“I think I have changed my mind,” she whispered.
The bed creaked as he rolled away from her. “Noted.”
The dark warmly welcomed her back.
He lay next to her, motionless while a hard pulse beat away in his neck. When her breathing had become even and deep, he rose and went to the washroom. He sucked her taste off his fingers, then wrapped his wet hand around his cock. He kept his eyes on the stars winking through the window slit as he worked himself. It took only moments until his vision blurred, for the long-held tension to coil tightly at the base of his spine. Her wet heat, her throaty cries. He hovered in perfect stillness for a second, then hot release exploded through his body with such mind-obliterating violence, he gritted his teeth and slapped his other hand against the stone wall, once, twice. He came to hoping she had slept through it, oblivious.
Chapter 22
The next morning she woke to mild cramps and the arrival of her courses, which she should have expected had she not lost track of time during the emotional whirlwind of the past few weeks. Lucian had already gone, and a note lay on his pillow informing her that he and the mining engineer would spend all day examining the tunnels. That was a relief. The memories of their debauchery last night intruded, and in the light of day, it made her head red-hot.
She felt improved enough around noon to go and hold the women’s assembly.
The small classroom was crammed with approximately fifty women lining the walls and sitting behind the small worn desks. Rosie Fraser took her seat next to Hattie in a chair in front of the blackboard. She wore her Sunday finery today: a white blouse and blue wool and no handkerchief to protect her hair. She had flaming-red locks like her son, Hamish.
She seemed intrigued enough by the idea of joining the trade union, but some of the other women grumbled. “It’ll put us up against the men before it protects us or our wages,” an older woman in the first row said. “It’s our own menfolk that thinks we’re the competition.”
“Not all of our own,” Mrs. Fraser said with vehemence. “Most are sensible.” But there were still some dark faces in the crowd. “I for once want the same pay,” said the blond woman who had asked Hattie for a sketch of her two sons the night before, and that elicited ambivalent murmurs. The final vote, however, revealed that a majority of women wanted to join, and Hattie scribbled the result onto the blackboard with a squeaky piece of chalk.
On the matter of joining the suffrage movement, they laughed uproariously. “Should we come down to London on Sundays and hand out pamphlets, then?” Rosie Fraser asked. “I’m all for it,” said another. “I’ll leave my fellow to change the baby and to bake the bread while I’m gone having a lark.” This started a good five minutes of hilarity, where they envisioned their husbands doing this or that around the house. “We can try to improve our pay through the union,” Mrs. Fraser concluded after restoring order. And that was that, women’s suffrage dismissed with a wave of her broad hand.
“But if you had the vote, you could hasten all these decisions about pay and working conditions along,” Hattie tried, “by voting for a party that works for precisely those interests. And you don’t have to come to London; you can sign petitions. You could influence the movement itself with your sheer numbers.”
“Precisely, eh,” Mrs. Fraser drawled. “But we’re not eligible for the vote. Our men aren’t eligible, ma’am. We don’t own property, nor do we run expensive households in a city.”
Nodding all around. This was not going well at all. “There shall be another reform act to enfranchise the workingmen,” Hattie said. “The property qualifications shan’t last forever.”
“Do you know that for certain, ma’am?”
She didn’t, and she felt some disappointment in the crowd when she bit her lip and shook her head. Her proposition was voted down.
Her palms were damp and her pulse high by the time she explained her idea about the photographs.
“Photographs,” Rosie Fraser repeated, her eyes narrowing. “Like they did in Yorkshire?”
“What happened in Yorkshire?”
“People went there and took photographs of the lassies in their working clothes a few years back,” Mhairi said from her seat in the front row. “Turned them into postcards.”
“Scandalous ones,” Mrs. Fraser added derisively. “The people selling them made good coin.”
Murmur rose again.
“Well, these portraits would be yours,” Hattie said. “Free of charge and for your personal use.”