Maggie and Alice exchanged brief looks, each aware of the boy’s yearning to be noticed by his father. Then Christabel tugged on Maggie’s hand.
‘Auntie Maggie, look! Look!’ the small girl cried in wonder as she pointed to a troupe of players performing in the open air.
‘That’s Pierrot,’ Maggie told her, ‘and the lass is Columbine. Her partner’s the one with the fancy costume; Harlequin.’
‘Me see!’ Christabel shouted excitedly.
‘Course you can, pet,’ Maggie smiled and lifted the girl into her arms with a kiss. It was a source of wonder to Maggie that she could feel so attached to this child. It had always been Susan who had been credited with the maternal feelings, while she had been called the hard one, showing impatience with everything except politics, so her mother and sisters had declared. But loving Christabel had shown her that it was possible to do both and Maggie hoped she had grown more aware of the feelings of others, more tolerant. She often wondered about Alice, a seemingly solitary woman, hiding behind her camera. Yet here she was enjoying this seaside trip like an excited child. Did she love Christabel too?
It became increasingly hard saying goodbye to her daughter at the end of the visits and there were long periods while Alice was away in London when she did not see Christabel at all. It was towards the end of the summer that Maggie’s restlessness and her dissatisfaction with her quiet, orderly life grew intolerable.
John noticed her impatience and short temper with alarm. He had been so relieved to see her regain her old enthusiasm for life and work after the trauma of discovering George Gordon was still alive. Maggie had never told him what had happened after her visit to Benwell, but he knew she had been because one of his customers mentioned it soon afterwards. He did not pry; he was just thankful that she appeared to be over him and that they had resumed their intimacy in the marital bed.
But this new brooding made him anxious once more, for he saw the boredom on her face, the frustration after visits from Christabel. His worst fear was that she would tire of living with a man twice her age, turn to Gordon and run off with him.
‘You need a new cause, Maggie,’ he told her one September afternoon while they strolled aimlessly through the Dene and watched children playing by the side of the burn. ‘Why don’t you come and help more at the mission?’
Maggie stopped and gazed at two boys who were jumping in and out of a rock pool. She did not reply.
‘You have so much experience of the knocks life can give,’ John continued, ‘that you seem wasted in what you’re doing. You’re a campaigner, Maggie, you could be using your gifts to better the lives of others.’
Maggie felt stung by his gentle rebuke that she was choosing a safe, quiet life, content to snatch at the small precious moments with her daughter that were granted her. But then she was no longer content. It echoed her own feeling that she should not be settling for a half-life of middle-class comforts and these fleeting moments with a daughter who still thought of her as a kindly friend of her aunt’s. She would never be fully responsible for Christabel as a mother should be, she told herself brutally, and she could not go through the rest of her life waiting for those brief, unreal times together when she played a game of make-believe, pretending that the child was legally hers.
Maggie turned pained eyes on her husband. ‘You’re right, John,’ she answered heavily. ‘I’m wasting my time waiting for the day Christabel will become mine again. It’s never going to happen, is it? In a year or two she’ll have a governess to tell her how to behave and probably won’t be allowed to visit me anymore. Or she’ll be sent off to boarding school like Henry and will soon learn to be too embarrassed to visit the likes of us.’
John moved close. ‘We don’t know that. Ideas have changed since the war; people aren’t prepared to put up with so much class restriction.’
‘It hasn’t changed so you’d notice,’ Maggie replied scornfully.
‘Well, put your energies into changing things then,’ he challenged her. ‘You women won a great victory with the vote last year, but there’re plenty more injustices to right. Where’s your suffragette spirit gone to, Maggie?’
Angered, she retorted, ‘It’s gone nowhere. I still feel strongly about improving things for women. But I’m not as pig-headed.’ She glanced at him, flushing. ‘I admit now I used to think everything was either black or white and that everything I did was right. And perhaps I didn’t always do the best thing but I always believed I did, so I’m not afraid of being judged for it.’
Her look was defiant, but her voice was more controlled as she went on, ‘But I now see that society’s problems are more tangled. It’s not just a matter of changing the law and everything will be champion. Nothing will change unless what goes on in people’s heads change. I remember thinking so in St Chad’s when I saw the look of contempt on the bosses’ faces. I thought, they’re not seeing me, they’re looking at me crime - if crime it was to bear that beautiful lass. We’ve got so many small battles to fight to make things better for women, it’s not just the big campaigns that matter.’
John regarded her. ‘So what are you going to do about it? Tear down St Chad’s? It may be a dismal place but it’s somewhere for the very poor to go to.’
Maggie returned his steady look. Now was the time to speak of what had been occupying her mind for months. ‘To lead by example rather than tell people how to lead their lives. Isn’t that what you’re always preaching is the Christian way?’
John nodded.
‘Aye, well that’s what I want to do.’
‘Go on.’ John observed her closely. Maggie took a deep breath.
‘I want to improve things for lasses like me - the ones who find themselves at the bottom of the heap, unmarried and penniless and carrying someone’s bastard child.’ Her eyes blazed at him in defiance as she expressed her ideas. John kept quiet, willing her to go on.
‘If I had the money, I’d set up a home for lasses to live in, a decent place, a safe place, where they wouldn’t be treated like the very devil and made to scrub floors until their babies dropped. They’d be allowed visitors - family, fathers of their bairns - not just locked away out of sight until it’s all over.’ Maggie started to walk as her ideas took shape. ‘But it wouldn’t end there with the birth of the baby,’ she continued. ‘The bairns wouldn’t be just whipped away and never seen again. Their mams would be allowed to keep them while they had a decent confinement, recovered from the birth.’ She looked at her husband for encouragement.
John pursed his lips, unsettled by the idea. ‘It sounds all very humane, Maggie,’ he frowned, ‘but if it’s all made so easy, won’t it just encourage immorality among young women?’
Maggie bristled at the suggestion. ‘Why do men assume it’s always the women who are immoral?’ she demanded in annoyance. ‘To my mind it’s society that’s immoral treating lasses with such cruelty while the men take no responsibility. The hypocrisy makes me stomach turn. It may offend your sense of propriety, John, but there will always be vulnerable lasses who find themselves in such a state. What they need is somewhere they’ll be cared for and not judged and condemned for the rest of their lives. Lasses like us may not get to heaven, but at least we can ask for a brief haven from a hostile world.’
John regarded her warily. ‘And afterwards, when the baby is born? What then?’
Maggie stopped and spoke more calmly. ‘I would actively seek employment for them, jobs where they could keep their bairns with them, or help them find lodgings and get started in the world again with a bit support and money. Reconcile them with their families if they’ve got them. When I think what a difference a bit help would’ve done me at the right time ...’
Maggie stopped herself, not meaning any criticism of John, for had she known the depths of his compassion she would have gone to him in her need rather than turning to the workhouse. But she had been too proud, too full of guilt and grief for the loss of her lover to do anything but run and hide her shame in
St Chad’s until it was all over.
‘And how will you fund such a home?’ John pressed her.
Maggie let out a long breath as she thought it through. ‘In Utopia,’ she said with a twitch of a smile, ‘it would be funded by the state, for all lasses, no matter what their class. But barring a revolution, I need to find a wealthy patron, I suppose.’
They looked at each other in understanding.
‘Have you spoken of this to Miss Alice yet?’ John asked.
Maggie shook her head. ‘Not yet, but I will. She’s never exactly said so, but I think she’s still trying to pay a debt to the suffrage movement. She once told me that she felt responsible for encouraging her old friend Emily Davison to go to Epsom. I think it’s still on her mind.’
John gave Maggie a questioning smile. ‘The Emily Davison Memorial Home then?’
***
Maggie was swift to follow up her plan and called on Alice Pearson at Hebron House in early October when she heard she was back from London. It felt very strange entering through the high iron gates and passing the summerhouse she had once burnt down. Yet it was here also that her passion for suffragism had been fuelled, sitting in Alice’s vast, elegant drawing room listening to the inspiring voice of Emily Davison all those years ago.
She was surprised at how shabby the house looked now, then remembered that for part of the war it had been taken over by the army. Only a section of the grand old house appeared to be used, with a whole flank of windows shuttered against the wind and Maggie caught a glimpse of white dustsheets covering furniture in a downstairs room.
She took tea with Alice in a small, cosy sitting room where she felt at ease spelling out her ideas.
‘I’m interested,’ the older woman nodded reflectively, ‘but I think it would be important to gather other subscribers to such a scheme. I myself don’t have any great personal wealth, despite what you see around you.’
‘Perhaps Mr Herbert might lend us some money?’
Alice pulled a face. ‘I doubt it is something he would have much enthusiasm for. Besides, Pearson’s is contracting now that the war is over and the demand for arms and ships has dropped. Herbert can no longer afford to be the kind of patron that my father was.’
‘You’ll consider it, though?’ Maggie pressed her.
‘Indeed,’ Alice nodded vigorously. ‘No matter what my brother thinks, I will help with what I have.’
Maggie drank her tea in triumph and their talk turned to Christabel and when she could next visit.
By December Alice had found a likely house for the experiment in the west of Newcastle and was contacting sympathetic individuals and charitable bodies for funds. She used her Pearson name for all it was worth, but this soon drew the disapproving interest of her brother. He demanded to know more about the scheme and who was involved.
Annoyed by his sister’s evasiveness, he had her followed and soon discovered her involvement with Maggie Heslop. It was not long before he learned that she was none other than the infamous Beaton woman who had so damaged his family’s interests in the days before the war.
Herbert came storming down from Oxford Hall just before Christmas and tore into Alice.
‘I suppose this is the woman Henry and Georgina talk about so much,’ he fumed. ‘I’m horrified to think you’ve been allowing them to mix with such a woman. Worse, encouraging them to see her. But then you’ve always been such an appalling judge of character. Well, it’s not going to continue. I forbid you to take them to that woman’s house or I’ll never let you have them here to stay again. Do you understand, Alice?’
Alice swallowed her indignation and tried to reason with her brother. ‘Maggie Heslop is a friend of mine and respectably married to a Methodist preacher and prosperous businessman. All that suffragette business is long over. And the children enjoy going to see the Heslops. Why spoil their fun, Herbert? Besides, the Heslops are holding a party for them after Christmas, it’s all arranged.’
‘Fun?’ Herbert thundered. ‘With a suffragette and one of those radical preachers! Imagine what Felicity would say if she knew the children were consorting with such riffraff! No, it must stop.’
Alice would probably have bowed to her brother’s will, as she had so often in the past, if he had not added with such contempt, ‘And as for this nonsense about a home for fallen women, you’ll not have it in my constituency. We don’t want to be seen encouraging immoral behaviour. I’m baffled by why you should want to sully the Pearson name by involving yourself in such a farce.’ He poured himself a large brandy and laughed mirthlessly. ‘You’re much too old still to be trying to shock me with your petty posturing. I’ll not indulge you like Papa did. Stick to your depressing photography if you must, but leave the politics to me.’
Alice sat stunned for a moment, quite wounded by his patronising contempt. Did her brother really hold her in such little regard? Then something within her finally gave way, some inner wall of restraint came tumbling down, breached by years of frustration and hurt at the way her brother treated her. In that instant, she saw how futile had been her attempts to win his approval as she had tried to do with her father, in order to feel wanted and of worth within the great Pearson dynasty. But it was plain he had never viewed her as anything more than an eccentric, recalcitrant female who had refused to be married off to further the family fortunes and was therefore valueless. She looked at Herbert’s disdainful, bloated features and realised he cared nothing for her, in his eyes she was merely a nuisance that had to be controlled. How had she allowed him to use and manipulate her for so long?
She stood up and faced him, ignited by her new-found rage.
‘Don’t you scold me like some wayward hunting dog of yours!’ she cried. ‘Whatever my interests in the past, or the reasons behind them, I’m quite serious about this home for unmarried mothers and I’ll set it up without your help - and in your precious constituency. You’ll not stop me this time, Herbert, so don’t cross me!’
He slugged his brandy and laughed in disbelief. ‘Tut-tut, Alice, aren’t you a little old for throwing tantrums? And what could you possibly threaten me with, eh?’
Alice glared at him. ‘I could go to the newspapers with an interesting story,’ she said menacingly. ‘About how Herbert Pearson MP paid for a baby girl to try and salvage his rotten marriage. A sweet creature called Georgina whom her so-called parents show absolutely no interest in.’
Herbert, his brandy glass halfway to his lips, froze in surprise.
Alice ploughed on before he could deny it. ‘But the irony is she’s really called Christabel after the famous suffragette, so named by her real mother who was also a well-known suffragette on Tyneside. Have you any idea whose child you’re nurturing, Herbert? It would really be very funny if it wasn’t so tragic. Georgina was born to one of those fallen women you so despise.’
He was gawping at her open-mouthed, stunned by her attack. ‘You’re making this whole preposterous story up,’ he spluttered. ‘You’re a vindictive bitch, Alice, just because you can’t have your own way for once. Little Georgie is our child.’
‘Don’t be so ridiculous! Georgina isn’t your daughter, Herbert. No one really believes Felicity bore you a second child. You’ve slept apart for years and we both know who Tish would rather be sleeping with, don’t we?’
She saw Herbert turn puce at the allusion to Felicity’s affair with Poppy Beresford. He advanced on Alice with the brandy glass raised menacingly as if he would dash it into her face.
‘Shut up! Shut up!’ he bawled.
But Alice could not stop now as the frustration and anger of years came pouring out of her. She wanted to hurt him, wanted to see him reduced to tears as he had so often reduced her.
Standing her ground, she cried, ‘Can’t you guess whose bastard child you’re rearing, Herbert? Do you know whose little girl is being brought up as a respectable Pearson? Georgina - Christabel - is the illegitimate child of Maggie Beaton and that so-called agitator George Gordon. You
probably don’t remember how he was blacklisted from Pearson’s at the beginning of the war - just another casualty of petty Pearson vindictiveness. Now wouldn’t that make a fascinating story for the papers?’
‘You’re lying!’ Herbert was apoplectic. ‘Georgina’s real name was Martha Brown, not Christabel. She was orphaned. She’s nothing to do with that evil Beaton woman!’
Alice shook her head in triumph. ‘No orphan, Herbert. Just look at her - she’s the double of Maggie, with those startling eyes and the dark ringlets. She reminds me of her mother every time I look at her!’
Herbert let out a strangled sound like a trapped animal and hurled the brandy glass over her head, smashing it against a lacquered tallboy. The look that blazed in his eyes was pure hatred and Alice flinched from him, fearing he would seize and throttle her.
But he turned without another word and rushed blindly from the room, banging into furniture in his haste to get away from her. For minutes afterwards, Alice stood breathing fast, her heart racing painfully. Her elation at having for once defeated her brother gave way to foreboding at what she had done.
She walked to the window and peered down at the sweep of frosted drive, watching Herbert roar away in the family Bentley that he liked to drive himself. What had she done? Alice trembled. And what would she tell Maggie now that she had certainly ended any possibility of her ever seeing Christabel again?
Chapter 31
Maggie read the Christmas letter that had arrived that morning with delight. Millie was lighting the lamps and there was a warm smell of orange and ginger punch filling the room, spiced with cloves and cinnamon. The Christmas decorations sparkled around the mantelpiece and doorway and the Nativity scene was laid out in anticipation of Christabel and Bella wanting to play with the figures. She and John had just returned from the mission where he had been taking a Christmas Eve carol service.
‘It’s from Rose - Rose Johnstone!’ she told John and Millie. ‘I can’t believe she’s written to me after all this time.’
THE GREAT WAR SAGAS: Box set of 2 passionate and inspiring stories: A Crimson Dawn and No Greater Love Page 84
