Bethlehem Road (4 page)

Now Charlotte sat in the back row of a crowded meeting hall and watched the first speaker, a stout young woman with a strong, blunt face and red hands, as she got to her feet and the muttering gradually fell to silence.

“Sisters!” The word stuck oddly on such a mixed company. In front of Charlotte a well-dressed woman in green silk hunched her shoulders a little, withdrawing from the touch and the association of those she was forced to be so close to. “We’re all ’ere for the same reason!” the young woman on the platform continued, her voice rich, and hardened with a strong northern accent. “We all believe as ’ow we should ’ave some say in the way our lives is run, wot laws is made an’ oo makes ’em! All kinds o’ men get a chance to choose their members o’ Parliament, an’ if ’e wants to get elected, that Member ’as to answer to the people. ’Alf the people, sisters, just ’alf the people—the ’alf that’s men!”

She went on speaking for another ten minutes, and Charlotte only half listened. She had heard the arguments before, and in her mind they were already irrefutable. What she had come for was to see what support there was, and the kind of women who were prepared to come from conviction rather than curiosity. Gazing round at them as discreetly as she could, she saw that a large number were soberly dressed in browns and muted tones, and the cut of their coats and skirts were serviceable but not smart, designed to last through many changes of fashion. Several wore shawls pulled round their shoulders for warmth, not decoration. They were ordinary women whose husbands were clerks or tradesmen, struggling to make ends meet, perhaps striving after a little gentility, perhaps not.

Here and there were a few who were smarter; some young with a touch of elegance, others matronly, ample bosoms draped with furs and beads, hats sprouting feathers.

But it was their faces that interested Charlotte most, the fleeting expressions chasing across them as they listened to the ideas that almost all society found revolutionary, unnatural, and either ridiculous or dangerous, depending on their perception of any real change awakening from them.

In some she saw interest, even the glimmer of belief. In others there was confusion: the thought was too big to accept, required too great a break with the inbred teaching of mother and grandmother, a way of life not always comfortable but whose hardships were at least familiar. In some there was already derision and dislike, and the fear of change.

One face held Charlotte’s attention particularly, round and yet delicately boned, intelligent, curious, very feminine, and with a strong, stubborn jaw. It was the expression which drew Charlotte, a mixture of wonder and doubt, as though new thoughts were entering the woman’s mind and enormous questions arose out of them instantly. Her eyes were intent on the speaker, afraid lest she lose a word. She seemed oblivious of the women packed close to her; indeed, when one jostled against her and a feather from a rakish hat brushed her cheek she did no more than blink without turning to see who the offender might be.

With the third speaker, a thin, overearnest woman of indeterminate age, the hecklers began. Their voices were still moderately good-natured, but their questions were sharp.

“Yer sayin’ as women knows as much abaht business as men? That don’t say much fer yer man, then, do it?”

“That is if yer ’as one!” There was a roar of laughter, half raucous, half pitying: a single woman was in most eyes a sad object, a creature who had failed in her prime objective.

The woman on the platform winced so very slightly that it might even have been Charlotte’s imagination. She was used to this particular taunt and had grown to expect it.

“You have one?” she flung back with certainty blazing in her face. “And children, do you?”

“Sure I ’ave! Ten of ’em!”

There were more shouts of laughter.

“Do you have a maid, and a cook, and other servants?” the woman on the platform asked.

“Course I don’t! Wotcher think I am? I ’ave one girl as scrubs.”

“Then you manage the household yourself?”

There was silence, and Charlotte glanced at the woman with the remarkable face and saw that already she understood what the speaker was intending. Her face was keen with appreciation.

“Course I do!”

“Accounts, budgeting, the purchase of clothes, the use of fuel, the discipline of your ten children? Seems to me you know a great deal about business—and people. I daresay you are a pretty good judge of character too. You know when you are being lied to, when someone is trying to give you short change or sell you shoddy goods, don’t you?”

“Yeah ...” the woman agreed slowly. She was not yet ready to concede, not in front of so many. “Don’t mean I know ’ow ter run a country!”

“Does your husband? Could he run a country? Could he even run your house?”

“Isn’t the same!”

“Does he have a vote?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Isn’t your judgment as good as his?”

“My dear good woman!” another voice burst in, rich and piled with scorn, and heads turned towards the wearer of a plum-colored hat. “You may be very proficient at buying enough potatoes to feed your family and assessing the cost any given week; I don’t doubt you are. But that is hardly on the same level as choosing a Prime Minister!”

There were giggles of stifled mirth, and someone called out, “Hear, hear,” in agreement.

“Our place is in the home,” the woman with the plum hat continued, gathering momentum. “Domestic duties are among our natural gifts, and as mothers, of course we know how to discipline our children—such instincts awake in us when we bear our young. It is God’s order of the world. But our judgments on matters of high finance, foreign affairs, and concerns of state are utterly hopeless. Neither nature nor the Lord designed us to meddle in such things, and we rob ourselves and our daughters of our proper place, and the respect and protection due us from men, if we try to go contrary to it!”

There were more murmurs of approval, and a sprinkling of tentative applause.

The woman on the platform was exasperated at the irrelevance of the argument. There were spots of color high on her thin cheeks. “I am not suggesting you become a Minister of State!” she said sharply. “Only that you have as much right as your butler or your poulterer has to choose who shall represent you in the Parliament of your country! And that your judgment of character is probably just as competent as theirs!”

“Oh! You impertinent creature!” The woman in plum was quite outraged; her face colored darkly and her rather heavy jowls shook as she raced through her mind for words scalding enough to satisfy the occasion.

“You are quite right!” Suddenly the woman who had drawn Charlotte’s attention broke the silence. Her voice was husky and pleasant; both her diction and her poise revealed she was of considerable breeding. “Women’s judgment of character is quite as good as men’s; on the whole, I think very often rather better. And that is all that is required to have a useful opinion as to who should represent one in Parliament!”

Everyone in the cramped hall swung round to look at her, and she blushed with slight self-consciousness, but it did not prevent her continuing.

“We are bound by the laws; I think it is only proper that we should have some say as to what they shall be. I—”

“You are quite wrong, madame!” A deeper voice cut across her, the rich contralto of a very large woman with jet beads across her bosom and a fine mourning brooch on her lapel. “The law, framed by men whom you so despise, is our finest protection! As a woman you are guarded by your husband, or should you be single, your father; he provides for your needs both spiritual and temporal; he exercises his wisdom to gain what is best for you, without the least exertion on your part; he undertakes your well-being; should you transgress or fall into debt, it is he, not you, who answers the magistrates and must satisfy your creditors. It is only just that he should also frame the laws, or elect those who do!”

“Stuff and nonsense!” Charlotte said loudly. She could contain herself no longer. “If my husband falls into debt, I shall be just as hungry as he is; if I commit a crime, the general public may look down upon him, but it is assuredly I who shall go to prison, not he! And if I kill someone, it is I who will hang!”

There was a sharp collective intake of breath and a little hiss of surprise at such unnecessary coarseness of reference.

Charlotte was not deterred: she had intended to shock, and the feeling of success was quite exhilarating.

“I agree with Miss Wutherspoon—women’s judgment of character is easily as good as men’s. What could be more important in your life than who you marry? And upon what basis does a man choose, if left to himself?”

“A pretty face!” someone answered sourly.

Someone else gave a reply a good deal less refined, and raised a loud laugh.

“Beauty, charm, a winning way,” Charlotte answered her own question before the purpose of it was lost. “Often upon flattery, and the color of her eyes, or the way she has of laughing. A woman chooses a man who can provide for her and her children.” Here she winced at her duplicity, she who had chosen Pitt entirely because he intrigued her, charmed her, frightened her with his directness, made her laugh, fired her with his anger at injustice, and because she both loved and trusted him. The fact that he was socially and financially a disaster, and likely to remain so, had not weighed an ounce with her. But she knew unquestionably that most women had more sense. She sailed on regardless both of that, and of her earlier infatuation with her brother-in-law Dominic, for which she did blush, but it was lost under the high color of her zeal. The principle was right.

“Men may go on all manner of adventures and brave the result, come what may, but most women will look to the outcome of a thing, knowing that their children must eat and be clothed, that there must be a safe home for them not only today and tomorrow, but next year and ten years from now! Women are less reckless.” She thought of all the wise and brave women she had known, discounting the idiotic things she had done herself, and the risks both she and Emily had taken. “When all the shouting and the heroics are over, who is it that will tend the sick, bury the dead and start over? Women! Our opinions should count, our judgment of a man’s honesty and worth to represent us should weigh in the balance too.”

“You’re right!” Miss Wutherspoon cried from the platform. “You’re absolutely right! And if Members of Parliament had to account to women as well as men to get elected, there wouldn’t be the injustices there are now!”

“What injustices?” someone demanded. “What does a good woman need that she does not have?”

“No natural woman wants to expose herself to ridicule,” the woman in the plum-colored hat said loudly, her voice rising with increasing indignation, “by parading for people to accept or reject her, pleading with them to listen to her, choose her, believe in her opinions or trust her judgment in affairs she knows nothing about! Miss Taylor is a laughingstock, and far from being a friend to women, she is our worst enemy. Not even Dr. Pankhurst would be seen in public with her! Standing for Parliament, indeed! Next thing you know we’ll become harridans, like that miserable Ivory woman, who has abandoned all semblance of decency and restraint which is essential to a woman and all that is precious to society—indeed to civilization!”

There were several cries of approval and even louder hisses and expostulations of outrage. Some even demanded that the traitors to the cause should leave and go back to their nurseries, or whatever other confining place they usually inhabited.

A stout woman in bombazine raised an umbrella, unfortunately catching the ferrule of it in an elderly housemaid’s skirts. There was a hiccup and a shriek of alarm. The housemaid, thinking she was being assaulted for her abuse of the lady in the plum hat, whisked her handbag round and landed it soundly on the head of the woman in bombazine, and the resulting melee had very little to do with the exercise of privilege or responsibility, and even less to do with Parliament.

Having no wish to become involved in a brawl, Charlotte withdrew. She was only a few yards outside the hall via the rear exit when she saw the woman whose face had drawn her attention. She was standing quite close, unaware of Charlotte, her attention caught by a hansom drawn up at the curb. The woman had her back to Charlotte and was arguing fiercely with a slim, elegantly dressed man whose fair hair shone almost white in the sun. He was obviously extremely annoyed.

“My dear Parthenope, this is both unseemly, and to be frank, a trifle ridiculous. You are letting me down by even being seen in such a place, and I am distressed that you should not have realized it!”

Charlotte could not see the woman’s face, but her voice was thick with a confusion of emotions.

“I am tempted to make the obvious answer to excuse myself, Cuthbert, and say that no one there knew who I was. But that is irrelevant.”

“Indeed it is! The risk—”

But she cut him short. “I am not talking about the risk! What if I am known to care that women should be represented in Parliament?”

“Women are represented!” He was exasperated now, and there was a flash of impatience in his face. “You are excellently represented by the present members of the House! For heaven’s sake, we don’t legislate simply for ourselves! Who on earth have you been listening to? Have you seen that wretched Ivory woman again? I most specifically told you that I did not wish it! Why do you insist on disobeying me? The woman is a virago, a miserable, unbalanced creature who embodies everything that is most to be deplored in a woman.”

“No I have not seen her!” Parthenope’s voice was low, but it now held an intensity of anger. “I told you I would not, and I have not! But I shall not stop listening to what people have to say about women one day obtaining the franchise.”

“Then listen at home; read articles, if you must—although it will never happen. It is quite unnecessary and unsuitable. Women’s interests are very well cared for now, and all women with any sense are fully aware of it!”

“Indeed!” Her voice grew harder, and high with sarcasm. “Then I have little sense! Only that which is required to govern a household of eight servants, see to the accounting, maintain discipline and good order and fellowship, raise and teach and nurse my children, entertain our business and parliamentary friends and provide them with fine meals in charming surroundings, and always see that no one is offended, embarrassed, excluded, or paired with someone unsuitable, and to keep the conversation charming, witty but never offensive, and never, never boring! And naturally always to look beautiful while doing all of this! I am sure that does not make me competent to decide which of two or three candidates should represent me in Parliament!”