by Robin Paige
Lottie had been here only since Tuesday, but it had been long enough to know that Jack had been right about this place; in many respects, it was a perfect hideaway. No one would ever think to look for her in an upstairs room let to the American adventure writer Jack London, in the house of a policeman! What was more, Officer Palmer went out on his beat every morning and Mrs. Palmer and her two daughters were employed as seamstresses in a dress shop in New Bond Street, so the house was empty all day. And the Palmers lived on the first floor and Jack’s room was on the second, at the rear; as long as they kept their voices down, there was little danger of discovery even when the family was at home. Jack’s room even had its own private stair, so when Lottie needed to use the backyard privy, all she had to do was check to see that the coast was clear and make a dash for it. Even if she were seen, it would only be assumed that Jack was entertaining a female visitor, as he certainly had every right to do.
Of course, there were drawbacks, too, and one was so serious that it had almost prompted her to leave that very first day. Lottie had always held the unconventional belief that a woman’s first responsibility was to herself, and that she had the moral obligation to be her very own person. To her, marriage seemed to compromise a woman’s independence, without which she was nothing. She believed that love should be free, without constraint, and if one could not love freely, one should not love.
Lottie might be quite a few years ahead of her era in this belief, but she was certainly not alone, for several important women of her day also advocated free love. In England, more than a century before, Mary Wollstonecraft had attacked marriage as “legal prostitution.” In the United States, the writer and self-trained physician Mary Gove Nichols spoke and wrote about the need for women’s sexual emancipation, while Victoria Woodhull, a leader of both the free love and woman suffrage movements, led a determined campaign against marriage. As Lottie considered her position vis-à-vis relationships with men outside of the bounds of marriage, she was in the company of a substantial number of forward-looking feminist thinkers of her day.
So if Lottie had considered Jack London as a potential lover, she was making a choice that she herself would consider perfectly moral. He was quite the handsomest, manliest, most virile man she had ever seen, and she was enormously attracted to him, so much so that almost all thought of Adam Gould had flown from her mind. What’s more, from the moment they met, Jack had made it abundantly, emphatically clear that he was attracted to her, as well. Considering that the two of them had been thrown together by fate (or so it seemed), Lottie saw no reason why she should not give herself to him eagerly, joyfully, without reservation. In fact, when he invited her to hide out in his room, she had assumed that they would become lovers. It all seemed very natural and, given her feelings against the restrictions of marriage and the prerogatives that women should claim outside of it, very right.
But that was before Lottie had found the photograph of Jack’s wife and little girl, hidden under a pile of manuscript pages next to his typewriter, on the little table beside the window. Jack had gone out to get them some supper, and Lottie, curious to see what sort of writer he was and what he had written about the East End, had picked up the manuscript to take it to her bed and read it. The photograph—the picture of a smiling, voluptuous, raven-haired woman with a baby girl in her arms—fluttered to the floor, and when she picked it up, she read the inscription on the back: To dearest Jack, from his devoted wife Bess and darling Joan.
Lottie had stared at the photograph until the images blurred, then put the manuscript, unread, back on the table, the photograph safely concealed beneath it. Having seen it, though, she knew that she was in a corner. She was free to love, but Jack was not, and to give herself to him would be morally wrong. It would be to betray a woman she had never met—a woman who had given birth to Jack’s child and to whom he had pledged his life—and Lottie could not in conscience bring herself to do this. In conscience, too, she had to condemn Jack for attempting to entice her into an adulterous relationship, and this new knowledge entirely changed her feelings toward him.
But what was she to do when he—as she knew he would—began to make love to her? Should she tell him she had found the photograph, and that it had changed the way she felt about him? Or push him away, letting him think what he might? Or simply leave, without explanation?
She’d told him, of course, that very first evening, when he’d come back with fish and chips and tea for their supper. She was too forthright, too honest and candid, to do anything else. For a moment he’d stared at her, his eyes dark, his lower lip thrusting sulkily, and then he’d laughed, a short, hard laugh that felt almost like a slap.
“Well, you’re a straight-shooter,” he said. “I’ll give you that, damn it.” He turned away from her and flung himself on his bed. “I don’t love her, you know,” he said gruffly. “She understood that when we got married.”
“Then why in the world did you marry her?” Lottie asked wonderingly. It was a very real question. She could barely imagine marrying someone she thought she loved and accepting the restriction of her freedom that came with it. To marry someone she did not love was unthinkable.
“Because I wanted the restraint laid on me,” Jack said sourly. “I was drifting, and when I’m drifting, it’s hard to write. Bess was solid, solid as a rock. I thought she’d be a weight, holding me down, giving me a rule to live by, imposing some order on my life. And she does,” he added bitterly, half to himself. “Entirely too much.”
His answer almost dumbfounded Lottie. He married because he needed restraint, when marriage seemed to her to be entirely too restraining? Could the man not see that it was his obligation as a human being to restrain himself? And if he felt he was drifting, could he not find some anchor within himself to lay hold of, without looking for it in his wife, whose anchoring, restraining qualities he was bound, sooner or later, to bitterly resent?
But Lottie doubted that he was capable of answering these questions, so she merely shrugged and said, “Well, then, you got what you wanted, didn’t you? A rule to live by. Order in your life.” She could not quite keep the sarcasm out of her tone. “You should be happy.”
“Well, I’m not,” Jack said sulkily. “I want you, Lottie. We’re meant for each other.”
Ignoring the last sentence, with which she reluctantly had to agree, she rose and unfolded the newspaper wrappings from the fish and chips, sniffing appreciatively. “Smells good.” She held out the package. “Here. Have some supper.”
Jack regarded her sullenly. “Bess has a peasant’s mind. She talks of nothing but the baby and the household. No imagination, none at all. She stifles me.”
“No doubt,” Lottie said, putting the package on the table and helping herself to a piece of fish. “But you’re not being very consistent, are you? You want her to be an anchor, but you complain that she holds you down. Right?” In Lottie’s view, it was dishonorable for a man to marry a woman to suit his own purposes and then condemn his wife when she fulfilled the role for which he had chosen her. Adam Gould would never think of doing such a thing.
“You don’t need to be cruel about it,” Jack said. He held out his hand with a seductive smile. “We can be friends, can’t we? Come have a nice cuddle, Lottie.”
“Not that kind of friends,” Lottie said firmly. “And I’ll only stay in this room on your guarantee that there will be no talk of cuddling or love. One word, and I’m out the door. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Jack said in a resigned tone. Then he flashed her a boyish grin. “But I’ll bet a quid you’ll change your mind.”
“Don’t have a quid,” Lottie said.
“I’ll loan it to you.”
“Never a borrower nor a lender be,” Lottie replied smartly, and ignoring his dark look, carried her feast of fish and chips to her own bed, where she made herself comfortable and ate hungrily until every crumb was gone.
In a way that she could not quite describe, Lottie felt relieved,
as if the fates had kept her from mistakenly choosing the wrong path, which, once taken, might have led to enormous complications. And so she was able to sleep without difficulty in the same room with this very attractive man, and was easily able to ignore his glance, dark and passionate, which followed her as she moved around. Jack might be as sulky as a scolded child, but Lottie felt easy in herself. She had done what she felt right, without regret, and she was pragmatist enough to put aside what she couldn’t or shouldn’t do and focus instead on what she could.
So when Lottie saw the article on the front page of Freedom on Thursday morning, she began to get a glimmering idea of how she could help Adam, who was now much on her mind. After all, if he had not been at the Clarion to take her to lunch, the police would not have arrested him, so it was up to her to see that, somehow or another, he was rescued.
The article reported that at the request of counsel, the three Anarchists accused of bomb-making had been granted a continuance to the fourth of September, which was a fortnight away. They would be transported from Holloway Prison, where they were being held, to the Old Bailey, where they would stand trial. The article urged all London Anarchists to attend the trial and show, by their presence, their support for their comrades, who, whatever they had done, had done it out of their belief that all governments were oppressive, and that the only path toward freedom was to end the rule of tyranny.
Lottie had, of course, told Jack why she was hiding from the police, and what had happened at the newspaper office, and all about Yuri Messenko and Ivan Kopinski and Pierre Mouffetard and Adam. Now, she thought for a few minutes, shaping her idea. Then she looked over the top of her newspaper. “Listen to this, Jack.”
“I’m working,” Jack replied, around his cigarette.
“Then stop working and listen,” she commanded, and read the article out loud. When she was finished, she put the newspaper down. “Something must be done, Jack,” she said urgently. “Those men are innocent. They must be freed.”
“Freed?” Jack turned around, a cigarette hanging from his lips. It was warm that morning; the window was open and he was wearing an undershirt that revealed his chiseled muscles—wearing it deliberately, Lottie suspected, hoping that the sight of his masculine torso might tempt her to change her mind. “You mean to infiltrate the jury, I take it,” he remarked sarcastically. “And just how do you reckon to do that?”
Lottie tossed her head impatiently. “That’s ridiculous. There’s no way to infiltrate a jury. Our men will be found guilty, of course. I mean to find a way to free them from prison.”
Jack’s blue eyes glinted and he smiled, as if in spite of himself. “Anybody ever tell you that you’re beautiful when you’re passionate?”
She scowled. “Be serious, Jack. This is serious business.”
“Serious? It sure as hell is,” he agreed. He turned around and straddled his chair backward. “I’ve been in jail, and I know. And I’ll tell you, Lottie, it ain’t no easy thing to get a man out of jail, once he’s behind bars.”
“You’ve been in jail?” Lottie put her head on one side, regarding him thoughtfully. Jack had told her—endlessly, it seemed—about his adventures as a seaman, a gold-seeker, and a Socialist, but he had not mentioned jail.
“It happened in the Depression of ’94,” Jack said, launching into what Lottie had come to think of as his storytelling mode. “I was travelin’ with Coxey’s Army, a rabble-rousin’ bunch of the unemployed who marched on Washington to try to get things changed. But I got fed up and deserted when we got to the Mississippi River. Hopped a freight headin’ east. I ended up at Niagara Falls and got one good look at the river before John Law pinched me for vagrancy, along with a couple of other hoboes. They shoved us into a big iron cage and then hauled us off to a courtroom, where the judge gave us thirty days apiece without allowin’ any of us so much as a word in our defense.” Jack’s voice grew hard. “Trial was a farce. I was denied not only my right of trial by jury but my right to plead guilty or not guilty. Got my American blood up, I’ll tell you.”
Lottie stared at him. “I didn’t think things like that happened in America.”
“Neither did I,” Jack said. “All I did was walk along their sidewalk and gawk at their picayune waterfall. What crime was there in that? Next thing I know, I’m rolled up snug as a bug in the Erie County Penitentiary.” He paused. “I learned plenty from that experience, I’ll tell you. It was like going to school. I learned how to pass the punk, pick a lock, pick a pocket—”
“Pick a pocket?” Lottie interrupted eagerly.
“Yeah.” Jack grinned. “This old geezer shared my cell, Cardboard Clancy, his name was. They called him Cardboard because that’s where he liked to sleep on the road, in little houses he made out of cardboard boxes. Card, he was a masterful pickpocket.” Jack lit a cigarette from the end of the one he was smoking and stubbed out the butt. His eyes were sparkling with the memory and the telling of it. “One day, in the mess-hall, ol’ Card picked the keys clean out of the guard’s pocket. Slick as a whistle, it was. Fella never even knew they were gone.”
“And then what happened?” Lottie asked, regarding him curiously. The trouble with Jack was that you never knew how much of his tale to believe. He could recount a story so full of lively, real-life details that you felt you were actually there, then he’d laugh and tell you he’d made it all up and congratulate himself on having fooled you.
“What happened?” Jack shrugged. “Nothing happened. We were getting out the next week, so we didn’t bother using the keys. Might as well get a few more prison meals under our belts.” He grinned. “Anyway, Card just did it to show me how it was done. We had it all fixed up to go into partnership when we got out, y’see. Card thought I was a crook just like him, and I didn’t see any merit in disabusing him of the notion. So I let him think I was the real goods, so to speak, and he spent a fair amount of time teaching me what he knew. Especially picking pockets. As I say, he was real good at it. We practiced on one another until I was real good at it, too.”
“So you learned how to be a dipper,” Lottie said in a speculative tone.
“A dipper?”
Lottie laughed. “That’s what a pickpocket is called here. A buzzer, sometimes. A mobsman, if he’s well-dressed.”
“Well, I don’t think they’d’ve called me a mobsman in those days.” Jack chuckled briefly. “I was a tramp, pure and simple. And I wasn’t doing it to pick up story material, or study human nature, either, the way I’m doing now. I did it because of the life that was in me, the wanderlust in my blood that wouldn’t let me rest. But I hadn’t the price of the railroad fare in my jeans, so I—”
“Did you practice dipping while you were a tramp?” Lottie interrupted. Jack’s story was interesting, but he was taking a long time to tell it.
Jack gave her a shame-faced look. “Well, I wouldn’t admit it to anybody but you, but I have to confess to giving it a shot a time or two. It’s a useful trade, I’ve got to say. One time in Ogden, Utah, when I was dead broke and didn’t know where my next meal was coming from, I passed this dandified dude on the street and—”
“I wonder,” Lottie said, “if you’d mind showing me just how good a dipper you really are.” She stood up. For a change from her gypsy costume, she was wearing a pair of Jack’s spare trousers and one of his clean shirts. “Give me your wallet,” she commanded. She tucked it into a rear pocket and turned her back on him. “Now, show me.”
Without hesitation, Jack brushed against her. She felt nothing, not even the touch of his fingers, but when she reached for the wallet, it wasn’t there.
He grinned at her mischievously, holding it up and reaching for her. “Is this what you’re looking for, lady?”
She evaded his grasp. “So much for the wallet,” she said. “How are you with keys?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Allow me here to give a word of caution about taking cold during the monthly period. It is very dangerous. I knew a young girl, wh
o had not been instructed by her mother upon this subject, to be so afraid of being found with this show of blood upon her apparel which she did not know the meaning of, that she went to a brook and washed herself and her clothes—took cold, and immediately went insane.
Dr. Chase’s Recipes; or
Information for Everybody, 1867
Nellie Lovelace sat in front of the mirror in her dressing room in the theater, staring at her reflection and fighting back tears. Tonight was the last time she would sit in the room that had become so dear to her in the past few months, with its big gold star on the door, its clever little costume closet, and its prettily-flounced dressing table littered with theatrical makeup, the mirror framed with photographs of herself in various theatrical roles. For tonight was the last time she would star as Princess Soo-Soo. She had been fired. The director, who had given her not just one warning but several, had finally told her that there was no longer any need of her services.
At the recollection of that terrible humiliation, Nellie stopping fighting, dropped her head on her arms, and gave way to bitter tears. It was an appalling thing to be fired from a role, especially such a plummy role as the Princess. The theatrical world was a close-knit society. By tomorrow, everyone in the cast would know what had happened, and by the following day, word of her disgrace would have rippled through every theater in London. Every director would know that she had been fired for missing cues and forgetting lines, and it would be next to impossible to get new work in a decent theater. If she was lucky, she might get a job as a chorus girl in the music halls, but likely not the Hippodrome or the Alhambra, the leading variety houses. The Paragon Theater of Varieties, maybe, in Mile End Road. She might even end up back in Whitechapel, at the Wonderland. At the thought, her heart sank. Given how far she had risen, such a thing would be a terrible come-down.