Rosie Fraser contemplated her with an unreadable expression. “Why?” At least she didn’t flat out ask, What’s in it for you?
Hattie replied the one thing that came to mind. “Because I can.”
The vote to have the portraits done was unanimous.
“I should like to have the vote,” Mhairi told Hattie an hour later as they walked back to the inn. Her plaid-patterned Sunday skirt was swinging in step with her thick braids. “I’ll have my own business one day and then it would come in handy.”
“Will you take over the Drover’s Inn?”
“Oh no. My sister, Clara, and I—we’d like to train as soap makers. The inn will go to my brothers.”
“Soap,” Hattie said, nonplussed, “why soap?”
“We thought people will always need to wash, won’t they? Drummuir will stop yielding one day, and then what’s left for the inn? Did you like the heather soap in your bath?”
She hadn’t paid much attention to the soap. “It smelled wonderful,” she said truthfully.
“It was us, suggesting heather to the soap maker in Dundee,” Mhairi said with obvious pride. “Now we have heather scent year-round from the linen. Would people in the cities want to buy it?”
Impulsively, she wanted to make exuberant promises. “When the time comes, you must send me a note,” she said instead. “I’m an esteemed customer in two fashionable perfume shops in London.” At least she would be again, once the scandal prompting her wedding had waned. Mhairi’s steps turned into a skip for a few paces, and Hattie’s chest felt tight with an emotion. A foot in the door, Lucian had called it. There needed to be more of it.
She returned to the room feeling both restless and exhausted. It was advised that a woman rest during this time of the month, and here she was holding assemblies and walking across heather fields. She wished her friends were at the inn so she could think out loud in front of them to organize her mind, which was a riot of flitting thoughts and hatching ideas. Eventually, it overwhelmed her innate reluctance to pick up a pen and write words. It was just a letter to Lucie, a friend.
My mind is turning at double the normal speed because I have so many thoughts, and only some of them are fully formed while the rest shall plague me with half-baked conclusions for weeks. I know you are busy with lobbying the House of Lords for the amendment hearing, but I wish you could meet the women at Drummuir so we could think together. My impression is they share a great camaraderie and possess a stubborn cheerfulness despite their daily hardships. They would make a formidable army for the Cause if we could convince them to join. They laughed at me today when I suggested it, since they don’t meet property qualifications; even if they did they’d have no spare time on their hands. They work on the coalfield like men, then they come home to babies, cooking, laundry, and scrubbing. I can’t see their men taking on these domestic chores so that they might go picketing or liaising, and for nothing.
My second impression is that we are committing a serious error by focusing so strongly on the lamentable lack of employment for women of our class, when there is a large group of women that has rather too much work on their hands all while receiving inadequate compensation for it. Legislating against their work in the name of protecting them ignores the reality of their families needing to eat.
Finally, I feel a strange unease, or perhaps a sense of guilt, that I can safely walk away from Drummuir and forget all about its existence when Rosie Fraser will continue to live this life every day. I have read about mining accidents in the papers, so it was hardly a shocking revelation that they exist; I have just never shared a table with the potential next victims before. I know most would argue that there is a natural order to these things, that we are born into our station in accordance with a higher plan, but as suffragists, we reject the same kind of thinking in regards to our sex, hence I feel quite encouraged to reject this way of thinking entirely.
I feel more acutely than ever an obligation to put whatever talents and good fortune I might possess to the best possible use. I’m not sure yet what best means, but I shall accompany Mr. Blackstone to St. Andrews tomorrow in search of a camera …
Regarding Mr. Blackstone,
she wrote, and paused for the longest time.
I’m quite well.
He has revealed himself to be part Robin Hood rather than plain villain.
She crossed out the last sentence so thoroughly, it was a black bar across the page, and Lucie would find it very strange indeed.