“Mr. Whitcox”—the barrister with whom Frances Hart lived in carnal sin—“is quite capable of helping himself.”
“It is Mrs. Clarring who needs our help, Miss Fredericks.”
Jane pictured in her mind the quiet, reserved woman who was six years her senior, and from whom she had for two years sat across. Immediately the image was replaced by the postcard of a man touching his sex.
A postcard Rose Clarring had purchased at a pornographic shop.
It had hurt to see the image of what it was that had infected her mother. But it hurt even more to know that Jane had gazed upon a man’s sex and wanted to feel every inch of it inside her.
Deliberately she banished both the image of the postcard and the desire it had generated. “Why would Mrs. Clarring need my aid?”
“You are a suffragette.”
Jane bristled defensively; it had been a point of contention among the members of the Men and Women’s Club for two years. “Yes, I am.”
“You believe in the emancipation of women.”
Jane flushed with guilt, but did not know why she felt guilty. “Yes.”
“Mrs. Clarring is being held inside her husband’s house,” Frances Hart said.
Shock reverberated over a roll of thunder.
“Why would her husband do that?”
“Mrs. Clarring left him.”
Outrage flared through Jane. “And so he feels it is his right to imprison her?”
The pale green eyes were uncomfortably astute. “Mrs. Clarring took a lover.”
Jane’s mouth snapped shut.
Rain pounded wood and glass.
“Does he still have the right to imprison her, Miss Fredericks?” Frances Hart gently queried.
“She was unfaithful,” Jane said coldly.
Just as her father had been unfaithful.
“And so she deserves to suffer?” Frances Hart countered.
Jane envisioned the hard white syphilitic tumor on her mother’s neck.
Every day it grew.
Jane’s voice was emphatic. “Yes.”
Someone had to pay for the pain.
“Even though,” Frances Hart asked, “she confided in us that her husband is not intimate with her?”
Jane remembered that her parents had slept in separate bedrooms. Before the syphilis. Jane remembered the single bed her parents now shared.
They had not laughed when they had been healthy. Now they frequently laughed.
“My mother doesn’t deserve to die,” Jane said tightly.
“Your father is dying, too.”
Every day.
“Are you suggesting it’s my mother’s fault that he went to another woman?”
“I’m suggesting, Miss Fredericks,” Frances Hart said over the punishing rain, “that we often do not understand why men and women do the things they do.”
“And understanding why,” Jane sneered, “magically makes the pain go away?”
Memory flitted through the pale green eyes. “We none of us live without pain, Miss Fredericks.”
There had been no pain before her father had been unfaithful.
Jane abruptly remembered the icy silence at the dinner table each night while she exuberantly chatted about women’s suffrage and the changes she would someday wrought.
But now was someday.
There had been no pain before her father had infected her mother, she now realized, but neither had there been love.
The words leapt unbidden out of her mouth, three years of accumulated emotion. “But how can you live with pain?”
Her mother and father would die, and Jane did not know how she would survive their deaths.
Frances Hart leaned forward; comforting fingers squeezed her hand. “By living.”
But now Rose Clarring suffered, because she had lived.
Jane withdrew her cold hand from Frances Hart’s warm fingers and sat back in the chair. “How do you think I could aid Mrs. Clarring?”
Straightening—hurt flickering inside the older woman’s eyes—Frances Hart asked: “You are familiar with marches and such, are you not?”
“Yes,” Jane said, throat taut. “Of course.”
Jane had marched many times in support of women’s suffrage.
Frances Hart solemnly asked: “Will you help arrange a demonstration to liberate Mrs. Clarring?”
One woman.
An adulteress.
Jane heard again her self-loathing, unable to control the ache to experience physical love: We will never, ever escape servitude if we do not sublimate our desires. Jane felt again the bite of John Nickols’s mockery: Miss Fredericks, you are prepared to attack anyone who has not liberated your fair sex, yet you yourself have done nothing to advance your cause.
Jane thought of the intimate glances her mother and father shared when they didn’t think she was looking.
Chapter 39
“You must eat lunch, Mrs. Clarring.”
Rose ignored the nurse who had held her down on the bed, and whose gaze now burned twin holes in her spine.
In the street, a rain-blurred carriage halted.
Her heartbeat escalated.
Was it another doctor? she wondered.
Her heart skipped a beat.
Was it Jack?
Had he come back?
Rose planted her palms against cool glass.
“You must eat for the baby, Mrs. Clarring.”
The gray-bearded doctor had said a man’s sperm could live inside a woman’s body for several days. The balding gynecologist had advised her it was safe to remove the Dutch cap eight hours after sexual intercourse.
Who was right?
Rose’s fingers fisted against the glass. “There will be no baby, Nurse Williams.”
Please, God.
“God works miracles.” The scrape of metal on china pierced her spine. “You should pray that He do so now.”
The aroma of sharp cheddar and eggs overpowered the asphyxiating odor of chicken fricassee.
Pain is a form of power, Jack had said. For both the administrator and the recipient.
The anonymous carriage lurched forward in the rain.
Rose stared down at four black umbrella tops.
“Do you have children, Nurse Williams?”
“I have six children, Mrs. Clarring.”
Maternal pride reverberated over a rumble of thunder.
“Do you have daughters?”
Metal ground into china.
“Two.”
The pride in the nurse’s voice was dimmer.
“You don’t love your daughters?” Rose queried.
Never once had Rose felt less loved than her brothers.
“Of course I love my daughters.”
Rose abstractedly watched the four black umbrellas that restlessly shifted, as if waiting for another umbrella to join them.
“Would you do this to them?” Rose asked.
“I’ve nursed them many a time through the years.”
“Would you stand guard, Nurse Williams, while their husbands imprisoned them?”
China clattered; the pouring of fragrant tea blended in to the steady pound of rain. “You are a very fortunate woman, Mrs. Clarring.”
Very fortunate.
Rose had experienced passion.
Another black carriage pulled to the curb. The four umbrellas bobbed after it, like black tops.
“How am I fortunate, Nurse Williams?” Rose asked incuriously.
“Your husband is a wealthy man.”
“So that entitles my husband to hold me here against my will?”
“I read about you in the papers, Mrs. Clarring.”
Raindrops kissed her knuckles, soothing little busses.
Jonathon could not hold her prisoner indefinitely, they promised.
The raindrops lied.
Her husband could have her locked away forever. And there was nothing anyone could do.
Because of men like Jack.
Rose spoke past the tightness of her throat. “Did you think my picture was a good likeness?”
“Pretty is as pretty does, I always say.” China impacted china. “We get what we deserve.”
Cynthia Whitcox had not deserved to die.
But she had.
“Did my husband deserve being sterilized by mumps?” Rose countered.
“You’re not fooling anyone, Mrs. Clarring: We’ve read the newspapers. We saw that disgusting device with which you polluted your body. You’re an adulterous woman. Thankfully, you’ve spared your husband illegitimate offspring. He’s been more than generous. If it were up to me, the likes of you would be thrown in gaol with the other harlots who taint our fair city.”
The black carriage pulled away. The four umbrellas had begat two more.
“Do you know how many men it takes to subdue a woman, Nurse Williams?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Liar, Rose thought. This was how she made her living, stealing other women’s pride and dignity.
“Two men, Nurse Williams.” Black bruises cuffed her upper arms. “It takes two men to subdue a woman.”
Rose had not cried out when they had carried her to the cab.
She had known Jonathon had the legal right to incarcerate her, but she had not thought he would do it.
Another carriage pulled up to the curb across the street.
“Do you know how many women it takes to subdue a woman, Nurse Williams?”
“I wouldn’t know,” the woman repeated.
The six black umbrellas bobbed toward the carriage.
“Neither do I,” Rose said flatly. “Get out.”
“My position is to look out for you.”
Rose abruptly pivoted, wool skirt and flannel petticoats swirling.
The nurse sat behind an oak drum table that had been transformed into a dining table. Steam drifted upward from rose-patterned china. Behind the white-capped woman pink roses climbed the wall.
Pretty is as pretty does.
“I said,” Rose said slowly, clearly, “get out.”
“You’re being irrational, Mrs. Clarring.”
“If you do not get out,” Rose said, gritting her teeth, “we will see how many women it takes to subdue another.”
“Your manner now proves, Mrs. Clarring, that you are a danger to yourself.” Smug superiority weighted the nurse’s face: She was eight inches taller than Rose, and had forcibly immobilized Rose, her expression said. “I will not leave.”
Rose had felt many emotions in her life. She had never before felt rage.
She felt it now.
“Then I will leave,” she said abruptly.
Wariness replaced the nurse’s smugness. “What are you doing?”
Rose slammed shut the pink enameled bathroom door: The lock turned with a satisfying snick.
Slowly she slid down painted wood, physically barring entrance to the bathroom: Wool, horsehair bustle and more wool humped in the small of her back.
Rose sat on the floor, cold tile imprinting a bared buttock.
Darkness pressed against her eyelids.
She could not cry.
Rose heard again the clatter of a wooden-handled umbrella striking wet concrete; it was chased by the dull shatter of porcelain.
She had not felt the ice-cold rain stabbing her skin. She had not felt the pain of being physically lifted off her feet.
The pain Jonathon had stolen from her had blossomed inside his eyes.
Now he stole her privacy.
A faint chime penetrated the barricade that was her body: Westminster Chimes announced the half hour. Or the three-quarter hour.
She had been inside the bathroom for fifteen minutes. Or thirty minutes.
She imagined living like this for the rest of her life: caged, like an animal.
“Mrs. Clarring.” Rose felt the sudden pounding of flesh against wood as surely as if the nurse struck her spine. “Open this door.”
“‘No, no, I won’t let you come in, not by the hair on my chinny chin chin,’ ” Rose murmured.
A giggle worked up inside her throat.
The thought of her youngest nephew—warm and drowsy from his nap—burst her laughter.
He loved the story of the Three Little Pigs. Perhaps even now he was enjoying the tale.
A low growl punctuated the pounding knocks.
Rose’s stomach.
But Rose did not have Jack to feed her.
The tears that had not come earlier burned her eyes.
She had not been able to stop the examination, but she would not cry.
Rose stood by the simple expediency of climbing up enameled wood with her hands.
A lock, she discovered, made the same sound opening as it did closing.
The nurse jerked open the bathroom door; greenish-gray light invaded the cocoon of darkness.
“I have decided I am hungry after all, Nurse Williams.” Rose calmly stared up at the older, taller woman in her dismal brown wool and frigid white cap. “Be so good as to step aside.”
The nurse was flabbergasted.
A smile tugged up Rose’s lips.
The smile died thirty minutes later when she resumed her post.
A small army of black umbrellas patrolled the pavement across the street. But it was not they who arrested Rose’s attention.
A cab pulled up to the curb directly underneath her window: The first occupant was hidden by a black umbrella. The second occupant carried no umbrella.
Rose’s heart rushed up into her throat.
Chapter 40
“Did Mr. Whitcox succeed?” The pounding rain throbbed inside Marie Hoppleworth’s ears, a living, pulsing drum of retribution. Metal bit into her thigh. She carefully angled her umbrella, shielding two bodies instead of one. “Will the constable set her free?”
“We’ll shortly know,” John Nickols grimly returned.
Marie glanced down at the thirty-eight-year-old man with whom she had verbally sparred for two years, but who now intimately knew every nook and cranny of her body. “Will your paper print her story?”
“Adultery. Abduction. Why wouldn’t they print it? The only ingredient that’s lacking is murder.” John looked out through the slashing rain and deepening gloom. “There’s a reporter from The Globe; there’s one from The Daily Herald. If press is what Whitcox wants, press is what he’s going to get.”
One moment the Clarring household was a prison; the next moment it flung open its door.
The ribbed tip of an umbrella collided with Marie’s umbrella.
“Is that him?” demanded a familiar feminine voice. “Her husband?”
Marie glanced at thirty-two-year-old Esther Palmer, the mathematics teacher who had lost her position at Mrs. Beasley’s Academy for Girls.
Her face was calm but shuttered.
Marie wanted to ask the woman if there was anything she could do to help, but this wasn’t about the fallout from the trial.
Or perhaps it was.
Marie did not know why Jonathon Clarring had abducted his wife. All she knew was that he could murder Rose Clarring, and quite likely be let off with the time he had spent in gaol awaiting trial.