Eden Falls (28 page)

She was stung. For a moment she was quiet, and let her hand fall from the crook of his arm. ‘Do you know something I don’t?’ she said, a little testily.

‘It’s a feeling, that’s all.’

Anna fell silent, leaving him to his bleak reverie. Ahead, by the house, Amos waited, leaning against the gate. He’d had a good day, Anna could see. He was laughing at something with Ellen and Maya, who’d come three-legged all the way from the hall – bound together by a scarf – and still managed to beat Daniel and Anna.

‘Daniel,’ Amos said as they approached. ‘’ow do.’

They shook hands. ‘Managing all right with no Eve?’

Amos asked the question with merry insouciance, quite disastrously – and innocently – out of tune with the prevailing mood.

‘Aye, managing fine,’ Daniel growled. ‘Though we’ll all be better off when she’s back where she belongs.’ He stomped down the garden path and Amos grimaced at Anna.

‘Was it summat I said?’

‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘And no.’

None the wiser, Amos followed his wife into the house. The little girls careered about, Ellen’s left leg tied to Maya’s right, and their laughter, which had no regard or respect for adults and their complexities, filled the silence.

M
r Arbuthnot, the magistrate, was obliged under the strict terms of court conventions to disallow many of Henrietta’s questions to Mr Asquith. She kept straying into matters of personal opinion or raising areas of government policy, neither of which avenues could possibly shine any light on the matter in hand. However, even the magistrate, who had little sympathy with violent protest whatever its cause, was finding her hard to resist; for sheer entertainment value, he would willingly admit – later, of course, in the privacy of his club – that he had never encountered the like before, and probably never would again. The journalists bubbled and fizzed with professional glee, and the public gallery listened with enraptured delight as Lady Henrietta Hoyland tied the prime minister in knots.

‘What were your emotions when my brick appeared, uninvited, in the entrance hall of Number Ten, Downing Street?’ Henrietta asked.

Mr Asquith’s handsome face wore the resigned expression of a busy man forced by circumstance to waste his time on nonsense. Disdain and distaste radiated from him like heat from a flame.

‘I was angry, just as you would be if someone were to vandalise your property and risk the safety of you and your family.’ He was a distinguished man – a barrister as well as prime minister – and debonair; he had clearly dressed with care for this appearance in court. He stood before her, an unwavering symbol of opposition to women’s suffrage, the man who had banned females from attending public meetings unless they had a written guarantee from a man to vouch for their character and good intentions. Henrietta smiled, the image of sweet concern.

‘Were you afraid, then, for your safety?’

‘I was angry, as I said.’

‘But, Prime Minister, if you felt the brick threatened your safety and that of your family, would you not feel afraid as well as angry?’

Thea whispered, ‘What’s she up to? Sounds like the case for the prosecution.’ The magistrate pierced her with gimlet eyes and demanded silence.

‘I was by no means afraid,’ Mr Asquith said.

‘Where were you, Prime Minister, when the brick was thrown through the fanlight of Number Ten?’

‘I was with members of the Cabinet at the House of Commons.’

‘Oh!’ said Henrietta, feigning astonishment. ‘So the grievous assault on your home posed no physical threat to you whatsoever. Perhaps, though, you were concerned for your wife and your children?’

The prime minister looked at the magistrate. ‘Is this relevant, your worship?’

‘It is not irrelevant, I believe,’ said Mr Arbuthnot, ‘if not exactly relevant either. Continue, if you please.’ There was a muted ripple of appreciation from the gallery, and Henrietta waited, her head cocked in an attitude of patient interest. Mr Asquith blew out a long breath of irritation. ‘My family was at our constituency home at the time,’ he said.

Now Henrietta looked at the pressmen and her supporters, and rolled her eyes. There was open laughter, and Mr Arbuthnot smacked the top of his bench and called for order. He glared at Henrietta.

‘Lady Henrietta, you will desist from playing to the crowd. This is a court of law, not a variety theatre. Similarly, you are not permitted to either cross-examine or attack the credibility of your own witness.’

‘I apologise, your worship,’ she said, but there was a light in her eyes now, a flush to her cheeks, a vigour to her movements: she looked altogether stronger than she had when the warders had first brought her in. ‘I merely wished to share my surprise that the crime for which I stand here, and for which I have already served four weeks’ imprisonment, placed neither Mr Asquith nor any member of his family at any possible risk.’

‘You are not required to share anything, least of all your surprise, with members of the public. Do you have any further questions for the prime minister?’

‘Just one, if I may?’

The magistrate inclined his head in agreement. Mr Asquith heaved another sigh.

‘Prime Minister, does your implacable opposition to women’s suffrage indicate an underlying lack of confidence in your own political future?’

Mr Asquith smiled, perfectly aware that his tormentor had just shot her bolt. The magistrate, boggle-eyed at her impertinence, demanded that Henrietta’s comment be struck from the record and that her questioning of the prime minister now cease. There was a small uproar as the dogged, devoted Mary Dixon stood and shouted ‘Votes for Women!’ and ‘Shame on you, Asquith!’ and, although she was shushed by her WSPU friends, she was herself escorted from the court as the prime minister made his own more dignified exit.

Thea was rapt. ‘Isn’t Henry marvellous?’ she said to Tobias.

‘Foolhardy, more like,’ he said.

Mr Arbuthnot called for silence, and barked out an order for a short recess. He looked extremely displeased, while Henrietta, standing tall between the two officers who now led her away, looked anything but apologetic.

Amos, Anna and Maya took the train home from Netherwood. To walk there was an outing; to walk home, an ordeal. As it was, Maya laid her head on Amos’s arm and slept for the duration of the short journey, worn out by Ellen’s inexhaustible fund of games, all involving sticks, mud and warfare of one form or another. Maya’s hat was lost somewhere on Netherwood Common and there were grass stains on her white pinafore. Ellen had daubed muddy stripes on their faces for war paint.

Soon Eliza would be back from Paris and Anna felt this could only be a good thing. She worried that, between them, Daniel and Ellen were turning feral; they ate when they liked and not always together, and Ellen had made a bed under a rowan tree: on warm nights she was allowed to sleep there.

‘Like a hedgehog,’ Anna said now, to Amos. ‘On a nest of leaves and feathers. And I don’t know that she’s had a bath since Eve left.’

Amos couldn’t see a problem.

‘Nowt wrong wi’ a bit o’ muck,’ he said. ‘Anyway, Lily Pickering still comes most days. She’ll not let everything go to pot.’

Anna wrinkled her nose. Lily Pickering was taking advantage of Eve’s absence too, in her view. By the looks of the linen basket she was at least two weeks behind with the washing and the windows were opaque with that particular mix of dust, midges and dried raindrops that was the speciality of the common in mid-summer. These things went unremarked upon by Anna, of course; the visit was clouded enough, from her point of view, without chiding Daniel about the quality of the housekeeping.

‘So,’ Amos said significantly. Maya shifted against him and he leaned down and kissed the top of her head, gently so as not to disturb her. There was a leaf threaded through her dark hair but he left it be, in case she wanted it there.

‘So, what?’ Anna said.

‘I expect it was all about t’family’s black sheep over at Netherwood ’all? Weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth?’

Anna gave him a look.

‘Not all about that, no,’ she said. ‘Some of it was about you.’

He grinned. ‘I’ve told you not to brag about your good fortune, Mrs Sykes.’

‘I think she pities me. She considers me … now what was it? Ah yes, lumbered. Mrs Powell-Hughes considers me lumbered.’

Amos laughed. ‘She’s not wrong,’ he said. ‘Whereas I consider myself blessed.’

‘You’re not wrong, either.’

They smiled at each other, enjoying an unexpected moment of perfect harmony that had come stealthily, from nowhere, and when they alighted at Ardington they kissed on the platform in plain sight of the stationmaster.

After the adjournment Mr Arbuthnot came back a changed man: not a shred of good humour, not an ounce of leniency. Tobias regarded him with alarm. It was clear as day that the magistrate regretted his earlier indulgence and was newly inured to the charms of Henrietta’s audacity. He spoke curtly, bringing matters to a close. She was allowed a brief summing up, which she used entirely to promulgate her views on female suffrage, after which the magistrate looked her straight in the eye and declared her guilty of a malicious act of vandalism.

‘Your aim, young woman, was to cause the greatest harm to both the property and, I have no doubt, the person of the prime minister. In this latter regard, of course, you did not succeed. However, your disgraceful actions reflect a lamentable and potentially dangerous lack of restraint, added to which you seem determined to ridicule the ancient and serious conventions of our judicial system.’

Henrietta watched his features steadily. His eyebrows were white, as was his hair, and they kicked up and out at their extremities like the ear tufts of an owl. He had thread veins on his cheeks and a florid nose: a port drinker, she surmised, or a lover of claret.

‘You are a privileged young woman and your status in society has, I suspect, protected you thus far from facing the consequences of your actions. However, we are none of us above the law and I feel it is my duty to put a stop to your destructive progress with the harshest possible sentence for your crime.’

She heard him and yet she didn’t. His words rose up and around the courtroom, perfectly audible but somehow disconnected from her own fate. She looked at Tobias and at Thea, who were staring at the magistrate with horrified faces. Sylvia Pankhurst had her hands clasped at her breast and her eyes cast down, as if she were grieving: for a suffragette, she was surprisingly unsettled by confrontation. Beside her, Christabel kept the magistrate in her sights, her gaze steady and clear-eyed, her expression unreadable.

Mr Arbuthnot paused in his soliloquy to glare at Henrietta, who met his eyes blandly, as if she barely saw him.

‘I sentence you to four months’ imprisonment,’ he said, then paused, and in the courtroom there was a hollow silence, an empty beat of time, before he continued in funereal tones with the formalities. But Henrietta didn’t hear because she fell, collapsing down and sideways in a dead faint. Her head struck the corner of the dock with a loud crack and she lay, awkwardly twisted like a broken puppet, on the floor. All about her was pandemonium.

She came to in a narrow hospital bed and for a moment she thought she was paralysed. In fact, her arms and legs were pinned flat by a blanket tucked so tightly under the mattress that it might have been nailed down. She tussled briefly to work herself free but the effort was exhausting so she laid perfectly still again, her eyes closed and her mind empty. Her head throbbed with a hot, pulsing rhythm, insistent and intrusive. She raised a hand, shakily, to the source of the pain and felt a thick wad of bandage, which someone had evidently wrapped round her head. She was puzzled, but in a vague, unquestioning way. There was a smell of carbolic acid and floor polish, and sounds – of voices, doors, trolleys, moans, the clatter of metal on metal – waxed and waned like the sounds in a dream, familiar yet unfathomable.

Slowly, experimentally, she turned her head to the right and opened her eyes. A woman appeared to be sleeping on a chair beside her. She was slumped and slack-mouthed, and her black-clad bosom rose and fell peacefully. The skin of her face was the colour of watery milk and there were soft bristles on the very edge of her jaw. Henrietta stared, and perhaps her scrutiny had a physical quality because the sleeping woman woke abruptly, as if she’d been prodded.

‘Back with us, are you?’ the woman said. She sounded resentful, aggressive. Caught napping, Henrietta thought, and this made her smile.

‘Funny, is it?’

She was speaking in questions, which Henrietta felt ill-equipped to answer. She looked away, turning her head so that she stared at the ceiling instead of at the cross and whey-faced woman in the chair.

‘You’ve nothing to smile about, I hope you know that. Do you?’

Henrietta decided to try a question of her own. ‘Please could you go away?’ she said. Her tongue felt too thick for her mouth and she heard her words, slurred and indistinct. The woman gave a sharp bark of incredulity.

‘Do you think I’d be sat here if it were my choice? I’m not visiting, you silly bitch, I’m guarding.’

Henrietta turned again, and now her eyes were filled with tears. She had no idea where she was, who this woman was or why she was being so beastly. Her head pounded fearfully; blood rushed against her eardrums and retreated, rushed and retreated, like waves against rock. It was disorientating, this internal thumping; it made all other sounds seem tinny and distant.

‘Not so cocky now, are you?’

There she went again, making demands. Henrietta closed her eyes, longing for silence.

‘Full of hot air, that’s your type. All mouth and no britches. You can dole it out all right, but you can’t take it, can you?’

Another figure loomed at the bedside; Henrietta felt, rather than saw, their presence.

‘Oh good, she’s awake.’ Another woman, though her voice wasn’t steeped in bile.

‘Looks that way, doesn’t it?’

‘Lady Henrietta? Can you hear me?’

This new person placed a cool hand on Henrietta’s arm and spoke kindly. Ah yes, thought Henrietta. I am Lady Henrietta Hoyland. That’s who I am. She smiled at the new arrival.