The Man from St. Petersburg (18 page)

She raised her hands, and the cheering and applause died down almost instantly.

She began to speak. Her voice was strong and clear, although she did not seem to shout. Charlotte was surprised to notice that she had a Lancashire accent.

She said: “In 1894 I was elected to the Manchester Board of Guardians, in charge of a workhouse. The first time I went into that place I was horrified to see little girls seven and eight years old on their knees scrubbing the cold stones of the long corridors. These little girls were clad, summer and winter, in thin cotton frocks, low in the neck and short-sleeved. At night they wore nothing at all, night-dresses being considered too good for paupers. The fact that bronchitis was epidemic among them most of the time had not suggested to the Guardians any change in the fashion of the clothes. I need hardly add that, until I arrived, all the Guardians were men.

“I found that there were pregnant women in that workhouse, scrubbing floors, doing the hardest kind of work, almost until their babies came into the world. Many of them were unmarried women: very, very young, mere girls. These poor mothers were allowed to stay in the hospital after confinement for a short two weeks. Then they had to make a choice of staying in the workhouse and earning their living by scrubbing and other work—in which case they were separated from their babies—or of taking their discharges. They could stay and be paupers, or they could leave—leave with a two-week-old baby in their arms, without hope, without home, without money, without anywhere to go. What became of those girls, and what became of their hapless infants?”

Charlotte was stunned by the public discussion of such delicate matters. Unmarried mothers … mere girls … without homes, without money … And why should they be separated from their babies in the workhouse? Could this be true?

There was worse to come.

Mrs. Pankhurst’s voice rose a fraction. “Under the law, if a man who ruins a girl pays down a lump sum of twenty pounds, the boarding home is immune from inspection. As long as a baby farmer takes only one child at a time, the twenty pounds being paid, the inspectors cannot inspect the house.”

Baby farmers … a man who ruins a girl … the terms were unfamiliar to Charlotte, but they were dreadfully self-explanatory.

“Of course the babies die with hideous promptness, and then the baby farmers are free to solicit another victim. For years women have tried to get the Poor Law changed, to protect all illegitimate children, and to make it impossible for any rich scoundrel to escape liability for his child. Over and over again it has been tried, but it has always failed—” here her voice became a passionate cry “—because the ones who really care about the thing are mere women!”

The audience burst into applause, and a woman next to Charlotte cried: “Hear, hear!”

Charlotte turned to the woman and grabbed her arm. “Is this true?” she said. “Is this
true?
”

But Mrs. Pankhurst was speaking again.

“I wish I had time, and strength, to tell you of all the tragedies I witnessed while I was on that board. In our out-relief department, I was brought into contact with widows who were struggling desperately to keep their homes and families together. The law allowed these women relief of a certain very inadequate kind, but for herself and one child it offered no relief except the workhouse. Even if the woman had a baby at her breast she was regarded, under the law, as an able-bodied man. Women, we are told, should stay at home and take care of their children. I used to astound my men colleagues by saying to them: ‘When women have the vote they will see that mothers
can
stay at home and care for their children!’

“In 1899 I was appointed to the office of Registrar of Births and Deaths in Manchester. Even after my experience on the Board of Guardians I was shocked to be reminded over and over again of what little respect there was in the world for women and children. I have had little girls of thirteen come to my office to register the births of their babies—illegitimate, of course. There was nothing that could be done in most cases. The age of consent is sixteen years, but a man can usually claim that he thought the girl was over sixteen. During my term of office, a very young mother of an illegitimate child exposed her baby and it died. The girl was tried for murder and sentenced to death. The man who was, from the point of view of justice, the real murderer of the baby received no punishment at all.

“Many times in those days I asked myself what was to be done. I had joined the Labor Party, thinking that through its councils something vital might come, some demand for women’s enfranchisement that the politicians could not possibly ignore. Nothing came.

“All those years my daughters had been growing up. One day Christabel startled me with the remark: ‘How long you women have been trying for the vote. For my part, I mean to get it.’ Since that day I have had two mottoes. One has been: ‘Votes for women.’ The other: ‘For my part, I mean to get it!’ “

Someone shouted: “So do I!” and there was another outburst of cheering and clapping. Charlotte was feeling dazed. It was as if she, like Alice in the story, had walked through the looking glass and found herself in a world where nothing was what it seemed. When she had read in the newspapers about suffragettes, no mention had been made of the Poor Law, of thirteen-year-old mothers (was it
possible?
) or of little girls catching bronchitis in the workhouse. Charlotte would have believed none of it had she not seen with her own eyes Annie, a decent, ordinary maid from Norfolk, sleeping on a London pavement after being “ruined” by a man. What did a few broken windows matter while this sort of thing was going on?

“It was many years before we lighted the torch of militancy. We had tried every other measure, and our years of work and suffering and sacrifice had taught us that the Government would not yield to right and justice, but it would yield to expediency. We had to make every department of English life insecure and unsafe. We had to make English law a failure and the courts theaters of farce; we had to discredit the Government in the eyes of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt business, destroy valuable property, demoralize the world of society, shame the churches, upset the whole orderly conduct of life! We had to do as much of this guerrilla warfare as the people of England would tolerate. When they come to the point of saying to the Government: ‘Stop this, in the only way it can be stopped, by giving the women of England representation,’ then we should extinguish our torch.

“The great American statesman Patrick Henry summed up the causes that led to the American revolution like this: ‘We have petitioned, we have remonstrated, we have supplicated, we have prostrated ourselves at the foot of the throne, and it has all been in vain. We must fight—I repeat it, sir, we must fight.’ Patrick Henry was advocating killing people as the proper means of securing the political freedom of
men.
The suffragettes have not done that and never will. In fact, the moving spirit of militancy is a deep and abiding reverence for human life.

“It was in this spirit that our women went forth to war last year. On January thirty-first a number of putting greens were burned with acids. On February seventh and eighth telegraph and telephone wires were cut in several places and for some hours all communication between London and Glasgow was suspended. A few days later windows in various of London’s smartest clubs were broken, and the orchid houses at Kew were wrecked and many valuable blooms destroyed by cold. The jewel room at the Tower of London was invaded and a showcase broken. On February eighteenth a country house that was being built on Walton-on-the-Hill for Mr. Lloyd George was partially destroyed, a bomb having been exploded in the early morning before the arrival of the workmen.

“Over one thousand women have gone to prison in the course of this agitation, have suffered their imprisonment, have come out of prison injured in health, weakened in body but not in spirit. Not one of those women would, if women were free, be lawbreakers. They are women who seriously believe that the welfare of humanity demands this sacrifice. They believe that the horrible evils which are ravaging our civilization will never be removed until women get the vote. There is only one way to put a stop to this agitation; there is only one way to break down this agitation. It is not by deporting us!”

“No!” someone shouted.

“It is not by locking us up in jail!”

The whole crowd shouted: “No!”

“It is by doing us justice!”

“Yes!”

Charlotte found herself shouting with the rest. The little woman on the platform seemed to radiate righteous indignation. Her eyes blazed, she clenched her fists, she tilted up her chin, and her voice rose and fell with emotion.

“The fire of suffering whose flame is upon our sisters in prison is burning us also. For we suffer with them, we partake of their affliction, and we shall share their victory by-and-by. This fire will breathe into the ear of many a sleeper the one word ‘Awake,’ and she will arise to slumber no more. It will descend with the gift of tongues upon many who have hitherto been dumb, and they will go forth to preach the news of deliverance. Its light will be seen afar off by many who suffer and are sorrowful and oppressed, and will irradiate their lives with a new hope. For the spirit which is in women today cannot be quenched; it is stronger than all tyranny, cruelty and oppression; it is stronger—even—than—death—itself!”

During the day a dreadful suspicion had dawned on Lydia.

After lunch she had gone to her room to lie down. She had been unable to think about anything but Feliks. She was still vulnerable to his magnetism: it was foolish to pretend otherwise. But she was no longer a helpless girl. She had resources of her own. And she was determined that she would not lose control, would not let Feliks wreck the placid life she had so carefully made for herself.

She thought of all the questions she had not asked him. What was he doing in London? How did he earn his living? How had he known where to find her?

He had given Pritchard a false name. Clearly he had been afraid that she would not let him in. She realized why “Konstantin Dmitrich Levin” had seemed familiar: it was the name of a character in
Anna Karenina
, the book she had been buying when she first met Feliks. It was an alias with a double meaning, a sly mnemonic which lit up a host of dim memories, like a taste recalled from childhood. They had argued about the novel. It was brilliantly real, Lydia had said, for she knew what it was like when passion was released in the soul of a respectable woman; Anna
was
Lydia. But the book was not about Anna, said Feliks; it was about Levin and his search for the answer to the question: “How should I live?” Tolstoy’s answer was: “In your heart you know what is right.” Feliks argued that it was this kind of empty-headed morality—deliberately ignorant of history, economics and psychology—which had led to the utter incompetence and degeneracy of the Russian ruling class. That was the night they ate pickled mushrooms and she tasted vodka for the first time. She had been wearing a turquoise dress which turned her gray eyes blue. Feliks had kissed her toes, and then—

Yes, he was sly, to remind her of all that.

Had he been in London a long time, she wondered, or had he come just to see Aleks? There was presumably a reason for approaching an admiral in London about the release of a sailor imprisoned in Russia. For the first time it occurred to Lydia that Feliks might not have told her the truth about that. After all, he was still an anarchist. In 1895 he had been determinedly nonviolent, but he might have changed.

If Stephen knew that I had told an anarchist where to find Aleks …

She had worried about it through tea. She had worried about it while the maid was putting up her hair, with the result that the job was not properly done and she looked a fright. She had worried about it through dinner, with the result that she had been less than vivacious with the Marchioness of Quort, Mr. Chamberlain and a young man called Freddie who kept hoping aloud that there was nothing seriously wrong with Charlotte.

She recalled Feliks’s cut hand, which had caused him to give such a shout when she squeezed it. She had only glimpsed the wound but it looked as if it had been bad enough to need stitches.

Nevertheless, it was not until the end of the evening, when she sat in her bedroom at home brushing her hair, that it occurred to her to connect Feliks with the madman in the park.

The thought was so frightening that she dropped a gold-backed hairbrush onto the dressing table and broke a glass vial of perfume.

What if Feliks had come to London to kill Aleks?

Suppose it was Feliks who had attacked the coach in the park, not to rob them but to get at Aleks? Had the man with the gun been Feliks’s height and build? Yes, roughly. And Stephen had wounded him with his sword …

Then Aleks had left the house because he was frightened (or perhaps, she now realized, because he
knew
the “robbery” had been an assassination attempt) and Feliks had not known where to find him, so he had asked Lydia …

She stared at herself in the mirror. The woman she saw there had gray eyes, fair eyebrows, blond hair, a pretty face and the brain of a sparrow.

Could it be true? Could Feliks have deceived her so? Yes—because he had spent nineteen years imagining that she had betrayed him.

She picked up the pieces of broken glass from the vial and put them in a handkerchief; then she mopped up the spilled perfume. She did not know what to do now. She had to warn Stephen, but how? “By the way, an anarchist called this morning and asked me where Aleks had gone; and because he used to be my lover I told him …” She would have to make up a story. She thought for a while. Once upon a time she had been an expert barefaced liar, but she was out of practice. Eventually she decided she could get away with a combination of the lies Feliks had told to her and to Pritchard.

She put on a cashmere robe over the silk nightgown and went through to Stephen’s bedroom.