March 30, 1912
London, England
The newspaper sits between us like a third person at the table. I smooth my celadon-green gown and sip the steaming tea, my calm exterior belying my interior. My stomach churns in anticipation of Winston’s reaction. He has yet to reveal a single feeling, not even about my decision to abandon bed rest five days before the doctor’s orders.
He sips at his afternoon port while studying the whist cards. We have assumed this relaxed posture at our games table in an almost studied indifference to the folded copy of the Times sitting at the table’s center for nearly half an hour. I assume he’s read the paper, as it’s his daily habit to review it cover to cover before leaving for Parliament. And even if, for some odd reason, he deviated from his ritual, certainly his fellow members of Parliament read it.
He clears his throat and finishes his drink. Here it comes, I think.
“You know you needn’t have written an editorial to the Times to get my attention, my kitten,” he says, keeping his eyes fixed on the cards. His tone is a perfect modulation of serenity, yet I sense another note in his voice. Do I hear a hint of anger? Or is it amusement? I say a silent prayer for the latter, but I don’t soften my posture.
“Oh?” I ask, the picture of innocence, as I play my hand.
“Of course not.” He places his cards on the table and reaches for my free hand.
“These days, one wonders,” I answer, allowing my fingers to rest on his hand but not clasping back. And I do not meet his eyes.
“I know this illness has been hard on you, and I admit that I should not have gone to the Asquiths without you. But you have no cause to harbor any suspicions. My heart belongs to you utterly, and I will never love anyone but you.” He lifts my fingertips to his lips and kisses them one by one. “Of that, you can be certain.”
“Oh, my dear Pug, thank you for your reassurances. Sometimes, the formidable family history of infidelity—on both sides—lodges itself in my consciousness.”
“You have nothing to fear with me, Cat.”
Relief softens through my rigid, anxious limbs, and I am glad my missive has been received and understood. That I cannot tolerate infidelity, either physical or emotional. Winston now knows, if he did not before, that I will do my utmost to serve by his side and run our home—using sleights of hand to hide our financial state—but I will not permit him to scamper off at another woman’s bidding when I am laid low. Even if that woman’s father is the prime minister.
“Your piece caused quite the furor in Parliament.”
I feel my eyebrow arch quizzically, and this expression prompts him to continue.
“Oh yes, Clemmie. You really know how to grab the reader from the opening lines.” He relinquishes my hand and reaches for the newspaper. “I mean, it was sheer genius to reframe the question that Sir Almroth Wright poses in his preposterous article—changing it from whether women should be given the vote to whether women should exist at all due to their many deficiencies, the ones Sir Almroth Wright alleges should prevent them from voting. It really lays bare the ridiculousness of his argument.”
He chuckles, and I laugh along with him. Then he recites the opening lines of my Times salvo, and they sound ironic and powerful—not strident, as I’d worried they might seem. I wonder if the members of Parliament took the rest of the piece well.
He continues reciting from the article. Laughter escaping from him, he reads aloud from the section in which I pretend that—given the litany of faults and instabilities Sir Almroth Wright attributes to women—we should extrapolate from Wright’s contentions and just eliminate women altogether.
A loud guffaw escapes from my lips, startling Winston. Had I really written that? How bold of me, I think. It hadn’t seemed quite so audacious while I was drafting the piece, but then I’d been fueled by fury.
“Oh, Clemmie, the next bit is positively withering,” Winston comments with undisguised glee and then reads aloud again, this time from the section in which I posit the question as to whether we could perpetuate the human race without women since—according to Sir Almroth Wright—women are fatally flawed. “Brilliantly scathing, Clemmie. The PM thinks so too.”
“He does?” I am shocked. Asquith does not show even a smidgen of sympathy for women’s rights or suffrage, and I thought Winston would suffer at his hands when he learned—as everyone undoubtedly would—that the article’s anonymous author “CSC” was indeed the wife of his very own admiralty lord. “I wouldn’t have thought his view of suffrage extended so far.”
“You don’t have to be a suffragist to know that this Sir Almroth Wright fellow is a bloody fool and he is deserving of a dressing-down.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Asquith went even further though, Cat. He insinuated that it was the best piece he’s read on the issues surrounding women for quite some time.”
“Did he indeed?”
“Oh yes. Not that it changed his position on women’s suffrage, of course.”
“Did he know I was the author?”
“Once I told him,” he says with a mischievous gleam in his eye. I see now that Winston waited for the prime minister’s reaction, then dropped his bit of news upon him.
I feel my cheeks flush, and I am suffused with pleasure. My piece, written in a fit of pique, had had an even farther-reaching impact than I’d intended. Perhaps if the prime minister finally stamps his seal of approval upon me, Violet will be forced to follow suit and abandon her overtures to Winston, once and for all. And not only Winston—but Violet—will understand that I am not to be underestimated.