Dangerous Destiny

by Chris Longmuir

  ‘I can see what you’re thinking.’ Martha laughed. ‘But don’t be afraid – I’m one of the organisers of this event.’

  Heat suffused Ethel’s neck and spread to her face. She hoped she wasn’t blushing. Martha ignored her discomfiture.

  ‘Some members of our group are meeting at my house after the meeting. Would you like to join us?’

  After that initial, chance encounter, Ethel attended many more meetings and discussions. She even went out with Martha, on one occasion, to chalk advertisements for an evening meeting on the pavements of Dundee. That had frightened her, and she was sure she couldn’t have done it without Martha’s support. And throughout it all, her friendship with the older woman had grown.

  And now, here she was, living with her. Ethel heaved her bag on top of the wardrobe then moved to the window overlooking the Nethergate. At the other side of the road, she could see the church and its steeple; and if she leaned forward, she could just glimpse the majestic proportions of the Queens Hotel, further up the road to her left. It was so clean and civilised in this part of the town, a million miles from the grime and dirt of the tenements and their backlands.

  There was a tap at the door and Martha called out.

  ‘I have tea ready – would you care to join me?’

  Ethel turned from the window.

  ‘Of course.’ She walked to the door and grasped Martha’s hands in her own. ‘I don’t know why you’re so good to me and I’m not sure how I can thank you.’

  ‘You don’t have to thank me.’ Martha smiled. ‘It’s what anyone who supports the cause would do. We’re here to help others who join us.’

  Ethel slept fitfully that night. Her plush surroundings were unfamiliar and, while the bed was more comfortable than she was accustomed to, sleep eluded her as worries about her mother plagued her mind.

  The house was quiet when she rose. Ethel tiptoed around, trying not to make a noise, unable to shake off the feeling she shouldn’t be here, even though, the night before, Martha had shown her where to find breakfast things and had helped her make sandwiches for her midday meal.

  ‘It’s too early for me,’ Martha had apologised. ‘But help yourself to anything you need and I’ll see you in the evening.’

  Ethel struggled into her mill clothes, the stink of jute strong in her nostrils – a peculiar, musty, dust-like smell which clung to everything it came in contact with, although it hadn’t been so noticeable in the Hilltown house where everything stank the same. It made her think of Martha, so delicate and beautiful, who always smelled of fresh flowers. Maybe she wouldn’t care for the smell of jute in her lovely, clean house. Maybe she’d change her mind about allowing Ethel to stay.

  * * *

  Aching all over, Margery struggled out of bed. She stood up and promptly slid to the floor, where she lay for a moment before crawling to the door. She had to find help and Hughie was no use, lying on top of a pile of clothes in the box-room, snoring.

  It took her an age to get to the front door, and then she couldn’t reach the doorknob. She lay, panting, as she tried to summon the strength to pull herself far enough up the door to open it. Several agonising attempts later, she succeeded. But the effort was too much for her and she collapsed on the doorstep, her head and shoulders lying on the stone landing and her feet and legs in the lobby.

  ‘Godalmighty!’ It was the voice of her neighbour, known as Nosy Nelly. For once, Margery was thankful for her curiosity, although normally she shunned her.

  ‘A tram hit you, did it?’ Strong arms helped her to her feet and back into the house where she plonked Margery into a chair beside the window. Margery could see Nelly’s eyes taking everything in, but for once didn’t care. ‘My, you’ve copped a wallop. D’you want me to send for the doctor?’ Nelly stood in front of her, inspecting the damage.

  ‘No, no. I’ve no money for a doctor, ‘ Margery muttered through thick lips. It felt as if some of her teeth were missing. ‘I have to get to work.’

  Nelly snorted.

  ‘I doubt you can stand, never mind work. You’d be better if the doctor saw you, but if you say no, then no, it is. Here, I’ll try to clean you up.’

  ‘Thanks, Nelly.’ Margery tried to grasp her hand, but it hurt too much to move her arm.

  ‘I’d better give you a prod or two, make sure nothing’s broken. It’ll hurt, mind.’

  Nelly went to work, feeling Margery’s ribs, her legs, ankles, arms and wrists. There was an unspoken, shared, grim acceptance of the situation between them; so many of the women of the tenements suffered from the same sorts of attention from their men.

  ‘Feels as if it’s only bruises,’ Nelly said at last. ‘But the bruises are worse than any I’ve seen. You’ll be sore for a while.’

  Hugh wandered through from the box-room.

  ‘What’re you doing in my house, you old harpy?’ He glared at Nelly.

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Hugh Stewart. Beating on your wife.’ Nelly straightened. She was a big woman, taller and stronger than Hugh. ‘You’re lucky she’s no’ deid.’

  ‘Get the hell out of my house!’ Hugh roared. ‘Always poking your nose in where it’s not wanted.’ He flailed his long arms in the air, though he didn’t move any nearer to Nelly.

  ‘I’ll get out,’ Nelly shouted back. ‘But you’d better look after your wife, and if I hear her scream, I’ll send for the bobbies.’

  She slammed the door and stamped along the landing to her own house.

  Hugh looked at Margery.

  ‘Aw, Marge,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, lass. I didnae mean it. Ye know I never mean it, but I was so upset about Ethel going off, I couldna help myself.’

  ‘I know, Hughie.’ Margery forgave him like she always did. ‘But ye’ll leave the lassie alone, promise?’

  ‘Aye, I promise.’ The promise was easy to make in Hugh’s sober, penitent state. Assurances were harder to abide by when he was drunk and raging against the world.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wednesday, 24th June 1908

  Sleep evaded Martha. The streetlight outside her house ensured the room was never completely dark. She stared at the ceiling, watching the shadows flicker, while she thought about the rally. She wasn’t a devotee of Christabel Pankhurst, nor her call to women to take a violent stance to further the cause. But Christabel’s appearances generated publicity and interest, and even Martha had been surprised at the number of people who’d turned out to listen to her.

  She adjusted her pillow and snuggled further beneath the blankets. Ethel had done well. The girl showed great promise; she would be an asset for the cause. Martha’s thoughts drifted to Victoria. Where had she disappeared to earlier? It wasn’t like her to miss a meeting or a rally. She was one of the foremost advocates of suffrage. What on earth had prevented her attending? It must be something serious.

  Martha fell asleep worrying about Victoria, and what might have kept her from the rally.

  ***

  The clang of a tram passing in the street outside woke her. She struggled to prise her eyes open as the previous night’s worries resurfaced in her mind. Determined to find out the cause of Victoria’s nonappearance, she sat up with a groan and forced herself out of bed.

  Refreshed after a wash and breakfast, Martha donned a short jacket over her skirt and blouse and set out for Perth Road, where Victoria lived with her sister and brother-in-law.

  Elizabeth Inglis opened the door to her knock.

  ‘I’m looking for Victoria,’ Martha said. ‘Can I speak to her?’

  Elizabeth slumped against the doorpost and shook her head.

  ‘She’s not here. I haven’t seen her since the night before last and I’m sick with worry.’

  ‘The night before last?’ Martha’s mind whirled. That was when they’d been sticking posters all over Dundee to advertise the rally. ‘I was with her that evening. I said goodbye to her in the Nethergate and she told me she was going straight home.’

  ‘She never came
home. I waited and waited, but she didn’t come.’

  ‘Strange,’ Martha said. ‘The last time I saw her was in the office, yesterday morning. She intended to join me at the rally in Albert Square but she never turned up and I wondered if something was wrong. Has anything unusual happened?’

  ‘Nothing I know about – she’s not said anything.’

  A worrying thought crept into Martha’s mind.

  ‘Have you reported her as a missing person?’

  Elizabeth shook her head.

  ‘I keep hoping she’ll turn up.’

  ‘Get your coat and we’ll go to the police station now.’

  They walked in silence until they came to the archway leading into the police quadrangle.

  ‘You don’t think something awful has happened to her, do you?’ Elizabeth stopped, as if afraid that continuing meant making their fears a reality.

  ‘I’m certain it will be all right. Victoria’s strong and able to look after herself. It’s probably completely innocuous, but it’s best to be on the safe side.’ Martha put an arm around Elizabeth’s shoulder while she tried to sound convincing. But inside, Martha wasn’t as sure as she sounded. Her mind kept returning to the threatening letter pushed through the Women’s Freedom League letterbox that same morning, and she regretted not bringing it to the attention of her colleagues.

  The policeman behind the counter in the charge-room glanced at them and then looked towards the door as if expecting someone else to follow them in.

  Martha cleared her throat.

  ‘We want to report a woman missing.’

  The policeman tapped his pencil on the desk.

  ‘If you had a piece of paper, I could give you the details.’ Martha was losing patience.

  ‘Perhaps this is something the man of the house should attend to? A police station is no place for ladies.’ The sergeant’s eyes flickered away from them. ‘You meet all sorts in here.’

  ‘Such as yourself, I take it.’

  ‘No need for that tone, ma’am.’ He placed a ledger on the desk and opened it.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Victoria Allan. This is her sister, Elizabeth Inglis.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘She was thirty-two on her last birthday.’

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘Martha Fairweather.’

  The sergeant wrote the information in the book.

  ‘When and where was the missing person last seen?’

  ‘It must have been shortly before one o’clock yesterday. I left her at the Women’s Freedom League office in the Nethergate. I expected her to join me at Albert Square, but she never turned up.’ Martha tightened her grasp on Elizabeth’s hand. ‘And no one has seen her since.’

  ‘She never came home on Monday night and I’ve been worried.’ A tear slid down Elizabeth’s cheek.

  The sergeant laid his pen on the desk and closed the ledger.

  ‘So, she’s only been gone since yesterday, but she didn’t come home the night before and she’s a grown woman. It’s obvious to me that she must have a man friend.’

  ‘Why is it obvious?’ Martha stiffened.

  ‘Sounds to me she’s one of them modern young women. No knowing what they get up to.’

  ‘What you mean is that because Victoria is a suffragette, you intend to do nothing about this.’ Martha pulled Elizabeth towards the door. ‘Come on, we’re wasting our time here.’

  Anger consumed Martha, and she didn’t calm down until they’d left the quadrangle and were walking along Ward Road. That was when she realised she hadn’t informed the sergeant about the threatening letter in her pocket.

  * * *

  Inspector Hammond pushed open the door from the inner sanctum of the police station. Women always made him feel uncomfortable, so he lurked in the corridor while Sergeant Edwards questioned them.

  ‘What was that all about?’

  Edwards snorted.

  ‘Missing person, sir. I’ve taken the details but – if you ask me – it’s a waste of our time.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Well, for a start, she’s one of them suffragettes and we know they’re all a bunch of unnatural women. She could’ve run off with a man or taken off for London to cause havoc with the police there. Maybe she’s banged up in a cell at Holloway. That’s where a lot of them wind up.’

  Hammond sighed. He had an unsettling feeling.

  ‘I suppose you’re right but keep hold of the details. We don’t want them coming back and accusing us of negligence.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ethel reached the mill a moment before the gates were closed to latecomers. She’d woken later than usual and had to run to get here on time before the gaffers docked her pay at the end of the week.

  She joined the queue of workers crowding through the mill gates and tagged herself on the end of the line, to wait her turn to insert her time-card into the clocking-on machine. Women and girls made up the workforce of weavers, spinners and winders, though a few men – mechanics, engineers and box boys – straggled along beside them. She looked for her ma but couldn’t see her. A pang of fear twitched at her, and she tried to shrug it away. Her da couldn’t touch her inside the mill – the women would protect her. He knew that and Ethel was sure he’d keep his distance. The fear that remained was for her ma and what her da might have done to her.

  Caught in the middle of the crowd, Ethel had no choice but to keep moving forward. Once the mill started to hum, she’d have no time to think of anything except work.

  The huge wooden doors leading into the courtyard were open. They closed after the last worker was in and wouldn’t open again until the bummer shrieked its loud whistle to release them from the working day. Then the hordes of workers would push and clatter through them, glad to escape the drudgery of their daily toil.

  Ethel passed through to the courtyard, the uneven cobbles biting into her feet and threatening to unbalance her. The gable ends of three rows of stone buildings faced her at the other side of the yard. Carding and roving sheds lay in the buildings to the left and ran the length of the mill. Spinning sheds stretched all along the right-hand side. The middle building was for the weavers, who wouldn’t lower themselves to enter the sheds at either side of them.

  The crowd separated. Women of all ages, shapes and sizes made their way, with weary footsteps, to where they worked. Ethel headed for one of the spinning sheds, a large, long room, with a claustrophobic atmosphere owing to all the machinery it contained.

  Rows of massive, iron spinning frames extended its length. The roves, spindles and bobbins they housed stood lined up alongside the machines, looking like soldiers waiting for their orders. Workers scurried inside, eager to reach their designated spinning frame before the signal to switch on echoed through the room. Their shoes and clogs clattered in a staccato rhythm on the stone floors and muted the buzz of voices. Soon, even those sounds would be drowned out, replaced by the noise of engines and whizzing spindles beating on Ethel’s ears until they ached. Dry, musty dust, filtered into her nostrils, tainted her skin and hair and marked her as a jute worker.

  A set of wooden stairs by the door led upwards to a platform that ran the length of the room. This was where the gaffer stood to get a clear view of several frames at a time; by walking its length he could oversee the entire room. At the top of the stairs was a glass-windowed office, where he filled in his time-sheets and kept a note of how many shifts each spinning frame did, keeping track of the number of bobbins available for the weaving sheds.

  Ethel walked to her frame and checked every bobbin, making sure they were pressed down so they couldn’t fly up and split the jute ends once she turned the machine on, then she waited for the gaffer’s signal.

  The signal came soon enough, and she switched on the engine of the massive frame, watching as the silvery spindles gathered speed until they whirled so fast they became a blur.

  She stood for a moment, watching the thick, woolly thread being pul
led downwards from the roves to run through the rollers, transforming it into a finer thread, similar to string. From there, each thread filtered through the spinning top of a flyer, which spun and fed it down through the machine, into the eye of one of the legs of each whirling spindle winding the thread around the bobbins. As the spindles whirled, the bobbins filled with string.

  Ethel’s job as a spinner was to work the machine that spun the raw jute into string, mend any broken ends of jute after they passed between rollers and spindle caps, and then to shift the full bobbins from the machine and start another new set spinning. At the start of each working day, her prayer was the same as every other spinner’s prayer: that not too many jute ends would break at the same time. Too many half-full bobbins led to a reprimand from the gaffer. It was all right for him; he didn’t have to halt a spindle and put his fingers between its stationary legs to grasp the thread, while the other spindles continued to whirl their high-speed dance on either side.

  There were many injuries in the mill; it didn’t do to be careless. Ethel, who had seen friends hurt, feared the spinning frames, imagining they were waiting for their next victim. As a result, she tried to work like an automaton but wasn’t always successful at blanking out the task and her fears. She often woke up in the middle of the night, convinced she’d lost her grip on the flyer cap which fed the jute through to the whirling bobbins. In these nightmares, the spinning legs of the spindles trapped her fingers and she always needed to feel her hands repeatedly before she was satisfied they’d only been mangled in her dream-world.

  Despite this, she was a good spinner; though more often than not, she counted the minutes until the end of each shift, when she could turn off her frame.

  The morning passed in a daze and she tended her machine while her mind was elsewhere.

  ‘You working overtime or something?’

  The voice broke into Ethel’s thoughts and she started. The spinning frames around her had fallen silent, and hers was the only one still operating.