Lucian leaned closer, teasing her nose with hints of his shaving soap. “You need anything?” he murmured. “A glass of water?”
He was distractingly handsome, with his shoulders perfectly filling his navy-blue coat. “Thank you,” she said with a small smile. “I have all I need.”
Pleasure lit his eyes. Briefly, his attention lingered on the thistle she had pinned over her heart. “The representative of the Chinese Legation has requested an introduction,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I told him it was my wife’s influence that saw a certain pair of vases returned into his keeping.”
A quiet joy passed between themas they stood close with their hearts and little fingers linked, one year after their first encounter in Chelsea. The turmoil of those early days had given way to learning how to love each other well, and at its core, their new union felt warm and safe. At first sight, they were still an unlikely match—opposites in looks, upbringing, and temperament. But on the artist’s color wheel, two opposite colors were considered complementary. Their high contrast caused high impact, and they looked their brightest when placed next to each other.
Hattie brazenly slipped her whole hand into Lucian’s. “I am the orange to your blue,” she said.
He gently pressed her fingers. “My fanciful lass.”
“It means we are fine on our own,” she said. “But side by side, we’re brilliant.”
Author’s Note
The accident that killed Lucian’s family was inspired by a pit disaster in Silkstone’s Huskar Pit in 1838, which was one of the events prompting the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act. The public then seemed most concerned about female nudity in the mine tunnels, with the miner-friendly Labor Tribune fretting, “A woman accustomed to such work cannot be expected to know much of household duties or how to make a man’s home comfortable.” For a while, people traveled to mines to take pictures of women in trousers for commercial purposes, and the miners received a share of the proceeds. Female miners frequently defended their work and evaded the law because they needed their wages to feed their families. They very much embodied the conflict between Victorian notions of ideal womanhood （the dainty angel in the house） and the reality of women depending on manual labor for survival.
Pit-brow lasses played a strong role in the fight for women’s suffrage in the Edwardian era. In the Victorian era, the organized British suffrage movement consisted overwhelmingly of middle-and upper-class women; British society was rigorously stratified along class lines, and working-class women had low personal incentives and high practical barriers to join the movement for the vote. However, British suffragist leaders were long aware of class-based double standards—in 1872 Millicent Fawcett noted, “It is a small consolation for Nancy Jones, in Whitechapel, who is kicked and beaten at discretion by her husband, to know that Lady Jones, in Belgravia, is always assisted in and out of her carriage as if she were a cripple.” Suffrage and women workers’s rights movements increasingly overlapped toward the end of the century, particularly in the industrialized North. The full integration of the two movements was frequently hampered by the narrow focus middle-and upper-class suffragists kept on a woman’s right to vote rather than wider social reform including the rectification of wage inequality, which was a priority for female workers. On many occasions, aristocrats and factory workers did stand side by side, notably when the suffrage struggle entered its militant phase in 1905. It still took until 1928 for low-income women to vote, while their monied or university-educated counterparts were given the vote in 1918.
Art as a vehicle for change
In the late 19th century, many Victorians turned to art to address societal ills. Artists began viewing their work as a charitable endeavor and a driver for social reform, often by creating either romanticized or shockingly realistic depictions of poverty to move the public. Social photography did play a part in raising awareness about dire working conditions and the continued use of child labor in Victorian Britain.
Wedding nights
I included the artifact The Art of Begetting Handsome Children in this story to show that some Victorians acknowledged both the existence and the importance of female pleasure in a marriage. As a rule, however, middle-and upper-class women in particular were kept ignorant about sex until it happened to them. Inspiration for Hattie’s wedding-night discussions came from novelist Mimi Matthews’s blog post “Ether for Every Occasion”：
The 1897 edition of A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence reports the case of a newlywed Victorian lady who went into hysterics whenever her husband tried to initiate sex. As a result, the consummation of their marriage was “long delayed.” According to the report: “The difficulty was at length overcome by the administration of ether vapor. She recovered consciousness during the act of coitus, and there was no subsequent difficulty in intercourse.”