‘I don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘She is the one that we saw on the common with the Caldwells. The one who excited the dog, although you would not know it – she was wearing a bonnet then.’
Mrs Elliot-Palmer looked back to me. Her eyes were a little dulled with age but I noticed they were the same light blue colour as her son’s. ‘I do remember,’ she said, although right then I wished that she did not, as I felt I was somehow to blame for the excitable dog.
‘A friend of the Caldwells…’ she said, as if she was voicing a thought that was not yet formed.
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘My mother gives religious instruction to Iris. I’m just a companion to her, like a servant.’ I added firmly, ‘I’m not a friend.’
The last women were leaving the hall. Curtains were being opened and the bed sheet unpinned from the wall as footsteps and the grate of chairs echoed across the parquet.
‘I really should be leaving too,’ I said. ‘My mother thinks that I have only been to the haberdasher’s but I went in to Partridge’s also, so I am already late.’
‘Of course,’ said Mrs Elliot-Palmer. ‘It was nice to meet you.’ But the strength had gone from her voice and she muttered the words as if deep in thought.
I stood up and Francis pulled back my chair, but I realised that it was not due to manners when he followed me to the doorway and out into the chill of the afternoon.
‘It was nice to meet you properly, Miss Ryland,’ he said, his voice softening a bit now that we were away from the older women. ‘I am sorry about Charlie’s behaviour the other day,’ he continued, ruffling the ears of the dog as he strained towards him, ‘but my mother dotes on him and would never apologise for his lack of training. I think that you might have…’ Then he seemed to hesitate but did not take his eyes from the dog. ‘You saw me by the Caldwell place last week,’ he said quietly. ‘I would appreciate it if you would not tell anyone that you saw me there.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
He looked up sharply as if he had not expected me to question him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Iris and I should like to see more of each other but her father won’t allow us more than a few snatched words at society events. I was only near the house by coincidence, after all it is common land, but Sir Howard would still not be happy about it.’
‘I suppose you were not trespassing,’ I said. ‘Anyone may shoot on the common.’ I could not say any more. We both knew that he had not been stalking game when I had seen him, and that he must have been looking directly at the house in order to have noticed me at the window.
‘It was not a rifle that I was carrying,’ he said. ‘The long bag carries the tripod for my cine camera – many people make that mistake.’
‘You were filming Haughten Hall—’ I began.
‘No!’ he said quickly. ‘There is plenty to film on the common. There are foxes hunting in broad daylight this time of year and sometimes our stable lad will loose the horses on there to graze. It is all practice for when I film the May Day festivities, when I will begin my observations.’
‘Iris said you think that May Day is pagan,’ I said.
‘What I think does not matter so much,’ he said, ‘for the camera will not judge it. I think there is some honesty in capturing light and shadow on to diacetate film – a truth that cannot be questioned.’ He fixed his eyes on me again and I felt I had to nod in agreement because he spoke so earnestly as if he was repeating some great knowledge he had gained from his studies at Oxford.
‘I will not say anything,’ I said.
Then he looked quickly back through the open door of the church hall and his tone changed again. ‘Here!’ he said loudly, thrusting a piece of paper into my hand. ‘Maybe you could show the leaflet to Iris and she could pass it on to Sir Howard. Her father clearly adores her; if we could have Iris Caldwell on board, he might listen to her.’
I nodded, folding the paper into my pocket without looking at it.
‘Goodbye, Nell,’ he said and returned quickly into the hall, the door swinging behind him.
The dog looked up at me silently.
‘He called me Nell!’ I whispered as I stepped back into the street. I had not told him my name. Nobody had told him my name.
11
They were the women I had read about in the newspapers. They were the ones who had smashed windows in the streets of London and attacked politicians with whips, acids and missiles. They were something new, brave and passionate, and now they were in Missensham.
I had not suspected it when I sat among them in the village hall, but these women were the ones that the papers accused of waging war on government officials, Members of Parliament and common decency itself. They had not seemed dangerous as they chatted to each other in their respectable blouses, spectacles and churchy hats. It was only when I sat at the breakfast table the following morning and took the crinkled leaflet from my pocket that I realised who these women were and what they wanted.
I pushed my plate of toast crumbs aside and spread the leaflet across the tablecloth, smoothing it with my sleeve and reading the words quickly as my mother banged pots in the kitchen.
The leaflet bore a picture of a woman in a loose gown, with wings like an angel blowing a long horn, and it spoke of freedom and revolution. These women wanted a say in how their taxes were spent and a share in the making of the laws. They wanted a vote in parliament.
The leaflet contained words that I had never heard or read before – things that I understood only a little of, yet enough to know that these women were right. These words were ones understood and believed by the women in the church hall that day – the faces I had grown used to seeing in the butcher’s and the grocer’s, the ordinary women all around me. They were women who would nod to me in the street, women who had known me in my childhood and watched me grow. They had seen me in the meeting and they would tell my mother that I had been there – and I liked that.
I waited for my mother to return from the kitchen with her tea, then I leant back in my chair so that she would see the leaflet in front of me. She seemed to hesitate for a moment when she saw it but then set down her cup and snatched up the paper with my plate, saying nothing about it as she headed back to the kitchen again.
‘I went to that meeting,’ I shouted towards the kitchen where she had started clattering plates in the sink.
The clattering stopped and she came back through, wiping her hands on her apron, the leaflet in her hand once more.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ she said, handing it back to me, soapsuds bleeding into the paper. ‘Now go and put your boots on or we will be late for our appointment at Haughten Hall. Sir Howard and Iris will be waiting for us. Sir Howard and I need to discuss a suitable Bible passage for Iris’s devotions, while you accompany Iris with some lighter reading.’
‘I saw the new vicar’s wife at the meeting,’ I said.
She shrugged and took the teapot off the table.
‘Do you not think that any of this is important?’ I cried. ‘All you ever think about is an ancient book about what happened in the past and old buildings full of relics. This is now,’ I said jabbing my finger at the leaflet. ‘This is our future. You don’t even understand how important politics is!’