Eden Falls

by Sanderson, Jane

  ‘Soda fountain, you say?’ said Archie, still one topic behind.

  ‘Mmm.’ Thea pushed a piece of salmon around her plate. She looked up from the fish and at the duke, of whom she grew fonder each day – in direct proportion to her dislike of his wife. ‘You don’t have them here. Where I come from, you find them in drugstores. They’re fun. Delicious.’

  He nodded as she spoke, eagerly trying to decipher what she said. His hearing was letting him down, added to which Thea, with her American drawl and odd vocabulary, very often had him stumped. Currently, he was wondering what a drugstore was, and it irritated Clarissa to see him gazing like a milksop across the table, his pale blue eyes shining with a sort of baffled devotion.

  ‘Toby,’ she said, turning to her son in a determined manner. ‘I’d like you to speak to Henry. I fear she’s being exploited by those horrid people. She imagines herself indispensible to the cause, when in actual fact all they want from her is her money.’

  ‘I’d like to know where you got the idea she might listen to me,’ Tobias replied. He nodded at Padgett, who refilled his glass with some of the duke’s excellent hock.

  ‘Have you ever heard Henry speak?’ Thea, directing her question at Clarissa, knew the answer to it, but asked anyway.

  Clarissa said, ‘Well, of course not!’ and she smirked around the table, looking for someone to share her incredulity.

  ‘Then, with all due respect,’ said Thea, ‘I don’t think you’re qualified to pass judgement. Henry is magnificent on a podium. If anyone can shame Mr Asquith into making concessions, it’ll be her.’

  ‘I think I know my own daughter, thank you.’

  ‘And yet, I think you don’t, if you imagine she’d let anyone take her for a ride.’ She rose, suddenly and unexpectedly, and the footman stepped smartly forwards, reaching for her chair just a few seconds late.‘Will you all excuse me?’ she said. ‘I feel a little nauseous.’

  Thea trailed away and out of the door, seeming not so much ill as weary or, perhaps, bored. Tobias let his eyes follow her until she left the room. He didn’t seem particularly concerned, thought Isabella, but neither did he seem entirely indifferent. For a moment no one spoke, and then Clarissa said, ‘She’s terribly cold, I think, your wife.’

  Tobias gave a strange, secret smile, looking not at his mother but down into his glass of wine. Opposite him, Isabella felt the onset of tears. Her Season would be spoiled by this selfish family of hers, with its horrible, internal battles and stubborn preoccupations with private interests. She stood too, and her mother snapped out a brittle command to sit down.

  ‘I shan’t,’ Isabella said. ‘Why should I oblige, when everyone else is being perfectly beastly?’ And she exited the dining room, leaving the duke, the duchess and Tobias gazing gloomily at each other, like the last, unwelcome guests at a party, marooned together not by choice but by circumstance, long after the band has packed up and gone home.

  Chapter 18

  Just as the poached salmon was being served in the Duke of Plymouth’s gilded Park Lane dining room, Lady Henrietta Hoyland was being escorted by two constables from the foyer of the Women’s Exhibition to the lowlier confines of Sloane Street police station, where she was made to wait on a hard bench in a small holding cell for four hours before being released without charge. Someone had daubed a slogan on the wall of St Stephen’s Hall in the Houses of Parliament, and the trail had led to Henrietta on the flimsy pretext that the culprit had been glimpsed darting into a waiting motorcar after committing the outrage. The same person, it was presumed, had tied a jaunty ‘Votes for Women’ flag to the statue of William Pitt the Younger, whose stony expression only served to increase the poignancy of his helplessness. Instead of proclaiming her innocence, Henrietta had said as little as possible, leaving it to the police to work out that she had a copper-bottomed alibi, having been on the programmes and pamphlets stall at Prince’s Skating Rink in the company of Sylvia Pankhurst and Eva Gore-Booth from eight in the morning until the moment of glory when she was marched from the building. There was nothing quite so effective at lending weight to a cause than for one of the organisers to be wrongly accused in so public a manner.

  It wasn’t the first time Henrietta had been hauled away from a gathering by police officers, and it always amused her to see them struggle between duty and inclination. Taking her details at the station, she had given Fulton House, Belgravia and Netherwood Hall, Yorkshire as her places of residence, and the young constable had blushed furiously as he completed the formalities, then apologised as he showed her to the holding cell. Here was a titled lady, to whom he would doff his cap if their paths crossed on a Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park, and yet he had to log her presence in the book and lock the door on her, just as he had with every other sneak thief and chancer they’d collared in the course of the day. In deference to her class she was offered a cushion, which she declined with a cursory shake of the head.

  The truth was, every time she was apprehended it gave Henrietta a frisson of satisfaction and excitement: a sense that she was in the vanguard of the struggle, where ‘deeds, not words’ truly was the credo. As she sat on her bench, gazing at the obscenities and witticisms that others had left on the walls before her, she found herself wishing not for freedom but for sterner treatment: something that would propel her to the forefront of the campaign. She knew she would be released in due course, shown out of the station with all the courtesy at their disposal when the police realised their mistake. She knew, too, that this episode might be no more than a single lost paragraph in the papers – and perhaps not even that, if the actual St Stephen’s artist made herself known. Henrietta, in her darker moments, worried that what her sisters in the struggle valued most about her were her wealth and her title; Clarissa’s view, in fact, and a theory which, in the company of her mother, Henrietta would laugh off, but in the privacy of her own thoughts found harder to contradict.

  The problem was, she decided, in the Sloane Street cell, that she was too well bred to behave sufficiently badly. Christabel and Emmeline – though perhaps not Sylvia – could spit in the faces of policemen or strike them across the face with a clenched fist, and with such actions guarantee arrest and a good long spell behind bars. Henrietta couldn’t spit and she couldn’t hit, no more than she could hoist her skirts and dance the can-can in the street. Spitting, in particular, was out of the question. She considered it now, as an amiable young police constable led her out of the cell and back to the freedom of the Sloane Street sunshine. She looked at his pleasant face and considered spitting into it in order to be marched back whence she’d come, but though she knew what she was meant to do she simply couldn’t bring herself to do it. The very worst she could manage was to return neither his smile nor his farewell, and to rudely ignore his offer of a lift back to the Women’s Exhibition. She felt his eyes on her as she walked away; it was all she could do not to turn round and thank him for his kindness and hospitality. At that moment, she despised her impeccable manners: they threatened, she felt, to expose her.

  However, this dissatisfaction with the apparent limits of her militancy, while temporarily dispiriting, proved productive. Henrietta was, fundamentally, the sort of person who found solutions rather than problems, and her train of thought ran very naturally from the inherent difficulties of her aristocratic heritage to the inherent advantages of the same. At home in Netherwood, she reminded herself, she managed (to all intents and purposes) a twenty-five-thousand-acre estate with three collieries and the largest private house in England. The land agent, the bailiff, the butler, the housekeeper – all of them deferred to her when she was in residence, as indeed did her brother, the Earl of Netherwood, who would be the first to concede that Henrietta was much better equipped than he to grapple with the myriad practical matters that arose in the course of a single day at Netherwood Hall. Thus bolstered by her own stern talking-to, Henrietta slipped into a state of mind more conducive to decisive action: a practical, plan-hatching condition in
which she was able to think quite logically about how to progress. By the time she swept back through the doors of Prince’s Skating Rink she was so full of vim and vigour for the cause that she clambered immediately onto the trestle table – from which this morning she had merely been selling programmes – and issued a rousing, forthright and entirely unexpected call to arms. It was a brave thing to do, and very possibly foolhardy; there was every chance she might have looked foolish, if – say – she hadn’t managed to be heard above the hubbub. But as well as irreproachable good manners and a characteristically high complexion, Henrietta had also inherited the carrying voice of the true aristocrat, and she employed it now to exhort her fellow campaigners to take, once more, to the streets of London.

  ‘Let us present ourselves, en masse, at the House of Commons and demand of Mr Asquith our ancient and inviolable right to petition the king,’ she shouted. Beneath her, at floor level, Sylvia Pankhurst murmured, ‘Now, dear?’

  ‘The prime minister is accountable to the king,’ continued Henrietta, from her lofty platform. ‘And as such he is duty and honour bound to receive our deputation, and to hear our petition.’

  Christabel Pankhurst, torn between admiration at Henrietta’s initiative and her own irritation at this impromptu rallying cry, said to her sister, ‘I suppose we could. We’re all assembled, after all.’

  ‘If Mr Asquith refuses to hear us, if Mr Asquith sets the police on us as if we were common criminals, if Mr Asquith prevents us from deploying our right to petition the king, then it is he who will be guilty of illegality.’

  Henrietta was flushed with zeal, and her enthusiasm was catching. Someone tore down a banner and shouted ‘Votes for Women’; a cheer went up through the hall.

  ‘So,’ Henrietta said, still on the table. ‘Those of you who wish to force Mr Asquith’s hand, we shall march to the House of Commons in’ – she glanced down, now, at Christabel, who raised her eyebrows as if to say, ‘Now you consult me?’ so that Henrietta, to maintain the mood and momentum, had to look away again, and lay down her own terms – ‘in thirty minutes’ time. Ladies of the pipe and drum band’ – she waved at them, in their corner of the exhibition hall – ‘bring your instruments, and take us to Westminster on a tide of glory!’

  She clambered down, but the buzz of excitement she had created continued on about her. Christabel said: ‘Tide of glory? What does that mean?’ but Eva Gore-Booth flung her arms round Henrietta and said, ‘Brilliant! You’re brilliant!’ and this, Henrietta found, made up for any coolness from other quarters.

  In the event, there were almost a hundred women in Henrietta’s deputation. They formed themselves into an almost-disciplined regiment and walked four abreast to Westminster, parting and stopping only for the most insistent of motorists. The pipe and drum band played marching songs and on the pavements people stood and either jeered, cheered or simply stared. On Millbank the police caught up with them, among them the young constable from Sloane Street, who had been pulled off the front desk to maintain order on the streets; he greeted Henrietta with a look of pleasant surprise, as if it was a coincidence at a cocktail party, and to her abiding annoyance, Henrietta automatically smiled back and nodded a gracious acknowledgement.

  The police joined the procession to Parliament, walking on either side of the column of women with expressions of weary forbearance. They knew, of course, what would happen. At the entrance to the House of Commons the ringleaders would hand their written request to the duty police officer, who would then disappear inside, returning after a period of time with a written refusal from the prime minister’s private secretary. In fact, Mr Asquith’s opinion would probably not even be sought, being already well enough known by everyone involved.

  All of this was predictable, and all of it came to pass. What no one had expected was that when the private secretary handed the exquisitely worded rebuttal to Henrietta with an apology of almost palpable disingenuousness, she snatched it from the functionary’s hand, screwed it into a tight ball and threw it directly into his left eye.

  ‘Oh I say, good shot,’ someone said in the massed ranks, and there was laughter and scattered applause. A police officer stepped forward and took hold of Henrietta’s elbow, in case the prime minister’s man should cry foul play, and the Sloane Street constable said, ‘It’s Lady Henrietta Hoyland, sir. I’m sure she intended no harm,’ at which point, Henrietta saw red. Was she always to be excused on the grounds of her title and breeding? It was intolerable.

  She began to run – in itself, a shocking sight. Her hat flew off in her haste and she didn’t stop to retrieve it but barrelled on, up towards Parliament Square, into Parliament Street and down into Whitehall. Behind her, a small pack of women followed, unsure of her intention but carried along by the thrill of the moment. Behind them, a couple of constables, dispatched by a senior officer, jogged along with vaguely bashful expressions as if this unforeseen duty was an assault on their dignity and a certain distance – both actual and emotional – had to be maintained.

  Up ahead Henrietta had swung left into Downing Street and here, she stopped. She clutched her right side and took great gulps of air, and while she caught her breath she cast about with her eyes, as if she’d lost something and was desperate to find it.

  ‘What’s the plan?’

  This was Mary Dixon, Henrietta’s ardent admirer from the Guildford branch of the WSPU, dressed as she always was in white, green and purple, like a walking pennant. She had followed Henrietta to Downing Street, just as she would follow her to the ends of the earth. Henrietta didn’t answer her question, but lurched suddenly to a small pile of house bricks stacked tidily against a wall, awaiting the moment at which they might be useful. It was only when Henrietta seized one of them and ran with it towards the prime minister’s residence that her intention – and the scale of her frustration – became clear. She was fast, though, and while she might not have been a spitter or a puncher she was a first-rate flinger: a childhood at the wicket with Toby and Dickie had given her an eye for a target and an arm for distance. As the two constables rounded the corner from Whitehall into Downing Street, and as the startled officer positioned outside Number 10 stepped forwards into her path, Henrietta launched her missile at the fan light above the door and had the satisfaction of hearing the ugly fracture and splinter of glass and wood before she was pinioned in the unforgiving grip of the constables. She threw her head back and shouted, ‘Votes for women!’, and as she was led away, Mary Dixon and the other women with her took up the cry, chanting the slogan again and again so that their voices accompanied Henrietta as she was shoved and bundled away from the scene of her crime.

  At Park Lane, Isabella had found Thea in the drawing room, which pleased and surprised her, as she was sure her sister-in-law would have other things to do than wait for her husband. Instead, Thea looked extravagantly content and comfortable, nestling among a heap of cushions on a couch, leafing idly through the fashion plates of the Tatler and smoking a slim, dark cigarette in an elegant silver holder. Clarissa detested the smell, so it struck Isabella as a provocative act until she said, ‘Mama hates cigarette smoke,’ and Thea, looking up from her magazine, said, ‘Oh Lord, yes, I forgot,’ and immediately stubbed it out. She smiled at Isabella and patted the seat next to her.

  ‘I thought I was at home, in Fulton House,’ she said. ‘Silly me.’

  Isabella sat.

  ‘Thea?’ she said.

  ‘Mmm?’ Thea was back at the fashion plates again, her fingers stroking the pages as if she could feel the folds of silk and satin.

  ‘Do you have a pash for Eugene Stiller?’ Her heart pounded at her audacity.

  Thea tilted her head and flashed a sharp, sidelong glance at Isabella. ‘Oh, I see. That’s why you’ve been so snippy.’

  ‘Never mind that. Do you?’

  ‘No, not overly, although I did at first. Do you like him?’

  ‘Since you ask, no,’ Isabella said, feeling calmer since her question had clearly
caused neither consternation nor anger. ‘He’s not half so handsome as Toby.’

  Thea laughed lightly. ‘Agreed.’

  ‘But you spend so much time with him. And you take him up to your rooms.’ At this Isabella coloured, and again her heart pattered; how she would love, she thought, to possess just a fraction of Thea’s sangfroid. Thea closed her magazine and placed it on the lamp table. She turned to Isabella.

  ‘You mustn’t worry about Tobes,’ she said. ‘He has his fun and I have mine, but we are the Earl and Countess of Netherwood and ever shall be, until fate decides our number’s up.’

  Isabella looked troubled. ‘Doesn’t Toby mind?’

  ‘Not really,’ Thea said. Then, ‘Sometimes,’ she added, more truthfully.

  ‘I thought when one married it was to the exclusion of all others,’ Isabella said. She knew at once that she sounded silly, and that Thea would laugh; she did.

  ‘No, dearest, not necessarily. Monogamy isn’t compulsory, and it’s certainly not something Tobes and I have ever suffered from.’

  ‘Well I intend to honour and obey my husband when the time comes.’ She sounded like a prig, she knew she did, and her face felt foolishly warm and pink.

  ‘Good for you,’ Thea said almost kindly. ‘Do let me know how you get on with that.’

  There was something in Thea’s tone that she didn’t quite like, but Isabella was prevented from speaking further because the drawing-room door opened and Padgett entered, with the demeanour of a man bearing bad news.

  ‘Padgett?’ said Thea. ‘Are we to worry about something?’

  ‘Thomas is at the door, Your Ladyship,’ said the butler.

  ‘The Fulton House footman?’

  ‘Indeed, Your Ladyship. It seems Lady Henrietta has’ – he hesitated, choosing his words with care – ‘orchestrated an incident.’

  Thea heaved a sigh. ‘Oh what now? Eggs at Mr Churchill? Flour at Mr Lloyd George?’