A Monstrous Regiment of Women

and mouth. The first swallow from the glass was equally savoured, and she shut her eyes for a long minute.

When she opened them, the magic had gone out of her, and she was just a small, tired, dishevelled woman in an expensive dress, with a much-needed drink and cigarette to hand. I revised my estimate of her age upward a few years, to nearly forty, and wondered if I ought to leave.

She looked at me again, not searchingly as before, but with the mild distraction of someone confronted by an unexpected and potentially problematic gift horse. When she spoke, it was in an ordinary voice, neither inspiring nor manipulating, as if she had decided to pack away her power from me. I wondered whether this was a deliberate strategy, putting on honesty when confronted by someone upon whom the normal techniques had proven ineffective, or if she had just, for some unknown reason of her own, decided to shed pretence. My perceptions were generally very good, and although it did not feel like deception, she did seem watchful. Hiding behind the truth, perhaps? Anticipation stirred.

Her first words matched her attitude, as if blunt honesty was both her natural response to the problem I represented and a deliberately chosen tactic.

“Why are you here, Mary Russell?”

“Veronica invited me. I will go if you wish.”

She shook her head impatiently, dismissing both my offer and my response.

“People come here for a reason, I have found,” she said half to herself. “People come because they are in need, or because they have something to give. Some come because they want to hurt me. Why have you come?”

Somewhat unsettled, I cast around for an answer.

“I came because my friend needed me,” I finally admitted, and she seemed more willing to accept that.

“Veronica, yes. How did you come to know her?”

“We were neighbours in lodgings in Oxford one year.” I decided I did not need to tell her of the elaborate pranks we had joined forces on, opting for a dignified enterprise instead.

“Ronnie organised a production of Taming of the Shrew for the wounded soldiers who were being housed in the colleges. She also hired a hall for a series of lectures and debates on the Vote”—no need to specify which Vote!—“and dragged me into it. She has a knack for getting others involved—but no doubt you’ve discovered that. Her enthusiasms are contagious, I suppose because they’re based in her innate goodness. She even succeeded in getting me involved in one of the debates, and we became friends. I’m not really sure why.” I was astonished, when I came to a halt, at how wordy I had been and how much of the truth I had given this stranger.

“The attraction of opposites, I see that. Veronica is softer and more generous than is good for her, which I doubt would be said about you. The hard and the soft, power and love, tug strongly at each other, do they not?”

It was said in a mode of casual conversation, and followed by a pull at her glass, but the devastating simplicity of her observations immediately raised my defences. However, it seemed that attack was not her intention, because she went on.

“That is the basis of our evening cycle of services, you might say.” She reflected for a moment. “And of the daytime work, as well.”

“A cycle?” I asked carefully.

“Ah, I see Veronica did not explain much about us.”

“Nothing very coherent. A lot of talk about love and the rights of women.”

She laughed, deep and rich.

“Dear Veronica, she is enthusiastic. Let me see if I can fill in the gaps.” She paused to crush out the cigarette and immediately light another one, squinting through the smoke at me. “The evening services are what I suppose you might call our public events. Quite a few of our members came in originally out of curiosity, and stayed. Mondays, the topic is left general. I talk about any number of things; sometimes we have Bible readings, silent or guided prayer, even a discussion of some political issue currently in the news—I let the Spirit lead me, on Mondays, and it’s usually a small, well-behaved group of friends, like tonight. Thursdays are different. Very different.” She thought about Thursdays for a minute, and whatever her thoughts were, they turned her eyes dark and put a small smile on her full lips, and the magnetically beautiful woman I had seen earlier was there briefly. Then she reached down and flicked her cigarette over the ashtray and looked at me.

“Thursdays, I talk about love. It’s a very popular night. We even see a fair number of men. And then on Saturdays, we talk about the other end of the spectrum: power. Sometimes Saturday meetings get quite political, and a lot of our hotter heads are given free rein. We don’t get many men on Saturdays, and when we do, it’s usually because they want a fight. Saturdays can get very exciting.” She grinned.

“I can imagine,” I said, calling to mind the shouts of the “quiet evening” I had witnessed. “And you have other activities, as well?”

“Oh heavens, the evening services are just the tip. Our goal, simply stated, is to touch everything concerned with the lives of women. Yes”—she laughed—“I know how it sounds, but one has to aim high. We have four areas we’re concentrating on at the moment: literacy, health, safety, and political reform. Veronica is in charge of the reading program, in fact, and she’s doing fine work. She has about eighty women at the moment learning to read and write.”

“Teaching them all herself?” No wonder she was exhausted.

“No, no. All Temple members volunteer a certain amount of time every week to one or another of our projects. Veronica mostly coordinates them, though she, too, does her share of actual teaching. It’s the same in each of the four areas. In the health program, for example, we have a doctor and several nurses who give time, but it’s more a matter of identifying the women in the community who need help and putting them into touch with the right person. A woman with recurring lung infections will be seen by a doctor, but also by a building specialist who will look at her house to see if the ventilation might be improved. A woman with headaches from eyestrain will be given spectacles, and we’ll see if we can find way to put more light into her working area—laying on gas, perhaps, or even electrical lights. A woman ill from exhaustion and nerves who has eleven children will be educated about birth control and enrolled in our nutritional-supplements program along with her children.”

“You haven’t had any problems with the birth-control thing? Legally, I mean?”

“Once or twice. One of our members spent a week behind bars because of it, so we tend to give that information orally now rather than as pamphlets. Ridiculous, but there it is. It’s getting easier, though. In fact, I understand that Dr Stopes— you know her, the Married Love woman?—intends to open a clinic here in London specialising in birth-control methods, sometime this spring. She’s going to come speak to our members next month, if you’re interested.”

I grunted a noncommittal noise; I could just imagine Holmes’ reaction.

“And safety?”

“That was a branch off the health program originally, though now it’s almost as large and certainly causes more headaches for us. We run a shelter—for women and their children who are without a roof or in danger from the father. It is appalling how little help is available for a desperate woman who has no relations to turn to. Violent husbands don’t count as a threat in the eyes of the law,” she commented, her voice controlled but her eyes dark, this time with anger, and I was briefly aware of her once-broken nose. “So two years ago when one of our members left us two large adjoining terrace houses on the corner, we opened them as a shelter and let it be known that any woman, and her children, of course, who needs a warm, dry, safe place is welcome.”

“I can imagine the headaches. I’m surprised you aren’t overrun.”

“We don’t allow them to stay indefinitely. We help them find a job and someone to care for the small children, try to work something out with the husband—the shelter is not meant to be a permanent solution. There are still workhouses for that,” she added with heavy irony, though the hardness of her face bespoke her opinion of the institution.

“Only women, then?”

“Only women. We occasionally get men, who think we’re a soup kitchen, and we give them a meal and send them away. Men have other options. Women need the help of their sisters, and in fact, that to me is one of the most exciting things about what we’re doing, when women of different classes meet and see that we share more similarities than differences, in spite of everything. We are on the edge of a revolution in the way women live in this society, and some of us want to ensure that the changes that are coming will apply to all women, rich and poor