Chapter 46
Chapter forty-six
London
As Penny pulled on her gloves by the front door, Crispin appeared unexpectedly from the sitting room.
“Going out?” he said hopefully.
“Why aren’t you at the office?” Penny demanded.
“They’re repainting it.”
Penny stared at him. He rolled his eyes.
Heavens, did everything set off his asthma? “Oh. Well. I suppose you could come along with me. If you don’t have anything better to do.”
“If I go with you, we can take my umbrella,“ Crispin said brightly, getting it out of the stand with a little flourish.
“I was going to do that already,” she said. She narrowed her eyes. “You haven’t even asked where I’m going.”
“Does it matter? You’re the fearless female investigator. It’s sure to be a romp.”
“I’m going back to Limehouse, as a matter of fact.”
“To tell your Miss Wu that you’re all right?”
Penny nodded. “And to see what I can find out about that Brotherhood.”
Crispin polished his glasses. “I just thought…perhaps we could have another adventure.”
“That was my adventure, Crispin, and you lobbed yourself into it uninvited,“ Penny pointed out.
“So it was,” said Crispin mildly, putting his glasses back in his pocket. “But I’ll be ever so polite this time, Penny. Just watch me. It’ll be like old times.”
She stared at him. There had been no such old times, only Penny beating him at every physical game or challenge over and over, and feeling a horrid mixture of glee and guilt every time.
But just now, for a moment, she almost wanted Crispin’s company.
Of course it wouldn’t do to let the old chap know it.
Brothers must be kept firmly in their place, or they would walk all over you.
Penny took the umbrella from his hand.
“All right,” she said. “Just this once.”
Mrs Wu appeared relieved to see Penny come into the shop unscathed.
“Mae is working today,” she explained. She seemed to expect Penny to know what her daughter’s job was, so Penny did not inquire. “But of course I’ll tell her you called. She’ll be happy to know you are safe.”
For the first time, Penny noticed a black-haired man in an English suit, polishing the teapots in the window.
“Then perhaps I might interview you? Or Mr Wu himself? It’s about the Brotherhood I asked you about yesterday. You seemed to think he might be willing to talk to me.”
Mrs Wu glanced at the man. “My dear, this is the young lady I told you about. Mae’s friend.”
He turned to look Penny and Crispin over. He was Chinese.
“Oh! How do you do, Mr Wu! This is my brother, Crispin,” said Penny.
Mr Wu looked at Penny gravely. “I am relieved to see you have learned your lesson and no longer walk the streets of London alone. We never let our daughter do such a thing. She rides the omnibus with my sister’s son when she goes to her work.”
Crispin jumped in before Penny could correct him.
“Exactly right, sir,” said Crispin, extending a hand. “You can’t be too careful these days, can you?”
Mr Wu put down his duster to shake Crispin’s hand.
“The wicked sprout like grass,” he said darkly, shaking his head.
Penny looked back and forth. Mr Wu and Crispin seemed pleased with each other. It irritated her, but she could use it to her advantage.
“It’s precisely that I’ve come to talk with you about,” Penny slipped in confidentially. “The wicked. Sprouting.”
Mr Wu looked at them silently for a moment.
“Mrs Wu,” he said courteously. “Would you be so good as to put on the kettle, and I will make our guests some of our finest tea.”
Penny inhaled the delightfully pungent smell wafting from the teapot.
“Is this lapsang souchong?” she exclaimed in delight.
Mr Wu looked at her blankly. She repeated the question.
“It’s quite a famous Chinese tea,” she said a little defensively.
Mrs Wu bent and murmured something to her husband. Mr Wu’s face lit.
“Ah, yes! I see you are discerning drinker of good tea. Mei-Ling did not mention this.”
Penny looked sideways at Crispin, pleased she had now scored a point of her own with Mr Wu.
They were in the family’s cramped quarters above the shop. It was a very winsome blend of East and West, just like Mae’s parents, Penny thought. How sweet that Mrs Wu wore Chinese garb while Mr Wu wore an English suit.
Mrs Wu moved a Chinese newspaper aside and placed a tray of little round cakes sprinkled with sesame seeds in front of them, then went back downstairs to mind the shop.
Mr Wu poured the steaming topaz liquid into a cup as delicate as a shell, and as he handed it to her, he spoke in a hushed tone.
“See the colour? There is none of the black lead rubbish the English put in their tea here. This variety came about hundreds of years ago in a village in the mountains in Southern China, when soldiers came during the tea harvest and occupied the farmers’ homes.
The farmers smoked the tender green tea leaves over a fire of pine logs to preserve them.
So you see,” he said with a smile, “my people have always found ways to bring beauty out of hardship.”
Penny sipped her tea. She had not expected Limehouse to be so cosy. The intense, invigorating flavour almost made her forget why she had come.
Crispin, however, kept to the programme. “So about this brotherhood, sir. Have they really been bothering such peaceful, industrious citizens as yourselves?”
Penny slowly compressed the toe of her brother’s shoe with her boot to remind him whose adventure this was.
Mr Wu picked up the newspaper and folded it to show them a Saint George’s Cross.
“This was left on my friend’s laundry in Ming Street,” he explained. “The next day, it burned down. That is not the only such thing that has happened here.”
Penny got out her notebook. “Please, tell me everything, Mr Wu.”
A few hours later, Penny and Crispin were in a cab heading back to Bloomsbury. Penny had a little tin of tea in her lap, as well as a fragrant fried snack from the street vendor outside the shop which she was making short work of, in typical Penny fashion.
“Penny,” said Crispin suddenly.
Penny made a semi-attentive sound around her mouthful of golden-crisp dough.
“Why a Saint George’s Cross, do you think?” he asked. He was so interested in the whole subject that he didn’t even mind the sound of her eating, which he usually abominated.
Penny shrugged. “Seems simple. It’s for England, isn’t it? England for the English.”
“England for the English,” repeated Crispin thoughtfully. “And India, and Egypt, and the Sudan, and Hong Kong for the English.” He gave a low whistle. “And none of them welcome here? What kind of bargain is that?”
Penny licked her fingers shamelessly. “Careful, Brother. Ours is not to reason why, after all,“ she said with a touch of sarcasm. “Just be thankful you have only to do and not to die, snug in your office there in Downing Street.”
“Well, the Fenians probably wouldn’t mind taking me out,” he remarked. “Or—you never know—one of your friends might try making bombs. Whatever made you a suffragette? It’s not as if Father was a pater familias who beat you black and blue or wouldn’t let you ride a bicycle.”
“Do you really want to know?” asked Penny, wiping her fingers on her handkerchief.
Crispin nodded.
“Well,” she said. “I can tell you, then. It wasn’t Father. It was Miss Hobhouse.”
Crispin squinted. “Hobhouse? You mean Lady Hobhouse? Mother knows her, doesn’t she?”
“No, Crispin, Emily Hobhouse. The one who blew up the story about the concentration camps our government established for women and children in South Africa.”
“Oh, right, that Hobhouse. The one that was always hobnobbing—sorry!—with the Boers and giving speeches about how awful we Britishers were.”
Penny made a sound.
Crispin shook his head. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I just don’t see the connection.”
Penny drew a deep breath. “It’s just that before Miss Hobhouse, I believed you.”
Crispin’s eyebrows went high. “Believed me?”
“I believed that men—Englishmen, gentlemen, men like you and father—would keep women like me safe,” Penny said, her voice unnaturally calm.
Penny was always so worked up about everything that now the quietness of her voice sent shivers down his spine.
“That you all really thought that we were safer and happier as we were, in our little dolls’ houses.
That you protected us from a grubby, mean, tiresome part of life, just as you would always try to protect us from anything horrible or dangerous.
But you didn’t protect those women. Did you?
It’s all a sham, all of your high talk of chivalry, and I wouldn’t risk a rat’s life on it, much less a woman’s. ”
Crispin couldn’t be silent any longer.
“It was war, Penny! I don’t say everything we did to the Boers was, well, quite cricket, and Milner shouldn’t have been rewarded for dragging things on as he did—everyone says it now—but if I recall, the Boers were doing their own part, keeping the war going long after they knew they couldn’t win.
Our men were dying over there every day, weren’t they?
Kitchener had to do something, and the civilians kept getting in the way. ”
“Herding women and babies behind miles of barbed wire—women who looked just like your wives and sisters and mothers? Letting them starve and die of dysentery, when everyone knew it was happening for simply months?”
“That wasn’t me,” protested Crispin. “I was just a schoolboy, Penny.”
“All right. You get a pass for being a child—back then. But what about now, Crispin?”
“What do you mean?”
“You work in a government office. Can you honestly look me in the eye and tell me that if you found out something wrong was happening, you’d do everything you could to stop it?
Even if it cost your career? You’d use your voice and your vote for something other than your own prosperity and advancement? ”
There was a silence, during which the cab pulled up at Brunswick Square. Penny wiped a scattering of tears off her cheek. Crispin was confused by his sister’s emotion for something that felt so distant to him.
“Well, at least you’re honest about it,” she said bitterly. “So now you know why I don’t trust any of you to keep us safe anymore. Women are starting to wake up and keep each other safe now, and we’ll do a better job of it—you see if we don’t!”
Crispin reached to open the door of the cab for her, but Penny batted his hand away and opened it herself.
“We don’t want it anymore—your posturing, your pretty speeches,” she cried out. “Do you understand? I suggest you all prepare to be completely extraneous for everything except—procreation!”
With this devastating prophecy, Penny tossed his umbrella back inside the cab and ran up the steps to their front door.
“Cor,” the cabman breathed. “Gave it to you straight, didn’t she? Reminds me of me ol’ woman when I’ve had a few too many.”
“I don’t think my sister gives it any other way,” Crispin said ruefully. “Ashley Mansions on Vauxhall Bridge Road, please, if you don’t mind.”