Thursday February 20, 2025

Beatrice Bests the Burglars, Scene 5

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1632:

For the month of February, I am offering, for free, the fifth short story in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Beatrice Bests the Burglars. Today is scene 5, but if you would like to read the short post I did on why I wrote this short story, click HERE, or if you would like to read the Historical Tidbit on San Francisco boardinghouses in this period, click HERE.

Brief check-in: I had a good second night sleeping in new bed, and almost everything is back to normal, with the guest bedroom all squared away. Just need to find someone to come take all the old furniture and bedding and haul off to one of the charity shops. That and taxes, plus usual noon zoom meeting and phone call after that scheduled.

Beatrice Bests the Burglars

by M. Louisa Locke

Copyright 2019

Scene 5:

Jerking awake, Beatrice’s heart raced, and for a moment the room, glowing with a bright heat, felt so strange that she wondered if she were still dreaming. Had she been awakened by some more of those infernal firecrackers?

As she sat up and looked around, she decided that daylight wasn’t particularly kind to the old chest of drawers and wardrobe across the room, showing up every scratch. Since she seldom spent time in her bedroom during the day, she’d never noticed this before, or how faded the bed quilt had become from decades of washing. Not that Kathleen didn’t make sure the room stayed spotlessly clean, and Annie had bought her a cheerful, red carpet for the floor last Christmas and had the Miss Moffets sew up curtains that matched it perfectly. No, it was more that candle-light softened the edges of everything, hid the effects of age.

This probably explained why each morning the mirror over her washstand reflected back a face that, to her mind, hadn’t changed much since she was a young woman. Maybe the face was a little rounder and there were a few more wrinkles around the eyes, but it wasn’t the face of the old woman she saw when she looked in the kitchen mirror in the daylight.

A noise from outside got her attention. She glanced at the clock on the table beside her bed and saw it was three-thirty. Mercy! I’ve slept for nearly two hours. No wonder I feel out of sorts.

She heard the noise again. Seemed to be a man’s voice, quiet-like, but definitely coming from the side of the house. Maybe Annie and the baby were back already. The plan was for Mr. Nate to drop them and Tilly off in the alley behind the house and go back to the park so he could bring the others home later. This would give Annie time to get Abigail down for a nap, maybe take one herself, before everyone came home.

But Mr. Nate wouldn’t have gotten down from the carriage and left the horses. So, who had she heard? Could be Mr. Chapman or Mr. Harvey had come back early as well.

She pushed herself off the bed and went quickly over to the washstand to rinse her face, sticky with the heat. As she poured tepid water into the washbowl, she contemplated whether she had time for a bit of a sponge-off so she could put on a clean dress before going on downstairs to see if the mistress or the baby needed anything.

“Hisst…George, see anyone about?”

“No, and I looked in at all the windows. Don’t look like anyone’s at home. You ready to do this, Jimmy?”

When she realized that she was hearing two men, neither of them men she knew, Beatrice hastily dried her face and tip-toed to the window, being careful to stand where it would be hard for someone on the ground to see her. She first spied a wide-shouldered man wearing a derby who stood near the front parlor’s side window.

Then she noticed another man––or a boy, given his size and the cap on his head—walking from the front of the house to join the larger man. She watched as the two started towards the backyard.

Up to no good, whoever they are. Thank goodness, she’d made sure all the first-floor windows were locked. Surely they’d leave once they found everything closed up.

What about the high window in Kathleen’s room back of the kitchen? She often leaves it open a crack. Surely it’s too narrow for a man to slip through. But if they do figure out a way into the house, only the Stein’s doors are locked!

No-one, except the Steins, ever bothered to lock their rooms when they left the house. Certainly made life easier for Kathleen and Tilly, who were in and out of all the rooms in the house multiple times a day, tidying up, cleaning the fireplaces, dusting and sweeping, and putting away newly laundered clothes. Plus, the front door was always locked, and there was always somebody in the kitchen, except at night, when that door was locked as well.

She grabbed up her keys from beside the bed and ran back down to the Moffets’ work room at the end of the hall. The windows in that room should let her see what the two men were doing.

Beatrice made for the window that overlooked the back yard. To her dismay, the two men weren’t making for the back alley, instead they were standing beneath the kitchen window. As she watched, the big man with the derby swung some long, cloth-covered object, hitting the window, causing it to shatter. Quickly clearing out the shards of glass left in the frame, he climbed into the window and disappeared, followed immediately by the young man with the cap.

Saints above. They’re in the house. I should have shouted at them, first I saw them outside my window.

Her heart pounding, she trotted to the top of the back stairs and leaned in to listen. In her experience, sounds from the kitchen came up the stairwell, clear as could be.

“Jimmy, you search here and down the back kitchen passages. See if they keep any of the silver in the pantry. I’ll go on up, search the first floor. We’ll meet in the dining room. That’s the best place to find something of value, outside the bedrooms.”

Beatrice thought she heard Jimmy grunt in reply. The thought of some ruffian combing his greasy fingers through her kitchen shelves made her sick, but he wouldn’t find anything worthwhile, even if he could break the lock on the larder and pantry doors. All the silver plate and flatware were safely locked away in the dining room sideboard.

But she knew that some burglars were able to break into even these kinds of locks.

Maybe if she ran and got Officer Stanley, he’d get here in time to catch the two men in the act and arrest them.

But I can’t leave the house by the kitchen or the front door without chancing that I’ll run into them.

She hurried back to her room, thinking that if she could see someone on the street, she could shout for them to get the police and hope the burglars wouldn’t hear her.

But the street was completely deserted. No one on any of the porches, no wagons or carriages going down the street, no one on horseback, and certainly no foot traffic. How could it be that in a city of thousands and thousands of people, no one was coming down this particular block?

That’s when she remembered her nephew Patrick telling Kathleen once about a gang of thieves who specialized in burglarizing houses during hot weather. They concentrated on the times when people were more likely to be out of the house—going to church or celebrating a holiday. Like the Fourth of July. Patrick said these were also the days when servants were traditionally given the afternoon off. When they finally caught one of the gang, the man bragged that all they had to do was find a house where all the windows on the first floor were closed during the day, despite the heat. That usually meant everyone was out.

And here I as good as invited these men to rob the house when I went around and shut all the windows.

To be continued…

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