put out that you forgot to open the door for me and Wong this morning. But if you want to, let's go together. She'll tell you just what I told you, but if you don't believe me...."

  "Good heavens, girl, that's enough, get back down to the kitchen. It's time for Mrs. Voss’s tea."

  Anne watched with some satisfaction as Cartier turned to knock softly on the door to her mistress’s sitting room. She sincerely doubted that Cartier would take the trouble to ask for a confirmation of her story from Miss Nancy, since the women’s mutual enmity meant they spoke to each other as little as possible. Annie also hoped the threat of getting Miss Nancy upset would convince Cartier to stay out of her way for awhile.

  Carrying the pail of water down the back stairs, Annie stopped at the small mirror in the back hallway to check to see that she didn’t have any smudges on her face from cleaning. She could hear Miss Nancy’s voice float up from the kitchen, and she wanted to make sure she didn’t give the irascible old woman any reason to complain about her lack of neatness. She was just in the midst of replacing one of her hairpins when the shrill sound of the front door bell made her jump and stab the hairpin painfully into her scalp. Muttering an unladylike oath, Annie smoothed her apron and regained her composure. She pasted on the demure, subservient expression she had gradually perfected as her "servant-look" and opened the front door. The degree of relief that she felt when the man at the door did not turn out to be Nate Dawson told Annie how much she had been dreading this possibility.

  But relief turned to surprise when she realized that the man standing in front of her was Malcolm Samuels, his picture come to life. As instructed, she began to mouth the polite fiction that her mistress was not at home. Ignoring her formulaic phrases, Samuels skillfully side-stepped her, both verbally and physically, and moved from the doorway into the hall and then into the front parlor in several long strides.

  As Annie ran indignantly after him, she was again struck by how much younger he seemed than his late partner, Matthew. At close range she could see that Samuels was nearer to Matthew's age than she had thought at the cemetery, but he was still a remarkably vital and handsome man.

  Once inside the parlor, Mr. Samuels turned to look down at her with a marked twinkle in his eye, and he assumed an exaggerated air of seriousness, saying, "Well, young lady, you have been fibbing. You and I both know that Mrs. Voss is at home. But since you are obviously the new girl, I will forgive you this time. But you must learn that I am not a person to be fobbed off with polite fabrications."

  Breaking out in a friendly smile, seemingly designed to assure Annie that he was teasing, Mr. Samuels went on to say, "You just run up and tell Mrs. Voss that Mr. Samuels is here to see her, and if she doesn't stop moping around in her fancy boudoir and come down to see me, I'll just have to come up there!"

  Annie couldn't help smile in return, and, since she knew that Samuels was a close friend of the family, she put up no more resistance. Instead, she asked him to make himself comfortable while she saw if the mistress would receive him. As she went upstairs on this errand, she wondered how she might contrive to overhear what these two people would have to say to each other. What if she pretended to do some cleaning in the large formal parlor? It was across the hall from the smaller morning room that Samuels had entered, so she might be able to hear if both doors were left ajar. Another near collision with Jeremy Voss, outside his mother’s sitting room door, drove all thoughts of eavesdropping temporarily from her mind.

  Jeremy made no attempt at apology this morning. Annie decided that the weekend had brought no solace to the young man. Instead, his mood seemed to have darkened considerably. He was carelessly dressed, his clothes hanging from him as if he had lost flesh overnight. His pale skin was drawn very tightly across his cheekbones, accentuating the dark smudges that circled his eyes. Annie wondered whether he had slept at all. The smell of stale whiskey clung to him and brought back unwelcome memories of her husband in the last months before his death.

  John would stumble in late, drunk, and disheveled
, rising the next morning still bleary-eyed and even more belligerent than the night before. Outwardly he would pretend such confidence, loudly asserting that this day his luck would turn, that all he would have gambled away the day before would be gained back again, doubled in worth. In time Annie realized that the bravado was just that; it hid a fear and guilt that consumed him. Jeremy exuded a similar miasma of anxious remorse, and that troubled her.

  Jeremy impatiently demanded to know who had been at the door.

  "Was it another one of those damned women, come to sniff out the scandal in the house? Why don't you just tell them all to go to hell," Jeremy growled. "Wouldn't I just like to see their faces if you did. Maybe I should answer the door the next time it rings. I'd give them all something to gossip about."

  When Annie murmured something about Mr. Samuels to see Mrs. Voss, his face brightened, and he turned and began to go down the steps to the first floor, saying, "Uncle Malcolm? What a relief! He'll know how to get us out of this mess."

  Annie knocked gently on Mrs. Voss's door, amused by Jeremy’s sudden optimism. She hoped that his faith wasn't misplaced. Perhaps Samuels was just the strong masculine presence Jeremy needed. Despite her sincere affection for Matthew Voss, Annie had always wondered if he might have been as much at fault as his son in their misunderstandings. She also wondered just what Jeremy meant by "mess." Was it just the financial uncertainty he was talking about, or did they need the help of Malcolm Samuels to straighten out a more serious problem, like Matthew's murder?

  Annie found Mrs. Voss up, dressed, and ensconced in her sitting room, again working on some embroidery. She also looked like the weekend had not brought much repose. Even though the dress she wore was fashionably cut and trimmed with lace, its dull black sheen tinged her pale skin grey this morning. Cartier was not in the room, so Annie assumed she was tidying the adjoining bedroom. Annie was surprised when Mrs. Voss frowned at her announcement that Mr. Samuels, joined by Master Jeremy, was waiting in the morning room. The reason for the frown became clearer when she asked Annie to bring a strong pot of coffee, as well as tea, to the downstairs parlor, and to get Wong to unwrap some of the fruitcake to serve as well. Jeremy’s mother must have some inkling about his state this morning.