To Phil, Nathan, and Will— your tireless support means everything to me.
CHAPTER 1
San Francisco, March 1867
The Chinese believed that some days were inauspicious, the ill tidings written in the passage of the heavenly bodies. Celia Davies gazed down at her patient, a delicate Chinese girl whose skin displayed more bruises than unblemished flesh, and wondered if today would prove to be one of those days.
“You heal.” The old woman who’d been watching from the doorway flapped wrinkled hands, causing the lengthy twist of her silver-tinged ebony hair to swing across her chest. “You heal!”
“I shall try,” Celia answered. “I shall try my best.”
Celia leaned over the girl, a bead of perspiration trickling down her spine. It was stifling and gloomy in this airless room no larger than a closet, devoid of any furnishings beyond a washstand, a rickety bamboo stool, and the miserable cot the girl lay upon.
A room as tight and dark as a coffin.
“I have come to help you,” Celia said, though the prostitute likely could not hear or understand. There was a purple bruise along her collarbone, just above the neckband of her blue cotton sacque, and several more along her chin and cheekbone. One skinny arm was wrapped in filthy, bloodstained bandages. The girl’s face was sticky with dried sweat, and she whimpered drowsily. Undoubtedly, she had been dosed with opium for the pain. Celia rested a hand upon the girl’s forehead. Hot but not dangerously so. Not yet.
“She may have inflammation from her wounds. It is bad. Yau peng,” she said to the old woman waiting by the open door with its lattice-barred window.
The brothel owner’s hands had returned to the wide sleeves of her high-necked silk tunic, and her features creased with a frown. How much, Celia wondered, did this girl owe her in exchange for passage from China? Two hundred dollars? Three? Her freedom had been signed away in a contract she probably had not been able to read and might never escape. These girls came here by the dozens, sometimes sold by their own desperately poor families in China who thought they were sending their daughters to a better world, to Gam Saan, the Golden Mountain. Instead they were gathered at the docks and locked in barracoons, stripped and sold at auction, and relegated to the worst servitude a female could endure.
Celia settled onto the bamboo stool and undid the latch on the black leather portmanteau she used as a medical bag. More droplets of sweat collected beneath her collar, in the pits of her arms, and along her ribs where her corset hugged. She longed for a breath of air.
“When did this happen?” she asked, feeling for a pulse in the girl’s wrist. Weak and fast. Not unexpected. “How many days? Yat.”
“Saam yat.”
Did she mean three entire days? Celia wished Barbara were here to talk to the woman. But her half-Chinese cousin had not been home when Celia had been summoned and had rushed to the stews in China Alley with only her portmanteau as company.
“You should have sent for me before now,” she said.
The Chinese woman’s expression, stoic and implacable, hardened. “You heal or you go.”
“I do not intend to let her die.”
Swiping the cuff of her sleeve across her forehead, Celia set out the clean cloth she’d had the foresight to bring and spread her tools upon it—a small pair of scissors and forceps. Fresh muslin and linen for the dressing. Carbolic acid for cleaning the lacerations.
Celia unwound the bandage covering the girl’s arm. It adhered to the wound, which stank when she peeled the last of the cloth away. The wound was extensive, suppurating, its edges jagged. The tissue was brown instead of healthy pink, and clotted with blood. Bits of torn clothing were stuck in the gashes.
Gently, she turned the girl’s arm over, looking for redness along its length, the sign of a dangerous spread of purulent matter in the blood. In the shadowy gloom the extent of the inflammation was difficult to determine, the angry purple bruises too many and too great. She must have attempted to fend off the blows. Celia suspected she would also find bruises on the girl’s torso. The strikes her customer had landed—with a heavy belt buckle, if Celia had to guess—had been unrelenting and could have killed her immediately. Might still kill her, despite Celia’s best efforts.
A young woman had appeared in the doorway. Two long braids hung beneath a dirty gingham handkerchief tied over her hair, and her hands plucked anxiously at the hem of her shabby tunic. The girl—small boned, pretty—was another of the many prostitutes imprisoned within this building.
“I need clean water,” Celia said to her. “Ts’eng shui.” Given the stench of sewage wafting through the open door, she might as well ask for the moon.
The prostitute gathered the filthy bandages and scurried off to fetch water.
Celia brushed her patient’s hair away from her face. The girl groaned and twisted away from her touch.
“Shh,” said Celia. “I am here to help you.”
“You heal or you go,” the old woman repeated.
“Yes, I shall try,” she answered firmly. That was all she’d ever sought to do—help, heal. But a brothel in Chinatown was worlds away from her childhood home in England and her youthful attempts to bandage the scrapes suffered by the neighbor’s barn cat or mend the broken wings of birds.
“Here. Water.”
The other young woman had returned with a tin basin, water sloshing over the rim. She set it on the floor next to Celia’s feet and stood back. There were tears in her eyes as she looked down at Celia’s patient. It would be hard to be a friend in this place. Hard when life was so uncertain and far too short.
Celia started to work, first cleaning the wound as best she could, flushing it with generous amounts of water to remove the loose debris and pus. The runoff splashed onto the dirt floor at her feet, splattering her boots, dirtying her stockings. The prostitute standing in the doorway murmured to the elderly woman, sounding distressed. Her anxiety for her friend received a sharp reprimand. There was no pity to be found here, and less room for affection.
“Unh.” The patient’s eyelids fluttered as she tried to open them.
“Hurt?” asked her friend, shuffling forward.
“What I am doing hurts only a little,” Celia reassured her. “The flesh is too decayed to have much feeling in it.”
Using her forceps to grasp the diseased tissue, she retrieved the scissors and cut away as much flesh as she could manage. The wound began to bleed anew, which she took as a good sign. The other prostitute decided she could stand no more and ran off, her footsteps echoing down the alleyway. When Celia finished, she cleaned the gash with the carbolic and packed the wound with a pad of linen. She would not stitch it closed or cover it with a plaster. It needed a chance to heal, and sealing in the putrefaction would only guarantee the girl’s death.
“It must be kept clean. Wash it. Sai,” she said to the elderly woman as she bandaged the arm. “Change the dressing every day.” From her bag, Celia extracted a small envelope. “This is quinine. She must be given a grain every three to four hours.” She held up fingers, trying to explain. “For the fever.”
The woman took the envelope and tucked it into a pocket hidden beneath her tunic.
“Send a message if she worsens,” Celia added.
“You go now,” the brothel owner demanded, and stalked off.
Celia stared at the empty doorway, saw a drunk laborer shuffle past and down the alleyway, heard the call of prostitutes. No matter how long she stared, though, the woman would not be reappearing, her concern limited for a girl she considered little more than damaged merchandise.
Celia washed her hands and returned her supplies to the medical bag. Collecting her bonnet, she glanced at her patient one last time before hastening out into the alleyway.
The incessant spring winds had died down, leaving the air heavy with the reek of clogged sewer drains and the cloying sweetness of incense burning in a nearby joss house. She could hold her breath, but she couldn’t avoid hearing the muffled noises emanating from behind the closed doors that lined the passageway.
The alley widened as Celia walked on, the prostitutes’ rooms replaced by apartments and small shops. Overnight rain had left muddy puddles in the street. Hoisting her skirts, she hopped from one dry spot to the next. A porter squeezed past, the bamboo pole he’d slung over his shoulders curving from heavily laden baskets on either end. She skidded as she attempted to jump out of his path, her feet sinking to her ankles in slimy water.
“Gad!” Brilliant, Celia.
At the sound of her voice, the local constable who always offered to act as an escort straightened from where he had been leaning against a telegraph pole. He pulled the cigarette he’d been smoking from his mouth.
“You done, ma’am?” he asked.
“Yes, Constable.” She stepped up to him, her feet squelching in her boots. “Thank you for waiting.”
They headed for Washington Street, the constable eyeing every Chinese person they passed. “Ain’t smart to come here.”
“I do believe, Constable, that makes the tenth time you have made that observation,” she said, with a slight smile. He meant no harm.
“I keep hopin’ you’ll get some sense.”
“Most of these women are uncomfortable leaving Chinatown, so I have to come to them,” Celia explained. “I do not know what else I could do.”
The look he gave her suggested he could think of a whole host of things a proper lady should be doing besides tending prostitutes, and Celestials at that. It was not the first time he had given her that look, either.
They reached Washington Street. “I will be safe from here, Constable. Again, thank you.”
He nodded and strolled off, his head swiveling as he peered into every doorway, searching for drunks or gamblers to apprehend. The farther he walked without finding any, the more his shoulders sagged with disappointment.
Celia took one last glance back at the alleyway. In the distance, the old woman leaned through a ground-floor window, checking that Celia had left without taking any of the girls with her. As if there were someplace Celia could readily hide a girl from the owner who controlled her life.
As if there were someplace safe for any of them.
• • •
Celia hailed the horsecar running along the rails laid down on Stockton, its yellow coach a bright splash of color against the brick buildings and gray macadam. A ride when she was less than a mile from home was a real treat, but as her housekeeper would say in her Scottish brogue, “We didna come to America to kill ourselves.”
It was nearly seven years to the day since she had arrived in America with a husband and a dream. She had lost one. She clung fiercely to the other.
The driver reined in the horse, bringing the omnibus to a halt. She waited for the steps to clear of departing passengers and idly observed the busy streets around her. Across the way, the corner tobacconist closed his shop, shoving back the awning with a bang, and a newspaper boy called out the last copies of the Evening Bulletin. An elderly Chinese woman clattered past in her satin shoes with thick soles of felt and wood, silver anklets jangling. She disappeared into the shadows of the alley Celia had just left. The day’s activities were winding down, while soon the restaurants, lagerbier saloons, and gambling dens of the Barbary would be in full swing. And in the morning there might be new patients like the girl Celia had left moaning on a filthy cot.
Celia climbed aboard and paid her five cents to the conductor, who recorded her payment with his gang punch. The car was as crowded as ever, having come from the businesses along Market Street, and noisy with voices speaking a myriad of tongues. Several men stood hanging on to straps suspended from the ceiling. One or two eyed her outfit and the portmanteau in her hand. She could almost hear their thoughts: One of that sort of women, looking for rights. Next they’ll be asking for the vote, too, just like the negroes.
Gazing coolly at them, she noticed that a gentleman in a stovepipe hat had risen to offer her a seat. He, apparently, was not alarmed by a woman toting a medical bag. Celia thanked him and sank onto the bench between a matron whose hooped dress spread across two spaces and a man fast asleep. The woman pursed her lips as her regard settled on Celia’s muddy boots. Hastily, Celia tucked them beneath the hem of her equally muddy petticoats.
She had closed her eyes for only a second, it seemed, when someone called her name.
“Signora Davies. You come from a patient?”
Her neighbor, Maria Cascarino, occupied the bench opposite. Celia must have been exhausted to have missed her, a stout woman wearing a floral print skirt, her usual bright red shawl tucked around her white blouse. Perhaps Celia had not noticed Mrs. Cascarino without all of her children clinging to her skirts. Today only her youngest boy, Angelo, was at her side, kicking his heels.
“Yes, I have done, Mrs. Cascarino. I am sorry I did not notice you. It has been a very long and tiring day.”
“It is fine. I know you work hard.” She ruffled the mop of dark hair atop Angelo’s head. He must have misplaced his cap again. “We come from the city to buy shoes.” She motioned toward the scuffed brogans on the young boy’s feet. They looked far too large for a six-year-old. “Seventy-five cents. For old shoes! We cannot buy better.”
Celia’s gaze lingered on Maria Cascarino’s hand. It had come to rest upon Angelo’s shoulder, drawing his warm body snug against her side, the familiar itch of his wool jacket beneath her fingers. Celia buffed a thumb across her wedding band and felt an empty, hollow longing, which she quickly snuffed.
“Your shoes look very sturdy and fine, Angelo,” said Celia, making the boy grin and kick his heels faster.
Mrs. Cascarino smiled at her, crinkling the skin around her eyes. She often smiled, though she and her husband both claimed they had seen horrible things during the Risorgimento, the wars of Italian independence from Austria, which were still being fought, and the reason they had fled Italy almost twenty years ago, an infant girl in tow.
“But your patient, she is better?” the other woman asked.
“I have done what I could for her.”
“Sì. You always do the best.” She glanced down at Angelo, whose large eyes blinked at Celia, and her smile faltered. “Do you see my daughter?”
“I was in the Chinese quarter, Signora Cascarino. Not near her place of employment.”
Mrs. Cascarino clicked her tongue against her teeth. “That Mina,” she said. “We worry for her.”
I would worry for her, too, if she were my daughter. As far as Celia knew, however, Mina Cascarino did nothing more than sing at the saloon where she worked. A situation far better than what other girls like Mina could claim.
“Mina is a good girl,” said Celia.
Mrs. Cascarino eyed her. “My Mina? You are kind to say, but . . .” She looked out the window behind Celia’s back and yanked the cord strung overhead, ringing the bell to signal the driver to stop. “You come for dinner tonight. You and Miss Barbara. You talk to my husband and tell him Mina is good. We pray every day.”
“We would be delighted to come . . .” Oh no. Celia consulted the Ellery watch pinned to her waistband. She’d completely forgotten that she and Barbara were attending a meeting at the Ladies’ Society of Christian Aid in less than an hour. Celia was scheduled to give a talk urging the group to extend support to the Chinese women, and she expected opposition. “Actually, we cannot. We have a prior engagement this evening.”
“One day soon.”
“Indeed.”
The horsecar arrived at their destination, and they both alighted. Angelo noticed a friend across the street and dashed over the muddy road to join him.
“Good day, Signora,” Celia called, leaving the woman shouting at her son from the corner of Vallejo Street as the streetcar rattled off.
She hurried up the steep wooden pavement that lined both sides of the street. Telegraph Hill rose to her left, the white building and its unused signal pole at its peak. A horse and rider pulling a water cask on wheels slogged up the hill, the dirt road slick from last night’s shower. There would be fog tonight because of the damp. The water carrier tipped his hat to her as she reached her house, two stories tall and sturdily built of brick, wedged between clapboard dwellings that stairstepped the incline. From here, the city flowed over hills in all directions, buildings crowding out the chaparral that still clung to the sides of Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill looming to the west. She wondered if she would ever grow accustomed to the drifts of tawny sand that clogged the streets when the wind blew hard, or to the overwhelming brownness of it all during the summer months. At least there was the bay and the green, green mountains to the east to ease her homesickness.
Celia climbed the flight of stone steps and passed beneath the sign suspended from the overhang that read FEMALES’ FREE CLINIC and was repeated in Chinese and every other language she had been able to think of. Optimism had encouraged her to add the Chinese characters when she’d first opened the clinic two years ago. To date, only one Chinese girl had found her way there.
Mrs. Cascarino had collected Angelo and was ascending the road with him as Celia entered the house. She gave them a parting wave. Hearing the front door open, Addie Ferguson wandered into the vestibule from the parlor, her attention fixed on the day’s copy of the Daily Alta California.
“Men looking for positions and men looking for houses to let, but not a one looking for a wife! I’m wasting my time . . .” She glanced up and caught sight of Celia, who had dropped into the chair by the door and began wrestling off her boots. “Och, look at your feet! And those stockings . . . I’ll ne’er get that muck out of them.”
Lean and strong, with snapping hazel eyes and curly brown hair pinned beneath a cap, Addie conveyed her disapproval—and concern—with the hastiest of frowns. Despite being younger than Celia and on the wrong side of the servant-mistress relationship, Addie never hesitated to express her opinion. The tendency had irritated Celia’s husband, whose broad shoulders and Irish wit hadn’t impressed the strong-minded Scottish maid the same way they had impressed an impetuous young nurse with a wounded heart. Patrick had demanded Addie be dismissed within a month of Celia’s employing her. All this time later, though, she was still with Celia.
And Patrick Davies was the one who had left.
“Has Barbara returned from checking on the girl down the street?” asked Celia, worried for the young woman, who’d burned herself cooking.
Addie caught Celia’s boots before they landed on the floor.
“Miss Barbara’s been home near to an hour now, ma’am. She’s been reading on the back porch. That Dickens book you assigned her. And grumbling all the while,” Addie added, holding the grimy footwear away from her hopsack apron, the newspaper tucked under her other arm. “I suppose this rush means you’ve no plans to eat?”
“I do not have time, Addie.”
“’Tisn’t my place, ma’am, but starving will do you no good.”
“I shall not starve. I’ll eat when we return from the meeting.” Celia headed for the oak staircase in the center of the house, her fingers working the buttons of her crimson flannel garibaldi. The style of blouse had been named for a hero of the Italian independence movement, she recalled, thinking again of the Cascarinos and their chanteuse daughter.
“And please tell Miss Barbara to be ready to leave in fifteen minutes,” she added.
“Aye, ma’am.” The newspaper crackled as Addie withdrew it, ready to return to scanning its pages in her hunt for a man seeking a spouse. In all honesty, there were so many unattached males in San Francisco that if Addie really wanted a man, all she need do was step onto the street and snag one. “She’s none too happy about having to go.”
“Well, I’m none too happy about having to go, either, but we must. For the sake of the women we are trying to help,” said Celia, climbing the steps.
“By the by, ma’am, Miss Li didna come for dinner this afternoon.”
Celia paused and looked down at Addie. Li Sha, the lone Chinese girl who’d found her way to the clinic—and a way out of her life of prostitution—regularly came for dinner at Celia’s invitation. She had never missed a meal before. “Did she send a note?”
“Nae a word.”
“That is not like her.” Not in the least. “Li Sha will have a good reason for her absence, and we are silly to fret.”
“I am certain you’re right, ma’am,” answered Addie, sounding none too certain at all.
• • •
“We have always been generous,” Celia said, her gaze sweeping the women seated in the meeting room in the church’s basement. This evening the numbers were fewer than usual. “We can afford to be generous again in support of these girls, who have nowhere else to turn.”
At the back, a woman rose, gathered her things, and exited the room. Mrs. Douglass, the chairwoman of the Ladies’ Society of Christian Aid, intercepted her before she reached the door. The woman, however, was not dissuaded from leaving. Heads leaned together as others debated following her lead.
“I know this is a difficult choice to make,” Celia continued, “given how sentiment has turned against the Chinese who labor among us.”
“Taking away jobs,” someone muttered, generating more restless shuffling of delaine and poplin skirts, more whispers.
Celia studied each face; most of the women in the room had ceased meeting her gaze. “The Chinese should not be allowed to fall victim to prejudice. These girls require assistance now more than ever.”
Her cousin, seated in the front row, stared down at her hands folded in her lap. It was because of Barbara that Celia had become so passionate about the Chinese women of this city. A sentiment clearly not shared by most of those gathered here.
“There already is a Chinese Mission House in the city, Mrs. Davies,” pointed out a matron in plaid taffeta, a beribboned hat perched upon her graying hair. “The society doesn’t need to stretch its meager budget to provide charity to Chinese prostitutes when they already have an avenue toward a proper life.”
Her comment received a flutter of applause.
“Many of them cannot get to the mission, even if they wished to,” responded Celia. “They do not feel safe in the streets, and their own culture discourages them from leaving their homes and accommodations.”
“Brothels, you mean.”
“The society has supported other prostitutes who wished to turn their lives around. How are these women different?”
“It’s obvious! They’re Chinese!” said the woman. Frowning, she slid her glance toward Barbara, whose hands were clasped so tightly that her knuckles were turning white. A young lady seated next to her took a chair farther away.
It had been a mistake to bring her cousin here, Celia realized. In the past, these same women had always welcomed Barbara. Tonight, however, she was learning how readily professions of friendship could hide the bitterness of bigotry.
Celia rapped a fist against the podium, her anger mounting. “And it is because they are Chinese that we must act as a force for good in this city, a city that is becoming obsessed with dangerous hatred.”
“You’re mistaken, Mrs. Davies. We can’t afford to support these women,” said a third woman, who stood to leave, taking a friend with her.
The grumbling increased. Mrs. Douglass, sensing serious trouble, swept forward between the chairs and stopped in front of the podium.
“Thank you so much, Mrs. Davies. Perhaps at another time we can discuss extending support to the Chinese girls in this town.” She clapped politely and signaled for the next speaker to come up.
Seething, Celia stepped out from behind the podium. She collected the reticule she had left on her chair and clasped Barbara’s elbow. “Come, it’s time to leave.”
Tears in her dark eyes, her cousin rose awkwardly to her feet.
“Keep your chin up, Barbara. They must not defeat us,” Celia whispered, marching out of the room while every eye remained on them.
“Cousin Celia, please wait!” Barbara called, hobbling into the stairwell. Her left foot, disfigured since birth, made it difficult for her to walk quickly.
Celia slowed and helped her climb the stairs that led to the church’s vestibule.
“I shouldn’t have dashed off like that, but I was angry,” Celia said by way of apology. “It was a mistake to bring you here.”
“I hate them!” Barbara spat, all of her youth exposed in the angry outburst.
Her cousin was only sixteen and not much different from Celia at that age—sensitive, awkward, baffled by the world. To be half-Chinese and afflicted with a clubfoot made life that much more difficult.
“At the moment, Barbara, I feel precisely the same,” said Celia, stepping through the church’s main doors and descending onto the street. The sun had set, and the corner streetlamp puddled light over the pavement. A man across the road shot Barbara a black look. Celia hoped her cousin hadn’t noticed.
Celia hailed a hackney coming up the cobbled road. They climbed into the dark, quiet interior and the carriage pulled away from the curb.
“How could those ladies be so mean?” Barbara asked, her voice breaking on a sob. “It’s just like when Papa sent me to that school and everybody made fun of me.”
Celia wrapped an arm around her cousin’s shoulders, drawing her close. Barbara rarely allowed such attention, and Celia relished it.
“Shh,” she murmured. “We must stay strong, you and I, because there will be times when strength is all we have to rely on.”
Her words only made Barbara cry harder.
Celia sighed and let her weep. We are both pitiful. A reluctant daughter and an inexperienced guardian who could not replace the parents Barbara had lost. They both had so much to learn.
• • •
“It’s a bad ’un, Mr. Greaves.”
Detective Nicholas Greaves shifted his gaze from the crumpled pile of indigo cotton and black hair tangled in the staves of a discarded broken barrel to stare at the policeman. He squinted against the morning sun. “When, exactly, aren’t they, Taylor?”
The man frowned. Lifting his hat, Taylor pulled out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat beading his forehead. It was turning into a typical San Francisco spring day—cool, a breeze off the water climbing the hills, chasing off the fog. The weather wasn’t making Taylor sweat. The dead body was.
“Give me the details,” Nick requested. His assistant had a weak stomach and probably shouldn’t have been on the detective force, but he was thorough in his work. Nick would forgive a lot for thoroughness.
Taylor retrieved a small notebook from the inner pocket of his knee-length gray coat and consulted it. Out in the bay a few yards distant, a seagull bobbed on the waves while its companions swirled overhead. Behind Nick, at the land side of the quay, a crowd had gathered—warehouse workers and longshoremen in shirtsleeves, a couple of chapped-skinne
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