Tuesday March 11, 2025

Dandy's Discovery, Scene 1

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 1651: Yesterday was sunny and productive in terms of both exercise and working on the short story. But now for the story!

Throughout the rest of March, I will be publishing every Tuesday and Thursday the sixth short story in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Dandy’s Discovery. Today is scene 1, but if you would like to first read the short posts I did on why I wrote this short story with some historical tidbits on both dogs and cats as pets in the Victorian era, click HERE, or HERE.

Dandy’s Discovery
by M. Louisa Locke
Copyright 2020

Scene 1: O’Farrell Street Boardinghouse, San Francisco, 1881

Annie stood overlooking the crib at the foot of her bed, watching her daughter sleep. Abigail’s short, reddish-blond curls looked wilted in the heat. August, as usual, had become sweltering. Long, hot days were unrelieved by fog or rain, and even the ocean breezes from the west had failed to materialize this morning. The creases in Abigail’s chubby arms and legs had been pink with the beginning of heat rash after yesterday’s naps, so Annie put her daughter down to sleep this morning wearing only her diaper.

Her boarder, Mrs. Esther Stein, would have been scandalized. She felt that a baby who showed any skin was vulnerable to stray infectious diseases—which the good woman still seemed to believe was the result of some sort of miasma that floated in the air, particularly at night. As a result, Esther insisted on closing the windows in the two-room suite she and her husband Herman occupied across the hall when they went to bed. Fortunately, the couple were currently in Portland, visiting their oldest son and his family. Annie hoped that by the time they came back to San Francisco next month, the city would have returned to its usual cool days and cooler nights.

Taking one final look at her daughter, Annie sighed and walked over to start putting away the clean diapers that sat in a basket by the chest of drawers. She’d really thought that, by this time, with Abigail now three months old and no longer needing to be nursed every two hours, she would have started seeing clients again, giving financial advice, and doing audits for companies. What she hadn’t anticipated was the continued fatigue that came from repeatedly being awakened in the night to nurse. And her brain seemed to have shut down permanently. She could do simple tasks, like fold laundry. Otherwise, she often found herself sitting in a kind of daze, with time just slipping away.

Nate would come home from the law offices and ask her how her day had gone. Apart from being able to describe such monumental events as the first time Abigail had put her foot in her mouth, held her head up when she was on her stomach, and rolled over, Annie couldn’t think of anything to tell him. At least, there had been a fair amount going on in the boardinghouse that she could report on, so she didn’t feel like a complete dullard.

Since Barbara Hewitt, who taught at Girls High, wasn’t working during the summer, she often sat with Annie and Abigail when they took the air on the front porch. The kind woman would try to discuss the news of the day with her or would recount what the talkative Minnie Moffet had said at lunch. In addition, the three children in the house, Jamie Hewitt, Ian Hennessey, and Emmaline Fournier, would come in and out of Annie and Nate’s room to “see the baby” and tell her about the latest antics of Dandy, the Boston Terrier.

Mrs. Stein often invited her over to her parlor in order to dispense bits of wisdom she had gained from her own experiences of motherhood, which was extensive given her six children and countless grandchildren. Even Laura, Nate’s sister, had more time during the summer break from the university, and she had dinner with Annie when Nate worked late, which happened way too often for Annie’s liking. Laura would tell her about the book she had set type for that day and talk about what her beau, Seth Timmons, was learning while clerking in Nate’s law offices.

And, of course, Annie could always bring Abigail down to the kitchen, where she would rock the baby and bask in the gentle flow of gossip among the three servants. Somehow, between Kathleen Hennessey’s forays out to do the daily marketing, little Tilly’s brief exchanges with the delivery boys who came to the back door with eggs, milk, meat, and ice, and Mrs. O’Rourke’s weekly chats with the laundress, they kept informed about everything that went on in the homes and businesses within a ten block radius of the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse.

But a week ago, Annie lost even these mild pleasures.

First, the Steins left for their trip to Oregon at the same time school started back up. This meant Mrs. Hewitt and the children were gone during the day, and Laura was back to her university classes during the mornings, which meant most evenings she didn’t get home from her type-setting job until after dinner. Even the Moffets, the two elderly dressmakers, were working longer than usual hours as they began designing the winter collection for the dress department of the Silver Strike Bazaar. And Mr. Harvey’s wife and children finally made the move down from Sacramento, so he and his fellow boarder, David Chapman, had moved out last week.

To make matters worse, this week the kitchen had stopped being a congenial place to visit. Beatrice O’Rourke, who combined her duties as cook with being the general housekeeper, had decided to commence a general fall cleaning throughout the house. Her excuse was the fact that the Steins were out of town, so it would be easy to clean their rooms. Plus, since Chapman’s and Harvey’s back room was now empty, Beatrice announced this was the perfect time to give it a thorough cleaning so Laura could move in and they could finally turn her old room into a nursery for Abigail.

All perfectly reasonable explanations for her decision, except for the heat. The few times Annie made it down to the kitchen, the place was steaming, and every surface was covered with pots and pans and wooden boxes and glass bottles that Beatrice had removed so she could give all the shelves and cupboards a thorough scrub.

Meanwhile, Kathleen and Tilly tackled the rest of the house. They would go into a room and take down the curtains and roll up the carpets and carry them outside to shake and beat out the accumulated dust. Then they would move all the furniture in the room to the center so they could clean the walls and baseboards and dust behind furniture. When this was done, it was time to mop the floors and push back the furniture, bring up the carpets, and rehang the curtains. All this entailed constant movement up and down the stairs and in and out the kitchen’s back door, and Annie felt she should stay in her room with Abigail and out of everyone’s way.

Kathleen and Tilly had started their work on Wednesday, after the laundry and ironing for the week was completed. It took them two days to clean Beatrice’s room, the Moffets’ two rooms, and then Barbara Hewitt’s room, all in the attic. This morning they finished up the two boys’ room in the attic and had started on the Steins’ two rooms on this floor.

Kathleen took a brief break to help Annie bathe Abigail before the baby’s morning nap, and she had shared with Annie how upset she’d been when she discovered that the boys had been squirreling away candy they bought with some of the money they made selling newspapers. She said she’d give her brother Ian a piece of her mind when he got home today. Said he knew very well that was a sure way to attract vermin. Then she’d rushed away to work off some of her anger by helping Tilly whack the Steins’ carpets.

The result of all this activity in the house was that Annie felt particularly useless, and lonely, and unbelievably pathetic.

To make matters worse, going back over to look at Abigail, who was waking up and smiling at her, she felt she was an ungrateful wretch to even think of complaining about her life.

To be continued…

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