“I’m going to tell the men,” he repeated. Tom kissed Kezia on the cheek, and turned to leave. “Don’t give me that fennel again, love. That taste—it’ll only remind me of losing Jimmy.”
Kezia sat for a long time, though it was probably not as long as she thought, but it was enough lingering when there was washing to be brought in from the line, when there was ironing to be done, a fire to be banked again, and a tea to be prepared and set before her spouse. She went to the washing line and gathered in the sun-bleached sheets, pulling them to her so that she might bury her face in the folds, drowning her senses in the fragrance of something scrubbed and blown through with a fresh wild breeze.
Hop-picking days were long. No sooner had Tom finished his tea each day than he stood up from the table, kissed Kezia on the cheek, and left to go up to the oast house once more. He had barely spoken a word over their early-evening meal, one that Kezia had planned especially. She thought something simple would be best, so she cooked a bacon and egg pie, chipped potatoes, and peas. Food to comfort him, food with no herbs added, no garnish of dandelion leaf, no fancy chutney to frame the chips. It was into the pudding she’d poured her imagination, for she wanted Tom to feel the comfort of sweetness. Scalded cream, raw cream, sifted sugar, sherry, and brandy, whipped together with lemon and grated nutmeg, then poured into wine glasses. Syllabub cured all ills, according to her mother—though Kezia thought Tom might consider it extravagant. She watched as he ate the syllabub, holding the slippery taste at the back of his throat before swallowing. He scraped the glass clean, took one last teaspoonful—the cutlery delicate, almost like a sparrow’s leg in his rough, bruised hands—and then came to his feet.
“I’ll see you later, Kezzie. Lovely tea. Lovely.”
And then he was gone, the kitchen door closed behind him, putting his cap on his head as he walked along the farm road, the collies slinking in his wake.
Kezia sighed. She knew, already, what was on his mind. And if she were to admit it, she had known since she came back from London. She would wait him out though, and not encourage him. Kezia sat at the table for some time. She knew her mother-in-law would have been up already, washing the crockery, scrubbing the stove, sweeping the floor before bringing out the mop and bucket. She would be checking to see if the tablecloth could be used the next day, and she would bustle.
It was as she lingered, pouring salt onto her palm, then using the lines on her hand to funnel it back into the pot, that she remembered the letters. She flung the grains of salt remaining over her shoulder—for luck, because salt should never be cast aside without proper disposal—and went to the mantelpiece, where she claimed the letters brought by Mr. Barham.
Tom did not return to the house until after ten that night, and when he’d sipped the last of his cocoa, he set the earthenware mug on the kitchen table. “I’m going up, love.” He reached across and took Kezia’s hand. “Been a long day.”
She nodded, and he stood to make his way to the staircase.
“I’m going to finish work on the books, Tom. I’ve got to be ready for the wages on Saturday morning.”
They exchanged smiles, and all the unspoken words between them seemed to surge forward and then retreat.
Later, when Kezia had added and subtracted, multiplied and divided, when she had checked the books and reckoned up the amount of money she would need to take from the bank this week, she closed her ledgers, put them away in a drawer in the parlor desk, and made ready to join her husband in their bed. She undressed in the dark, slipping on her cotton nightdress and taking down her hair, brushing it one hundred times like her mother had taught her, and as she had been taught in turn by her mother before her. Then she wrapped a silk scarf around the brush and drew it across her hair; if there were moonlight, it would shine back at her reflection in the windowpanes. Kezia crept across to the bed, not wanting to wake Tom, but when she slipped between the cool white sheets, he drew close to her. He did not lay his hand upon her thigh, did not lift her nightdress to touch her skin. Instead he rested his head on her breast, as if he were a child seeking solace.
“Kezzie,” he whispered into the dusky night, as if interlopers were eavesdropping.
“Tom.”
“Kezzie, I’ve come to a decision.”
She swallowed, the movement in her throat almost constricting her breath. “Yes, I know you have.”
“I’m going over there. To fight.”
She kissed the top of his head and drew him even closer. “Oh, Tom.”
“I won’t go yet,” said Tom. “I’ll take us through the last of the hopping, and get everything in. It’ll be a few weeks yet, and then by the time spring comes, I daresay I’ll be home again.”
“Shhhhh. Come morning, we’ll talk about it. Not now.”
“Do you understand, Kezzie?”
“About Jimmy?”
“And the other lads. They’re all going from the village—lads I’ve known since I was a boy. It won’t be right if I don’t go.”
She nodded, and Tom felt her hair move against the pillow.
“I love you,” he said.
Kezia moved her head again. She rested her chin against her husband’s hair, and closed her eyes.
Chapter 7
Words of Command. Commands will be pronounced distinctly and sufficiently loud to be heard by all concerned, but no louder.
—INFANTRY TRAINING,
1914
While Kezia lay in her bed, asleep and yet not asleep, feeling as if she had just escaped a sinking ship and was lingering, spent, sodden, and kept afloat by her life jacket in a sea that at once lulled and threatened her, Thea was wide awake in her room at Queen Charlotte’s Chambers. According to the letter she’d received that afternoon—a letter with no address at the top of the page or on the back of the envelope, no postmark, for it was delivered by hand, and no date to mark its creation—if she still felt the pull of opposition to the war, then a meeting of like-minded individuals would convene at seven o’clock this evening at an address just off Marylebone Road.
Thea wasn’t sure what she’d expected when she set off at six o’clock—perhaps a darkened parlor filled with desperate souls trying to stop a boulder of some magnitude from rolling down a steep hill. She imagined the meeting to be something akin to a rendezvous between Guy Fawkes and his collaborators, men in dark coats, with wide-brimmed hats pulled down over their faces, and all with the pockmarked complexions of those afflicted by terror. She found the address with ease, and followed instructions indicating that she should employ several means of transport to reach the destination, including her own two feet, to ensure she was not followed. This rather scared Thea, though at the same time she was filled with a sense of purpose, an impassioned belief that she was flying in the face of authority to stop a monster. And whenever she imagined that authority, it had her father’s face.
A woman answered her knock at the door—a woman who might have been pegged for a rector’s wife had she not seemed so perplexed, looking both ways along the street before taking Thea by the shoulder and leading her into the hall with some force, as if an offer of shelter from a storm had become an order. Perhaps this was shelter in a storm, thought Thea, though the way the woman glanced this way and that to ensure no one had followed the latest visitor reminded Thea of Mrs. Bracken in the village, a busybody who would come out onto her front doorstep when she collected her milk, peering down the street to ascertain who else might be there to exchange gossip. But this was no convening of idle talkers. Thea was required to show her letter before she was ushered in among the company.
“Good of you to come. Welcome.”
A tall, thin man stood up as she entered and came towards her, hand outstretched. He guided her towards a chair. Thea thought he reminded her of how she had once imagined Casaubon in Middlemarch. A sudden longing for Kezia’s company enveloped her. Together they would have whispered and giggled, and then tried to match everyone in the room to characters in the book. And th
en she remembered—though how could it not have entered her mind as soon as she’d given the man an identity?—that George Eliot’s Dorothea had married Mr. Casaubon. Thea took her seat. It seemed she was among the last to arrive. Men and women had all found places on the available chairs, though there were apologies here and there, an “I do beg your pardon” as a foot was nudged by another foot, and a mouthed “Excuse me” when knee knocked against knee. The youngest woman present appeared to be about twenty-two and was accompanied by a man some ten years older, whom Thea assumed to be her husband. The oldest was a woman who might have been a thinner Queen Victoria, dressed in black from head to toe, and wearing a bonnet from another age.
“Thank you all for coming this evening.” Casaubon stood up, and introduced himself. “My name is Ian Thurber.”
Ah, not a Casaubon, thought Thea. No, this one had the name of a factory clerk, or perhaps a teacher, like herself. Mr. Thurber, the geography teacher. Or the physics teacher. Or perhaps Thurber wasn’t his name at all.
“As some of you know, I am secretary of the United Pacifist Society, though there are a few here who know me from my occupation. I would like to affirm, before anything else, the gravity of what we are about to discuss, and the importance of keeping these meetings in confidence. There is no need to introduce yourselves; in fact, it would be better if you remained anonymous to those present who do not already know who you are. As a further precaution, there are two different exits from this building, and we will leave at intervals, spacing our departures so as not to look like it’s closing time at the White Hart.”
Thurber smiled as low, tension-easing laughter rippled through the room.
“If you have reason to discuss any aspect of our work here—and it is crucially important work—then you must do so via the person who is your immediate link in the line of communication. I would urge you to keep such conversations to a minimum and in a location where you will not be overheard, or will not cause you to be observed as unnatural in your manner.”
Thea looked around. There was Avril, just arrived, leaning against the door. She was late—Avril was always late. She gave an almost-nod towards Thea, then smiled as a man stood up, extending his hand towards his seat. He took her place by the door.
“These meetings will be rare. The climate of response to the war is too fraught with danger, and those of you”—Thea felt as if he were looking at her directly—“who have been members of the suffragist societies will already be known to the authorities.” He paused. “Be assured of that.”
Thea felt herself redden. She had suspected as much. Though she had never been caught, she had known what it was like to have a close shave. It was last year that it had happened, in early spring. She was walking with Mary Williams on a fine afternoon—she must have had a day off work, but now could not remember the reason for the holiday—when, without warning, her friend had taken a brick from her shopping bag and thrown it through the window of a gentlemen’s outfitters. Thea had no recollection of the name of the shop, but for a split second, having seen the woman’s arm arch and the way she bowled the brick, she had the incongruous thought that Mary must be the sister of a brother, because surely she had played cricket as a girl. It was a random notion, and one she knew, now, was born of shock. And then Mary had yelled, “Run! Run for God’s sake, woman.” And the police whistles came closer, and soon Mary was gone, and Thea ran and ran into the crowds on Oxford Street, whereupon she began to walk, her head down, with the cool air diffusing perspiration across her cheeks and above her lip. Without looking back, she made her way into Selfridge & Co., trying to breathe at a more measured rate so her heart might stop beating as if it would break through her ribs. She stopped behind a pillar and placed her hand on her chest, and when she had finally gained control over her breath, she went on her way, exiting the store on a side street. She walked all the way back to Queen Charlotte’s along streets she didn’t know, but all the time setting one foot in front of the other in the direction of a place that was, at that very moment, as good as home. Once there, she penned a letter to the school’s headmistress and paid a boy to deliver it at once. Claiming a fever that she did not wish to pass on to the children, she informed Mrs. Gibson that she would be at school on Monday, fit and well. Thea left London as soon as she could, but did not return to the village. Instead she went to Kezia in Tunbridge Wells. What a lovely surprise. Kezia had taken her down to the Pantiles for tea the following day, and they had listened to the band playing.
Mary, though, had been apprehended, charged, sentenced, and dispatched to Holloway prison for three months. Once incarcerated she refused to eat, and after a few days of this perceived insolence, something akin to gruel had been poured into her stomach through a rubber tube rammed down her gullet. When Thea saw Mary again, she had just been released. She was rail-thin, the bones on her wrists blue and so fragile, and though her hair was beginning to grow back, her body’s malnourishment had caused it to fall out in small, soft clumps. Mary would never again feel long hair against the length of her spine. She took her own life, throwing herself into the Thames from Westminster Bridge under the gaze of the Houses of Parliament. Thea wondered if any man inside was looking, or would have been concerned had he witnessed Mary’s desperate drowning. But something had come to pass, though not down to Mary ending her life—the so-called Cat and Mouse Act was now law. Women who went on hunger strike were released upon the point of death, only to be arrested again when—if—they recovered.
Now, as Ian Thurber spoke, his words breaking in and out of her memories, Thea felt a sickness rising within her. Mary had died about two weeks before Kezia and Tom were married.
“It’s important you understand the danger involved in the risk each and every one of you are taking—but know this; you are putting your cards on the table and you are gambling your livelihoods, your family life, indeed your own personal well-being, in the name of peace in Europe, and in the name of the men—both Allied and those from Germany—who are at this moment being butchered on the battlefields of Flanders.”
Thurber then motioned an older woman to the front of the room. Her name was not given. If this meeting was so fraught with danger, Thea wondered, why did Ian Thurber even bother to give himself a name, even if it was a fiction? Or perhaps he was not so big a catch if he were apprehended. She felt the bile rise in her throat again, and tried to press from her mind the memory of the day Mary threw the brick. It was after leaving Selfridge & Co., on one of those side streets, with barely a soul about, that she had stopped and, leaning against a cast-iron railing outside a house, vomited onto the flagstones. A woman came running up from the dark downstairs of the four-storey house, wiping her hands on an apron, the cap keeping her hair at bay marking her as the household’s cook. Oi, what do you think you’re at—all over the bleedin’ path? You can clear that up—your sort always think you can roll out of the pub, chuck it all up, and then make up the money lying on your back somewhere. And then Thea had spoken in her good Town voice, her I-am-one-of-your-betters voice, and told the woman she had been shopping and began to feel unwell, so had thought a walk would be best, but now . . . She let the words linger. The cook had taken her downstairs, pulled out a chair for her, and when she was settled, had gone up to the street again with a pail filled with water and bleach, which she threw across the flagstones. She went back twice more before she was satisfied that the contents of Thea’s stomach had been sluiced well away. Then she returned and grated ginger into a cup that she filled with hot water from a stove-blackened kettle. There, that’ll sort you out. And it had. For the moment. Thea had had trouble keeping food down since Mary died.
“The plan to raise small groups—four, five, or six together—will enable us to deploy you across parts of London at the same time. We can distribute our literature, make our point, and then disperse into the crowd. We will convene in popular locations where there are many people gathered. Arrive as individuals, depart as individuals. Go home, and await inst
ructions for your next demonstration. Do not retain pamphlets; simply leave them if not distributed among the populace.” The unnamed woman paused. “Expect confrontation.” She paused again. “But know that the illustration on the pamphlet—which you will not see until the day of your participation—accurately depicts what is happening to men at the front, and to the local populations where war has arrived on the doorstep. We are a pacifist society, so we go forward in peace. We will not rise to the bait of argument, and we will turn the other cheek if attacked—though again, departure and dispersal should be employed.”
A hand went up, and a man spoke. “May I ask a question?”
Thea began to look at the man, then turned away—she did not want to know who he was in case she saw him in the street.
“Aren’t we putting ourselves at risk, being in such small groups? We could be set upon by a larger gang in support of war.”
“We must not be afraid of our remit,” said the woman.
Thea felt the man shrink into his chair.
By the time the meeting was disbanded, and Thea had waited by the rear exit for directions back onto the Marylebone Road, she had learned that she would soon receive her instructions. The letter must be memorized and destroyed, as must any other correspondence from the society, and she would be expected to be present at the demonstration. Was she fearful, as she ran to catch a tram, and then a bus, and then walk to Queen Charlotte’s Chambers? Yes, it must be said that Thea felt it in the pit of her stomach, a duality of emotion—a conviction that she was doing something that was right and true, and a sense of terror that someone might press a thick rubber tube into her mouth, that she would feel it snake to her stomach, and then the warm mush slopping into her gut. She pressed her hand to her mouth and hoped she would get home in time to avoid embarrassing herself on the street once more.