Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  So I’m still regarded as part of the staff, Ruth thought with amazement. She followed the stocky figure of Mrs Canning out of the governor’s room and down the corridor. At least, I’m a member of staff until I choose to resign. If they haven’t worked out how I was involved by tonight, I can walk out of here and never come back. Take up that job Mrs Watson said she’d find for me. And by then Sarah Becket will be miles away.

  The only problem will be to stop myself laughing. And singing. Singing the same song those women are singing right now on C landing.

  As they came nearer, the words reached her more clearly. The whole landing was singing.

  ‘Sarah Becket’s body went

  a-marching through the wall!

  Sarah Becket’s body went

  a-marching through the wall!

  Sarah Becket’s body went

  a-marching through the wall!

  And her cell is empty now!

  Glory, glory halleluia!

  Glory, glory halleluia!

  Glory, glory halleluia!

  Her cell is empty now!’

  ‘Debbie!’

  Sarah stood quite still in the doorway, swaying lightly. Deborah stepped forward, hoping that the smile on her face hid her shock at the gaunt face, the painfully thin hands her sister reached out to her.

  ‘Welcome, my dear. I’ve been expecting you.’ But her voice broke, she couldn’t go on. For a moment the two embraced, and Deborah thought: how light she is, just a skeleton in a coat.

  They drew apart and looked at each other through a film of tears.

  ‘Same old Debbie. Always here when I need you,’ Sarah said. ‘But why . . .?’

  ‘Never mind all that now.’ Deborah took her sister’s arm and led her forward. ‘Come on in and sit down, poor thing. You need rest.’

  ‘She does indeed,’ said Rachel Camperdowne. ‘I suggest this lady goes straight to bed. You can save any talking until she is comfortable there.’

  Sarah said: ‘Oh, don’t fuss, please.’ But she swayed as she said it. Deborah took her arm.

  ‘It’s all ready for you, dear. Come through here. I’ve brought clean nightclothes, everything.’

  She led the way through a pleasant sitting room, furnished with soft carpets, comfortable chintz armchairs, and light, cheerful wallpaper, to an equally pleasant bedroom. The afternoon sunlight poured in through a window that looked out over a quiet mews and there was a large double bed with clean, crisp sheets turned back. On the dressing table were her own combs, hairbrushes and makeup case from home, a basin with a jug and ewer, and a small fire crackled in the grate. Tears came into Sarah’s eyes.

  ‘Is this my cell? It’s like a dream!’

  ‘Let me help you undress.’ Deborah smiled, and began to unbutton the fastenings of Sarah’s dress. It was an effort to keep the cheerfulness in her voice. She had known her sister would look thin, but not this skeletal. She wondered if she had been wise to plan the journey to Glenfee. And the other thing . . . But they could talk about that later.

  Sarah climbed into bed and lay back with a sigh on the soft clean pillows. Deborah sat down beside her, took her hand.

  ‘Now, our landlady, Mrs Stewart, has a particularly sustaining beef broth on the stove downstairs, with her own home-baked rolls and cheese. Do you think you could manage those?’

  ‘Just a little, perhaps.’ Sarah frowned, torn between laughter and a sudden, overwhelming desire for sleep. ‘Debbie, what are you doing here?’

  Deborah hesitated. Too much truth would be painful for both of them; she was not sure that Sarah was ready for it. But then, part of the truth could be a reassurance, she thought. She said: ‘I heard you took a dislike to a picture, and so I came over to offer my help. I confess that at first I thought Jonathan might need my support too, but since then I have met Alice Watson here and learnt some things that . . . have made me change my mind. Oh Sarah, I am so sorry!’

  ‘About Jonathan, you mean? Don’t be. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘I used to like him, Sarah. I believed in him!’

  ‘So did I, once. Debbie, I want to see him.’

  ‘No!’ They both turned to see Alice Watson glaring at them through her round spectacles, looking more than ever like a headmistress. ‘It would be far too much risk for Sarah to go anywhere near her husband, either at her home or at his office. You have to appreciate that the police will be searching for you, my dear. It is your duty to stay out of sight. That is why Deborah and I have agreed that it would be best for all concerned if you were to get on the train tomorrow morning and go to her house in Ulster. No one will be looking for you there and you can rest in peace and comfort.’

  ‘I see you have it all planned,’ Sarah said. ‘Glenfee would be wonderful. But, sooner or later, I have to see Jonathan. I could confront him at the House of Commons, Alice — why not? That would cook the man’s goose — and the government’s too. Escaped Suffragette Raids Parliament — MP husband exposed as whoremonger — wouldn’t that look fine in the newspapers?’

  She began to laugh, but then the tears took over. She turned away from them all, staring out of the window into the useless sunlight.

  ‘You will do no such thing,’ Mrs Watson said gently. ‘Dr Armstrong is the main villain in this affair, not your husband, and, now that you are free, I will take care of him. If I can do it without causing a scandal to Mr Becket I will, for your sake. When you are safely settled in Glenfee I will write and let you know whether it is necessary to arrange for a lawyer to take a detailed statement of all you know about Dr Armstrong, but it may not be. We already have that letter you received, and there are one or two other things in the WSPU files about that wretched man which you may not have guessed at. So for the moment you need do nothing. Your duty is to obey orders, stay out of sight, look after yourself and get well. Do you understand me now?’

  ‘Oh yes, I understand you.’ Sarah wiped her eyes with the handkerchief Deborah had given her, and stared bleakly at the three women watching her. ‘But life is not as easy as you think, Alice. You are a widow, but my husband is still alive, and marriage is for life, whatever happens. Whatever he has done, I loved him once, you know.’

  There was a silence. Deborah watched and thought: marriage is for life. That is the cruellest thing she could have said, for either of us. What will Charles say, when we arrive together in Glenfee? God forgive me, but he will have to do exactly what I ask, for once in his life. At least as far as looking after Sarah is concerned. Then, when she is stronger, I will tell him about the baby.

  And Sarah will be able to help me.

  Not until Sarah had finished her beef broth, and Mrs Watson and Rachel Campderdowne had left, did Deborah say: ‘It may have been very wrong of me, my dear, but I left a note for Jonathan before I came away. Asking him to meet me here in this hotel, tonight.’

  For Martin Armstrong, the rolled-up blanket in Sarah Becket’s bed had been like the sight of his own grave. He was a large man, overweight, addicted to good food and drink, and, when he had first seen that roll of hairy cloth where the woman’s head should have been, he had thought his heart would drown in its own blood. There had been an intense pain in his chest and he remembered clutching the wardress, sweating, screaming something at her.

  What he had said did not matter. It couldn’t be her fault, surely. She was tough, stupid, unimaginative — she had helped him force-feed the woman every time he had done it. It had to be something to do with the other suffragettes in the prison, as the governor seemed to think. They had got her out while the wardresses were trying to control the demonstration.

  Oh, what did it matter how the woman escaped or who organised it? The point was that she was out, free, and within a day at most she would be telling her story to all and sundry. His life would be in ruins!

  Twice he had tried to leave the governor’s office, pleading that he had important appointments to keep with patients, but the governor had insisted that he send notes cancelling them. Not u
ntil three o’clock, when the songs of the suffragettes on C landing had been quelled, and several of them had been interviewed with no result, was he able to leave. He made immediately for his consulting rooms in Kensington.

  As he sat in the cab on the way across town he totted up in his mind the list of dreadful things that were likely to happen, and what he could do about them.

  First, Sarah Becket would tell her husband that she had been forcibly fed. And so Jonathan Becket, KC, MP, would know that he had lied to him. He would undoubtedly be furious. But what could he do about it, Martin wondered. Complain in Parliament, ask questions of the Home Secretary? Perhaps, but complaints had been made in Parliament about forcible feeding many times before. Public opinion was divided about it — many people would support the government. Particularly since this woman had destroyed an irreplaceable work of art, and then escaped from prison. Publicly. McKenna would be bound to stand firm and support Martin. There was no problem there.

  Martin thought carefully. Jonathan might say that he asked me for help, though, and I lied to him, he realised. That wouldn’t look so good. I could stop him from doing that by threatening to reveal that he visits prostitutes — that would shut his mouth. But then, if I actually did reveal that, he could tell the world that I rent rooms to these same prostitutes, which would ruin us both. That’s no good, then. Damn.

  The worst aspect of all, however, was that Sarah Becket knew, or appeared to know, a great deal about the brothels and prostitutes which Martin profited from. Ever since she had confronted him with this in her cell at Holloway — when he had gone in at the request of her husband to help the wretched woman, damn her to hell! — Martin had been wondering what to do about it. He would have to close the brothels down, he could see that. Move the girls to a different address where they could not be traced, and let the rooms to a respectable married couple, or a few elderly widows, or something. But such things took time, and he had been earning good money every day by leaving things as they were. So long as Sarah Becket had remained isolated in prison, nothing could have happened.

  He had promised himself that he would begin the moves next week. He had already broached the subject with Mrs Burgoyne and received such a poor response that it had terrified him.

  ‘Maybe you’ll be sent down for a good long time, Doctor,’ she had said. ‘But I won’t, and neither will the girls. A couple of months in the first division, at most. It’s not such a crime or a scandal for us. If the Home Office start getting too harsh I shall threaten to name names in open court, and that’ll stop ‘em. Prominent lawyers with their members waving in the air and their pinstriped trousers round their ankles — won’t look good in the columns of The Times, will it now?’

  If she was forced to move at short notice from the rooms in Kensington, she said, she would have to cut down the amount of money she paid him. He already took far too large a cut for doing next to nothing.

  It was after that conversation that he had returned to Holloway to find that Sarah Becket had decided to give up her fast and begin eating again. A decision which had enraged him so much with its pure wilfulness and perversity that he had lost his temper entirely and gone into her cell with a dose of bromide so large that it might easily kill her.

  It had not done so and in a way he was glad, because the post mortem would have shown him to be incompetent at the least. But on the other hand, a dead suffragette could tell no tales. He would have been able to keep the girls and Mrs Burgoyne in the rooms where they were . . .

  Now they would have to go. Today. Otherwise his career would be in ruins. He would be struck off the medical register. He would lose his posts in Holloway and the charitable children’s home, and be unable to practise privately. He would be imprisoned. His wife would desert him.

  He got out of the hansom cab outside his consulting rooms in Kensington and looked at the brass plate by the door and the rich curtains in the rooms upstairs. I was too greedy, he thought. Too confident. I thought that no one would suspect anything because this is such a respectable neighbourhood, with a doctor’s plate downstairs. No one would think this could possibly be a brothel, and so rich, respectable men like Jonathan Becket would be happy to come here and pay ten times the normal fee.

  God, I should never have pandered to a man with such a damned puritan killjoy for a wife!

  But that’s why they all come.

  Damn! Damn! Damn!

  He strode through the door and up the stairs. This deep pink stair carpet cost me nearly forty pounds, he thought bitterly, only a month ago. All wasted. On the stairs he met an eminent lawyer with a satisfied smirk on his face. Martin strode past him without a word.

  Two hours later, after an extremely bitter and wounding conversation. Mrs Burgoyne and all the girls currently in residence had packed their bags and gone. Where they had gone, Martin did not, for the moment, know. They had not gone quietly, either. Not only had they made some extremely cutting remarks about his personal sexual abilities, they had flounced down into the street in their most conspicuous feathered hats and striking dresses, and sang and shouted at passers-by on the pavement while Mrs Burgoyne dithered around trying to hail a taxi. When Martin had gone down to check that they had finally left for good, he had noticed several neighbours staring openly at him from across the street.

  Then, when he turned to go in, he saw that one of the girls had taken a penknife and scratched the words Cunt For Sale underneath his name on the brass plate. Appalled, he dashed indoors, found a large screwdriver, and wrenched the thing bodily off the wall.

  He spent another desperate three quarters of an hour clearing the place of anything that might be seen as incriminating evidence if the police should visit, or which might put off the seventy-year-old widows he hoped to introduce as new respectable tenants. In one cupboard he found a collection of dildoes and fancy underwear, in another a selection of young girl’s dresses, in a third some ropes, straps, handcuffs, boots and riding whips. He took all these down into the kitchen and fed as many as he could into the fire. The rest went into a dustbin in the back yard.

  The two things he kept were the large, leather-bound book in the front sitting room, with the photographs of girls and descriptions of their interests; and Mrs Burgoyne’s book of accounts. She was a meticulous woman, well organised, and he was amazed she had left them. Probably she had forgotten in all the hysteria and the fun of mocking his sexual prowess.

  He put them into his briefcase, thinking they would be useful when everything had calmed down and he was trying to set up a network again. Then he had a final look around, went outside, and hailed a cab for Hackney.

  ‘How d’ye do, Reeves. Fine morning. Is my sister-in-law at home?’

  ‘No sir, I’m afraid she is not.’

  ‘Oh really? That’s a surprise. She’s usually here at midday.’ Jonathan handed his top hat and gloves to his butler and began to shrug his way out of his coat. Reeves hung up the hat, dropped the gloves on the hall stand, and then moved behind Jonathan to help him off with his coat. There was something in the man’s manner, Jonathan thought, which was slightly odd.

  ‘Anything up, Reeves?’

  Jonathan hoped not. It was a fine, breezy spring morning. His business in Sussex had gone well, and he had returned on the train to London in cheerful, expansive mood. He had thought quite a lot about his sister-in-law on the way, and realised he had been a bit precipitate that first night when she had arrived. After all she leads a sheltered life over in Ulster with that dreadful prig Charles. Of course she is fond of me but it will take time to make any progress.

  He had hoped to find her here waiting for him in Belgrave Square. They could have had lunch together and gone out for a walk in the park, and he would have been charming and urbane and impressed her with his knowledge of the world. Then, perhaps a few days later . . .

  He glanced at Reeves again. The man had not answered and there was definitely something odd, uneasy, in the expression on his face.

 
‘Come on, man. Out with it! What’s up!’

  ‘It is . . . a little hard to say, sir. Perhaps . . . it would help if you came into the library.’

  ‘The library? Why — is there a visitor?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Reeves opened the double doors of the hall, and stood back. ‘On your desk, sir.’

  Jonathan walked to the writing desk. It was a piece of furniture he was exquisitely proud of. It had been given to him in part settlement of a fee in his first really prestigious case. There was a letter lying on it. He reached out a hand to pick it up and then stopped, stunned.

  ‘My God! What the devil is this?’

  ‘I think perhaps the letter will explain, sir. It is from Mrs Cavendish.’

  ‘Yes, but my God! The desk — it’s slashed to ribbons!’

  ‘Indeed, sir.’

  Jonathan stretched out his hand across the ragged edges of ripped leather and picked up the envelope. The paper knife was there on the desk beside it. He slit the envelope.

  Jonathan,

  I will not write ‘dear’ because you are not that any longer. You will see from your desk that I have become a vandal, like Sarah. I believe it is from the same cause. What that may be is for your conscience to discover. I hope one day you repent of your perversion and become the brother-in-law I once knew. Until then, the damage I have done to your desk is as nothing to what you deserve.

  Don’t expect to find me here because I cannot bear to spend another night under your roof. I am going back to Glenfee.

  Deborah.

  Underneath was another sentence in a slightly different shade of ink, as though it might have been written later.

  PS. It may be that you think you deserve a fuller explanation of this. If you think you do, meet me at the Anglesey Hotel, near Waterloo Station, between four and five.

  He read the letter twice, astonished. Then he realised that Reeves was still standing deferentially, watching him. He had a sudden overwhelming desire to be alone.