The Sealed Letter (4 page)

Helen only giggles. "I wonder, did you read about Madame Genviève last week?"

"I don't know the lady."

"Nor I: a tightrope walker, as well as wife and mother," she explains. "Madame Genviève was performing blindfolded at a fête in Birmingham when she toppled to her death. It turns out she was unbalanced—"

"Mentally?"

"Literally," Helen corrects her, "by being in the last month of a delicate condition."

Fido winces.

"So perhaps nature has set
some
bounds to female ambition?"

"That's a ghoulish anecdote, Helen, not a reasoned argument." She cackles.

"I always felt like a cow, in the final months. It was hard enough to walk upstairs, let alone along a high wire."

"Come, come," says Fido, straight-faced, "what of the pride of giving life to a new soul?"

"Speaks one who's never tried it," cries Helen, poking her in the arm. "All I remember is the smell of the chloroform, and the curious sensation of skyrockets going off in my head. After that it's simply messy and confining," she tells Fido, "and I could never summon any
tendre
for them till the first few months were over. A newborn's frightful when undressed: swollen head, skinny limbs, and that terrible froglike action."

All Fido can do is laugh.

"But tell me more about this Reform Firm, isn't that what you call yourselves?"

"You're well informed." Fido is gratified that Helen would take such an interest in the Cause.

"Oh, the papers from home were full of you and your comrades at Langham Place: your
English Woman's Journal
and Married Women's Property Bill, your Victoria Press..."

"Then I'm sure you've read as much in the way of mockery as praise. The Reform Firm is what our enemies dubbed us—but like the Quakers, we've embraced the title, to take the sting out of it."

"So is this Miss Parkes the boss of the Firm?"

Fido shakes her head. "We're an informal knot of fellows," she explains, "each working on a variety of schemes to improve the lot of women. For instance, after that dreadful shipwreck last year in which all the female passengers drowned, we managed to persuade Marylebone Baths to open for women's classes one day a week."

Helen is clearly not interested in swimming classes. "Come, there's always a leader."

"Well, Madame Bodichon—Bar Smith, as was—could be called our guiding angel," says Fido, "as she ran and funded the first campaigns. But she's married a wild Algerian doctor and spends most of the year there."

"How sensible of her," says Helen wryly.

"Miss Bessie Parkes is Madame's chief acolyte and dearest friend, and set up the
English Woman's Journal,
and edited it till her health obliged her to resign the job to Miss Davies—a new comrade, but awfully capable—so yes, I dare say Miss Parkes could be considered
first among equals"
Fido admits. "My own efforts have focused on the press and SPEW—the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women—"

"What an unfortunate acronym," cries Helen.

"Isn't it! But five years ago, when we founded it in a surge of zeal, that seemed a trivial consideration."

"Tell me, which of these ladies—" Helen breaks off. "You're all ladies, I suppose?"

The question makes Fido uncomfortable. "By education, if not by birth. Miss Boucherett rides to hounds, whereas Miss Craig's a glover's daughter," she says a little defiantly.

"But what I want to know is, which of them is your real friend?"

Fido doesn't know how to answer.

"Who's supplanted me?"

For all its mocking tone, the question hits Fido like a crowbar. "Helen! You should know me better than to think I'd sacrifice old attachments for new."

Helen's face blooms, dazzles. "How it relieves me to hear you say that."

"There are certainly bonds of affection between us all at Langham Place, but—Isa Craig is very sympathetic, for instance, but I don't know that I could count her as a
real friend.
And since the death of Miss Procter—"

"You knew the poet, personally?" asks Helen, audibly impressed. "Adelaide was our hardest worker, and our wittiest," says Fido sadly. "Since that loss, old ties have frayed somewhat, and differences loom larger. But our work still unites us," she adds, afraid she's giving the wrong impression. "There's a great spirit of love at bottom."

Helen snorts. "I've run charity bazaars with women I'd happily see dead at my feet. But
carina,"
she laughs, resting her fingertips on the brown satin of Fido's skirt, "if you haven't found one true intimate among the whole coven—that's a crying shame. You've such a genius for friendship, such an adhesive disposition—"

When I was young,
thinks Fido with a stab.
Perhaps it's rusted up.

"I had a sort of friend, in Malta," volunteers Helen.

"A
sort of
friend?"

"Quite a bit older; the wife of a local clergyman. The Watsons had a French governess for their wards, you see, and invited Nell and Nan over there to share lessons, which seemed harmless," says Helen bleakly. "We were all great mates till she began to turn Harry against me."

Fido's eyebrows shoot up. "Surely he didn't—he wasn't—"

"Oh, her attractions weren't of that kind," says Helen, "but she gained a strange ascendancy over him. Prigs are the worst of women; all that prudery hides a lust for power."

It strikes Fido that this is her chance to enquire into the state of the Codrington marriage. She wonders if the admiral is downstairs in his study. Has Harry been told she's in the house, for the first time since the day he—regretfully, impeccably—asked her to leave?

But she's hesitated too long, and Helen's rattling on again. "Well, my dear, if you really haven't one kindred spirit among this gang of
black and midnight hags
—then I intend to reinstate myself at once."

They're both grinning at her cheek. "There are no hags at Langham Place," Fido tells her. "Bessie Parkes, for one, is so small-boned and lovely that I feel like a bull beside her. In fact, there was a comical incident last spring when some Swedish professor called and mistook me for Miss Parkes; he described her in his travel memoir as an independent, strapping female who went outside and called a cab for herself—much to Bessie's horror!"

When Helen has stopped laughing, she remarks, "Reading about your career, in Malta—I used to wonder if you might end up marrying some earnest reformer, a lecturer on hygiene or some such. Or a vicar perhaps, like your sisters."

Fido smiles slightly. "You know, the old maid of today is not an object of pity."

"I've never pitied you for an instant."

"Independence, a home of one's own, travel..." She marks them off on her fingers. "Liberty's been a better husband to many of us than love."

"I've not a word to say against the single life," Helen protests, "I just can't quite imagine how it's done. But you'll hear no hymns to matrimony from me," she adds darkly.

There, the subject's been laid squarely on the table. Fido speaks before she can lose her nerve. "Are you ... may I ask, are you and your husband any happier, these days?"

A small grimace.
"Mi ritrovaiper una selva oscura,
" recites Helen. "That's the only tag from Dante I can recall from all the Signora's lessons."

"You've ... woken in a dark wood?" Fido translates.

"And once married folk have strayed into the dark wood, one doesn't hear that they generally find their way out."

"I'm so very sorry." Not surprised, though, she realizes; not surprised at all.

"Well at least Harry and I both behave rather better than in the era when you had to put up with scenes over the breakfast table," says Helen. "Somehow we've acquired the knack of getting through the days. The years, rather! Separate lives, separate rooms, separate friends..."

All Fido can think to say is, "I'm sure he still cares for you, in his stiff way."

"Huh! Everything you know about marriage comes out of a book."

Fido stares at her. "That's not true. I've talked to many wives. They often speak of marriage pragmatically, as an occupation with its own duties and satisfactions. Some tell me a husband can be managed quite easily, as he wants only to be treated with deference, as master in his own house."

"So I should pacify Harry, just as I'd soothe one of the girls if she had a stomachache, or nag a forgetful maid, or tot up a budget for coals and lamp oil?" Helen's tone is withering.

"It's nothing more than tact. Forbearance. A hidden power."

"You try it!" Helen rubs the back of her neck. Then, in a chastened tone, "Did living with us for all those years scare you off the whole business?"

"Oh no," Fido assures her. "I'm afraid I've simply never felt that interest in a man that the poet calls 'woman's whole existence.' Solitude suits me," she adds.
Is this true?
she wonders suddenly. She thinks of solitude within a marriage, like a hearth that gives off cold instead of light. "But it mustn't be thought that my views on the advancement of women mean that I've lost faith in marriage," she goes on confusedly.

"Well, that makes one of us."

"Helen!" In the silence, she scrabbles for an analogy. "One may have a single bad dinner on a Sunday, without deciding to scrap the whole institution of Sunday dinner."

"I've been choking down this particular dinner for fifteen years," says Helen under her breath.

"Marriage is still the bedrock of society," Fido tells her, almost pleadingly. "If founded on self-respect and freedom—"

"Aye,
if,"
Helen interrupts. "There's the rub."

Fido sighs. "Well, yes, it needs reform, of course. The entire engulfing of the wife's identity in the husband's—her surrender of property—his almost unlimited rights over her person..." Does her friend even know her true position under British law, Fido wonders—classed with criminals, lunatics, and children? "And so often the wife's
I do
is neither truly informed nor free."

Helen is nodding eagerly.

"We of the Cause—we seek to open careers to women precisely to give them a choice," Fido explains, "so they won't be driven by monetary need into loveless marriage, as some sort of life raft."

"I thought I was choosing. I thought I loved him," says Helen in a shaking voice. "These December-May matches..."

"Hardly December. I see you're still absurdly prone to exaggeration," says Fido, trying to lighten the moment.

"Well, late October, at least. Harry was forty-one, and I barely twenty-one; he might have been my father! A handsome giant in blue and white, with gold lace cuffs," she says wistfully, "posted to shield us Anglo-Florentines from the rebel mob. And I, little Miss Helen Smith, a wide-eyed Desdemona, enchanted by his tales of adventure on the high seas."

Fido frowns. Helen as Shakespeare's heroine, perhaps, but anyone less like the jealous Moor than the sober, thoroughly English Harry Codrington..." My dear, haven't the years done anything to soften you two to each other?"

"Oh, you innocent," says Helen. "That's not what years do."

***

The early September morning's still cool. Fido stands in the shower-bath and pulls the lever decisively. The numbing deluge makes her hiss. Afterwards she rubs herself all over with the towel, coughing. So many of her sex spend a week in bed at the least sign of weakness, but in Fido's view, the body's tremendous engine must be kept running.

Outside, the distinctive clink-clink of the milkwoman's iron-shod boots. She'll be shifting her laden yoke on her shoulders, filling up a half-quart for Miss Faithfull and lowering it on a hook over the railings.

Fido's still brooding over the conversation at Eccleston Square two days ago. She made a hash of explaining her work, or rather, its contagious excitement. In an age when
the system
(that hackneyed phrase) is generally said to determine everything, when all social ills are
nobody's fault,
the women of the Reform Firm—with the men of the Social Science Association and a few other forward-thinking organizations—say,
not so!
Fido's seen change coming in a single generation; the icy chains of prejudice shaking loose. She toils hard and with pleasure, so that other women may be freed from their set grooves (whether of poverty or boredom, dependence or idleness), freed to toil hard and with pleasure in their turn. This is what gets Fido out of bed by six every morning. So why does she feel she left Helen with the impression that she sits around squabbling with other do-gooders?

The main office of the Victoria Press is at 9 Great Coram Street, five minutes' brisk walk from the house.
(Evacuation of Atlanta Ends Four Month Siege,
reads the newsboy's sign, and she considers stopping to recommend a hyphen between
four
and
month.)

In the typos' room, she pauses to congratulate Gladys Jennings on her recovery from smallpox; the girl's still purple-tinged and marked with scabs that Fido pretends not to see. Then she stops by the desk of Flora Parsons. "This will take half the day to correct," she remarks, handing back the long slip she's marked up in red. "If you'd applied your mind the first time, as Miss Jennings always does—"

"Beg pardon, ma'am," mutters Flora Parsons, head down, still rapidly plucking sorts from the alphabetical cases.

"It's not a matter of my pardon," says Fido, exasperated. "I'm merely pointing out why Miss Jennings makes eighteen shillings to your ten. That's the very reason I pay by the piece rather than by the week: to put your earning power in your own hands."

"You're very good to us, ma'am."

Fido could hardly miss the sarcasm. This one's a hard case: a workhouse orphan with cream-coloured hair who's been here four years now and is as slapdash as ever. Engaged, already, to one of the junior clickers, Mr. Ned Dunstable, which Fido finds disheartening: young hands are more trainable than their elders, but most won't trouble to master a trade they expect to leave at any moment. "You underestimate yourself, Miss Parsons," she says now, on impulse.