I’ll Bring You Buttercups. Elizabeth Elgin
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a woman such a weapon would be nothing short of madness; a surrender, some even went so far as to say, to bitchpower.
‘And I’ll tell you something else, Hawthorn. Until women can have babies when they want them, if they want them, we’ll never get anywhere!’
‘Miss! Don’t talk like that,’ Alice wailed. ‘You’ll get us locked up. Having babies is what women are for!’ Who ever heard of a man having a baby? ‘It’s what the good God intended us to do!’ It was as plain as the nose on your face, and nothing – not even giving a woman two votes – would change it.
‘Did He now? Intended us to be wives and providers of heirs. And to scrub and clean, too, and be grateful to some man for putting a ring on our finger? A servant for life, that’s what you’ll be, and me not so much better!’
‘But, Miss Julia, that’s what I am. Being a servant is all I’ve ever known and I – I think I shall like very much being married,’ she hesitated. ‘I want to marry Tom.’ She could think of nothing nicer, in fact, than having her own home – her very own home – and being beholden to no one. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Tom? You haven’t got a young man,’ Julia gasped. ‘Oh, not Dwerryhouse? But, Hawthorn, they’re all in love with Dwerryhouse!’
‘Then I’m the lucky one, aren’t I? Because Tom and me are walking out seriously. On the night milady went to Pendenys – that was when he asked me. And I said yes, so those others had better find someone else to be in love with!’
‘Oh, my dear, I’m so glad for you, I truly am. You lucky girl! Are you really in love? Really and truly, I mean?’
‘I don’t know, miss, and that’s for sure. It’s the first time it’s happened to me, and the last, I hope. But if being in love makes you feel contented all over, and special, and if the sun comes out every time you see him – even on a rainy day – then yes, I suppose I am.
‘Mind, I haven’t told anyone, yet. Not even Cousin Reuben. Tom and me can’t marry, you see, till Reuben retires. There’ll be nowhere for us to live till then. And I’m only eighteen, so that gives me three years to get used to it and to –’
‘To be quite sure you’re both suited?’
‘Yes. Though I know we are. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life before.’
‘Then I envy you. I would so like to be in love,’ Julia sighed. ‘Not engaged, or anything. Not something arranged by the families, but a real romance and me knowing, the moment I set eyes on him, that he’s the one. And I shall know. The minute I see him, I’ll know …’
‘The minute,’ Alice confirmed, yet wondering why, when Miss Julia had been presented at Court, something didn’t happen for her then. After all, that’s what it was really about. The season in London was really a marriage-market, and the gentry, if they were honest, would be the first to admit it. Most young ladies of Julia Sutton’s age and station in life were wedded and bedded by now – aye, and some were with child. ‘Hadn’t you thought to meet your husband when –’
‘When I ought to have done, you mean; when I made my curtsey to the King and Queen and had my London season?’
‘Well – yes …’
‘Ah, but Hawthorn, at the beginning of my season, Pa was killed and there was an end to my coming-out before it had hardly begun. Mourning for a year for me, and for Aunt Sutton too. And three years in purdah for my mother. Betrothal and marriage just don’t arise when a house is in mourning.
‘But do you know, those three years haven’t been wasted, because they gave me time to think about what I really wanted to do with my life, and one of the things that came out of it was the certain fact that I wanted to choose my husband for myself.’
‘Choose your own –’ Alice gasped. But the upper classes never chose their own husbands!
‘Indeed. And what was more, my mother said I might. She even said Pa would have agreed with her, too, because though their marriage was arranged, they’d been in love for ages beforehand, and kept it a secret.’
‘Oh, how lovely.’ Tears misted Alice’s eyes and she felt suddenly closer to her employer’s daughter and found herself hoping that she too could know the joy of loving and being loved. ‘And maybe you’ll meet him, soon. Maybe he might be just around the next corner.’
‘The next corner we come to will be Speakers Corner and I’m almost sure that the only men who’ll be around there will be policemen and I very much doubt –’
‘Look, miss! Over yonder!’ Alice pointed excitedly to the roadway and the carriage drawn by two splendid white horses. ‘Those horses! There’s a wish on a white horse. One for you and one for me. Close your eyes and cross your fingers and wish, quickly, afore they’re out of sight!’
Foolishly, fervently, they wished, neither confiding in the other, for both knew that a wish shared was a wish wasted, and Alice let go her indrawn breath and opened her eyes and Julia did the same. Then smiling, she said, ‘We mustn’t tell, Hawthorn.’
‘No, we mustn’t.’ But oh, when Miss Julia met him, let him be tall and broad and handsome and let him be rich enough to keep her in the manner to which she’d been born – please?
It seemed there would be no meeting that night; at least, not at Hyde Park Corner, for there was no gathering of waiting women, no banners, no policemen lurking.
‘Shall we go back, miss?’ Alice murmured with relief. ‘Looks as if nothing’s going to happen, and if we go home by way of the bandstand, perhaps there’ll be music.’
‘No, Hawthorn. We must stay just a little longer. Someone might come.’
They sat down again, stubbornly to wait it out, for it stood to sense, didn’t it, that forewarned was forearmed, Julia declared. If the police knew exactly when a meeting was to be held, they could all the more easily prevent it. The police, she flung, were the instruments of their masters, the Government, and wasn’t that government made up entirely of men; men ruling women’s lives?
‘It’s the way of the world,’ Alice reasoned forlornly, for she would rather have listened to the band. She was not interested in politics because not for a minute would men even consider giving the vote to women. It would make a woman a man’s equal, almost, and men would never stand for that.
A woman carrying a child over her shoulder walked past them and Julia nodded her head in the direction of the pale-faced mother.
‘Look at her. Not a lot older than I am, I shouldn’t wonder, yet that’s her life for the foreseeable future – a baby or a miscarriage every year. And why? Simply because her husband doesn’t know any better!’
‘But that’s what they call nature, Miss Julia. It’s the way things are.’
‘It needn’t be. They don’t have to wear themselves out having children they can’t afford. If they listened to Doctor Stopes, and people who think like her, it needn’t.’
Alice’s mouth made an ooh of protest, for she had heard of the young woman who advocated birth control. Disgusting, Cook said it was, and not fit for a young girl’s ears and if women didn’t want to have babies there was one sure and certain remedy. Let them stay unwed!
‘Ooooh, miss, where do you hear of such things?’ But that was what came, she supposed, of sending a girl to a boarding school. Julia Sutton wouldn’t have been exposed to such free thinking at the Church of England school in Holdenby village.
‘Learn? You read, I suppose, and you listen. And if ever you get the chance, you reason calmly and sensibly. And you keep on and on, like the suffragettes are doing, until men take notice of what you say.’
‘And is that why you aren’t married or spoken for – is it because of the way you think?’
‘No,