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'd even climbed the front steps. "You look like you're preparing for battle," Clara said, adjusting the collar of Eleanor's coat with six years' familiarity, 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 kept for 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 tonight, will you," Clara said, without much complaint in it. "Cataloguing exits instead of dancing."

"I don't dance."

"You danced with me. Once. In our own sitting room, and only because I insisted — you trod on my foot twice before you gave it up as a bad business. But you danced."

Eleanor felt the memory land somewhere 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 full, murmuring pitch. Eleanor recognized the choreography at once — suffragists clustered near the windows, correct and watchful, while the old-money hostesses circulated in pairs, trailing scent and appraisal. A string quartet worked carefully through something unthreatening. Clara was pulled away almost immediately by 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. Her attention drifted anyway, more than once, toward the tilt of Clara's head as she listened to some earnest committee woman — and 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, in dark green silk that sharpened her rather than softened 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 with two glasses of lemon water. "Standing there like a lighthouse nobody wants."

"Waiting for someone."

"Or avoiding someone." Clara handed her a glass, then let her free hand rest a moment at the small of Eleanor's back — brief enough to pass for nothing, deliberate enough that it wasn't. "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 tracked past Eleanor's shoulder — their hostess, approaching Margaret with the gliding walk of a woman who had never once 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 and a compliment in the same register 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 years. On her right hand, worn thin at the edges, sat a single plain gold band, 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 the thing that made it worse. 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 wine glass, the stiff, deliberate distance two furious women keep when neither will let it show.

Clara had gone very still beside her.

"Can you hear anything?"

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

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

Lavinia watched her go, composure settling back into place a fraction slower than it should have, then smoothed the front of her gown as 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."

· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·

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

"Mrs. Ainsworth."

Margaret glanced up, and for a moment something flickered across her face — not quite fear, not quite anger — gone almost before Eleanor could name it, 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 for my own coat. But I confess I saw you and Mrs. Blackstone."

"Everyone saw us." Margaret pulled her gloves on in 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, 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 and without cruelty; Margaret noting a fact, and choosing not to make anything of it, which from her 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 what you mean before you say it — and then say it plainly, once you do. It's a rarer habit than people credit."

"Mrs. Ainsworth —"

"I am perfectly all right, Miss Hargrove." She finished with her gloves, 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 what we discussed, 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 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 — a dark shape moving quickly down Mount Vernon Street toward a waiting cab. Eleanor stood in the doorway a moment longer than she meant to, watching the space where she had been.

· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·

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, 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, the door bolted behind them, that Clara finally spoke. "She said something to me too. Before she left." She pulled the pins from her hat with unsteady fingers, and Eleanor came and took them from her, one at a time. "She asked if I still had the Wentworth correspondence file — the old committee records. 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 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. "She looked frightened tonight. Underneath the armor. 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. Tomorrow I intend to make a great many people considerably less comfortable than they are tonight. "We'll ask her," she 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 leaned into her 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 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.

The house settled back into its ordinary quiet — the 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 travels 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.