The Serpent's Shadow (32 page)

“No—” Maya's anger ebbed a little, deflected momentarily by the quick change of subject.

Now it was Amelia's turn to look grim. “You know that some of us have been thrown in prison for our actions; you probably know that, following Mrs. Pank-hurst's example, many of them have gone on hunger strikes. What you
don't
know is that they've started to force-feed the ones on strike. Today one of the girls being force-fed died.”

“What?”
She'd seen a lunatic being force-fed once; it had made her sick. To pry a person's mouth open with a metal instrument even at the cost of breaking teeth, to gag him so that he could not close his mouth again, to then feed a tube through the mouth or nose into the stomach and pour “nourishing liquid” down it from a funnel seemed more like a barbaric torture that should have vanished with the Mongols. To inflict that on a lunatic was bad enough, for this might be someone who was not able to recognize the difference between eating and not eating—but to do so on a sane, sober woman who was going on a hunger strike to prove the justice of her cause? And then to do so in such a way as to
kill
her? That was like inflicting a death-sentence on someone who had stolen a crust of bread!

“How? How did she die?” was all she could think to ask.

Amelia bit her lip. “They're claiming that it was an accident, that she choked later when she vomited,” the young woman said grimly, “But one of the matrons admitted that she died while they were still pouring their foul mess into her. They probably put the tube into the lung instead of the stomach, the beasts! She was
only
a poor little Irish scullery maid, not a
lady,
not someone who would be missed. There are thousands like her, after all; she doesn't matter. Tomorrow her mistress can hire another just like her, from the hordes that live in the slums.
They breed like flies,
don't they?”

The words stung, just as Amelia had intended, and Maya shot to her feet. “When is the march?” she demanded. “And where?”

Maya had not expected to find herself at the front of the march, right behind the girls carrying banners—and the six who were carrying a vivid reminder of why they were all marching. Amelia had told her to wear her stethoscope about her neck and carry her Glad-stone bag, the two items by which she would be identified as a doctor. “We
have
to show people that we are just as able to provide intelligent, professional workers as men do!” Amelia told her fiercely.

The only addition to her black suit was a white sash, reading “Votes for Women” that fitted from shoulder to hip. Her garb was peculiarly appropriate. She was in mourning for her father, but anyone looking at her wouldn't know that. It would appear that, like many of the women in this march, she was in mourning for the girl who had been murdered.

The force-feedings had not been discontinued after the death of one victim. As Amelia had bitterly pointed out, the authorities, assuming that the girl wasn't important enough to be noticed, had blithely continued in their brutality. But they were wrong.

The central banner, held aloft by two girls and hastily, but expertly, rendered by a suffragette who was an artist, depicted force-feeding in all its brutality; the victim tied down to a chair, four burly attendants restraining her, while a fifth, all but kneeling on her chest, poured something into the tube shoved down her throat. Behind the banner, six more girls carried a symbolic white coffin, draped with banners that read, “Mary O‘Leary, Murdered By Police!”

The bulk of the marchers walked behind them. Unlike other marches that Maya had seen, this one was not characterized by chants of “Votes for Women!” and a brass band, but by silence broken only by the steady beating of muffled drums. Not a few faces bore the telltale signs of weeping—red eyes, or actual tears of mourning on pale cheeks—but there were no open sobs even though several of the younger women looked as if they might burst into tears on a slight provocation.

The silence was only on the part of the marchers, however. These marches were rarely accompanied by cheering, but in the silence, the shouting and jeering of the (predominantly male) onlookers was all the more shocking. Most of the hecklers were clearly of the laboring class, but by no means all of them, and Maya reflected that if the march had taken place on a Sunday or later in the day, there would have been
many
middle-class men adding their threats to those of the laborers. And there were threats, everything from declarations that the women should be taken home and locked up, to crude and graphic obscenities promising that the shouter would inflict a great deal more than a simple beating if he got his hands on one of the women.

Maya kept her eyes on the girls ahead of her, but she couldn't help but shiver internally. She considered herself to be brave, but it seemed to her that there was no doubt many of those men
would
do exactly as they threatened if they could catch a suffragette alone.

They were so
angry!
How could a demand by women that they have a right that these men had and didn't even value enough to exercise be so threatening to them? Why should they care?

Perhaps because if they
“
allow
”
us to vote, they will have to treat us as equals?
Unbidden, memories arose with each step on the pavement, echoing in her mind in concert with the marching cadence behind her. So many women coming into the Fleet beaten within an inch of their lives—with broken bones or flesh not just bruised but pulped. So long as the woman didn't die, it was perfectly legal for a father or husband to treat her worse than a dog or a horse! He could starve her, beat her, torture her, abuse her in any way his mind could encompass. He could make her sleep on the dirt floor of a cellar dressed only in rags, force her to work until she dropped, then force her to turn over the fruits of her labor to him. She was his property, to do with as he willed, and the force of the law was behind him.

And then there were those who did die; all the man had to do was to claim he had caught “his” woman in adultery, and the law released him to the streets, to do the same to another woman, and another, and another.

Even among men who counted themselves as civilized and would not dream of physically hurting a female, there was the repeated and deliberate starvation of woman's intellect. Consider the refusal of male instructors to teach women subjects
they
considered improper—that was the reason the London School of Medicine for Women had been founded in the first place. For heaven's sake, Oxford hadn't even granted degrees to women in
anything
until the end of last century!

And the marriage laws! While a father lived, no matter how incompetent, a woman's property could be handled (or mishandled) by him. Once married, it belonged to her husband, again to be treated as
he
willed! Even when a woman earned money by her own work, it belonged to
him!
The only time a woman could be free from interference was when father and husband (if she had one) were both dead—and even
then
, any male relative who wished to have what she had earned could have her brought into court and declared incompetent! She had
seen
that happen, to women who were too intimidated to fight back, or those who lost in the court to a lawyer with a smoother tongue (or a readier hand with a bribe) than hers had been!

With every step, with every memory, her fear fled, and her anger rose. Last of all came the most recent memories, of Simon Parkening and his cronies heckling both her
and
her unconscious, helpless patient, afraid of her competence, and trying to overmaster her with brutal words because they could not beat her into submission.

And neither they, nor these other beasts will beat us down!
she thought, her anger now bringing new energy to her steps, so that she raised her head and glared at the hecklers in the streets with white-hot rage in her eyes. Go
ahead!
she challenged silently.
Threaten me all you like! You only prove that you are worse than the brute animals!

“Votes for Women” was only the battle cry, the hook upon which all else depended. It was
emancipation
of women that was the real issue—for until women could vote, they could never change the laws that oppressed them and made them slaves.

Maya was not the only one mustering anger as a weapon against the mob; she saw now that others were glaring at their tormentors with equal defiance as they marched. In the younger girls, the defiance was mixed partly with fear, but mostly with excitement. Perhaps they had not yet had enough experience with the worst that men could do for the fear to seem very real to them. But in the older women, it was clear that the anger had overmastered the fear, and their glares were intended to shame the instruments of that fear.

Sometimes it even worked, when they could actually catch and hold the eyes of those who shouted so angrily at the marchers. Now and again, a man stopped in mid-shout, his mouth gaping foolishly. His face flushed, he dropped his eyes, and he slunk into the crowd. But there was always another shoving forward to take his place.

At this moment, Maya almost hated Men, the entire brutal race of them.

Almost. For there were men among the marchers, and not the cowed, hen-pecked specimens depicted in the cartoons of the critical press either. Men who were
braver and stronger
than the ones shouting on the line of march, because they weren't afraid of women who were just as brave and strong as they were! For their sake, Maya could not take the easy route of condemning the whole sex—only those who were too cowardly, weak, and ignorant to bear the thought of losing their domination over those that should have been their partners.

At last their goal came within sight. Parliament, where the marchers were going to lay their coffin, fill it with stones until it was too heavy to lift, and some of the women were going to chain themselves to it and to the railings of the stairs and the fences. These women would be arrested and dragged off to prison, of course, where they would also go on hunger strikes, and be force-fed-
And die, perhaps. Until shame overtakes those in authority and the murdering stops!

Amelia worked her way up through the marchers to Maya's side. “As soon as we gather and start to fill the coffin, you and I need to slip off,” Amelia said quietly, under the muffled drumming and the shouts.

“I feel horrible to leave them,” Maya said, looking about her at the determined faces of the women around her.

“You and I fight the fight where we are working, and we are needed there,” Amelia told her, although she, too, looked guiltily at the others who marched past them and began to solemnly place the stones each one carried into the now-open coffin. “Who would take our place, guarding the Bridgets and the Alices of London from the Clayton-Smythes and Simon Par-kenings who treat them like so many disposable experiments?”

Maya sighed and nodded, although it was hard to leave those others here to face whatever fate and the police had in store for them. Hidden from the jeering onlookers by the other women around them, they removed their sashes and handed them to one of the others—nor were they the only ones who were taking off sashes and blending back into the crowd. The drummers formed a semicircle, continuing the death-march rhythm and distracting the eyes from those who were slipping away. Now that the marchers had reached Parliament, there were other people thronging the streets than merely those who had gathered to jeer, and it was much easier to move to the edge of the group and slip off to hide among them. Most of the women here would not be among those who courted arrest. Several, like Amelia and Maya, would not even remain here unchained to risk it.

But she still felt horribly guilty as she tucked her stethoscope into her bag and squeezed past a couple— a nursemaid and her beau—who were craning their necks to see what was going on to cause such an uproar.

Once past the crowd, she and Amelia walked briskly away, unmolested even by those who had been shouting at them a few moments before. Without that white sash branding them as suffragettes, men looked right past them as things of no threat, and hence, no importance.

And perhaps that spoke of their contempt and disregard for all women even more than the shouting. It certainly spoke eloquently of their blindness.

14

T
HE summons came just after sunset and found Peter Scott at his flat; a moment later, he was on a ‘bus, figuring that the odds of finding a cab at that time of the evening in his neighborhood were pretty remote. He only had to change 'buses twice, when it all came down to cases, and the ‘bus was just as fast as a cab would have been.

He swung himself off the back steps of the ‘bus at the corner as it paused to make the turn, and trotted all the way to the club. He met another of the club members, young Reginald Fenyx, on the steps of the Exeter Club, as a third and fourth climbed grim-faced out of cabs behind him. The summons tonight had come in the person of a human messenger boy carrying an envelope with his name on it, not in some arcane fashion, and it had been marked “urgent.” Only twice since he had been invited to join the White Lodge had he gotten such a summons, and both times the situation had, indeed, been urgent.