Free The Misses Moffet Mend A Marriage: A Victorian San Francisco Story by M. Louisa Locke

The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage
    A Victorian San Francisco Story
     
    By M. Louisa Locke
     
    Copyright 2012 by M. Louisa Locke
    Cover design Copyright 2012 Michelle Huffaker
     
    Kindle Edition
     
    This short story is based on characters from the full-length novels in Locke's Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, Maids of Misfortune , Uneasy Spirits , and Bloody Lessons .
     
    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
     
    *****
     
    Millie felt a warm glow of pleasure as her older sister, Minnie, sailed up to the front desk at the Palace, San Francisco’s newest and grandest hotel, and announced, “Miss Minerva and Miss Millicent Moffet, for their appointment with Mrs. Andrew Roberts.”
    The desk clerk snapped his fingers at one of the bellmen, who came running over. He bowed and took the large brown-paper parcel from Minnie and her own carpetbag of sewing materials before leading the way to the nearest elevator. This device, the only one that Millie had ever ridden in, was an imposing wood-paneled room that miraculously ascended up to the fifth floor, with just the slightest hiss and jerk when they reached their destination. Even though they had been coming to work for Mrs. Roberts for nearly a year, riding in this odd conveyance never got old for Millie. Neither did the respectful treatment by the staff. As the bellman guided them solicitously down the corridor to Mrs. Roberts’ suite, his dark skin and soft southern accent made her nostalgic for her Natchez home. She and her sister hadn’t been back in the twenty-five years since they and their younger brother were swept up in the golden rush to San Francisco in the early eighteen-fifties.
    While her sister continued a stream of questions designed to elicit every detail of the bellman’s history, Millie stepped over to the balcony railing that ran around all four sides of the Grand Court of the Palace Hotel. Noticing how motes of dust drifted in the soft shafts of light slanting down from the glass domed ceiling three stories above, she looked up at the seventh floor, which housed the Conservatory. She hadn’t seen so many marble columns and Greek statues since the doors of polite Natchez society had been slammed in her family’s face when her father went bankrupt. This made her remember the gown she’d made for the cotillion where her engagement was to be announced. It was made of light-blue striped satin and had the large puffed sleeves that were so fashionable back then. The engagement, like the cotillion, had never happened for her. So long ago. I wonder if Percy ever regrets…?
    “ Millicent!” Minnie’s sharp voice interrupted her melancholy reverie.
    Millie obediently retu rned to stand next to the door to the Roberts’s suite of rooms. The door opened, and Juliette, Mrs. Roberts’s maid, ushered them in. Juliette was wearing a severely tailored dark-blue dress with starched white apron, collar, and cuffs and a white lace cap that the Moffets had made. Millie was particularly proud of the cap, made precisely to Mrs. Roberts’s specifications. Her sister had designed the dress itself, and Mrs. Roberts had confided to them one afternoon during a fitting that she believed that the only reason Juliette stayed in her employ was because of how well she looked in her uniform.
    She’d said, with her engaging laugh, “She hates living in the hotel . Our suite is such a long way from the basement where the maids are housed, and Juliette says the matron in charge of the servant dormitory is worse than a prison guard. Of course, I can’t help but wonder what she knows about prison guards.”
    Mrs. Roberts, formerly Jewell Darling, a favorite of the vaudeville circuit, was now married to the respected and wealthy Mr. Andrew