Chapter 36
Chapter thirty-six
London
At the offices of the Daily Mail, Penelope Fairweather was presented with a stack of correspondence related to her newspaper article.
“What am I to do with this?”
“You want to be a proper reporter, don’t you?” said the subeditor, a bleary-eyed man who exuded the fumes of a sleepless night fuelled by coffee, tobacco, and breaking news.
Penny found this aroma thrilling. She’d met the man all of twice, and already she coveted his job as if she’d been dreaming of it since she was ten.
“Write a follow-up,” he replied. “The dragons always sell.”
Penny looked at the letters. “But I don’t have anything more about dragons. What about force-feeding? There’s a young lady I could interview about that.”
He yawned pungently. “Last year’s news. What about this fellow?” He jabbed a blackened finger at the picture Penny had purloined. “Connect him to something juicy. Secret societies, Fenians, German spies, airships, white slavers…the public’ll eat it up.”
“White slavers?” Penny said faintly. “Isn’t that rather late-Victorian?”
“It sells. Start hunting for the story or we’ll put someone else on it.” He took a swig from a flask of something that was stronger than coffee, identifying another note in the bouquet. “I’m about to knock off. You’d better disappear before the day editor shows up; he’s not a gentleman like me.”
With difficulty, Penny restrained her eyebrows.
“And if you come any later in the day,” he said, shuffling papers into some semblance of order, “I’d strongly suggest you bring a chaperone. Somebody—I’m not naming names, mind—might get the wrong idea.”
Penny made a very strong mental note about the nameless day editor, stowed the correspondence in her bag, and headed for her favourite tea shop, which was a brisk ten minute walk away from Fleet Street, dreaming of staying awake all night to the sound of printing machines.
In this pleasing daydream, she was at a desk all her own, wearing a little tie and stiff collar, her waist very small and her curls very glossy, and in her newsprint-smeared hands she held a revelation that would cause government heads to roll (figuratively) and cause her name to be mentioned in Parliament.
How jolly it would be! After she saw that the day editor was fired, of course. That would also be jolly.
Two blocks later, Penny’s eye was attracted through the milling people by a flash of purple and green.
A small woman with a dark pair of glasses stood at the corner.
Her coloured sash would have alerted the world to her sympathies even if she were not holding a sign that announced to the world the unarguable fact that WOMEN brING ALL VOTERS INTO THE WORLD.
Penny slowed her gait. Girls of her political persuasion knew it was very inadvisable to protest alone. There was safety in numbers. Some safety, at least.
Spotting a tea shop on the same corner, Penny adjusted her course.
This one was a little lower in tone than the ones she was accustomed to frequent amidst the bohemian gentility of Bloomsbury and was unlikely to offer her favourite kind of smoky Chinese tea, but she could keep an eye out for any trouble for this sister-in-arms from the table by the window.
Under the soothing influence of a pot of her second-favourite tea—all to herself and no one to point out how many lumps of sugar she put in her cup, thank-you-very-much, Crispin!—Penny opened the letters and began to make a careful summary in her notebook.
She soon stopped making them altogether.
The letters were uniformly unhelpful and ranged from fanciful to offensive.
They contained several offers of marriage—mostly for Una Worms, but there was one for Penny herself.
Another letter castigated her for allowing her name to appear in the public press (it was a pseudonym) and blamed her for everything that the writer deemed deficient in the younger generation.
Penny ordered an additional crumpet to bolster her sinking spirits.
She wondered what Crispin was up to today. Doubtless, he never received ridiculous proposals in the course of his work. Everything came easily to him because he was a man. And she could tell he did not feel things deeply, as she did.
Things had been so different growing up. She had always known herself to be bright, charming, robust, and persistent. She had inherited her father’s cleverness—though much less of his discretion—and her mother’s effortless charm.
It had all begun to fall apart during her university years. She couldn’t settle on anything. Everything was fascinating to her—until it wasn’t, and she couldn’t threaten or bribe herself into keeping her mind on it. So she had dropped out, partly because she was terrified of getting low marks.
Crispin had consistently excellent marks.
While Penny had always been widely acknowledged as her brother’s superior, it had all been, she now realised, a classic case of the tortoise and the hare. While she had been dashing about raising expectations, Crispin had been quietly exceeding low ones.
How absolutely nauseating of him.
Penny closed her eyes and drank her tea. Possibly, she had overdone it with the sugar.
As she did so, she became aware of a pair of female voices at the table directly behind her.
“But where’s he getting that extra money he’s splashing around, Maude? If he’s still out of work? Doesn’t it worry you?”
“Of course it does! But he’s acting more like himself again! How can I complain about it, after all that moping around for months?”
“What’s this ‘brotherhood’ all about, anyway? They aren’t…communists or Jews, or riffraff like that?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “They’re secretive enough.”
“No! Nothing like that. He says they’re for king and country and all that. England for the English. Nothing shady.”
“England for the English?” she repeated with a laugh. “Who else would it be for? Are they soft in the head?”
“But it’s the foreigners that take the jobs here in London—you know it, Daisy! They charge less, and they eat rubbish, and they don’t seem to sleep at all. We don’t have a hope.”
“What’s your fellow going to do about it, then?” the other woman scoffed.
“Well, that’s just it.” Her voice became even lower. “They’re making plans.”
There was a flash of suffragette colours outside. The woman with the sign was being forced towards the window in order to maintain her distance from a man who was shouting at her.
Penny stuffed the letters into her bag and left payment on the table. She crammed the crumpet into her mouth and darted out of the tea shop just as another man appeared and took advantage of the woman’s divided attention to wrest the sign from her.
“Go home!” a passing woman tossed over her shoulder at the embattled suffragist. “Go home to your husband and your children!”
“Go home yourself!” Penny retorted, though the bit of crumpet still in her mouth spoiled the effect a bit.
Slinging her bag strap over her body, she executed a brief display of martial movements with the aid of her umbrella, finishing with the sharpened tip of it hovering an inch from the gulping throat of the shouting man—who was no longer shouting.
“Would you care to spar with me, sir?” she offered.
“Well, if you have to resort to violence instead of rational debate, I’ve nothing more to say,” he said loudly, for the benefit of the few people nearby. “I should call a policeman, really.”
“Please do!” said Penny. “My brother works for the police. He doesn’t like people who threaten helpless young ladies.”
While he sputtered and someone behind him laughed, the suffragist put her hand on Penny’s arm in a gesture of caution.
“No, let’s not,” the woman said, glancing at her watch. “We have an urgent appointment to keep. Don’t we?”
Penny nodded.
The other man still had his arms round the sign in a bulldoggish sort of way.
“Thank you so much for your support of the cause, it’s men like you that will get us the vote,” Penny said sincerely as they passed, saddling him with the sign.
As the two young women walked down the street together at a brisk clip, Penny glanced at her new friend. She appeared to be approaching thirty, with a lightly golden complexion and hair that was black and glossy where it puffed out under her hat.
“You’re wanted by the police?” Penny asked quietly. “Do you need—somewhere to wait?”
“Thanks, but no,” she said. They paused at a shop window.
“I’m not a fugitive. It’s just—it doesn’t usually go very well with my sort when a policeman is called.
They assume I’m a floozy at an opium den.
” She took off her glasses, revealing a pair of almond-shaped dark eyes. “Mae Wu, and I’m pleased to meet you.”
“Oh,” breathed Penny with a laugh. “I’m Penny Fairweather. Fancy me bounding up to rescue you with jiu-jitsu, of all people!”
“Not at all,” Miss Wu said a trifle acidly, putting a stop to Penny’s laughter.
“Jiu-jitsu comes from Japan. My father’s family is from Shanghai.
I owe you,” she added, cracking a smile, which relieved Penny, who was beginning to worry that she’d offended the woman somehow.
Her voice had a soft tang of Cockney, though all her h’s were correctly positioned.
“I didn’t like my odds back there at all.
Don’t hesitate to call on me if there is ever anything I can do for you in return. My dad has a shop, out Limehouse way.”
“Of course,” said Penny politely, although she could not imagine how a Wu of Limehouse could ever assist a Fairweather of Bloomsbury.
As Miss Wu turned to go, an idea struck Penny.
She caught her by the arm. “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘England for the English’?”
Miss Wu looked at her oddly. “If want to argue that with me, Penny Fairweather, I might point out to you that your ancestors were likely about as English as mine.”
Penny laughed. “No, no, that’s not what I meant.
And you’re quite right—Norman French and Scottish.
It’s just, I write for the Daily Mail, and I think I’ve sensed an important story.
About a secret society that uses that motto.
I believe they call themselves the Brotherhood, or something like it?
Have they caused any trouble? For your people? ”
Miss Wu’s eyes grew sharp. “They might have. But you’d have to come and see for yourself. Most of the people who write about our part of London can’t be bothered to go there.”
“I’m ready to go now,” Penny said, buttoning the top button of her jacket.
“Not worried about white slavers?” Miss Wu said, looking at her a little sideways.
“Well, you said you owe me a favour,” Penny said. “I assume that extends to protecting me from abduction.”
Miss Wu laughed. “Indeed it does! Shall we catch a tram?”
As they headed to the nearest tram depot, Penny’s skin prickled with anticipation. She was about to visit the fabled Chinese district in the East End, immortalised in sensationalist literature, and she was visiting it as the fearless lady reporter of the Daily Mail.
“Miss Wu, I know you’re not a floozy,” Penny said apologetically, “but I’d quite like it if you took me to an opium den.”
“For your paper?”
“Oh, no! Because it would give my brother such a turn.”
“Your brother in the police?” Miss Wu asked as they climbed the curved staircase onto the top level of the electric tram.
Penny felt obscurely pleased by the Daily Mail advertisement plastered across it.
“Oh, that was a fib,” Penny admitted. “Actually, my brother makes maps at the Colonial Office. He has a little pot and brush and paints everything with imperial pink. He’s harmless, really.”
Miss Wu gave her another side glance as they sat together. “Course he is. Harmless—just like you.”
“Oh, no!” said Penny. “We’re nothing alike.”