The Princess and the Suffragette
Page 12
“Anne, would you telephone for a doctor?” Lottie’s mother called, as she directed the carter to lay Lottie down on a padded bench in the entrance hall.
“Miss Walker?” The clerk who had ignored Lottie beforehand jumped up, staring at them in shock. “Oh, no … these girls – they were looking for you. I didn’t realize…”
“A doctor, please,” Lottie’s mother waved away the clerk’s horrified apologies. “I think she may be coming around, don’t you?” She glanced from Sara to Sally, both kneeling on the marble floor next to the bench. “Her eyelids are twitching, I’m sure – there, look!”
“Yes!” Sally grabbed Lottie’s dusty hand. “Oh, thank god, miss. Lottie!”
Lottie blinked again, and looked up at Sally and Sara, their anxious faces leaning over her. “My father…” she whispered fearfully. “He’s here, I saw him. We have to get away.”
“How can you talk like this?” Mr Legh growled. “You’re just like her. After I did everything I could to school her influence out of you! I was assured that everything would be done to bring you up as a model child, and instead I have another little criminal.”
“Perhaps it would have worked better if you had tried to do it yourself, instead of paying someone else to do it for you…” Lottie’s mother moved so that Lottie could see her. “Lottie, darling. You won’t know—”
“Mamma?” Lottie whispered, unbelievingly. She looked between Sara and Sally, confused, and not daring to hope.
“It really is her,” Sara promised. “You were right.”
Lottie reached out, holding up the ragged piece of newspaper, and her mother took it.
“Oh, Lottie. This is all you had? Harry, you never even let her have a photograph?”
“You’re dead to me,” Lottie’s father said coldly. “I heard that woman call you Miss Walker. You don’t even carry my name. You were dead to Lottie, as you should be.”
“You can’t – not now that I know,” Lottie whispered shakily. “I’ll find her, whatever you do. I’ll run away, again and again.”
Her father stared down at her in disgust. “Perhaps I should have let her keep you, as she wanted.”
“Did you want to?” Lottie breathed, moving her head painfully to look at her mother.
“Oh, Lottie, of course I did! I begged and begged, but I had so little money, and my family were as angry with me as he was. They wouldn’t help me pay for a lawyer. My father and brothers told me that any court would always give you to him, and I wasn’t brave enough to fight for you as I should have done. They told me that if I did as I was told, he would let me see you, that you would have my letters – but then he locked you away from me entirely. I have never regretted anything more. I should have fought, I should have done everything I could to keep you.”
“He lied,” Lottie whispered. “To you as well.”
“I will not stay here and listen to this,” Lottie’s father said bitterly. “So you want to stay with your disgrace of a mother? Good luck to the pair of you.”
“Harry – you’ll let me keep her?” Lottie’s mother stood up slowly. “You mean it?”
He glared at her, and then sighed shakily, rubbing his hand across his face. “You don’t understand how angry I was,” he muttered. “The way everyone was talking. The whispers… I couldn’t let you win!”
“She’s not a—” Lottie’s mother started to say, but then she pressed her lips together, as if to stop herself. “Thank you. I will write to you, of course, with news of Lottie. She will write herself, I’m sure.”
“I’ll speak to the lawyers.” Lottie’s father stared at her. “And that blasted school, I suppose. I have to go.” He glanced disgustedly around the marble hall. “Goodbye, Lottie.”
“Goodbye.” Lottie found that her voice was shaking, even though she couldn’t remember ever feeling happier. “I will write, I promise.”
And he was gone, leaving only her mother, and Sara and Sally, leaning over her and stroking her forehead, frowning and murmuring about doctors.
“It feels like another dream.” Lottie closed her eyes and opened them again.
“I can pinch you, if you want,” Sally offered, and Lottie giggled faintly.
“I can’t smell lilies, though.”
“Lilies?” Lottie’s mother glanced worriedly at the two older girls. “What does she mean? Is she delirious? Where is that doctor?”
“When she was very small, and we all thought that you were dead, I told her a story about our mothers, that they were somewhere beautiful, with fields and fields of lilies,” Sara explained.
“She always dreamed of you with your arms full of them,” Sally agreed. “All their golden dust scattered down your dress.”
Lottie’s mother sat back, her face full of shock. “The last day,” she whispered. “But she was so tiny! She can’t even have been three, how could she remember?”
Lottie hauled herself up with an effort. “It was real? You were gathering lilies?”
“Harry and I fought, because I had the pollen all over my hands, and there was a guest, oh, someone he wanted me to impress. It was just the same fight all over again.” Lottie’s mother pressed her hands against her eyes. “You were with me in the garden. Why didn’t I pick you up and take you with me, Lottie? Instead of telling your nanny to take you back to the nursery?” She let out a shaky breath and dropped her hands. “We could have had years.”
“Oh…” Sally gulped. “I’m sorry, miss. It’s too sad.”
“Mamma,” Lottie’s voice wavered as she said it. “This isn’t the right time, I know, but you have to help Sally find a new position. In a house with a family that doesn’t mind she’s a Suffragette. Miss Minchin sacked her this morning because she was trying to help me get away.”
“Since you’re well enough to think of that, I can’t believe you climbed over a roof and didn’t do any more than tear your dress, and then you go running into a road and get yourself half-killed! I could slap you,” Sally said crossly, sniffing. “Please don’t worry about me, miss.”
“But I do,” Lottie’s mother shook her head. “I want to know everything. You climbed over a roof, Lottie? You must tell me exactly what happened – how you found the letters, all of it. Once a doctor has seen Lottie, you must all come home with me.”
“Home?” Lottie wriggled until she was sitting upright. “See, I’m not half-killed at all, Sally, just my head aches a little. Do you have a house – or … or rooms somewhere? I wouldn’t mind what it was. But I can live there with you?”
“I share a house with a friend who works here too, and you will most certainly live there with me.” Her mother stroked her cheek, and then smiled at Sally. “You too, until we can find what would be best for you for you to do. Another position, if you like, or perhaps something here.”
Sally swallowed, looking around the marble hall, and at the women hurrying purposefully past them. She ducked her head, but Lottie could see that her lips were sucked in to stop herself from crying or laughing, or perhaps both. She put her hand in Sally’s.
“A home.”
Sally nodded. “I can’t believe it’s real.”
“Nor me.” Lottie shook her head. “The first time I ever saw you, when you were standing on the area steps, that’s what I was thinking about, that I didn’t have anyone or anywhere that was really mine. Even though Sara had promised to be my mother.”
Sara hugged her. “It’s all right. I shall give you back.”
Lottie’s mother watched Sara and Sally, their arms around her lost daughter, lost and found. “Lottie, I don’t think you knew how lucky you were.”
Author’s Note
On 21st January 2017, while I was writing the second draft of this book, I went on the Women’s March in London with my thirteen-year-old son, Tom. Between eighty and a hundred thousand women, men and children marched in protest against attacks on women’s rights in the US, in solidarity with two and a half million marchers worldwide.
Then I
came back home and went on working on The Princess and the Suffragette, feeling that it was more important than ever to talk about women and their struggle to win the vote. The procession that Lottie and Ermengarde watch in Chapter Two was real – it was the Women’s Coronation Procession, in 1911. This procession of sixty thousand Suffragette supporters must have been an incredible experience for those taking part. When I wrote that Lottie felt it was beautiful and exciting just to have been there, it echoes the way Tom and I felt over a hundred years later. What’s so sad is that we were marching for the same reasons – to say that women and men are equal, and should be treated equally. That women should have the right to say what happens to their own bodies. That women should never feel that they are controlled by their partners, fathers or governments.
There were even women dressed as Suffragettes on the march in 2017 – their costumes and signs clever and desperately sad all at the same time.
However we feel now about the Suffragettes’ violent means of protest – and you can probably tell from the conversations between Lottie and Sally that I find it hard to work out how I feel, even after writing this book – we cannot forget that their fight is still going on, and we are all still a part of it.
Holly Webb, 2017
Read Holly Webb’s magical sequel to another of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s timeless classics…
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First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2017
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Text copyright © Holly Webb, 2017
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