by Evie Dunmore
“I see,” Annabelle said, and Lucie realized she had been sitting in her chair with a wide smile on her face.
“What have you told the consortium?” Annabelle asked. “How this, erm, change has come about?”
“Half a truth,” she admitted. “I told them the daily close intercourse between Lord Ballentine and me at London Print convinced him of my competencies and goodwill, and that he would regain a more leisurely life, yet still reap all of the benefits if he sold us his shares.”
“Daily close intercourse,” Annabelle said wryly. “Very well. And Lucie.”
“Yes?”
“When you wish to talk, do not hesitate to call on me.”
When, not if. But of course, Annabelle was right.
“Now,” she said brightly. “Have you any news on the pamphlets for the St. Giles Fair? I found out yesterday that we must give them to production before the end of the week.”
* * *
She was lazing in the creaky bed in Adelaide Street a few days later, while Tristan was in the backyard to fetch fresh water from the pump, and she was studying her task list before her mind’s eye.
She still owed Millicent Fawcett an answer on the latest amendment proposal for the Contagious Diseases Act.
She needed to prepare the July newsletter.
The first batch of new magazine content had to be readied for production.
She still had made no progress on Lady Harberton’s blasted bicycle campaign.
And she had not yet sent Lord Melvin the summary on the last suffrage society activities.
Melvin. Melvin . . .
“Oh blast—”
The pre-amendment appointment on the Property Act with Melvin was today.
She had forgotten the appointment.
She leapt out of bed. Her gaze bounced around the room, locating scattered clothing.
She rushed to pick up a stocking.
There was a train at eleven o’clock, going straight to Paddington. She’d need to be very, very lucky though to hail a hackney right away. . . . She dressed with flying fingers, pantaloons, chemise, the right stocking, underskirt. Tapes and bows were slipping from her grasp; her adroitness had vanished together with her sense of duty.
It was how Tristan found her, spinning around her own axis and chasing the hidden clasps on the back of her skirt. A pitcher in hand, he eyed her frantic dance with growing bemusement. “I leave a sleepy vixen and come back to a whirling dervish,” he said. “What happened?”
“I must go to London—I should be in London as we speak.”
She also had to reconsider her priorities. She had been negligent. She had not been home in days.
Tristan put the pitcher down on the table. “London—whatever for?”
“A meeting. At noon. Help me, please.”
He helped her into her walking dress. “At noon?” he said. “You will not make it.”
“I must,” she bit out and buttoned up the bodice.
“But—”
A button snagged and was unmoored, was left dangling by a thread. “Drat.”
“Lucie.”
She felt him touch the crown of her head, and her instinct was to jerk away.
But she could not blame him for this; this was of her own making. Granted, he had hardly insisted she go home and fulfill her duties, but why would he, if he could have her under him and flat on her back instead?
She took a deep breath and looked him in the eye. “We cannot continue, not like this.”
He stood oddly frozen.
The corresponding twist in her chest nearly made her heart stop. One night. One night had turned into a juggernaut crashing through her life, making her forget her appointments.
Tristan still had not moved. “Are you ending the liaison?”
“I . . .” She shook her head. “It cannot continue like this.”
His rigid stance softened by an increment. “It is the lady’s prerogative to end a liaison. And normally, I would not ask for an explanation. However, given the astonishing speed at which you have turned from looking well-pleased to half-crazed, etiquette can go hang. What is it, Lucie?”
She spread her fingers with great annoyance. Where to begin with the list she had just tallied up in her head? “I have responsibilities,” she said. “I have a lot of responsibilities.”
“This has always been the case. It doesn’t explain the hasty flight now.”
He stood, gaze steely now, and waited. But if she were to decide to run from the room, back into her meaningful routine, he would not hinder her. Unfortunately, running from the room would not just restore her old life, would it.
“I missed an appointment with Lord Melvin,” she said acerbically. “Because I was in bed with you.”
His eyes flashed. “Melvin.”
“I had not expected you to understand.” She had, and was disappointed. “But I take my appointments seriously; they matter to me because the Cause matters to me, and I . . .” To her dismay, her throat tightened. “Where are my shoes?”
She spotted one, near the chair. Lying on its side, laces sprawling, like some creature that had been hit by a carriage and left on the road. She sat down hard on the chair and stuffed her foot into the boot.
Tristan went down on one knee, plucked her hands off the shoe, and laced his fingers through hers.
“Let me help.”
“You,” she said, looking down at him with surprise. “Help.”
“I am trying not to take offense at your incredulity.”
“I do not need help.”
“Very well. Allow me the pleasure of making myself useful then, oh stubborn one.”
She hesitated. “But you know nothing about my work.”
His left brow arced. “You talk about your work constantly.”
“I do?”
“Constantly,” he drawled.
“And you . . . listened?”
He shrugged. “I listen. When I’m interested.”
“Oh, and for how long have you been interested in women’s suffrage?”
“I never opposed it. And I am interested in you—that suffices.”
Very well. He looked serious enough.
Perhaps it was time they both found out whether the Cause could be interesting to him in its own right. The meeting with Lord Melvin had been soundly missed either way—she might as well try and proceed with work on other fronts, such as the mail at home.
Her breathing was still a little shaky. What an emotional outburst. She was learning she was that, emotional.
“I shall go ahead,” she said. “I shall leave the kitchen door unlocked for you.”
Chapter 29
When Tristan spotted the three bulging hemp bags at the center of her drawing room, he stopped dead in the doorway and whistled through his teeth. “When you said bags of mail, it was not an exaggeration.”
He strolled toward the desk while shrugging out of his jacket, then briefly derailed her focus by rolling up his sleeves and exposing muscular forearms. He looked enticingly purposeful, doing so.
“What do I do?” He turned to her, his face expectant.
Kiss me.
She cleared her throat. “You pick a letter. You determine whether the writer is a married woman and whether her woes pertain to her marriage. Whenever that is the case, you sort the letter into a category.”
She turned to unlock the doors to the cherrywood cabinet to take out the labeled boxes and the notebook for the tally.
“There are five main grievances married women experience,” she said as she set the boxes down next to each other on the long table. “Emotional, physical, or financial maltreatment, melancholia due to a lack of purpose, or a combination of the four.”
Tristan was silent, and when she glanced at him, he wore a frown.
“Right,” he said, and waved. “Continue.”
“You allocate each letter to a category and add up the numbers in this ledger. That is all there is to it.”
“I see,” Tristan said, his tone suspiciously neutral.
“Help yourself.” She presented the opened bag with a little flourish.
“Lucie.” The frown was back in place. “What, on God’s earth, is the purpose of this . . . ghoulish exercise?”
“Ghoulish? This is research.”
“Toward which end?”
“Do you know what the main argument of the opposition to a Property Act amendment is?”
He had the decency to look vaguely contrite. “I’m afraid not.”
“They argue that we must keep the legal status quo because unless a woman’s person is completely subsumed in that of her husband, it threatens the harmony in the home. They reason that only when a woman is completely dependent on her husband in all things will he feel obliged to care for her despite his selfish male interests. In the same vein, she will be deterred from nagging her provider and act like a good wife.”
His lips quirked without humor. “There is a logic to it.”
She shot him a dark look. “Logic matters not when its predictions are not grounded in reality. We have collected ample proof that coverture does not protect women from neglect or outright harm. We could in fact go as far as to claim that the opposite is the case. Which means the main case against amending the act is hollow, morally and also factually, and people who continue to insist upon it will have to do it in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This,” she said, and made a gesture to include all the bags of mail, “is our case against the Property Act.”
He gave her an unreadable look, but she could hear his mind working from here.
He shook his head and reached for the letter opener.
He took one of the envelopes from his bag and sliced it open with a smooth flick of his wrist.
“My dear lady,” he read out. “It has been thirty years since Florence Nightingale sailed to the battlefields of Crimea, where she near single-handedly saved thousands of our wounded soldiers from certain death.
“Unfortunately, the existence of women such as myself has not changed despite Miss Nightingale demonstrating the tenacity and abilities of the female sex. And I call it an existence, rather than a life, because we much resemble a fancy bauble, decorative but ultimately useless, our place decided by others. I can’t help but feel that our lives lack meaning, filled artificially by chores and rituals that are empty and do nothing to better our minds, or the cruel realities blighting this world—the poverty, the spread of diseases, the ill-use of children, to name only a few. There are days when I feel I cannot breathe, and my heart is racing, as I watch my life running through my fingers like sand through an hourglass . . . huh.”
He dropped the letter onto the middle of the table and looked at her with raised brows. “I suppose this one is for the melancholy category?”
He selected the next envelope from the top of the pile.
“From a Mrs. Annie Brown. . . . My dear lady . . . I am increasingly convinced that the struggle for a married woman’s rights will be a longer and a harder fought battle than any other that the world has known. Men have been taught that they are absolute monarchs in their families, ever since the world began, and that to kill a wife by inches, is not murder—”
He faltered. “Bloody hell,” he said after a pause, and that was all he said for a while.
At first, she tried addressing him now and again, and he reacted with absentminded grunts, until she gave up. He did not touch the biscuits or the cup of tea she served him when the clock struck eleven. He waved away the brandy she offered, too. A focused Tristan, with furrows between his brows. She kept stealing glances at him in between letters. So many sides to a man she had once thought as shallow as a puddle.
Her bag had emptied and been replaced by the next as his looked still half-full, but then, she had developed a keen eye for the gist of the matter, and rarely needed to read to the end. He startled her by abruptly coming to his feet and staring into a nothingness.
She lowered her letter into her lap. “Would you like some tea?”
“No,” he said absently, and then most ungentlemanly cracked his knuckles in his palms.
“If it is too tedious, you could also—”
“Oh no. This is interesting.” The jeering note in his voice alarmed her. “Very interesting.”
“In truth?”
His smile was positively sardonic. “Oh yes. It has been a veritable treasure trove of insights. So many gems. This one is my favorite.” He picked up a letter he had set aside.
“My dear lady,
“I turn to you in confidence, in the hope that you could help me on a matter about which a woman should be silent as a grave, but I cannot be silent any longer.
“I know a man who tells his wife, ‘I own you, I have got a deed to you and got it recorded, I have a right to do what I please to you,’ and the law of a Christian land says she shall submit, to indecencies that would make a respectable devil blush for shame. Man, who is said to have been created in the image of God, is the lowest animal in the world, and the most cruel. It shatters my faith in the goodness of God, so much that it makes me tremble for my own reason.”
Here, he stopped, and his gaze bore into hers over the rim of the page.
She inclined her head. “Yes?”
“You read such things every day, I presume.” There was a disconcerting flicker in his eyes.
“I do, yes.”
“Since when?”
She had to think about it. “They came pouring in around five years ago, when my name had become established. We have been collecting and categorizing them for nearly two years now.”
“‘We’?”
“The suffragist chapters across Britain. I consolidate the tally every fortnight.”
“Ah.”
He was pacing round the room, his hands clasped behind his back.
“How many?” he then asked curtly. “Letters, I mean.”
“Presently, we have a count of fifteen thousand.”
His laugh was harsh. “And those are just the ones who write to you.”
“I expect there are many more who never speak,” she acknowledged.
“Indeed.” He was contemplating her with an alertness as though he had never really seen her before. “And it hasn’t occurred to you yet to shoot the next man you meet on sight?”
Now he had her full attention. “What a curious thing to say.”
“How about setting fire to Parliament?”
“You are angry,” she said, amazed. “The letters shocked you.”
“I knew my father was a dastardly husband.” His gaze fell heavily upon the five boxes, now filled to the brim. “I had not realized all of them were.”
“Not all of them,” she said. “It is a rather filtered selection. Contented wives do not write to us. Though, of course, they would be no less trapped if their good fortune changed.”
He gave her a hard look. “It is abominable. All of this.”
A knot of tension she hadn’t realized was there until now dissolved in her chest. The sudden sensation of lightness made her fingers curl into her skirts, as though it would keep her from floating up toward the ceiling.
Until now, she had not been sure how her lover would respond to realities most people refused to see. Until now, she had not been entirely certain whether he would fall victim to the peculiar, selective blindness which afflicted so many otherwise perfectly sensible people when confronted with something ugly; whether he would claw for explanations, no matter how ludicrous, or would try to belittle away what unnerved him rather than face inconvenient truths. She should have trusted him. His mind was fluid and fast, it resented t
he rigidness of conventions rather than find comfort in their constraints.
A smile broke over her face. Perhaps that was why she had not debated her work with him so closely until this morning. He gave her so much joy. A morning of lying in bed with him, entwined and content like a simple animal, had her feeling bright and warm all day. Her time of joy and warmth would have ended quick like a shot had he proven himself unwilling to see. She had not been ready to know. She had not been ready yet to give him up. And it appeared she could keep him awhile longer.
“They are all the same, aren’t they?” His sweeping gesture included the three bags’ worth of mail.
“I’m afraid so.”
“And yet you sit there in your chair looking very calm.”
She drew back. “I have not been calm in over ten years, Tristan.”
His gaze narrowed. Several seconds ticked past in heavy silence.
“No,” he finally said. “I suppose you were not. God.” He speared his fingers into his hair, leaving it in disarray. “Lucie. You must publish the results.”
She couldn’t help a deeply cynical smile. “This certainly used to be the plan.”
“Finding a newspaper to run it, however, should be a challenge—it’s poisonous.”
“It is near impossible,” she confirmed. “We tried. But as you can imagine, people would rather not see it. Of course, society is well aware that women are in danger from their menfolk ever since Oliver Twist, you know, when Dickens had Bill Sikes kill poor Nancy. But Nancy was a drudge of the working classes, wasn’t she? Surely you noticed that most of these letters here are written eloquently, sometimes on very costly stationery. These are middle-class and lady wives, Tristan. The maltreatment of married women is not a secret, but they want you to believe it is a problem of the poor. No, it is pervasive. It spares no one. We prove it. And that is the poison you speak of.”
Tristan was pale. “You must take it to the House of Commons.”
She sniffed. “And have these precious voices wedged between two agenda points on import tariffs? Only to be dismissed and forgotten, as is usually the case, or to hear again that we should wait some more? No. Men of influence have been fighting for women’s suffrage on the floor of Parliament for twenty years. Don’t think we have not considered all our options—we have been trying for twenty years, too.”
