Tuesday February 11, 2025

Beatrice Bests the Burglars, Scene 2

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 1623:

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 2, 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: A reminder that between 12:30 and 1:00 today (Eastern Standard Time) I will be jumping on Facebook to participate in this Valentine’s promotion by the History Mystery Chicks. Hope to see some of you there!

Beatrice Bests the Burglars
by M. Louisa Locke
Copyright 2019

Scene 2:

Beatrice dried the last bowl and put it on the shelf, glancing at the kitchen clock. Only a little past one and she’d finished the dishes, washed the baby’s soiled nappies and hung them out to dry, and started a pot of baked beans to simmer. She also had mixed up enough dough for rolls, which would rise slowly over the afternoon. All she had to do now was peel some potatoes and boil some eggs so she could make potato salad when it was closer to supper-time.

Tilly had instructions to bring back any of the left-over fried chicken and roast beef when she accompanied Annie and Mr. Nate home, but if there wasn’t any left, or the meat had sat too long outside, there was still half of Sunday’s ham in the larder to go with the beans and potato salad, in addition to fresh greens from the garden.

She’d bake some cookies later in the afternoon, since she doubted very much if any of the pies she’d made would survive the picnic. And the master did love her cookies. Annie often joked that Mr. Nate only wanted to marry her because of Beatrice’s cooking.

As she sat at the kitchen table and started peeling the potatoes, she looked around the kitchen with satisfaction. Everything neat and tidy as she liked it.

But so empty.

Even the old black cat, Queenie, had deserted her, going outside to lay in the shade of one of the bushes at the back fence.

Beatrice couldn’t remember the last time she had been all alone in the house.

Between the other servants, Kathleen and Tilly, her mistress Annie and Annie’s husband and new baby, and the eleven boarders, there was always someone here. Even the few times a month she took an evening or afternoon off and left the boardinghouse, she always visited one of her numerous relatives. This meant sitting in crowded kitchens, listening to her sisters complaining about good-for-nothing sons-in-law, flighty unmarried daughters, or grandchildren who had gotten into some sort of mischief.

Could this really be the first time that I’ve been all by myself since Mrs. Waterstone died? Hard to believe that was over three and a half years ago.

Agatha and Timothy Waterstone first hired Beatrice in 1840. She’d recently arrived in New York City, a shy eighteen-year-old, fresh off the boat from County Cork. The saints had surely been looking after her that day when they led her to the employment agency where Agatha Waterstone had put in a request for a maid-of-all-work. Not only did Mrs. Waterston turn out to be a kind mistress, which Beatrice would learn was rare indeed, but the woman, who had no children of her own, had taken Beatrice under her wing—patiently forgiving her mistakes, listening to her small concerns, and giving her wise advice.

By the time Mr. Waterstone, a sea captain, decided to retire and move out west to make his fortune in ’49, Beatrice was a well-trained parlormaid and the only servant brave enough to come with them and weather the first few years of living in tents and crowded boardinghouses. As a reward, Mrs. Waterstone promoted her to the position of lady’s maid, with an increase in weekly wages, as soon as they moved into the newly built O’Farrell Street house. With those wages she’d even been able to help pay for the rest of her siblings to come west.

Such fine times! Dressing her mistress for a constant round of afternoon visits, fancy parties, and nights at the theatre. And then there were the small select dinners the Waterstones hosted, where Mr. Waterstone made his successful business connections. With a staff of four servants, the house had hummed with life.

Nevertheless, Beatrice had begun to yearn for a home and a husband of her own. Agatha Waterstone, unlike some mistresses who tried to make a good servant feel disloyal if they chose to leave, supported her decision to marry the brash Irish copper, Peter O’Rourke. She even paid to have a dress made special for her for the wedding. A lovely light blue plaid that matched the color of her eyes, with yards and yards of material in the skirt. When Peter danced with her, sweeping her up in the air, it twirled out so sweetly. She pitied the young girls nowadays, like Kathleen, who wanted dresses like their betters…with those narrow skirts and awkward bustles. Couldn’t be much fun on the dance floor.

But twelve years ago, her dances with Peter came to an end when he was shot to death by some thief who objected to her husband’s demand he hand over the wallet he’d stolen.

Oh, that had been an awful day.

She’d always known Peter’s job put him in danger. But she was still young enough to believe that disasters happened to other people, so she’d not been prepared. The small pittance the policeman’s benevolent society gave her barely paid for the funeral and wake, and she surely hadn’t wanted to go live with one of her younger sisters or brothers. But she feared she’d not be able to get a decent job as a servant—the only paid work she’d ever done. There weren’t very many employers who would be interested in hiring a woman in her late forties, specially not as a lady’s maid. The styles had changed so much from the hoop skirts and curls of the eighteen-fifties, which was when Beatrice last held that position.

She remembered thinking that maybe she could get a letter of recommendation from Mrs. Waterstone. She’d kept contact with her former mistress, who’d occasionally hired her to help out in the kitchen when the Waterstones hosted a large dinner party. The kind woman had known it was hard to make ends meet on a policeman’s meagre salary.

What Beatrice hadn’t imagined was that––the day after Peter’s funeral––Agatha Waterston would arrive at her doorstep and ask her if she would consider moving back to the O’Farrell Street house to work, telling her that her current cook had left her in the lurch. Only later did Beatrice learn the truth, that Mrs. Waterstone had gotten a friend to hire her former cook, at a slightly higher wage, so that she could offer the job to Beatrice.

All she had known then was that the second she stepped back into the O’Farrell Street kitchen, put on the apron that hung by the back door, and fired up the old wood cookstove, her heart had begun its slow process of healing.

She soon got the opportunity to show her gratitude. As Mr. Timothy’s health and business declined in the early seventies, one-by-one, the other servants either left and weren’t replaced or had to be let go. Beatrice cheerfully became a maid-of-all-work again, doing what she could to keep the house clean, the laundry washed and ironed, and the meals cooked and served. She even helped out by taking over some of the nursing duties so her poor mistress could go to church and keep up some social life, doing her charity work, playing whist with her old friends.

Then came Mr. Timothy’s death and, a few months later, the stroke that felled her mistress. Merciful heavens, that had been a shock! Although Agatha Waterstone had been in her seventies, she’d appeared quite healthy.

Even in death, her mistress had reached out to help her. Not only with the small annuity she’d left Beatrice in her will––a sum that would have at least kept her out of the poor house if she’d not had family to take her in––but Mrs. Waterstone had left instructions with Mr. Stein, the executor of her will, to let Beatrice stay in the house, at least until Mrs. Waterstone’s widowed niece, Annie Fuller, came to take possession.

When Mr. Stein told her about the niece inheriting the O’Farrell Street house, she’d not been surprised. She knew all about Annie. Beatrice was still working for the Waterstones in 1852 when Annie’s parents, Elizabeth and Edward Stewart, arrived in San Francisco. They’d taken the trip west to join the Waterstones by way of Panama, and Mrs. Stewart was already pregnant with Annie when they arrived.

Beatrice had even been in the room when Annie was born and had been given the job of taking the newborn down to meet her father and aunt and uncle who were waiting down in the small front parlor.

Yet, back then, what Beatrice really wanted was a baby of her own, so when she left the O’Farrell Street house to get married a year later, she’d not given it a thought that she might not see the little girl again. Didn’t even bother to come by and say goodbye when she heard that the Stewarts were moving down south to Los Angeles, for Mrs. Stewart’s health.

She had felt a passing sadness when Mrs. Waterstone told her that Annie’s mother had died. She’d been back working for the Waterstones by then. And after Mr. Stewart took Annie back east to live, Mrs. Waterstone would read her the yearly Christmas letter Annie sent. From these letters, Beatrice learned about Annie’s decision to marry a young man named John Fuller, and then the terrible news that less than three years later, first Annie’s father and then her husband died.

When Mrs. Waterstone heard this last piece of news, she reached out to Annie, asking if she wanted to move back to San Francisco to live with her and her husband. But she’d never received an answer. Eventually, as Mr. Waterstone got sicker, she gave up writing.

Beatrice now knew that Annie never received those letters. Annie never spoke much about her marriage to John Fuller, or the five unhappy years after his death that she spent living with his family as a kind of unpaid servant, but Beatrice often wondered if Annie’s in-laws had kept Mrs. Waterstone’s letters from her.

Thank heavens, Mr. Stein was of sterner stuff. He’d even hired a private detective to track Annie down and sent the funds to bring her to San Francisco to take up possession of the O’Farrell Street house.

And a month after Mrs. Waterstone’s death, when Annie showed up at the back door, Beatrice had been sitting in this very kitchen, all alone. Annie had been right off the train from back east, looking so tired and sad, so lost. Yet she’d given her such a brave smile when Beatrice had come over to welcome her.

Maybe that’s why she’d found herself opening up her arms to fold the poor girl into a tight embrace, that smile calling forth one of the last times Beatrice had seen Annie, a sturdy one-year-old who’d smiled in exactly that way after she’d fallen and skinned her knees.

Or, maybe it was that Beatrice saw in Annie a woman like herself, who’d found herself widowed, too young, trying to make her way in the world.

In any case, that embrace, which Annie returned with fervor, forged some sort of kinship between the two of them, and Beatrice knew in that instant that just as Mrs. Waterstone had become the mother she’d needed, Annie was going to be the daughter Beatrice had never had.

To be continued…

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