He had recognized hysteria, seen too her fear of him, her fear of his body, etched into the distorted lines of her face. It had shaken him to the soul. The desire that had prompted him to reach for her had fled. Coldly he had drawn away from her. In silence had left her to her desperate sobbing.
And now he stood alone in the darkness as the lights of the Dancing Bear went out one by one around him.
II
Caxton Hall was packed; and not just with women, Sally was quick to notice as she and Hannah took their seats, but with a fair sprinkling of men as well. They were late – the hall was full and the platform party already seated. Sally’s spirits, still low after the events of the week, lifted a little at the sight of the handsome figure of Emmeline Pankhurst flanked by her two daughters. With all the Pankhursts here it would certainly be, as Hannah had promised with a confident smile, a special meeting. With them on the platform were the well-known and well-loved figures of Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, the treasurer of the WSPU and her husband, a staunch supporter, and beside them the slight, fair figure of Annie Kenney, the Manchester working girl who had just the year before arrived from the north with nothing but courage and two pounds in her pocket, her brief to ‘rouse London’. Her passionate dedication to the Pankhursts and their cause had already cost her her freedom twice and was more than likely to do so again. Sally studied her. Here was a girl very like herself, a girl disadvantaged, ill-educated, who still wore proudly the clogs and shawl she had worn as she trudged morning and evening to the mill where she had scraped a living. She was also a girl who had been accepted into the most inner circles of the Union, whose praises were sung by everyone who knew her; a girl who had won an enviable and admired place for herself by her own efforts, her own courage.
When Christabel Pankhurst, trim, attractive and shining with fervour rose to speak, she was cheered to the echo before she could open her mouth. Darling of the movement, this eloquent, passionate and intelligent girl personified for many the spirit of their cause. Witty and independent – in defiance of convention she had studied law in Manchester, as her sister Sylvia had studied art – she could hold an audience in the palm of her small, capable hand. She spoke now of the necessary drive for funds, of the hundreds of meetings being organized up and down the country to win support for the fight for women’s suffrage. ‘Twenty thousand people came to cheer and to contribute in Manchester – twenty thousand! Let the Liberal Government beware! In Hyde Park thousands come each Sunday to support us! Let the Liberal Government beware! The women want the vote! The women will have the vote! Let the Liberal Government beware!’ The last, fierce words were lost in a storm of cheering. Smiling she waited until the noise died a little. Then, dropping her voice she asked, looking keenly around the hall, ‘And what is this vote?’
Silence fell.
She let it build for a moment before continuing. ‘What is this vote for which women are ready to fight, ready to shed their blood and sacrifice their freedom?’
Sally, with most of the rest of the audience was still and tense as a drawn bow in her chair, leaning forward a little, eyes and ears intent upon that small, charismatic figure, enthralled.
‘I’ll tell you what it is. It is a key. It is a very small key to a very large door. It is a symbol. A symbol of citizenship. A symbol of freedom. It is not an end, but a beginning!’ She stopped, let the words sink in to the hearts and minds of her audience, knowing she had them. ‘Let the Liberal Government beware,’ she said very quietly, very finally.
The roof nearly lifted. Sally and Hannah were on their feet with the rest, clapping and shouting, grinning at each other like children, exhilarated. It was full minutes before a smiling Emmeline Pankhurst could, with lifted hands, quieten the meeting. ‘Friends—’
The uproar continued.
She waited. ‘Friends—’ This time quiet slowly fell. Seats clattered as people sat down. Mrs Pankhurst, tall and dignified, waited until full silence had taken the hall. ‘Friends,’ she said again, ‘thank you. Thank you for your support and for your donations. Thank you for your efforts. Thank you for coming to listen to us tonight.’ She paused for a moment, looking round, including everyone in the hall in that warm glance. ‘As my daughter Christabel has just said, we are fighting for a cause. As she also pointed out that cause already has its martyrs, brave women who risk injury – yes perhaps even death – to stand up for – to demand! – their rights as citizens of this great country. Who go to prison rather than forswear their beliefs. With such courage – such sheer valiance – behind us, how can we help but win?’ She lifted her head proudly. Like her daughter she held them, breath bated, by the sheer force of her personality. ‘And does not such bravery deserve recognition? We have with us tonight two young women who have suffered so. I ask you now to thank them. To show your gratitude for their gallantry in your cause. Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to clap the prisoners to the platform.’
Sally had been listening in growing, glowing confusion.
Smiling glances had been thrown her way as Mrs Pankhurst spoke. Hannah sat, head proudly high, eyes shining, beside her. At the last words she rose and taking Sally by the hand drew her to her feet with her. A thunderous, rhythmic clapping and stamping filled the hall. In a daze Sally allowed herself to be ushered along the row to the aisle that led to the stage. Eager hands reached, taking hers, patting her shoulders. Face aflame she walked with Hannah in time to the joyous clapping towards the brightly lit stage. They climbed the steps, walked along the line of the platform party shaking hands.
‘Well done, my dears!’ Mrs Pethick-Lawrence was beaming. ‘A blow for freedom!’
‘Splendid!’ Christabel’s hand was strong and warm, the slanting green eyes asparkle.
‘Hannah! Sally!’ Sylvia, a familiar and friendly face, kissed them both warmly, ‘Oh, I’m so proud of you both!’
Annie Kenney grinned, pumping their hands with a vigour that entirely belied her frail appearance.
‘A small token.’ Emmeline Pankhurst, graceful and commanding, pinned small enamelled brooches on to their lapels – a white dove in flight with the words ‘Votes for Women’ emblazoned beneath it. ‘We’ll show them what brave soldiers we have in our ranks!’
Sally had never been so taken aback, never in her life felt so proud. As the din of the applause echoed to the roof, she smiled dazedly at Hannah. So. It was true then. Sally Smith was no longer alone and pitched solitarily against a hostile world. She was one of a team. Part of an army. She had friends.
In sheer exuberance at the edge of the stage she stopped, lifted a small clenched fist. ‘Votes for women!’
And ‘Votes for women!’ roared back the audience, delighted, and clapped them with enthusiasm back to their seats.
* * *
The months that followed that meeting, through the summer and autumn of 1907, saw an upsurge in militancy: they also saw a split in the movement. Perhaps inevitably the constitutionalists, who had been fighting for the vote for so long through constitutional means, were uncomfortable and on occasion in outright and outraged disagreement with the more direct action favoured by the Pankhursts and their followers. As throughout the summer political meetings were broken up and more women arrested and imprisoned, the breach between the two sides grew: both were passionately dedicated to the same end, but as to the means they differed, and in some cases differed bitterly. There were also some discontented and uneasy mutterings about the high-handed behaviour of both Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, with whose crusading fervour and disregard for convention it must be said not everyone was comfortable. At the beginning of October the differences came to a head and the movement split, the more moderate constitutionalists finally taking the name of the Women’s Freedom League, whilst the militants lined proudly behind the Pankhursts and their Women’s Social and Political Union banner. There was never any question but that Hannah and Sally would stay with the militant Union. To Sally particularly, talk of petitions and by-elections, o
f constitutional rights and of Private Member’s Bills meant nothing. It was the way of life, so far as she had ever known it, that nothing came easily. If you wanted something, you fought for it.
On 12 October Mr Sydney Buxton held yet another meeting in Poplar. On the 13th, Sally Smith, Hannah Patten and half a dozen others were sentenced by a not unsympathetic but mildly exasperated judge to two weeks in the second division; and this time they served their time.
* * *
Charlotte Patten watched it all with puzzled and disinterested eyes. What possessed Hannah, or the girl Sally or any other madwoman engaged in this lunatic battle for a vote that no one so far as she could see wanted she could not imagine. Life was surely complicated enough without wilfully making it more so? Was it not bad enough that her brother Ralph talked with such sober concern of growing dissatisfaction amongst the labouring classes, the need for drastic social reform, even, with in Charlotte’s eyes absurd earnestness, of the possible stirrings of revolution? Or that Doctor Will and Ben had little apparent concern with anything but the setting up of a panel to monitor the health of schoolchildren, the provision of school meals for the needy, the insistence upon registration of births and vaccination for every Tom, Dick or Harry of a baby? Who in all of this cared about her? Who cared that she had neither the will nor the energy sometimes to get out of bed in the morning? Who cared that when she looked in her mirror – which nowadays was seldom – she barely recognized the pale, plump face set in downward, ageing lines, that looked back at her? Who was in the least concerned that on occasion the mere sight of her child was enough to bring on a sick headache that could confine her to a darkened room for hours?
No one.
Whilst Hannah cavorted in this ridiculous and – yes, it had to be said, demeaning – way with her social inferiors, whilst Ralph split his time almost equally between his beastly deprived children and their even beastlier and apparently even more deprived elders, and Peter, blithe as always, pursued – as always – his own capricious affairs she, Charlotte, was left alone in this teeming madhouse of a household. Alone to face Mrs Winterbottom, the widowed nurse Ben had at last agreed should be hired to help with the child; to cope with a Mrs Briggs whose phlegmatic and unsettling refusal to take the reins of the chaotic household entirely back into her own hands now that there was a ‘Mrs Ben’ to take the responsibility was driving Charlotte to distraction; and worse and, last and most fearful, to watch in resentful and helpless self-pity as her relationship with her husband – for what it had ever been worth – disintegrated entirely. He was polite. He was correct in every way. He was as distant as a well-mannered stranger on an omnibus. Almost she longed for those days when at least she had been able to rouse him to anger with her outbursts. Now he treated her, firmly but not unkindly, like a child: no – like a slightly ill-behaved and unwanted child with whom he had been saddled and of whom, in all good faith, he could not be rid. That this was as much her own fault as his did not make it easier to accept or bear. She was not now certain that she had intended him to take her seriously when she had petulantly demanded that she be allowed to return to the sanctuary of her own pink and white bedroom until her health improved: but he did. Nor when she had brushed off a calmly professional enquiry as to how she did with a brusquely peevish demand that he leave her alone had she actually meant him to take her literally at her word: but he had. She saw him rarely – he was up and off long before she rose in the morning, on call all day and half the night either at the hospital or with his local patients. He was, it seemed to her, on every committee that God or man had seen fit to constitute in Poplar and the surrounding area and what spare time he did miraculously manage to squeeze from his days was spent either with the children in the home, pursuing this new passion of his about cures for poison in the blood or some such thing or – most galling of all – with the child he called his daughter in the little room under the eaves that the whole household had dubbed the nursery. Charlotte rarely went up there herself; but the occasion that she had, and had found Ben tossing a small, squealing bundle into the air whilst Mrs Winterbottom watched in quite fatuous approval, had brought on a headache that had lasted for days.
Confused and unhappy she spent most of her time in her bedroom, her only companions a romantic novel and a box of chocolates for which since Rachel’s birth she had conceived a passion she seemed utterly unable in her misery to deny. It was the only escape she could manage. Even Peter, in her eyes the only lively and normal member of the household, who once had delighted in teasing and entertaining his pretty young sister-in-law had lost interest and abandoned her. Her only other interest was letter writing. Lacking a confidante – Cissy had never recovered, unfairly Charlotte considered, from Charlotte’s treatment of her brother – she took to writing letters to the few, far-flung female relatives whose addresses she found in an old notebook of her mother’s. Cousin Annabel, married to a dashing young lieutenant in the Indian Army. Cousin Adèle, who lived with her parson husband and a vast brood of children outside Brighton. Aunt Alice, her father’s somewhat eccentric sister, who had married – of all things – a Belgian and settled in Bruges where they ran, true to family form, a children’s home much like the Pattens’ own; indeed it had been, Charlotte remembered as she had sealed the letter, through the Patten family that Aunt Alice had actually met her Belgian groom, who had been a close friend of Doctor Will’s. Not much hope of sympathy there, then. Her letter writing in any case was no great success. Cousin Annabel’s letter disappeared without trace, and neither did Aunt Alice at first reply. Only Adèle apparently welcomed the correspondence – and that more to air her own grievances and disappointments than to lend an ear to Charlotte’s. Charlotte very soon lost interest. Adèle’s letters lay, half-read, abandoned, unanswered upon the dressing table, whilst Charlotte curled in her chair, a box of sweetmeats by her side, the exploits of the latest of Mrs Henry Bidding’s fair heroines more real to her than the exhausting, pointless activity that filled the world beyond her door.
* * *
It was on the day that things came to a head with Kate that Aunt Alice’s reply to Charlotte’s letter finally arrived from Belgium.
Any brush with Kate had come to be something that Charlotte dreaded; her problems with the girl had been, if not the worst of her worries, a niggling thorn in the side, another small unpleasantness to stretch nerves already fraught to breaking point. That Kate had never either liked or respected her she did not know – mere months ago it would not have occurred to her to care. But that Kate of all the household seemed best aware of the situation between Charlotte and her husband had been made very clear on the day of the move back into the pink bedroom.
Kate it had been who had aired the room and made up the bed; Kate’s keen and insolent eyes had watched with the unpleasant hint of a smile as Charlotte had moved her few personal possessions back on to the little kidney-shaped dressing table.
‘Not feelin’ too good, Miss?’ No one could have missed the faint thread of scorn in the words, nor the pointed lack of respect in the title.
‘I – no.’ Charlotte had neither the strength nor the energy to defend herself against the other girl’s half-recognized wholly incomprehensible malice.
‘Well,’ Kate had paused at the door, smiling, ‘you’ll find it nice an’ quiet here. No one ter bother you. An’ I expect Doctor Ben’ll find things a good deal easier too.’ And on that neat piece of insolence she had shut the door.
The incident had opened Charlotte’s eyes to the way that the girl seemed bent upon flouting her: the orders either ignored or executed in a slipshod manner; the way the bold eyes held hers with no attempt to disguise a disrespect that sometimes bordered on contempt; the way in which, if another member of the household were present in the room Kate would contrive to ignore Charlotte and take her orders from elsewhere. And on occasion, with no other ears to hear her, downright insolence.
‘I’d like you to polish the silver in the dining room please, Kate.
It’s looking very dull.’
‘Mr Ralph’s asked me to black the fire in the schoolroom, miss.’ Never would the girl use the more appropriate and respectful ‘ma’am’.
‘You can do that later.’
‘I’d rather not, miss. I don’t like to upset Mr Ralph.’
And somehow, as Kate appeared to know, Charlotte could never stand up to her, but would blush and stammer and let the matter drop. Amidst her other miseries she simply could not summon the energy necessary to defend herself against the other girl’s inexplicable yet wounding hostility.
On the morning in October when Aunt Alice’s letter arrived Charlotte was breakfasting alone in the dining room. Kate, sent to the kitchen for fresh toast, performed the errand with her usual bad grace. She banged the plate on the table.
Charlotte, deep in her letter, reached for a piece of toast. Not until the butter was poised on the knife did she glance at it. ‘Kate?’
Kate, at the side table collecting empty dishes, did not turn. ‘Yes?’
‘What’s happened to this? It’s dirty.’ With a fastidious shudder Charlotte held up the toast between two fingertips.
Kate still did not turn. ‘I dunno.’
It was too much, even for Charlotte. ‘Kate! I’ll thank you to face me when I speak to you!’
The girl took her time to stack the silver dishes, turned very slowly, leaning against the side table.
‘I asked you what happened to this? See – it’s dirty. Kate – did you drop it?’
The infinitesimal hesitation was damning. ‘No.’
Charlotte stared at her in rising anger. ‘I think you did.’
The girl all but shrugged. Sighed a little.
‘Kate!’ Charlotte’s voice was rising.
‘Well, you can think all you like, can’t you? I say I didn’t.’
Tomorrow, Jerusalem Page 22
