by Baird Wells
His mouth quirked. “And Simon is a saint?”
“Simon would be a god.” She recalled that they were in a crowd, and lowered her voice. “You don’t imagine that simple fear of retaliation is what keeps us bound together? Observance of the religion of Piccadilly hobbles us to each other.”
James leaned back onto his cushion. “I thought you didn’t practice.”
She leaned in, eyes wide. “I like to imagine myself as Martin Luther, nailing my ninety-five theses to their doors.”
“I was thinking Jesus and the money-changers,” he said with an amusement that was catching.
“Occasionally.” She took his cup and arranged it next to hers, beginning the ritual of afternoon tea. Some part of her was ingrained with it, no matter how she fought against her society. Pinch the sugar so that it didn’t spring free; don’t let it tink against the cup; no dribbles of cream onto the saucer, being mindful always that weighing eyes were upon your every move.
Those eyes were on her now, too, but not strangers at the nearby tables. It was James who minded her movements like a cat, though it took her a moment to notice, lost in disdain for her training. “She isn’t here.” Hannah raised his cup and saucer by her fingertips and set it before him without causing a ripple in its caramel surface. “No matter how hard you look, you won’t find Emily.”
He turned guilty attention to his cup. “I wish that she was, sometimes. I would take pieces over nothing at all. And sometimes I’m afraid of finding her in you, so afraid that I look a hundred times, just to reassure myself.”
His confession made a dual ache in her heart, pity for both of them. “Scraps. Grief makes you content with scraps.”
James was stirring and stirring, a soundless swirl of his little spoon until it formed a cyclone. “I didn’t think of you, not once that I can remember, while I was at Harry’s, or when I first came to London.”
His admission stung in a way that no rational thought could mitigate, but she swept it aside. “Who could blame you, after what you’d suffered?”
“Even after we met at Simon’s, it didn’t cross my mind that you were hurting, that you’d lost something, too.”
“You show all of your hurt, and I show none of mine.” She took his hand and then, recalling where they were, squeezed awkwardly and drew away, pulse tapping at the danger of her gesture. She wished the moment would hurry and pass unnoticed by the crowd, but James stared at her fingers atop the cloth and seemed to make it stay.
“You said you understand my guilt, if not my pain, but I think you grasp all of it better than anybody. Everyone wants Emily,” he cleared his throat, “wanted Emily, to fit their mold. You just want her as she was.” He rasped out the last to their tablecloth.
Hannah dabbed her eyes, first with a sleeve and then with a handkerchief he passed to her down beside the table. “I can’t pretend to know what you’ve lost. I can empathize with it, feel jealousy for what you shared…” She trailed off, tucking his handkerchief up inside her cuff. “I’m sorry. This isn’t why I asked you here.”
“Why did you, Hannah?” His question filled the space between them with meaning and blotted out the room’s noise a moment.
She counted the stitches in his initials on the hankie. “I didn’t want to be alone.”
His expression was tender, rewarding Hannah for her admission. Then his eyes flicked past her for a second. “It doesn’t look as though you are alone.”
She didn’t need to follow his glance to know he was looking at the gentleman in the corduroy jacket and brown felt bowler who’d turned onto Dempsey behind her, just as she was leaving the Fitz’s. She’d seen him before, not that the fact was remarkable. He made no attempt to hide himself, as half of his work was done just by Hannah knowing he was there.
“Ten such men, ten Margarets, they are always close. They’re not with me, they’re against me. I am alone.” She took care arranging some jam on her scone. “Except at times like this.”
His foot bumped hers under the table, and pressed it in answer.
Their waiter materialized from the kitchen, not with the long gaze of measuring their table’s adequacy, but on a nervous bounce that sent his eyes between her and James. “Lady Hannah,” he whispered with the same gravity as imparting the existence of a library fine, “Your carriage is waiting.”
Hannah blinked at James, and then at the waiter. “My carriage? I don’t understand.”
“A Miss Maddox asked the maître de to pass word along.”
“Miss Maddox?” Hannah ground her teeth, nodding. “I’ll be out in a moment.” She offered James a helpless shrug, with no words to articulate the comic irony underscoring her point. If Margaret had discovered the ‘where’, she had no doubt discovered the ‘who’, which rearranged the borders of how long Hannah could dare in James’s company.
James claimed his hat. “I’ll at least walk you out.”
She waved him down as she got up. “You’re already on one list. Don’t show yourself to Margaret and make it a pair.”
“I’m sorry.” He crafted the words with a double-meaning.
“I’m glad, in an odd way, that you didn’t think of me while you were at Harry’s. You might have written, or called on me, and neither of us were in a state to be friends.”
“That’s changed now.”
“It has.” Feeling eyes lingering on her back, she stepped away. “I have to go.”
“When should I call?” he murmured.
“I’ll send you a note.”
James stood, and sent her off with a small bow, speaking for the benefit of an audience. “I’m glad you’re feeling improved. Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon, Doctor Grimshaw.” Her lips hung onto the words, and her eyes ached with each step that pushed her from James until she reached the street. Margaret’s pale face at the carriage window woke something inside Hannah then, and she climbed its two narrow steps, from misery to a numbness that carried her home.
* * *
He would have walked Hannah out, if she’d let him, but he had no intention of leaving with her. James poured himself another cup of tea with the same methodical approach he would a surgery, a process that helped him order his thoughts. He hadn’t appreciated, though Tad and Hannah had expressed it more than once, how vast and thickly-woven Simon’s web was until now. He understood on some level that Simon pried into Hannah’s affairs, that he examined her conduct and motives, turning her to see each facet. James had assumed that, from time to time, Simon must grow weary of looking and put her away for a while. He hadn’t grasped that Simon merely handed her off to someone else when his eyes grew tired. It bothered him, anyone being circled in such a way; it doubly irritated him to be included. It wasn’t lost on him that the man he’d pointed out to Hannah had come to watch her, but after she’d left, had stayed to watch him.
James finished his tea, and more croquettes than were advisable, before throwing down his napkin and pushing out his chair with conspicuous movements. He grabbed up his hat, sidled between the tables and surged across the Persian-carpeted common area. Simon’s man didn’t show a hint of notice, not until James came near enough that he could have no intention of veering away, taking a different tack. An anxious gulp of tea dribbled the man’s brown-bearded chin, and he coughed a hurried bite of food into his napkin, bulging sideways eyes on James, who rested a hip against the table in bad form.
“You’re upsetting my patient.”
A shrug. “Your patient don’t pay my wages.”
“But our employer does.” He watched for understanding to dawn. “Our employer is a man who wants results. Your arse put out in plain sight like a bargain on ugly hats, where the lady can see you, is depriving him of those results. He’s asked that satisfaction of me, and he’s holding me accountable for it; you can see how that’s put us crossways.”
“I get paid to be a tail, on the street.” He’s voice hadn’t changed, but his posture tempered. James saw the forward roll of his
thick shoulders, a repeated ducking of his eyes.
“Do what you’re paid to do. Just don’t let her, or me, see you doing it. Understood?”
He smirked, and snorted, turning his gaze to the window. “You ain’t the sort to say ‘understood’ to me.”
James set his hat on the table’s edge, and arranged it carefully with a push of his fingers. “Make yourself known and cost me her confession again, and we’ll answer what sort I am.” He cracked the knuckles of both hands, and watched the tough’s shoulders jump a fraction with each pop. “I’m glad we understand each other.” He snapped up his hat and flipped it onto his head. “And feel free to inform our mutual acquaintance that if he doesn’t trust me to do as he’s instructed, we can have that conversation in person, or he can find another doctor.” He tipped his hat to a sidelong look. “Good day.”
He moved for the doors with an energy he hadn’t felt in ages. The exchange might not have done anything material for him, or Hannah, but if it let her breathe even the slightest bit easier for now, James thought he’d done enough.
.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
James squinted at the coarse scrap of paper given to him by Mrs. Delford and wondered if she had known what the two streets represented when she’d wicked them out in her long, neat print. The loops of her s’s were like sails on a boat, blowing him into churning chaos at the ancient intersection of Abingdon and Parliament Square.
Mrs. Delford was shrewd and skilled, and native enough to London that if she had been imported from the hinterlands there was no note of it in her low and rounded words. She must have comprehended the intersection’s proximity to Westminster, understood even abstractly the choke point there for passing MPs, so near the House of Commons. So, his question now, observing a whirlpool of onlookers spiraling tighter around the assembly, was, did Mrs. Delford comprehend what her mistress was about at the hallowed locale? More than relief baskets; that much was assured by the bold sweeps of black paint on white pickets, raised and lowered as slow pistons of the suffrage machine. ‘Votes for Women’; ‘Suffrage First’; ‘Right the Wrong’.
A bulwark of ladies clad like mourners formed up along Abingdon’s low stone balustrade, in tailored silks or threadbare poplin seasons-old, a charcoal band against a steel December sky. Signs were canted over shoulders young and old alike, clutched like rifles ahead of a swelling crowd.
A throng of hoodlums made passes ahead of the women, clutching their baker-boy caps with each turn, jeers rising and falling like clouds of flies over the general murmur. Ahead of their stalwart companions, a handful of other ladies – he recognized Hannah’s unmistakable silhouette among them – called to the passersby and waved their wooden binders, petitions fanning. Whether they were inviting or provoking, he found it hard to say.
The darting boys, though an annoyance even to his ears, were benign compared to an agitated ribbon of men, equally diverse as the women, tightening like a noose around the picket, inches of slack taken up by a succession of inflammatory cries.
“We won’t have your laws regulating our morals!” bellowed one walrus in a beaver top hat, an assertion that garnered parade-day cheers of ‘No Temperance, No thank you!’ from his side of the confrontation. “
“You ‘ave freedom!” shouted a thick-armed lad in a muddy brick-layer’s smock, “Inside yer homes!”
A sharp-eyed woman beside Hannah rubbed her proud forehead, it seemed in frustration, but as James picked his way along the crowd’s ragged edge, he spied a tension in her shoulders, a drawing up of self-preservation, to defend or to flee. “We only appeal for the right of self-determination, wherever we choose employment!” She spoke true and clear, to her credit, not betraying a fear of the crowd now close enough to judge her eye color.
Hannah was equally fierce and clamped down her hat, striding the line and holding out her board to the crowd. “You must sign; you must speak! Half the world has no voice!”
The petition was jerked from her and swallowed up with a lusty roar. An unmistakable crack of wood reached him, and then the pages were tossed high, raining down over sounds of triumph. Hannah’s jaw tightened, but she kept silent and stood still, refusing to give ground. She was beautiful and fearsome in that moment, Liberty in the paintings of France’s revolution. His respect for her swelled, but not in greater measure than his worry for her.
“It has a voice!” harrumphed a tall hat near the front. “We hear your shouting as plain as we feel the stones you throw at our persons and carriages, as clearly as we hear the windows you smash!”
“That is not fair!” cried Hannah’s companion at the front, cupping her mouth to be heard over a rekindled din of outrage. “Nor is it true! Our league has never taken radical steps in order to be heard. We invite civil discourse, a rational approach!”
“You neglect your homes and families!” came yet another protest.
“You are the decay in this city,” agreed another voice. “Empty kitchens, empty nurseries because you disdain your natural lot!”
Hannah yanked up her skirts and stamped up onto the balustrade, rocking twice and obliging James to flinch before catching herself. “No sir, you disdain my lot by presenting it as vital now, when confronted. But in your clubs and halls you refer to a woman’s lot as filled with menial, thoughtless tasks constructed for and fit only for a congregation of irrational nitwits!”
The crowd surged, and James braced a hand on an anonymous tweed shoulder ahead of him, prepared to lurch, shove, and do anything to reach her. Hannah raised a slender arm, unruffled by frothing hyperbole on the ground, and pitched her words above the noise. “Each of you here was born of a mother! Do none of you love her, feel gratitude for her care, or concern for her welfare?”
Furious murmuring. No retorts were lobbed back; she’d cleverly tangled the front row in their own arguments.
“You do have concern.” She skimmed them with a finger. “I see it on your faces! You would care for her with your last breath. But who will care for her as you do, if that last breath should come today or a week on?” Hannah’s rich voice reached a crescendo and she jammed a finger to Westminster’s gothic walls at her back. “Not these men! Not them! Because they won’t allow her to decide what’s in her best interest when she stands alone. They don’t love her, nor your dear aunt, nor your wife!”
Her passion shouldn’t have surprised him. He’d had a small taste of it at the Fitz’s, but with no concept of how deep it flowed. In that moment, she was more than a society lady, more than Simon’s adversary, or Emily’s estranged sister. He was overwhelmed with a sense of seeing Hannah as she really was.
The crowd felt it, too. James perceived the uncomfortable shuffling all around him, but the booing had simmered and a fragile thread of discontent had begun to weave between a person or two, and then throughout the crowd; not in opposition to Hannah’s assurances, but in support.
Hannah wasn’t finished; her voice rose on an impassioned pitch. “When, God forbid you pass on, that wrinkled old conclave who has never seen to the welfare of our poor, our oppressed, never soothed the aching backs on which our nation is built and on which they stand – they won’t take any more pains for the beloved women in your life than they have for our laborers, our tradesmen!”
Cheers erupted, not from the front, but from the threadbare further back. Perhaps where it most needed to be heard.
“You would never allow Tom or John in the street to tell your mother to shut her mouth and go back to her mending. Will you allow it of your government?” She leaned down at them, arms wide, and James held his breath. “Because that’s what they’ll do, and you know that they will. They already treat most of you men thusly!” Her accusation garnered more shouts and a few whistles. James raised a fist.
“Millicent!” she shouted, and held out her hand to her brave companion, who claimed a perch beside her.
“We must have a dialogue,” cried Millicent, “We must have empathy, and we must express to our government that
we are a nation of Britons, one and all! No more for you,” Millicent paused and rested her hand at her breast, “And no less for me!”
There was a gap between Millicent’s words and the scuffle; James understood it in his rational mind, but awful anticipation heaped everything together. In the moment, it seemed the cries of ‘Deeds not words!’ ignited along the fringes before Millicent stopped speaking. The newcomers tore from the crowd’s edge and rushed before the stoic picket, movements calculated to agitate both sides of the rally. Adorned in bold green and stark white, they distinguished themselves by words and actions from Hannah and her companions. His recognition of what would come next, how it would gobble up the small measure of support garnered by the women, snapped together both halves of the moment with an impact soon to be mirrored around him.
“Actions not words! Actions not words!” came the chant, in four or five raised female voices. When their leader, a wiry woman in pinned-up skirts, hurled her first stone at the men, James knew why Mrs. Delford had given him Hannah’s direction that morning. She, too, must have suffered a premonition of the break, a slip of the unrest simmering for weeks. He could smell the first smoke of kindled violence raising over a sliver of shocked silence.
Whatever traction and good will Hannah and Millicent had gained, he felt it slip back through the riot like an outgoing wave, and in its place, came rage. Retaliation was swift. He couldn’t see it, swallowed by a press and surge of vengeful bodies, but James heard the splintering, a thud of poles and planks tossed to the cobblestone. Several women shouted protests, and then, screaming.
Brass whistles pierced holes in the mob voice, police constables rushing up behind with batons raised. But not more than one or two stuck at the edge of the crowd, or even when they’d reached James near the centerline. His stomach clenched, and then turned when it became plain that the beatings were reserved for the suffragists alone. Men, in fine wool coats and patched trousers alike, struck and snatched at the women, stripping one to her waist in a single breath and pinning others to the street.
