Death In Hyde Park Read Online Free

Charlotte, her eyes swimming with tears for the poor lad who had died in such a terrible way, had whispered a few words of farewell, and then made her way through the jeering crowd. She had long ago learned to keep on the lookout for police, but she was too upset to notice the stocky, bowler-hatted man with his hands in his pockets, his glance sharply predatory, his thin lips pressed tight together.
    “Well, there you are,” Adam said, poking his blond head through the opening in the floor, where a wooden ladder led up from the second-floor print shop below. “How soon will the article be ready? Ivan has almost finished setting up the forms.” His pale blue eyes were serious. “You know how nervous Ivan can be—and today he’s worse than usual. He says somebody’s been watching him. Pierre says he’s being watched, too—but of course, Pierre always seems to feel a certain paranoia.” He paused, frowning. “What about you, Lottie? Have you been followed?”
    Charlotte gave a small nod, not wanting to worry Adam, who had a tendency to be protective. Being dogged by the police wasn’t new to her—and it wasn’t just the British police, either. French and Russian agents swarmed all over London, and because the Clarion attracted the most radical of the Anarchists, it often attracted their attention, too. Since Ivan and Pierre were also being followed, perhaps someone thought that the three of them had something to do with Yuri’s bomb—that they were all involved in a plot. It was a sobering thought.
    But Charlotte didn’t have time to worry about that now. “Tell Ivan I’ll be finished in fifteen minutes,” she said, going back to her desk.
    “And then we’ll go out and get some lunch,” Adam said. “I have to be back at the union office at one.” He lifted his hand, gave her an affectionate smile, and went back down the ladder.
    Charlotte sat down and pulled on her cigarette, thinking that if it were not for Adam, her world would be rather bleak. He wasn’t an Anarchist—in fact, his work for the railway union made him what Pierre sneeringly called a “reformist”—and he lacked Ivan’s disciplined hatred of the ruling class. But he believed that the way forward was to put as much power as possible into the hands of the laboring man, and he saw no contradiction between his work for the railway union and her work for the Clarion . He supported her, and worried about her, and was always there to lend a hand when the newspaper was going to press. If she had believed in marriage, Adam would have made a wonderful husband, but she felt that marriage was part of the bourgeois plot to confine women to their homes and keep them under control, and—
    But that wouldn’t get the article corrected. Charlotte stubbed out her cigarette, picked up her pencil, and within ten minutes had finished the piece. She had been only a few days past her twentieth birthday when she became editor of the Clarion, and in the intervening five years, she had grown quite competent as a working journalist, able to crank out stories quickly. Of course, her work involved more than just writing. She’d had to learn how to set type, manage the small handpress, and deal with the many odd people—mostly men, many of them foreigners, and all of them revolutionaries of one stripe or another—who found their way to the Clarion’s office at the rear of Mrs. Battle’s green-grocer’s shop. She had also learned to make sense of the impassioned but irrational rhetoric that poured in a constant flood across her desk, submitted by any revolutionary who thought he could persuade the masses to overthrow the world’s governments. It was her skillful pen that refashioned these often indecipherable diatribes into something that might actually be accessible to the ordinary reader.
    It was hard work, damned hard work, if she were honest with herself, and required her to do a great many things that a bourgeois woman, safe-harbored by husband and