The doors to the ladies’ gallery swung wide. A wigged footman emerged.
“Goodladies, goodfellows, and fine citizens,” he said, “the Second House is in session. You may enter the gallery to witness the debate if you wish.”
The occupants of the saloon downed their drinks and made their way to the door, some still engaged in passionate political debate. Many were of the same social class as Katriona—new money aristocrats, their families recently ennobled. Most of these people were against her and glared their disapproval. Ironically, the old money crowd who were ordinarily venomously opposed to anything the new industrialists offered to the house, were enthusiastically in favour of her reforms. In her movement they saw a way of curbing the power of the newcomers.
It was a mess. People from all factions despised her. Many who said they supported her did for selfish reasons. Others who would support her kept their opinions to themselves fearing the judgement of their peers. She could not trust anyone. Damn the lot of them, she thought.
To stiffen her resolve, Katriona held in her mind the children toiling their lives away in factories, the families starving as they worked themselves to death, the workers dying from the filth they lived in.
Head held high, she entered the Ladies Gallery. Her supporters formed up around her.
Women were only allowed into that one space, whereas of course the men could go where they liked, and that included the Ladies Gallery. Demion, Brask and the rest sat around her without a thought for that fact. For them, it was natural. For her, it was an affront.
Once she had won the war for the lives of the poor, she thought she might attempt to change the lot of women too.
THE KARSAN GOVERNMENT was a multi-layered thing, cumbersome in its multitudinous departments and cursed with several layers of interleaved, duplicated authority. Despite all that, its system was among the most liberal in the Hundred Kingdoms.
Unlike many other nations, Karsa’s head of state, the king, did not have absolute power. Complicating the situation, King Demes was unfortunately mad, and his son Prince Alfra ruled for him. Had he been sane, his power would have been limited anyway; after the Lord’s Rebellion three centuries before, the nation had been governed as a constitutional monarchy.
Three Houses made up the parliament, each with a hundred members. The First House had once been made up of priests. Since the days of the god driving, its members had been professional bureaucrats. It had no legislative power. The First House existed solely to decide the legality of any motion to be put before the other Houses of the parliament, and gauge the true intent of the petitioners in suggesting motions to be debated.
The Second House had much more influence. Its ranks were drawn from the merchants, lesser aristocracy and bankers of the realm, with a smattering of philosophs and other wise minds to grant it a veneer of intellectual respectability. They were all directly elected by the populace, although suffrage was restricted to the wealthy.
Many of the new, industrial nobility occupied the landsmen seats of the Second House. They further scrutinised what the First House had deemed as acceptable for possible legislation, and voted upon its implementation. Should the motion be passed, it was then sent to the Third House.
In the Third House the roar of democracy became a timid presentation of fealty. The Third House had evolved from the King’s Council of earlier centuries, and performed a similar role, though its membership had been greatly expanded to match the hundred of the lower two houses. The Third House’s landsmen were the hereditary lords, most descended from King Brannon’s companions. The remainder were drawn from the richest industrialists. Prince Alfra himself headed its proceedings, in the stead of the king.
Katriona was well versed in all this. Her father’s contrary attitudes towards his eldest daughter had encompassed bullying her to learn all about politics, then rejecting her because she unfemininely excelled at its study.
She was grateful there was little chance of Gelbion Kressind showing up to vote. He still had his seat in the House, but had withdrawn from politics after his illness several years before, and had not voted on any issue since. Even so, she resented her father’s presence in her thoughts. Had he actually deigned to come...
She clenched her hand until her manicured nails bit into her palm through her lace gloves. She had far more pressing issues to consider than her father.
Plutocrats, careerists, old money, new money, slave drivers, shirkers, inheritors and parasites of every cloth waited to foul her political ambitions.
If Katriona’s motion were to pass the Second House’s vote, it would fail in the Third, as the members there had the most to lose from it. Though the industrialists made up a minority in the Upper House, most of the richer companion lords had money invested in the new industries. But the Second was by no means won. The poorer landed aristocracy would vote for the motion to cripple the industrialists. The industrialists would vote according to the relative weight they attached to their consciences and their wallets. She could not even decide with any certainty if her bill of laws would be voted for by those who professed support. They all had their games to play, and they hid their hands well.
According to the spirit of Karsa’s national character, her challenge should have been welcome. Before the days of glimmer engines and factories, Karsa had been an agrarian nation. The Little Agreement made between the lords and the peasants after the Lords’ Rebellion cemented the rights of those who tilled the land, and the responsibilities of those who owned it. She sought to extend the spirit of that agreement to the relationship between factory owner and worker. There was, as far as she could see, no difference. She knew the rest of them saw she was right, that all this new wealth depended on the blood of others.
Fortunes were at risk. Unsurprisingly, the issue was hotly contested.
The crowd took their seats in a gallery so steep that the feet of each tier’s occupants were close by the heads of the people in the row below. The observers clung like seabirds to a cliff over the assembly of the Second House. The chamber was in a pit beneath, shaped like a floatstone hull in recognition of Karsa’s maritime traditions.
In another land, in the Queendom of Pris, Katriona would have been down there presenting her own case while the men looked on powerlessly. In Karsa, she must rely on men. She found it tiresome. Having achieved so much, she knew she could achieve more if only her gender did not stand in her way.
In her stead, the speaker of the Second House set out Katriona’s bill in reduced form. Most of the men (again, she noted, they were all men), had copies of her motion in their hands that they peered at and flicked through. Some had obviously read it back to front. Others had just as obviously never set eyes on it and looked at it as if they had no acquaintance with documents whatsoever. Of the hundred seats, fewer than half were occupied. The members’ absence was a mark of the lack of seriousness with which the house regarded Katriona. That was another thing that would have to change. A fiery mix of impatience and outrage clenched her heart. Through injustice and thwarted will are revolutionaries made.
Speeches were given on her behalf. Those in favour came before the rest. Two were allowed per side, all strictly timed upon a large brass timepiece to the right of the speaker’s chair.
The first speech came from Goodman Polko Vreesen, a manufacturer of bricks out of Stoncastrum. He was a dull fellow whose first name Katriona could never recall; she was sure she would forget it again before the end of the proceedings. He had been chosen by his male peers, not her. Frustrated enormously that she played no part, she watched men she barely knew hijack her reforms.
“Rich men are not necessarily blind to the suffering of those they make their money from,” Vreesen began. “Wealth does not automatically lead to an erosion of morality. We all of us know wherefrom our wealth springs. It is not from the sweat of our own brows, but those of the workers who toil for us. In their suffering is gold, and we mine it ruthlessly.” His voice droned like a hive of bees, sopo
rific and irritating. “Our Goodlady Kressinda-Morthrocksa has achieved much where other reformers have failed, embarrassing our Ministry of Justice into ensuring existing legislation is properly enforced. I say she is right to want to go further!”
Demion leaned in to his wife.
“I cannot simply stand by,” he said. “I support you fully, my dear. This is all beyond me, but I will find the children for you. You know that I am striving to do that?”
“I know, my husband,” she said, her attention on the proceedings of the House.
“I love you my dear,” he said. “You are strong, and talented.”
She turned to him with a half-smile. “What about beautiful?”
“I would not reduce you to the characteristic of beauty,” he said seriously.
She laughed softly. “I am a woman. We are contrary creatures. None of us wish to be judged by our looks, my dear husband, but most of us wish to be thought beautiful.”
“But you are beautiful.”
She put her hand through the loop of his elbow.
“And you are kind, and generous. And a good lover,” she added mischievously.
He reddened.
“And I love you very much also, but now I ask you to please be quiet, because I am trying to listen to the speeches.”
“Of course, of course my dear.”
She smiled again at him. His bumbling manner she found endearing only because, beneath his bluster and his obsession with horses and cards, Demion was an upright man.
The first speech ended to applause from more than half the House. The bells of the clock chimed a moment later.
“A good sign,” whispered Martenion from the row behind. His back popped as he bent low enough to speak in Katriona’s ear.
Katriona nodded. Martenion had helped select Vreesen to speak first. In her opinion, his speech had been unforgivably dull, and full of platitude. Martenion did not have enough regard for her, or her own choice would have delivered the opening speech. Still, Vreesen’s message was clear. Morality must play a part in profit. There was a mark in their favour.
The second speech was less inspiring, and drew a half-hearted response. She breathed hard against her corsets. If only she could speak herself!
The bells rang before the speech was finished. The first speech against was announced.
The first speech against was simply, “No, no, no, no!” delivered by a man brandishing the paper bearing her proposals as if it were a murder weapon. Worryingly, the applause for that was the loudest yet.
The second against was equally thunderous in tone, though more traditional in scope. A short, round man announced as Goodfellow Dwin gave it, a man Katriona was wearyingly familiar with.
“These proposals cannot pass!” Dwin explosively roared, his face turning shockingly red, as if a lever had been thrown and sent the pistons of his heart into sudden motion. “They go against every principle of Karsan free enterprise, the very virtues that have made this nation great! The poor should not be coddled, they should have no allowance made for them!” He whacked the proposals on the board of the speaking lectern in time with his words. “If the poor are granted these concessions, they will become lazy, and presumptuous of aid. Where will be their incentive to better themselves, and to raise themselves to a higher state of life? No! I say no!”
Laughter greeted parts of his speech. Men shouted, “Hear hear.” Others jeered back at them, naming them heartless and slavers. Shouts in support and against what Dwin said echoed off the high ceiling; through all Dwin ploughed on regardless, with the manner of a man who would be heard no matter how long it took.
“He’s certainly stirred them up,” said Brask.
“We are fools to pander to the lazy few,” Dwin continued. “For the sake of our tormented morality, we would toss our economic might upon a bonfire. If we are to do this, then I will remove my manufacturing operation to the continent. In Maceriya they have no such laws. Do not think our competitors of other lands have not seen this, or that they do not rub their hands at the prospect of this law’s enactment! Without these restrictions upon their own manufactories, they shall drain the industry from these isles, and take the money from our pockets. This woman,” he pointed up to the gallery, “should remain at home and raise children, a situation better suited to her compassion. See, my goodfellows, the danger that lies in allowing women to participate in men’s affairs. They are a disruptive factor to an ordered world, and the result is this!” He threw his papers down. “It is anti-competitive, it is unpatriotic, it is economic suicide! I for one hope that Katriona Kressinda-Morthrocksa’s tenure at the Morthrocksey Mill remain an isolated experiment, and that she enters no further into the field of politics. Enact this ruling at your peril, goodfellows! Mark my words, mark my words!”
“Dwin is among our worst opponents. Many of the older men respect him,” muttered Brask.
“I know him well,” said Katriona. “He has tried to cheat me twice on wholesale silver prices for my munitions factory, thinking me a weak-minded woman. I corrected his opinion there. It appears he requires further correction.”
“I am sure you will provide it,” said Brask, amused.
The Second House went into a brief recess. The clocks were reset. Drinks were brought to the members too occupied in conversation with their fellows to leave the chamber. They were also served to those too indolent to bother, or those too ridden with gout to move. The difficulty was, Katriona thought to herself, in telling the tribes apart. There was no mechanism for separating men from one another as there was for wheat and chaff. She wished to toss them into a machine, and see what virtues were collected, and what sins bailed like straw.
“If only there was such a machine,” she murmured.
“What my dear?” Demion asked. He held out his arm to her. She consented to be led into the Ladies Saloon.
“Nothing,” she said.
Fifteen minutes ran by at breathless pace. Faces came and went, their owners presenting themselves in case advantage might be got in future, or come to condemn. Several were all for enforcement of existing laws, but no more than that. Fingers were wagged. Demion brusquely escorted two gentlemen away whose admonitions were too animated. Wine was offered her, refused twice, finally accepted, but when sipped, found to be insipidly warm.
The chamber bells rang. The footman came out and declared the vote would be taken. Katriona was lightheaded, she feared she had drunk too much, though she had but a mouthful. Now was the moment of truth.
IN THE CHAMBER two large urns had been set up. They were mismatched, cracked, their bronze pitted with corrosion. Legend told that King Brannon had been presented these ancient artefacts by the Tyn as an offering of peace when he had crossed the neck. They had been used in voting in Karsa ever since.
Between the urns was a bowl full of identical white glass beads. The principal was simple. The urn on the left was for votes against, that on the right votes for.
“Goodfellows,” said the speaker from his throne. “You may begin voting now on The Morthrock Motion.”
There were offices within the House which granted their holders precedence; the master of the rolls, the heads of the loose party groupings, the secretary for records and a few others. They voted first, beginning with the speaker. He stepped down from his elevated perch, and solemnly cast a glass bead into the urn for against. Several others followed. Beads clanked into the urns. The vote was public. Everyone watching knew exactly who voted for what.
After the officials voted, the general mass of members were permitted to vote. The braver men made their opinions known first. Such courage could make a career or ruin it. Men of slyer character held back, to see which way the vote went before adding their choice to the winning side. So was politics done in Karsa.
The votes were barely begun, when a minor commotion began at the back of the hall. The doors to the chamber opened. A dozen members arrived to cast their vote.
Katriona was occupied with counting the
tally of votes for her motion, and so at first did not see who led the latecomers, until his name, harshly whispered, made its way down the Ladies Gallery.
“Gelbion Kressind!”
Katriona’s stomach turned to ice. Her father was limping determinedly down the open area at the centre of the chamber, flanked by old men like himself.
“Gods!” said Brask. “That’s the cream of the new nobility, right there.”
Whispered speculation was rife in the gallery as everyone debated which way Kressind would vote. Katriona knew in the pit of her stomach that he had come to destroy her ambition. He was a callous man, with no time for workers’ rights.
His progress was slow. The disease that crippled his left side made walking extremely difficult for him, but he refused all help, and doggedly forced his malfunctioning body toward the voting urns.
He stopped at the basket. He shifted his stick to his withered hand, and used his right to reach for the beads. He almost overbalanced, but righted himself, and snarled at the men who rushed to his side. He scrabbled a bead from the basket, and threw it into the urn.
Katriona stood up so fast her folding chair banged back into the upright position.
Her father had voted for.
Without saying a word, Gelbion Kressind made his laborious way back to the doors.
All the men who had accompanied him cast their votes the same way. Seeing their betters vote, the lesser industrialists followed suit.
“Gelbion Kressind voted for!” The words were repeated everywhere.
Katriona ran for the door.
“My dear!” called Demion. “They will be counting the vote soon.” But she was out of the Ladies Gallery, and running as fast as her restrictive clothing would allow for the atrium of the palace, where she hoped to intercept her father.
NOW SHE HAD to run, she hated the corsets and hoops, the heels and the stays that her womanhood forced on her. Katriona liked being a woman. She liked dressing as one. She had no desire to emulate the Countess of Mogawn. The idea of wearing men’s clothes in high society appalled her, but at that moment she wished for a choice of something more practical. A memory of running through the woods of the Kressind country estate with her brothers came to mind. There had been no lacing of her body to constrain her breath then, no padding and crushing and forcing. She wore trousers to roam the hills with her siblings.
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