Chapter 2
“I would talk to you,” Robert said when she and Fenella arrived home.
“Could it wait?” she asked, striding through the kitchen still smelling of tonight’s dinner of mutton and onions. She’d taken time off to hear her favorite author speak, reasoning that she could write about the lecture for the paper. Since she couldn’t do that now, she had to find something else for the new edition.
Fenella moved past her, smiling apologetically as she whisked a maid from the room. At least there wouldn’t be any witnesses to this dressing down. Normally, Robert didn’t care where or when he criticized her.
After Macrath had purchased a home far from Edinburgh, he wanted her and Fenella to join him. She refused to leave the city, so they’d compromised. He purchased a large home for them, and instilled Robert, their second cousin, as chaperone and financial advisor, and their driver, James, as spy.
Mairi had told her brother that she and Fenella were capable of protecting themselves, however weak and defenseless he thought they were. Macrath had only smiled and done as he wished.
Robert was her daily trial.
The man’s face bore evidence of each of his years, the last few making their mark with more impact. The pockets beneath his eyes sagged more each day, as if his face couldn’t bear the weight of his skin.
His beard, thin and pointed, made his face appear even longer and accentuated the down-turned corners of his mouth.
His hair had thinned considerably in the last year, but he still maintained the notion that no one but he could tell, wrapping long strands around the top until they covered most of his bald pate. He was endearingly vain about his hair, but seemed not to notice when he’d splotched ink on his cuffs or shirtfront.
He was a private man, one who occupied a large room on the second floor surrounded by those items he’d brought from Inverness. For most of his life he’d lived with his sister, the woman dying shortly before he came to Edinburgh. No doubt Robert was another cause of Macrath’s, another person who’d been helped from a bad situation by her brother’s effortless kindness.
She only wished Robert had gone to some other distant relative.
But for all his dour appearance and personality, Robert was a man of great joys. He loved growing things. When he was not hunkered over the Gazette’s books, laboriously entering and grumbling over each expenditure, he was in their garden, transforming it into a place of beauty. Even in winter he was busy, readying the hardy shoots in the shed built for him, and laying out the beds in plans he worked on almost every night.
Now he frowned at her, the area above his nose folding into three vertical lines.
“No, it cannot wait,” he said, blocking her way to the stairs. “You need to explain these new expenses. Why are you spending so much on paper?”
She sighed inwardly. He’d seen the invoice for the newsprint. She knew, from previous harangues, that nothing she said would stop Robert’s fussing. She simply needed to wait him out.
“I should take over ordering your supplies.”
She pushed back her irritation. “That’s not necessary, Robert,” she said.
“It is if you’re determined to put the Sinclair Printing Company in debt.”
She circled him and nearly raced up the stairs and to her room before he could manage another word. But his glare followed her, making her wish he knew her better. She’d never put the paper in jeopardy. But she had no choice. Their paper supplies were running low. Did he think it was possible to print a newspaper on air?
Once in her room, she pulled off her cloak, settling down to work. If she had her way, she would have replaced her secretary with a long, broad table so she could spread a layout on it. But the minute she arranged for it, Fenella would have just had it removed.
“You work too much,” Fenella would have said. A comment Mairi heard often. “You need to have a place of peace to rest.”
Fenella was the one who gifted their home with personal touches. She acted as their housekeeper, conferring with Cook over menus and recipes. Soft sheets and towels graced their rooms, and dishes of potpourri were everywhere, the scent dependent on the room.
Here in Mairi’s bedroom it was something spicy with cloves and cinnamon, reminding her of apples and autumn. In the spring the scent would change, and she’d smell roses. Because of her cousin there were porcelain figurines on the fireplace mantel, and upholstered chairs with tassels. Mairi would have been just as comfortable with a bare room and a bed, but she appreciated Fenella’s efforts to make their home both beautiful and comfortable.
Fenella also trained the four maids on their tasks, managed the laundry, and oversaw the purchases for the house, presenting the bills to Robert.
Her cousin was very careful with money, and whenever Mairi presented the monthly expenditures for the paper to Robert, he held Fenella up as a paragon of thrifty virtue.
She doubted her cousin had ever been lectured on frugality.
Pushing back the embarrassment she’d suffered at the Edinburgh Press Club, as well as her irritation over Robert’s lecture, she undressed, washed, and donned her nightgown, pulled from a drawer smelling of oranges.
Sleep, however, would have to wait until after she worked. Grabbing the sheaf of submissions, she sat and began to read.
Early on, she’d realized that the Edinburgh Gazette would have to change from what it had been in her father’s day. Once, they printed six pages of legal notices, bankrupts declared or adjudicated, debt announcements, and official proceedings at Parliament. If the paper was going to attract subscribers, she knew it had to offer more content for people, ranging from information about citizens of Edinburgh to housekeeping tips.
The only thing she didn’t write about was politics, reasoning that the numerous larger papers handled that topic better than she could.
She wrote three columns herself, each signed with a male pseudonym. But she also accepted submissions from other writers. Her newest idea, to begin in the new year, was to serialize a novel, something that had been done successfully in England for decades. She could only afford a fraction of what a London paper might pay a writer, but could offer something the other papers didn’t: opportunity. She was more than willing to hire a woman writer.
If she had the money, she’d employ a few full-time reporters and take on the job of being solely the editor of the Gazette. That was for the future. For now, she’d continue to be the chief writer for both the paper and the broadsides they printed three times a week.
She selected two columns from the ten she read and wrote acceptance letters to the writers. Tonight, it irritated her even more than usual to sign Macrath’s name.
One day, perhaps, she’d be able to use her own name as the proprietor of the Edinburgh Gazette. People would know that she was responsible for the success of the paper, that she was a woman of influence.
When would that ever happen?
The Lord Provost had looked at her like she was a beetle, one he’d found on his shoe and quickly dispatched.
Why had he looked down his rather bearlike nose at her? Very well, perhaps his nose wasn’t bearlike, but the rest of him certainly was. He was entirely too large a man. When she was standing next to him she felt almost tiny, and she was tall for a woman.
He epitomized those minor irritants she’d experienced all her life. Now they gathered in a ball and sat, like lead, in the pit of her stomach.
What was wrong with a woman running a business? And the newspaper was as much a business as a millinery shop.
She hadn’t heard anyone say she couldn’t buy Melvin Hampstead’s book because she was a woman. Why, then, wasn’t she good enough to hear his lecture?
If she was competent enough to be editor of the Edinburgh Gazette, why couldn’t she be a member of the Edinburgh Press Club?
Why wasn’t she treated with the same respect as a man, especially if she could do a man’s job?
She never asked for help moving the reams of newsprint into place. She might not accomplish the task as quickly as a man, true, but she did it nonetheless.
Nor did she ever ask a man to write her columns, or gather the information for the broadsides she wrote. How many of the men who purchased their broadsides were aware that a woman had written them?
Perhaps that’s why she felt the insult at the press club so acutely. She’d fought inequity all her life but never lost a battle face-to-face the way she had tonight.
She’d been treated like a beggar at a feast. Go away, don’t bother us. How dare you think yourself the equal of us?
The injustice of it made her seethe.
More and more women were daring to stand up and announce their displeasure with a society run by men. Josephine Butler’s campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts was a model for women who believed their gender was being treated unfairly.
Strides were being made each day. Look at the Married Women’s Property Act passed just two years earlier.
How did she change her own circumstances? It seemed to her that she could either continue to be treated as shabbily as she’d been tonight or act as an instrument of change. Standing in front of the Lord Provost and demanding that he treat her better hadn’t accomplished anything. He’d only smiled at her.
There was a newly formed organization—the Scottish Ladies National Association—that was taking up women’s causes, one of them suffrage. She could almost imagine herself standing at a podium, imploring a crowd of women before her to vote for anyone other than the Lord Provost.
A few minutes later she caught herself staring off into the distance, then brought her focus back to finishing the letters.
Once they were done, she pulled out a blank sheet of her stationery. She knew exactly to whom she’d write, one of the founders of the SLNA, a woman who lived in Edinburgh.
When she heard the hall clock chime midnight, she pushed back her fatigue and continued writing. A half hour later, after reviewing her letter a dozen times, she sealed it and went to bed, only to lay there staring up at the ceiling.
Normally when she couldn’t sleep, it was because she was caught up in worry about their subscription numbers. Tonight, however, she was on fire with ideas.
Would it be enough to just volunteer to assist a group? What could she do to awaken the women of Edinburgh?
She rose from the bed, walked to the window, and pulled open the drapes. A flagstone path, showing gray and black in the moonlight, led to the garden. A copse of trees stood on this side of the lawn. Saplings speared upward from the ground like arrows, the mature trees guarding them like protective mothers.
No wind shivered the leaves. They were perfectly still and waiting. Death could not be as silent as this night.
She was abruptly and painfully lonely.
Pushing that emotion aside, she walked back to her secretary, lit the lamp and sat.
If she couldn’t write about the Hampstead lecture, she would write about something else: the Right Honorable Lord Provost of Edinburgh himself. She wouldn’t put it in a column. Instead, she’d make him the subject of one of their broadsides.
Without hesitation, she began to write a poem. She finished it only a few minutes later.
When shameful Vice began our streets to tread,
And foul Disease reared his deathlike head,
When the fate of sacred womanhood was profan’d,
And fair Edinburgh’s character was stain’d ;
Then (by the Grace of God) Harrison came,
(Ye residents of Edinburgh tremble at the Name!)
He showed himself to our admiring sight,
Indeed a burning and shining light.
Yet weep my friends for more’s the pity.
He did not labor to clean the city.
He doth not strive to cure the profane
Or clean the vice and scrub the stain,
No, Harrison dared show his face,
Only to keep a woman in her place.
She added a small essay to the poem, explaining the situation and adding that the time for women to stand up and come out of the shadows had arrived. Otherwise, men like Logan Harrison would forever try to keep them from achieving their rightful place in society.
Smiling, she put the poem down, consulted her watch, and decided that she could sleep for a few hours. Then she’d head for the paper and begin her campaign to win equality for women.
She couldn’t wait to hear what the High and Mighty Lord Provost thought of that.