by Jaima Fixsen
Mary had to beat on the door to summon the landlady, who opened the door only a fraction, caught sight of Mary, then opened it wide.
“I thought it was Unionists. You made such a commotion.” She eyed Mary reproachfully.
“Forgive me. I’m in a hurry.” Ignoring the landlady’s widening eyes, she asked for Mr. Murray.
“What do you want with him?”
“I need to see him.” She wasn’t telling this woman any more. Trembling with impatience, Mary waited on the step. The landlady deliberated.
“He left yesterday.”
“Gone? To Edinburgh?”
The landlady nodded. “Would you care to leave a note?”
Mary wouldn’t leave a note, not for anything. She was still traumatized by yesterday’s failed letter-writing attempts, and wholly demoralized now she found Neil gone. She wouldn’t be able to manage anything more than a polite ‘I’m sorry I missed you. Please call once you are back in town’ and that was next to useless. Choking out the required replies, she left the house. The carriage, waiting at the curb, seemed a long way away, the climb inside high and strenuous. “Everything all right?” the coachman asked.
Mary mumbled something. What, she couldn’t say.
When they turned into Wimpole Street, she couldn’t face going home. “Not yet. May we drive a little, please?”
“Where to?” If the request surprised him, his voice revealed nothing.
“Anywhere.” It hardly mattered. Submerged in her own loss, Mary saw and heard nothing.
“Something brewing along by the park,” the coachman said dubiously, interrupting Mary’s thoughts.
“What?” Mary thrust her head out the carriage window. “We’d best go home,” she said. A crowd was gathering, whooping and shouting. It looked dangerous. No need to get any closer. Papa was probably worried enough as it was.
The coachman let her off at the front door and Mary made her weary way up the steps. She had no way of getting a letter to Neil in Scotland, even supposing she could write it. The only thing she could do was wait and trust that Neil would return. She remembered him telling her about a railway under construction in France and felt sick.
Samuel would have some way of getting hold of him. It was a humbling prospect, but she would ask. In an hour. She couldn’t face him just yet.
“I’ve come back,” Mary said to the open door of the library.
“Mary?” The voice was too young for Papa. It was the voice that whispered to her in the dimness between wakefulness and sleep, and chuckled at her silent asides. It came to her now like strains of music. Calm swept over her and she went into the room. Neil stood on the hearthrug, travel-stained and haggard about the eyes.
“You’re here,” she said stupidly, her hands limp at her sides.
“I had to speak with you,” he said.
“Your landlady told me you’d gone to Edinburgh.” He couldn’t be back so quickly.
“I turned back at Leeds.” He shifted his feet. “Mary—”
“It’s safer away from here. I saw a crowd gathering at the park.”
Neil shook his head. “There’s no more danger. I heard the news on the road into town. What you saw is the beginning of the celebrations. Grey is reinstated, the Lords voted once more and the bill is passed.”
Mary reached out a hand and found nothing, so she planted it on her own hip. “Passed?” She ought to feel more than simply sapped by this news. Once again, it was just what she’d wished for, and yet…“You came to tell Samuel,” she said dully. Her smile mechanism didn’t function no matter how she tried, so she hid her face by turning for the door. “Does he already know?”
“Mrs. Yates said he’s sleeping.”
“Oh.” She was stuck here, then.
“Mary.”
Steeling herself, she turned to look at him and for the first time saw the scraps of paper in his fingers. White hot embarrassment consumed her. He’d been reading those letters she’d torn last evening and tossed into the unlit hearth. She took a step back. “I—”
“You aren’t going to marry Samuel.” Neil moved closer.
“No.” Her throat was so dry the word came as a croak. She swallowed and forced herself on, speaking to a button on his waistcoat since she could drag her eyes no higher. “You were right. About everything. He’ll make an excellent husband, but he shouldn’t be mine. Not when—not when…” Mary licked her lips.
“Not when your heart wants to live in my pocket?”
Impossibly, Mary’s cheeks flamed even hotter. That horrible phrase wasn’t her worst attempt; there were more idiotic ones still, scrawled all over the bits of paper strewn about Neil’s feet. “I was trying to tell you I love you.” It might have sounded better without the quaver.
Neil checked the paper in his hands again. “You need me like a plant needs earth?”
In a merciful universe, it would be possible to expire from shame, to escape in a spontaneous combustion or vaporize in a puff of smoke.
“You’d rather be Mary Murray than Mary Brown.”
Any more of this and she might scream. “I know it sounds ludicrous, but—”
“You want to go with me to Turkey?”
There was no escaping his eyes. Mary went limp. “I’d go with you anywhere.”
His face blazed like she’d never seen before. “Come here, then.”
The scraps of paper fell unheeded as he opened his arms to her.
Later, he began talking. Their breath still mingled, her forehead resting on his chin. It seemed a good place—close enough she could keep her arms resting around his shoulders and feel the comfortable weight of his in the small of her back.
“I didn’t come to tell Samuel about the bill,” Neil said. “I wanted to tell you I loved you, but I’ve spent so much time telling you what to do and warning you away from Samuel. It seemed wrong when I wanted you to refuse him for my sake. I made it to Leeds, hurting more each mile, until I realized I had to ask you just once to choose me.”
Mary smiled into his cravat. “I already have.”
“So I discovered. You are a splendid artist, but your talents as a writer—”
“Are probably better than yours,” Mary finished.
“Absolutely. But I was going to say you astonish me.”
“I’m going to burn them all,” Mary said, hiding her face in his coat.
“Never. I’m keeping every one.” And just to be sure, he gathered them up and hid them away in his pockets.
“Blackmail?” Mary asked warily.
“If I must. I’ll remind you again and again how much you love me.”
“I don’t know why that astonishes you. We can talk of it later. Today is for kissing.”
“A whole day?” One of his eyebrows hitched up.
“At least,” Mary promised.
“May we talk of the future? A very little? To catch our breath?”
“All right. But it looks much better than it did an hour ago.”
His arms tightened around her. “I’ve been afraid of the future for too long—that it wouldn’t be with you.”
“It will.” The years stretched before her, beautifully replete with uncertainties and the unexplored, but she felt confident knowing Neil would discover them with her. “Is that all that worries you? You care nothing for politics?” she teased.
“Right now? Not a jot.”
Mary brought her lips to his ear. “Don’t tell, but neither do I.”
“Good,” Neil said, and then they were finished with words.
Forty
1 June 1832
Dear ma’am,
Forgive the formality. I can’t quite accustom myself to the word mama. Papa has given me the truth, but growing up as I did, your existence strikes me as miraculous and fantastical. I am writing in the hope we can be friends. It would mean a great deal. Thank you for finding me. I’m sure it must have been hard.
I am also writing with news of my own—I am to be married this Christ
mas. His name is Neil Murray and he is the best of men. Please let me know if circumstances permit us to meet. Neil and I are travelling north so I can meet his family and I should like to become acquainted with the rest of mine.
You are invited to the wedding. Do come if you can. I will vouch for the good behaviour of Papa. He may not like it, exactly, but he has promised.
I love Neil. We are happy.
Fondly,
Your Mary
Forty-One
1839
They hadn’t been long in Newcastle, but Mary liked it already. It was nice too, having visitors so soon after being settled.
Thomas Barnes was greyer and stouter now and Samuel’s face more lined. “We came to see you,” Samuel assured her. “The statue is merely an excuse.” He smiled at her with the affection reserved for his one-time collaborator, fiancée, and for seven years the wife of his oldest friend.
“One needs an excuse to come all the way north to Newcastle on Tyne,” Neil laughed. “It’s quite out of the way for both of you.”
“It’s a lovely place,” Mary said, defensive of her newest home. She was fond of the bustling, industrial city and glad of the underground wagonway that had brought them here. Already she felt pride in the place, pointing out buildings, workshops, and monuments as they brought Samuel and Mr. Barnes through the streets.
“You once told me you’d go with me anywhere,” Neil said for her ears alone.
“Still would.” Mary smiled at him. “Newcastle isn’t a challenge. You’ll have to try harder next time. Russia or Brazil.”
Neil winked at her.
There’d been a railway in France and a trestle bridge in Cornwall where Mary had worked under a pseudonym for a local printer, between caring for their daughter and a newborn son. He was three now and full of frisk, tugging at his father’s arm.
“Drawing again?” Mr. Barnes asked her.
“I’m getting back to it,” Mary said. “Now that we’re settled again.” It helped that the children were a little older. Samantha Anne and Arthur James were in their best clothes for this occasion, and at present adequately behaved. “I wasn’t sure you’d be persuaded to come see it unveiled.”
“I’ll write about it, of course, but I said we’re here to see you, not just a monument to Earl Grey erected by the subscribers of Newcastle,” Samuel reminded her.
“Though it looks to be impressive,” Barnes put in.
“It is,” Neil said beside her, pulling with his left hand so Arthur wouldn’t stray. “But I think we should have one with you and Barnes.”
Mary watched Samuel grimace. “Samuel wouldn’t want to be a statue.”
“No, indeed. Barnes might.”
He dismissed this with a loud “Ha!”
“Be serious,” Mary told Neil, nudging his arm.
“I am. They deserve to be. So do you. You were persuasive, and even though you never addressed Parliament, you made yourself heard.”
“I never said anything.” Mary reminded him.
“Now you’re splitting hairs,” Neil told her.
They stayed toward the periphery as the band played and the covering was lifted away from the statue. The crowd cheered and Mary took her eyes off the children long enough to add to the applause. “Looks well, doesn’t it?” she said to Mr. Barnes. Samuel scribbled furiously, capturing details for subscribers of the Times. As the crowd thinned and they moved closer to get a better look at the statue on its tall pinnacle, Mary thought she recognized a face in the milling crowd.
Impossible. It couldn’t be. She was merely travelling back in time because of the presence of Samuel and Mr. Barnes after so many years. Still…Mary moved forward, trying to get a closer look inside a fashionable blue velvet bonnet, but the slight lady moved suddenly, darting through the crowd. Her shoulder glanced off a man in a rough coat, and he stumbled into a chestnut-haired girl beside him.
“Forgive me.” The man immediately swept off his hat.
The girl blushed.
It couldn’t be. Mary’s eyes narrowed, seeking out the vanishing blue velvet of the lady who’d pushed them together. After so many years, she couldn’t trust her memory, but the elegance of that dress, the nimble movements…it might have been Mrs. Chin, who’d moved away from Wimpole Street years ago. She’d never explained herself to Mary, but she had accepted the invitation to the wedding.
“Is something the matter?” Neil asked.
“Nothing. Thought I recognized a face.” The blue velvet was gone, lost in the swirl of people, and Mary was only half aware, swept into her own thoughts. If Mrs. Chin hadn’t scolded her upon learning she’d engaged herself to Samuel…if Neil hadn’t sought her out in Bath…if she hadn’t started drawing or been caught out one day in the rain…
Small things, all of them, but it was a glad feeling to thread her hand around Neil’s arm. With Arthur on her left and Samantha on Neil’s right, they followed Samuel around the square admiring the statue of England’s great reformer.
You could call it accident or good fortune, but Mary couldn’t believe the happiness in her life was all due to luck. At seventeen, she’d have called it destiny.
Author’s Note
In fiction an author is always taking liberties, and I should point out my own. The early 1830s were a time of tremendous uncertainty in England. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 wasn’t that far removed from the subjects of George IV and William IV. More troubling though, were the last fifty years of blood and turmoil across the channel. Ideas of the Enlightenment had been subjected to experiment with varying longevity and success, and by 1830, many in England were ready for change.
As Mary learned, it’s true that representation in the House of Commons (the elected house of Parliament) hadn’t changed for eight hundred years, and some boroughs (electoral districts) that in earlier centuries had been thriving settlements, were now uninhabited or nonexistent. Pocket boroughs, as these were called, were bought by men of wealth and privilege, who effectively controlled Parliament. The exponential growth of industrial centres like Birmingham and Manchester wasn’t accounted for—so towns with hundreds of thousands of people had little or no national political representation.
Literacy was increasing, so was the number of printers and newspapers. Having witnessed years of revolution, republic, empire, and restoration in France, the population of England had some idea of what, if pressed, they had the power to do. In November of 1830 there were three days of riots in Bristol; and at the height of the crisis in 1832 the political unions (now waxing mighty) declared they would pay no tax unless the bill was passed. 1.6 million pounds of gold were withdrawn from the Bank of England. The Duke of Wellington’s windows were smashed (again), and at least one Tory aristocrat mounted cannon on his terrace.
I did embroider a bit describing the events of the days of May when King William forced the House of Lords to pass the bill by threatening to create enough new lords to vote it in. There were marches and scuffles that month in London but in actual fact, the House of Lords voted down the bill on the 7th of May and the political unions didn’t post their placards urging a run on the banks until May 13th. In this book one event immediately follows the other, since I didn’t like the idea of Mary and Neil and Samuel twiddling their thumbs for a week.
Many of the political cartoons described here are real. I’ve pinned images of them on the Pinterest board I keep for this book. They are clever, cheeky, sharp, wonderfully inspiring, and I feel just a little guilty giving Mary the credit.
By 1830 there had already been exceptional women novelists, musicians, and painters; sadly, I found no real basis for a young female cartoonist at that time. To my knowledge the field remains astonishingly male-dominated even today, but the work of talented artists like Jen Sorensen, Liza Donnelly, and Canadian Sue Dewar is changing that.
I had a lot of fun researching this story, thanks in large part to Antonia Fraser’s excellent book, Perilous Question: Reform or Revolution? Britain on the Brink,
1832.
I am also indebted to L. M. Montgomery for many happy hours of reading in my growing-up years (and a good many more since). It seems presumptuous to say my story was inspired by her work, but I did write it hoping to evoke some of her flavour and the pleasure I felt in the world of Jane, Valancy, Rilla, and Anne.
Thank you for reading The Reformer. I hope you enjoyed it! If you did…
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Keep reading for an excerpt of Fairchild, a Regency retelling of a classic fairytale.
It was a foul day for riding, Tom thought, but that was England for you. It had rained all the way from Bury St. Edmonds, and he was wet to the skin by the time he glimpsed Chippenstone’s lights.
His mother, of course, was waiting for him. As he dismounted, a groom ran out to lead his horse away. He hadn’t taken two steps before the butler stood beside him, holding out an umbrella. Tom didn’t recognize him, but he was used to new faces. Servants didn’t usually stay at Chippenstone for long. Stepping inside, he very properly handed his hat, whip and gloves to the waiting lackey. His mother rushed towards him from the drawing room, her crisp purple silk rustling, the ludicrous tower of curls atop her head bouncing madly.
“Martin’s preparing a bath,” she said, helping him from his coat, pushing aside the hovering butler. She kissed him soundly on both cheeks. “I needn’t ask about your journey. You look like a drowned cat.”
“And you look your angel self, mother. Stand off, so I don’t get wet all over you.” He thrust his sodden greatcoat at the butler. “May as well make just one puddle,” he said, fumbling at the buttons of his coat with numb fingers.