A Monstrous Regiment of Women (15 page)

“books wanted for lending library, good condition, nothing too dreary. Veronica Beaconsfield.” We went on.

The next room was a study, with books on law and history; filing cabinets of articles, maps, and census reports; several volumes of jokes; and great piles of journals, from suffragette tractates to
Punch
(“This is where we draught the speeches”). There was even a print shop in the corner that could turn out broadsheets and pamphlets.

And to think, a week ago I didn’t even know this existed, I thought, and then said it aloud to Veronica.

“You’d have heard of it before too long,” she said, and I believed her. In my preoccupation with the religious aspects of Margery Childe’s personality and message, I had been aware of the attendant practical manifestations of that message only as on the periphery. Now, moving around within the walls of the hive, as it were, I became increasingly aware that as far as Margery’s followers were concerned, the thrice-weekly services might be Margery’s way of infusing them with her energies, but here was where those energies were ultimately spent.

The Temple was a political machine, a highly efficient means of gathering in and laying out monies and giving the enthusiasm of every Temple member, no matter how lowly, a direction and a concrete goal. Canvassing, speech making, pamphlet printing; doctoring the poor and teaching the illiterate; feeding the hungry and planning assaults on the law of the land—all went on here, all directed by a member of the Inner Circle, and therefore ultimately by Margery Childe herself. A mystic, perhaps, but one quite aware of the need for works as well as contemplations. There was a groundswell of power within these walls, gathering beneath Margery Childe and carrying her—where? A seat on the local council? Into Parliament? The fifteenth-century St Catherine of Genoa was a teacher, a philanthropist, the administrator of a great hospital—and a mystic. A century before her, another Catherine, of Siena, advised kings and popes, played a key role in papal reformation, and ran a nursing order; she was also a visionary and a mystic ranked by Miss Underhill alongside St Francis in importance. So, why not Margery Childe in twentieth-century London?

We went back up the stairs to the ground floor, and Veronica was about to lead me into the side entrance of the hall when we were intercepted by one of the refuge workers.

“Oh, Miss Beaconsfield, I’m glad I found you. There’s a Queenie something wants to see you, says her husband’s gone off his nut. She’s cryin’ and carrying’ on like anything.”

“You go on, Ronnie,” I said. “It’s almost time for me to see Margery, anyway.”

“If you’re sure? I’ll tell Marie you’re here.”

She scurried down the hallway and up the stairs, then returned within a minute, gave me a brief wave, and turned into the corridor that led to the shelter. I nodded at the women behind their desks, noting that their curiosity about me had increased when I had mentioned Margery, an indication that the Temple was now big enough to make its leader aloof from lesser mortals. I sat down and picked up a stack of pamphlets to keep me occupied, managing to work my way through
Diseases of Childhood, Treating Tuberculosis
, and
Women in the Classroom
before Marie appeared in the doorway, pronounced my name, and turned without another word. I followed at a leisurely pace and chattered away at the taciturn grey back in perversely cheery French as she led me up the stairs to, I was unsurprised to see, the corridor where Veronica and I had ended up on Monday night. Marie paused in front of the door opposite the Circle’s meeting room, knocked once, waited for the response, and opened it for me.

Margery Childe was sitting in front of a fire, wearing an orange-and-grey shot silk dressing gown, a book in her lap. She uncurled from her chair and came to greet me, one hand out to seize mine.

“Mary, how lovely—may I call you Mary? Everyone calls me Margery. I hope you will. Do you mind an informal meal, here in front of the fire? I never eat very much before a service, and I have to go and dress and meditate in an hour. I hope you don’t mind that, either. What a lovely colour of green that is; it does magical things to your eyes.”

My responses consisted of Yes, of course, very well, of course not, I understand, and thank you, and I found myself giving Marie my coat and hat and being seated at a small table with two delicate chairs that I tentatively identified as Louis XIV. The place settings were luminous and paper-thin, the silver old and heavy, the glasses blown into an ornate and modern twist. I hid my twice-let-down hem beneath the table.

“Veronica has been showing you about, I take it?”

“Yes, it was most impressive.”

“You sound surprised.” From her expression, it was a common reaction.

“Mostly by the fact that I’d not heard of the Temple before Monday.”

“We are working to remedy that. Wine?”

“Thank you.” She poured from a cut-glass decanter into two glasses that matched those on the table, these with a twist of pale orange in the stem. “But it must be new,” I noted, accepting the glass, “most of it. One of the presses in the print shop looked almost unused.”

“True. Five years ago, we hired a pair of second-storey rooms once a week. We now own four buildings outright.”

I wanted very badly to know more of just how the transformation had come about, but I held my tongue. It would have sounded, if not accusatory, at the least suspicious, and even if she did answer, I did not want that note to sound just yet.

“Very impressive,” I repeated. “I shall make a donation to the library fund.”

“A good choice,” she said blandly, without so much as a glance at my tired clothing. “Veronica has great hopes for her free lending library.” The bluestocking will be good for a couple of pounds, she was thinking, and with a rush of mischief, I decided to surprise her come Monday.

“I had also not expected you—the Temple—to be so politically active, somehow.”

“Religion oughtn’t dirty its hands, you mean? Without essential changes in the law, we will be operating soup kitchens and baby clinics until Doomsday.”

“But don’t you think—” I was interrupted by Marie, entering with a wide tray on which were several covered dishes. She unloaded it onto our table, removed the covers, and fussed with the arrangement of bits of cutlery for a moment, and then, somewhat to my surprise, she left. Margery served us, giving herself rather little and me rather a lot of the chicken slices in tarragon sauce, the glazed carrots, still firm, the potatoes and salad. She bowed her head briefly over her plate, then approached the food with neat concentration, chewing each mouthful thoroughly and washing it down with a sip of some pale herbal tea that had a slice of lemon floating in it. I drank a glass of fruity German wine. She ate a bite, then looked up at me.

“You were saying?” she enquired.

“I was wondering whether your identity as a, shall we say nonconforming religious leader might not count against you in the political arena.”

“I think not. Some will take it as a sign of my dedication and will listen to me the more for it; others will see it as a mere eccentricity.”

“I hope you’re right.” It was said politely, but she took it as a declaration of wholehearted support.

“That’s very good of you. And actually, I have been thinking, and praying, a great deal about you and your offer.” (Offer? I thought indignantly.) “And I have come to realise that my teaching has indeed been a very personal thing, and perhaps it is time to place it on a more universally acceptable plane. It came to me in the night that perhaps once the other projects are securely launched, we might think about sponsoring an academic project, research and discussions along the lines of what you were saying the other night. Invite the more prominent thinkers in the field. Perhaps even a journal… on the press you saw standing idle. What do you think?”

Damn it, was what I thought; then grimly, Does the woman imagine she can buy me? Something of the thought must have shown on my face, because she laid down her fork and leant forward.

“I’m not asking you to do anything you don’t feel is right, Mary. I’m sure there are a thousand things I’ve said and done that you don’t agree with. And I’m not about to say that I’ll change. However, I want to learn. For my own sake, and for the Temple, I need to know how your world handles the questions that I grapple with alone. You say that you were surprised at our existence; it is nothing to the impression you made on me. I did not sleep at all Monday night. All I could do was think how blind and arrogant I’d been. I felt like some peasant who owned a pretty box, only to have someone take it and open it to reveal the jewels inside. I need your help, Mary. Not as a permanent commitment—I don’t ask that of you. I’m not asking you to join the Temple. But I need you, just at the beginning, to start me on the road. Please.”

How does one refuse such a request? I know that I was not able to. By the time Marie arrived with a second tray, coffee and strawberries (in January!) I found I had agreed to a series of informal tutorials with Margery and one lecture to the Inner Circle at the end of the month.

Having gotten what she wanted, Margery sat back with her coffee.

“Tell me a little about yourself, Mary. Veronica hints of dark secrets and exciting adventures in your life.”

I made a mental note to kick Veronica when next I saw her.

“Ronnie exaggerates. I had to be away for over a month in the middle of my second year at Oxford, on some rather distasteful family business, and when I didn’t talk about it later, rumours started.” The truth was considerably more complex and deadly than that, but so far I had kept my name from the newspapers. “Then a couple of months later I was injured in an accident, and that seems to have changed the rumours to fact. You know how it works. The truth is, I’m just a student. Not an ordinary Oxford student, perhaps, but a student nonetheless. My mother was English, father American, both dead. A house in Sussex, a few friends in London, and an interest in feminism and theology.”

“A long standing interest. Tell me honestly, Mary: What do you think of what you’ve seen and heard?”

I started to give her a polite answer, then saw in her eyes that this was no light conversation on her part, but a very serious question. I put down my cup and frowned at it for a minute, putting together a response that was honest but not too revealing. She waited, and then I picked up the exquisite hand-spun glass that had held my wine.

“About ten years after the crucifixion of Jesus,” I began, “there was born a Jew named Akiva. He was a simple man, a goatherd who didn’t even learn to read until he was a grown man, yet he became one of Judaism’s greatest rabbis. Akiva, like Jesus, taught best in brief epigrams and barbed stories. He also, incidentally, brought in a number of reforms regarding the status of women, but that is beside the point. I shall answer your question with one of his remarks. ‘Poverty,’ he said, ‘is as becoming to the daughter of Israel as a red strap against the neck of a white horse.’ ” I put the costly glass down on the gleaming linen tablecloth and ate the last of my tiny, intense berries.

“You don’t approve of wealth,” she said.

“I’m not a socialist.”

“In the Temple, then.”

“I speak of the aesthetic beauty of poverty; you take it as a personal criticism.”

“You feel uneasy,” she decided, “at the misuse of funds. I do understand. Were it strictly up to me, I would take the gifts given me and feed my sisters. However, there is Biblical precedent for using the expensive oil rather than selling it, as Judas would have wished.”

“Using it as an ointment to prepare the body for burial,” I commented. “Not as a perfume for daily life. The parallel is faulty.” She studied me intently, puzzled and more than a bit angry.

“It is a difficult thing,” she said abruptly. “A certain amount of show and glitter is necessary, in order to be taken seriously by the sorts of people I believe we must reach. The image of ourselves as fanatics can only harm our cause. It is a balancing act—to walk proudly before men and humble one’s self before God. Power and luxury are great temptations, Mary. Humility, discipline, self-abnegation are the only ways to remain pure to the cause.”

Her words startled me, or rather, the way they were said. Margery Childe had seemed to me the soul of rational humanism, and although I had seen evidence of strong religious feelings, had heard Veronica’s account of this woman’s mystical trance, I had not been witness to such unbridled passion until now. For a brief and unsettling moment, her eyes gleamed with fervour and she sat forward as if to seize my shoulders; then it passed and she deflected an equally brief moment of confusion into reaching for the coffeepot and refilling our cups.

“You’ve touched on the topic for this evening, you know.”

“Have I?”

“Yes. Power, we call it, but as that sounds so very aggressive, I often present the idea as ‘eliminating powerlessness’ when I speak to outside groups. You’ll hear a great deal of energy, even anger, at our Saturday meetings. As I said to you the other night, the Vote is acting as a great deceiver, fooling women into thinking that the powers we took over for the duration of the War remain in our hands. In truth, the rights of women to own property, decide what their children will do, divorce themselves from a cruel or demeaning marriage, and a thousand other human rights held predominantly by males have developed little since the last century. We aim to see that changed. The suffrage movement is in disarray, aimless, splintered; I believe that we in the Temple can step in and pull the pieces together again.”

“Through legislation?”

“Supporting proposed changes, yes, through educating voters and convincing members of Parliament. But we need women in Parliament—many women.”

“You propose to stand for election yourself, then?”

“A seat is coming available in north London within the next two years. I have my eye on it, yes.” Something in my manner must have communicated my doubts. “You seem dubious.”

“I think you may be underestimating the misgivings the voting public will have with the idea of a ‘lady minister’ standing for office. In America, you might get away with it, but here?”