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Alice held the flat-iron an inch from her cheek, satisfying herself it was hot enough, then rubbed it in the tray of powdered bathbrick to clean and polish it, relieved that Miss Julia’s blue costume had travelled well, with hardly a crease in it to press out.
She glanced around the kitchen, easily the largest room in the house, at the brown sinkstone and shining brass taps; at the wooden plate rack above it; the red-tiled floor and the white, bright paintwork. All this pretty little house was white. It was the new fashion, Julia said. There was white furniture, too, in the bedrooms, and pots and pots of ferns: aspidistras were completely out of favour, now. It was so different, this light, bright house compared to Rowangarth in the far-away north.
To recall her home – for Rowangarth was her home now, and she wanted never to leave it, except with Tom – brought a pang of longing for the ages-old house that lay gently in a fold of the hills, sheltered and secure.
Rowangarth had been built with mellow stone, pillaged from a roofless priory nearby. It was an early Jacobean house, with mullioned windows and twisted chimneys. Inside there was oak in plenty – wall panels, staircases and uneven floorboards – and rooms built smaller for warmth in winter yet with high, wide windows to let in the summer sun. Rowangarth smelled of wax polish and musty tapestries and wood fires, and of smoke, too, when the wind blew from the south – which wasn’t often – hitting Holdenby Pike and gusting down chimneys to send smoke and soot billowing. But mostly the wind blew from the north-east; a fire-whipping wind that sucked smoke from the ancient flues and reddened fires and heated ovens with no bother at all. Rowangarth was a winter house that wrapped itself around those who lived there; Aunt Sutton’s house was a bright, summertime house that had once been part of the stables at the back of Montpelier Place. Stables, indeed, and Miss Anne Lavinia Sutton a lady born!
But perhaps it was one of Miss Julia’s jokes. You never knew when to believe her and when to take what she said with a pinch of salt, for she was always teasing or laughing, though once she had given up her tomboy ways she would grow into a very beautiful lady. Miss Julia was fair-to-middling now, but mark Cook’s words, those beautiful bones of hers would come into their own before so very much longer, and there’d be young men killing themselves for love of her. And when, Cook had plaintively demanded, was the girl going to get herself wed? There was nothing Cook would like better than a wedding at Rowangarth, now milady’s mourning was over, with dinner parties beforehand and such a wedding feast that the skill of Rowangarth’s Mrs Shaw would be the talk of the Riding for years to come; the yardstick by which all other wedding feasts were measured!
Alice smiled down at the blue jacket, shook it gently, then draped it on a chair-back. Blue of any shade suited Miss Julia; it seemed to shade her grey eyes and make them look larger than ever. Julia Sutton’s eyes were beautiful, and her brown hair waved softly so it was a pleasure to dress and hardly ever needed hot tongs.
Alice wondered if she should press her long scarf, for didn’t folk say it could be draughty on that Underground railway, and mightn’t it be wise if she were to tie down her hat?
She sighed, wishing the trip on the tube train had never been mentioned, though it was safe as houses she was assured, with people riding on the Underground every day of the week. And what Miss Julia said was doubtless correct: that she would be glad that she had done it. It wasn’t given to many around Holdenby to ride on a tube train, even though Alice didn’t think it natural to burrow beneath a city like moles.
Carefully she carried the costume upstairs, laying it over the bed with the blouse, then took out a clean chemise and drawers and black silk stockings. Later, she would help Miss Julia to dress, pulling and tugging at her corset laces from the back until the girl cried, ‘Enough!’ and was satisfied with the shape nature had never intended her to be. Corsets, said Julia, were the very devil, and one day women would refuse to wear them, just see if they didn’t! It was good, Alice smiled, that the dress of servants was far less bothersome; good that her shape was her own.
Closing the bedroom door she took the narrow, twisting stairs to the attic in which she slept, thinking of the costume in finest grey flannel she had been given.
‘Take it, for I’m sick and tired of black and grey!’ Julia Sutton had said when her mourning for her father came to an end. Children were luckier than their elders; needed only to shut themselves away in drabness for one year, not three. ‘And take this black skirt, if you’d like it, and these white blouses!’
Alice had gratefully accepted such bounty, for were not grey and black the colours servants wore, and mightn’t it be fine, now that she and Tom were walking out officially, to have so beautiful a costume to wear for him; to walk proudly at his side in, with pink satin roses on her hat?
Tom. Thomas Dwerryhouse. Her cheeks pinked just to think of him; to think how she missed him and loved him and how very much she wanted him to kiss her. And though she was enjoying every minute of her stay in London, she wouldn’t complain when they boarded the train for home. And meantime, there was Miss Julia’s shoes to polish, and her own boots too, and a meal to prepare before their evening outing.
Life was all rush and bustle. Life was wonderful!
They walked through Hyde Park in the direction of Marble Arch and Speakers Corner, looking like young ladies of quality, Alice thought with delight, with Miss Julia stepping daintily because of her fashionable long hobble skirt, and herself in the grey flannel and a flower-trimmed hat.
‘What a beautiful evening, Hawthorn. It’s much warmer here than at home.’
It was, Alice had to admit, with none of the northern sharpness in the early night air. It was a perfect evening in every way, because even if they did find a meeting and even if the police got wind of it, they’d just take to their heels and run, wouldn’t they, laughing at the fun of it, though sad that it would be one adventure that neither would ever dare speak about when they were back home again. But Rowangarth and parental authority were a long way away, and this was a May evening in London, and they still had a week to run before they must leave it all behind.
She wondered what she would say to Tom after so long apart, and he to her. Maybe, though, there would be no need for words; just a whispered ‘Hullo’, and she closing her eyes and lifting her chin, the better, the sweeter for him to kiss her. It was, she thought happily, so nice to stroll companionably at Miss Julia’s side and daydream of Tom.
The sooner a woman took charge of her own destiny, Julia reasoned silently, the better; though if the men who ruled their lives had anything to do with it, she would wait long and maybe in vain, for even though a woman was now allowed by law to keep her own money when she married, she still belonged to her father in her youth and to her husband in marriage. A woman, she frowned, was allowed no opinions of her own. Politics was men’s business.
‘I think here will do nicely.’ She stopped at a bench on which they could sit and wait and later stand so they might miss nothing of the speakers, if any speakers arrived, that was, and were not discovered by the police – which they almost certainly would be. ‘And all this is our own fault, Hawthorn,’ she fretted. ‘We are our own worst enemies. We come into this world precisely made for the bearing of children, and men take advantage of the fact!’
Women, she reasoned, died too young, worn out by too many pregnancies. ‘You must have no more babies,’ doctors would warn, but women were never told how, for birth control and the advocating of it was illegal, and those women who campaigned for the vote were still dependent on the indulgence of a government made up entirely of men. And men were afraid that a vote would give women an undue advantage, for weren’t there far more women than men? To allow a woman such a weapon would be nothing short of madness; a surrender, some even went so far as to say, to bitchpower.
‘And I’ll tell you something else, Hawthorn. Until women can have babies when they want them, if they want them, we’ll never get anywhere!’
‘Miss! Don’t talk like that,’ Alice wailed. ‘You’ll get us locked up. Having babies is what women are for!’ Who ever heard of a man having a baby? ‘It’s what the good God intended us to do!’ It was as plain as the nose on your face, and nothing – not even giving a woman two votes – would change it.
‘Did He now? Intended us to be wives and providers of heirs. And to scrub and clean, too, and be grateful to some man for putting a ring on our finger? A servant for life, that’s what you’ll be, and me not so much better!’
‘But, Miss Julia, that’s what I am. Being a servant is all I’ve ever known and I – I think I shall like very much being married,’ she hesitated. ‘I want to marry Tom.’ She could think of nothing nicer, in fact, than having her own home – her very own home – and being beholden to no one. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Tom? You haven’t got a young man,’ Julia gasped. ‘Oh, not Dwerryhouse? But, Hawthorn, they’re all in love with Dwerryhouse!’
‘Then I’m the lucky one, aren’t I? Because Tom and me are walking out seriously. On the night milady went to Pendenys – that was when he asked me. And I said yes, so those others had better find someone else to be in love with!’
‘Oh, my dear, I’m so glad for you, I truly am. You lucky girl! Are you really in love? Really and truly, I mean?’
‘I don’t know, miss, and that’s for sure. It’s the first time it’s happened to me, and the last, I hope. But if being in love makes you feel contented all over, and special, and if the sun comes out every time you see him – even on a rainy day – then yes, I suppose I am.
‘Mind, I haven’t told anyone, yet. Not even Cousin Reuben. Tom and me can’t marry, you see, till Reuben retires. There’ll be nowhere for us to live till then. And I’m only eighteen, so that gives me three years to get used to it and to –’
‘To be quite sure you’re both suited?’
‘Yes. Though I know we are. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life before.’
‘Then I envy you. I would so like to be in love,’ Julia sighed. ‘Not engaged, or anything. Not something arranged by the families, but a real romance and me knowing, the moment I set eyes on him, that he’s the one. And I shall know. The minute I see him, I’ll know …’
‘The minute,’ Alice confirmed, yet wondering why, when Miss Julia had been presented at Court, something didn’t happen for her then. After all, that’s what it was really about. The season in London was really a marriage-market, and the gentry, if they were honest, would be the first to admit it. Most young ladies of Julia Sutton’s age and station in life were wedded and bedded by now – aye, and some were with child. ‘Hadn’t you thought to meet your husband when –’
‘When I ought to have done, you mean; when I made my curtsey to the King and Queen and had my London season?’
‘Well – yes …’
‘Ah, but Hawthorn, at the beginning of my season, Pa was killed and there was an end to my coming-out before it had hardly begun. Mourning for a year for me, and for Aunt Sutton too. And three years in purdah for my mother. Betrothal and marriage just don’t arise when a house is in mourning.
‘But do you know, those three years haven’t been wasted, because they gave me time to think about what I really wanted to do with my life, and one of the things that came out of it was the certain fact that I wanted to choose my husband for myself.’
‘Choose your own –’ Alice gasped. But the upper classes never chose their own husbands!
‘Indeed. And what was more, my mother said I might. She even said Pa would have agreed with her, too, because though their marriage was arranged, they’d been in love for ages beforehand, and kept it a secret.’
‘Oh, how lovely.’ Tears misted Alice’s eyes and she felt suddenly closer to her employer’s daughter and found herself hoping that she too could know the joy of loving and being loved. ‘And maybe you’ll meet him, soon. Maybe he might be just around the next corner.’
‘The next corner we come to will be Speakers Corner and I’m almost sure that the only men who’ll be around there will be policemen and I very much doubt –’
‘Look, miss! Over yonder!’ Alice pointed excitedly to the roadway and the carriage drawn by two splendid white horses. ‘Those horses! There’s a wish on a white horse. One for you and one for me. Close your eyes and cross your fingers and wish, quickly, afore they’re out of sight!’
Foolishly, fervently, they wished, neither confiding in the other, for both knew that a wish shared was a wish wasted, and Alice let go her indrawn breath and opened her eyes and Julia did the same. Then smiling, she said, ‘We mustn’t tell, Hawthorn.’
‘No, we mustn’t.’ But oh, when Miss Julia met him, let him be tall and broad and handsome and let him be rich enough to keep her in the manner to which she’d been born – please?
It seemed there would be no meeting that night; at least, not at Hyde Park Corner, for there was no gathering of waiting women, no banners, no policemen lurking.
‘Shall we go back, miss?’ Alice murmured with relief. ‘Looks as if nothing’s going to happen, and if we go home by way of the bandstand, perhaps there’ll be music.’
‘No, Hawthorn. We must stay just a little longer. Someone might come.’
They sat down again, stubbornly to wait it out, for it stood to sense, didn’t it, that forewarned was forearmed, Julia declared. If the police knew exactly when a meeting was to be held, they could all the more easily prevent it. The police, she flung, were the instruments of their masters, the Government, and wasn’t that government made up entirely of men; men ruling women’s lives?
‘It’s the way of the world,’ Alice reasoned forlornly, for she would rather have listened to the band. She was not interested in politics because not for a minute would men even consider giving the vote to women. It would make a woman a man’s equal, almost, and men would never stand for that.
A woman carrying a child over her shoulder walked past them and Julia nodded her head in the direction of the pale-faced mother.
‘Look at her. Not a lot older than I am, I shouldn’t wonder, yet that’s her life for the foreseeable future – a baby or a miscarriage every year. And why? Simply because her husband doesn’t know any better!’
‘But that’s what they call nature, Miss Julia. It’s the way things are.’
‘It needn’t be. They don’t have to wear themselves out having children they can’t afford. If they listened to Doctor Stopes, and people who think like her, it needn’t.’
Alice’s mouth made an ooh of protest, for she had heard of the young woman who advocated birth control. Disgusting, Cook said it was, and not fit for a young girl’s ears and if women didn’t want to have babies there was one sure and certain remedy. Let them stay unwed!
‘Ooooh, miss, where do you hear of such things?’ But that was what came, she supposed, of sending a girl to a boarding school. Julia Sutton wouldn’t have been exposed to such free thinking at the Church of England school in Holdenby village.
‘Learn? You read, I suppose, and you listen. And if ever you get the chance, you reason calmly and sensibly. And you keep on and on, like the suffragettes are doing, until men take notice of what you say.’
‘And is that why you aren’t married or spoken for – is it because of the way you think?’
‘No, Hawthorn. I want to be married, but only to the right man. And until I meet him I shall go on sticking up for women and –’
‘And getting yourself disliked, miss, if you’ll pardon me. You don’t want to end up a lonely old lady, do you, like Miss Sutton?’
‘But my aunt isn’t lonely and, what’s more, she does precisely what she wants. Aunt Sutton thinks more of good food and good horseflesh than about husbands. That’s why she’s always taking off for the Camargue – it’s where the men worship horses and the women are all fine cooks, she says. She’d live there all the time if she could.’
‘And does Miss Sutton believe as you do; does she believe women should have the vote and not have babies unless they want them?’
‘I really don’t know. It’s not a subject one discusses with family. But Aunt Sutton is broad-minded and very forward-thinking and I wouldn’t mind betting she agrees with everything I say.
‘And you mustn’t breathe one word at Rowangarth of what I’ve said tonight – not to anyone – nor that we’ve been looking for a meeting, because it would upset my mother and I wouldn’t do that for all the votes in the world. So you promise, Hawthorn, don’t you?’
‘I promise.’ Not one word would she breathe. Ever.
‘Good. And it looks as if we might as well give up and come back another night and – oh – look …’
‘Where?’ Alice frowned uneasily.
‘By the big gate. A woman, and she’s selling something,’ Julia pointed. ‘She’s giving out handbills – or is it newspapers?’ She was off as fast as her skirt would allow in the direction of the gate and the several women who had appeared from nowhere. ‘Come on, Hawthorn. Oh, damn this stupid skirt!’
The woman who sold papers was tall and slim, with hair swept back in waves around a high-cheeked face. She asked one penny for the single sheet of print which was headed, to Julia’s great joy, The Suffragette.
‘Thank you,’ she gasped, handing over a sixpenny piece and waving away the change. ‘And can you tell me where the next meeting will be? Tonight, is it? Will there be any use in waiting?’
‘Sorry, my dear, not yet. Not just yet. Not safe, you see …’ She handed a sheet to the young, pale-faced mother. ‘But soon. Perhaps in Trafalgar Square. Maybe on Wednesday.’
She spoke in short, anxious sentences, her eyes swivelling right and left as they were joined by more women.
‘Not tonight, ladies,’ she called softly. ‘They know. They’re watching …’
They had known and they had watched and waited, and now they marched purposefully across the road; four constables, headed by a police sergeant riding a black horse.
They advanced on the group of women as though they had expected the paper-seller to be there; held their truncheons at the ready as a warning to all who saw them that they meant to use them.
‘Cor! The perlice! Blimey, wouldn’t yer just know it!’
‘Don’t go, ladies!’ called a bespectacled woman. ‘We’re doing nothing wrong. We have every right to buy a news-sheet. Don’t let them frighten you,’ she urged.
‘Miss – let’s go?’ Alice wanted no truck with the police who could arrest any one of them and march her off to the nearest lock-up to cool her heels in a cell for the night. ‘I promised her ladyship I’d look after you and I don’t think we should stay.’
‘You do what you like, Hawthorn, but I’m staying. Like she said, we’ve every right to be here. It isn’t a meeting and I won’t be bullied!’
‘No, miss, but it looks like a meeting.’ Now a score or more women had gathered. ‘But if you’re set on it, then I’ll stay, too.’ Alice closed her eyes and swallowed hard. ‘But don’t say anything, will you, or they’ll have just the excuse they want to lock you up.’
‘I’ll not harass them if they don’t harass me,’ Julia said quietly. ‘But I have every right to be here and so have we all and I’m not going to turn tail and run as if we’re up to something!’
‘But we are up to something – at least we would be, if we could. They know what we’re here for.’
What Miss Julia was here for, she mentally corrected, because she, Alice, would rather have been anywhere than gathering in the defence of a woman who sold news-sheets about votes for women.
‘They can’t prove what we’re here for, and if we don’t make trouble they can do nothing about it. So stay beside me and don’t be afraid, Hawthorn. I won’t let them hurt you.’
And that might have been the end of it, had they all of them listened to what the sergeant on the black horse had to say and quietly gone home.
‘There’ll be no meeting tonight,’ he’d said, ‘so be off to your homes, all of you, and you’ll hear no more about it. And you, Davison – pack up those papers and be off, or I’ll have you inside again, soon as look at you!’
If they had listened and acted on advice that was sound enough, Alice conceded … But they had not. They had stood there, all of them, pretending not to have heard, saying not a word, clutching their news-sheets. It might still have been all right had someone not thrown a cricket ball and knocked off a constable’s helmet; a well-aimed, masterful throw that sent it flying, and the constable’s dignity with it.
It was all the sergeant needed. A cricket ball was a missile and the throwing of a missile at an officer of the law was an arrestable offence.
‘Right! That’ll do!’ He pointed to the law-breaker who stood, chin set defiantly, as if she wanted to be arrested; because why else, Alice reasoned desperately, should a woman carry a cricket ball if she wasn’t set on throwing it at someone?
The sergeant urged forward his horse, scattering the women, followed by truncheon-waving police who grabbed their victim roughly and hurried her off to the horse-drawn cab with windows of darkened glass, ready and waiting but a few yards away, as if they had known – or intended – that there would be arrests.
‘Leave her alone!’ The challenge had been made and taken up by those set on confrontation; those determined that one of their own should not be taken away without at least some protest.
‘Bullies! Take your hands off her!’
‘Pick on someone yer own size!’
‘Like knockin’ women about, do yer?’
The pushing and shoving and shin-kicking began then, and more helmets were sent flying, and such screeching and screaming arose that Alice would have taken to her heels had not Julia been intent upon staying. And not only on staying, but on cat-calling and digging her elbows sharply into any uniform that came her way. Then she really excelled herself. All at once her face went bright pink and she let out a yell of indignation.
‘How dare you! How dare you strike a lady!’ She flung herself in front of the pale-faced young woman who had walked past them only minutes ago. ‘You did it deliberately. I saw you. And a child in her arms, too!’ She kicked out wildly, her skirt pulled shockingly above her knees.
Miss Julia had taken leave of her senses, yet even then, Alice was to think later, she might have got away with it had not she, who should have been looking after her mistress, suddenly taken leave of her own senses and joined in the affray, giving the policeman an almighty shove from behind, knocking him off balance, sending all fourteen stone of him hurtling at Miss Julia, taking her down with him in a flail of arms and legs.
Alice would always remember the thud as that poor head hit the ground, and she would never forget, not if she lived to be a hundred, the sight of that defenceless face with blood already trickling down it.
‘Brute!’ Alice shrieked, on her knees in an instant. ‘I saw what you did, you great bully! Out of my way and let me see to her,’ she flung at a bewildered constable, still sprawled on hands and knees and wondering at the fury directed at him from behind. ‘Get a doctor, before she bleeds to death. Go on! Do as you’re bid!’ How dare he? He’d fallen bang on top of Miss Julia; done it on purpose, and him putting on an expression of innocence. ‘Oh, miss, open your eyes?’ Alice patted the marble-white cheeks. ‘Oh, Lor’ …’
There was a sudden silence as though neither side had intended it should go this far and realized the folly of it too late.
