The Bedlam Detective

TWENTY-FOUR

The Typewriters’ workplace was in the basement of the South Chambers, and Evangeline’s machine was under a barred window in a lightwell that ran along the front of the buildings. If inclined, she could look up through its railings and glimpse the feet of passing benchers, as the senior lawyers were called, and the occasional clerk pushing a trolley of beribboned documents from one part of New Square to another. But in the interests of her employment, she resisted the inclination. Noticed at the wrong moment, it might be taken for idling.

She’d hoped to complete her work early so that she could square everything away and leave on time, but extra papers had come in and kept her late. Now she drew out the last typewritten page and its two carbons and pulled the cover over her everyday dancing partner, the Remington Standard.

She was by no means the last to leave. As she hastened her way up the basement stairs, young Barnes, one of the articled clerks, called after her, “Don’t keep that young man waiting, Miss Bancroft!”

She did not reply, or even acknowledge him. Barnes was, in essence, a solicitor’s apprentice, and many of his remarks to the women employees were in poor taste. But reprimand had no effect on him. His uncle had a partnership and so, one day, would he.

Evangeline’s lodgings were in Holborn, no more than ten minutes’ walk away, but she had plans for the evening. The pavement outside was wet and slick and the New Square gaslights had been lit, each one bearing a halo like a hovering angel in the damp September air. As she walked along, she doubled her scarf and pinned it in place.

She boarded a Central Line tube train at Chancery Lane, and changed at Oxford Circus for Baker Street. The second train was crowded, but a man gave up his seat.

The Great Room and hall of the Portman Rooms had once housed Tussaud’s exhibition of waxworks and Napoleonic relics. Now the waxworks had moved across the road, and these rooms were a spacious venue for dancing, concerts, and public gatherings. As she hurried up the ballroom-wide stairway, she could hear that the Women’s Freedom League meeting was already in progress. She cracked open the door to the hall as gently as she could; it made a sound like a gunshot to her own ears, but no more than one or two people sitting close by seemed to notice.

The seating was around two-thirds full. Attendance always varied. The WFL was a breakaway movement from the Women’s Social and Political Union, its members dissatisfied with the growing autocracy of the Pankhurst leadership and dismayed by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s advocacy of violent protest. Though she supported the principle of democratic equality, Evangeline had found herself ill at ease with a leadership that resisted democracy within its own ranks and saw consultation as “interference”; while to her mind, the use of violence in a cause dishonored it.

Tonight’s speaker was making a case for a program of social disobedience that defied the law, but stopped short of vandalism and arson. The building’s steam heat was fired up and the big room was warm and stuffy, in contrast to the nipping air of the street.

“I ask you,” the speaker on the stage was saying, “what is the good of the constitutional policy to those who have no constitutional weapon?”

She was a tall, strong-boned woman, and no stranger to public debate. Her references were impeccable: twice arrested, and once sent to prison where she’d been pinioned and photographed, with her picture being distributed to police forces and institutions across the land.

Evangeline slid along into one of the empty seats in the back row as the speaker went on, “When someone does not listen, you can request their attention. But when they will not listen, then their attention has to be compelled. They say they will not deal with us unless they have to. So we must make it that they have to. When the subject of the forced feeding of women in prison is met with laughter in Parliament, we know that we can expect neither grace nor courtesy from those we address. It is the government alone that we regard as our enemy, and the whole of our agitation should be directed to bring just as much pressure as necessary upon those people who can deal with our grievance.”

A woman farther along the row caught Evangeline’s eye.

“Thought you weren’t coming,” she mouthed.

“Sorry,” Evangeline whispered back. “I’ll stay after and help clear up.”

The address went on for about another twenty minutes. Evangeline listened intently for the first ten, struggled to keep her attention in focus for the next five, and fought against drowsiness for the remainder. It was too hot in here, and her day had been a long one. But the talk ended with some spirited questions, most of them from the first three rows of the audience, and the change in tone helped to rouse her.

“We have to agitate,” the speaker concluded in response to an earnest young telegraphist in the second row. “We can organize a peaceful demonstration as well as anyone. But when we fill Hyde Park with ten thousand voices and our own prime minister affects not to hear, what then are we to do?”

After the talk, tea was served. Some women left early. Many of those who stayed behind were young and single and fired up by what they’d heard. Usually Evangeline would have been an eager contributor to their conversations. But tonight, it was as if she hadn’t the heart or the energy to join in. Instead, she offered to help with the refreshments.

At one point she set an empty cup on a table, forgot that it was there, and knocked it to the floor with her sleeve only a moment later.

“What’s the matter?” said her earlier companion from the back row. She was a Yorkshirewoman, and her name was Lillian. She worked in the drapery department of Derry and Toms department store, over on Kensington High Street.

“Just tired,” Evangeline said.

Lillian cocked her head in the direction of the doors. “Go on, then,” she said. “I can manage here.”

“No,” Evangeline said with a half-serious smile. “This is all the fun I ever have.”

At nine o’clock they set about collecting and stacking chairs; most of those remaining began a halfhearted effort to help and then discovered the time with surprise.

Emptied, the big room took on a more melancholy character. It was said that when Tussaud’s had vacated these rooms for its new premises, the entire move had been carried off in a single weekend. Sheeted figures on the floor, when prodded, had proved not to be the mannequins they appeared, but exhausted members of the staff.

“Now go,” Lillian urged her when the stacking was done. “I’ll stay and find the caretaker to lock up.”

So Evangeline went, thinking wistfully of her rooms and her bed and a novel from the Boots circulating library. Out into Baker Street, past the studios of Elliot and Fry, the Court photographers next door, imagining as she always did the great and the good who daily crossed the pavement she was passing over now. Usually she’d have a companion for her journey back to Holborn, Lillian or a lady whose husband worked in the advertising office at the Daily Mirror building and supported their cause. But in the lady’s absence, tonight Evangeline walked out alone.

There was some traffic on Baker Street, much diminished at this hour. So much had changed in the few short years since she’d come to London. Most of the hansoms were disappearing, supplanted by motor taxis. Horse wagons were still used for deliveries, but fewer of those as the months went by. Where would all the animals go? Wherever they went when their usefulness was done, she supposed, only not to be replaced. Theirs would not be a happy fate. Grace Eccles couldn’t take them all. It would be the tanner’s knife and the bone merchant’s cauldron, rather than grazing out their days in a field.

And in a moment that struck her as both absurd and sincere, God grant them Grace, she thought.

It was then that she heard a man’s voice call out, “There’s one of them.”