Nora’s thinking wasn’t quite sharp again yet, and she’d felt ill and frantic for days after she began to make herself bring up the contents of the blue bottle. Sometimes, her father lingered in her room and stole away her chance to rid herself of what he called medicine, and she was tempted by the numb it brought again. But she persevered, and each day, she felt a bit stronger, a bit clearer, and a great deal more outraged. Now she could see and feel and hear and think and remember each day—not like she had before; everything seemed a bit more distant and quiet than before, but enough to understand that her father had no intention of ‘making her well.’ If he ever had, he’d given it up. He meant to keep her locked away, in her own personal Bedlam. Forever.
Like Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre, the novel by Charlotte Brontë—a woman whose father had allowed her, and her sisters, to pursue their intellectual interests. Miss Brontë hadn’t had a title, of course, or a thousand years of family history to support with her womb.
When she’d read that novel, before her world had closed itself up, she’d felt sorry for Jane and Mr. Rochester, how he’d been burdened with his wife’s madness and held back from true love. Now, she understood his wife much better. Had she merely seen the world differently to others, before she’d been locked away from it?
Her maid Kate knew almost right away that Nora wasn’t keeping her medicine down, and her knowing changed everything. Because Kate was on her side. After a few days, once she was sure of what she’d suspected, she began to talk to Nora again. A few days after that, she began to sneak newspapers in under her apron.
Nora’s father’s means of isolating her worked in her favour in this respect. Because he wanted to avoid ‘overstimulating’ her, he’d limited the number of people coming in and going from her bedroom—including the scullery maids, whose job it was to clean her rooms and tend her fireplace, to change her linens and launder her clothing. He’d assigned Kate to handle all of Nora’s needs.
Thus, even without the need for Nora to be dressed, Kate spent a whole hour or more with her each morning, and again in the afternoon. While she turned and made the bed and cleaned the room, Nora would close herself up in her bathroom and read the papers.
After a few weeks, Kate had offered to post a letter for her, to seek assistance, but there was no one Nora trusted to help her. Her brother and her aunt had left her here, and there was no one else she could petition.
But Kate’s offer changed everything again.
A few days after that, when Nora’s father had left the room, and she’d given over her dutifully numb mannequin performance and brought up the medicine, Kate came in to prepare her for the night. Before she began her tasks, she sat down on Nora’s bed—a tremendous liberty for a domestic to take in the world of Tarrindale Hall, but Nora didn’t mind.
“May I speak informally, Lady Nora?”
“Of course you may. Speak as my friend, Kate. You’re the only one I have.”
“Thank you. I have … I have an idea. I hope with all my heart you’ll hear it in the way I mean it, and if you don’t like it, you’ll not think poor of me for bringing it up.”
There was some risk, then, to Kate in the mere mention, and Nora clasped her hand. “I’ll not hurt you. Ever.”
“I think I can”—she lost her nerve, swallowed, and found it again. “If it’s something you want, I can get you away from here. If it’s something you want.”
“What do you mean? Escape?”
“Yes. Escape.”
“I don’t—how?”
“When next Lord Tarrin takes his day away. I’ll give you some common clothes, and we’ll off to London together. I have a good friend from home there, and she’ll let us stay. I’ve some little bit of coin saved up. Enough for two tickets on the train.”
Nora had to work extra hard these days to conquer the continuing effects of her weeks under sedation. She stared at Kate, concentrating, and worked out the import of her words.
Her intense focus must have shaped her face into something like disapproval, because Kate paled. “Please, milady. I mean no offense. No offense at all.”
“No, Kate, it’s all right. I’m only trying—you mean to take me away to London to stay with your friend? And pay my way?”
“Yes. I don’t expect you have money of your own, but I’ve got a bit saved. Enough.”
“You’d never be able to return to Tarrindale. Or ever get another job in service again.” Kate had worked for the family longer than Nora had been alive.
“I know. Maude can get me on at the laundry, where she works. I’ve worked it all out.”
A laundress was a careening, crashing tumble in status from lady’s maid. Not only status but circumstance. “I can’t ask you to tear your life apart like that.”
“You’ve not asked, milady. I’ve offered. I can’t sit by another minute and see what’s happening to you. I don’t want to be here anymore. I stay for you. Only …”
“Yes?”
“You understand what it would mean for you? If you leave and don’t come back? You would be like me. You’d have to work, once your feet were under you.”
Her choice was to be locked away in ease, or free in toil.
“If you’re sure you’d give up so much to help me, then I’m sure I can learn to work.”
The chance came about a week later. Kate came into the room with a basket of laundry and informed her that Lord Tarrin had left in his motorcar and announced that he wouldn’t need dinner.
Inside the basket was a simple woolen skirt and cotton blouse, with heavy cotton stockings and sturdy shoes. A lined canvas coat and a simply trimmed, flat-crowned hat completed the ensemble. Kate helped her dress, giving her instructions as she fixed her hair in a simple coil at her nape, so that she might be able to do it again herself.
Nora filled a bag with a few things—she had little that would be of use in this new life—and they left the room.
She’d considered leaving a note for her father but finally decided against it. He was no longer interested in her thoughts, so there was no point in sharing them. But she took William’s note, tucking it away in the finger of her glove.
Kate led her up the service stairs, and they collected her belongings. She, who’d lived a full life in these modest circumstances, had two full bags and a bit of melancholy to carry with her, but she put on a cheerful smile for Nora, and led her back down the stairs.
They met Mr. Gaines on the landing, and Nora thought all was lost. For a painful eternity, they three stood there, Nora and Kate holding their bags, Nora dressed like a common girl, Mr. Gaines in his typical proper, stony reserve, but his eyes wide as saucers.
He was the head of the household staff, responsible for everything that went on within the stone walls. There was no end here but Nora locked again in her room, and Kate sent out of service.
But he stepped out of their way. “Be safe, my dear lady. Be well.”
She lifted onto her toes and kissed his cheek on her way out the door.
Kate’s friend, Maude, lived in a small flat in London’s East End, a part of the city Nora had never seen before. It was another world entirely from the one she knew. The buildings were dingy and tall. They seemed rickety, as if they might tumble over in the first stiff wind, except for the lines traversing every space between them, where shirts and pants and drawers and sheets and socks hung to dry.
Children played loudly and wildly in the streets, and vendors with carts shouted out their wares. The place was bursting with life but seemed dead at the same time, like a decayed wall papered over. Nora struggled to make sense of this odd, otherworldly place.
Maude’s flat was only two rooms: a larger room that was for sitting, eating, and cooking, and another that held a bed and a cot for her youngest child. The older child slept in the bed with Maude. Her husband had been killed the year before, in an accident at the same laundry where she worked, and where Kate had signed on. Kate and Nora slept on pallets on the main room floor.
The flat had two windows: one at the front of the main room, which looked out on the street, and the other in the bedroom, which looked out on the back of the building and the privies. The flats in the building had indoor plumbing in the form of a cold-water tap at the sink. Personal business was handled out of doors, in the privies.
Nora kept a brave face and felt silly that she needed to. While it was foreign to her, this world held Maude’s life, every day. It was where she’d birthed her children and now raised them. Where she had her joys and her sorrows. She knew nothing else. It was a real place, a true one. And it was absurd to the point of obscene that Nora would be dismayed at the idea of using a privy, when they were a simple fact of life for all the women around her.
For her part, Maude wasn’t impressed with her noble guest. She thought Nora was embarking on a ‘lark’ and seeking attention, and would ‘fly away home to the manor’ the moment her circumstances were sufficiently trying.
But she let Nora stay and offered her meals, and, when the prospect of Nora working in the laundry made her laugh until her face turned red, she said she could stay if she’d keep watch over the children. Her own child minder was huge with her seventh child, and was about to move her brood back up to the North Country, where her people could help.
As the youngest of her family, and raised without a mother or a mother’s friends around her, Nora had spent very little time with children in her life. But Maude assured her that “Amy knows what to do. Just look to her.”
Amy was four years old. But, in the event, she did in fact know what to do, and Nora, Amy, and baby Pauline managed well enough.
There wasn’t much of anything to go around among the five of them, and several times a day, Nora wondered if being locked away in a stupor hadn’t been the easier, better life. But each time she thought to send word to her father, or her aunt, or Christopher, she thought next of Maude’s sneering voice: I give it a week before you’re cryin’ for Papa to save you. Fine ladies ain’t bred for livin’, just for showin’ off.
Nora marked the end of her first week living in Maude’s crowded flat with a private, internal celebration. On the same day, the papers began to run headlines about the missing Lady Nora Tate, stolen from her bed at Tarrindale Hall. The young lady was quite ill, they reported. There was a reward of a thousand pounds for information leading to her return.
At Kate’s suggestion, Nora had already adopted an alias. The people in Maude’s neighbourhood knew her as Eve Frazier. Eve had been her mother’s name; Frazier was the name she’d once hoped to take as her own. Perhaps that was too close to her own truth for an alias, but it was one she could remember, and a name she could be content to keep.
She didn’t think she looked much like the description posted in the papers, not here in the East End, and the few photographs that had ever been taken of her were stiff and proper. Her father had had her portrait painted when she was a girl, but she’d changed much since then. She thought she was as safe from detection as she could be. Still, she stayed close to the flat and tried to avoid meeting people without being noticeable for doing so.
Kate’s name wasn’t mentioned in any of the reports. Nora and Kate wondered to each other how Mr. Gaines had managed to shield her from suspicion. However he’d done it, Nora was more grateful for that than anything else.
An additional boon was that Kate’s freedom from suspicion seemed to give Maude an incentive not to take the reward. Her affection for her friend, and her loyalty, was of greater value than money. Nora thought of all the wealthy, noble men and women she knew, and how they gossiped and clawed behind each other’s backs. They’d turn on each other for a better seat at the theatre. And here was a woman whose life would be materially, and possibly permanently, improved by a sum of a thousand pounds, yet she valued her friendship more.
There was a life Nora might make here, when she understood it better. Not an easy one, but one of her own choosing.
Toward the end of her second week in the East End, as November began to settle into a winter’s cold, the strange little group sat at a crowded table and ate a tea of beef hash, hard rolls, and beans.
Maude sopped up some gravy off her plate with a roll. “Eve,” she said—they’d all taken to calling her Eve, so they wouldn’t slip around others—“I’ve got friends comin’ over tonight. We’ve work to do. You’re welcome to stay, but not to judge. If you don’t like what we do, you can keep your gob shut about it, yeah?”
“Of course. May I ask what you’ll be doing?”
“Maude’s working for suffrage,” Kate answered, and then turned to her friend. “She’s one of us, Maudie.”
“No, she ain’t. You been doin’ for her her whole life, Kate. All the way to buttonin’ her boots. She ain’t nothin’ like one of us.”
Nora could hardly deny that. And yet, they were alike in some ways. “But I’m for the cause of suffrage. I want to help. Are you a Rose?”
Maude squinted at her, considering. Nora tried to show her earnest resolve, and her excitement, too. Finally! She’d happily sleep on the floor and use a privy to relieve herself for the rest of her life if it meant she could fight for something worthwhile.
“We’re not Roses. They’ve a fancy benefactress with a big purse and no spine. Down here, we’re just grindin’ out the fight as best we can. Unless you’ve a big purse yourself, you can’t help, Eve, no. After next week, maybe. But this is too big. You don’t know enough.”
She was ignorant of everything important to her. But she’d seen a suffrage protest, and she’d heard of others, and she thought she knew the risks. “I’ll do anything. I don’t need to lead a charge. I can stand back and hold your hats. I don’t care. I just want to be involved. I want to help.”
“She’s stronger than she looks, Maude,” Kate said. “And she means what she says.”
Maude sighed. “You can sit in on the meetin’, like I said. But you listen, and you think. And we’ll see what the others say.”
A few days later, on the twenty-first of November, Nora hunkered in the back of a grocer’s lorry with eleven other women. Two other lorries rolled over the London streets with them, on their way to Westminster. And Parliament.
They’d meet others there, including the Kensington Roses and other groups inspired by Mrs. Pankhurst. The big event that Maude and her friends, and now Kate and Nora, were involved in? Nora’s inauguration into the cause? Nothing less than the storming of Parliament itself.
As the lorry doors opened, Kate grabbed her hand. “You stay close, milady. Keep my hand. We’ll stay back and let others lead, yeah?”
Her heart thumping behind her teeth, Nora nodded and followed Kate out into the brisk November day.
It wasn’t a storming, as far as Nora could see, at least not at first. They were a sizeable group but not enormous or overwhelming. The women massed together, all in coats against the November chill, most in hats, many wearing sashes or roses or medals, some carrying signs, some calling out chants. Maude led their group, and Kate pulled Nora along, holding her tightly, their arms and hands linked.
Nora had never been in, or even seen, anything like it. She was most impressed by the sheer mass of womanhood, all of them pressed together, moving in the same direction, fighting for the same cause. She felt part of a single consciousness, and the thrill of it raised the hair on her arms and the back of her neck. This was power, this unified voice calling out an injustice, fighting for a righting of the world. This was what women were capable of. A force for good in the world. A voice that had been silenced far too long, by a world that suffered for the lack of it. The power suffused Nora’s bones, filled her veins, overrode all else in her, around her.
Together, they walked toward to the building. Up ahead, a shout and a crash, and then the group fragmented. Women dived for rocks or pulled bricks wrapped with notes from their cloaks. They threw them at every window they could reach, shouting “VOTES FOR WOMEN! VOTES FOR WOMEN!” And still they charged forward, even as the men around them leapt at them and tried to drag them down.
At the doors of Westminster Palace, they were held back, but the women at the fore pushed on, and the women who followed added their force to the drive forward.
Nora wasn’t quite sure what happened next. She was too far back, and things became too chaotic to make sense of any one thing. Women began to scream and moan. Their press forward scrambled again into a roiling knot. Police whistles echoed off the walls around them. Nora saw women engaged in brawls with officers and male bystanders, throwing their feet and hands as if they’d been trained to fight, knocking men much larger than they to the ground. Other women pulled sticks and clubs from under their coats and fought back with those.
Kate’s hand was forcibly wrested from Nora’s, and then Nora was alone in the crush, trying to move forward, trying to keep going, trying to understand. A whistle shrieked loudly right at her head, deafening her, and she was snatched backward by her hair. The hat Kate had given her ripped from her head, and she tried to turn and grab it before it was crushed, but there was a hand in her hair, dragging her backward, off her feet. She fell and was still dragged. Screaming in pain and confusion, she reached up and grabbed at the hand, digging her nails in, drawing her fingers downward with all the strength she could put in them, feeling some desperate satisfaction at the warm, coppery wet of blood soaking her fingertips.
Then something hard and smooth crashed down on her hands, and she let go. It crashed again, striking her shoulder, exploding new pain there, and she twisted and tried to get away, even if it meant leaving her whole head of hair behind. But the weapon crashed down on her again. This time it struck her head. She had one second, maybe two, to see the chaos before her, and then it all went away.
“Your name, miss.” The detective sat across from her at a scarred table, paper and pen before him. So far, that paper was blank.
“Eve. Eve Frazier.”
He wrote it down. “Well, that’s a right lovely name, for a bonny lass such as yourself. This is your first time with us, I can tell. Might I ask who you were with?”
Nora didn’t answer him. Her mind had decided that this day was simply too much to sort, and it stood far back from the moment. Since she’d opened her eyes and discovered she lay on the floor of a lorry filled with bleeding and bedraggled women, she hadn’t fully felt like she was part of the things that were happening.
She rested her violently aching head on her hand and was quiet. Men always wanted women to be quiet, so this man would have to reap what he’d sown.
“Things will go hard for you if you don’t cooperate. I’ll wager your so-called friends didn’t tell you that, did they? They dragged you here into the lion’s den and told you you were off on a grand adventure, yeah?”
She knew enough. What she didn’t know was where Kate was, or Maude, or what would happen to Amy and Pauline, who’d been left with a neighbour for the day. She couldn’t ask because she didn’t know if they’d used their names. So she stayed quiet and let her mind stay away, where there weren’t so many confounding things to think about.
The detective sighed loudly. He’d told her his name, but she hadn’t bothered to listen. “This is no place for you, Miss Frazier. Lovely thing like you, frail like you are, I’ll not sleep tonight knowing you’re not home where you belong. So tell me who turned your head to this folly and write here that you’re sorry. Then you can give us the name of a man who’ll take care of you, a father or a husband, perhaps a brother, and home away you’ll go.”
He was telling her that she would go to prison if she didn’t betray the only people who’d been kind to her in months. Her mind tried to run from that thought, but it chased her and caught her. Terror filled her from her head to her heels, icy and sharp. But there was one simple, inescapable truth that kept her resolve locked in place: she’d already been imprisoned. There was nowhere she could go and be free. “There’s no man who’ll care for me, and I’ve no home. Your accommodations will be as acceptable as any other, I’m sure.”
His head cocked to one side, and he studied her for a long time. “You’ve a lovely way of speaking, too, Miss Frazier. Very lovely. I find myself convinced you’ve been taken advantage of, and I can’t believe there’s no one for you. Are you quite sure you’ll not help me set things right for you?”
That was impossible. She closed her eyes and let his questions go unanswered. Her mind freed itself from the clutches of fear, and receded.
Nora moved through the rest of the day in a fog, finding safety in her silence. When she wouldn’t give the detectives the answers they sought, they locked her in the room, then shackled her and sent her away in a dark lorry, with others like her.
She was reunited with Maude and Kate at HM Prison Holloway. Kate cried and hugged her and begged her forgiveness, but Nora had none, because there was nothing to forgive. She’d made this choice on her own.
The women were stripped of their clothes and any belongings, forcibly washed in icy water, dressed in a coarse, shapeless frock and apron and flimsy shoes, and locked away alone in narrow cells.
Nora let it happen. She didn’t cry or moan or lament her fate. It was so beyond the range of her knowing that her mind couldn’t reach it.
It was past dark when she was shoved into her cell and locked in. Scant minutes later, all the lights went out, and she stood in near perfect darkness.
This place was like her mind turned inside out. All the things she feared, the things she’d lost and the thing she sought, all her frustrations and disappointments, her rebellions and befuddlements, her heartbreak and her rage, they were manifest here, laid out before her eyes.
This was where they put women who forged their own way. She was surrounded by them.
This was where she belonged.