“Well, it’s certainly possible,” Mrs. Winston said, her pen flying over her paper.

“Excellent,” Lucie said, and a little louder: “And do make the waist a few inches smaller, because for this one, I shall tighten the laces.”

* * *

She could not remember the route she had taken to the Randolph and was vaguely surprised to find herself standing in the doorway to Annabelle’s study.

Annabelle was seated behind her desk, surrounded by open books, translating something, for her lips were moving silently. The heavy mass of her hair had been pinned haphazardly on top of her head.

She glanced up. “Lucie.” She cast a confused look at the clock on the mantelpiece while rising. “Forgive me, I had not yet expected you—I’m covered in ink.”

“I just ordered a crimson ball gown.”

Annabelle chuckled as she wiped her fingers. “Oh dear. Hattie has finally worn you down, has she not? Do not feel bad, we all succumb in the end.”

“No. It was my mother.”

Annabelle’s brows lowered. “Your mother?”

“The very same. She did not look much changed.”

Annabelle was by her side. “What happened?”

She must have looked rattled, as Annabelle spoke to her in a soft, concerned tone.

“I must apologize—I’m calling on you too early.”

“Nonsense. Come.”

She followed Annabelle into the drawing room, onto the green divan.

“She just walked into the tailor shop on High Street,” she said. “With my cousin Cecily. I understand they are staying in Oxford for the summer so Cecily can improve her excellent watercoloring techniques at Ruskin’s school.”

Watercoloring—one of few pursuits a lady was encouraged to study in depth. Many young women had enjoyed a trip to Europe, even, to perfect painting techniques. Her mother had used to exclaim in despair over Lucie’s lack of finesse with a paintbrush; no tour across Europe would have improved her.

Annabelle had paused the process of ringing for some tea. “Oh Lord,” she said. “They will be in town for the whole summer?”

“It appears so. I reckon they will stay here, in the Randolph—it is the best hotel in town, after all.” Today’s awkward encounter might well repeat itself. And here she had thought the matter of Tristan owning half her business was troubling enough.

“I was petty,” she said. “I ordered a red dress and ensured that they heard about how I wear my unmentionables.”

“It was a shock,” Annabelle said, quick to excuse her pettiness, as a good friend would.

A shock? She refused to admit to anything of such magnitude.

“It could have been worse—she could have given me the cut direct.” Her brows pulled together. “She and Cecily seemed close.”

“Were you close to your cousin?”

Lucie shook her head. “She was still a child when I left home. We never had much in common.” By the time she was eleven and Lucie was leaving, Ceci had had one face and voice for men, and another for the women, and it wasn’t quite clear which was the real one, something Lucie had found disconcerting. “Cecily is lovely, I suppose,” she said. “And she liked Lord Ballentine. She followed him around every summer as if he had her on a string, like one of those wooden ducks on wheels.” And Tristan had indulged her, with comments on her dolls and her ribbons. Sometimes he had made coins dance between his fingers, or toffees had appeared from midair. Even Lucie had been impressed by these tricks.

“If you are ordering ball gowns, may we assume you are coming to our house party?” Annabelle said with a smile.

“You may,” she said, her own smile a little forced. “All four of us will be together. Hooray.”

We assume . . . our house party. It grated a little, how husband and wife ceased to exist as I and became us. Annabelle had been changing accordingly since her wedding; her country accent was making way for the steeper vowels of the upper classes, and her hand-altered dresses had been replaced by the constraining gowns befitting a duchess. It was reassuring to still see ink stains marking her fingers, even though her study was now located in a plush hotel rather than her little student room at Lady Margaret Hall. Still, as she sat here in Annabelle’s rooms and enjoyed the comforts of their close friendship, she was painfully reminded that some day soon, Annabelle would be lost to their circle of friends and the Cause, because at the end of the day, she was a married woman. And while Montgomery granted her time away from Claremont, he was an excessively dutiful man, and he would soon require his duchess to have his heir. . . .

“Oh.” Annabelle made a face. “I’m scatterbrained these days. The going back and forth between Claremont and Oxford, and learning duchess duties . . . Lucie, I think your mother and your brother are on the guest list. As I believe is one of your father’s cousins, the Marquess of Doncaster.”

Her stomach gave an unpleasant twist. “Don’t you worry,” she said lightly. “I shall be on my best behavior—and avoiding relations during such gatherings is impossible; we are all, more or less, related.”

“I never doubted your behavior.”

“I just ordered a crimson ball gown. Clearly my comportment cannot be accounted for in their presence.”

“Families are complicated,” Annabelle murmured. She knew this from personal experience, judging from the few glimpses Lucie had caught of her friend’s past.

She leaned back into the soft upholstery of the divan, the tensions slowly draining from her limbs. “I never told you why my father banished me, have I?”

“No,” Annabelle said carefully. “I always suspected it was because of the incident with the fork and the Spanish ambassador.”

“Ah. But no. It was because of the Contagious Diseases Act.”

Annabelle’s green eyes widened. “The same act we are still trying to have repealed?”

Lucie nodded. “I was seventeen years old and restless to do something other than just read about the adventures of Florence Nightingale and annotate Wollstonecraft essays. Whenever my family was in London during the season, I had access to newspapers other than the Times—and by chance, I came across Josephine Butler’s manifesto against the act in the Manchester Guardian.”

Annabelle bit her lip. “I imagine it was eye-opening?”

“Spectacularly so. Mrs. Butler had just founded the Ladies National Association to repeal the act and she was touring the country to gain support. Around this time, a factory girl had nearly drowned at the London docks, because she had jumped into the Thames to evade the police. It made headlines; the patrolling officers had thought she looked like a prostitute and wanted to apprehend her. At the time, word had already spread among working women that they would be subject to a forcible examination if caught—sometimes in view of male workers. Oh, I feel angry just thinking of it. Anyways, the girl flew into a panic and jumped to spare herself the humiliation, and Annabelle, I was enraged. Forcing examinations for venereal diseases on any woman struck me as abominable.”

Annabelle visibly shuddered. “And all to protect men who use prostitutes from catching the pox.”

“Indeed. So naturally, I stole away to attend one of Mrs. Butler’s rallies in Islington.”

And there, she had found something remarkable: a woman who had spoken in a loud, clear voice about ugly things. A woman who used words as weapons on behalf of girls who saw no choice but to jump. While the ladies in her mother’s salon drifted over the agony of choosing the correct wallpaper in hushed tones, Mrs. Butler talked about forcibly apprehended women, and injustice, and double standards, and she had hung on every word. A diffuse anger coursing round and round beneath her skin for years had finally found a direction.

“I felt a great sense of relief,” she told Annabelle. “Half my life I had felt strangely asphyxiated in the presence of my mother and her friends. But there, I was at ease. As though I were finally wearing clothes that fit rather than chafed.”

Because these women had mobilized. Fight, she had wanted to tell her mother after the fateful morning in the library. Fight! when Wycliffe’s indiscretions and belittling comments, relentlessly sprinkled over their daily lives, continued. But her mother never fought. She had pressed her lips together, and become thinner, and paler, and haughtier, until she had haunted Wycliffe Hall like a wronged wraith, and the more martyred and quieter she had become, the louder Lucie had wanted to yell. Years later, as her work with the Cause progressed, she had understood that she should have directed all her youthful anger against her father. She had not yet truly comprehended power then, and how treacherously easy it was to side with it, and to ask that the downtrodden ones change before one demanded the tyrant change.

Annabelle was looking at her with a small smile. “And this was how Lady Lucinda Tedbury as we know her was born.”

Lucie gave a nod. “Mrs. Butler introduced me to Lydia Becker that night who had just founded the first suffrage chapter in Manchester. I should lose my birth family not long after.”

Annabelle’s brow furrowed. “But I understand quite a lot of ladies joined the movement against the diseases acts—and I imagine not all of them were banished?”