Mistress Suffragette

by Diana Forbes

  The ride home was languorous. Sunset splashed splinters of pink and orange across the sky, and then purple darkness fell. He told me with every breath how much he loved me—exclusively, steadfastly, and more than any other woman. Somewhere, young lovers with nothing to hide were kissing openly under tonight’s silvery full moon.

  The weather was perfect: not too breezy, not too humid. Inside this carriage, in our little corner of serenity, I felt like the world’s most pampered mistress. He was quite generous with his love, and I anticipated that he would feed it to me for years, along with wine and caviar.

  “It took longer than I’d hoped, but I arranged for those sailors to be buried at Cedar Grove,” he said, handing me a perfect long-stemmed daisy. “I went to check their graves, and all is in order. If you’d like, we can go visit their gravestones one day.”

  I closed my eyes, feeling lightheaded, giddy. He was a man who kept his word, and that was something. I only wished he’d leave his wife as he’d once promised.

  But she was ever-present. And once the carriage turned off of Fifth Avenue, down Union Square, and past Tiffany & Company, he said, “Oh, by the way, darling, a small inconvenience. A trifle, really. Mrs. Daggers wants you to come over Thursday night for dinner.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, darling. As you’re my mistress now, I believe she wants to become friendlier with you. She’s positively French about these things.”

  “That’s a pity. I’m not.”

  “But you teach French, so at least you understand.”

  I banged my hand against the velvet seat cushion. “I don’t want to become friends with her. Ever.”

  Some French kings had mistresses they paraded out in the open; but Mr. Daggers was a businessman, and this was America.

  He reached under my dress to squeeze my calf. Chills shot up to my thigh. Then, just as I recovered from the naughtiness of it, he did it again. I felt luscious, like an overripe pear that needed to be plucked.

  “Penelope, don’t you see? It’s better if she approves of you. It means we can go out together all the time, just like tonight.” Under my dress, he softly stroked my thigh, which quivered at his tender touch. His lips grazed my neck. “I’ll take you to restaurants, the theater, the opera, everything.”

  I wanted him to take me right there in the carriage. I was in love with him. I felt safe. I wanted him to reward me with endless kisses.

  Tenderly he blew the hair away from my face. “We can squirrel away to Tuxedo Park when she’s in Manhattan.” He nibbled my ear. “We can travel to Europe. We’ll be free of her censure.”

  Censure? I thought back to the three of us riding together on the cliffs. Did she disapprove of me? And what had she thought about his other liaisons?

  I pulled away from his kisses. “Does she approve of Mrs. Streuthers, too, then?”

  His face, just inches from mine, turned magenta. His features twisted into caricature. Abruptly, he removed his hand from my leg, pushed me to the side, and cuffed me on the right shoulder—hard.

  Would a bruise would form where he’d hit me?

  I suffered the cold shoulder of his scorn as he refused to face me for the next ten blocks downtown. I righted my dress over my thighs and awkwardly sat up, biting my lip hard to stop from crying. I hid behind my hair, wanting to take back the words that had made him so angry. But I couldn’t. If he became so enraged when I mentioned Mrs. Streuthers, had he really ended it with her? Or with the others?

  Would a man who’d cheat on his wife and lie to her hesitate to cheat on his mistress?

  At long length, he broke the chilly silence. “The dalliance with Mrs. Streuthers, such as it was, is over. I told you that you’re the only ‘other woman’ now. Stop bothering with her. So, will you come?”

  “No.” I massaged my shoulder and tried to hold back my tears.

  “Capital.” He turned to me and crossed his arms. “I’ll expect you at 7 p.m. sharp.”

  Who did he think he was? A king?

  “And you hurt my shoulder,” I said. “You’re too angry for me.”

  He tapped his index finger against his lip, possibly bewildered that his violent behavior could make me cry. His face crumpled. “Oh, darling, I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry,” he said. “I love you. Please, please forgive me, my love.” He removed a handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed away my tears. “Here, here, let me kiss it.”

  Still crying, I turned my injured shoulder to him.

  He gently rubbed my shoulder. “Is it okay, then?” he asked, showering it with kisses.

  It was. I just wasn’t sure about the rest of me.

  Wednesday, September 20, 1893

  Amy Van Buren gripped my right elbow and herded me away from the thirty women in her salon. Her tight grasp sent a shock all the way up my arm to my shoulder. That shoulder, already weakened from my bicycle spill, still ached from the bruise that Mr. Daggers had planted. Wincing from the stab of new pain, I moved out of her grasp.

  “Take a walk with me, dear,” she ordered with a tight frown. “Let’s retire to the atrium.”

  We mounted a long, marble staircase, then walked through a narrow, over-lit hallway, and stepped through a small door outside to a charming patio. She crossed over to another building, painted lime green, which looked to be a greenhouse. Opening the creaking metal door, she motioned me inside to an earthy, humid cigar-box of a room that smelled like mowed grass.

  Metal shelves teemed with pots of exotic flowers. There were Venus flytraps and tiger lilies and something labeled African daisies, which were gigantic petaled flowers vaguely resembling the American oxeye, but in an array of garish colors such as bright pink.

  “I had no idea you enjoyed gardening,” I said, awestruck. I glanced at the topmost shelves, which housed boxes of seedlings that were starting to sprout. But looking up also hurt: I massaged my shoulder again.

  Amy plucked an orange African daisy off its stem and stuck it in her broad white hat. “Now it’s a garden hat,” she said, chuckling at her own joke.

  A bee buzzed near the flower in her hat.

  “Thank you for showing me your secret garden, Amy. It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s not secret. However I rarely talk about it. Unlike your affair with Mr. Daggers, which is the talk of the town.”

  I cringed, which made my shoulder smart. I rubbed it. “What do you mean?” No one from the Movement could have seen us. It just wasn’t possible. “Who’s talking about it?”

  “Everyone.” Her dark eyes rolled. “If you want a future with our cause, you must stop these shenanigans. How can you possibly be a role model for the independent woman and his mistress at the same time?”

  The bee flew on her arm. She absently petted it with the index finger of her opposite hand. She petted the bee again. Was it tame?

  “Really, Edgar Daggers kissed you in public. In his carriage.” She stared out the window at one of her home’s many turrets. “That’s like a declaration to the 400.” She turned around and faced me, her nostrils pinched together as if warding off a noxious fume. “Once the newspapers get a hold of this, they’ll have a field day.” She curled her index finger and beckoned. “Come here,” she said.

  I approached.

  “No, closer.”

  The phrase was eerily familiar, and I grimly recalled my dream about Mr. Daggers in the stable. No, closer, he’d commanded. And didn’t I always obey both of them? I walked toward her until I was standing just in front of her.

  She reached out her small hand and grasped my injured shoulder in her palm. Then she pinched my shoulder hard. I screamed out in pain.

  “Did he hit you?” she asked.

  I moved out of her powerful grasp as my left hand flew up to comfort my shoulder.

  “I repeat, did Edgar Daggers hit you?”

  Her face was just inches from mine, and her eyebrows appeared darker and more arched than usual. “Don’t be stoical,” she snapped. “Now, listen to me. No gentleman hi
ts a lady. This sordid…” Her lips quivered as she seemed to struggle to put a word to it, “liaison…” She waved her hand at me, “…must end.”

  I hesitated. To admit what he’d done aloud almost felt like I was betraying him. And though he’d betrayed me, he’d also loved me in a way that no man had, including my father. Mr. Daggers was a violent man, but I still craved the validation of his love.

  Amy refused to take my silence for an answer. She was like a bloodhound in the body of a magistrate.

  “Did he ever offer you anything to become his mistress?” she asked, sizing me up with her eyes. “An apartment perhaps? Or an allowance?”

  I thought back to the day he’d tried to accost me on the cliffs and straightened my spine.

  “Yes, Amy. He offered me both, but I didn’t accept anything.” I glanced around the atrium at all the exotic flora that I’d never be able to afford. Bees buzzed about everywhere. “Verdana and I live down on crowded Orchard Street, but there’s no shame in being poor. I never accepted anything from him but a daisy.”

  Staring at some white daisies in a vase near a window, Amy marched over to inspect them. She sniffed one, filling her lungs with its scent. Then she tore the flower from its stem and handed it to me.

  “Here,” she said.

  I threaded it through my buttonhole, recalling how the first daisy he’d given me had gone behind my ear. I nodded my thanks, which made my shoulder pinch. But I would not allow her the satisfaction of watching me rub it again.

  “Don’t you feel sympathy for his wife?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “What if you were her?”

  I remembered Evelyn laughing at her husband’s bee allergy.

  “I thought their marriage was troubled. I suppose I always thought he’d leave her.”

  “If I had a dollar for every married man who promised he’d leave his wife…” she said, glancing at her lush atrium, “I’d be a Van Buren.”

  She laughed loudly.

  “But…” Her face assumed a serious cast. “He’ll leave you before he ever leaves her. He leaves all his mistresses after a short time. And then you’ll carry the extra burden of a sullied reputation. If not a great deal more,” she said, patting my stomach in the same way that he had when he spoke of our future together. “I wonder how many little Daggers children are running around. I mean, the illegitimate ones.”

  I considered the building he’d donated to the home for unwed mothers and stared down at the ground. My reputation would be destroyed, and I would never be able to hold my head high again Then I lifted my head and looked at Amy. I wondered whether she was happy being the wife of her own well-known philanderer and whether that misery informed some of this conversation. Could a philanderer ever be tamed? I glanced at her unsmiling lips upholding their grim, moral line. No, I supposed not.

  Amy absently scratched her earlobe where an emerald teardrop earring sparkled. “We can’t have a scandal like this tainting the Movement,” she said.

  I sighed. Honest to God, I wanted him right there in the greenhouse under the sweating African daisies. Yet I knew she was right. It was as if the rational side of me was fighting with the irrational. The Rational Dress Movement wanted me to give up Mr. Daggers. Why did I have to behave so irrationally about it?

  “I promise to excise him gradually.”

  Amy cast me with a beady eye. “Tumors are best cut out immediately. You’re not afraid of him, are you?”

  My shoulder screamed, and I rubbed it again, annoyed for having to soothe it in front of her. “No,” I said sulkily, remembering how he’d once saved me from Stone Aldrich.

  She adjusted her hat. “Because if you are, you can borrow my gun. Or my army of footmen. Or both, if you’d like.”

  “I’d rather borrow one of those,” I said, pointing to the bee swarm around her plants.

  “A bee?”

  “Yes. What would it take to keep a few of them alive for twenty-four hours?” I asked.

  Amy approached a tray on the windowsill that held some tea ingredients. There stood a Mason jar filled with honey along with a second Mason jar that held sugar cubes. She carried the jar of sugar over to one of the sinks and partially filled the glass with warm water until the cubes dissolved. Then she walked the Mason jar over to the exotic flora and simply waited until five bees flew inside. Carefully she placed the cork lid on top and handed me the jar.

  “Bees only sting people who are scared of them,” she said. “I remember Edgar Daggers once saying he was terrified of my lovely pets.” She tapped the glass at the trapped bees as if they were her personal pets.

  “You know that I probably won’t be able to return them, right?” I said.

  Chapter 36

  The Dastardly Mr. Daggers

  Thursday, September 21, 1893

  Cradling the Mason jar in the crook of my left elbow, I marched down Millionaire’s Row to his home on 10th street. He’d never leave his wife. And even if he did, he shouldn’t have cuffed me. I should have been speaking out against men like him, not encouraging them. I thought of the many times he had offered to help me get speeches. I should not have let him help me—even once. When I reached his door, I adjusted my pink shawl to completely hide the jar. I caught sight of my distorted reflection in his brass door knocker. I was neither the woman nor the public speaker I wanted to be. I rapped three times on the white door.

  My life had taken a horrible turn somewhere, but there was still time to make things right. He had revealed himself to me in Newport. He was violent. In spite of that I had given him another chance—he’d not get another one. I knocked again, louder this time. The door knocker reflection looked like an image from a funhouse mirror. My eyes bulged; my cheeks appeared hollow.

  No one answered, and I reached for the brass knob. Magically, the door opened at my touch. I poked my head inside and let myself in. I called out to him several times. Then, seeing neither him nor Mrs. Daggers, I navigated my way up a gigantic staircase, which led directly from the foyer to the first floor. I stepped inside the parlor, a pale yellow room with hundreds of leather-bound books and a pink marble fireplace.

  This was exactly how I’d decorate this room were I married to him. Maybe I had more in common with his wife than I had previously supposed.

  Had he hit her, too?

  I noticed a lovely portrait of her over the mantel. Her delicate features, prominent cheekbones, and shimmering complexion seemed to be lit from a source under her skin. Like all good portraits, her eyes followed me as I walked from one side of the room to the other. Her eyes were dark, knowing, kind. Why had she linked her fate to his? She shouldn’t have put up with him, and neither should I.

  The eyes in the painting seemed to flicker. And suddenly I wanted to leave. Coming here had been a terrible idea.

  “Hallo there,” a young voice said from behind me.

  I spun around to see a parlor maid, just about my age. She was pretty and little with an elfin face, wispy blonde hair, and eyes the same hue as charred wood.

  “I’ll let him know Miss Fitzgerald’s here,” she said.

  “No. It’s Miss Stanton.”

  She chuckled, and hit her head with the palm of her hand. “Oh, silly me! Miss Fitzgerald was here yesterday.”

  Who in the hell was Miss Fitzgerald?

  “Ask him to meet me here,” I said, edging toward one of the yellow walls. This seemed like a safe place to end the liaison.

  “No. He wants you upstairs. He was quite insistent,” she offered with a smirk.

  She was just about the most insolent parlor maid I’d ever met. Turning to glance at her reflection in a small gilded mirror that hung near the doorway, she pursed her lips and fluffed her pale hair.

  She glanced at me over her shoulder. “It’s two flights up,” she said, pointing up the stairs. “You can see yourself up.”

  “I’m not going up there alone,” I said. “Please take me, will you?”

  She nodded. We lifted our
long skirts and proceeded to mount the narrow, carpeted stairway. Once we reached the top of the first flight, she turned around.

  “He’s quite the stallion,” she said under her breath. She put her index finger to her lips as if asking me to keep a secret.

  “What?” I asked sharply.

  “He’s quite the man about town,” she said with a wink. “Did you hear about his home for unwed mothers, now? Impressive.”

  I clenched my jaw, pointing to the staircase so we could continue up the final flight. When we reached the landing, a dark-haired parlor maid darted out of one of the doors and ran up the stairs without a glance at us. We entered the room she’d left. It was so dark that it took my eyes several moments to adjust.

  “Your 7 p.m. appointment,” my elfin escort said with a flirty curtsy at Mr. Daggers. The corners of his lips turned up at her.

  In an emerald room sat three mahogany colored leather couches arranged in a “u” shape around a dark wood table. Shelves, floor to ceiling, teemed with books. Mr. Daggers lounged on the middle couch wearing a purple silk smoking jacket. His hair was pomaded; and his dark eyes looked bright, the way they did after a drink or two. It was obvious that he’d taken some trouble to arrange the room for me. Six vases of daisies, our special flowers, brightened the dark corners, and playing on the gramophone was the perennial favorite: Handel’s soulful “Love’s But the Frailty of the Mind.” A sweet brandy smell perfumed the air.

  “Leave us,” he directed the young woman who’d escorted me upstairs, and she did.

  I sat down on the couch closest to the door, struggling to adjust my eyes to the dim light.

  “Is your wife here?” I asked, glancing over at the pretty flowers, clearly just cut, bursting with freshness. Fulfilling Amy’s request was going to be harder than I thought.

  He stood up and closed the door, locking it. While his back was turned to me, I extracted the Mason jar from the folds of my shawl and quickly hid the jar behind a Tiffany lamp.