‘A bit of paper would do the trick,’ he said, trying to keep the smile in his eyes from spreading to his lips. ‘It’s little worse than a shaving cut.’
I extracted a blank slip and tore the corner off it. He dabbed at his lip with the sleeve of his shirt, then I placed the bit of paper on the cut. It stained red immediately, but held.
‘I’ll see you both on Friday,’ Tilda said, winking at me. Then she turned toward Broad Street, where the fray seemed to be concentrating.
Gareth and I turned in the opposite direction.
‘Esme! Good Lord, what happened?’ Rosfrith saw us as we walked in through the gates of Sunnyside. She looked to Gareth for an explanation.
‘The procession to the Martyrs’ Memorial got out of hand,’ he said.
Gareth and I had barely spoken on our walk up the Banbury Road. Tilda had unsettled us and rendered us both shy.
‘This happened at the procession?’ said Rosfrith. She looked me up and down. My skirt was torn and soiled, my hair had come loose, my cheek smarted from where I’d continued to rub it to remove the filth of that man’s hatred. ‘Oh dear,’ she continued. ‘Mamma was there with Hilda and Gwyneth. It was wise of you to go together, though it doesn’t seem to have helped you,’ she said.
I found my tongue. ‘Oh, no, we met quite by accident. I don’t know how Gareth came to be there.’
She looked from Gareth to me, sceptical.
I was unable to hold her gaze and turned to Gareth. ‘Why were you there?’
‘Same reason you were,’ he said.
‘I’m not sure why I was there,’ I said, as much to myself as to him.
Just then, Mrs Murray walked in through the gates with her eldest and youngest daughters. All three were unscathed and excited. Rosfrith ran to them.
Gareth walked with me to the kitchen and I introduced him to Lizzie. He helped explain what had happened.
‘Let me give you something for that lip.’ Lizzie dampened a clean cloth and passed it to him.
He removed the scrap of paper and held it up for us both to see. ‘Stopped me bleeding to death, this did.’
‘What on earth is it?’ asked Lizzie, peering at it.
‘The edge of a slip,’ Gareth said, smiling in my direction.
‘I really am grateful, you know,’ I said. ‘That man was terrifying. It was unfair of Tilda to mock you.’
‘She was just testing me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Making sure I was on the right side.’
I smiled. ‘And are you on the right side?’
He smiled back. ‘Yes, I am.’
He seemed more sure than I was, and part of me felt ashamed. ‘Sometimes I think there may be more than two sides,’ I said.
‘You’d do well not to take the side of the suffragettes,’ Lizzie said. ‘They’re slowing things down with all their mischief.’ She handed Gareth a glass of water.
‘Thank you, Miss Lester,’ he said.
‘You call me Lizzie. I don’t answer to anything else.’
We watched as he drank it down. When he finished, he took the glass to the sink and rinsed it. Lizzie looked at me in astonishment.
‘People have always taken different roads to get to the same place,’ Gareth said when he turned back to face us. ‘Women’s suffrage won’t be any different.’
When Gareth left, Lizzie sat me down and washed my face. She brushed out my hair and rolled it back into a bun.
‘Never met a man like him,’ she said. ‘Except maybe your da. He also rinses his cup.’
She had the same look on her face that Da did whenever Gareth visited the Scriptorium. I ignored her.
‘You never did say why you was there,’ she said.
I couldn’t tell her about Tilda. It was the one topic we avoided, and the events of the day wouldn’t help to elevate her in Lizzie’s eyes. ‘I was coming home from the Bodleian,’ I said.
‘Would have been quicker to come along Parks Road.’
‘There was so much anger, Lizzie.’
‘Well, I’m just glad you weren’t badly hurt, or arrested.’
‘What are they so scared of?’
Lizzie sighed. ‘All of them are scared of losing something; but for the likes of him that spat in your face, they don’t want their wives thinking they deserve more than they’ve got. Makes me glad to be in service when I think that men like that might be the alternative.’
The day was almost over when I returned to the Scriptorium. Tilda’s postcard was sitting on top. I read it again then wrote a new slip, in duplicate.
SISTERHOOD
‘I’m glad you have joined the sisterhood and will be adding your voice to the cry.’
Tilda Taylor, 1912
I searched the fascicles. Sisterhood was already published. The main sense referred, in one way or another, to the sisterhood experienced by nuns. Tilda’s quotation belonged with the second sense: Used loosely to denote a number of females having some common aim, characteristic or calling. Often in a bad sense.
I went to the pigeon-holes and found the original slips. Newspaper clippings made up most of the quotations. In a clipping about females who agitate on questions they know nothing about, a volunteer had underlined the shrieking sisterhood. The most recent slip, from an article written in 1909, described women of the suffragette type as a highly educated, screeching, childless, and husbandless sisterhood.
They were all insulting, and I was heartened to think that Dr Murray had rejected them. Even so, I rewrote the published definition on a new slip, leaving off in a bad sense, and pinned a copy of Tilda’s quotation in front of it. Then I put them in the pigeon-holes reserved for supplementary words.
When I turned away from the shelves, Da was watching me.
‘What do you think of newspapers as a source of meaning?’ he asked.
‘What else did you see?’
He smiled, but it seemed an effort. ‘I don’t mind what you add to the pigeon-holes, Essy. Even if your quotations don’t come from a text, they might encourage the search
