by V. Penley
Her school had been open only two years, but it had felt like a protracted war. Eugenie had been skirting bankruptcy and destitution since the school had opened. And now she was battling something else: six sleepy students.
But she was determined to make it a success.
“Class. Attention,” she said, stepping into the room and taking her familiar place in front of the black board. She was prepared to lead them through their morning assignment, which was based on her first detective case from several years earlier.
“I assume everyone has read the assignment I copied out for you?” She looked around expectantly and noted the lack of vigorous nodding.
Eugenie covered her mouth to stifle her own yawn. “In case anyone cannot remember, let me summarize.”
But before she could start, she was interrupted. The students were passing something around the room, down by their feet. Heads bent, as if looking at their books, they passed a note from girl to girl. Eugenie crouched down, to see what had snared their attention.
“Ivie!” Eugenie said, when the piece of paper landed in the hands of her best student. “Ivie, let me see the paper, please.” Eugenie stood and held out her hand.
With a sulk, Ivie gave it over, only having had a chance to glance at it quickly.
It was a piece of newsprint, ragged at the edges where it had been torn out. Dominating the page was a photograph of a woman lying on her back, somewhere…somewhere Eugenie couldn’t tell. She looked at the caption to the photograph.
It was the suffragette, Emily Davison, who had been stomped by King George’s horse.
Eugenie’s students eyed her expectantly. As a teacher, Eugenie had few maxims. But there was one she swore by: meet your students where you find them. If you couldn’t engage with what they were thinking, their ears would be stopped up. Accordingly, she folded the paper and asked them what they wanted to discuss.
And what they wanted to talk about this morning was Emily Davison.
“To rush the King’s horse?” cried Maisie Nebbles, sitting half in her chair at the front of the classroom. There were two rows of students, three girls each, and Maisie and Ivie sat at the head of each row. “She must have been mad. Whatever for?”
“For the vote,” said Ivie Niles, nodding. “No one will allow us to vote unless we interrupt their daily lives.”
Maisie guffawed, but Ivie continued in a steady voice. “If women want anything, they have to stand up and make people uncomfortable. Otherwise people will walk on by you. I’ve seen that happen myself.” She nodded at Eugenie. “There are suffragettes who stand there with signs, who can’t draw a crowd. It is the women who block doors who get the public’s attention.”
Maisie listened with her bottom lip stuck out. She and Ivie jostled constantly and were like two magnetic poles. Eugenie should have been disturbed, except none of the other girls would challenge Ivie. They were too willing to allow Ivie to hold sway.
Ivie turned around to address the class: “Women have known that since our own mum, Queen Mary. Stand outside there with a tin cup and see if anyone comes by to drop your vote in it. Look at the Property Act,” she said. “We had to twist arms to get that passed.”
“What is the Property Act?” one girl ventured, in a thin, unsteady voice.
“Don’t you read?” Ivie snapped.
“Please, Ivie,” Lady Eugenie said gently. “Educate us on the Property Act, if you would be so kind.”
Suddenly, Ivie reddened. “Well, Miss…” she stammered, turning back around to face her teacher. Perhaps Ivie didn’t even know what the Property Act was. Her brow furrowed. “If I remember my reading correctly, before 1870, I think, British women could not inherit property. It passed only to their husbands. The Property Act changed that.”
“That’s about right,” Eugenie said. “They also were unable to keep any money they earned.”
“If they worked,” Ivie said.
Eugenie nodded, remembering that all her students, except Maisie, came from the gentry.
When Eugenie had started her school, she had assumed—wrongly—that her students would come from the middle classes, professional families who needed somewhere to send a daughter. But it turned out that the estates of the propertied classes were teeming with girls whose parents wanted to get rid of them.
Ivie herself had been dumped off because she was too outspoken, too challenging for her family. Her parents had shown up on Eugenie’s doorstep with Ivie standing between them. “Please,” the father had said. A simple word, but desperate. It had been raining on the family’s uncovered heads. The father had said it again, his voice cracking. “Please. Can we come in?” They were responding to her advertisement.
“And why do you want your daughter to attend this school?” Eugenie had asked, laying out tea and passing around hand towels for the family to mop the wet from their brows.
“She’s, well…” The father had looked at his wife for support. Instead, the wife completed his thought. “She’s rather outspoken,” she said. “We’ve sent her to three different schools already. And…” She smiled nervously at her daughter.
Eugenie had seen the intelligence in Ivie’s eyes immediately. And so she had decided to make an argument on the girl’s behalf. “Perhaps she’s just bored. I’m sure she would enjoy a more challenging academic environment than the one I can provide.”
“Please,” the father had said. “We just need to get rid of her.”
And, to date, 11 families had stood on her doorstep, making the same claim.
Ivie now stood before the class, almost as their teacher. “The battle for the vote is the most important fight of our lifetime. And it is a fight requiring that we step in front of a horse. After all, if we had to fight to hold onto our money, as women—money we earned—then surely we must twist arms to obtain the right to vote.”
“Twist arms to get the vote!” cried Maisie, unable to contain herself. Whereas Ivie was tall and thin, Maisie was squat like a bulldog. Her two clenched fists sat on the desk top.
“Yes,” Ivie said coolly, looking down her nose at her opponent. “The right to vote is the most important right a citizen can have.”
“In a monarchy?” Maisie cried, pummeling her forehead with her fists, as if she had heard the stupidest thing said.
A few of the other girls laughed—but stopped as soon as Ivie glared.
Come on, Ivie, Eugenie thought, admiring the girl’s back. Don’t give up now.
Lady Eugenie knew that Ivie would have to face down plenty of men like Maisie in the future. Many men saw debate as a chance to give vent to personal feelings, which were usually strong, crudely phrased, but not always unreasonable. You had to stand your ground with these men.
Fortunately, Ivie did not fold.
“We do not have a pure monarchy,” she said slowly. “We have a constitutional monarchy.”
“With a King,” Maisie said.
“I said ‘constitutional’ monarchy. You can have a king in a constitutional monarchy.”
“Oh.”
“A constitutional monarchy means that most of the decisions that affect our daily lives are made by Parliament, for which people vote.”
In spite of the definitiveness of the last word, Ivie glanced quickly over her shoulder at Lady Eugenie for confirmation, and Eugenie promptly nodded. Britain, indeed, was a constitutional monarchy.
Like a fish with its mouth flapping open, Maisie leaped to her feet so that she could deliver her counterargument directly to the other girls. “Constitutional monarchy means that the rich get to vote and the poor get to beg.” She shook her fist in the air. “And if women get to vote, then poor women can vote on their way to the poor house!”
“Oh, dear,” Ivie said.
“Just like their men!”
A pall settled over the room. No one moved or spoke. With embarrassment, the girls looked everywhere but at Maisie. Some studied their shoes, while others examined the scuff marks their shoes had made on the flo
or. More than one tried to catch Eugenie’s attention, as if seeking confirmation for what Maisie had said.
Eugenie thought, all in all, that it wasn’t a bad interpretation of the world. She gave a slow, ambiguous nod with her eyes closed.
“If we are to make ourselves useful as women,” Ivie finally said, “we will need all of the responsibilities and duties of men. Whether poor or rich--”
“Like working in the freezing cold to make sure propertied ladies get their morning coal,” Maisie said in a low voice. Ivie pretended not to hear, but she winced nevertheless.
Maisie had been the most recent addition to the school, having started only two months ago; Eugenie’s first scholarship student. Although Eugenie was nearly broke, Maisie had proved worth her weight in gold. She was Eugenie’s protection in the early dawn hours when she went out to pay the school’s bills.
Maisie’s entire family had worked the streets, which is where Eugenie had found her. She had impressed Eugenie when she managed to corral a pick pocket who had stolen Eugenie’s purse one afternoon in Covent Garden.
“Stop!” Eugenie had cried, feeling the purse disentangle from her arm. A young boy had raced away from her, the strap of the purse fluttering in the air behind him. “A thief has stolen my purse!”
Most of the crowd stared, unmoved. But a little girl, as round as a barrel, had dashed after him and, through sheer foot speed, had quickly overtaken the young man. She threw herself onto his back like a bear and wrestled him to the ground. She had his head in a lock when Eugenie jogged up to retrieve her purse.
“Should I hold him until a bobby comes?” the girl had panted. Her face glowed scarlet, while the boy kicked helplessly and had even begun to cry. Something like “Let me go” struggled to escape his choked throat.
“No, it’s fine,” Eugenie had said, feeling some pangs of pity for the boy. She reached down and plucked her purse from his loose hand.
“Are you sure, ma’am?” The girl tightened her hold, which caused the boy’s face to slowly darken to purple and the tongue to slide out. “If he steals once, he’ll steal again! That’s what I say!”
“No no,” Eugenie said, mainly because the girl looked on the verge of strangling him. “I am sure he has learned his lesson. At least he looks as if he has.” She addressed the purpling face. “Am I correct?”
The boy began to nod; sweat had broken out on his face, and his white lip had curled up to greet it.
“Indeed he has,” Lady Eugenie said. “You may release your hold,” she told the girl.
“If you say,” Maisie had replied and then let him go.
Within seconds, the boy had scrambled to his feet and run away.
“You really ought to carry that purse differently, ma’am” Maisie had said, standing up and declining to even brush herself off. Her yellow dress was already quite soiled with bits of food and whatever else dried on it. She took Eugenie’s purse and showed her how to position it on her arm. “You wrap it like this and it can’t be pulled off. My Mum told me that. Try it,” she said. “Try and pull it off.”
Eugenie had tried, and no matter how hard she pulled, the purse had been securely fastened.
“Thank you,” Eugenie had said. “I believe you have taught me an incredible lesson.”
And right then and there, on the busy street, Lady Eugenie had decided to offer to educate the girl. Money, Eugenie had told the girl’s bewildered parents, would not be an issue. In fact, Maisie would pay for herself. And she had.
“Maisie,” Eugenie said, “you aren’t arguing that women shouldn’t vote because some women are poor, are you?”
“Er…no…” Maisie said slowly.
“Poor women should surely vote. Much as poor men already do. I’m sure you would agree.”
“But if women are to act as men,” Maisie said, “then what is the use of women?”
Eugenie laughed, startled. Maisie was certainly clever. “Or of men, for that matter,” Eugenie added.
Ivie looked darkly at her instructor, unsteady. Perhaps she feared that she was losing her audience. But after this flicker of self-doubt, Ivie gathered herself and, chin high, proclaimed, “It is the women of Britain who will lead her to new glories this century.”
A noble, nationalist sentiment that silenced even Maisie.
Eugenie nodded curtly. “Right,” she said. “Well said, Ivie. Perhaps now we can move on.” Both Maisie and Ivie took their seats.
But then Eugenie thought of the one girl in the room she wanted to hear from: Pippa. Pippa had been one of Eugenie’s first students. She was, in fact, a relation. Eugenie’s brother-in-law had had a young daughter, whom the mother thought was mentally slow. It had been out of charity, and out of concern with Eugenie’s financial well-being, that they had invited Eugenie to watch the girl, in London. They would pay her a small stipend and cover any major expenses. Their request was simple: to educate her as best she could—but the primary need was to get Pippa out of the way.
With practically no other options, Eugenie had accepted—and had quickly discovered that Pippa was in no way mentally deficient. If anything, she was deeper, certainly deeper than her parents. As Eugenie would learn, Pippa would look and look at something until she had drained it of every drop of significance. Her mind was ideally suited to the life of detection.
“Pippa,” Eugenie said. “Do you think Ms. Emily Davison was mad when she rushed onto the race track?”
Pippa’s hair was already white—nearly as white as her skin. Blue veins showed at her temples, and she always kept to herself, as if people could see the words through her skull.
“Ma’am,” Pippa began, swallowing. It remained a tremendous struggle for her to talk. She chose to sit in the back of the classroom, though Eugenie would always find her. “I don’t think we can answer whether or not she is mad.”
“And why not?”
Pippa paused. “It’s like this,” she stammered. She swallowed again, and wet her bottom lip. “If Ms. Davison gave up her life to draw attention to the right to vote, then she will be mad if women don’t secure it.”
Eugenie nodded at that.
“But,” Pippa said, “if we do secure it, then history will say that she wasn’t mad.”
“So you think how we view Ms. Davison will depend on the future?” Eugenie asked.
“I…I don’t think anyone can really decide in their own mind whether or not they are normal or not normal,” Pippa said quickly. “So, yes. Other people will decide that for Ms. Davison.”
“Based on the future?”
“Based on how important they consider the right to vote. And whether we do end up securing it.”
“But we know, don’t we, Pippa,” Lady Eugenie said, wishing to correct something. “In our own minds. We know, in our own minds, whether we’re mad or not. Emily Davison knew, certainly. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Eugenie thought back to the day Pippa had arrived at the school. Two trunks of clothes and an envelope full of pound notes had accompanied her. But what Eugenie remembered most clearly was how Pippa’s mother had said, loudly, in front of her soon-to-be abandoned daughter, “Do your best, Genie. I know you will. But something’s just not right in her head!” Pippa had heard her mother, but had showed no reaction.
Pippa was now silent, thinking over Eugenie’s question.
Eugenie wanted the point made, so she persisted. “Whatever people say, Pippa, we know in our own minds that we are not mad.”
“We do, ma’am,” Pippa said, looking up and smiling.
“That’s right,” Eugenie said. “So we do not depend entirely on what other people think of us.”
“But there’s a problem, ma’am,” Pippa quickly interjected. By now, all the other girls were listening intently. Both Ivie and Maisie had turned fully around to look at their pale classmate.
“And what is that?” Eugenie asked.
“Ms. Davison might not live to tell us whether she is mad. So people will have to make up their own mi
nds, regardless of what she thinks. In that way, I guess, other people will decide whether she was mad.”
Eugenie paused, surprised once again by the girl’s insight. “Indeed, Pippa,” Eugenie said. “And that is a problem Ms. Davison did not think through.” Eugenie then clapped her hands. “Since no one can answer with certainty whether Ms. Davison is mad, it would perhaps be best to focus now on our morning studies.
“Class,” she said, stepping behind the table at the front of the room, where she had set up the diorama which she had made the day before. “If you will all please come gather around. We will begin our morning lesson in detection.”
Chapter Three: A Failed Lesson
The girls wandered up to the front of the classroom. Maisie pushed against Ivie, and Ivie jammed an elbow in return. Eugenie ignored them. Pippa hung back, standing behind the other girls; but she was tall, and could see over everyone’s heads and shoulders, save Ivie’s.
All eyes looked down on Eugenie’s diorama, which she had set up the night before on the table. It was a diorama of a castle, the roof missing and each room carefully furnished with miniature beds and tables. It was an exact replica of Thistledorn Manor, where Eugenie, freshly widowed and thrown out of her home, had stayed to lick her wounds for as long as possible, trading on the charity of a distant acquaintance. It was in this castle where Eugenie’s wedding ring had been stolen.
She looked at her girls. “Am I correct that you all have read the back story?”
She had written her own little playlet, complete with a cast of characters. The girls nodded, though some more weakly than others. Eugenie decided to forego a lecture; they had wasted enough time talking about Emily Davison, and half the period for detection studies had been lost. So Eugenie quickly recited the relevant facts.
A weekend in April. Rainy. Chill.
A dozen people gathered for a weekend of shooting and parties.
