A Mad, Wicked Folly (33 page)

Mr. Pethick-Lawrence printed it the next day. It was on
the front page of
Votes for Women
. It was an honor, but I
couldn’t help but feel we were preaching to the converted.

LUCY, HAVING BEEN
among the first to hunger-strike,
wasn’t content to let other women sacrifice themselves
while she stood idly by, and so I knew something was up
when she rose early on the ninth of November and dressed
in the plainest clothes she had.

“A little something I’ve been planning.” She pulled on a
pair of kitchen sleeves.
“Are you cleaning something?”
“You might say that. Going to help the Lord Mayor.”
The importance of the date sifted through my tired
mind then. The ninth of November was the Lord Mayor’s
Banquet at the Guildhall, and every politician of note
would be there to celebrate the new mayor. “Are you going
to the Guildhall?”
“Good guess!”
“Why?”
“Never been to a knees-up at the Guildhall,” she said.
“Might be a laugh.”
“Wait!” I said, fully awake now. “Are you going there to
get arrested?”
Lucy made a face. “Not going for the canapés, I can tell
you that.”
“But . . . but . . . if they arrest you, will you hunger-strike
again? If you do, they’ll force-feed you.” I was terrified for
Lucy. People died from being force-fed, like that man in the
paper said.
“Look, Vicky, the government doesn’t seem to know
the weapon they’ve handed to us now because of this
force-feeding. We’re in all the papers, and if we don’t stop,
the truth will come out eventually, and people will be on
our side. We’ve all got to do our bit. And this is what we’re
all about.”
If the end result hadn’t been so grave, Lucy’s escapade
would have been hilarious. Lucy and two other suffragettes, a fellow American called Alice Paul and a Brit called
Amelia Brown, slipped into the palatial Guildhall by dressing as charwomen. Each time they saw someone, they’d
ask the way to the kitchen. One time when they saw a
police constable, they hid in a cloakroom. The constable,
not knowing they were there, actually threw his cloak over
them. Eventually they worked their way to the gallery in
the banqueting hall, and when everyone was seated, tucking into their feast, Lucy and her friends shouted and threw
stones through a stained glass window.
They were, of course, arrested. Mr. Pethick-Lawrence
went to the court to sit in at their hearing. The judge sentenced them to thirty days’ imprisonment in the dreaded
second division at Holloway.
A week dragged by. I missed Lucy so much. The flat was
empty without her. I even missed sharing the bed with her.
Lucy had been in prison for ten days when Mr. PethickLawrence got word from a sympathetic wardress that Lucy
had gone on hunger strike and they had begun force-feeding her. I worried about her well-being in prison, though I
knew she was proud to be there. If only I could make everyone see my cartoon for
Votes for Women
, make everyone
understand what Lucy was going through right now.
Then I remembered Étienne’s posters of the cabaret
girls. I would make posters of the force-feeding and hang
them where everyone would see them! The WSPU didn’t
have to be at the mercy of the newspapers. Anyone with
eyes would see the truth.

HAVE AN IDEA
to get the truth of force-feeding
out to the public,” I said. “I want to make an illustration for a poster that we can stick up.”
It was the next morning, and I had sought out

Mr. Pethick-Lawrence in the newspaper room at Clement’s
Inn.
“What do you have in mind?” he asked.
I pulled out my sketchbook and set it on the table, turning it to the page with my sketch. “This is an illustration
of the wardress’s statement. We can paste the posters on
hoardings, pub walls, buildings, signs.”
His finger landed on the bottom of the illustration.
“What’s
Victorious
?”
“That’s me. My secret signature; a play on my real
name. I want that word to be on everyone’s lips in connection with force-feeding. They’ll all wonder who Victorious
is. But no one will know.”
Mr. Pethick-Lawrence looked at the illustration
thoughtfully. “The idea has great merit, but won’t people
just tear them down? The police tear down anything we
post almost before the glue’s gone off.”
“I thought of that.” I told him about Étienne’s posters,
and how he had put them up high.
He rubbed his chin. “Fly-posting is illegal. We’ll have
to find someone willing to risk arrest. That might take a
little while, as most of the women who do such things are
already serving time in Holloway. I’m sorry, Vicky. Maybe
there will be another opportunity, when we have the
resources.”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I shut my book, feeling
deflated.
“It’s a wonderful idea,” he said. “It’s certainly worth
considering in future.” He smiled at me kindly and went
back to work at the layout desk.
I went out front to the visitors’ entrance. Sophie and
Clara had been sorting through the day’s post but stopped
what they were doing when I came over.
“I had this idea for a poster, but Mr. Pethick-Lawrence
says there’s no one to hang them,” I said, showing them my
sketchbook.
“That’s good,” Sophie said. “Really good. I can’t see how
anyone could ignore it.”
“Why can’t
you
hang them?” Clara said.
“Me?” I supposed the idea wasn’t so far-fetched. Étienne
hung his own posters. He didn’t make anyone else do it. “I
guess I could. I’m not afraid of heights.”
“You’ll need a lookout and someone to help lug your
clobber,” Clara said. “You can’t do everything burdened
down with pastepots and brushes and the like.”
“I’ll go with you,” Sophie said. “It’ll make a nice change
from stitching banners.”
“You’ll have to go in the dead of night or else you won’t
get a lick of paste on the wall much less a poster,” Clara
warned. “The only women about in the night are”—she
lowered her voice—“
harlots
. What if you’re mistaken for
one of those?”
“What about delivery boys?” Sophie said. “Delivery
boys are about at that hour. We’ll go dressed as boys and
ride the bicycles they have here for the bicycling corps. I’ll
kit us out in boys’ clothes. No one will be the wiser.”
Clara drew in her breath, her eyes shining. “It’s just
like Mary Frith and Lady Catherine Ferrers. Those highwaywomen who dressed as men and relieved many a
gentleman of his purse.”
We started to laugh so hard that several of the women
working in the back came out to see what was funny.
“Just remember that Lady Catherine died from a gunshot wound,” Clara said after she had collected herself.
“Let’s not pretend this isn’t going to be a dangerous caper.
If a constable catches you, you might not be able to blag
your way out of it.”
“He’ll have to catch me first. I’m pretty swift on a bicycle,” Sophie said.
“Me too,” I said. Although truth be told, I hadn’t been
cycling in years.
“Start with Whitehall,” Clara said. “Lots of politicians,
lots of traffic in the daytime to see the posters.”
And so the scheme was put into motion. Mr. PethickLawrence had my illustration printed up in four
colors—gold, gray, black, and green—by a sympathetic
printer on Fleet Street who’d agreed to keep quiet. I had
postcard-sized versions to paste onto the backs of signs
and park benches and broadsheet-sized ones for buildings
and hoardings.
Sophie found boys’ reach-me-down clothing—knickerbockers with braces, muslin shirts, wool jackets, and flat
newsboy caps—on Petticoat Lane, and altered them to fit.
I loved the way the garments felt, especially the knickerbockers, which were very freeing.
As the night of the fly-posting drew closer, I grew giddy
with anticipation. I felt like a horse released in a pasture
after a lifetime of living in a stall. I may not have been
brave enough to volunteer for prison and risk force-feeding
like Lucy, but I had been brave enough to leave home for
an unfamiliar world, one I had grown to love. I was ready
to join the ranks of the doers, those mad women making
demands instead of asking politely. I was itching to use
my artwork, put forth my point of view, in the fight. As I’d
told Mr. Earnshaw at the RCA on the day I climbed out my
window, my artwork would hang in a place of pride where
everyone could see it. I had just never imagined my first
exhibition would be so public.
Two days later, we were ready. Sophie and I dressed
at Clement’s Inn about midnight. Some of the suffragettes
who rented rooms upstairs came down in their dressing
gowns to see us off. We wore our own boots, but we rubbed
dirt into them to make them look shabby. A little coal dust
on our cheeks hid our femininity. My hair proved a challenge, being so long and thick. Sophie struggled to fit all of
it underneath the cap. She glared at me when I suggested
cutting it—once a lady’s maid, always a lady’s maid. She
settled on coiling it into a spiral and pinning the flat cap
on top.
She looked doubtful. “I’m not sure this will stay on.”
She tugged at the cap. “If I put too many pins in, people
will cotton on that you aren’t a boy.”
I shook my head a bit to test the pins. “It will have to do.
Just make sure you hide all of your hair under yours. Your
ginger hair attracts enough attention as it is.”
I prepared the wheat paste next, a messy business that
required mixing equal parts flour and water and heating
the mixture over a paraffin burner until it turned into a
glop that would hold the posters in place and make it difficult to tear them down in one piece.
And so it was well after midnight when Sophie and I
(after a few wobbly starts) set off on bicycles with posters
in canvas satchels over our shoulders, and a pastepot and
long-handled brush rattling in my basket. I was afraid, but
I thought about what Lucy was going through in Holloway,
and that gave me courage. I was glad that it was Sophie
who cycled beside me. I remembered that day when Sophie
taught me to dance. I had thought she and I could never be
friends. We had more in common than I ever guessed.
Whitehall, the center of His Majesty’s government and
home to its departments and ministers’ offices, was largely
silent during the night. We skirted the edge Trafalgar
Square and turned our bicycles down Northumberland
Avenue and up Great Scotland Yard. It was so quiet on
Northumberland Avenue that the hiss of our bicycle tires
and the jangling of the pedals echoing off the buildings
was the only sound. Shadows cast from streetlamps created shifting figures, turning trees into looming monsters
with eerie, clawlike hands, and ivy-covered gates into
otherworldly creatures. A brisk wind shot between the
buildings, and I could feel my cap fighting the hairpins,
trying to take flight. I dared not let go of the handlebars to
clamp it down because I didn’t trust myself to steer onehanded. I used to cycle a lot in Hyde Park before I went
to finishing school, but that had been a few years ago. My
skills were coming back slowly, but crashing into a bollard
was still a possibility if I didn’t concentrate.
“Have you ever been out this late, Sophie?” I whispered.
She shook her head. “No.”
“It’s terrifying.”
“It is. I won’t say no.”
“We’ll have to work fast,” I said. “Wheat paste on the
back, then brush the bill into place with more paste—that
will make it harder to tear down.”
We pasted the smaller posters onto benches, road signs,
and statue plinths. The larger ones went up on any building we could get to without being seen. To put the posters
up high, Sophie would boost me up or I would climb trees
and shinny out on the limbs to reach the building. It was so
much easier to climb in knickerbockers. I wished I could
wear them all the time.
“I want to stick one right on Ten Downing, where the
prime minister lives,” I said after pasting a poster on the
door of the Red Lion pub. “But I don’t dare. Too guarded.”
“We’d be nicked for sure,” Sophie said, pedaling next
to me. “Cannon Row Police Station is a stone’s throw away
from there.”
“How about Horse Guards?” I said. “You know the
little sentry boxes for the Household Cavalry regiment?
Just under the roofs would be a smashing place to slap
up posters. If we do a good job of it, they won’t be able to
scrape them off before the cavalry take up their post in the
morning. Everyone will see them over the soldiers’ heads.
Wouldn’t that be a coup?”
“Damaging Household Cavalry property?” Sophie
shivered. “I’m up for anything, but if they catch us . . . well,
a second-division cell will be a blessing. We’ll most likely
be tucked away with the murderers waiting to be hanged.”
Sophie had a point, but faint heart never won fair
maiden, and the smooth empty space just below the pitched
roofline was calling out to be fly-posted. I wanted to do it,
no matter what. The soldiers on their horses always drew
crowds, and so my poster would be seen by hundreds of
people.
And so, as Big Ben rang out two o’clock, we cycled back
up Whitehall to Horse Guards. We left our bikes against a
bollard and had a look at our targets. The roofs were maybe
only twenty feet off the ground, but there was nothing
close to either sentry box that I could climb on.
“We’ll have to use those little ledges,” Sophie whispered. “You can reach the roof from there.” The ledges she
was referring to were two decorative plinths, no wider
than the length of my toes, one halfway up the wall, the
other a few feet from the roof. “You can push off my shoulders to the next ledge. I’ll stand right there so I can grab
you if you slide down.”
I eyed the ledges. They looked really narrow. I took a
shaking breath and blew it out. “I suppose there’s nothing
for it. I’ll have to try.”
Sophie held out her cupped hands and I stepped into
them and grabbed hold of the first ledge with my fingers.
She boosted me up farther, and I reached up for the next
one. I dangled in midair for a heart-stopping moment, toes
scraping against the wall while Sophie got her shoulders
under my boots and pushed me up toward the roof. It was
difficult to get hold of the roof’s edge with the pastepot
dangling from my elbow, but with a few wriggles and a
few shoves from Sophie, I made it.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my
sleeve. I had scraped my hands, and I was sure my knees
would be blue with bruises in the morning, but I wanted to
stand up and dance a jig on top of the sentry box.
I set to my task, pasting the back of the poster, unfurling it over the edge, and then reaching down with the
brush and smoothing the paper into place.
It fit perfectly in the little space, almost as though it
were made to be there. Now, just the next sentry box to do,
and we could go home.
I perched for a moment on the ridgeline, catching my
breath. Sophie was standing right under me, scanning the
pavement right and left, keeping a lookout. Suddenly, I
saw her stiffen. She lifted her hand, and I looked where
she was pointing. A figure was approaching, casting a
long shadow over the pavement. The shadow wore a tall
helmet.
Sophie said it before my stunned mind could form
the words: “It’s a police constable!” she hissed. She spun
around and looked up at me, her hand on top of her cap.
Her face was full of fear. “Get down!”
“Run, Sophie,” I whispered. It had been my idea to
climb the sentry boxes. I’d just have to chance it alone.
“I can’t leave you!” she said, fidgeting from one foot to
the other.
“Go!”
“Damn and blast!” Sophie glanced at me one more
time, and then lit off toward the bicycles, her boot heels
clattering on the pavement.
I crept toward the back of the sentry box, hoping the
constable wouldn’t notice me, but he would have had to be
blind not to see me crouching on the roof like a gargoyle
come to life. My skin felt as if it were on fire with anxiety,
and my legs were shaking. I swung out over the edge, jabbing my toes around, fully expecting to find a little ledge
like the one on the other side, but it wasn’t there. There
was only sheer wall. Without a ledge, I would have to drop
straight down. I didn’t have the strength to lift myself back
up and I was too terrified to let go. My arms burned with
the effort of holding on.
The sound of the constable’s feet crunching in the
gravel grew louder and louder, and then they paused for
a moment in front of the sentry box. I squeezed my eyes
shut. The footsteps began again; this time they were moving quicker. Moving toward the back of the box, where I
dangled in midair.
I took a breath and let go.
I slid down the wall, scraping my chin against the stone,
and I landed hard, my right leg buckling underneath me as
I fell. I felt something in my ankle give, and searing white
pain flew up my leg. I shoved my palm into my mouth, biting hard on it so I wouldn’t scream out loud. I struggled
to my feet, ignoring the pain, and stumbled toward Horse
Guards Parade.
“Stop!”
I shot a look over my shoulder, and the police constable
was speeding up behind me. The light from a nearby lamppost illuminated my pursuer. Instead of the irritated police
constable, the light shone on a friendly face. A face I knew
and had drawn many times.
I stopped running.
“Will!”
His eyes went wide, and everything seemed to stand
still in that instant. “Vicky?”
The relief was so great that I did the daftest thing. I
threw myself into his arms and burst into tears. I pressed
my forehead against his coat, hiccupping with sobs like a
little girl. The wool of his jacket felt rough against my skin
and it smelled like him, green grass and clean laundry.
“So you’re the one fly-posting these illustrations up