A New World for the Irish Daughter (Maggie O'Halloran #3)

Chapter 1

SAN FRANCISCO

San Francisco was swathed in a thick, murky fog as Maggie O’Halloran stepped briskly off the train onto the platform of the Southern Pacific Depot.

She tipped her head up, one hand holding onto her straw boater, to survey the station looming above her.

While the large brick building was impressive in its own way, it was, she reflected, a far cry from Chicago’s beautiful Beaux Arts station, where she’d alighted only a year ago, desperate to start a new life.

Back then, she’d been downcast and weary-hearted, reeling from the way her life had come to ruins back in New York, after her brother Danny had forced them to flee the dastardly schemes of the dreaded Whyo gang.

Now, in San Francisco, her dreams were once more in ashes all around her, but she was stubborn enough to hold onto hope. After all, someone had to.

She glanced behind her, where Brendan was stepping off the train, his head slightly bowed, seemingly willfully uninterested in his new surroundings.

Since realizing the shocking extent of his former employer’s crimes back in Chicago—and even those remained only terrible suspicions—Brendan had struggled with guilt and, worse, despair over his unwitting part in the awful tragedy.

Maggie had done her best to bolster his spirits, and Danny’s chirpy enthusiasm seemed to help, but after six days of grueling train travel where Brendan had barely been able to stir himself to view the majestic Rocky Mountains, it was becoming increasingly difficult to hold onto her optimism.

Still, Maggie was determined to try.

“Welcome to the Paris of the West,” she remarked playfully as she reached for Brendan’s arm, slipping hers through it.

“Isn’t that what they call San Francisco these days?

” A businessman on the train had said as much, expostulating about how the Wild West boomtown had recently grown into a city of industrial and cultural renown.

“Before the Gold Rush of ’49,” he’d told them importantly, “San Francisco had only a thousand souls. Now we’re over three hundred thousand!”

Which was still a much smaller city than the one they’d just left, but San Francisco was a clean slate, a new opportunity, and Maggie was determined that both she and Brendan should see it that way.

She smiled at Danny, who was sauntering off the train behind Brendan.

Before they’d left Chicago, he’d bought himself a three-piece suit and brown Derby, the clothes of a young man about town rather than the scrappy boy he’d been, running errands for the druggist H.H.

Holmes—the name of the suspected killer still brought a shudder to Maggie’s very soul.

Thank goodness they’d escaped that evil man.

He’d been arrested as they’d left Chicago, thanks to Danny, but Maggie knew Brendan had his doubts about whether Holmes would remain in jail.

“I’m sixteen, a man now,” Danny had told Maggie as he’d shown off his new clothes. “I’m going to be different in San Francisco, you’ll see.”

Maggie had smiled and held her tongue, not entirely convinced that her brother could change his ways, although she certainly hoped he might be at least a little different as they started afresh yet again.

He’d gotten into plenty of scrapes during their times in both New York and Chicago, his manner as carefree and feckless as their father’s, whom they’d come to find in this city.

They’d been led across the ocean and then the entire country, looking for Declan O’Halloran, who had left them behind in Ireland with so many silver-tongued promises.

Maggie had her doubts as to whether they’d find him here, but it could still be a new start—for all of them.

“Get one of the suitcases, Danny, won’t you?” she asked her brother. “And then we can head outside and see where we are.” She turned back to Brendan. “We’ve arrived at last! Aren’t you glad to get off that dusty train?”

When they’d traveled from New York to Chicago, Brendan had splurged on a luxurious berth in one of the world-class Pullman cars.

This time, however, with their circumstances so reduced, they’d had to make do with regular seats and meals from the food carts, or bought in the stations.

After six dusty days of travel, Maggie was ready to have her feet firmly on solid ground.

“I suppose,” Brendan replied, glancing around in seeming indifference.

He had not roused himself to show interest in anything since they’d left Chicago, but Maggie told herself that once they’d found lodgings and work, began to build a life for themselves, whatever that might look like, Brendan would regain something of the man he’d been—cheerful and warmhearted, capable and kind.

The man she’d liked and needed, even if she’d chosen not to love him the way he’d once said he loved her.

She’d lost sight of that kind and generous man over the last year, as she and Brendan had become estranged.

While he’d remained in Englewood, a working-class suburb of Chicago, managing the drugstore for Dr. Holmes, Maggie’s dreams of being a famous milliner, now no more than dust, had taken her soaring to the lofty heights of that city’s society—and then right back down again.

Despite the distance that had grown between them over those months, Maggie knew she still cared for him—more, perhaps, than she’d ever been willing to admit, thanks to her own pride and folly.

And yet, even though he was standing right next to her, her arm slipped through his, in many ways Brendan now felt farther away than ever.

Maggie scanned the busy platform, where porters pushed handcarts of luggage and smartly dressed passengers hurried off to their destinations, while seagulls circled high above, weaving among the station’s wooden rafters.

“Shall we ask for directions?” she asked Brendan, forcing another smile to her lips. As daunting as starting over for a third time felt, she kept her voice briskly cheerful.

“Da’s address is on the corner of Montgomery and Market Streets,” Danny reminded her, while Brendan slipped his arm from hers and took the other suitcase, the two now the sum total of all their belongings.

There had been a return address on the letter Declan O’Halloran sent that had come via their former landlady back in New York and was now a year old.

Maggie had no idea if her father would even still be there.

“Shall we take a hansom?” Danny suggested.

“Or a cable car!” His dark eyes lit with excitement at the prospect.

The businessman on the train had told them about San Francisco’s famous cable cars that ran up and down the city’s hills and, while Maggie had certainly taken her fair share of that mode of transportation back in Chicago, it had been on flat prairieland, not these steep streets where she feared her life would be taken into her hands—or really, those of the driver.

“Let’s get out onto the street,” she suggested, “and then we can see where we are.” She turned to Brendan, offering him another smile that he didn’t return.

Maggie’s own slipped from her lips as she renewed her grip on her hatbox—she’d kept one of her own creations as a reminder of both where she’d once been and how far she’d fallen—and headed for the station’s main hall.

Outside the station, Maggie blinked in the gloom—although the sky high above was a pale, summertime blue, the fog rolling off the bay cloaked everything in an ethereal mist. Maggie had learned that the station was built on ground reclaimed by the tidelands; the bay was just beyond the railyards, although it was too foggy to glimpse it, and the air tasted damp and salty.

As she glanced at the people hurrying by, the cable cars and horse-drawn wagons and carriages clattering along the street, a sense of something almost like futility briefly swamped her.

How could she possibly be starting over again?

And this time without Brendan’s cheerful confidence to buoy her.

A year ago, she’d resented how assured he’d seemed as he’d pretended, all too easily, to be her husband, but now she found she missed that steadiness.

She missed him, even though he was standing right next to her.

What a contrary woman she was, she reflected ruefully. She refused to give in to moping or self-pity now, or ever again. She would, Maggie decided, have to take her fate into her own hands.

Stepping forward smartly, she approached a young man sporting the knickerbockers and flat cap of a delivery boy. “Pardon me, but can you tell me how to find Montgomery Street, on the corner of Market?”

The boy eyed her up and down in a way that was almost, but not quite, insulting, and then snorted. “That’s right in the middle of the Barbary Coast,” he remarked with another up-and-down of her person. “Whaddya wantin’ there?”

“The Barbary Coast…” Maggie repeated in confusion.

“Where all the dance halls and saloons and cribs are,” the boy explained with a deliberate leer, and she stepped back sharply, surprised and alarmed by his forward manner.

With a cackle of laughter, he ran off, and she shook her head slowly.

This hardly seemed like an auspicious beginning to their new life in San Francisco.

“Montgomery Street is about a mile north of here,” Danny announced as he sauntered up to her with a cocksure smile. Apparently, he’d had better luck ascertaining their direction than she’d had. “We can walk up Third Street all the way to Market, unless you want to take one of them trolleys?”

Maggie glanced at Brendan, who had still not said a word. “It’s a long way, with these suitcases,” she remarked, frowning. “Perhaps we should take a streetcar?”

“I can manage,” Brendan told her shortly, looking away, and for a moment, she was reminded, painfully, of when she and Danny had arrived at Castle Garden in New York, carrying her mother’s trunk between them all the way to Orchard Street.

How long ago it seemed now, and how far they’d come, and yet she felt further from everything—from who she’d been and, more importantly, who she wanted to be—than she ever had.

“Very well,” she told Brendan and, holding her hatbox, she followed Danny up the steep street, further into the city.

It did not take long before the railyards gave way to the city’s business district, but before Maggie could be comforted by the reassuring sight of the many stately buildings, seeming bulwarks of respectability and prosperity, the landscape changed once more, and the semi-dilapidated apartment buildings and Victorian houses, paint peeling from their trim, informed them they had entered the neighborhood the errand boy had told her was known as the Barbary Coast.

Maggie kept her chin lifted and her gaze straight ahead as they passed dance halls and dive bars, cow yards and cribs—the slang, she quickly realized from the signs she saw, for brothels—with half-dressed women hanging out of the windows, men staggering from saloons with empty tankards of beer.

The air smelled thickly of cigar smoke and beer, sweat and something sweetish Maggie didn’t recognize.

More than one wolf whistle accosted her ears as a man sauntered by, giving her an insultingly thorough glance.

Her cheeks heated from the mortification of it all.

It had been bad enough, back in Chicago, when she’d realized how much of society had come to view her—as little better than one of the women lounging on the balcony above her now, a tattered feather boa looped around her shoulders.

Thanks to the business arrangement she’d had with Theo Stein, she’d been considered a kept woman, even if she hadn’t been, not in that way.

But to be treated as such here, where she’d come to start afresh, to be a new person and be seen as a new person, was too much to be borne. She glared defiantly at one man who stepped forward with a decided leer, but he only laughed and blew her a drunken kiss.

Maggie looked quickly away, her cheeks scarlet.

Everywhere she turned, there was a sign—some painted, some in electric lights—advertising some debauched attraction—drink, opium, whatever kind of woman might be required.

To walk along such a street as if she belonged there felt like both punishment and penance—as well as a reminder that no matter how far she traveled, she might never escape her past mistakes.

Especially if she continued to make them.

Except here, she reminded herself, she wouldn’t. Her brother wasn’t the only one who was going to be different in this new city.

“Here it is!” Danny exclaimed. He’d stopped in front of a three-story house, its wooden exterior painted lilac, with peeling trim painted a deeper purple, and the front door a bright and vivid pink.

Maggie had never seen such a colorful establishment, and it made her wonder what—or really, who—was inside.

A woman appeared in an upstairs window, dressed only in a lacy peignoir open at the front, her thick blond hair twisted into a heavy rope hanging over one shoulder. She glanced down at them in rueful curiosity before she pulled the gauzy curtain across the window, blocking their view.

Maggie swallowed hard.

Danny started toward the steps. “Shall we go inside?”

Quickly, she grabbed her brother’s shoulder.

“Danny, wait.” She glanced at Brendan, who did not seem to have noticed the near-naked woman above them, and had not once remarked on the unwholesome nature of the neighborhood as they’d ventured further into it, obvious as it had to have been to him.

Irritation flared through her at his seemingly deliberate indifference not just toward her but toward everything, but she forced herself to suppress it as she turned back to Danny.

“I believe this is a… women’s establishment,” she told him stiffly. “I can’t imagine that Da…” She swallowed that thought. “But I’ll go and ask if they know of him.”

“A women’s establishment?” Danny repeated, frowning, before his eyes rounded and he let out a guffaw. “By Jove, Maggie, do you mean a brothel?” Her brother cackled with laughter. “Well, fancy that! Our da lives in a whorehouse!”

“Hold your tongue, Danny,” Maggie snapped. “Likely as not he isn’t here, but like I said, I’ll ask.” And angling her chin a notch higher as she stared straight ahead, her cheeks positively aflame, she mounted the steps and knocked smartly on the door.