Robin Durrant is treacherous, and not to be trusted. I think you know this already, but I say again – if you can remove him from your household, do so at once. Perhaps I have no right to offer you advice, but since we are not to meet again, I shall offer it anyway. I know something of your troubles with the vicar. A servant will learn these things, whether they would want to or no. In London there was a gentleman, a friend of my father’s, who came to visit from time to time. He only ever brought with him, as his companions, young and beautiful men, whom he kept and spoilt like pets. He found women inferior to men in all regards, and shunned their company, from his life and from his bed. If you come to suspect that your husband may feel this same way, then you will never be happy until you have left him, or accepted him as he is and sought companionship for yourself elsewhere.
Goodbye, and please mind what I have written about Teresa Kemp. You have in her an opportunity to do tremendous good. I have written a letter to her, which I will post myself, telling her to expect to hear from you. This is presumptuous of me, I know, but I trust you to do the right and charitable thing. I wish you well, and I hope you can find it in your heart to wish me the same.
Your cousin, Catherine Morley
Cat finishes these letters with cramps in her hand, the muscles more used to scrubbing than writing. She seals them into their envelopes, addresses each one, and puts Hester Canning’s on the night stand, propped up to be easily visible. She slips Tess’s into her bag, which she has packed with her few possessions, and what money she has saved. Outside the window the moon is mottled and full, as pale as fresh milk. It shines onto a landscape of graphite grey shadows and silvery outlines, and in the perfect quiet and calm, Cat sleeps.
The Rev. Albert Canning – from his journal
TUESDAY, AUGUST 8TH, 1911
This is the time. He has told me to stay away, he feels the time is right and I feel it too. He goes with his camera so I know, I know. He will summon them again, he means to take more pictures. I will go, and I will be there, and I will show that I am worthy since I will not announce myself, I will let him go about his great work all undisturbed, and when the images are captured I will reveal that I was there with him, and this will prove that I am ready, and I am pure, and that the elementals can look into the heart of me and will find that I am all I should be. This night has been long but I have waited it out. And all my nights in the meadows were not wasted. Without the sun’s energy the ethereals stay hidden – just as the daisy curls its petals, and shuts its eyes to the darkness, so they sleep. But I have spent long hours, alone and cloaked in darkness, and I have studied my soul and my heart, and I have looked inwards and I have rooted out all lust and material desire, and all the wrong feelings that the devil has sent to torment me of late, and I have scoured myself of it all, and left nothing but the light and pure energy of my astral and ethereal core. I am ready, I know this. I know this. Never at prayer alone have I experienced such vivid dreams and feelings. How dead and cold the stones of my church seem now, when all along the real church was all around me, and I could not see it. Until now! The church of the living light and the living breath and the living spirit of all that is holy and good, lying all around us in its green and golden splendour, and I at last have come to see it and to belong to it. And those of impure heart and those whose minds cannot encompass these mighty truths will be left where they are, lower down, further back, below us on the journey, on the ladder to enlightenment. They have many lives left, many turns of the cycle, to atone for whatever sins and misdeeds have rendered them incapable, in this life, of advancement. Even my wife must atone. Like all women, her heart is full of lust and wanting. Now is the time – this very dawn. I am ready and I will go, and I will see, and all will be complete. Dawn is breaking and the sky is clear, and the sun’s holy light begins to touch, to awaken. Soon the dance will begin and I will dance it too, and I will leave this shell of crystallised spirit, and find my true form. I am ready.
1911
Before dawn, Cat opens her eyes. This is the last time, she tells herself, and smiles. The last time she will wake up in a servant’s bed, the last time she will be in a house where she must labour, and be treated as lesser, and have no freedom. She pauses for a moment, makes note of the feeling of the bumpy mattress, pressing into her spine, and the way the muscles that run from her ribs to her hips are aching, from scrubbing the flagstones of the cellar floors the day before. She makes note of the smell of yeast caught under her fingernails, from taking over the kneading of the bread dough when Sophie Bell got too hot and had a funny turn. She remembers that today she would have had to wash a load of the Cannings’ underwear, if she stayed. With all of this absorbed, and studied, and scorned, she rises and washes her face and hands. The water wakes her, makes her shiver. It splatters into the enamel bowl, fills the room with tinny echoes. The whole world seems to hold its breath.
She pauses outside Sophie Bell’s room as she passes it. She has not told her she is leaving, and there is a needle of guilt about this, behind her excitement. The woman’s loud and heavy breaths sound clearly through the door, and Cat presses her hand briefly to the wood. Too late to do anything about it now. Bidding her a silent farewell, Cat resolves to write to her, once she and George have found rooms somewhere. Hungerford, or Bedwyn. Small towns and villages strung along the canal like beads as it heads west. They can visit, explore, choose. She creeps as silently as she can to the back door, because she knows the vicar no longer takes to his bed. His pillow is smooth every morning, one side of the sheets uncreased. The library door is shut, and though no light comes out from under it, it seems to watch and wait; the silence behind it a watchful one, a poised one. Cat pauses, listens as hard as she can for sounds of movement within. When she walks on again, her heart is thumping. The top step of the cellar stairs creaks, and she freezes. She thinks she hears a footstep, behind that secretive door. The squeak of a chair being risen from. But she won’t go back so she rushes on instead, as quietly as she can. Down the cellar steps, through the kitchen and out of the back door. The latch seems thunderous in the silence.
The world outside is still colourless, flat and surreal with that odd pre-dawn glow, neither dark nor light, not day or night. A suspended moment, when what was before has gone, what is to come has not yet begun. Cat walks through this between-time and feels the blood in her veins, cool and vital. The air is damp, and touches her cheeks and hair with moisture. She pauses by the garden gate and looks back at The Rectory with its high walls and shuttered windows. How much like a prison it looks, and she reassures herself that she will never set foot inside it again. She takes a deep breath, hopes that what for her has been a prison, for Tess will be a sanctuary, of a kind at least. A safe haven, a place to heal. She hopes that in bringing Tess here she has begun to atone for all the violence she brought upon her friend.
The force-feeding had a peculiar effect on some of the gaoled suffragettes. Their faces were bruised and cut, they had frequent nose bleeds, and suffered attacks of nerves they couldn’t contain; many had chest infections, racking coughs that robbed them of air. But beneath all of that, a few of them began to feel stronger again. The food that was poured into them went some way towards nourishing their bodies, and the dizziness and listlessness dissipated for a while. After three days of the terror and violation of it, Tess, Cat and some others stumbled from their cells, strong enough to stand and desperate to see the sky. Leaning on each other like a pair of elderly widows, the two servants from Broughton Street made their slow way out into the yard. Cat could hardly bring herself to look at the cuts and scabs on Tess’s face, the chalky pallor of her skin and the way she shivered constantly, though the day was mild.