Crooked Pieces (38 page)

I clutched his arm. ‘Will it save her?’

‘I cannot tell. Nothing else will, unless you believe in miracles.’

I shook my head.

‘You understand there is no certainty that this will work?’

‘There is no certainty of anything in this life.’

He almost smiled.

I stayed the night at Miss Sylvia’s lodgings. I knew I should go to Pa’s but I could not face it. A house full of misery. Evelyn begging me to make Lucy well again. How many times must I let her down?

We sat together by the fire and drank beef tea, and toasted bread and talked. She told me how her East End mission is growing faster than she can keep up with, but that she has never in her life been happier. ‘I could not ask for more loyal, willing helpers, men
and
women. We are making such strides, Maggie. I have three women running a reading class for the children that cannot afford Poor School, and others offering to take clean linen to the sick, and a soup kitchen – goodness, it’s better than The Savoy sometimes. I should sell the recipe to their chef.’

‘You’d be better selling it to Holloway, miss. They’ve more customers.’

She laughed. ‘Yes, well, if you think they’d appreciate it…’

I told her about the Bodyguard and how two of the volunteers had black eyes from trying to swing their batons like David at Goliath and forgetting to let go.

Miss Sylvia has her own bodyguard.

‘“The People’s Army”, we call it. They are quite brilliant. Every time I am speaking and word comes of a raid, they line up close by the platform and as the police come storming on to the stage, they cry, “Jump, Sylvia, Jump”, and I just launch myself into the air like a trapeze artist and they catch me and rush me out of the building.’

‘What happens if they miss?’

Miss Sylvia swallowed. ‘Well, I rather fancy I shall be the main ingredient for the next soup run, but so far, touch wood, they never have. Anyway, it’s better not to dwell on what may go wrong, I rather think, don’t you? There are too many imponderables.’

‘What are those?’

‘Oh, things that you don’t know about until it’s too late to do anything. Things you couldn’t hope to change.’

‘Like what’s happened to Lucy?’

She nodded sadly. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Dr Rowan is a very fine physician, Maggie. If anyone can save your sister…’

We were quiet for a while, me thinking, if he is so fine what is he doing in a poor people’s infirmary? Miss Sylvia, something altogether different, for at last she raised her eyes from the fire and said, ‘I want to tell you something, Maggie.’

I waited.

‘When Mrs Grant first came to me to tell me what had happened I brought Lucy here to our hostel, hoping perhaps rest and proper nursing would provide a cure. One night before the fever set in, she could not sleep so I took her some broth and sat with her for a while. She told me then that she thought she would die. I said that was nonsense and that she would soon be well again, but she said, “No, I was never meant to live”. I asked her what on earth she meant. How had she come by such a dismal notion? And she said, “My brother Frank told me. When I was a baby my brother Samuel caught the measles and so did I. Frank said he heard my mother praying, ‘Please God, take the baby. Not Samuel. Please spare me my Samuel. Don’t let him die. Take the baby.’”’

I thought, have you worked among these people so long and still you do not know them? So I told her. ‘Women round here try never to love a baby before it can walk. They don’t even use its name, just “the baby”. So many die, you see, in the first few months, it is better not to waste your affections on what you may lose. Keep them for when the child is strong enough to live. But it was wrong of Frank to talk to Lucy so. She must have vexed him mightily.’

Miss Sylvia was staring at me and I knew she was shocked by what I had said. So I did not tell her the rest.

Lucy is mending. It will be long and slow but it seems whatever worked on the rat is working just as well on her. I must not be mean and say it does not surprise me. Since my talk with Miss Sylvia I have begun to understand how wretched she must have been and I am trying my very hardest to be a good sister. She is moved to the hostel now and I visit
once a week and bring her flowers or some fruit, and a magazine, as well as the latest copy of
The Suffragette
, which I fancy she uses to wrap her leavings in for she seems no wiser about our work than ever. I tried to explain to her about Frank not meaning what he had said, but she just turned her head away and covered her ears with her hands.

Evelyn visits every day with Mrs Grant, bringing a new painting so that Lucy’s wall looks like a gallery although most of the pictures are of cherry cakes which are Evelyn’s favourite at the moment – thanks to Alfie’s Edith who is fattening the whole family for the slaughter, I fancy, judging by the amount of pastries coming into that house.

Miss Sylvia met me at the door one day as I arrived. She seemed excited. ‘Maggie, I have spoken to Dr Rowan about baby Ann. He thinks he may know what is wrong.’

‘How can he? He has never examined her.’ Though how I could question his judgement when he had performed such a miracle on Lucy, I do not know.

‘He says it is common with the infants round here. They catch an infection early on before they are speaking and it makes a congestion in their ears which stops them hearing. He says it is a simple matter to cure. Of course he cannot be sure…’

I left her holding the bag of plums and ran all the way to our house.

During these weeks I have come to see how much good is done by Miss Sylvia’s East End Federation. In a practical way. There is nursing, teaching, cleaning, lessons in how to care for babies, help with finding work, a savings plan that lets people
put by money for if they are laid off or injured at work, trips to the country for the children – so much going on, and all of it useful. All of it making a difference.

And I think, it is all very well for me to sit in an office passing on instructions to burn this building, bomb that one… Miss Christabel insists, and of course being so clever, she must be right, that in the end ours is the only way. But it is a way strewn with broken bodies, broken minds, broken dreams, and if, in the end, we should all die for the Cause, which we know in our hearts it may come to, what will be left? A few columns in the national newspapers. A few sombre words from the pulpits. A few shakes of the head, a few hopeless tears from those who loved us.

We are commanded to model ourselves on Joan of Arc. ‘Think,’ writes Miss Christabel from France. ‘Only consider how now, four centuries after her ruthless murder by the English rulers of the day, she is remembered, sanctified, honoured. And where are they? Dead, and all but forgotten.’

And I think, yes, but she was nineteen. So am I. What good is it to me to be remembered four hundred years from now? I want to live. Why is my life worth so much less to the Cause than my death? And all those forgotten nobles went home after they had burnt that young French peasant girl, and ate and drank and ruled, just as they had done before.

I have resolved to ask Miss Sylvia if I may work for her. She is gone to Paris to see Miss Christabel but I shall write to her offering my services. There are plenty could take my place in the office – would happily do so. I know it means I must leave Mrs Garrud and that will be a sore wrench for I have never loved anywhere more than my room with the blue curtains
(unless it be my yellow one at The Mascot) but I cannot stay my life in someone else’s family.

I can lodge at the hostel and although I think the pay will be far less, so will my costs be, for I shall have no need of fine office clothes and money for cabs and the like.

Tomorrow I will write a letter to Miss Christabel.

It is so long since I have cried. Tonight I wept till there were no more tears inside my body.

I have lost a friend. My oldest truest friend. Miss Sylvia is gone. Split from the WSPU. All contact severed. The outcome of her trip to Paris. Miss Christabel demanding that she forsake the men who had served and defended her so bravely, and rely only on women from now on. Miss Lake says there was a disagreement. I can only guess at its fury. So now Miss Sylvia is cast out. For refusing to bow the knee to her sister.

And I have my answer.

From Miss Christabel Pankhurst

Founder Member of the Women’s Social and Political Union Paris

From Miss Sylvia:

I remember Miss Roe once saying she had writ down all the reasons to stay and those to resign before she took over as Chief Organiser. I asked her how many of each.

‘Oh, fourteen, I think, to go.’

‘How many to stay?’

‘One.’

I asked her what it was.

‘Loyalty.’

Tonight I am to burn down a man’s house. I have been chosen specially. It is a reward for all my past endeavours. My loyalty. Choosing the Cause above friendship, wishes, instincts. But I will always follow the light, the shining dazzling light of those who have no doubts, no fear of darkness, hoping one day it will rub off on me.

Miss Christabel sent word specially.

‘The highest trust’. At last. At last I am on the inside.

All summer long I have thrown myself back into the battle.
Baton hurling, stone throwing, painting slogans, carving up golf greens. We even attend the churches of those who have preached against us and sing loudly and lustily throughout the prayers. We interrupt plays, operas, sporting tournaments. One headline likened us to jesters, the licensed fools of old – permitted to be mad, but only for so long.

Mrs Garrud taught the Bodyguard a wonderful African dance. Every time the bobbies rushed at Mrs Pankhurst we swung our hips one way and our batons the other so there was no way they could break through, or there would not have been, had the same two ladies who blackened each other’s eyes managed to keep the rhythm for more than six beats together.

Galleries and museums are closed for fear of assault. It distresses me greatly when I hear of paintings ripped and torn apart. Museums I do not mind, for they are full of bits of old iron and cracked up bones, but to ruin a picture seems to me a very wretched thing, remembering as I do how much work goes into one. And if it be a good one, not just ‘work’ but a drop of someone’s soul.

It is odd I have been sent to Birmingham, a city I detest, for it was here I first was tortured. Here that that doctor prised my lips apart and forced his filthy poison down my throat. I have never forgotten him. He was not old like the politicians, nor young like Dr Rowan. He was what I would call a bloodless man. There was nothing warm and vital in him.

He did not see us as living creatures, but objects to be stretched and twisted as a tanner works a hide. Bloodless face, bloodless mind. Bloodless heart, with one hand to pinch my
nose shut, and the other to sip his glass of brandy.

As I walked from the station to the lodgings where I am to stay, I passed a gallery – open. I cannot tell why, but suddenly I longed to see something good, untarnished, something worth caring about, for I knew tomorrow a man would be looking at his dreams and memories destroyed and that I would have no right to care for anything ever again.

I went in.

They were not remarkable paintings. Neat water colours, a few splashy fruit bowls, some fierce wobbly flowers. I was about to leave when I saw a little side room and there, leaning against the wall, a stack of canvases, a cloth half thrown across them.

Suddenly I was back in Miss Sylvia’s studio, high up in the eaves above Park Walk. I knew that if I lifted that cloth the picture beneath it would be me.

It was as I bent to do so I heard a voice. ‘Maggie.’

I turned. Standing in the doorway, the sun, as always, flickering through his hair, or perhaps that was just how I remembered it, was Fred.

We stood there, just gazing at each other. He looked thinner, older. I think I must have too.

At last he spoke. ‘I had not thought to see you here. How have you been?’

I swallowed. ‘Well enough, I suppose. And you?’

‘Well enough. I… I… Why did you not answer my letter, Maggie?’

I stared at him. ‘What letter?’

‘The one I gave to Lucy. Explaining. Telling you where I
was. Begging you to come to me. Did I not deserve even a word? A refusal I could have borne, understood, but silence…’

This afternoon we walked in a park. It was not pretty, for nothing in Birmingham can be, but to me it seemed the finest in the world with its dull dusty trees and scraps of dried-out grass.

Fred told me he often visited that gallery. ‘Not that I like it particularly, but so few of them are open these days and besides, I always hoped…’

‘Hoped what?’

‘I don’t know. That perhaps your picture would turn up there one day. I never did get to see it, did I?’

‘I doubt there’s many gallery owners would hang a picture painted by a suffragette.’

‘No. Although they might, in the hope you would not destroy one of your own.’

It was on my tongue to say, they are the only people we would destroy, but I just smiled.

Fred teaches at a boys’ academy. He says he must spend each evening swotting the next day’s lesson, for they are bright lads, picked from the Poor School to be trained as clerks and office workers, and if he is not careful they catch him out with their questions.

He was bitter angry that Lucy had kept his letter from me, but I told him how she has suffered of late so he gave up his plan to throttle her – for now, at least.

We talked of oh, so many things. How after he had quit the police he had thought to train as a doctor then found he had
no stomach for it. ‘Besides, what should I have done if they had ordered me to feed the women in prison?’

‘Refused, of course.’

‘Yes, well, I should have, but that would have meant another career lost. A man cannot be forever changing or he will end up completely useless.’

I hugged his arm. ‘In that case you could have become a politician.’

He said his father had suggested teaching and though he was not a particular scholar, he enjoyed it more than he could have imagined. ‘The boys are mad keen to learn and so full of ideas and enthusiasm. I swear I gain more from them than they do from me.’

‘Well, if it was anyone but you teaching them, I might agree,’ I said, and he just smiled, that great golden smile.

I told him how, after my visit to Marylebone police station, I had gone round to his lodgings and what Miss Blackett had said.

‘Well, if she was waiting for my address, she is still waiting.’

‘Oh, she’s had other things to think about,’ and I explained about throwing a stone right through her shop’s main window. Fred looked at me in utter amazement.

‘You mean you actually hit your target? Is there no end to surprises with you, Maggie?’

I laughed. ‘I am a lot closer to my target now, so you should be careful what you say to me.’

He tucked my arm right in close to his. I could feel the warmth of him flowing right through me and I thought, this must be how Lazarus felt when Our Lord breathed him back to life. Born again. A new beginning. Another chance.

And so we walked about and sat and talked and then we went to a corner house and this time Fred didn’t ask me what I wanted. Just ordered two great slices of chocolate sponge.

‘They have burnt down our tearoom in Regent’s Park.’

‘And the elephant?’

‘We do not harm living things.’

Fred looked at me and I could see now that his eyes had grown old like Dr Rowan’s. ‘You do not
burn
living things, Maggie. Never pretend you do not harm them.’

I said nothing.

He asked what brought me to Birmingham. ‘Or need I guess? There must be a meeting somewhere.’

‘Not a meeting. I cannot tell you, Fred, and it is better you do not know.’

‘Why? Do you think I would arrest you? All that is over.’

I tried to smile. ‘Over for you.’

‘But not you?’

‘It can never be over till the Cause is won.’

He was silent.

‘What are you thinking?’

He shook his head. ‘It would only vex you.’

‘Nothing you can say will ever vex me.’

‘I thought you sounded like a machine, Maggie.’

Although I laughed, his words cut deep inside me. Because I knew that they were true. That is what I have become. A machine. How else can I go on? Tonight I must burn down a man’s house. There are no second chances for me.

And I thought, this is how it is. Today is a dream. A brief, glorious dream. But soon I will wake. I am set on a course. I
am a cog in a wheel that is spinning too fast to be stopped. I cannot escape. I cannot break free. Not now I am on the inside. ‘A dog cannot serve two masters.’ ‘Loyalty.’ ‘Even unto death.’

There will be no cottage in the country, no children that do not wail, no talking and reading together of an evening. There is only today.

We bought bread and sausages and cheese and strawberries and a bottle of blood red wine and I went home with him to his lodgings, two fine clean rooms and a little balcony on which he is growing a lot of dead plants, by the look of them. His landlord lives in the basement and has no daughter he needs to marry off.

Fred found some candles and we lit them and sat together watching the sun go down, and after we had eaten he reached for my hand across the table and we looked at each other, deep into each other’s eyes and right through into our hearts. And I knew he understood.

He took my hand and led me into the other room.

I did not know loving could be like that. Loving between a man and woman. All I knew of it was pain and fear. Frank’s fingers, groping, eager, slippery, putting babies in, pulling them out, rooting inside me – rough, unstoppable. And me, my shift all crumpled up round my shoulders, trying not to cry out, trying to turn away, trying to block my mind. Praying never to be loved again.

I knew so little. Less than nothing. I did not know a man could be so gentle and yet so strong, could make my body sing with every touch and beg for more. Make me part of him. Part
of his soul. I did not know it could be like that. I did not know what love was.

He asked me if it had hurt.

‘A little. Not very much.’

‘I tried not to hurt you.’

‘I know.’

‘Next time it won’t.’

I turned away. He kissed the back of my neck. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘Nothing. Everything. Why did you come to Birmingham?’

‘Because I thought you never would.’

‘You did not want me to?’

‘Oh, yes, but if you were lost to me, I could not face the agony of seeing you. I was trying to be sensible.’

I turned back to him and saw that he was not a great golden god at all. He was young like me, and he feared to be hurt, just as I do. I kissed his nose. ‘We are neither of us very good at being sensible, are we?’

He smiled. ‘I suppose not. Tomorrow we can start again.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow we will find a clergyman.’

‘No.’

He grasped my hand. ‘Because of The Cause? I would not stand in your way, Maggie. You know that. I believe in truth and justice, too, you know.’

‘I know you do. It is not that. Not just that. I cannot…’

‘Cannot what?’

Cannot retrace my steps. Cannot undo the past. Cannot undo the future.

I knew I had one hope. To make him hate me, so that when
I left he would no longer care. I closed my eyes. ‘There is something much worse.’

‘Worse?’

‘I had thought never to tell you.’

‘Tell me what?’

I told him then how I had killed my brother, Samuel. How, when Samuel was so ill with the measles, I had heard the Reverend Beckett say he would take me in his Bible class for a shilling a week, and my ma had replied, ‘I cannot find it, Reverend, for I have medicine to buy for my Samuel.’ And yet the very next week I was called up from my seat in the Sunday School and told I was to go home and learn two psalms by heart and the Reverend would test me on them on the Friday. And so I did, and when he came by I said the two he had set me and one more, ‘
As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God
.’ And he said that was very good, and I was to attend on Sunday after matins. And at five o’clock next morning Samuel died.

Fred gripped my hand and squeezed it very tight. ‘Maggie, you are wrong. So wrong. Don’t you understand? This Reverend took you in his class because you are clever. Because he knew he could reap the rewards of his charity. Did he not use you to teach the younger children, to impress the Guardians on their rounds, to clean the classrooms after lessons?’

‘Yes, but…’

‘You did not kill your brother, Maggie. Do you truly believe your ma would, even for one mad second, have chosen a few scripture lessons above her child’s life? Is that all you think of her?’

I started to cry. ‘But Samuel died. He died the next day. Because he had no medicine, only a poultice to ease the blisters.’

‘There is no cure for measles, Maggie. You live or you die. And if you are poor and have no medicine, most likely you will die.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Because I have seen it, over and over. My father used to take me visiting. I feared it. Hated those stinking hovels full of illness and decay. I caught everything that was going. He said it would save me from it in later life. I used to think, what good is ‘later life’ if I die before I am twelve? But I did not. And they did. And if you have a life you must live it. If I believe nothing else, I believe that.’

I curled up close to him and he wiped away my tears and kissed me and told me I was safe now. Would always be safe. Then he asked, ‘Have you never spoken of this before, Maggie?’

‘Never. Only to Frank when it happened.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said he felt very sorry for me and he promised to keep my secret.’

Fred was silent for a while and then he spoke. ‘Just as you kept his?’

My heart stopped. I looked at him and saw his eyes were full of kindness and love – and forgiveness, I suppose. ‘The things he did to you, Maggie, in return for that silence.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Lucy told me. Not in so many words, but she made it fairly clear she had taken your place. Besides, I think I’d already
guessed. We used to see a lot of it when I was in the police – young prostitutes, trained up by their brothers or fathers.’