Stepping Into the Past
I always swore I’d never write a historical novel. Too much research involved, too many tiny details of everyday life to keep track of. I have a hard enough time keeping everything straight when I’m writing about the present moment.
Then Roxane stepped out of 1896 and into my life.
In her time Roxane would have been called a soiled dove. She lived and worked in a parlor house in San Francisco’s well-to-do Pacific Heights neighborhood, a long way from the Missouri farm where she grew up and the Barbary Coast dives where dire circumstances drove her to become a lady of the night. When the attentions of the visiting gentlemen became too much to bear, she would slip through a time portal and find refuge in what she called the Future House—the same grand Victorian, but now in the 21st century.
One night, she escaped into our present era and landed smack in the middle of the novel I was writing. And she promptly took over the book.
Her story isn’t the one I originally intended to write. But I know better than to sneer at a gift from the Muse.
The novel is House of Desire, my second haunted-house mystery starring reluctant psychic Claire Scanlan, following House of Whispers. Claire becomes embroiled in a battle over the historic house, now known as the Burnham Mansion, its shady past long forgotten. A woman lived there, post-bordello, for more than a century, but she has died, and her heirs are quarreling over its fate. Should they let a preservation group make it a museum? Or should they go for big money and sell it to the developer who wants to turn it into condos?
At a fundraising gala for the preservation group, Claire encounters a mysterious woman whom no one else can see—Roxane, though Claire doesn’t yet know her name. When someone Claire cares about is murdered in the mansion, Roxane is the sole witness. Terrified, she flees back to her own time. And when Claire’s philandering brother-in-law is accused of being the killer, Claire must find the elusive Roxane in order to clear his name. But how do you find someone who’s hiding in a different century?
I knew the story would include a ghost or two—that’s the premise of the series. But I didn’t expect a principal character who can cross time boundaries—and who would insist I go back into the past and recount her life there. So House of Desire, like Roxane, moves back and forth between two centuries.
To depict Roxane’s experiences, I began with what I learned about San Francisco’s lively history when I was the communications director for a local historic preservation organization. It may not surprise you to know that its offices were in a Queen Anne–style house that bears resemblance to the Burnham Mansion. Though let me be clear: the real house was never a bordello.
Author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, whose many historical novels span several centuries, has said that one of the hardest things to discover about a bygone era is what people had for breakfast. Dinners are well recorded, but breakfast is so mundane that people rarely make note of it. So I decided to give readers their first look at the Burnham Mansion’s 19th century residents while they are gathered around the breakfast table.
In that early scene, Lady Celeste, proprietress of the parlor house, tells the story of how she won the title to the house in a poker game. The game took place in the Old Poodle Dog—the name of an actual business of that era. Downstairs it was a respectable restaurant, while upstairs it offered private rooms where patrons could gamble and indulge in other not-so-savory activities.
That tension between respectability and licentiousness characterized San Francisco in the 1890s. Only four decades earlier, a sleepy Spanish village called Yerba Buena (good herb) was transformed into a wild place populated by men eager to make a fortune by finding gold or fleecing the gold seekers. Many were miscreants or misfits fleeing their staid homes back East. Quite a few of the colorful city leaders we look back on fondly achieved their power and influence by means that would send them to jail today.
Then women arrived and families were established. Residents who yearned for respectability and good reputation pushed to clean up the city. But others resisted. The old licentious ways suited their desire for fun or money or clout.
Chez Celeste, as the Burnham Mansion was then called, was at the crux of this battle for San Francisco’s soul: a house of ill repute hiding behind drawn drapes in an upright (and maybe uptight) neighborhood.
My goal was to depict the house vividly in both story worlds, to make Chez Celeste in the 19th century as true as the Burnham Mansion in the 21st. My research journey led me to documents on the internet, into the pages of many books, onto San Francisco’s streets, and into the rooms of museums historic houses. Baby steps into the realm of historical fiction.
Will I write another book set in an earlier era? Right now I have no such plans, but I won’t rule it out. All it will take is for another compelling character to show up like Roxane did, and beckon me to step into the past.
No comments yet.