I’ll Bring You Buttercups

Where was the wrong in one forbidden gathering when Miss Julia hadn’t so far done anything awful, like meeting a young man or going without a gentleman escort to a music hall, even though she had the spunk to do either had she been of a mind to. Miss Julia had more about her than her brother Giles, who was quiet and bookish. Julia Sutton, it had more than once been remarked upon, should have been born a lad, so much devilment had she in her.

‘Exactly as we please? We won’t be looking for trouble, will we? Well, I am responsible for you and –’

‘You? Responsible for me? Oh, Hawthorn, you’re only a child!’

‘I’m eighteen!’ Well she would be, come June.

‘And I will be twenty-one soon, so it is I who must look after you.’

She was right, Alice conceded silently. Not only was Julia Sutton older but she was wiser, too, if you thought how far afield she had been: to Switzerland and France and to London ever so many times; whilst she, Alice Hawthorn, had never set foot outside the Riding until now.

But she was here: just to think how it would be when she got back, with everyone demanding to know what London was like, and gasping and exclaiming when she told them about sitting in a ladies-only first-class compartment, and riding through the crowded London streets to the house of Miss Anne Lavinia Sutton, so near to Hyde Park you could see the tops of the trees from your bedroom window. Indeed, the whole of Holdenby village would be curious about it. The comings and going of the Garth Suttons and the Place Suttons provided a fair proportion of Holdenby gossip – not to mention the goings-on of Mr Elliot Sutton.

What a journey it had been: such speed, and the two of them eating luncheon as the rest of the world rushed past the window of their compartment. It was only the second time Alice had been on a railway train, the first time so long ago that she couldn’t recall it at all and had had to take Aunt Bella’s word for it. So she wasn’t going to say anything about them being alone in Miss Sutton’s house, nor about trying to find a Votes-for-Women meeting, because these two weeks in London would stay with her for the rest of her life and be brought out fresh and bright when she was old to be lived through again. And the things she would have to tell Tom!

She smiled to remember that night – the buttercup night – and the yellow flowers which now lay carefully wrapped in tissue paper and placed inside her Bible at her favourite place. Luke, Chapter Two: And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn … Tom’s buttercup, and the Christmas story.

‘Hawthorn! What are you brooding about now?’

‘I – er – just about what you’ll be wearing tonight. Best tell me, miss, so I can give it a brush and a press.’

‘Something plain I suppose, and ordinary. Well, I shan’t want to look frivolous and uncaring, shall I? Women getting the vote is important – to be taken seriously.’

‘And you agree with it, miss – that some women should be given the vote?’

‘Not some women – all women over twenty-one. And not given it. It should be theirs by right.’

‘Yes, miss. I’ll put out the blue costume and the pale blue blouse, then?’

‘Whatever you think. And Hawthorn – nothing will happen tonight and, anyway, there mightn’t even be a meeting because they don’t exactly advertise them now. Wouldn’t do to have the police waiting to stop it before it had even started, now would it? So don’t look so worried.’

‘All right.’ There wasn’t anything else to say, come to think of it, because tonight something would happen, she was sure of it, though whether good or bad or a mixing of both, she couldn’t for the life of her tell. But they would be there, the two of them, at Speakers Corner, hoping to find a meeting. And finding trouble, like as not …

‘Thank you, Mary.’ Helen Sutton smiled as the parlourmaid set down a tray bearing afternoon tea.

‘Is it muffins?’ Her son lifted the plate cover.

‘No, it is not. Muffins are consolation for winter, Giles. It’s May, now, so it’s egg-and-cress sandwiches, I hope. Now pour my tea, won’t you? I feel like being spoiled today.’

‘What did my sister say in her letter?’ Giles Sutton demanded, passing the cup.

‘Julia seems to be having a grand time and says that Hawthorn is, too.’

‘Dear little Hawthorn. I miss her.’

‘Don’t you mean that you miss her looking after your dog?’

‘Well, I’ve got to admit that Morgan misses her too, but giving him his outings does get me out, once in a while.’

‘I don’t know why you spend so much time in that dull old library.’

‘I like it there.’ He liked the library better than any room in the house: the smell of old books and wax-polished furniture, the slow, soothing tick of the clock, and dust-motes hanging sunlit on the still air. Peace, there, and words for the reading. It was all he ever wanted, come to think of it, except to go to his father’s old college at Cambridge. ‘But how do you feel, Mother, now that it’s all behind you?’ He referred, hesitantly, to her period of mourning. ‘It’s good to see you out of that dreary black.’

‘That dreary black was necessary. I wore it for your father, Giles. Not because society demanded I should, but because it suited my mood.’

‘You still miss him, don’t you, dearest?

‘I miss him.’ And not so old, yet, that she didn’t want him, too, and the comfort of his nearness. ‘And I don’t know what your father would have thought to both his sons still being unmarried. One son interested only in tea-growing, and the other never so happy as when he’s got his nose in a book!’

But they were men, both of them, for all that. It was just that neither had yet decided upon a suitable wife. And at least they didn’t flaunt their masculinity like some not so far from this very house. Why, even the other night at Clementina Sutton’s dinner party, Elliot hadn’t been able to keep his eyes – or his hands, if she hadn’t been mistaken – off the parlourmaid who helped at table. She could almost feel sorry for her brother-in-law’s wife and the embarrassment their eldest son must cause her.

‘Why the sigh, Mother?’

‘Nothing, really. Just a sigh. A coincidence, I suppose, that I happened to be thinking about your cousin.’

‘Elliot? It’s a butcher’s daughter now, I believe. And trouble, so I heard.’

‘Giles! You mustn’t listen to kitchen gossip!’

‘Not even when it’s true? They were talking about it in the stables. I heard them. The man’s a fool. Why can’t he do his carrying-on in London, though I suppose he’s at it there, too, when it gets too hot for him around here.’

‘I think you’re right. One of these days, Elliot will find himself in real trouble.’

‘Which he’ll be promptly bought out of with old Nathan’s money.’

‘I fear so.’ She stirred her tea reflectively. ‘What that young man needs is a good whipping, and more’s the pity his father doesn’t give him one before he’s beyond redemption.’

‘Don’t blame his father. Like me, Uncle Edward was born a second son.’

‘And second sons must shift for themselves – I know; though it seems that both you and your uncle would have been better suited to the academic life. For Edward it was a choice of the army or the Church – so the poor man chose Clementina.’

‘Aunt Clemmy chose him, don’t you mean?’ Giles laughed, making his mother wonder why this serious, bookish son of hers didn’t laugh more often, and why he didn’t marry and give her grandchildren; for it seemed that her other son, whose duty it was to provide an heir, had little intention of doing so in the foreseeable future.

‘Must go, dearest,’ Giles kissed his mother’s cheek with affection, ‘and give Morgan his outing. When will Hawthorn be back?’

‘Not for a while yet; and Giles,’ Helen murmured, eyeing his pocket with mock severity, ‘that animal will always be fat if you insist on spoiling him with titbits.’

‘Just a macaroon. He’s very fond of them.’ He grinned, boyishly disarming, which made his mother love him all the more and send up a small prayer of thanks that her younger son at least did not prefer India to the springtime greenness of Rowangarth.

Rowangarth. So dear to her. Built more than three hundred years ago at the time of King James’s dissertation on witches and the evils of their craft. Small, by some standards, for the home of a gentleman of ancient title, but built square and solid against the northern weather, and with a rowan tree planted at all four aspects of the house, for witches feared the rowan tree and gave it a wide berth, their early ancestor had reasoned. And should a rowan tree die of age or be uprooted in a high wind, another was always planted in its place. It was still the custom, and thus far the Suttons had prospered, having had no generation without a male heir, so the descent was direct and ever would be, Helen Sutton fervently hoped. And above all else, Rowangarth was a happy place in which to live – which was more than could be said for her brother-in-law’s home, if one could call Pendenys Place a home.

‘Pendenys,’ she murmured, shaking her head. Completed little more than twenty-five years ago, the newness was still on it, with its carefully arranged trees little more than saplings still, and the house proud and cold and loveless. It made her feel sorry for her husband’s younger brother, and the need for him to love where money lay. Edward Sutton had not been cut out for clerical orders, and even to think of being a soldier had left him cold with apprehension. So he had married Clementina, daughter of Nathan Elliot, an Ironmaster of prodigious wealth, whose ambitions for his only child were boundless. Thus brass, so local talk insisted, had married breeding, as so often happened these days.

Clementina had come to Edward Sutton possessed of a dowry that built Pendenys Place. The house had been named for Clementina’s grandmother, Cornish-born Mary Anne Pendennis who, talk had it, had scrimped and saved and even taken in washing to help fund that first, long-ago Elliot foundry.

Yet Clementina had done her duty by her marriage contract, Helen admitted with scrupulous fairness, and had given Edward three sons in as many years, then straight away closed her bedroom door to him, enabling him to live his own life again, more or less, and return, duty done, to his beloved books. And his wife, secure in her loveless marriage, ruled Pendenys like the martinet she was, doing exactly as she pleased, for it was she who paid the piper.

Helen clucked impatiently, wishing Clementina would mellow just a little, be less belligerent. Clemmy was so insular; could not forgive anyone she deemed better born than herself; still clung unconsciously to her roots and sheltered behind the power her father’s money gave her. Defiantly, she had called her first son Elliot, determined her maiden name should not be forgotten; her second-born she named for her father, Nathan, and her third child for her father’s father, Albert. Her eldest son wanted for nothing, and coveted only one thing: the knighthood his father had not received, despite the many and bountiful donations made by his mother to Queen Victoria’s favourite charities.

Now Elliot secretly hoped that pestilence would strike down his Rowangarth cousins Robert and Giles, thus ensuring the baronetcy would pass, eventually, to him. Not, Helen frowned, that she could be sure that Elliot thought it, but she was as certain as she could be that he did.

‘And her servants,’ Helen confided to the vase of lilac reflected in the window-table. ‘She screams at her servants, too.’

Clementina harangued her domestic staff as no lady would ever do. Reprimands to servants should be given to the housekeeper to pass on, for a lady never stooped to such behaviour. Not ever, Helen sighed. And now, she supposed, she must return Clementina’s kindness – if kindness the recent dinner invitation to Pendenys had been – and ask her to Rowangarth. And since her husband would find an excuse to decline, he being so embarrassed by his wife’s loud voice, and since it always left him pained to visit the home he had been born in; it would be Elliot Sutton who would accompany his mother to Rowangarth, and his braying laugh and doubtful jokes would be a discomfort to all, except to his doting mother.

Helen set down her cup. The tea had gone cold and she decided against sending for a fresh pot. The servants would be taking their own tea now, and it wasn’t kind to send one of them hurrying to answer her ring.

She sighed again, tears rising to her eyes. Instantly, she blinked them away. ‘Oh, John,’ she whispered to the empty room, ‘I do so miss you, my dearest.’

Alice held the flat-iron an inch from her cheek, satisfying herself it was hot enough, then rubbed it in the tray of powdered bathbrick to clean and polish it, relieved that Miss Julia’s blue costume had travelled well, with hardly a crease in it to press out.

She glanced around the kitchen, easily the largest room in the house, at the brown sinkstone and shining brass taps; at the wooden plate rack above it; the red-tiled floor and the white, bright paintwork. All this pretty little house was white. It was the new fashion, Julia said. There was white furniture, too, in the bedrooms, and pots and pots of ferns: aspidistras were completely out of favour, now. It was so different, this light, bright house compared to Rowangarth in the far-away north.

To recall her home – for Rowangarth was her home now, and she wanted never to leave it, except with Tom – brought a pang of longing for the ages-old house that lay gently in a fold of the hills, sheltered and secure.

Rowangarth had been built with mellow stone, pillaged from a roofless priory nearby. It was an early Jacobean house, with mullioned windows and twisted chimneys. Inside there was oak in plenty – wall panels, staircases and uneven floorboards – and rooms built smaller for warmth in winter yet with high, wide windows to let in the summer sun. Rowangarth smelled of wax polish and musty tapestries and wood fires, and of smoke, too, when the wind blew from the south – which wasn’t often – hitting Holdenby Pike and gusting down chimneys to send smoke and soot billowing. But mostly the wind blew from the north-east; a fire-whipping wind that sucked smoke from the ancient flues and reddened fires and heated ovens with no bother at all. Rowangarth was a winter house that wrapped itself around those who lived there; Aunt Sutton’s house was a bright, summertime house that had once been part of the stables at the back of Montpelier Place. Stables, indeed, and Miss Anne Lavinia Sutton a lady born!

But perhaps it was one of Miss Julia’s jokes. You never knew when to believe her and when to take what she said with a pinch of salt, for she was always teasing or laughing, though once she had given up her tomboy ways she would grow into a very beautiful lady. Miss Julia was fair-to-middling now, but mark Cook’s words, those beautiful bones of hers would come into their own before so very much longer, and there’d be young men killing themselves for love of her. And when, Cook had plaintively demanded, was the girl going to get herself wed? There was nothing Cook would like better than a wedding at Rowangarth, now milady’s mourning was over, with dinner parties beforehand and such a wedding feast that the skill of Rowangarth’s Mrs Shaw would be the talk of the Riding for years to come; the yardstick by which all other wedding feasts were measured!

Alice smiled down at the blue jacket, shook it gently, then draped it on a chair-back. Blue of any shade suited Miss Julia; it seemed to shade her grey eyes and make them look larger than ever. Julia Sutton’s eyes were beautiful, and her brown hair waved softly so it was a pleasure to dress and hardly ever needed hot tongs.

Alice wondered if she should press her long scarf, for didn’t folk say it could be draughty on that Underground railway, and mightn’t it be wise if she were to tie down her hat?

She sighed, wishing the trip on the tube train had never been mentioned, though it was safe as houses she was assured, with people riding on the Underground every day of the week. And what Miss Julia said was doubtless correct: that she would be glad that she had done it. It wasn’t given to many around Holdenby to ride on a tube train, even though Alice didn’t think it natural to burrow beneath a city like moles.

Carefully she carried the costume upstairs, laying it over the bed with the blouse, then took out a clean chemise and drawers and black silk stockings. Later, she would help Miss Julia to dress, pulling and tugging at her corset laces from the back until the girl cried, ‘Enough!’ and was satisfied with the shape nature had never intended her to be. Corsets, said Julia, were the very devil, and one day women would refuse to wear them, just see if they didn’t! It was good, Alice smiled, that the dress of servants was far less bothersome; good that her shape was her own.

Closing the bedroom door she took the narrow, twisting stairs to the attic in which she slept, thinking of the costume in finest grey flannel she had been given.

‘Take it, for I’m sick and tired of black and grey!’ Julia Sutton had said when her mourning for her father came to an end. Children were luckier than their elders; needed only to shut themselves away in drabness for one year, not three. ‘And take this black skirt, if you’d like it, and these white blouses!’

Alice had gratefully accepted such bounty, for were not grey and black the colours servants wore, and mightn’t it be fine, now that she and Tom were walking out officially, to have so beautiful a costume to wear for him; to walk proudly at his side in, with pink satin roses on her hat?

Tom. Thomas Dwerryhouse. Her cheeks pinked just to think of him; to think how she missed him and loved him and how very much she wanted him to kiss her. And though she was enjoying every minute of her stay in London, she wouldn’t complain when they boarded the train for home. And meantime, there was Miss Julia’s shoes to polish, and her own boots too, and a meal to prepare before their evening outing.

Life was all rush and bustle. Life was wonderful!

They walked through Hyde Park in the direction of Marble Arch and Speakers Corner, looking like young ladies of quality, Alice thought with delight, with Miss Julia stepping daintily because of her fashionable long hobble skirt, and herself in the grey flannel and a flower-trimmed hat.

‘What a beautiful evening, Hawthorn. It’s much warmer here than at home.’

It was, Alice had to admit, with none of the northern sharpness in the early night air. It was a perfect evening in every way, because even if they did find a meeting and even if the police got wind of it, they’d just take to their heels and run, wouldn’t they, laughing at the fun of it, though sad that it would be one adventure that neither would ever dare speak about when they were back home again. But Rowangarth and parental authority were a long way away, and this was a May evening in London, and they still had a week to run before they must leave it all behind.

She wondered what she would say to Tom after so long apart, and he to her. Maybe, though, there would be no need for words; just a whispered ‘Hullo’, and she closing her eyes and lifting her chin, the better, the sweeter for him to kiss her. It was, she thought happily, so nice to stroll companionably at Miss Julia’s side and daydream of Tom.

The sooner a woman took charge of her own destiny, Julia reasoned silently, the better; though if the men who ruled their lives had anything to do with it, she would wait long and maybe in vain, for even though a woman was now allowed by law to keep her own money when she married, she still belonged to her father in her youth and to her husband in marriage. A woman, she frowned, was allowed no opinions of her own. Politics was men’s business.

‘I think here will do nicely.’ She stopped at a bench on which they could sit and wait and later stand so they might miss nothing of the speakers, if any speakers arrived, that was, and were not discovered by the police – which they almost certainly would be. ‘And all this is our own fault, Hawthorn,’ she fretted. ‘We are our own worst enemies. We come into this world precisely made for the bearing of children, and men take advantage of the fact!’

Women, she reasoned, died too young, worn out by too many pregnancies. ‘You must have no more babies,’ doctors would warn, but women were never told how, for birth control and the advocating of it was illegal, and those women who campaigned for the vote were still dependent on the indulgence of a government made up entirely of men. And men were afraid that a vote would give women an undue advantage, for weren’t there far more women than men? To allow a woman such a weapon would be nothing short of madness; a surrender, some even went so far as to say, to bitchpower.

‘And I’ll tell you something else, Hawthorn. Until women can have babies when they want them, if they want them, we’ll never get anywhere!’

‘Miss! Don’t talk like that,’ Alice wailed. ‘You’ll get us locked up. Having babies is what women are for!’ Who ever heard of a man having a baby? ‘It’s what the good God intended us to do!’ It was as plain as the nose on your face, and nothing – not even giving a woman two votes – would change it.

‘Did He now? Intended us to be wives and providers of heirs. And to scrub and clean, too, and be grateful to some man for putting a ring on our finger? A servant for life, that’s what you’ll be, and me not so much better!’

‘But, Miss Julia, that’s what I am. Being a servant is all I’ve ever known and I – I think I shall like very much being married,’ she hesitated. ‘I want to marry Tom.’ She could think of nothing nicer, in fact, than having her own home – her very own home – and being beholden to no one. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Tom? You haven’t got a young man,’ Julia gasped. ‘Oh, not Dwerryhouse? But, Hawthorn, they’re all in love with Dwerryhouse!’

‘Then I’m the lucky one, aren’t I? Because Tom and me are walking out seriously. On the night milady went to Pendenys – that was when he asked me. And I said yes, so those others had better find someone else to be in love with!’

‘Oh, my dear, I’m so glad for you, I truly am. You lucky girl! Are you really in love? Really and truly, I mean?’

‘I don’t know, miss, and that’s for sure. It’s the first time it’s happened to me, and the last, I hope. But if being in love makes you feel contented all over, and special, and if the sun comes out every time you see him – even on a rainy day – then yes, I suppose I am.

‘Mind, I haven’t told anyone, yet. Not even Cousin Reuben. Tom and me can’t marry, you see, till Reuben retires. There’ll be nowhere for us to live till then. And I’m only eighteen, so that gives me three years to get used to it and to –’

‘To be quite sure you’re both suited?’

‘Yes. Though I know we are. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life before.’

‘Then I envy you. I would so like to be in love,’ Julia sighed. ‘Not engaged, or anything. Not something arranged by the families, but a real romance and me knowing, the moment I set eyes on him, that he’s the one. And I shall know. The minute I see him, I’ll know …’

‘The minute,’ Alice confirmed, yet wondering why, when Miss Julia had been presented at Court, something didn’t happen for her then. After all, that’s what it was really about. The season in London was really a marriage-market, and the gentry, if they were honest, would be the first to admit it. Most young ladies of Julia Sutton’s age and station in life were wedded and bedded by now – aye, and some were with child. ‘Hadn’t you thought to meet your husband when –’

‘When I ought to have done, you mean; when I made my curtsey to the King and Queen and had my London season?’

‘Well – yes …’

‘Ah, but Hawthorn, at the beginning of my season, Pa was killed and there was an end to my coming-out before it had hardly begun. Mourning for a year for me, and for Aunt Sutton too. And three years in purdah for my mother. Betrothal and marriage just don’t arise when a house is in mourning.