The Sealed Letter Page 4

  Fido sighs. "Well, yes, it needs reform, of course. The entire engulfing of the wife's identity in the husband's—her surrender of property—his almost unlimited rights over her person..." Does her friend even know her true position under British law, Fido wonders—classed with criminals, lunatics, and children? "And so often the wife's I do is neither truly informed nor free."

  Helen is nodding eagerly.

  "We of the Cause—we seek to open careers to women precisely to give them a choice," Fido explains, "so they won't be driven by monetary need into loveless marriage, as some sort of life raft."

  "I thought I was choosing. I thought I loved him," says Helen in a shaking voice. "These December-May matches..."

  "Hardly December. I see you're still absurdly prone to exaggeration," says Fido, trying to lighten the moment.

  "Well, late October, at least. Harry was forty-one, and I barely twenty-one; he might have been my father! A handsome giant in blue and white, with gold lace cuffs," she says wistfully, "posted to shield us Anglo-Florentines from the rebel mob. And I, little Miss Helen Smith, a wide-eyed Desdemona, enchanted by his tales of adventure on the high seas."

  Fido frowns. Helen as Shakespeare's heroine, perhaps, but anyone less like the jealous Moor than the sober, thoroughly English Harry Codrington..." My dear, haven't the years done anything to soften you two to each other?"

  "Oh, you innocent," says Helen. "That's not what years do."

  ***

  The early September morning's still cool. Fido stands in the shower-bath and pulls the lever decisively. The numbing deluge makes her hiss. Afterwards she rubs herself all over with the towel, coughing. So many of her sex spend a week in bed at the least sign of weakness, but in Fido's view, the body's tremendous engine must be kept running.

  Outside, the distinctive clink-clink of the milkwoman's iron-shod boots. She'll be shifting her laden yoke on her shoulders, filling up a half-quart for Miss Faithfull and lowering it on a hook over the railings.

  Fido's still brooding over the conversation at Eccleston Square two days ago. She made a hash of explaining her work, or rather, its contagious excitement. In an age when the system (that hackneyed phrase) is generally said to determine everything, when all social ills are nobody's fault, the women of the Reform Firm—with the men of the Social Science Association and a few other forward-thinking organizations—say, not so! Fido's seen change coming in a single generation; the icy chains of prejudice shaking loose. She toils hard and with pleasure, so that other women may be freed from their set grooves (whether of poverty or boredom, dependence or idleness), freed to toil hard and with pleasure in their turn. This is what gets Fido out of bed by six every morning. So why does she feel she left Helen with the impression that she sits around squabbling with other do-gooders?

  The main office of the Victoria Press is at 9 Great Coram Street, five minutes' brisk walk from the house. (Evacuation of Atlanta Ends Four Month Siege, reads the newsboy's sign, and she considers stopping to recommend a hyphen between four and month.)

  In the typos' room, she pauses to congratulate Gladys Jennings on her recovery from smallpox; the girl's still purple-tinged and marked with scabs that Fido pretends not to see. Then she stops by the desk of Flora Parsons. "This will take half the day to correct," she remarks, handing back the long slip she's marked up in red. "If you'd applied your mind the first time, as Miss Jennings always does—"

  "Beg pardon, ma'am," mutters Flora Parsons, head down, still rapidly plucking sorts from the alphabetical cases.

  "It's not a matter of my pardon," says Fido, exasperated. "I'm merely pointing out why Miss Jennings makes eighteen shillings to your ten. That's the very reason I pay by the piece rather than by the week: to put your earning power in your own hands."

  "You're very good to us, ma'am."

  Fido could hardly miss the sarcasm. This one's a hard case: a workhouse orphan with cream-coloured hair who's been here four years now and is as slapdash as ever. Engaged, already, to one of the junior clickers, Mr. Ned Dunstable, which Fido finds disheartening: young hands are more trainable than their elders, but most won't trouble to master a trade they expect to leave at any moment. "You underestimate yourself, Miss Parsons," she says now, on impulse.

  That makes the blonde typo glance up.

  "It's a marvel to me, for instance, that without any formal schooling, you've such a fine grasp of the language."

  A shrug. "Down to all the copy I've set up, I dare say. What old Robert Owen would call the spread of education."

  Fido stands closer to the desk. "What infuriates me—" She breaks off. "If you really applied your forces," she starts again, "you could be the quickest, most accurate typo here. Save some capital, go into your wedded life on terms at least approaching equality. In fact, I've never hired a married woman yet, but in your case I would consider—"

  Flora Parsons interrupts with a peculiar half-smile. "Ned and I will do perfectly well, thank you, ma'am."

  Without another word, Fido goes back to her office.

  She still does her own correcting; it's hard to find the time. She'd be glad to find an educated lady to take it on—though she's not sure she could afford one, given that six of her apprentices become journeymen this year and will have to be paid half as much again.

  Mr. Head comes in hangdog with the Printer's Journal. "You see here, Miss Faithfull, where the London Society of Compositors is debating a policy of making its members swear not to finish work set up by females?"

  Fido winces. And to think she's had the impression the trade's hostility to her has been fading away, as the years prove that the Victoria Press is not going to depress wages..." Women, if you please, Mr. Head," she says, glancing through the article; "females smacks of the zoo. Do I refer to your sex as males, as if you were orangutans?"

  He grins, but only briefly. "What if the society were to strike the press?"

  Fido takes a long breath before she answers. "Have you received a direct order from your superiors?"

  "No, no," he says, horrified. "They don't know I'm a clicker here."

  It's as if she's running a gambling cellar or opium den. "Well, then, I suggest you put it out of your mind, Mr. Head. If that dark day comes, you'll be obliged to decide whether to let yourself be bullied out of a job that I think you've found both agreeable and profitable."

  He nods unhappily. He makes no move towards the door. "Myself and Mr. Kettle were thinking, perhaps we could change names."

  She blinks at him. "You would be known as Kettle, and he as Head?" (She doesn't like Kettle, as it happens; on occasion she's suspected something fishy about his figures, but she's never had proof.)

  "No, no, we'd both assume false ones, aliases on paper, as it were. So that there'd be no record that it's we who supervise the girls."

  She almost laughs at the atmosphere of skullduggery. "Very well, I'll pay my clickers under any nom de guerre of your choice. May I still address you as Mr. Head and Mr. Kettle, to save confusion?"

  "Certainly, madam, it's just for the books," says Head, sheepish.

  Don't fret, she tells herself when he's gone; she presses her fingers to her hot face. It won't come to a strike. And if it does, well, I've survived worse. Had Fido wanted a peaceful existence, she reminds herself, she could have stayed at home and helped her mother with the parish work.

  With unnecessary violence she slits open some letters, including one from Matthew Arnold apologizing for the lateness of his review of a new translation of Marcus Aurelius. My dear Faithfull is how he addresses her, and she likes the style; in the world of letters, sex shouldn't matter. Emily Davies has forwarded a poem by Miss Rossetti; Fido finds it touching that these authors remain willing to write for the pittance the English Woman's Journal can offer them.

  She spends the next half-hour proofreading an article for the enormous Annual Proceedings of the Social Science Association:

  "Are Men Naturally Cleverer Than Women?"

  Men are superior to
women because they know more, but they have this knowledge because they have three times the opportunities of acquiring it.

  She likes that line; it has a punch to it.

  The boy's tapped three times before she looks up. "A Mrs. Coddleton and a Colonel Anderson, to pay their respects, ma'am."

  "Codrington," a merry voice corrects him from behind the opaque glass of the door.

  Taken aback, on her feet, Fido's all smiles. Helen, here!

  "I badgered poor Anderson to bring me along, since my lord and master's still glued to his papers," Helen explains as she presses her cheek to Fido's in the Continental manner. She's in the tiniest of ivory bonnets today: it's a stray dove perched on her brilliant hair.

  The officer's in mufti, a rather loud waistcoat: the family tartan? Fido wonders. "No badgering was required," he assures her.

  "What fun, Fido, to glimpse you in character," cries Helen, tucking her arm through Fido's as they move through the workroom.

  Fido flinches a little, because the typos will have heard the nickname—then tells herself they must know it already. "That makes it sound as if I'm acting a role."

  Helen's mouth twists. "Oh, don't we each have several selves?"

  And indeed, even as Fido launches into the usual spiel about setting up the press four years ago, "as a practical demonstration to the world of the capacities of women's eyes, fingers, and brains," she's listening to herself with a strange self-consciousness, noting how cool and professional she sounds.

  Helen sniffs the air.

  "Ink," Fido tells her. She shows off the Wharfedale flatbed press, ornamented with brass eagles, "Capable of a thousand impressions an hour. Oh, and this is Miss Bridget Mulcahy: my first employee and right-hand woman."

  The pallid Irishwoman smiles and bows, her hands skimming like dragon-flies as she returns cleaned letters to their cases.

  "Daughter of a Limerick printer, who took the unusual step of training her," Fido tells her visitors in a murmur. "After his death she saw my advertisement in a newspaper and headed straight for London."

  "Isn't it an unhealthy occupation?" Anderson asks as they walk between the pew-like composing desks.

  Fido's always glad when a visitor brings up this misconception. "Traditionally, but not necessarily. I remember the Printer's Journal claimed all my hands would sink under the strain! But you see, I make sure to provide good lighting, ventilation, breaks for lunch, and stools to sit on while they work."

  "Mm, nothing sinking about these girls, by the looks of it," says Anderson with an appreciative scan of the room that Fido doesn't like.

  "Your hands, is that what you call them?" asks Helen in amusement, wiggling her fingers. "As if you're some monstrous octopus!"

  Fido grins, but uneasily; it's strange to have her old friend here in the workroom, crackingjokes. "I see myself in a maternal role, really," she says in a low voice. "Miss Jennings here, for instance, is only thirteen; apprenticed by the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb."

  "Awfully kind of you," remarks the colonel.

  Fido shakes her head. "She's been rather more trouble to train, but wonderfully immune to distraction."

  "Oh, but you have the coarser sex here too," Helen mutters, catching sight of Mr. Kettle chalking his hands.

  "Well, of course there are tasks beyond the average girl's strength," says Fido a little defensively. "Carrying the type cases, feeding and striking off the sheets ... So I hire one male clicker to oversee each company of five typos: he distributes copy, makes up the girls' work into columns and imposes the matter—puts the pages in the right order," she glosses. "But I'm proud to say I employ twenty-five girls here and fifteen at Farringdon Street."

  Helen is hanging back, looking at the long racks covered with iron frames. "They're known as chases" says Fido, at her elbow, "but when they're filled with type and secured we call themformes." It occurs to her that she's being a bore. "Miss Clark is setting up a line at a time on a composing stick—if I may, Miss Clark—it's adjustable in width, you see." She offers the stick to Helen.

  She pulls back. "I mustn't get stained; Harry and I dine at the Beechams' tonight."

  Anderson chuckles. "There's no ink on it yet, Mrs. C."

  That name has jarred on Fido's ear each time he's used it. Too vulgar, or too presuming? It sounds like something a butcher might call his wife. She tells herself not to be such a snob; military circles have their own jargon. "Everything's thoroughly scrubbed after each print run," she assures Helen. "The trade absolutely depends on hygiene and order." How pompous I sound, how elderly, at twenty-nine.

  "You'd never take me on, Fido," Helen remarks. "Far too disorderly, not to mention too plump in the fingers."

  "Your fingers are irrelevant, but your character would be an obstacle," Fido agrees, loosening into laughter.

  She offers them tea in her office.

  "Aha, Tennyson, capital." Anderson points his cane's silver tip at a framed verse on the wall and recites:

  Give every flying minute

  Something to keep in store:

  Work, for the night is coming,

  When man works no more.

  Fido smiles slightly. "In fact, the poet's a Miss Anna Walker."

  Helen smiles at his discomfiture.

  "Rather in the laureate's manner, though," ventures Anderson after a second.

  Over shrimps and bread and butter, it emerges that some of Fido's Scottish connections are acquainted with some of the colonel's.

  "This establishment is a great credit to you, Miss Faithfull," he tells her.

  "Yet we've had our enemies," she says, theatrically.

  Helen stops chewing a large shrimp.

  Aha, that's hooked her. "Ceaseless sabotage, in the early days," says Fido. "Windows smashed, frames and stools daubed in ink to destroy the hands' dresses, sorts jumbled up in their cases or scattered like birdseed, machines prised apart with crowbars ... the waste was simply ruinous, quite apart from the distress caused."

  "My dear, how sensational," cries Helen.

  Strange how a few years can reduce humiliation to an anecdote. "There were scurrilous attacks on me in the journals; I had to grow a rhinoceros's hide. But the Victoria Press was self-supporting in a year, I was honoured with Her Majesty's approval, and now we win medals for excellence from the International Exhibition." Well, one medal. In her attempt to impress her old friend, Fido's getting carried away.

  "Bravissima," cries Helen, clapping her hands. "And to think, when I first knew you, it was four costumes a day and routs at Lady Morgan's."

  Fido laughs. "I'm afraid we were a wild pair, my soi-disant chaperone and I," she tells Anderson.

  "We had a policy of dancing with anything in trousers that asked us," contributes Helen.

  "And made facile and impertinent remarks, in the name of youthful artless-ness. You, as the married lady, should have reined me in."

  "Ah, but Fido's always been my better self," Helen tells Anderson. "And look at her now, how she's transformed herself from deb to philanthropist..."

  "Miss Faithfull, on that theme," he asks playfully, "wouldn't you admit that some of your woman-ist set want to go too far?"

  Fido arranges her smile. (It's little by little that the world will be changed, she reminds herself, as mice nibble a hole in a wall.) "I assure you, Colonel, we don't mean to smash the social machine, only to readjust its workings."

  "But one hears of calls for women judges, MPs, officers—"

  "Oh, if any argument's pushed ad absurdum..." Fido controls her temper. "My own belief is that there should be no legal bars to our sex's progress—and certainly none are needed, because it's inconceivable that more than a handful would ever attempt to enter the professions you mention. Women naturally prefer the nobler spheres of education, medicine, and welfare."

  "Nobler than your line, Anderson," Helen teases.

  "Well, more conducive to human happiness than war is, shall we say?" suggests Fido.

  He snorts. "I'll g
rant you that, Miss Faithfull. What those miserable Americans are suffering this year, on both sides..."

  She likes him for that.

  "But I'll confess, we soldiers are always panting for another dust-up."

  "The colonel's glory days were in the Crimea," Helen says with a little yawn.

  "And as for poor Navy men like Codrington," he adds, "the last real action he saw was at Acre, a quarter of a century ago!"

  Rather a sneering remark to make about his friend, Fido thinks. "More tea?" she asks.

  ***

  Fido shouldn't be here this morning, strolling along the banks of the Serpentine; she should be at Langham Place, attending a meeting to discuss the draft of SPEW's quarterly report. But the sky's the blue of a vein, and the September breeze has cut the heat deliciously. And Helen asked her to come walking in Hyde Park, after all, and for the seven years in which she's done without her friend, it strikes Fido now, she's attended too many meetings.

  "You must have read The Woman in White?" Helen asks.

  "I got it twice from Mudie's, then bought my own," Fido admits. "The loyal, ugly Marion—she breaks my heart."

  "I wore a white shawl all that summer."

  "You're still a slave to fashion! What about Mrs. Norton's novels? Or Miss Braddon's?"

  Helen nods eagerly. "My favourite title of hers is Three Times Dead."

  "Do you take Temple Bar? The current serial is by Miss Braddon," Fido tells her, "it's called The Doctor's Wife, but she's really just an Englished Bovary. Now, Lady Audley can be accused of stealing from The Woman in White—"

  "But she's so elegant and audacious, I forgive her everything."

  "There's that interesting passage," Fido recalls, "that suggests such crimes result from women being frustrated in their ambitions to enter the professions."

  "My favourite is the scene in which she shoves her husband down the well."

  Fido lets out a hoot. "Do you remember reading Bleak House to each other, all that first winter?"

  "Of course. The death of Lady Dedlock—you made me shudder so, I couldn't sleep."