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as brave and strong as they were! For their sake, Maya could not take the easy route of condemning the whole sex-only those who were too cowardly, weak, and ignorant to bear the thought of losing their domination over those that should have been their partners. At last their goal came within sight. Parliament, where the marchers were going to lay their coffin, fill it with stones until it was too heavy to lift, and some of the women were going to chain themselves to it and to the railings of the stairs and the fences. These women would be arrested and dragged off to prison, of course, where they would also go on hunger strikes, and be force-fed- And die, perhaps. Until shame overtakes those in authority and the murdering stops! Amelia worked her way up through the marchers to Maya's side. "As soon as we gather and start to fill the coffin, you and I need to slip off," Amelia said quietly, under the muffled drumming and the shouts. "I feel horrible to leave them," Maya said, looking about her at the determined faces of the women around her. "You and I fight the fight where we are working, and we are needed there," Amelia told her, although she, too, looked guiltily at the others who marched past them and began to solemnly place the stones each one carried into the now-open coffin. "Who would take our place, guarding the Bridgets and the Alices of London from the Clayton- Smythes and Simon Par-kenings who treat them like so many disposable experiments?" Maya sighed and nodded, although it was hard to leave those others here to face whatever fate and the police had in store for them. Hidden from the jeering onlookers by the other women around them, they removed their sashes and handed them to one of the others-nor were they the only ones who were taking off sashes and blending back into the crowd. The drummers formed a semicircle, continuing the death-march rhythm and distracting the eyes from those who were slipping away. Now that the marchers had reached Parliament, there were other people thronging the streets than merely those who had gathered to jeer, and it was much easier to move to the edge of the group and slip off to hide among them. Most of the women here would not be among those who courted arrest. Several, like Amelia and Maya, would not even remain here unchained to risk it. But she still felt horribly guilty as she tucked her stethoscope into her bag and squeezed past a couple- a nursemaid and her beau-who were craning their necks to see what was going on to cause such an uproar. Once past the crowd, she and Amelia walked briskly away, unmolested even by those who had been shouting at them a few moments before. Without that white sash branding them as suffragettes, men looked right past them as things of no threat, and hence, no importance. And perhaps that spoke of their contempt and disregard for all women even more than the shouting. It certainly spoke eloquently of their blindness. THE summons came just after sunset and found Peter Scott at his flat; a moment later, he was on a 'bus, figuring that the odds of finding a cab at that time of the evening in his neighborhood were pretty remote. He only had to change 'buses twice, when it all came down to cases, and the 'bus was just as fast as a cab would have been. He swung himself off the back steps of the 'bus at the corner as it paused to make the turn, and trotted all the way to the club. He met another of the club members, young Reginald Fenyx, on the steps of the Exeter Club, as a third and fourth climbed grim-faced out of cabs behind him. The summons tonight had come in the person of a human messenger boy carrying an envelope with his name on it, not in some arcane fashion, and it had been marked "urgent." Only twice since he had been invited to join the White Lodge had he gotten such a summons, and both times the situation had, indeed, been urgent. "Do you know what this is about?" he asked Reggie Fenyx, holding open the door for the younger man. "Not a clue, I'm afraid," the latter replied, with a shake of his head. "I'd only just got to our town house, down from Oxford on the train, when the lad rang the bell. The card was for Pater as well, but he's down in Devon, and pretty well out of range for something that's urgent." "Whatever it is, they've called in every member that's in London," put in one of the men who had just arrived by cab. "I'm not certain how the Old Man knew that I was back in town." "I think he's just sending boys around with cards and a list of addresses," opined the fourth, as they all passed the guests' dining room, the Club Room, the public dining room, and headed for the stairs that would take them to the second-floor War Room. The War Room took up half of the second floor, which shared the floor with the private rooms of Lord Alderscroft and Lord Owlswick. Both peers were already in the War Room, along with more members of the Council of the White Lodge than Peter had ever seen before together at once. There was a table here, at which about half of those assembled were seated, with the rest standing behind them. As yet, no one had donned the robes that hung on pegs along one wall, but every member wore whatever mystic jewels he deemed necessary in an emergency situation. In the case of Lord Alderscroft, that was nothing more than his signet ring; in the case of the weedy squire [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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