A Mad, Wicked Folly (34 page)

and down Whitehall?” His chest rumbled with laughter.
“You’re Victorious?”
“I suppose you have to arrest me,” I mumbled. “I won’t
fight you. I’ll go.”
“I don’t want to arrest you!” Will held me away from
him. “I was going to tell whoever was doing the fly-posting
not to go this way; there are constables on the other side of
the parade ground. Let’s get you out of here before some
one sees you. Come on.”
“I can’t . . . I can’t walk!” I held my foot off the ground,
clinging on to Will’s coat for balance. My ankle was beginning to throb, and my bootlaces were so tight they felt as
though they were cutting into my skin. “I think I broke my
ankle jumping off the sentry box.”
Will was suddenly serious. “Here, put your arms
around my neck.”
I did, and Will hoisted me in his arms. “My bicycle is
over there,” I said, pointing over his shoulder. “I can’t leave
it. It belongs to the WSPU.”
“We’ll take care of the bicycle, and then I’ll take you
home to your . . . I suppose it will be to your husband.”
“I haven’t got a husband, William.”
Will paused. “You what?” His arms tightened around me.
“I haven’t got a husband. It’s a long story. Take me to
my friend’s flat, and I’ll tell you. There are so many things
I want to tell you.”
Will groaned and then shifted me in his arms. “How
much do you weigh? I feel as if I’m carrying a log.”
I thumped him on the shoulder. “I’ll get my own back
for that.”
He sighed. “I don’t doubt that you will. And Vicky?”
“Yes?”
“You look rather adorable in those knickerbockers.”

IN THE END,
we hid the bicycle under a bush and took the
Underground to Clement’s Inn. I was hopping on one leg
up the stairs to Lucy’s rooms, clinging on to Will, making
a hellish racket, when one of the other suffragettes poked
her head out of her flat. “Vicky? Is that . . .” Her voice trailed
off. Her eyes widened when she saw Will.

“It’s all right, miss,” Will said. “Just escorting Vicky
home.”
The woman ducked her head back into the flat. “Sophie,
she’s here! There’s a PC with her.”
There were quick shuffling noises from inside the flat,
and a moment later Sophie appeared, still dressed as a boy.
When she saw Will, a huge grin spread across her face.
Then her eyes traveled from Will’s arm around me to my
foot. “What happened? We’ve been waiting for a call from
the police.”
“I hurt my ankle jumping off the sentry box,” I said.
The conversation must have disturbed other suffragettes
because startled faces began to poke out of doors.
“Is it all right?” Sophie asked Will, her expression
worried.
“I’ll see to it for her.”
Inside Lucy’s flat it was cold; the fire hadn’t been lit all
day. Will helped me hobble to the edge of the bed, and I
dragged the bedcovers over my lap.
“This is your flat?” He shrugged off his police tunic and
laid it over my shoulders. Underneath it he wore a simple
white cotton shirt with braces.
“It’s Lucy Hawkins’s flat. You know her. She was the
one chained to the railing the day I got arrested.”
He knelt down and unlaced my boot, drawing it off
carefully. “Yes, I know her. She’s the one in jail just now
with the others being force-fed. That’s why I was trying to
help whoever was fly-posting. I was walking my beat and
saw the posters. I thought,
Finally people will know the truth
of it
. I have to say, it took a lot of bravery to do what you
did tonight.”
“I wasn’t very good,” I said glumly. “It’s probably my
last caper. Caught on the first night. It was too difficult to
pull off.”
“Now, don’t give up so easily. Where’s that stubborn
spirit of yours that I know so well?”
I nudged his leg with my good foot. “You shouldn’t
say that, Will. You’re a police constable. You should have
arrested me. In actual fact, you’re probably in the soup
tomorrow. We fly-posted on your beat, and they’re bound
to question you about that. You abandoned your post too.
They’ll think you helped me.”
“I was going off duty anyway.” He hesitated. “Hey now,
there’s an idea.”
“What do you mean?”
He let out a laugh. “I can tell you where we’ll be
patrolling, and you can fly-post somewhere else. Simple.”
“You? A turncoat? William Fletcher!”
He shrugged. “Let’s just call me an informant. The way
I see it, you could use someone on the inside to tip you
off. It’s not like I haven’t helped the suffragettes before.
Victorious would be able to give them all the slip.”
I could imagine the frustration of the government,
waking up each morning to a city wallpapered with my
illustrations. Everyone would wonder who Victorious was,
and surely the papers would take notice.
“‘Deeds not words.’ Isn’t that the suffragette motto?”
He pulled off my stocking and whistled. It was not a pretty
sight. My ankle was puffy and swollen and already turning an unlovely shade of yellow.
“Blimey,” he said. “You did a good job of it, didn’t you?”
His fingers pressed around my ankle. “I’m not sure it’s broken; maybe just wrenched. Still, I’ll strap it up for you, and
then in the morning we’ll get you to a doctor.”
Will went to Lucy’s fireplace, shoveled in some coal,
and coaxed a fire to light. My chin stung where I had
scraped it. I brushed it with the back of my hand.
Will went into Lucy’s little kitchen, and I heard cupboard doors opening and closing. He reappeared carrying
a bowl of water and some cloths. He dipped one into the
water, came over, and pressed it to my chin. “Hold it there
and it will ease in a moment. It’s just a little cut; I don’t
think you need stitches. You’ll look as though you’ve gone
a few rounds with a bare-knuckle fighter, I expect.”
He knelt on the floor and began to wrap a cloth around
my ankle. “So out with it. What’s all this about? Last time
we spoke, you were off to marry a rich bloke. Now you’re
dressed as a lad, fly-posting illustrations up and down
Whitehall. Surely you must have known you would have
been arrested if you were caught? I doubt there are any art
classes offered in Holloway.”
His flippant remark stung me. “I suppose I deserve
that.”
“I’m sorry, Vicky.” He shook his head. His voice was
marked with frustration. “I don’t mean to be a swine to
you. I’m just a little confused.”
“I couldn’t go through with the marriage. There was no
freedom in that life after all. I left home, and now I’m a
suffragette.”
“I can’t imagine what that cost you, Vicky.” Will’s fingers hesitated on the bandage. He looked up, his face grave.
“What about art school?”
“I got accepted. But it turns out I could never have
gone.”
Will looked at me in sorrow. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m going to try again next year, this time for the
scholarship. I tried to find you to see if you wanted to work
together again. I went to your flat, but you weren’t there. I
even went to the police station, but they wouldn’t tell me
anything about you.”
“I moved out of my flat and back into the police barracks. After that day I saw you at the RCA, I got rid of it.”
He finished rolling the bandage and sat next to me. “After
what happened with you, I didn’t want to stay in that flat.
There were too many memories of you there.”
“But why?” I said. “I thought you hated me. The way you
sounded that day at the RCA—it was the way you sounded
when you thought I was an anti-suffragist. Disgusted.”
He shook his head. “I wasn’t disgusted with you. I was
disgusted with me. When you told me you were engaged, I
felt so daft. It was stupid of me to think I had a chance with
you. Especially when I realized you had to get married in
order to go to art school. I couldn’t give you that. And then
I thought I had mucked things up between us, kissing you
as I did.”
“Didn’t you notice that I kissed you back?”
“I did.” He looked at me in that adorable way that I
remembered well. I watched his mouth turn up at the side
as he smiled.
Without even hesitating, I put my hands around
his neck and I pressed my mouth on his and kissed him
soundly.
Will made a garbled noise. He pulled away. “Vicky,
what the devil are you doing?”
“Kissing you.” I suddenly felt uncertain. “Isn’t it
obvious?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “Well, do it again
so I can be sure.”
So I did. And the same feelings I had had before
bloomed inside me, as if they had never gone away—the
same desire, the same need to feel him against me. And my
love for him bloomed into life, too.
“Is that all right?” I said, a moment later, feeling more
than a little breathless.
“Better than all right; grand, if you want to know the
truth of it.” He squeezed my fingers. “I had given up on
ever kissing you again. But I don’t understand. What’s this
about? Before, you told me what you felt for me was affection for a model.”
“It was a lie. The truth is, I can’t ever imagine my life
without you.”
He pulled me close to him, and I rested my head on his
chest, and for the first time in maybe my entire life, I felt
as if I was exactly where I needed to be and exactly who I
needed to be.
WILL’S DIAGNOSIS WAS correct. Painful as it was, my ankle had only been wrenched, and a month later Victorious
was fly-posting again, with her inside informer telling her
where to go. For weeks I posted my illustrations, evading
and frustrating the police. And slowly, as I worked, public opinion began to change, and more and more people
understood that force-feeding was barbaric and torturous. My mother’s favorite newspaper, the
Daily Bugle
, was
the first to take the suffragettes’ side. It denounced the
force-feeding, saying, “No matter whether one agrees with
the suffragettes, the government’s brutal torture of the
women cannot be justified.” Because of the public outcry,
the Home Office began an inquiry, interviewing all the
prison warders. While the WSPU waited to see what the
government would do, it called a truce.
Lucy and the other two suffragettes arrested with her
had been released at the beginning of December. There
were over a hundred of us at Holloway to greet them as
they walked through the small door in the gothic iron gate.
We draped them with flower garlands and paraded them
home in an open-topped horse-drawn carriage, the fifeand-drum band marching behind them.
I was now among the top artists at the WSPU, and I
asked Miss Housman if I could teach drawing classes at
the atelier. My classes were exactly the kind that women
should frequent. In my classes we drew from the undraped
figure—the nude. I started out with six students, all female,
from teenage girls to married women. But when word got
round that my model was PC William Fletcher, I had a
waiting list.
“Draw what you see, ladies, not what you know,” I said,
walking around the room, checking each drawing and
making comments and corrections. “Don’t gape, Violet,”
I said in a lofty voice to a teenage girl who was staring
at Will posing on the model’s dais. “A life-drawing class
is always professional, never risqué.” Violet blushed and
returned to her drawing. Will looked at me out of the corner of his eye, trying valiantly to keep his expression still,
fighting the compulsion to laugh.

INTER HAD BEGUN
in earnest, and snow
lay thickly on the ground and covered the
rooftops like cotton blankets. Everything
was so white that it nearly hurt my eyes.

It was so cold I could see my breath in the air, and I
felt sorry for a little house sparrow that pecked around for
seeds in my mother’s desolate rose garden. I looked up at
the windows of my old bedroom. The remains of the wisteria vine looked ragged and forlorn in the winter light. So
long ago I had climbed out that window.

I held in my hand a newly minted tuppeny novelette
that featured Will’s story, which Freddy’s company had
published. On the cover was my illustration of Sir Robert
dressed in a black cloak, robbing one of the lords as he
staggered drunken from the Reform Club. On top of it
was written:
Magnificent Picture Printed in Full Color! Sir
Robert Hoode Steals from the Rich and Gives to the Poor!
And on the bottom:
Written by W. Fletcher. Illustrated by V.
Darling. Published by Darling and Whitehouse and sold by
all newsagents everywhere
. I looked forward to including
it in my RCA application in April. I hadn’t given up on my
dream of going to art school, and I never would, no matter
how many times I had to apply.

Mamma was the first person I wanted to show it to. I
wanted her to see that I had become an artist and that I
was earning money. I wanted to show her because I knew
she would be proud of me.

When I lifted my hand to pull the doorbell, I saw a
curtain twitch at the window. And there was my father
peering out. I caught his eye and he nodded.

I LEFT MY
parents’ house and I stepped out into a day that
had turned bright with sunshine and promise. Mamma
had loved the novelette, and I left it with her, along with
the promise to join her at Sally’s Tea Shop on Saturday to
meet Will. As for Papa, the smile was a start.

I walked to the Royal Academy, and into the courtyard, past the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds, holding his
palette in one hand, brush held aloft in the other, making
his mark on an unseen canvas. But Sir Joshua did not hold
my attention for more than a passing glance. I saw Will
leaning against statue’s plinth. I threaded my way through
the scrum of people to his side.

Together we left the Royal Academy and walked down
the streets of London, a place brimming with hidden
opportunity. And I knew that I would find it. For opportunity is nothing if you don’t grab it by both hands.

The Edwardian era (1901–1910) was one of great change for
women. Queen Victoria (May 24, 1819–January 22, 1901)
had been very straitlaced, and her subjects often copied
her behavior. Her son and heir, King Edward VII, for whom
the era was named, was her exact opposite and had many
very public affairs; his mistresses included the famous
actress Lillie Langtry and with socialite Alice Keppel (who
was the maternal great-grandmother of Camilla, Duchess
of Cornwall and second wife of Prince Charles, the Prince
of Wales and future king of England).