by Annie Groves
She had known that he would be surprised, of course, but the look of bleakness and pain that crossed his face as his hand trembled and he looked away from her shocked her.
‘What is it, Henry?’ she asked him worriedly. ‘I thought you would be pleased. I know how much the watch means to you and when I discovered that you had pawned it to give money to me, I could not rest until I had gone to that dreadful shop and had got it back for you.’
‘You are very kind.’ His voice was thin and emotionless, a whispery, papery rasp, devoid of life and yet somehow heavy and tortured-sounding in a way that confused her.
‘Are you not pleased to have the watch back?’ Ellie asked him, upset.
‘Yes, yes, of course I am.’ His voice was muffled and he kept his back to her as he spoke.
‘Henry…’
‘Oh, Ellie.’ As he swung round, his voice was raw and tortured. ‘I am such a pathetic, weak apology for a man. My father is right about that! You are worthy of so much more than I am able to give you, and it shames me that I cannot…that I am so unworthy of you! You are so strong, Ellie, so much how I wish I might be myself, but know that I am not! Can’t you see? I am your husband. It is my duty to provide for you, and what you have done proves that I am not able to do so. I had no other way…This was my only way of…’ He stopped speaking and, to her distress, Ellie saw that he was crying.
A part of her ached to go to him, to comfort him, yet another part of her recoiled from his unmanly vulnerability and pain.
She was sharply aware that her own actions were the cause of his emotional humiliation, and the anguish he was obviously suffering, but she had no idea what to say or do to mend matters.
As though grey clouds had been parted by a sudden frightening zigzag of lightning, Ellie suddenly saw her future. She was destined always to be the stronger partner in their marriage; on her shoulders would fall the onus of protecting Henry – from everything and everyone, for ever.
THIRTY-TWO
It had become a new habit of Gideon’s to wander around Preston, keeping an eye on properties that became vacant or were up for sale, and he was on one of these missions when he stopped mid-stride and stiffened as he watched a familiar figure making her way towards the train station.
Miss Isherwood! She looked older and thinner – frailer, somehow – Gideon recognised. A feeling he did not want to acknowledge suddenly struck sharply through him, and before he could stop himself he was calling her name and hurrying towards her.
It shamed him to see the look of joy on her face as she turned and saw him.
‘Gideon!’ she exclaimed with obvious pleasure. ‘How are you?’ she asked him warmly. ‘I have often thought about you and –’ Mary bit her lip, deriding herself mentally for being a fool, and rambling so. But the shock of seeing Gideon when she had least expected to do so had driven rational good sense right out of her head!
‘I’m fine,’ Gideon told her brusquely.
Mary’s evident gladness at seeing him was making him feel guilty. He owed her a great deal, he knew that, but his pride had made it hard for him to admit as much to himself, never mind to her!
‘And your hand?’ Mary asked him, worriedly. ‘You are exercising it as the specialist suggested?’
A brief flare of bitter anger darkened Gideon’s eyes. ‘No amount of exercising is ever going to make it right,’ he told her curtly.
Instantly, Mary’s expression shadowed, and Gideon knew that his response had hurt her. Angrily he told himself that it wasn’t his fault she was such a daft softie, but then she started to turn away from him and he saw how the small movement caused her to flinch with pain.
‘You’ve hurt yourself.’ His statement was both angry and accusing, but it still made Mary smile a little.
‘Nothing much. Just a silly twisted ankle,’ she declared, not wanting Gideon to ask her any more questions about her ankle, which had been injured at a suffragette meeting when she caught a sharp blow from a policeman’s truncheon. Although she had no intention of telling Gideon so, Mary’s doctor had told her that she was lucky she had moved quickly enough to avoid the bone being crushed completely.
He had also expressed concern about her lingering cough, but Mary had told him not to fuss.
‘I am on my way to Manchester,’ she explained to Gideon instead. ‘That’s why I’m here. There is an important suffragette meeting there today, and since my chauffeur is sick and I cannot drive the car myself because of this wretched ankle, I have decided to go by train.’
‘You’re travelling to Manchester on your own?’ he demanded, frowning.
‘I’m a grown woman, Gideon,’ Mary reminded him gently.
‘Grown woman or not, with the way you’re limping –’
‘It’s nothing,’ Mary tried to assure him, but as she spoke she moved awkwardly and gave an involuntary gasp of pain.
‘I’m coming with you,’ he announced gruffly, his decision as much a surprise to him as it obviously was to Mary. ‘You already know I don’t approve of what you’re doing, but that doesn’t stop me being concerned about the risks you are taking. That ankle –’
‘Oh, no, Gideon. I couldn’t expect you to do that,’ Mary protested, but the expression in her eyes showed her true feelings.
‘Aye, well, I owe you a favour or two,’ Gideon responded, ‘and I’m not one to want to be beholden to anyone.’
He didn’t see the sad little smile that touched Mary’s mouth as she listened to his defensive speech, but then he insisted, ‘I’m going with you and that’s an end to it! Let me give you my arm.’
Ten minutes later, as they stood side by side on the platform, waiting for their train, Mary wondered if this was the moment she had been both longing for and dreading.
Before she could change her mind or lose her courage, she turned to Gideon and began, ‘Gideon, there is something I have to tell you. Something very important. I –’
‘The train’s coming,’ Gideon stopped her brusquely, relieved to be able to do so.
If she was thinking of offering him more charity, he was going to tell her that he didn’t need it!
As she heard the sound of Iris’s motor car drawing up outside the house, Ellie smoothed the skirt of her coat a little nervously. She still wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing in agreeing to attend one of the suffrage meetings with Iris, but once Cecily’s sister-in-law had set her mind on something, it was virtually impossible to dissuade her.
However, watching discreetly from the drawing-room window whilst Iris stepped out of her newly acquired car, it was hard not to feel her spirits lifting a little, Ellie acknowledged, despite her concern over Henry and the sad moods he seemed to suffer.
These rendered him so miserable and withdrawn that he could not bear any company, even hers, and instead shut himself away for hours on end in his dressing room, reading his Japanese books. Ellie tried not to feel shut out and hurt by his behaviour and was reluctant to discuss it with him in case, by doing so, she made him feel worse.
There was something about Iris, though, that was like a breath of fresh air, and immediately made Ellie feel able to put her concerns to one side for a while.
Maisie, who was totally in awe of Iris, opened the door to her, dumbstruck.
‘You are her heroine, Iris, ever since you insisted on driving her in your car.’ Ellie laughed as she showed her into the back parlour.
‘I have finished altering the tea gown you left with me,’ she told her.
‘Wonderful. But I am afraid you are going to be very cross with me, Ellie, because I now have a coat that just will not lie right and which desperately needs your magic touch, and I have to admit to telling a few of my friends about you and your sewing skills. I have given them your cards – I did not have any left, but I begged some from Cecily –’
‘Oh, Iris!’ Ellie stopped her, shaking her head. ‘You’re too good – too generous.’
‘Good? Me?’ Iris laughed. ‘My dear Ellie, I will have yo
u know that I am anything but! Now please do not put on such a solemn face!’
‘Iris, you have done so much to help me, recommending me to so many of your friends, and…I am so very grateful to you.’
‘Grateful! Ellie, you must not be any such thing,’ Iris scolded her. ‘And before you accuse me of being charitable or indulging in any other kind of such mawkish foolishness, let me tell you that I should be the one who is grateful to you! I am wholly reformed in the eyes of my friends, who had all but given up on me, claiming that I never cared as I should how I looked. Now, thanks to you, I am a pattern card of elegance. They actually demand to know where I have had my clothes made!’
Ellie smiled, full of gratitude. It was thanks to Iris and her tireless campaigning on Ellie’s behalf amongst her friends that Ellie was now earning enough money with her needle to ensure that she and Henry could live in moderate comfort.
Since Iris wanted to show off her latest acquisition, the new Rolls-Royce car she had just bought for herself, she had announced that she would drive them into Manchester where the women’s suffrage meeting was to be held.
‘Paul will not have it, but I can tell you that I am a far better driver than he,’ Iris boasted happily to Ellie as they got into her car.
It was a beautiful late spring day, the leaves newly unfurled in all their fresh greenery, the sky a perfect bowl of blue softened by the merest breath of an occasional fluffy white cloud.
Ellie was delighted to see that Iris was wearing beneath her coat one of the gowns she herself had remodelled for her, removing the fussy trimmings that Iris had allowed the dressmaker to add in a rush of impatience to escape from the boredom of dress fittings, tailoring it into a much more stylish shape to suit Iris’s busy life.
Iris worked at Liverpool Hospital, but, of course, there were only certain areas in which, as a woman, she was allowed to practise, and she complained to Ellie about this as she drove them towards Manchester.
‘You would think that I had never seen a naked male before – not that in my opinion there is much worth seeing about one – never mind knew anything about the inner workings of the human body to judge from the way some people react,’ she snorted acerbically, deftly overtaking a plodding wagoner’s cart.
The suffrage meeting was to be held at the Free Trade Hall, and Iris parked her car outside the building, her eyes shining with purpose as she tucked her arm through Ellie’s and urged her inside.
‘Heavens, what a press of people!’ Iris exclaimed. ‘So much for Ewan’s belief that there would be a poor turnout! The man is a complete bigot!’
‘You should not speak so of poor Ewan,’ Ellie scolded. ‘At heart he is your devoted admirer, Iris.’
‘You think so? I don’t! He does nothing but criticise me. And besides, I don’t wish to have an admirer. I promise you that I feel far more passionate about my medical career and the women’s movement than I can ever envisage doing about a mere man!’
Ellie laughed.
‘You must see how important our cause is, Ellie,’ Iris continued, looking serious. ‘For women like dearest Cecily, who are sheltered and shielded from the harsher realities of life, it is perhaps difficult to understand how important our total emancipation is, but in your circumstances…I am sorry if I am being tactless, but, my dear, no matter how much you try to shield and protect him it is obvious that your poor Henry is no match for his tyrant of a father, who abuses him dreadfully – and through him, you! To keep you so short of money that you must earn your own living, and yet at the same time be put in a position where you must not be seen to do so, is outrageous.’
‘Iris, I know you mean well, but really it is a subject I would rather not discuss,’ Ellie stopped her firmly, more out of loyalty to Henry than because she felt she could not talk openly with Iris about her situation.
Fortunately now that they were inside the Free Trade Hall, the noise meant that it was impossible to hold a private conversation anyway.
The meeting was a rousing one, the mood of both the speakers and their audience defiantly militant. A cheer went up when Annie Kenney said that perhaps it would do certain members of their current government good to have the tables turned on them and be forced to live under the same restrictions as women, and denied the right to vote.
After the meeting had broken up some of the women were still passionately expressing their views outside the Free Trade Hall where a solid phalanx of uniformed policemen had drawn up behind a local politician, who had taken it upon himself to remonstrate with the organisers of the meeting.
Ellie didn’t see the throwing of the first egg to splatter his coat, but she and Iris were close enough to the commotion for her to look at Iris with anxiety.
‘It is all right,’ Iris soothed her. ‘One cannot blame them. We have tried again and again to use reason and logic but it seems the government is determined not to give us a fair hearing.’
Ellie gasped as she saw a woman detach herself from the crowd in front of her and confront the politician, waving a placard demanding ‘Votes for Women’.
The politician, red-faced and spluttering, turned to say something to the police lined up behind him, and then to Ellie’s horror she saw the police break ranks and advance on the women at the front of the crowd, their truncheons raised.
Gideon had been listening to the uproar around the politician with one ear whilst reading the newspaper. Despite Mary’s protests he had insisted on remaining outside the Free Trade Hall to wait for her. Even if his male ego could not wholly approve of women’s suffrage he had a reluctant and secret admiration for Mary in her belief in her cause.
The sight of her pale face when he had first seen her today, though, had aroused within him emotions he was reluctant to acknowledge. It irked him that he should feel so protective towards her, so outraged and antagonistic towards his own sex on her behalf. And now, even though he would never have admitted it, a part of him was alert to any sign that she might be in danger.
The moment he heard a woman’s scream piercing the general sounds of chants and protests, he dropped the paper and hurried across the road. At least two thousand women were milling about outside the Free Trade Hall, but amongst those on the crowd’s outer edges there was no sign of Mary at all.
Knowing that she was well acquainted with the Pankhurst family, Gideon guessed that she would be at the forefront of the crowd – from where the screams and cries of pain were emanating.
Determinedly he started to push his way through the crowd, but the women, believing he was another of the enemy, refused to make way for him.
By the time he had fought his way through to the front it was too late: Mary was already standing handcuffed to a burly police officer and, to Gideon’s anguish and despair, as he tried to reach her, the officer marched her away to the waiting police van.
‘Poor sods, I hope they’ve all got full stomachs, because they’ll be on hunger strike once they’re in prison,’ Gideon heard one woman say as she watched Mary and several others being pushed into the waiting van.
It was accepted practice now amongst those suffragettes imprisoned to refuse to eat any food, Gideon knew, and he also knew that in retaliation the women were being force-fed, often with even greater brutality than was necessary. The thought of Mary undergoing such degradation made him want to break open the police van and secure her freedom, but it was already driving away and a second van taking its place, disgorging a fresh avalanche of uniformed men, who were pushing their way into the crowd and laying about themselves with their truncheons in a way that filled Gideon with disgust and fury.
He tried to remonstrate with one officer.
‘Look, mate,’ the man snarled at him, ‘these bitches are breaking the law, and we’ve got orders to break them. What kind of man are you, anyway, taking their side?’
Before Gideon could reply the officer had plunged into the crowd of slogan-chanting women.
Tight-lipped, Gideon turned away. Mary’s solicitor needed to be
told what had happened to her. Gideon wasn’t sure of how things would proceed, but there would have to be a court appearance and maybe she would be remanded on bail.
‘Quick, Ellie, come this way,’ Iris urged as she realised the situation was getting out of control. The arrival of the second vanload of policemen had increased the women’s sense of ill-usage, and it seemed the vocalisation of it was causing the new police arrivals to lash out even more violently than before.
To Ellie’s shock, right in front of her eyes, a small, shabbily dressed elderly woman, who had done no more than chant a protest, was suddenly seized by a policeman twice her size and dragged away.
‘Ellie! This way!’ Iris repeated, her experience judging how perilous their position was as she saw just how close to a particularly militant group of women they were.
Ellie turned to follow her, only too glad to leave. The violence that had suddenly erupted out of nowhere had shocked her, but as she turned to obey Iris, Ellie saw a police officer suddenly seize hold of a young girl, who immediately burst into tears and started to cry for her mother.
‘Let her go, you bully,’ Ellie demanded, her protective instincts to the fore.
His mind on Mary’s plight, at first Gideon only vaguely registered the commotion in front of him: the young girl, the police officer, and the young woman pummelling him with her fists, but as he hurried past, something made him stop and look back, his heart turning over as he recognised Ellie.
‘Ellie.’ He had said her name without even knowing it, just as he had equally unknowingly taken a step back towards her.
‘Why, you…’ The policeman was already making a grab for Ellie when Gideon took a firm hold of her, telling him, ‘It’s all right, officer, I’ll take charge of this one.’
For a second he thought the officer was going to challenge his assumption of authority, but before he could, one of his colleagues called him urgently to assist him, and he turned away, leaving Gideon still holding Ellie.
