dear me.’
With a heavy feeling she started off in the direction of the nearest tube station. She had gone a few paces when a colour caught her eye in the grimy mist. Somewhere along the road a flash of
bright copper was bobbing up and down, at first gently, then slowly breaking into a more vigorous bounce, swerving through the traffic and pedestrians.
The boy with the ginger hair, the boy who had let her into the shop. Frankie stopped to watch him as he ducked behind a parked cart, looked ahead, then dashed out again, light as a tomcat on his
feet.
Probably a pickpocket, she thought. Just as well she hadn’t given him that shilling, thank heavens for small mercies. Then with another audible groan – this one drawing looks of
horror from the Bond Street crowds – she realised she had left the camera case back at the corset shop.
Two
At the same time, three and a half miles away on Shoe Lane, Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union – The Suffragettes – walked
into an ironmonger’s. She was familiar with the smell of creosote, the various sizes of nails and washers that sat in the glass cabinet behind the counter. Carefully minding her skirts
against hooks and joints of wood protruding from the shelves, she sallied up the small aisle in the centre of the shop and idly fingered a row of small rubber mallets. Through a bead curtain a man
appeared. He was in his fifties, ruddy in the face with a neat white beard like Father Christmas. ‘May I help?’
Mrs Pankhurst looked up artfully as if stirred from a deep thought. ‘Oh yes, I’m looking for twenty-five hammers.’
The man didn’t bat an eyelid. Schoolteacher, he was thinking, by the look of her. The fine stern nose and Worcester porcelain eyes. And that dress, a thick brown wool creation pinned right
up proper despite the sunshine. School marm of a boys’ school. And a well-spoken one at that.
‘Well, it depends what you’re after. If it’s for woodwork, the basic craft one will do. Under normal circumstances you’d pay a shilling each, but if you want twenty-five
I’ll do the lot for twenty shillings.’
Mrs Pankhurst mulled it over. ‘That does sound rather fair.’
The man began to fumble under the counter, and at length emerged with a very sleek looking hammer, painted green at the handle, its bulb in burnished steel.
‘Oh that looks lovely.’ She took it into her hands. ‘It has to be able to smash glass you see. Efficiently.’
The man gave her a brisk nod. ‘That’s your one.’
‘Lovely.’
‘Trouble is,’ he scratched his head, ‘I think I only have eighteen of them in the back. Could get them by next week.’
‘Well, you see it’s rather urgent. We do need them tonight,’ she hesitated. ‘I mean tomorrow morning. First thing.’
The man shook his head. ‘Afraid it’s all I can do. They’re shilling and six but if you take all eighteen I’ll do them a shilling each.’
Mrs Pankhurst ceased fingering the painted green stem and looked up brightly. ‘Well, I think that sounds splendid. Some of them will just have to share.’
‘Indeed they will Madam,’ said the shopkeeper as she delved into her purse. ‘Indeed they will.’
Further north, Mrs Deacon of 72 Popham Drive had also just walked into an ironmonger’s on Cricklewood High Street.
The owner, a stout, shabby man with tufty whiskers, was taken aback to see a woman so delicately dressed in dark green velvet approach his grubby counter. He thought to himself, her maid must be
sick. She must be running an errand for the household.
What she said next surprised him. ‘Excuse me, I’m looking to purchase a number of hammers. Twenty-five to be exact.’
The shop owner gave her a startled look. Then he realised. School marm, he thought to himself. A boy’s school, no doubt. And it all made perfect sense.
By the time Frankie returned to 125 New Bond Street, Mr Smythe had turned the gaslights in the window off and was