“In 1899 I was appointed to the office of Registrar of Births and Deaths in Manchester. Even after my experience on the Board of Guardians I was shocked to be reminded over and over again of what little respect there was in the world for women and children. I have had little girls of thirteen come to my office to register the births of their babies-illegitimate, of course. There was nothing that could be done in most cases. The age of consent is sixteen years, but a man can usually claim that he thought the girl was over sixteen. During my term of office, a very young mother of an illegitimate child exposed her baby and it died. The girl was tried for murder and sentenced to death. The man who was, from the point of view of justice, the real murderer of the baby received no punishment at all.

“Many times in those days I asked myself what was to be done. I had joined the Labor Party, thinking that through its councils something vital might come, some demand for women’s enfranchisement that the politicians could not possibly ignore. Nothing came.

“All those years my daughters had been growing up. One day Christabel startled me with the remark: ‘How long you women have been trying for the vote. For my part, I mean to get it.’ Since that day I have had two mottoes. One has been: ‘Votes for women.’ The other: ‘For my part, I mean to get it!’ ”

Someone shouted: “So do I!” and there was another outburst of cheering and clapping. Charlotte was feeling dazed. It was as if she, like Alice in the story, had walked through the looking glass and found herself in a world where nothing was what it seemed. When she had read in the newspapers about suffragettes, no mention had been made of the Poor Law, of thirteen-year-old mothers (was it possible?) or of little girls catching bronchitis in the workhouse. Charlotte would have believed none of it had she not seen with her own eyes Annie, a decent, ordinary maid from Norfolk, sleeping on a London pavement after being “ruined” by a man. What did a few broken windows matter while this sort of thing was going on?

“It was many years before we lighted the torch of militancy. We had tried every other measure, and our years of work and suffering and sacrifice had taught us that the Government would not yield to right and justice, but it would yield to expediency. We had to make every department of English life insecure and unsafe. We had to make English law a failure and the courts theaters of farce; we had to discredit the Government in the eyes of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt business, destroy valuable property, demoralize the world of society, shame the churches, upset the whole orderly conduct of life! We had to do as much of this guerrilla warfare as the people of England would tolerate. When they come to the point of saying to the Government: ‘Stop this, in the only way it can be stopped, by giving the women of England representation,’ then we should extinguish our torch.

“The great American statesman Patrick Henry summed up the causes that led to the American revolution like this: ‘We have petitioned, we have remonstrated, we have supplicated, we have prostrated ourselves at the foot of the throne, and it has all been in vain. We must fight-I repeat it, sir, we must fight.’ Patrick Henry was advocating killing people as the proper means of securing the political freedom of men. The suffragettes have not done that and never will. In fact, the moving spirit of militancy is a deep and abiding reverence for human life.

“It was in this spirit that our women went forth to war last year. On January thirty-first a number of putting greens were burned with acids. On February seventh and eighth telegraph and telephone wires were cut in several places and for some hours all communication between London and Glasgow was suspended. A few days later windows in various of London’s smartest clubs were broken, and the orchid houses at Kew were wrecked and many valuable blooms destroyed by cold. The jewel room at the Tower of London was invaded and a showcase broken. On February eighteenth a country house that was being built on Walton-on-the-Hill for Mr. Lloyd George was partially destroyed, a bomb having been exploded in the early morning before the arrival of the workmen.

“Over one thousand women have gone to prison in the course of this agitation, have suffered their imprisonment, have come out of prison injured in health, weakened in body but not in spirit. Not one of those women would, if women were free, be lawbreakers. They are women who seriously believe that the welfare of humanity demands this sacrifice. They believe that the horrible evils which are ravaging our civilization will never be removed until women get the vote. There is only one way to put a stop to this agitation; there is only one way to break down this agitation. It is not by deporting us!”

“No!” someone shouted.

“It is not by locking us up in jail!”

The whole crowd shouted: “No!”

“It is by doing us justice!”

“Yes!”

Charlotte found herself shouting with the rest. The little woman on the platform seemed to radiate righteous indignation. Her eyes blazed, she clenched her fists, she tilted up her chin, and her voice rose and fell with emotion.

“The fire of suffering whose flame is upon our sisters in prison is burning us also. For we suffer with them, we partake of their affliction, and we shall share their victory by-and-by. This fire will breathe into the ear of many a sleeper the one word ‘Awake,’ and she will arise to slumber no more. It will descend with the gift of tongues upon many who have hitherto been dumb, and they will go forth to preach the news of deliverance. Its light will be seen afar off by many who suffer and are sorrowful and oppressed, and will irradiate their lives with a new hope. For the spirit which is in women today cannot be quenched; it is stronger than all tyranny, cruelty and oppression; it is stronger-even-than-death-itself!”

During the day a dreadful suspicion had dawned on Lydia.

After lunch she had gone to her room to lie down. She had been unable to think about anything but Feliks. She was still vulnerable to his magnetism: it was foolish to pretend otherwise. But she was no longer a helpless girl. She had resources of her own. And she was determined that she would not lose control, would not let Feliks wreck the placid life she had so carefully made for herself.

She thought of all the questions she had not asked him. What was he doing in London? How did he earn his living? How had he known where to find her?

He had given Pritchard a false name. Clearly he had been afraid that she would not let him in. She realized why “Konstantin Dmitrich Levin” had seemed familiar: it was the name of a character in Anna Karenina, the book she had been buying when she first met Feliks. It was an alias with a double meaning, a sly mnemonic which lit up a host of dim memories, like a taste recalled from childhood. They had argued about the novel. It was brilliantly real, Lydia had said, for she knew what it was like when passion was released in the soul of a respectable woman; Anna was Lydia. But the book was not about Anna, said Feliks; it was about Levin and his search for the answer to the question: “How should I live?” Tolstoy’s answer was: “In your heart you know what is right.” Feliks argued that it was this kind of empty-headed morality-deliberately ignorant of history, economics and psychology-which had led to the utter incompetence and degeneracy of the Russian ruling class. That was the night they ate pickled mushrooms and she tasted vodka for the first time. She had been wearing a turquoise dress which turned her gray eyes blue. Feliks had kissed her toes, and then-

Yes, he was sly, to remind her of all that.

Had he been in London a long time, she wondered, or had he come just to see Aleks? There was presumably a reason for approaching an admiral in London about the release of a sailor imprisoned in Russia. For the first time it occurred to Lydia that Feliks might not have told her the truth about that. After all, he was still an anarchist. In 1895 he had been determinedly nonviolent, but he might have changed.