Madam Sibyl's First Client: A Victorian San Francisco Story (3 page)

“If you please, could you put both of your hands on the table in front of you, palms down to begin with?” Annie said quietly. Lottie and her friends had all been experts at what to expect at a séance, so they required a minimum of explanation. She’d decided to start with reading this first client’s palms because she didn’t know his birth date, a requisite for coming up with a horoscope reading. Given his overt skepticism, even palm reading might not work. Maybe, if she could get him talking, she would think of something that would ease his suspicions.

She leaned forward and asked him why he had come and what he expected from her. He said simply that he’d heard she was the source of Mr. Porter’s recent string of good luck in picking mining stocks, and he wanted in on the secret. While he spoke, she visually examined the tops of his hands. She knew he owned a furniture company, Voss and Samuels, and that the recent depression had hurt his business; Mr. Stein had told her that much. Building construction and factory production was picking up, though. She wondered, did he now have a little extra money he wanted to invest for the long term or did he need something that would give him a quick return, maybe to pay off some outstanding debts? Was he the kind of man who craved the excitement that went along with a gamble on stocks, the riskier the better, or was he more comfortable with a conservative strategy. Her husband John had been one of the former. For some reason he felt putting money into some hair-brained scheme had made him powerful and masculine. At first glance, Mr. Voss did not seem like this sort of man.

The strong beam of light from the lamp behind her showed her some clues to his character. The light tracery of white scars running over the prominent veins and swollen knuckles of his hands suggested that Voss had spent a good deal of his life as a practicing woodworker. And, while his nails were clipped short and were clean as befitted a gentleman, she saw faint brown lines along the cuticles, which she suspected came from wood stain. This, plus a recently healed cut on his index finger, indicated that Voss was the kind of business owner who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.

The telltale sheen of the wool at the elbow and knees of his black suit suggested they were decades old, but his shirt had one of the modern-styled collars, his cuffs were nicely starched, and his watch chain and cuff links were solid gold. In addition, his thinning grey hair and modest mustache and beard were freshly barbered. Voss was clearly not a man who was about to throw out a suit if it was still serviceable, but he wasn’t poor by any means, and he probably had a manservant who made sure he went out of the house properly groomed, his clothes neatly pressed.

“Please, could you turn your hands over now,” Annie responded after he added that he’d give anything a try once, if it would make him money. He barked out another short laugh and complied, staring at her challengingly.

She’d prepared a whole speech about heart lines and the mount of Saturn, but she knew that this would just sound like some “hocus-pocus” to him. Picking up his right hand and examining the darker vertical and horizontal lines on his palms that intersected with white lines of more old scars, she said, “Mr. Voss, the purpose of our consultation today is for me to assess how your past is going to influence your future. Only then can I adequately advise you.”

Ignoring his sound of derision, she continued. “As a carpenter, when you have a piece of wood in your hands, don’t you examine it? Determine what kind of tree it came from, read its history in the grain, the evidence of foxing, and the placement of knotholes? And don’t you use that knowledge to decide how to make the best use of the wood, what its future should be? Should it be turned into the back of a chair, the legs of a sofa, an ornate frame for a mirror?”

Seeing the first glimmer of interest in his slate grey eyes, she went on, using the bits of information she had gotten from the Steins, her knowledge about San Francisco’s history and economy, and her understanding of human nature, to tell Matthew Voss a story that she hoped he would find familiar enough to embrace as his own.

“Your life line tells me there have been three stages to your life so far. The first part of the line shows decades of steady progress, then the line nearly breaks, which represents an abrupt change in your way of life. When you traveled west, perhaps? This was a time of struggle for you, but it was very short. See there, where the lifeline becomes progressively deeper and darker as it curves towards the base of your thumb. You found your life’s work, I believe. Wait, oh my, Mr. Voss. See where the vertical line of fate connects your heart line to your life line—right there.”

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 her gentle beauty instantly charmed him. 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, Amelia’s father, some shiftless gambler, had left the two of them penniless 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 lifeline that 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, 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 a 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 theses 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 crisscrosses towards the end of the headline 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 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?”