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Page 11.

Chapter 3. Kate Morgan–Late Summer 1892

In a tiny room, on a morning in late summer 1892, Kate Morgan sat on her neatly made bed, with her head bowed and her hands raised. She stared at her palms, holding her locket on a fine chain.

The room was stripped of her personal possessions. She wore street clothing. Her maid’s uniform was stuffed in her open satchel, and a distinctive wooden trunk stood closed nearby with a sense of finality and transition. It was the same trunk Magruder had carried down the stairs nearly four years earlier, the day she had last seen Tom in Chicago. She had moved around to many cities, plying her trade, and staying one step ahead of the shadowy husband she feared might still be tracking her.

Her face looked pale and transfigured as if she were staring into another world. The atmosphere around her, by contrast, was dark and brooding, filled with danger. But she was used to that. It was part of her way of living and surviving. What she could never get used to was the truth and finality of what she was staring at—her past, and its breaking point.

Kate looked unutterably sad and vulnerable in that moment.

Outside the dark little bubble of her moment, had she looked up at her two windows, she would have seen a sweeping view of the city in summer bloom. Her employer’s house stood atop a hill, and a good part of the best of glorious San Francisco spread before her, including the cliffs that opened like a doorway to the Pacific Ocean.

In San Francisco Bay, the harbor still bristled with a forest of ships’ masts, but a number of new steam ships showed their funnels among them.

The hills were covered with houses and tree crowns, all choked in fragrant blossoms. In the distance stood the Spreckels mansion at Washington and Van Ness Streets, among smaller but fine homes. The Spreckels family, whose patriarch was the so-called Hawai’ian sugar baron, Claus Spreckels, controlled much of the Pacific sugar industry. They owned vast holdings of cane fields under the Kalakaua Dynasty. Kate’s boss was an executive in Spreckels’ sugar industries, and owned this beautiful home with two dozen servants on Nob Hill.

This room would be her bedroom no longer. Kate Morgan heard footsteps approach. She heard the voice of Ida, the chief of female domestic staff, who was subordinate only to the butler. Kate pictured Ida in a long black uniform dress and white starched cap as she walked down a carpeted corridor in the maids’ quarters. A heavier set of footfalls rumbled along with her—a porter wearing hobnail boots. The two stopped at Kate’s door, and the rumbling ceased. Ida knocked imperiously.

Kate ignored the knocks as she sat on her bed and stared into the locket.

Ida said: “You’re wanted downstairs.”

Kate said icily: “I’ll be out in a moment” She stared longingly at a tiny portrait. The newborn infant’s eyes had a glazed look. The image was bordered in mourning black—a Victorian death photograph. Kate whispered: “Eddie.” She closed the locket.

Ida rapped loudly. “You better not keep the boss waiting!”

Kate held the locket in her fist for a long moment as she closed her eyes with intense concentration.

Ida pounded on the door. “I don’t have time for this.”

Kate rose, assuming a stony look. Her world was as big as that locket, as big as her trunk, as small as this cramped room that had been her home—no, her place to collapse in exhaustion after a day’s unrelenting work—for several weeks. As the pounding continued, she opened her eyes and saw herself in the mirror above the wash basin—a glowering, plain woman with cunning eyes, a fearless expression, and a full mouth. And what she wanted was what she was talented at extracting money from her employers. The moment had come again. She ignored Ida and clutched her locket a moment longer—as if it contained her very heart locked up in its cold metal casing.

Kate snapped the door open and stepped out, holding her satchel. Instantly, she was in charge, just by her demeanor. She regarded the domestic with a smoldering, wounded, threatening intensity that signaled Kate felt she had nothing to lose, and was capable of anything. The older woman stepped back, blanching, and spoke in a faint and tremulous voice. Her eyes were wide, and her rudeness was gone. “Claire, the boss wants to see you in his study.” Kate knew the woman had no idea why the boss wanted to see her, and walked past her as if she were an insect.

The porter stood apologetically behind Kate, eyeballing her room over her shoulder, and the object he’d been sent to fetch. Kate told him over her shoulder, without looking back: “Wait for me outside by the curb. I won’t be long.”

“Yes, Miss Claire.” Kate heard him tromp into the room to lift her wooden trunk. Ida scurried inside, with a wide-eyed afterglance, to start fluffing the bed, which Kate had perfectly made and needed no fluffing.

As Kate walked away from her room, down a maze of carpeted hallways with oak wainscoting and leaded glass windows, she spotted someone out of the corner of her eye. Emily, a fellow domestic, stood far down a cross hall. Kate knew very little of her—only that Emily had a reputation for being an impoverished, childless widow, who lived in a seedy neighborhood and drank herself into a stupor every night. Emily gave Kate a strange, meaningful look and an odd, unholy grin. Kate wondered—did Emily know? Was she a threat? There was something loaded and dangerous about Emily’s hard face.

They were alone in the room together—Kate, and her employer. In the smoky, mahogany gloom of a richly appointed library, the boss stood stiffly behind his desk. Books were all around on the walls, Oriental carpets on the floors, vases, umbrellas, top hats of the upper society, all sorts of knick-knacks, many of them quite expensive. Standing before him was Kate in her street clothes, with her satchel on the floor.

The boss, a fastidious, well dressed man, said: “Damn you!”

Kate said: “No, damn yourself. You mistook an innocent smile for a young woman’s careless flirtation, and pressed yourself upon me with gross physicality.”

The boss said: “Oh, what nonsense. You offered yourself, and I had a moment of mental and moral weakness. I thought that somehow I could find pleasure in your carnality.”

Kate said: “You’d better watch your mouth, you impertinent pecker-head. Who do you think you are, talking to a woman that way?”

Boss said: “Okay, okay—I’m sorry. Please—Miss Lomax—take your pay and go away.”

Kate said: “I’ll spare your wife and children the embarrassment of a public disgrace, you sanctimonious pig. Pay me my quitting wage plus three hundred, and we’ll be done.”

He had been ready for this. He counted out twenties with a cynical, defeated grin. He said: “Is your name really even Claire Lomax?”

Kate said: “Lay it to rest.” She pocketed the money.

He stood uncomfortably, perhaps thinking of going to the police.

She walked to the door, stopped half way, and turned. She said: “Forget your pecker pride, and think of your family. Three hundred dollars is a small price to pay, rather than go to the police and have the whole city laughing at you and you lose your job, your house, your family. Think carefully.” She had a last glimpse of the boss. He stood scared and sweaty in place for a long moment, and wiped a trembling hand across his brow. It was a scenario Kate had engineered often enough by now. This one had gone well. Served him right.

She slammed the door shut and strode down the hall. Her young, robust body moved with a seductive, hippy fullness that no employer with meandering eyes could miss under the dark dress. Her secret weapon was a subliminal, sensual allure that she broadcast with all her charm and guile. She was not beautiful—some might think her plain—but she was a dark-haired destroyer with fierce eyes and imposing, intelligent features.

She’d seen the look on Emily’s face in that corridor, signaling some dark intention. Outside, Kate again saw Emily’s pale face floating behind an upper story stairwell window. Kate tipped the porter and climbed aboard the Stanhope—a horse-drawn, open buggy with an accordion-top folded up—on whose rear boot the porter had loaded her trunk.