Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry [96]
The three women were motionless. Florence gripped the back of her chair, her knuckles white, the cloth of her dress strained at the shoulders till the stitching thread showed at the seams. Outside in the garden a bird hopped from a low lilac branch onto the windowsill.
Africa Dowell moved from the comer by the door where she had been listening. She made a move as if to touch Florence, then something in the rigid figure warned her away, and she turned to Charlotte, knowledge and fear in her eyes, and defiance.
“Florence is speaking for a great many people, more than you might imagine. Mrs. Sheridan had recently joined a group fighting for women’s suffrage, and there are others up and down the country. Famous people have urged it. John Stuart Mill wrote a paper years ago—” She stopped, painfully aware that nothing she said would erase from their minds the skin-crawling knowledge of a passion that could have driven Florence Ivory to kill, and may have.
Charlotte looked at the carpet, framing her words carefully.
“You say many women feel the same,” she began.
“Yes, many,” Africa agreed faintly, her voice without conviction.
Charlotte met her eyes. “Why not all women? Why should any woman be against it, or even indifferent?”
Florence’s answer was harsh and instant. “Because it is easier! We are brought up from the cradle to be ignorant, charming, obedient, and to depend completely on someone else to provide for us! We tell men we are fragile of body and of mind and must be protected from anything indecent or contentious, we must be looked after, we cannot be blamed for anything because we are not responsible! And they do look after us. They do as much for us as a mother does for a child that cannot walk: she carries it! And until she puts it down, it never will walk! Well I don’t want to be carried all my life!” She struck her hand so violently against her chest Charlotte felt sure it must have bruised the flesh. “I want to decide which way I will go, not be carried whether I choose to or not where someone else wishes. But many women have been told for so long they cannot walk that now they believe it, and they haven’t the courage to try. Others are too lazy; it is easier to be carried.”
It was only a partial truth. Charlotte knew so many more reasons: there was love, gratitude, guilt, the need to be loved with tenderness and without contention or rivalry, the deep pleasure of earning the respect and nurturing the best in a man, and perhaps the strongest reason of all—the need to give love, to cherish the young and the weak, to support a man, who seemed in the world’s eyes to be the stronger, and yet whom one learned so quickly was easily as vulnerable as oneself, often more so. The world expected so much of him, and allowed him no weakness, no tears, no failure. A host of memories came to her of Pitt, of George, of Dominic, even of her father, seen now with the wisdom of hindsight, and of other men whom the astringent wash of an investigation had stripped layer by layer of all pretense. Their hidden selves had been as frail, as full of terrors and weaknesses, self-doubt and petty vanities and deceptions as any woman’s. Only their outer garb was different, and their outer power.
But there was no purpose in telling this to Florence Ivory. Her wounds were too deep, and her cause was just. Charlotte imagined her emotions, thought for an instant how she would have felt had her own children been lost to her and knew reason would be misplaced.
But only reason could help now. She changed the subject entirely, looking at Florence with a calm she did not feel. “Where were you when Mr. Sheridan was murdered?” she asked.
Florence was startled. Then she smiled without