Read Online Lady Anne's Deception (The Changing Fortunes Series Book 4) by M. C. Beaton - Free Book Online

Pankhurst, had taken the blame and had been sentenced to three years’ penal servitude. Another woman had thrown a steel spike through the window of Lloyd George’s cab. It had just missed his eye and cut him on the cheek. They had been damned as “man-haters,” even by avowed feminists like H. G. Wells, despite the fact that the leaders of the movement, if they were not happily married, at least carried no sexual resentment.
    But Annie believed them to be man-haters because of all the adverse publicity the movement had received in the press, and it was that that made her want to go to the meeting. It was already August nineteenth. She had nothing else to do after she had eaten her solitary dinner at the Grand Hotel.
    And so it was that she found herself that evening sitting on a hard bench in a drafty Masonic Hall listening to a large, tweedy woman telling her and about fifteen other women that men’s sole goal in life was to debase and humiliate women and to keep them enslaved. Miss Hammond did not belong to the Women’s Social and Political Union. She had once but aimed to form a splinter group. She had a sort of Lysistrata plan in which the women of Britain would unite by stopping marriage, stopping any form of intimate relations with men, therefore stopping child bearing “until the men are brought to their knees.”
    All of which seemed a splendid idea to poor, hurt, childish, humiliated Annie. She would have been amazed to learn that the leaders of the WSPU considered Mary Hammond quite mad. Miss Hammond did not want equality; she wanted superiority.
    She was, nonetheless, a forceful personality and held the attention of her small audience until a little, local woman on the front bench called out, “Wot! No more slap an’ tickle, then?”
    “No!” replied Miss Hammond, majestically. “And no cuddling or canoodling either!”
    Everyone except Annie burst out laughing, and had it not been for the prospect of tea and cakes, which they had already paid a shilling for, most of the audience Would have left.
    Annie did not know that every woman in the place was well aware of who she was until the lecture was over and she found herself being my-ladyed right, left, and center.
    The audience was more interested in the tea and cakes and the pretty marchioness than in the speaker. For Annie did not know the effect that smart clothes and a good lady’s maid had wrought in her. By any standards she was now an extremely pretty young woman.
    But one by one the audience left and Annie found herself alone with Miss Hammond, who had asked her to stay behind for a moment.
    “My dear Lady Torrance,” said Miss Hammond. “I was extremely flattered to find a young and beautiful member of the aristocracy taking an interest in my one-woman movement. It is only a one-woman movement at the moment, but I hope to swell the ranks,
swell the ranks.
”
    “I’m surprised everyone knew who I was,” said Annie.
    “The hotel issues a circular with the names of all its notable guests,” said Miss Hammond. “And, of course, people point you out to each other. What brought you to hear me, Lady Torrance?”
    “I hate men,” said Annie savagely.
    “Yes, but you will find sometimes that we have to use the pests,” said Miss Hammond. “That is why I call my movement ‘Superiority for Woman’—no
direct
attack, you see.”
    She was a large woman with pale eyes and a mouth full of large, strong teeth. Her iron-gray hair was swept back in a bun, and she wore a mannish tweed suit with a short skirt that showed her ankles. She wore a man’s tie and a shirt with a shiny celluloid collar.
    But like quite a lot of people who teeter on the borderline of quasipolitical insanity, she had a warm, engaging, maternal charm and a humorous way of putting things, which belied the fact she had no sense of humor at all.
    “In fact,” Miss Hammond went on, “I have been invited to take tea tomorrow afternoon with a Very Important Person. I do wish