A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [21]
“The vote was a sop,” she snapped. “Granting individual slaves their manumission after a lifetime of service doesn’t alter the essential wrongness of the institution of slavery, nor does giving a small number of women the vote adequately compensate the entire sex for their wartime service—to say nothing of millenia of oppression. All the vote did was break up the underlying unity of feminists and allow the factions to disperse. We allowed ourselves to be misled by a sop,” she repeated. This speech was more personal and had its glints of spontaneity, but it was still ready-made—careful words, though with an angry woman behind them.
“So you use these women; you put them to work on your various projects in order to make them feel useful,” I said.
To my surprise, far from taking umbrage at my words, she subsided with a laugh and winked at me conspiratorially.
“Just think of the vast amount of energy out there waiting to be put to use.” She chuckled. “And no man will touch it. No male politician dares.”
“You have political ambitions, then?” The newspaper photograph came back to me. A donation, had it been? To a Lord Mayor?
“I have no ambitions… for myself.”
“But for the church?”
“For the Temple, I will do what needs to be done. Part of that may involve my entering the political arena.”
“Using the vast resources of energy available to you.” I smiled.
“Representing a large number of people, yes.”
“And their bank accounts,” I noted, but she did not rise even to that gibe. Instead, she put on a face as bland as anything Holmes could come up with.
“If you mean the funds our members make available to the Temple, it is true, God has been very good in meeting our needs. Most members tithe; others donate what they can.”
My near accusation bothered her not in the least, and I had the distinct impression that she had searched her own heart on this question and felt certain of the truth in her words. She waited calmly. Her drink was only half-gone—whatever her faults, drunkenness did not seem to be one of them. I changed the subject.
“I was interested in your reading of the text,” I began. “Tell me, was that a personal interpretation of the Creation Story, or was it based on someone else’s work?”
To my astonishment, after all I had asked and intimated in the last few minutes, this apparently innocuous question hit her hard. She sat up, as amazed as if Lady Macbeth had interrupted a peroration to give a cake recipe, and watched me cautiously through narrowed eyes for a moment before an abrupt question was forced out.
“Miss Russell, what newspaper are you with?”
It was my turn to be astonished.
“Newspaper? Good heavens, is that what you thought?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or to be offended—my only contacts with the profession had tended heavily towards the intrusive and ghoulish. It did, however, explain her odd façade of easy intimacy combined with formal speeches. She thought I was an undeclared journalist, using an unknowing acquaintance to get in and prise at The Real Margery Childe. I decided laughter was more called for, and so I laughed, apparently convincingly.
“No, Miss Childe, I’m not a reporter, or a journalist, or anything but a friend of Ronnie Beaconsfield.”
“What do you do, then?”
I wondered briefly at the question, and realised that I didn’t give off the same air of easy affluence that the rest of them had. It was a pleasing thought, that I was not recognisably of the leisured class.
“I’m at Oxford. I do informal tutoring, and a great deal of research.”
“Into what?”
“Bible mostly.”
“I see. You read theology, then?”
“Theology and chemistry.”
“An odd combination,” she said, the usual reaction.
“Not terribly.”
“No?”
“Chemistry involves the workings of the physical universe, theology those of the human universe. There are behaviour patterns common to both.”
She had forgotten both cigarette