Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore
Chapter 22
The next morning she woke to mild cramps and the arrival of her courses, which she should have expected had she not lost track of time during the emotional whirlwind of the past few weeks. Lucian had already gone, and a note lay on his pillow informing her that he and the mining engineer would spend all day examining the tunnels. That was a relief. The memories of their debauchery last night intruded, and in the light of day, it made her head red-hot.
She felt improved enough around noon to go and hold the women’s assembly.
The small classroom was crammed with approximately fifty women lining the walls and sitting behind the small worn desks. Rosie Fraser took her seat next to Hattie in a chair in front of the blackboard. She wore her Sunday finery today: a white blouse and blue wool and no handkerchief to protect her hair. She had flaming-red locks like her son, Hamish.
She seemed intrigued enough by the idea of joining the trade union, but some of the other women grumbled. “It’ll put us up against the men before it protects us or our wages,” an older woman in the first row said. “It’s our own menfolk that thinks we’re the competition.”
“Not all of our own,” Mrs. Fraser said with vehemence. “Most are sensible.” But there were still some dark faces in the crowd. “I for once want the same pay,” said the blond woman who had asked Hattie for a sketch of her two sons the night before, and that elicited ambivalent murmurs. The final vote, however, revealed that a majority of women wanted to join, and Hattie scribbled the result onto the blackboard with a squeaky piece of chalk.
On the matter of joining the suffrage movement, they laughed uproariously. “Should we come down to London on Sundays and hand out pamphlets, then?” Rosie Fraser asked. “I’m all for it,” said another. “I’ll leave my fellow to change the baby and to bake the bread while I’m gone having a lark.” This started a good five minutes of hilarity, where they envisioned their husbands doing this or that around the house. “We can try to improve our pay through the union,” Mrs. Fraser concluded after restoring order. And that was that, women’s suffrage dismissed with a wave of her broad hand.
“But if you had the vote, you could hasten all these decisions about pay and working conditions along,” Hattie tried, “by voting for a party that works for precisely those interests. And you don’t have to come to London; you can sign petitions. You could influence the movement itself with your sheer numbers.”
“Precisely, eh,” Mrs. Fraser drawled. “But we’re not eligible for the vote. Our men aren’t eligible, ma’am. We don’t own property, nor do we run expensive households in a city.”
Nodding all around. This was not going well at all. “There shall be another reform act to enfranchise the workingmen,” Hattie said. “The property qualifications shan’t last forever.”
“Do you know that for certain, ma’am?”
She didn’t, and she felt some disappointment in the crowd when she bit her lip and shook her head. Her proposition was voted down.
Her palms were damp and her pulse high by the time she explained her idea about the photographs.
“Photographs,” Rosie Fraser repeated, her eyes narrowing. “Like they did in Yorkshire?”
“What happened in Yorkshire?”
“People went there and took photographs of the lassies in their working clothes a few years back,” Mhairi said from her seat in the front row. “Turned them into postcards.”
“Scandalous ones,” Mrs. Fraser added derisively. “The people selling them made good coin.”
Murmur rose again.
“Well, these portraits would be yours,” Hattie said. “Free of charge and for your personal use.”
Rosie Fraser contemplated her with an unreadable expression. “Why?” At least she didn’t flat out ask, What’s in it for you?
Hattie replied the one thing that came to mind. “Because I can.”
The vote to have the portraits done was unanimous.
“I should like to have the vote,” Mhairi told Hattie an hour later as they walked back to the inn. Her plaid-patterned Sunday skirt was swinging in step with her thick braids. “I’ll have my own business one day and then it would come in handy.”
“Will you take over the Drover’s Inn?”
“Oh no. My sister, Clara, and I—we’d like to train as soap makers. The inn will go to my brothers.”
“Soap,” Hattie said, nonplussed, “why soap?”
“We thought people will always need to wash, won’t they? Drummuir will stop yielding one day, and then what’s left for the inn? Did you like the heather soap in your bath?”
She hadn’t paid much attention to the soap. “It smelled wonderful,” she said truthfully.
“It was us, suggesting heather to the soap maker in Dundee,” Mhairi said with obvious pride. “Now we have heather scent year-round from the linen. Would people in the cities want to buy it?”
Impulsively, she wanted to make exuberant promises. “When the time comes, you must send me a note,” she said instead. “I’m an esteemed customer in two fashionable perfume shops in London.” At least she would be again, once the scandal prompting her wedding had waned. Mhairi’s steps turned into a skip for a few paces, and Hattie’s chest felt tight with an emotion. A foot in the door, Lucian had called it. There needed to be more of it.
She returned to the room feeling both restless and exhausted. It was advised that a woman rest during this time of the month, and here she was holding assemblies and walking across heather fields. She wished her friends were at the inn so she could think out loud in front of them to organize her mind, which was a riot of flitting thoughts and hatching ideas. Eventually, it overwhelmed her innate reluctance to pick up a pen and write words. It was just a letter to Lucie, a friend.
My mind is turning at double the normal speed because I have so many thoughts, and only some of them are fully formed while the rest shall plague me with half-baked conclusions for weeks. I know you are busy with lobbying the House of Lords for the amendment hearing, but I wish you could meet the women at Drummuir so we could think together. My impression is they share a great camaraderie and possess a stubborn cheerfulness despite their daily hardships. They would make a formidable army for the Cause if we could convince them to join. They laughed at me today when I suggested it, since they don’t meet property qualifications; even if they did they’d have no spare time on their hands. They work on the coalfield like men, then they come home to babies, cooking, laundry, and scrubbing. I can’t see their men taking on these domestic chores so that they might go picketing or liaising, and for nothing.
My second impression is that we are committing a serious error by focusing so strongly on the lamentable lack of employment for women of our class, when there is a large group of women that has rather too much work on their hands all while receiving inadequate compensation for it. Legislating against their work in the name of protecting them ignores the reality of their families needing to eat.
Finally, I feel a strange unease, or perhaps a sense of guilt, that I can safely walk away from Drummuir and forget all about its existencewhen Rosie Fraser will continue to live this life every day. I have read about mining accidents in the papers, so it was hardly a shocking revelation that they exist; I have just never shared a table with the potential next victims before. I know most would argue that there is a natural order to these things, that we are born into our station in accordance with a higher plan, but as suffragists, we reject the same kind of thinking in regards to our sex, hence I feel quite encouraged to reject this way of thinking entirely.
I feel more acutely than ever an obligation to put whatever talents and good fortune I might possess to the best possible use. I’m not sure yet whatbest means, but I shall accompany Mr. Blackstone to St. Andrews tomorrow in search of a camera ….
Regarding Mr. Blackstone,
she wrote, and paused for the longest time.
I’m quite well.
He has revealed himself to be part Robin Hood rather than plain villain.
She crossed out the last sentence so thoroughly, it was a black bar across the page, and Lucie would find it very strange indeed.
A glance out the window said the sun was still high in the sky, but already butterflies swarmed in her belly at the prospect of facing him at dinner. Half dream, half shadows, their erotic intimacy last night appeared in soft focus now, but, oh, it had definitely happened. His fingers inside her, his teeth against her neck. She gave a nervous little huff. Her current condition would keep them on separate sides of the bed for a few nights. A no would suffice to deter him in any case; she knew this now. The trouble was, she might not say no. She could feel herself waver. And he knew. In the controlled, patient way a confident man could afford to wait, Lucian was waiting for her.