Her watch said it was half past eleven. Would he play chess today, and if yes, with whom? It could have been an excellent occasion to test her hypothesis about emotional inoculation. A deliberate infection to control future responses. Who better to practice with than him? He had seen her without a stitch of clothing; if she learned to feel unbothered with him, she could manage it with anyone. In case the experiment did go pear-shaped, no matter—he was leaving Britain before the summer was over.
In the end, she did not go because her motives were unclear—was she hoping for self-improvement, or was she hoping for something else entirely? She couldn’t have something else. She had just flung herself from a moving carriage over a cough. The noise, the entrapment, the people. And what was marriage, and the inevitable family life, other than an entrapment in a small, crowded space with erratic noise patterns? Even if all the laws of Britain changed in a woman’s favor, she would still be stuck inside her skin. People would always exhaust her eventually. So she remained at her desk, reading, acutely aware when the chapel clock struck twelve, then one.
Chapter 8
She walked to the Bodleian the next morning to begin the campaign against the writ for restitution in earnest. A blustery wind had cleared the skies, and she entered the library still holding on to her hat. The librarian had her stack of books and journals pertaining to the writ ready, and then he briefly became reluctant to release the requested Home Office reports into her female hands. The Campbell name held enough authority here to overrule his compunctions.
The Upper Reading Room of the Bod was largely empty, few students were present during term break. None of the usual glances followed her as she steered toward a desk. She sat down quietly and opened the first journal, a freshly sharpened pencil at the ready for note-taking. Opponents of the Cause rarely changed their mind based on facts alone, but when they found just a single fact wrong in a petition, they used it to bash the credibility of the Cause itself. Hours later, she had a pile of notes, and she was parched. She went to the fountain on the floor below. The water was nice and cool in her throat, and she lingered a moment while her mind whirred and shifted recently acquired information around. The writ for restitution was a vile piece of legislation. It claimed lives; apparently, a woman from Suffolk had perished in prison because she had refused to return to her marital home as decreed. Catriona curled her hand, still damp from the water, over her nape. They built women’s colleges far from the ribald town centers and surrounded the dorms with walls that were topped with broken glass, but there were no walls to keep a woman safe in her own home.
Approaching noon, she had a first draft to lobby a generic man of influence:
Dear Sir To the honourable
I’m appealing to you today on the matter of a policy that abjectly affects the safety and dignity of married women in Britain: the Writ for Restitution of Conjugal Rights.
The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878 allows a wife to apply for a legal separation from a physically abusive husband. Nothing demonstrates the necessity for such a law more clearly than The Report on Brutal Assaults, compiled for the Home Office in 1875, which showed that according to court records, over the course of five years, over 6,000 cases of the worst possible offences had been committed against women by their own husbands. This equates to 1,200 cases a year, or over three cases a day, a figure which does not include common assault （which is estimated to be 25 times higher than the figures reported to the Home Office）。
However, wives still find their plea for a separation frequently rejected by a magistrate, and the moment a wife takes her fate into her own hands and separates without a legal decree, she is guilty of desertion. Her husband may take out a writ for restitution against her, and a wife forfeits all access to her own children and property if she ignores it and might be made to choose between the gaol or an unsafe home.
Therefore, abolishing the writ for restitution is keeping in spirit with the Matrimonial Causes Act, which you have supported which your noble friends supported . . . It could in fact be considered a necessity for making the act fully operational.
The letter felt concise and factual to her, which meant it was too blunt. She would have to soften it and dress it with a bow; make it appealing to a man’s sense of honor or his vanity so that he would consider saving the damsel instead of becoming defensive on behalf of his entire sex. The prettifying would deplete her more than a whole day of research ever could. Annabelle would have to help her; Annabelle was naturally tactful and too pragmatic to indulge in Weltschmerz.