“I can’t see,” she briskly said.
“I see him,” a familiar masculine voice volunteered.
All Marie could see of thirty-year-old Louis Stiles—a man who stood six feet seven inches tall—was a dark woolen coat and the leather-bound sketch pad he clutched between ink-stained fingers.
“What does he look like?” Marie curiously asked.
“We don’t know what Mrs. Clarring’s husband looks like,” John flatly intervened, voice hollowly vibrating underneath the domed umbrellas. “So even if it were he standing in the doorway, we wouldn’t know.”
Another cab pulled up and discharged four women: Their numbers added to the growing crowd.
Tension gathered.
It was wet. It was cold.
Women and men restlessly milled about to keep warm.
“He’s moved aside,” Louis Stiles suddenly commented.
The constable and unknown man stepped over the threshold.
The door closed, sound obliterated by the hammering rain.
“Who do you think is with the constable?” Marie asked tensely.
“No doubt a representative of the Queen’s Bench,” John replied, voice equally tense.
“She’s looking down at us,” intruded a third masculine voice. “Do you think she knows we’re here?”
“How could she, Mr. Pierce?” Marie asked the thirty-one-year-old man who was a virgin still. “All she can see are these great black umbrellas. She probably thinks we’re all congregating at a neighbor’s wake.”
Marie refused to believe that they might in the near future be attending Rose Clarring’s wake.
“He won’t hurt her, will he?” Esther Palmer asked.
The husband.
But they didn’t know what Rose Clarring’s husband was capable of doing.
“The jury liberated Mrs. Hart,” Louis Stiles unexpectedly reassured the teacher. He was a virgin, too, Marie thought. Or perhaps not . . . There was a decisiveness in his voice that had not been there before the trial. “The constable will surely liberate Mrs. Clarring.”
“A husband is not a son, Mr. Stiles,” thirty-four-year-old Sarah Burns gruffly advised. “Unless the constable is commanded by his superiors to do so, he will not interfere between man and wife. Hello, Miss Hoppleworth. Miss Palmer. Mr. Nickols. Mr. Pierce.”
“Hello, Dr. Burns.” Marie’s fingers tightened around the grip of her umbrella: This woman more than anyone knew how easy it was to incarcerate women. “Mr. Addimore.”
“We got here as quickly as we could,” thirty-seven-year-old George Addimore said. There was a solemness about his eyes and mouth that was new. “Do we have any news yet?”
“No,” John said shortly. “We believe a representative from the Queen’s Bench is inside now.”
“That’s positive, surely,” George Addimore said. “For how long?”
“Just a few minutes.”
“What thoughts do you think are going through her mind?” Thomas Pierce asked.
Seven pairs of eyes assessed the rain-shrouded woman who stood in the upstairs window.
“What would you be thinking, were you abducted and imprisoned?” Marie asked.
“I’m not a woman,” Thomas Pierce said.
“Even men, Mr. Pierce,” Marie said, “feel the sting of betrayal.”
“I was merely stating, Miss Hoppleworth,” Thomas Pierce calmly expounded, “that I don’t know what I would be thinking were I in Mrs. Clarring’s shoes, because a man cannot be imprisoned by a woman.”
“There are many types of prisons, Mr. Pierce.” Marie stiffened at the cool, feminine response. “I assure you, women imprison men every day.”
John glanced past Marie to the woman who had noiselessly joined them. Mockingly, he asked, “Would you march to liberate me, Miss Dennison?”
“Would you march to liberate me, Mr. Nickols?” twenty-nine-year-old Ardelle Dennison evenly returned.
The mockery on the face Marie had mapped with her fingers melted in the rain. “Yes.”
“Likewise.”
For long seconds John studied the woman Marie could not see; suddenly his glance slid sideways. “I see you and Miss Dennison no longer suffer from extenuating circumstances, Mr. Manning.”
The excuse the two had used for not joining in club excursions held outside the museum.
“No,” thirty-five-year-old Joseph Manning—the founder of the Men and Women’s Club—imperturbably returned. “We don’t.”
“I thought,” Sarah Burns said over the pelting rain and drumming tension, “that if anyone should ever be imprisoned, it would be me.”
“Why?” Esther Palmer enquired.
“While we debated Malthusianism, Dr. Burns has all along been distributing literature in her office,” George Addimore proudly explained.
It was clear that he and Sarah Burns were seeing one another.
The dull pounding of hooves and grinding wheels permeated the spatter of voices and falling rain.
A darkly cloaked woman exited from a hansom cab: Immediately she joined a group of welcoming women.
“She asked what I feared,” John said harshly, referring to Rose Clarring.
Memory weighted the rain: Seven women and six men facing each other over a twenty-foot-long conference table. Rubber condom slapping wood . . . ivory cock ring rolling on gleaming mahogany . . . postcards cutting through the silence.
It occurred to Marie that the meeting to which John referred had led each of them here.
They had brought to the club an object expressing their deepest fears and desires.
Each of them, she now saw, had acted upon those desires.
They had come together in the trial because of a subpoena. They came together now because they had confronted their fears.
Esther Palmer spoke over the drum of rain. “I didn’t think it would come to this.”
A public trial. Reputations destroyed. A woman incarcerated.
“Neither did I,” Marie said.
“Nor I,” Ardelle Dennison admitted.
“Do you regret being a part of the club?” the founder of the Men and Women’s Club asked the mathematics teacher, voice oddly yearning.
Marie saw Joseph Manning and Ardelle Dennison as they had weekly appeared underneath the unforgiving glare of gaslight: She with perfectly coifed brown hair and amber eyes; he with a pencil-thin black mustache and gunmetal gray eyes.
They were beautiful in a hard, cold way.
Standing in the rain—gathered together for the benefit of Rose Clarring—they appeared neither hard nor cold.
“No,” Esther Palmer said finally, narrow shoulders visibly stiffening with resolve. “I don’t.”
Irresistibly Marie stared upward: The window was empty.
“I wonder if Mrs. Clarring does?” Thomas Pierce asked.
Marie knew that he, too, stared up at the empty window.
“If only she had taken a lover, like the newspapers accused her,” Esther Palmer said.
“She did,” Sarah Burns volunteered.
Marie wondered what type of man Rose Clarring—elegantly feminine yet quietly reserved—would take as a lover.
She glanced up at the doctor. “Did Mrs. Hart tell you that?”
Frances Hart had merely informed Marie that Rose Clarring had left her husband on the day of the trial, and had been abducted by him five days later: She had assumed Frances Hart had relayed the same information to the other club members.
“I saw her with Jack Lodoun outside the courthouse,” Sarah Burns said.
“You must be mistaken,” Marie denied.
“I don’t think so, Miss Hoppleworth,” the doctor replied. Her brown eyes—color blackened by the rain and gloom—were dull with worry. “They were . . . absorbed . . . in each other.”
Marie had focused solely on John before and after the trial: She had not noticed the other members.
“I don’t think it’s regrets with which Mrs. Clarring is now grappling,” Louis Stiles suddenly said.
But he didn’t know that.
They might never know.
The reporter from The Globe—head bent against the rain—sloshed across the pavement that ran cold water. Two men parted from the sea of black cloaks and umbrellas: They followed.
Marie recognized the reporter from The Daily Herald that John had earlier pointed out.
“I have to go,” John said, a reporter now instead of the man whose body had joined with her body. “Stand back; I don’t want to hit you.”
Battering water separated Marie and John.
Quickly he unfurled his umbrella; water cascaded over a dome of black. Twisting, he wedged the straight wooden handle in a specially crafted holder on the back of his wheelchair.
Every day he lived in fear, he had confessed during the meeting that had changed their lives.
He could be pushed in front of a carriage. He could be knocked over, unable to regain his mobility.
Rain blurred Marie’s vision. Or perhaps it was moisture that fogged her spectacles.
Marie wanted to protect John.
But he didn’t need her to protect him; he simply needed her to love him.
Clenching her hands into fists, she watched him wheel his chair through the lake that was the street.
Distant bells slogged through the damp and cold: An hour passed, three o’clock turning into four.
The occasional bark of masculine laughter drifted through the rain, men poised to report on a woman while inside the house men decided the woman’s fate.
“Everything is prepared,” ricocheted through Marie.
Her gaze snapped away from the rain-sluiced door that remained closed and the man who adjoined it, black umbrella lower than the others. “What is prepared, Miss Fredericks?”
The twenty-seven-year-old woman stood beside Thomas Pierce: She looked as grim as the waning day. “We will take shifts. Fresh suffragettes will come every eight hours, so that someone will be here day and night.”
“You’ve done a commendable job, Miss Fredericks,” Thomas Pierce said sincerely.
Jane Fredericks stared up at the man who had been a junior executive in a bank, but who was employed no longer.
Marie glanced away from the painful intensity on the younger woman’s face: Not everyone had yet confronted their fears.
“What is taking them so long?” Ardelle Dennison suddenly snapped.
“They’re men,” Sarah Burns rejoined.
And men ruled.
The cold and the rain knotted Marie’s chest.
“Look!” cried out a woman hidden inside a circle of black. “I see something!”
Hope surged through Marie. It was chased by fear.
She didn’t want to think about what could happen if Rose Clarring was not liberated, yet she could think of nothing else.
The door opened; immediately it was filled with a black umbrella.
The body it domed was clearly masculine.
“Free Rose!” hurtled through the rain.
It came from Jane Fredericks.
All of the passion the young suffragette denied herself was captured in the shout.
“Free Rose!” Marie joined, remembering the county orphanage in which she had been raised, and the men who had abused the forsaken girls and boys.
Simply because they could.
“Free Rose!” enveloped Marie, a jarring chant comprised of male voices as well as female; suffragettes as well as members of the Men and Women’s Club.
The emerging black umbrella was joined by four more.
Volleying voices rode the rain.
They had waited to see if the constable would liberate Rose Clarring: They got their answer.
Chapter 41
Jack could not stay away. Sitting in the gallery, face expressionless, he listened to the judgment of the Queen’s Bench.
“On Tuesday, the Sixth of June, Mr. Whitcox did hereby charge the Queen’s Bench with the serious task of summoning Mrs. Rose Clarring to this court to determine if her husband, Mr. Jonathon Clarring, has the lawful custody of her.
“A writ of habeas corpus is a powerful tool of liberty. It is not to be used lightly, nor is it meant to come between the unique relationship enjoyed between a man and his wife.
“Marriage is a sacred bond. A man vows to protect his wife and the sanctity of their union. We, the courts, grant him the supreme authority to do so.
“Mr. Whitcox charged that Mr. Clarring unlawfully detained his wife.
“To this charge, we say nay.
“Justice Coleridge In re Cochrane unequivocally determines that ‘there can be no doubt of the general dominion which the law of England attributes to the husband over the wife.’1 While ‘the forcible detention of a subject by another is prima facie illegal, yet where the relation is that of husband and wife the detention is not illegal.’
“Justice Coleridge allowed that Mr. Cochrane could ‘confine Mrs. Cochrane in his own dwelling house, and restrain her from her liberty, for an indefinite time, using no cruelty, nor imposing any hardship or unnecessary restraint on his part.’
“Had Mr. Clarring used undue force or cruelty against his wife, he could rightfully be charged with assault. Mr. Clarring acted wholly within the law when seizing Mrs. Clarring.
“Mrs. Clarring is a member of a notorious club that has recently featured in our papers. This group of men and women have encouraged her to commit acts contrary to the laws of marriage and to leave the sanctity of her husband’s home. They took Mrs. Clarring from him. ‘Prima facie he had a right to regain possession of her’ and to remove her from those who would interfere with his custody.
“ ‘If there were a prima facie case of cruelty, that would certainly entitle’ Mrs. Clarring to apply for a ruling. But Mr. Clarring has made every provision for his wife: He has employed a nurse to tend her. A physician has attested to her good health.
“We will not issue a writ of habeas corpus that would only serve to ‘unsettle the lady’s mind, and make her believe that the court was going to do what the court will not do—remove her from her husband’s custody—upon no ground whatsoever, except that she does not like to live with him.’
“Mrs. Clarring,” the justices of the Queen’s Bench concluded, “is where the law says she should be, and where she will stay as long as her husband says she will.”
A sharp order ricocheted off brass and oak.
Black silk shimmered in flickering gaslight: James Whitcox rose.
Jack remained seated.
The three justices stood, silk robes glistening like red blood.
James Whitcox turned—gray periwig framing sharp cheekbones—and caught Jack’s gaze.
There was neither victory nor defeat inside his gaze.