Page 1 of A New World for the Irish Daughter

CHAPTER 1

SAN FRANCISCO

June 1893

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 withguilt 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 threehundredthousand!”

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 thatbothshe 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 brothercouldchange his ways, although she certainly hoped he might be at least alittledifferent 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 inanythingsince 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’dremained 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 acable 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 overagain? 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 missedhim, 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.