Lady Rights a Wrong

by Eliza Casey

“If he can behave like that at his work—how does he act with his wife?”

  Cecilia shook her head. “Yes. Poor Mary Winter. He must bully her, too.”

  “Yet she does seem quick to defend him, to take his side against her own mother and sister.”

  “What choice does she have? According to Miss Smythe, it sounds as if Mr. Winter thinks his mother-in-law’s notoriety cost him his position, not his own actions.”

  “Of course he would think that, wouldn’t he? Men like that always blame everyone except themselves.”

  “I fear you are too right, Jane. Is Mr. Price a man like that, as well? Maybe he blames his wife for creating scandal and gossip in his venerable career.” Cecilia glanced at the little enameled watch pinned to her velvet lapel. “We should find the headquarters of the Women’s Suffrage Union, before it grows too late. Even thinking about a man like Monty Winter gives me a headache. Shall we find a tea shop first?”

  “Excellent idea, my lady. And the dressmaker. Remember?”

  Cecilia sighed. “How could I forget?”

  * * *

  The Union headquarters, where mostly officers of the organization met to plan strategy, seemed like some wonderfully mysterious temple, Cecilia thought, guarded by vestal virgins, pillared halls holding on to secret oaths. But it was nothing like that at all. It was a large, factorylike room above a printer’s shop, lined with plain pine desks and filing cabinets, the walls hung with corkboards covered with notes and pamphlets. Typewriters clicked, and the air smelled of stale coffee and chalk dust and ladies’ rosewater scent. The flowery sweetness was nothing like the perfume on the letters at Primrose Cottage.

  The only color was a large “Women’s Suffrage Union” banner of white, green, purple, and gold hung on the far wall and a portrait of Amelia Price draped in black crepe. Cecilia tilted her head to study it, the painted image just as beautiful as the real woman had been, but more serene.

  “You’re not a reporter, are you?” a lady asked loudly. She came from around a table where she had been studying a large document, the cuffs of her shirtwaist stained with ink, her brown hair sliding from its pins. “Because we still have no comment on Mrs. Price’s tragic passing.”

  “Not at all,” Cecilia answered, taking Anne’s letter from her handbag. “I’m Lady Cecilia Bates, of Danby Hall in Yorkshire, and this is Miss Jane Hughes. We met Mrs. Price shortly before her death, and I was so much moved by her words. I wanted to pay my condolences. I have here a letter from Miss Anne Price.”

  The lady scanned the short note, and her face softened in a smile. “Lady Cecilia. How do you do? I am Miss Wheeler, vice secretary of the Union, but trying to keep matters moving forward here until Anne or Mrs. Palmer returns. It is no easy task; as you can see, there is much grief.” She gestured to the busy, noisy room behind her. “Please, do follow me.”

  She led them into a small, windowless office in the corner of the space and poured out cups of thick, bitter coffee. “Please, Lady Cecilia, Miss Hughes. How are matters really progressing in Yorkshire? We hear only snatches of news here. Is Cora truly ill again?”

  “I’m afraid so. She’s taking Mrs. Price’s death quite badly.”

  Miss Wheeler rubbed at her eyes, as if weary or sad. “Of course she is. She quite idolized Mrs. Price. We all did.”

  “And I think confessing at the inquest to pushing Mrs. Price down the stairs has not helped her state of mind.”

  Miss Wheeler snorted. “That’s all nonsense, of course. Cora would never have touched Mrs. Price in anger. And with the TB, she would hardly have been able to shove a cat.”

  “TB?” Jane said sharply. “Is that what’s wrong with her, then?”

  “She seemed quite energetic when she first arrived in Danby Village,” Cecilia added. Though the flushed cheeks and bright eyes, the manic energy followed by collapse she had seen in Cora, did point to such an illness.

  “Yes, Cora Black is certainly one of the most ardent workers for the cause,” Miss Wheeler said. “She will do anything at all she thinks might help. But the last hunger strike she went on severely weakened her constitution.”

  “Has she ever used her spirit medium gifts in aid of the Union?” Jane asked.

  Miss Wheeler shrugged. “She does card readings for us on rainy afternoons sometimes. I am not a believer myself, but I certainly have no reason to curtail the amusements of others. And Cora has brought much comfort and enjoyment to so many of our ladies.”

  “So you don’t think she could have harmed Mrs. Price?” Cecilia said.

  Miss Wheeler firmly shook her head. “They were staunch allies in our war for freedom. I admit Cora sometimes took medicine that gave her terrible dreams, even caused sleepwalking once or twice, but . . .”

  “She wasn’t that strong even under the influence of those dreams?” Jane said.

  For the first time, a touch of doubt flickered across Miss Wheeler’s expression. “I shouldn’t think so. But I haven’t seen Cora in some time, as they’ve been on a speaking tour. Perhaps her condition has changed.”

  “What about any enemies?” Cecilia asked.

  “Mrs. Price had many, of course.” Miss Wheeler busied herself tidying papers on the desk, tapping them into piles. “This office and her flat are often vandalized, paint and rotten eggs, things of that sort, and poison-pen letters. She was knocked unconscious once on a march. And, of course, her marriage didn’t end well. A man like Henry Price could never bear a wife who thought for herself.”

  Cecilia nodded, remembering the rumors of infidelities. “Was her London home kept secure? Anne said her mother had valuable jewels she always wore.”

  “She did have a contingent of ladies who were a bodyguard of sorts, and had taken lessons in Eastern martial arts. But Mrs. Price never seemed much concerned. Were things stolen from her cottage?” Miss Wheeler’s face contorted, as if she struggled to hold back tears. “How awful it would be for such a great lady to meet her end through common robbery!”

  Or through a drunken fall. No wonder Cora wanted to protect Mrs. Price’s reputation when all else was lost. “No one is really sure what happened yet. Where will the Union go now with their officers?”

  “There will be a vote for a new president in due course. I am sure Anne will stand for it, as might Mrs. Palmer.”

  “Would Mrs. Palmer continue on as Mrs. Price has?” Cecilia asked. She recalled rumors of quarrels over the state of the Union, differences in opinion as to where the cause should go next.

  Miss Wheeler frowned. “It’s impossible to say at this point. Things are so very uncertain. But we will certainly continue the fight, one way or another. Perhaps you might join us, Lady Cecilia?”

  “Yes,” Cecilia said. “Yes, I think I just might.”

  * * *

  Aunt Maggie’s club was on the top two floors of an exclusive hotel in Mayfair, all elegant white and gilt paint, comfortable chintz settees, desks for letter writing, and shelves and shelves of books, mostly about exotic travel destinations and travel memoirs. Large doors opened to a library, a cardroom, a dining room set with heavy silver and large flower arrangements, no need spared. Maggie and Annabel were already having tea in the palm court, a string quartet playing discreetly behind the potted plants, light streaming from the glass-domed roof.

  “Oh, my dears, there you are at last!” Aunt Maggie called. “Do sit down and have some of the club’s delicious crab salad sandwiches. Tea, or perhaps something bubbly? You do look exhausted to bits. A busy day?”

  Jane paused, looking quite awed as she studied the opulent space, but Cecilia nudged her into one of the cushioned wicker chairs and handed her a teacup. Aunt Maggie waved her hand to order a bottle of champagne.

  “We visited Mr. Winter’s office—or should we say his former office. And the Women’s Suffrage Union headquarters, not to mention a couple of ateliers to order a new frock. All
on buses!” Cecilia gestured to the ribbon-bound box at her feet, which contained a lovely white lace gown one of Madame Handley’s clients had ordered but canceled, and happened to fit Cecilia quite well. She wiggled her aching toes in her kid boots as she told Maggie and Annabel all they had learned from Miss Smythe and Miss Wheeler.

  “We had quite an interesting day ourselves, didn’t we, Annabel?” Maggie said. She waited for one of the maids in her crisp white cap and apron to pour out the wine and leave more cakes before she went on. “We went to Madame Haya’s Turkish baths.”

  “The Turkish baths!” Cecilia cried, delighted to imagine Aunt Maggie and the highly elegant Annabel wrapped in towels and sitting in clouds of steam. “Did you use a hookah? See disreputable ladies?” She sighed happily as she sipped at the champagne and let the bubbles tickle her nose. An independent London life of champagne and baths would be quite delightful.

  “Oh, Cec, no one but your grandmother would ever think such a place scandalous now,” Maggie said with a laugh, straightening her large, sapphire-blue velvet hat. “Even Queen Mary has visited Madame Haya’s. And it’s the best place to hear all the gossip.”

  “It seems Mr. Price is hoping to marry again, and might even have a specific young lady in mind,” Annabel said. “And Mrs. Price was seen with some unknown young man at the park and theater. Ages younger than her, they said, but no one knows who he is. Delicious.”

  “We met old Lady Fermoy,” Maggie said. “She was at your debut ball, remember? She always wears those old Victorian bonnets. But she has the most prodigious memory I have ever encountered; she remembers every betrothal, affair, divorce, babies who looked nothing like their putative fathers . . .”

  Annabel took a sip of champagne and giggled. “I daresay she was bridesmaid at the wedding of Princess Charlotte and King Leopold, she was so ancient! When she dropped her towel . . .”

  “Oh, pish, Annabel. Victoria and Albert’s wedding, maybe. But then, none of us is getting any younger.” Maggie patted at her abundant, sun-streaked hair.

  “But maybe she remembered Amelia Price when she was Miss Merriman?” Cecilia asked, recalling that her own grandmother had said Amelia was the belle of the Season then.

  “Oh yes. It seems that Miss Merriman had her pick of suitors. She was engaged at least three times before Mr. Price. And one of them was . . .”

  “That dreadful Lord Elphin!” Annabel cried.

  “No!” Cecilia gasped. “Lord Elphin was once engaged to Mrs. Price?”

  “I’m sure he couldn’t always have been a reclusive gargoyle,” Maggie said. She refilled everyone’s glasses. “Lady Fermoy even said he was rather handsome, if a quite shy man. Everyone was surprised when Miss Merriman accepted him.”

  “But it didn’t last long,” Annabel said with a sad sigh. “And then Lord Elphin left London, never to return. They say he did marry later, but somehow it ended quickly. Maybe he was pining for his true love.”

  “It’s more likely she died, poor lady. Miss Merriman married Henry Price at the end of the Season, after Mr. Merriman suffered some sort of financial reversal,” Maggie said.

  “But why did her romance with Lord Elphin end?” Cecilia mused.

  Maggie shrugged. “Even Lady Fermoy didn’t know for sure. It was all very hush-hush. I shall have to ask around a bit more.”

  “Oooh, does that mean another visit to the baths?” Annabel clapped her hands. “I could quite get used to it. And having champagne in the afternoon.”

  Cecilia realized she was starting to really like Annabel Clarke. “Maybe Lord Elphin still nurses a defeated love for Mrs. Price. Maybe it’s festered in him all these years, and that’s why he was so hostile to her Union.”

  “And he was so overcome by his emotions when he saw her again he just had to kill her?” Jane whispered.

  “Just like in a penny dreadful story,” Cecilia said. “And he gave her ring to Guff? Or had Guff steal it for him?” She wondered if it was Lord Elphin who gave her that ring in the first place.

  “Then maybe he also still has that torn scrap from her sash,” Jane said.

  “Oh, good thinking, Jane!” Cecilia said. “But then how do we find it?”

  “I know a way,” Annabel said. “The church bazaar.”

  “The bazaar?” Cecilia asked, confused.

  “We need donations for the bring-and-buy tent, right?” Annabel said, wafting her glass. “We could go to his house and ask for one of those donations.”

  Cecilia shivered at the thought of Lord Elphin’s ramshackle house. “I don’t even know anyone who has set foot on the Elphin estate in years, except for his workers and cronies who heckled us at the rally.”

  Annabel used her glass to wave this away. “Pooh! He doesn’t scare me. I bet he lives there like—oh, who was that character in that one book? With her old wedding cake and moldering veil?”

  “Miss Havisham?” Cecilia asked.

  “Yes. Pining away for his lost Miss Merriman. Kissing the scrap of her sash.” Annabel sounded delighted by the macabre idea, and Cecilia found she liked her even more. “We’ll call on him when we get back to Danby, have a little peek around. I can distract him while you search his desk, or whatever. Now, shall we order another bottle of champagne? Is that allowed in your club, Margaret?”

  “Oh yes,” Maggie said cheerfully. “It is most definitely allowed.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  When Annabel had suggested they try to get Lord Elphin to make a donation to the church bazaar, it had seemed like quite a good idea. In London, anyway, after all that champagne at Aunt Maggie’s club. Now that the task was actually before them, Cecilia wasn’t quite so sure of it all.

  She stared up at Lord Elphin’s manor house from the seat of the governess cart. Annabel and Jane, squashed close next to her, were just as silent. Even Jack, in his basket under the seat, was quiet. While the Elphin house had never been as grand as Danby, or as modernly elegant as the Byswater estate, it had always had a respectable place in the neighborhood. Built in the Jacobean era by a family of prosperous farmers and added on to over the years, it had always been known as the seat of an old name and good English husbandry.

  Now the paint was peeling, the chimney cracked, the shutters banging loose from the old mullioned windows. The gardens around the house were long desiccated, but Cecilia knew the farm still had respectable yields, thanks to Lord Elphin’s loyal bullyboy tenants. None of them seemed to be around today, though.

  “It looks like the houses in the old ghost stories my granny used to tell us when we were kids,” Jane said softly.

  Cecilia laughed. “I think I might prefer to talk to a ghost rather than Lord Elphin.”

  “Oh, pooh!” Annabel said, but even she sounded a bit doubtful. “He might be a dreadful Neanderthal of a man, but he is just a man. And once, at least, he had the good taste to fancy a lady like Mrs. Price, right?”

  “Until she rejected him, and he took to heckling women who just want to live their own lives,” Cecilia said. But Annabel was right—Lord Elphin was just a man, and the sooner they knocked on his door, the sooner they could leave. She climbed down from the cart, tethering the mare to one of the peeling columns that supported the portico, and marched up the cracked stone steps. Annabel and Jane were right behind her.

  There was no bell, just a crusty old lion’s head knocker. Annabel pounded on the door with it, and they waited silently for so long that Cecilia began to wonder if Lord Elphin was fortuitously absent.

  But finally, they heard the sound of a rusty lock being peeled back, and a tall, cadaverously thin, balding man in a dark butler’s coat peered out at them. A dog snarled behind him. The man looked rather surprised and quite annoyed, emotions Redvers would never have betrayed at the sight of visitors.

  “Yes?” the man said, pushing the dog behind him.

  “How do you do? I am Lady Ce
cilia Bates, from Danby Hall, and this is Miss Annabel Clarke and Miss Hughes,” Cecilia said, in the haughtiest voice she had learned from her mother. She took a card from her handbag. “We are on the committee for the St. Swithin’s Church bazaar and wondered if perhaps Lord Elphin, as a most esteemed member of this neighborhood, might like to make a small donation to the cause. Is Lord Elphin at home, perhaps?”

  The man looked quite startled. “I will ascertain.” He took her card and disappeared back into the house, shutting the door. They could hear the echo of the dog barking.

  “How very charming,” Annabel said, her tone indicating it was anything but. She straightened the large, yellow silk and tulle hat she had bought in London. “I’m sure I’ll find lots of tips for running a most proper English household here.”

  They waited another moment before the butler returned. “Follow me, please. His lordship will be down presently.”

  The inside of the Elphin house seemed just as ramshackle as the outside, with wallpaper much in need of replacing, faded carpets, scratched furniture that hadn’t seen a lemon polish in many years, cobwebs around picture frames. Yet Cecilia could see that once it must have been rather lovely, and perhaps could be again. Like a castle in a fairy tale coming back to life.

  The butler left them in a drawing room, closing the door behind them as he left. Cecilia was glad; they had a little privacy to snoop. And they did, each of them wandering into a corner to examine the faded furniture, the piles of dusty books and old letters.

  “My heavens!” Annabel suddenly gasped. “Cec, Jane, look at this.”

  Cecilia and Jane hurried over to where Annabel was examining a portrait hanging near the soot-stained fireplace. Though in need of a good cleaning, Cecilia could tell it was a Frith, an image of a beautiful lady sitting on a garden bench beneath a shady, summer-green tree, a spaniel at her feet. Her dark hair was piled high in an elaborate Victorian coiffure of curls and waves, a skirt of pink-and-white lace spread around her as she studied a book in her hand.