A Mad, Wicked Folly

by Sharon Biggs Waller

  His finger landed on the bottom of the illustration. “What’s Victorious?”

  “That’s me. My secret signature; a play on my real name. I want that word to be on everyone’s lips in connection with force-feeding. They’ll all wonder who Victorious is. But no one will know.”

  Mr. Pethick-Lawrence looked at the illustration thoughtfully. “The idea has great merit, but won’t people just tear them down? The police tear down anything we post almost before the glue’s gone off.”

  “I thought of that.” I told him about Étienne’s posters, and how he had put them up high.

  He rubbed his chin. “Fly-posting is illegal. We’ll have to find someone willing to risk arrest. That might take a little while, as most of the women who do such things are already serving time in Holloway. I’m sorry, Vicky. Maybe there will be another opportunity, when we have the resources.”

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I shut my book, feeling deflated.

  “It’s a wonderful idea,” he said. “It’s certainly worth considering in future.” He smiled at me kindly and went back to work at the layout desk.

  I went out front to the visitors’ entrance. Sophie and Clara had been sorting through the day’s post but stopped what they were doing when I came over.

  “I had this idea for a poster, but Mr. Pethick-Lawrence says there’s no one to hang them,” I said, showing them my sketchbook.

  “That’s good,” Sophie said. “Really good. I can’t see how anyone could ignore it.”

  “Why can’t you hang them?” Clara said.

  “Me?” I supposed the idea wasn’t so far-fetched. Étienne hung his own posters. He didn’t make anyone else do it. “I guess I could. I’m not afraid of heights.”

  “You’ll need a lookout and someone to help lug your clobber,” Clara said. “You can’t do everything burdened down with pastepots and brushes and the like.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Sophie said. “It’ll make a nice change from stitching banners.”

  “You’ll have to go in the dead of night or else you won’t get a lick of paste on the wall, much less a poster,” Clara warned. “The only women about in the night are”—she lowered her voice—“harlots. What if you’re mistaken for one of those?”

  “What about delivery boys?” Sophie said. “Delivery boys are about at that hour. We’ll go dressed as boys and ride the bicycles they have here for the bicycling corps. I’ll kit us out in boys’ clothes. No one will be the wiser.”

  Clara drew in her breath, her eyes shining. “It’s just like Mary Frith and Lady Catherine Ferrers. Those highwaywomen who dressed as men and relieved many a gentleman of his purse.”

  We started to laugh so hard that several of the women working in the back came out to see what was funny.

  “Just remember that Lady Catherine died from a gunshot wound,” Clara said after she had collected herself. “Let’s not pretend this isn’t going to be a dangerous caper. If a constable catches you, you might not be able to blag your way out of it.”

  “He’ll have to catch me first. I’m pretty swift on a bi-

  cycle,” Sophie said.

  “Me too,” I said. Although truth be told, I hadn’t been cycling in years.

  “Start with Whitehall,” Clara said. “Lots of politicians, lots of traffic in the daytime to see the posters.”

  And so the scheme was put into motion. Mr. Pethick-Lawrence had my illustration printed up in four colors—gold, gray, black, and green—by a sympathetic printer on Fleet Street who’d agreed to keep quiet. I had postcard-sized versions to paste onto the backs of signs and park benches and broadsheet-sized ones for buildings and hoardings.

  Sophie found boys’ reach-me-down clothing—knickerbockers with braces, muslin shirts, wool jackets, and flat newsboy caps—on Petticoat Lane, and altered them to fit. I loved the way the garments felt, especially the knickerbockers, which were very freeing.

  As the night of the fly-posting drew closer, I grew giddy with anticipation. I felt like a horse released in a pasture after a lifetime of living in a stall. I may not have been brave enough to volunteer for prison and risk force-feeding like Lucy, but I had been brave enough to leave home for an unfamiliar world, one I had grown to love. I was ready to join the ranks of the doers, those mad women making demands instead of asking politely. I was itching to use my artwork, put forth my point of view, in the fight. As I’d told Mr. Earnshaw at the RCA on the day I climbed out my window, my artwork would hang in pride of place where everyone could see it. I had just never imagined my first exhibition would be so public.

  Two days later, we were ready. Sophie and I dressed at Clement’s Inn about midnight. Some of the suffragettes who rented rooms upstairs came down in their dressing gowns to see us off. We wore our own boots, but we rubbed dirt into them to make them look shabby. A little coal dust on our cheeks hid our femininity. My hair proved a challenge, being so long and thick. Sophie struggled to fit all of it underneath the cap. She glared at me when I suggested cutting it—once a lady’s maid, always a lady’s maid. She settled on coiling it into a spiral and pinning the flat cap on top.

  She looked doubtful. “I’m not sure this will stay on.” She tugged at the cap. “If I put too many pins in, people will cotton on that you aren’t a boy.”

  I shook my head a bit to test the pins. “It will have to do. Just make sure you hide all of your hair under your cap. Your ginger hair attracts enough attention as it is.”

  I prepared the wheat paste next, a messy business that required mixing equal parts flour and water and heating the mixture over a paraffin burner until it turned into a glop that would hold the posters in place and make it difficult to tear them down in one piece.

  And so it was well after midnight when Sophie and I (after a few wobbly starts) set off on bicycles with posters in canvas satchels over our shoulders, and a pastepot and long-handled brush rattling in my basket. I was afraid, but I thought about what Lucy was going through in Holloway, and that gave me courage. I was glad that it was Sophie who cycled beside me. I remembered that day when Sophie taught me to dance. I had thought she and I could never be friends. We had more in common than I ever guessed.

  Whitehall, the center of His Majesty’s government and home to its departments and ministers’ offices, was largely silent during the night. We skirted the edge of Trafalgar Square and turned our bicycles down Northumberland Avenue and up Great Scotland Yard. It was so quiet on Northumberland Avenue that the hiss of our bicycle tires and the jangling of the pedals echoing off the buildings was the only sound. Shadows cast from streetlamps created shifting figures, turning trees into looming monsters with eerie, clawlike hands, and ivy-covered gates into otherworldly creatures. A brisk wind shot between the buildings, and I could feel my cap fighting the hairpins, trying to take flight. I dared not let go of the handlebars to clamp it down because I didn’t trust myself to steer one-handed. I used to cycle a lot in Hyde Park before I went to finishing school, but that had been a few years ago. My skills were coming back slowly, but crashing into a bollard was still a possibility if I didn’t concentrate.

  “Have you ever been out this late, Sophie?” I whispered.

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “It’s terrifying.”

  “It is. I won’t say no.”

  “We’ll have to work fast,” I said. “Wheat paste on the back, then brush the bill into place with more paste—that will make it harder to tear down.”

  We pasted the smaller posters onto benches, road signs, and statue plinths. The larger ones went up on any building we could get to without being seen. To put the posters up high, Sophie would boost me up or I would climb trees and shinny out on the limbs to reach the building. It was so much easier to climb in knickerbockers. I wished I could wear them all the time.

  “I want to stick one right on Ten Downing, where the prime minister lives,
” I said after pasting a poster on the door of the Red Lion pub. “But I don’t dare. Too guarded.”

  “We’d be nicked for sure,” Sophie said, pedaling next to me. “Cannon Row Police Station is a stone’s throw away from there.”

  “How about Horse Guards?” I said. “You know the little sentry boxes for the Household Cavalry regiment? Just under the roofs would be a smashing place to slap up posters. If we do a good job of it, they won’t be able to scrape them off before the cavalry take up their post in the morning. Everyone will see them over the soldiers’ heads. Wouldn’t that be a coup?”

  “Damaging Household Cavalry property?” Sophie shivered. “I’m up for anything, but if they catch us . . . well, a second-division cell will be a blessing. We’ll most likely be tucked away with the murderers waiting to be hanged.”

  Sophie had a point, but faint heart never won fair maiden, and the smooth empty space just below the pitched roofline was calling out to be fly-posted. I wanted to do it, no matter what. The soldiers on their horses always drew crowds, and so my poster would be seen by hundreds of people.

  And so, as Big Ben rang out two o’clock, we cycled back up Whitehall to Horse Guards. We left our bikes against a bollard and had a look at our targets. The roofs were maybe only twenty feet off the ground, but there was nothing close to either sentry box that I could climb on.

  “We’ll have to use those little ledges,” Sophie whispered. “You can reach the roof from there.” The ledges she was referring to were two decorative plinths, no wider than the length of my toes, one halfway up the wall, the other a few feet from the roof. “You can push off my shoulders to the next ledge. I’ll stand right there so I can grab you if you slide down.”

  I eyed the ledges. They looked really narrow. I took a shaking breath and blew it out. “I suppose there’s nothing for it. I’ll have to try.”

  Sophie held out her cupped hands and I stepped into them and grabbed hold of the first ledge with my fingers. She boosted me up farther, and I reached up for the next one. I dangled in midair for a heart-stopping moment, toes scraping against the wall while Sophie got her shoulders under my boots and pushed me up toward the roof. It was difficult to get hold of the roof’s edge with the pastepot dangling from my elbow, but with a few wriggles and a few shoves from Sophie, I made it.

  I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my sleeve. I had scraped my hands, and I was sure my knees would be blue with bruises in the morning, but I wanted to stand up and dance a jig on top of the sentry box.

  I set to my task, pasting the back of the poster, unfurling it over the edge, and then reaching down with the brush and smoothing the paper into place.

  It fit perfectly in the little space, almost as though it were made to be there. Now, just the next sentry box to do, and we could go home.

  I perched for a moment on the ridgeline, catching my breath. Sophie was standing right under me, scanning the pavement right and left, keeping a lookout. Suddenly, I saw her stiffen. She lifted her hand, and I looked where she was pointing. A figure was approaching, casting a long shadow over the pavement. The shadow wore a tall helmet.

  Sophie said it before my stunned mind could form the words: “It’s a police constable!” she hissed. She spun around and looked up at me, her hand on top of her cap. Her face was full of fear. “Get down!”

  “Run, Sophie,” I whispered. It had been my idea to climb the sentry boxes. I’d just have to chance it alone.

  “I can’t leave you!” she said, fidgeting from one foot to the other.

  “Go!”

  “Damn and blast!” Sophie glanced at me one more time, then lit off toward the bicycles, her boot heels clattering on the pavement.

  I crept toward the back of the sentry box, hoping the constable wouldn’t notice me, but he would have had to be blind not to see me crouching on the roof like a gargoyle come to life. My skin felt as if it were on fire with anxiety, and my legs were shaking. I swung out over the edge, jabbing my toes around, fully expecting to find a little ledge like the one on the other side, but it wasn’t there. There was only sheer wall. Without a ledge, I would have to drop straight down. I didn’t have the strength to lift myself back up and I was too terrified to let go. My arms burned with the effort of holding on.

  The sound of the constable’s feet crunching in the gravel grew louder and louder, and then they paused for a moment in front of the sentry box. I squeezed my eyes shut. The footsteps began again; this time they were moving quicker. Moving toward the back of the box, where I dangled in midair.

  I took a breath and let go.

  I slid down the wall, scraping my chin against the stone, and I landed hard, my right leg buckling underneath me as I fell. I felt something in my ankle give, and searing white pain flew up my leg. I shoved my palm into my mouth, biting hard on it so I wouldn’t scream out loud. I struggled to my feet, ignoring the pain, and stumbled toward Horse Guards Parade.

  “Stop!”

  I shot a look over my shoulder, and the police constable was speeding up behind me. The light from a nearby lamppost illuminated my pursuer. Instead of the irritated police constable, the light shone on a friendly face. A face I knew and had drawn many times.

  I stopped running.

  “Will!”

  His eyes went wide, and everything seemed to stand still in that instant. “Vicky?”

  The relief was so great that I did the daftest thing. I threw myself into his arms and burst into tears. I pressed my forehead against his coat, hiccupping with sobs like a little girl. The wool of his jacket felt rough against my skin and it smelled like him, green grass and clean laundry.

  “So you’re the one fly-posting these illustrations up and down Whitehall?” His chest rumbled with laughter. “You’re Victorious?”

  “I suppose you have to arrest me,” I mumbled. “I won’t fight you. I’ll go.”

  “I don’t want to arrest you!” Will held me away from him. “I was going to tell whoever was doing the fly-posting not to go this way; there are constables on the other side of the parade ground. Let’s get you out of here before someone sees you. Come on.”

  “I can’t . . . I can’t walk!” I held my foot off the ground, clinging on to Will’s coat for balance. My ankle was beginning to throb, and my bootlaces were so tight they felt as though they were cutting into my skin. “I think I broke my ankle jumping off the sentry box.”

  Will was suddenly serious. “Here, put your arms around my neck.”

  I did, and Will hoisted me in his arms. “My bicycle is over there,” I said, pointing over his shoulder. “I can’t leave it. It belongs to the WSPU.”

  “We’ll take care of the bicycle, and then I’ll take you home to your . . . I suppose it will be to your husband.”

  “I haven’t got a husband, William.”

  Will paused. “You what?” His arms tightened around me.

  “I haven’t got a husband. It’s a long story. Take me to my friend’s flat, and I’ll tell you. There are so many things I want to tell you.”

  Will groaned and then shifted me in his arms. “How much do you weigh? I feel as if I’m carrying a log.”

  I thumped him on the shoulder. “I’ll get my own back for that.”

  He sighed. “I don’t doubt that you will. And Vicky?”

  “Yes?”

  “You look rather cute in those knickerbockers.”

  IN THE END, we hid the bicycle under a bush and took the Underground to Clement’s Inn. I was hopping on one leg up the stairs to Lucy’s rooms, clinging on to Will, making a hellish racket, when one of the other suffragettes poked her head out of her flat. “Vicky? Is that . . .” Her voice trailed off. Her eyes widened when she saw Will.

  “It’s all right, miss,” Will said. “Just escorting Vicky home.”

  The woman ducked her head back into the flat. “Sophie, she�
��s here! There’s a PC with her.”

  There were quick shuffling noises from inside the flat, and a moment later Sophie appeared, still dressed as a boy. When she saw Will, a huge grin spread across her face. Then her eyes traveled from Will’s arm around me to my foot. “What happened? We’ve been waiting for a call from the police.”

  “I hurt my ankle jumping off the sentry box,” I said. The conversation must have disturbed other suffragettes because startled faces began to poke out of doors.

  “Is it all right?” Sophie asked Will, her expression worried.

  “I’ll see to it for her.”

  Inside Lucy’s flat it was cold; the fire hadn’t been lit all day. Will helped me hobble to the edge of the bed, and I dragged the bedcovers over my lap.

  “This is your flat?” He shrugged off his police tunic and laid it over my shoulders. Underneath it he wore a simple white cotton shirt with braces.

  “It’s Lucy Hawkins’s flat. You know her. She was the one chained to the railing the day I got arrested.”

  He knelt down and unlaced my boot, drawing it off carefully. “Yes, I know her. She’s the one in jail just now with the others being force-fed. That’s why I was trying to help whoever was fly-posting. I was walking my beat and saw the posters. I thought, Finally people will know the truth of it. I have to say, it took a lot of bravery to do what you did tonight.”

  “I wasn’t very good,” I said glumly. “It’s probably my last caper. Caught on the first night. It was too difficult to pull off.”

  “Now, don’t give up so easily. Where’s that stubborn spirit of yours that I know so well?”

  I nudged his leg with my good foot. “You shouldn’t say that, Will. You’re a police constable. You should have arrested me. In actual fact, you’re probably in the soup tomorrow. We fly-posted on your beat, and they’re bound to question you about that. You abandoned your post too. They’ll think you helped me.”

  “I was going off duty anyway.” He hesitated. “Hey now, there’s an idea.”