THE VANISHING SUFFRAGETTE - CHAPTER 1

This is ch 1 of my upcoming historical fiction/sapphic novella, The Vanishing Suffragette. 

Chapter One: The Petition and the Party

The Blackstone house on Mount Vernon Street was lit like a ship coming into harbor, every window gold against the October dark, and Eleanor Hargrove disliked it on principle before she had even climbed the front steps.

"You look like you're preparing for battle," Clara said beside her, adjusting the collar of Eleanor's coat with the easy familiarity of six years' practice — a gesture she performed with more attention than it strictly required, her fingers lingering a moment at Eleanor's throat in a way that had nothing to do with the collar at all. "It's a reception, Eleanor. There will be lemon ices."

"There will be Lavinia Blackstone," Eleanor said, "which amounts to the same thing."

Clara laughed — the real laugh, not the one she used in rooms like the one they were about to enter — and looped her arm through Eleanor's for the length of the sidewalk, where no one was watching yet. Tomorrow the two of them, along with forty other women, would carry a petition bearing eleven thousand signatures up the steps of the State House. Tonight was meant to be a kind of armistice: a gathering of the city's prominent women, suffragist and otherwise, under the banner of civic goodwill. Eleanor did not believe in armistices hosted by women like Lavinia Blackstone. She believed in reconnaissance.

"You'll be no fun at all tonight, will you," Clara said, though there was no real complaint in it. "Cataloguing exits instead of dancing."

"I don't dance."

"You danced with me. Once. In our own sitting room, admittedly, and only because I insisted, and you trod on my foot twice before you gave it up as a bad business — but you danced." Clara's eyes held a warmth that had nothing to do with the cold October evening, and Eleanor felt it land somewhere just beneath her ribs, the particular ache of being looked at, after six years, as though she were still worth looking at that way.

Inside, the party was already at its full, murmuring pitch. Eleanor recognized the choreography at once — the suffragists clustered near the windows, correct and watchful, while the old-money hostesses circulated the room in pairs, trailing scent and appraisal. Somewhere a string quartet was doing careful, unthreatening work. Clara was pulled away almost immediately by a cluster of women from the New England Woman Suffrage Association, and Eleanor let her go, taking up a post near the refreshment table where she could see most of the room and be seen by very little of it — though her attention drifted, more than once over the following half hour, toward the particular tilt of Clara's head as she listened to some earnest committee woman, the small private smile Clara wore only when she'd caught Eleanor watching and wanted her to know it.

It was there that she first noticed Margaret Ainsworth.

Margaret stood near the tall windows overlooking the garden, dressed in dark green silk that did nothing to soften her — if anything it sharpened her, the way a good frame sharpens a portrait. She was speaking to no one, which was itself unusual; Margaret Ainsworth was rarely without an audience, whether she wanted one or not. She had a talent, well known in reform circles and considerably less appreciated in society ones, for saying the things everyone else in the room had agreed not to say. Eleanor had heard her, three months prior, ask a state senator's wife — pleasantly, over tea — whether her husband's opposition to suffrage had anything to do with the mill wages his family's business depended on keeping low. The senator's wife had not finished her tea.

Tonight, though, Margaret looked less like a woman preparing to say something unwelcome and more like a woman who had already said it and was waiting to see what it would cost her.

"She's been like that for twenty minutes," Clara murmured, reappearing at Eleanor's elbow with two glasses of lemon water. "Standing there like a lighthouse nobody wants."

"Waiting for someone."

"Or avoiding someone." Clara handed Eleanor a glass, and once her own hand was free again, let it rest a moment at the small of Eleanor's back — a touch brief enough to pass for nothing to anyone watching, and entirely deliberate to the two of them. "Half the room, probably. She told Mrs. Endicott her hat looked like a wounded pigeon."

"It did rather."

"Eleanor."

"I'm only agreeing with Margaret."

Clara's mouth twitched, but her eyes had already moved past Eleanor's shoulder, tracking something across the room, and Eleanor followed her gaze to find their hostess approaching Margaret with the particular gliding walk of a woman who had never in her life been required to hurry.

Lavinia Blackstone was, by every visible measure, exactly what a house like this one demanded: silver-blonde, precisely dressed, possessed of a voice that could deliver an insult in the same register as a compliment and leave you unsure for a full ten seconds which one you'd received. She was younger than Eleanor had expected the first time they'd met — not yet forty — though she carried herself with the settled authority of a much older woman, the kind built by money rather than by years. She wore, Eleanor noticed for the first time that evening, a single plain gold band on her right hand, worn thin at the edges, entirely out of keeping with the rest of her — the sort of ring a woman inherits rather than chooses, and keeps for reasons she has stopped explaining to anyone, including herself.

She did not raise her voice when she reached Margaret. That was, Eleanor thought later, the thing that made it worse.

Whatever passed between them lasted only a few moments, but even from across the room Eleanor could read the shape of it — Lavinia's chin lifting a fraction, Margaret's hand closing hard around her own wine glass, the stiff, deliberate distance two women keep between themselves when they are furious and unwilling to let anyone see it. Clara had gone very still beside her.

"Can you hear anything?" Eleanor asked quietly.

"No. But I don't need to." Clara's voice had dropped into the low, careful register she used when she was cataloguing a room for later. "Look at her hands."

Margaret's knuckles had gone white around the stem of her glass. She said something — short, clipped, unmistakably the last word of the exchange — and turned before Lavinia could answer it, cutting across the room toward the hall with the particular speed of a woman who has decided that leaving is the only dignified option remaining to her. Near the window, the quartet's cellist missed an entrance, recovered, and no one but Eleanor seemed to notice.

Lavinia watched Margaret go, her composure settling back into place a fraction slower than it should have. Then she smoothed the front of her gown, the way one might smooth a tablecloth after removing a stain, and turned back into the party as though nothing at all had happened.

"Well," Clara said. "That was something."

It was nearly eleven when Eleanor found herself close enough to Margaret to speak to her directly — in the coatroom, of all places, where Margaret was retrieving her wrap with more force than the garment strictly required.

"Mrs. Ainsworth."

Margaret glanced up, and for a moment something flickered across her face that Eleanor could not immediately name — not quite fear, not quite anger, something adjacent to both. It was gone almost as fast as it had come, replaced by the dry, assessing look Margaret gave most of the world.

"Miss Hargrove. Come to ask whether I've had too much wine?"

"I came to fetch my own coat," Eleanor said. "But I confess I saw you and Mrs. Blackstone."

"Everyone saw us." Margaret pulled her gloves on with short, efficient motions. "That was rather the point, I imagine. Lavinia doesn't do anything she doesn't want witnessed, even the things that look like mistakes."

"Are you all right?"

Margaret paused at that — actually paused, glove half-fastened, and looked at Eleanor with an attention she hadn't offered a moment before.

"You're the watchful one," she said. "Whitcomb's — companion." The hesitation before the word was brief, deliberate, and entirely without cruelty; it was, Eleanor understood, simply Margaret noting a fact and choosing not to make anything of it, which from Margaret Ainsworth was as close to tact as she came. "You take the measure of a room before you say a word in it. Most people mistake that for shyness. I don't think it is, in your case. I think you simply prefer to know exactly what you mean before you say it — and then say it plainly, once you do. It's a rarer habit than people credit. I've considered taking it up myself, lately, though I doubt I've the patience for the first half of it."

"Mrs. Ainsworth —"

"I am perfectly all right, Miss Hargrove." Margaret finished with her gloves and reached for her coat, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped, pitched for Eleanor alone. "Tomorrow I intend to make a great many people considerably less comfortable than they are tonight. Lavinia Blackstone included. If anyone asks you what we discussed, you may tell them she complimented my dress and I returned the favor. It will do for now."

"And if I want to know what you meant."

Margaret's smile was thin, but it was real. "Then come find me the day after tomorrow, Miss Hargrove, and I'll tell you more than you'll know what to do with. Tonight I'd rather go home."

She was gone before Eleanor could answer — out through the side door into the cold, one dark shape moving quickly down Mount Vernon Street toward a waiting cab, and Eleanor stood in the doorway a moment longer than she meant to, watching the space where she had been.

Clara was quiet on the walk home, which was its own kind of unusual; she was ordinarily the one narrating the party for both of them, cataloguing slights and alliances the way other women catalogued recipes. Chestnut Street was dark and cold and blessedly empty, and Eleanor found herself, more than once on that short walk, drawing Clara closer against the wind than the wind alone required — a small selfishness she allowed herself only on streets like this one, where no one was watching to make anything of it. It was only once they were inside their own front hall, the door bolted behind them, that Clara finally spoke.

"She said something to me too. Margaret. Before she left." Clara pulled the pins from her hat with unsteady fingers, and Eleanor came and took them from her gently, one at a time, the small ordinary intimacy of it a comfort neither of them named aloud. "She asked if I still had the Wentworth correspondence file. The old committee records, from years back. I told her yes, of course, and she said good — that she might need it soon. That she was tired of carrying things alone."

"Carrying what?"

"I don't know. I assumed she meant the work generally. She's been saying things like that for months — everyone's tired, Eleanor, it doesn't mean anything." But Clara didn't sound as though she believed that, and Eleanor didn't try to convince her of it. "She looked frightened tonight. Underneath all that — that armor of hers. I've known Margaret Ainsworth twelve years and I don't think I've ever seen her frightened."

Eleanor thought of the white knuckles around the wine glass, the flicker in Margaret's face in the coatroom, gone before it could be named. Tomorrow I intend to make a great many people considerably less comfortable than they are tonight.

"We'll ask her," Eleanor said. "Tomorrow, after the petition's delivered. You said yourself she likes an audience — she'll tell us more than we want to know, and we'll spend a week regretting having asked."

Clara managed a small smile at that, and let Eleanor take her coat, and for a moment, before either of them moved toward the stairs, she simply leaned into Eleanor in the dim front hall — not out of fear exactly, though something of the evening's unease still clung to her, but out of the plain, ordinary wish to be held by someone who knew her completely, in the one room in the city where that wish required no explanation at all. Eleanor held her there a moment, breathing in the cold-air smell still caught in Clara's hair, and thought, not for the first time, that whatever else the world withheld from them, it had never yet managed to touch this — the quiet, unwitnessed certainty of coming home to exactly the right person, night after night, for six years running.

The house settled back into its ordinary quiet — the particular quiet of two people who had built, carefully and at some cost, a life neither of them intended to explain to anyone.

Neither of them slept well. In the morning, they would learn why.

By nine o'clock, word had already begun moving through the suffrage committees, from house to house, the way bad news always seemed to travel faster than good: Margaret Ainsworth had not been seen since she left the Blackstone reception the night before. Her bed had not been slept in. Her household staff had no explanation to offer, and by the time Eleanor and Clara reached her house on Louisburg Square, neither did anyone else.

Margaret Ainsworth had vanished into the Boston night, on the eve of the most important day of the suffrage campaign's year, having told Eleanor Hargrove, not twelve hours before, exactly how much she meant to disturb.