“Ah, it’s yer rights yer after, is it?” He put his sweaty, black-whiskered face too close to mine. “You don’t look the part of a working woman, you’re too well dressed. You’re not one o’ them women’s rights types, are ya, trying to force your way into places where you’ve no business? You get yerself home, lass, before I’m forced to arrest you for trespass.”
After everything I had been through in recent days, this felt like the last straw. I searched for my pamphlet and waved it in his face. “I have legitimate business. You can’t stop me.”
I backed away but lost my balance, falling backwards off the low curb and landing hard on the cobblestone street. Two well-dressed young women in large bonnets, clearly out for an afternoon stroll, giggled behind lace handkerchiefs while their male partners strained for a better view. A burning flush crept from my chest to my cheeks. The last thing I needed was to be at the center of more gossip. I struggled to untangle my skirts when a man stepped forward from the gathering onlookers and offered me his hand. “Charles Dickens, at your service.”
One of the young women gave a small gasp, and a hushed silence descended on the crowd. In the moment, I forgot myself, so entranced was I at the prospect of England’s favourite author standing before me. I wanted to tell him how much I adored him and that I had read Little Dorrit ten times at least, but I simply stared. I was glad that Hari wasn’t with me. She often adopted her husband’s opinions on social issues, and I had heard him refer to Dickens as “a bloody socialist who pandered to the uneducated masses.” I cared little for Charles’s politics.
“Are you all right?” Dickens asked as he pulled me to my feet. He was dressed in a long black frock coat with a flowing neckerchief tied loosely under a high-point collar. He was handsome in his own way, a soulful artist with long hair and dark, searching eyes.
“Yes, thank you.” I let out the breath I’d been holding. Hopefully any gossip would be about him, not me.
He addressed the policeman. “Unescorted young women are welcome, even encouraged, to attend today’s meeting. It’s their future we’ll be discussing.” He raised his voice and turned to face the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, step inside with me and be witness to an historic event: the launch of the brideships destined for the far-off colony of British Columbia.”
There was a smattering of applause and a rush for seats. I was swept up in the crowd, propelled forward through venetian-glass doors into the grand ballroom. Ladies were only admitted into the spectators’ galleries on each end of the vast marble-pillared room, and I had to squeeze my way into a seat at the very back, but I was relieved. From this obscure corner, I wouldn’t attract attention, and I could still see the head table and hear much of what was said. My fluttering stomach soon settled, and I cooled my flush by fanning myself with the speakers list that had been placed on the chair.
“That’s wha’ I heard, Gertie,” one of the ladies in front of me was saying to the woman next to her. They both looked to be about my age, but their clothes, rough calico cotton dresses with matching bonnets, told me they were working class. “There’s hundreds o’ thousands more women than men in this country ’cause o’ the wars and such. So I ask you, how’s a lass to find a husband when she’s not a fancy-looker and has no money?”
I found myself nodding in sympathetic agreement. Not to mention when she’s the centre of a scandal, I thought.
A hush fell, and I recognized the Lord Mayor of London, William Cubitt, as he rose to speak. “Gentlemen, and, ah, ladies, we are here to discuss a bold proposal to send shipments of marriageable women to the colony of British Columbia. This plan has the strong endorsement of Mr. Charles Dickens and, I say, what could be better than to support our fellow countrymen who are facing great hardship as they carve a foothold for the empire in every corner of the world?”
Several of the soberly dressed gentlemen in front murmured, “Hear! Hear!”
The mayor took his seat, and a dandy in a yellow-striped knee-length coat with a ridiculously large handlebar moustache stepped to the front of the room. I resisted the urge to giggle at his dress. He proceeded to read a letter from a Reverend Lundin Brown, whose congregation included the gold prospectors in a town called Yale. Reverend Brown was “appalled by the number of illicit relationships conducted with both Native and white women” and said that frontier prostitution would “ultimately ruin religion and morals in this fine country.”
Two very different pictures were emerging here, one of a land of lonely upstanding men in a fruitless search for good Christian wives, and the other? Not so charitable. I wondered at the truth of it. How would these women get on in such a society? Would they be the recipient of many worthy offers, free to take their time and choose carefully, or would they be forced to fend off endless unwanted advances? I suspected the answer would be somewhere in the middle. But the New World offered hope for a better future, and there was a stir of excitement in the crowd as the bishop of Honolulu spoke with passion on the need for British women to emigrate to all regions of the far-flung empire.
I tried to imagine what life would be like in a colony on the other side of the world. It would be a physically rigorous existence, I expected, where ladies dressed for a day of riding or hiking, not social calls. I briefly saw myself striding out in a long split skirt with high boots, my corsets a thing of the past. But in truth, the more I listened to
