The secret was out about the white dress with the green and purple sash. Bridget had realised that was probably the one day when she wouldn’t be able to find any excuse to slip away unnoticed, but she was determined to have what she called a last fling. ‘But don’t worry, the whole point of the demonstration,’ she assured her mother, ‘is that it’s to be entirely peaceful, to show people we’re not the harridans they think we are. Just women with a serious and justifiable cause.’
The march, held in the evening, was a huge success. A river of colour four miles long, winding from Trafalgar Square via Pall Mall and Piccadilly to Kensington, to climax in a rally at the Albert Hall, where those lucky enough to get tickets were to hear Mrs Pankhurst’s triumphal speech. Splendid embroidered banners were carried high; there were floats with tableaux, national costumes, choirs from Wales, pipes from Scotland, harps from Ireland and seven hundred women, dressed plainly and totally in white, who had suffered imprisonment for their beliefs. No doubt somewhere among these last was Rina Collingwood with her proud coronet of black hair, no longer of interest to the police – at present.
Ursula was sitting with friends but Kitty had shocked her aunt by deciding to walk alongside Bridget and Jon’s friend, Nolly – and several other unlikely women Kitty recognised, whom she would never have dreamt could be supporters of women’s rights. Jon himself marched behind, a banner-carrier in the band of men keen to show they supported the women’s movement. He might have lost his job, but not his principles. By the time they set off, Kitty half-expected to see Miss Drax, encouraged by finding independence: she had sent the book to the publishers, they had liked it and were to meet the hitherto anonymous Marie Bartholemew next week.
The procession moved along decorously with good-humoured well-wishers lining the route. There were relatively few jeers and catcalls among the cheers and none of the expected disturbances. Those who were against them had shown their disapproval by their absence. By half past eight it was all over, with the crowds streaming towards the tube and the day trippers making their way back to the various stations where the excursion trains would take them home, the trams and omnibuses lurching along, their passengers packed like sardines. Nowhere was a taxi-cab to be found.
Marcus was waiting for Kitty as the marchers dispersed. He had declined to be among the marching men, not giving his reasons. He was not easily persuadable, even for a righteous cause. He took her arm and kept it pressed to his side as they walked, her hand tightly in his lest they should get separated as they made their way through the thinning crowds. ‘Your father wasn’t with your aunt, then?’
‘He’s at home with his stamp collection.’
Louis was still wrapped up in himself. He hadn’t yet found a way to fill the gap left in his life, but Kitty was convinced there was more on his mind than Lydia’s murder, and that it concerned Paul Estrabon. Challoner and Estrabon had ceased to exist, as such. Louis’s sudden retirement hadn’t been explained to her, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the reason. Whatever had happened was now in the past, where it should remain. Lydia had not been able to forget the past – and look where it had led. ‘He’s talking of going to Australia, my father,’ she told Marcus now, ‘to work with my uncle, Barnabus.’ The thought of Louis working on a sheep farm struck them simultaneously as utterly absurd, and they were still laughing when, neither caring nor noticing which way they had been going, they found they had walked as far as the Embankment.
After the crowds, the cheering and the music which had surrounded them for the last few hours, it was quiet and peaceful here where the noises of London, the city that was never silent or asleep, were distant. In the gathering dusk, the lamps gave off a hazy, lemony glow. They paused and Marcus propped himself against a lamp-post pillar and watched Kitty leaning on the balustrade, looking at the pinpricks of light showing on the opposite bank and in the still-moving river traffic.
‘Do you dream, Marcus?’ she asked suddenly.
She looked so young, vulnerable, yet oddly mature in an expensively simple, high-necked blouse under a chic jacket, her hair under her fashionable hat elaborately arranged by Emma Pavell this morning. ‘Yes, I do,’ he said gently.
‘I’ve been having such dreams lately, like the ones I told you about – the wolf, and the unicorn, and, and … I wish—’ She stopped. ‘No, wishes are liars. They hold out too much hope. That’s what Mama always said.’
‘Then I hope she was wrong. I think she was. We sometimes wish for too much – but not always.’ He slid a box from his pocket, small and square, and gave it to her.
It winked on its black velvet, a tiny, golden feather, a brooch so finely wrought its fronds seemed to move in the lamplight. Lydia’s ghost walked with them all, and Kitty felt her presence now as she looked up and saw the tension in his dark-browed face turned towards her. And then, unexpectedly, he smiled.
No, she didn’t think Marcus was wishing for too much.
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