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 thatWOMEN 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,henever 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 likethat.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.
