A Mad, Wicked Folly (32 page)

IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON
by the time I arrived at Lucy’s
flat in Clement’s Inn. I knocked on the door, and after a
moment the door opened and Lucy stood there.

UCY’S FLAT WAS
bigger than Will’s, with two
rooms instead of one. But unlike Will’s, hers were
gloomy and dark inside, though she had done
much to brighten them, gracing them with the
beauty of an artist. Two overstuffed upholstered chairs

faced a little coal fire, and a table filled with jars of paste
stones, beads, metalwork, and tools sat under a window.
A large iron bedstead covered with a colorful patchwork
quilt filled one corner. One of Alphonse Mucha’s advertisements hung on the wall over the bed. It was a drawing of
a woman sitting on a bicycle, a laurel branch in her hand.
Over her stretched the words

Lucy had given me a section of her wardrobe for my
things and cleared a little space on her dressing table in
her tiny lavatory. She had a flush toilet and a wash-hand
basin, but like Will, Lucy bathed at the public baths.

Things were difficult at first, and I fear I tried Lucy’s
patience. I didn’t mean to, but unused to doing for myself,
I simply left my clothing in a pile on the floor, expecting it
to be laundered in the morning. By whom, I did not know.
“Enchanted mice?” Lucy suggested once. After meals I got
up from the table and left the dishes behind. Of course,
when Lucy pointed it out, I dealt with the mess, but she
always had to ask.

Finally, fed up with me, Lucy took things into her own
hands. One day I found my breakfast dishes stored in my
bureau drawer. Egg yolk and marmalade had dripped onto
my chemises. Lucy calmly explained what I would have to
do to get the stains out. I had never considered what work
a stain could create. It was an entire ordeal. I had to rub the
soiled marks with butter and then let the garments sit in
ammonia and washing soda. Once the stains had faded, I
took them to the City of London Municipal Bath and Wash
House and waited in line to use the boiler and mangle. I
hung my damp wash on a clothesline strung across the
rooftop garden and then pressed the garments with an iron
heated up in the coal fireplace. I never forgot to wash my
dishes again.

Once a week we bathed at the wash house. Despite the
noise and bluster, it was tolerable enough. The building
was clean and tidy, with wrought iron columns and greenand-yellow tiles on the floors and walls. To save money,
Lucy brought soap so we wouldn’t have to purchase a tablet. Still, we each had to pay a tuppence for the bath and
another penny to hire a small towel. Each little slipper tub
was behind its own curtain, and one could change in a private cubicle beforehand. There was plenty of hot water,
and the towel was clean.

But once again, I behaved like a toff. I sat on the little
stool by the tub and waited for someone to come and draw
the bath. When no one appeared, after waiting a quarter
of an hour, I poked my head around the curtain into Lucy’s
cubicle and asked when the maid would come in. I think at
that moment Lucy wanted to drown me in her bath.

Through all of this, my thoughts flitted briefly to the
comforts of home, but I turned them back firmly toward
the present. After all, I needed to learn to do for myself if I
wished to be independent.

Lucy was as patient as she could be. She helped me
find a shop to sell my grandmother’s jewelry. The trinkets
weren’t the crown jewels, only oddments of old-fashioned
things that no one ever wore, but because she knew jewelry well, she made the clerk give me a decent sum. Lucy
and I joined together to make jewelry to sell to the local
department stores, and Mr. Pethick-Lawrence gave me a
job working at WSPU headquarters. I illustrated articles
for
Votes for Women
, answered telephones, and performed
other assorted duties three days a week. In all, everything
added up to enough money to help Lucy with the rent and
food.

A week after I’d left home, Lucy and I saw Sophie at
the headquarters sewing banners. She had found employment with a family in Park Lane. The mother was one of
the WSPU’s biggest supporters, so Sophie didn’t have to
hide her politics anymore. She was even given a paid day
off each week to help at headquarters.

I told Sophie all about what had happened when I went
into the RCA. “If I’m to get a scholarship next year, I need
to do what the female winner did,” I told her. “I need to be
published and to enter some sort of contest.”

“What about PC Fletcher?” Lucy asked. “Why not see if
the two of you can get your novelette idea off the ground?
Votes for Women
is all well and good, but I don’t know how
much sway it will have with the old establishment at the
RCA. Remember how they felt about Sylvia Pankhurst. No
sense putting their backs up if you don’t have to.”

“PC Fletcher and I are not a partnership anymore. We
haven’t been for a long time; I told you that before.”
“Yes, I know,” Lucy said. “But that was when you were
engaged. You aren’t engaged now, so what’s to stop you?”
“You love him; you know you do!” Sophie said. “Every
time you were with him you’d come home smiling.
Whenever you were with your fiancé you were so serious.”
Before I left home, I would have lied about my feelings
for Will. I had only ever admitted them to myself. But now,
hearing Sophie say
you love him
made a little thrill of happiness shoot through me. “But Will doesn’t feel the same
way about me.”
“I’m sure he does!” Sophie insisted.
“Well, if he did, then he doesn’t anymore,” I said. “The
last time we talked, he didn’t want anything to do with me.
After the RCA exam he came to see me, and I told him I
was engaged. I tried to explain, but he didn’t want to hear.
You should have seen the look on his face, as if he loathed
me.”
“Are we talking about PC William Fletcher, the knight
in shining armor, who helped us all the time, risking the
wrath of a lot of police constables?” Lucy said. “Vicky, I
never thought you were dumb, but sheesh.”
“What are you going on about, Lucy?” I said. I was growing impatient with both her and Sophie. It was enough for
me to be rejected once by Will. If I heard him talk to me in
that formal voice again, I didn’t think I could bear it.
“You told him you were engaged!” Lucy said,
exasperated.
“As a servant living in an upper-class household, I can
see why he acted like he did,” Sophie put in. “He thought
there was more between you, and then he realized he
really had no right to love you. And as Lucy said, he’s a
gentleman through and through. He backed away.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You never thought of that, did you?” Lucy said.
“It’s probably too late, anyhow,” I said, feeling hopeful
despite my words. “It’s been ages since I’ve talked to him.
Not since July.”
“At least go to him to see if you can work together again.
You need a publishing credit for your portfolio.”
“I suppose I could write to him.”
“No!” both Sophie and Lucy shouted.
“You know where he lives, so go there,” Sophie urged.
“I know one thing.” Lucy picked up a box of leaflets. “If
I had a chance with a guy like PC Fletcher, I’d grab hold of
him and cling on until he cried uncle. No foolin’.”
I looked at Sophie. She shrugged. “I’ve seen him. I have
to agree with Lucy.”
It took me several days to get up the nerve to go, but
finally I took the Underground to Praed Street and walked to
Will’s flat. When I arrived, I knocked on the door, but no one
answered. After a moment, the door across the hall opened,
and an elderly man with a walking stick stepped out.
“Are you looking for the police constable?” he said.
“I am. Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“He’s gone. He’s moved away.”
I felt myself grow cold. “When?” I whispered.
The man leaned on his stick. “Now, let’s see. A month
ago, I suppose.”
“Do you know where he went?”
He shook his head slowly. “No, I’m sorry, miss. I don’t
know.”
Everywhere I went, I looked for Will, but I never saw
him. I even went to Cannon Row Police Station, but they
wouldn’t give me any information about him, and eyed
me suspiciously when I asked. I sat down several times to
write a letter to him care of his parents in Rye, but I didn’t
know what to say.
I wrote my parents and Freddy letters from time to
time, letting them know I was well. My parents never
replied, but I knew that was my father’s doing. I knew he
could never forgive me for what I had done. I was sure he’d
renounced all attachments to me. I knew my mother had
to do as my father commanded, because she wouldn’t dare
otherwise, but I didn’t blame her anymore. She didn’t know
how to be any other way. But still, for all of our arguing, I
found I missed my mother. And if I were honest, I found I
missed my father too.
Freddy wrote to me and told me that Papa had returned
to the Reform Club, and that little by little his compatriots
began to speak to him again. I received a letter from Freddy
on my would-be wedding day, telling me that Edmund had
become engaged to Georgette Plimpton, Mrs. Plimpton’s
crushingly boring daughter. But for all my opinions of Miss
Plimpton, I hoped that Edmund would be happy with her,
and she with him.

ONE DAY IN
late September, Sophie, Lucy, and I were on
our way home from a WSPU poster parade when we saw
a crowd bustling around a newsagent. Several men in the
crowd were laughing and saying something about how the
women finally got what was coming to them.

We pushed through the crowd to see Clara, one of the
mural artists. She was holding a copy of
The Daily Bugle
,
her face grim.

Clara passed me the paper; her finger marked a story
just above the fold on the front page. Lucy and Sophie
leaned over my shoulder.

Suffragettes Undergo
Hospital Treatment
in Winson Gaol

Home Secretary spokesman, Mr. G.
Masterman, confirms the prison in
Birmingham has resorted to the “hospital
treatment” of feeding hunger-striking suffragette prisoners Laura Ainsworth, Charlotte
Marsh, and Mary Leigh by way of the stomach
pump.

Keir Hardie was the solitary voice against
such practice. Many MPs in the House of
Commons found the situation amusing and
laughed when Mr. Hardie touted the dangers of
force-feeding, stating that the last person who
had received such treatment had died the next
day. “I could not have believed that a body of
gentlemen could have found reason for mirth and
applause in a scene which had no parallel in the
recent history of our country,” Mr. Hardie said.

One Mr. C. Mansell-Moullin, MD, said, “As
a hospital surgeon of thirty years’ standing, I
indignantly repudiate the use of the term ‘hospital treatment.’ It is a foul libel. Violence and
brutality have no place in hospitals, as Mr.
Masterman ought to know.”

Mr. Masterman declared the government was
within its rights to force-feed the women because
they were weak-minded.

“As if they were inmates in an insane asylum!” Sophie
said. I could feel her behind me shifting from foot to foot,
beside herself with rage.

“It’s front-page news.” Clara gestured to the newsagent’s
window. Nearly every paper there had the story blazoned
across the front page. “But not all the papers are on our side.
Most of them are on the government’s side. Several doctors
have come out saying it isn’t at all what the suffragettes
are making it out to be. Have a look.” She unfolded another
broadsheet and pointed to the article.

The story was illustrated with a photograph of a
woman neatly dressed in prison garb, sitting calmly in
a chair while a smiling doctor held a tube to her mouth.
The woman gazed up at him, a grateful look on her face,
as though she hadn’t the sense in her addlepated brain to
work out the right thing to do until the doctor pitched up
with his hosepipe.

I looked up from the paper. “Is this what force-feeding
is like?”
“That’s staged,” Lucy said. “That woman is no one
Birmingham headquarters knows. But there’re many people in this country who’ll think that’s real.” She made a
noise of frustration. “It’s gruesome, that force-feeding.
Mr. Pethick-Lawrence received a telephone call from the
WSPU branch in Birmingham this morning. A sympathetic
wardress called to report what had happened. Four prison
wardresses hold the women down; a doctor wrenches their
mouth open with some sort of metal gag and then shoves a
tube down it. He pours raw eggs and Benger’s Food down
the tube with a funnel. The wardress said she was resigning because she couldn’t bear to be part of it. Said it was
torture.”
I felt nauseated thinking of having a tube pushed into
my stomach. I could almost feel the rubber brushing down
my own throat. My stomach roiled, and I swallowed hard
to keep from retching.
“I’m not sure I understand the hunger-striking, Lucy.” I
asked, “Why do you do it?”
“When we did it after the deputation in June, it was
because we were denied the rights of political prisoners.
Hunger-striking is protest, pure and simple. But now, with
this barbaric force-feeding, this is war. The women’s suffering will boost determination and encourage many women
who wouldn’t otherwise do so to stand up and take part.”
“Only if they know the truth!” I said. “This photo certainly won’t encourage anyone.”
Later, at WSPU headquarters, I drew an illustration for
Votes for Women
bringing the horror of force-feeding to life
on the page. I sketched a woman captive in a chair, held
there by four wardresses while a man forced her head back
and another poured liquid through a gruesome tube trailing
into her mouth, wrenched open with a gag. At the top of the
page I wrote in block letters:

I had once thought that I could only express myself
through a sketch or a painting, but now I knew that was
not true. I could express my beliefs in many ways, be it
an illustration, a cartoon, or even a chalk drawing on the
pavement, if I was so inclined. With every stroke of my
pencil, I felt more and more inspired and triumphant. So
instead of my real name, I signed the drawing:
Victorious.