A Mother's Love (41 page)

Annie, viewing her sister’s continuing heartbroken demonstrations long after everyone else had recovered – as most people usually did, confronted by the funeral lunch – curled her lip as she nibbled on a pressed tongue sandwich and whispered to Clara, ‘She’s making a big enough fuss, don’t you think?’

Clara looked concerned, sipped at her tiny glass of sherry. ‘She was closer to Mum than we were, I suppose.’

Annie’s lip curled even more at the unwitting pun. ‘You can well say that! A good four years closer to her. Had her share of Mum’s will right enough in four years.’ To which Clara nodded reluctantly.

To her husband, after they’d departed for home, Annie took time out to reopen the issue. She was taken aback when he turned on her, his mild and mediocre face thunderous.

‘No, we’re not going into all that again! I’m not dragging through solicitors’ offices so you can get a bit more. The woman’s dead. The will’s drawn up. Signed, sealed, settled. Let’s leave it at that!’

‘I’m sorry,’ Annie began, her tone haughty. ‘I’m not prepared to leave it at that.’

‘Yes, you are, Annie. That’s my final word, take it or leave it.’

Annie glared, opened her mouth, then closed it again and let it stay closed, the look on Robert’s face enough to tell her that in this he was wearing the trousers and had no intention of passing them over to her. Thereafter, not caring to see that look on his face return, Annie did not broach the subject again.

A few days later, Mary’s will was read, and her wishes duly executed, uncontested.

Harriet sobbed quietly as her share was read out, remembering how the contents of Matthew’s will had all gone to pay his debts. Her mother’s will was sound, took no account of Harriet’s keep these last few years, and if Annie had any views about it, she kept them to herself apart from a cautious sideways glance at Robert.

The previous year’s dramas of suffragette outrages – even Emily Wilding Davidson throwing herself to her death beneath the king’s horse at Epsom – faded before the unfolding of events this year. The press was full of the trouble in the Balkans with Austria-Hungary and Serbia at each other’s throats, and the petty local affairs of silly women, as Jonathan put it, had been relegated to the inside pages, lesser columns.

‘Damned sight more important things going on,’ Jonathan observed, passing through the cluttered newsroom. ‘Not that most readers worry about anything if it’s not on their own doorstep.’

‘Well, what do you think is going to happen?’ she asked.

‘It’s anyone’s guess. But if we don’t watch out, we’re going to be led by the nose into a war, I can feel it in my blood.’

Jonathan was good at feeling things in his blood – wasn’t usually wrong. It was what made him good at his job, what made her good at hers too – a sixth sense about things.

Sara looked at him with interest. ‘How do you make that out?’

‘You’re bright enough to work it out.’ His grin was lopsided as he delivered her the backhanded compliment. ‘Think about it. If it does escalate, countries like Germany and Russia will start taking sides, and then … Germany has had an axe to grind for a long time, wants to feel her feet a bit. That’s the way wars start.’

‘That doesn’t mean we’d be involved.’ Sara saw his grin broaden.

‘Maybe not. Hope not anyway.’ He let his hand rest on her shoulder, a light pressure that made her heart begin unexpectedly to race. She was not prepared for her reaction as her shoulder stiffened almost of its own accord. The pressure lifted immediately and she saw his smile disappear.

‘You’re a cold fish, Sara,’ he whispered as he moved off, leaving her to wonder why in heaven’s name she must react so conversely to anything tender in him.

Sara had seen less of him lately. It wasn’t her attitude that drove him away. He had been made Editor after Mr Mackenzie had retired in February, and he was now no longer so available, and though she refused to admit it, she missed his constant presence in the newsroom. Yet whenever he did appear, it always seemed to result in their coming to verbal blows, usually over her reports on her pet subject of suffragette activities.

‘Can’t you see anything else but that? There’s a lot more going on out there apart from that.’

‘You’ve got other reporters,’ she blazed at him. ‘Let them cover anything else going on.’

‘You’re here to cover a variety of news. If I’d wanted you as a gossip columnist I’d have let you do just that.’

Sara glared at him. She had long ago discovered that she had a journalist’s instinct for news and could put a good story together. She had earned old Mackenzie’s respect, yet it seemed that, no matter how good her reports, the moment she touched on suffragettes, her new editor would find something sarcastic to say about it.

‘It’s not gossip. It’s about women giving up their freedom, their lives, for something they believe in. For women like me to be able to make their way in a world men have created for themselves at our expense.’

‘I thought you did very well without their help.’

‘Perhaps I do, but you would never understand the uphill struggle it is for a woman. The misery a woman has to endure just to make her way in your world. The humiliation, the insults …’ She was seething now, then she saw that sardonic grin of his spread across his even features.

‘I’ve always said women are too much victims of their emotions to make journalists,’ he said slowly, almost vindictively, and somehow she felt that the sardonic grin he gave her hid some inner hurt; felt that she was the cause of that hurt in some way.

‘You prove me right over and over again,’ he continued, his tone soft yet stinging. ‘You can’t remain neutral, can you? A journalist has to be unbiased, write the truth. You break every rule. If you were a man, you’d understand.’

Wanting to protest, she knew he was right. A greater part of her was influenced by the heroic deeds and daring campaigns of those forceful women. Did any of them allow a man to put them down as she seemed to allow Jonathan to do? Why did she let him do it; and why did he do it? He never behaved this way to the other two women in the office. Maybe they posed no threat to him, or maybe there was something far closer between her and him than she cared to think.

It didn’t stop her feeling furious about his attitude towards her own subject. But it was true: more and more she had chosen to write about the suffragettes above other news, extolling their endeavours to gain the right for women to vote, commenting perhaps a little too freely on the cruelty of the Cat and Mouse Act that allowed the ‘mice’ to be released as hunger strikes brought them dangerously near to death, only to have the ‘cat’ rearrest them as they regained their health, knowing they would again resort to hunger strikes and renewed force-feeding, their health whittled away. The government’s hope had been to demoralise. Instead it served to intensify their resolve. Sara could not help admiring their tenacity to their cause.

She had written an enthusiastic account of the arrival of the Women’s Pilgrimage, as it was called, into London – thousands of NUWSS members marching proudly after six weeks on the road, waving their red, white and green banners in an orderly march that permitted no interference to their entry into Hyde Park – and was infuriated when Jonathan had withdrawn her report.

The next day she’d confronted him with
The Times
and an armful of other newspapers, each with a prominent report on the march. She told him he had no place on the
Graphic
as an editor, and that he would cause its demise just because he couldn’t bear to see her, personally, succeed. She had faced up to his dark frown, half expecting him to dismiss her. But he merely told her to calm down and stop behaving like a bloody silly woman.

‘Perhaps you ought to examine your own motives before going off half-cocked.’

‘What do you mean?’ she flared.

He looked at her steadily. ‘Do I have to spell it out? It’s not just your need to uphold that cause. It’s something else. I’ve thought about it a lot. Now you think about it, Sara.’

That last remark stunned her into silence. For the first time, she realised that her insistence on upholding the women wasn’t so much because she admired them as a wish to put him down, to justify a need to combat those feelings she kept having for him. That he had peered into her heart and seen the truth – like a lover – made her feel strange. He had no right to see inside her.

It took her a long time to forgive him that. Then in March he sent her to cover a story at the National Gallery.

‘Take a look at the results of one of your precious suffragette members’ protest,’ he remarked enigmatically.

She went off as ordered, came back subdued, wrote up her piece and presented it to him. Jonathan’s satisfied smile said it all – he was deliberately obliging her to write up one of the WSPU’s more senseless acts of protest to bring her back in line.

Wild women, the
Daily Mirror
called them, and Jonathan echoed those sentiments in the face of Sara’s stalwart protest that force-feeding was just as outrageous as slashing the Rokeby Venus painting by Velasquez, worth some £45,000, with a meat cleaver. But even she had to admit that the act had been quite senseless. Destroying empty houses with homemade explosive devices, or attacking a doctor from Holloway prison with a rhino whip had some point to it. Slashing a beautiful and irreplaceable work of art seemed quite pointless.

‘Don’t get carried away by them, Sara,’ he said. ‘You’re worth more than that.’

The softness of his tone made her look up. The warm glow in his eyes prompted a corresponding warmth within her, as she used to feel when Matthew had looked at her. Confusion engulfed her. Was it Matthew’s memory prompting this feeling of warm security, or was it Jonathan standing so close?
It can’t be love
, cried something inside her.
It mustn’t be. You made a vow …

‘Don’t be so damned stupid,’ she heard herself burst out, almost savagely, the retort stemming purely from her shaken resolve. Hating herself, she watched him walk off.

‘You don’t catch me like that, Jonathan Ward,’ she whispered to herself, needing to combat the confusion of emotions churning inside her. If he thought she was going to melt before that false display of tenderness just now, he was sadly mistaken.

Her resolve
had
been shaken; she’d been humiliated by the lengths to which some women militants could go. But that didn’t mean their cause was ill-founded. Jonathan saying they were all painted by the same brush was entirely wrong. She would prove it. She felt belligerent.

Belligerence led her to follow up, without pausing to report on a hastily delivered message coming through to her, on an uproar outside the Old Bailey after Annie Kenney, her health undermined by her previous imprisonment and hunger strike, was rearrested in May.

Sara arrived in a drizzle of morning rain to find two Black Marias drawn up, a dishevelled suffragette being frogmarched by two grim-faced policemen into one of the vans, and a knot of women still jostling and being jostled by more police. A crowd of bystanders of both sexes stood yelling abuse at the ridiculous female protesters with their hats and hair askew and their arms waving frantically.

‘Bleedin’ insult to proper women,’ a truculent middle-aged housewife in flat cap and apron was yelling from the body of onlookers. Supported by cat calls from all sides, she gestured with arms flexed like huge hams. ‘Gerron, you coppers, git ’em orf out of ’ere!’

The friend beside her scooped up a handful of gutter mud and flung it hard into the struggling throng. Sara, already on the perimeter of struggling police and militants, hoping to get a story from one of the protesters once the scuffles had died down, was the one to receive the clod of mud full on the shoulder of her beige suit.

It was her surprised cry of protest that made one policeman glance round.

‘Oi! Another one of yer, eh?’

Sara found herself grabbed, her arm pushed painfully up her back.

‘Let go of me!’ she cried. ‘I’m a reporter –
London Graphic.
’

‘Don’t come the old Adam wiv me, missus. Lady reporter, me arse!’

‘I am. I have my credentials.’ She struggled to free herself so as to reach into her handbag but found the policeman’s grip tighten still more.

‘No yer don’t!’ The man looked grim. Women were known to carry itching powder, sneezing powder, even wounding scissors in their bags and he wasn’t going to be caught that way. ‘You come along with me, young lady.’

Her imprisoned arm hurt under the pressure of being trundled away, and she struggled frantically. At his call, another policeman leapt to his aid. ‘Lively one, this,’ laughed the first.

Almost dragging her, they passed near to the crowd of onlookers. A cloth-capped man leapt from the crowd and, before the trio could dodge away, landed Sara a thump full in the face.

Thrown back by the force of the blow, her upper cheek gone instantly numb, she staggered from the grip of the police as they mildly remonstrated with her attacker.

‘No call fer that, chum. Ladies, yer know, no matter what …’

But Sara was off, running down the street as fast as her hobble skirt would allow, the shouts of the two policemen following her. She didn’t stop until she had turned the corner into Ludgate Hill. There she recovered her wits and her breath.

The police hadn’t followed. Suddenly weak, her cheek beginning to swell and hurt like the devil, she leaned against a wall, wanting to cry, but she was in a public place. No one would see her cry, that was definite.

Passers-by looked curiously at her, this well-dressed woman, her appearance dishevelled, dilly-dallying and seeming not to know where she was going.

‘Has someone been knocking you about, young lady?’ A man had approached, and now he took her by the elbow. She almost flinched. It had been a man who had vindictively and scurrilously knocked her down. But this one was kindly, a middle-aged man, a city man in a topper and morning suit. ‘Can I be of any help?’

Sara took a deep ragged breath. ‘I need to get a cab.’

‘You need hospital treatment more like.’