Page 36 of Rivals at Ashmore Castle

When she had later relayed that to her friends, Lady Clemmie had seemed doubtful about the timetable, but Bobby had said robustly, ‘It might be impossible for the likes of you and me, Clem, but a millionaire can always get things done.’

Nina, slightly shocked, had asked him at dinner that night if he really was a millionaire, and he had looked embarrassed and said, ‘I don’t like that word, but I suppose I am. All it means, really, is that I’ve got enough to give you anything you want, to take care of you the way you deserve.’

Nina had grown accustomed to the fact that her husband was a rich man, but a millionaire? A million was a number outside ordinary life, almost beyond comprehension. A hundred pounds a year would be a reasonable wage for a bank clerk. He could keep a family on it. Over a lifetime he might earn five thousand pounds or so. How could you begin to count a million pounds, let alone spend it?

Mr Cowling had wanted Nina to move to London while the building was going on, but she had not wanted to travel in her condition, and the entertainments of London would have been wasted on her, since she didn’t like to go out in public. She had wanted to stay at home, but the noise and dust made it impossible. The result was this rented house in St Mary’s Road in the centre of Market Harborough, small, but quite well appointed. And now he had to go away on business for a couple of weeks.

‘Better I’m away now and get things settled, so I can be here when the baby comes,’ he’d explained.

She had hardly waved him goodbye when Lady Clemmie, whose house was just around the corner, arrived with a bunch of flowers from her garden and a small, thin woman whom she introduced as Aggie Summers. ‘She’s staying with me, down from London, and I wanted to introduce her to you. I hope you don’t mind?’

Mrs Summers was one of the few paid organisers of the Women’s Social and Political Union, working with their small Central London committee – the leading Pankhursts were still, for various reasons, largely operating from Manchester. ‘Aggie’s been working too hard and made herself ill, so I insisted she come here for a few days to convalesce,’ Clemmie said.

Nina rang for refreshments, and asked Mrs Summers politely how things were going. ‘I believe you had great hopes of the new Labour Party,’ she said. ‘Twenty-nine Members of Parliament, isn’t it? They must make a big difference.’

‘You’d think so,’ Aggie replied – she had a flat voice and a Lancashire accent – ‘but most of ’em got in through a pact with the Liberals, so they don’t want to upset them. Christabel calls ’em Government Poodles. And the Liberals have got such a big majority they don’t need to court suffragists for support.’

‘They’ve a substantial reforming programme of their own that they want to get on with,’ Clemmie said. ‘They haven’t time for us.’

Aggie told about the rally they had organised in London on the day of the King’s Speech, the 19th of February. ‘We wanted to have a march to Trafalgar Square, but the police wouldn’t allow it, so we hired the Caxton Hall – it’s only half a mile from the Houses of Parliament, so we’d get the news quick of what was in the speech. Some of us worried that the Caxton was too big, that if we only got a handful of people it’d look a proper failure and we’d be laughed at. But we managed to get some money together.’ She looked fondly at Clemmie.

‘Oh, I helped a little,’ she said shyly. ‘I wish I could have afforded more.’

‘Well, thanks to people like her, we got enough to pay the bus fares of three hundred women from the East End – and give them tea and buns. And in the end, word of the rally got round and a lot of respectable middle-class London ladies came, so we were nearly full by the time the speeches started.’

‘But the King’s Speech contained nothing on votes for women,’ Clemmie said.

‘Well, we didn’t have much hope,’ said Aggie. ‘If they wouldn’t promise it during the election campaign, why would they promise it after they’d won? But we got some good publicity out of it. The Daily Mirror wanted photographs, so Annie Kenney, Sylvia and me organised a procession from the tube station at St James’s Park to Caxton Hall, and the Mirror covered both their front and back pages with it.’

‘The Daily Mirror – that’s Lord Northcliffe’s newspaper, isn’t it?’ said Nina. Mr Cowling had mentioned him, having met him several times. ‘Is he a supporter of votes for women? That would be very useful.’

‘I don’t suppose he gives a damn about it,’ Aggie said frankly, ‘but it’s a picture paper, so he’s got to have pictures. Our procession filled two pages for him for nothing.’

Clemmie said, ‘Don’t mind Aggie. She isn’t nearly as cynical as she sounds. You have to have hope, or you wouldn’t go on.’

‘Aye, well, it’s not going to happen tomorrow, Clem. It’s going to be a long job.’

‘So what’s happening now?’ Nina asked.

‘When the King’s Speech let us down, the committee decided to ask for an interview with the prime minister,’ said Clemmie. ‘Of course, he refused.’

‘So some of us marched up Downing Street and camped ourselves outside his door, just so he knew we weren’t going to go quietly,’ said Aggie.

‘Two of them actually managed to slip inside,’ said Clemmie.

‘And got thrown straight out again!’

‘Then Annie Kenney jumped up on the prime minister’s motor-car to make a speech—’

‘And all three got arrested.’

‘But the prime minister intervened and asked the police to release them without charge.’

‘That was nice of him,’ Nina said. She had heard of some suffragists being sent to prison, and the idea of a woman in prison was horrible.

Aggie shrugged. ‘We’d had all those pictures in the paper, you see. He claimed we do things just to get notoriety, and he said it would be giving us what we wanted to put us up in front of a magistrate, so we’d to be let off. It was like he was ignoring a child’s tantrum. They don’t take us seriously.’

‘Yet,’ said Clemmie. ‘The time will come…’