A Death for a Cause Read Online Free

singing her heart out. I judged her to be about eighteen years of age. Her face had the pinched look of one who does not always manage to eat three meals a day, but she took pride in her appearance. Her face was scrubbed clean and her light brown hair tightly braided. Her eyes shone with, I thought, hope rather than fanaticism. She was simply dressed and obviously of the lower working classes. I surmised she was a woman who had always had to work hard and who life had no doubt treated less than fairly. She believed in this cause in the way a child of an orphanage might cling to the idea that one day their real parents might come to rescue them.
    I ventured a whisper. ‘Do you know how long we will be marching?’
    Immediately her expression turned to concern and even, I thought, fear. ‘No, m’um,’ she replied, and after that sang a little quieter. The flame-haired young woman on my other side nudged me none to gently in the ribs and stopped singing for a moment. ‘Emily Davidson,’ she said, ‘we will march for as long as it takes!’ Then she turned away from me returned to her song, inflating her thin chest with effort, but not before I had caught the glint in her eye.
    I did my best to calm myself. Who was I to think I saw the evidence of fanaticism in her face? Being part of this large throng, for the crowd snaked away into distance both before and after me, was affecting. There might well be hundreds of women here, singing. I did not have the knack of estimating a crowd like Fitzroy. It was hard to resist both the feelings of sisterhood and righteous indignation that were coming in emotional waves from the women around me. Deep breaths, I told myself, do not become hysterical. I knew this was the phrase most commonly banded about by the newspapers. I sneaked a glance at the faces on either side of me. Both were flushed with excitement? With the exercise or with fervour? I twisted my head round to look to for Richenda. The lady who had placed me so carefully in line must also have indicated a place to Richenda. Sense dictated that it could not be that far away, but it is difficult to look around when around when marching in formation. We were not unlike a moving version of one of my little brother’s toys, dominoes. There was a sense that I struggle to describe of each of us buoying the others up, that we were more than ourselves and had become part of a greater whole. Should I stumble I feared I would disappear underneath this body of women as they marched on over me. Perhaps others too would fall, but like the ants I had seen as a child in the country, I could not shake the fantasy that the march would carry on, bodies beaten under the unison of marching boots. Perhaps I had indeed become infected by the ways of Madam Arcana, when she had first told me, that I had preternatural capabilities. 14 But whatever it was I could not shake my feeling of dread.
    Richenda, I thought ruefully, would be having a grand time. She had few friends in real life, and of her family, there existed affection only between herself and her brother Bertram. Feeling as she did now, that Hans no longer desired her, I could well understand her desire to feel part of something bigger, to be welcomed into the suffragette fold, and to march shoulder to shoulder with women whom she could pretend were her sisters.
    I knew I was being nasty, that these were unkind thoughts about Richenda, but I latched on to the seething annoyance inside me that she had dragged me into this mess and at my own stupidity for not realising the significance of the colours she had been dressing me in for some time. She had played me for a fool. Yes, it was better to hold onto to this anger than give into the creeping fear that threatened to swallow me. I glanced sideways at Emily Davidson. Her reticule was small. Could it contain a brick? It was tied with a feminine bow, so I doubted it. If I was bringing a missile for use, I would have