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  “I thought so. My aunt and her friend. My aunt’s in a wheelchair but her friend drives.”

  “I don’t see any wheelchairs. Perhaps the friend came on his own.”

  “Her own.”

  “She drives?”

  “Lots of women drive.”

  “So they do. Well, miss, it looks like they might have forgotten you. Did you telegraph your arrival time?”

  “Of course.” Poppy’s voice sounded more high-pitched than she would have liked. She didn’t want to give the impression she was in a panic. She wasn’t. Well, not yet anyway. But it was a bother being stuck at King’s Cross without anyone to meet her.

  “Perhaps I could telephone.”

  “They have a telephone?”

  Poppy raised her eyebrows at him. He took the bait and grinned. “I know, I know, lots of women have telephones.”

  Poppy laughed. “We don’t, back in Morpeth. But they do have one at the Post Office. When Aunt Dot first had her telephone put in, she rang the Morpeth exchange and asked to be put through to us. She was most put out when they told her there was no listing for anyone called Denby. So then she sent a telegram instead – like any normal person would have done in the first place!”

  He was looking at her and smiling.

  “What?”

  “You are very pretty when you laugh, Miss… Miss… Denby?”

  Poppy flushed, embarrassed by his brazenness but delighted by the compliment. “Yes, Denby. Poppy Denby.”

  “From Morpeth in Northumberland.”

  “That’s correct, sir. You seem to have learned an awful lot about me in a very short time. And I know nothing about you.”

  He grinned. “Sorry, it’s the job. Bad habit. I start interviewing people before I even realize what I’m doing.”

  “And before you even introduce yourself, either. How rude!” she said in mock chastisement.

  He looked chagrined and pushed out his hand. “Pardon me, Miss Denby. My name is Rokeby. Daniel Rokeby. From Hackney. I work for The Daily Globe.”

  “You’re a press photographer?”

  “I am.”

  “Oh, how exciting! I’ve always wanted to be a journalist.”

  “You have? Well, there are not too many women doing that job.”

  “No? Then it’s time things changed.”

  He laughed again. She was beginning to enjoy hearing it and she would have carried on with their chit-chat if she hadn’t the vexing problem of not having anyone at the station to meet her. She looked around her again: still no Aunt Dot or her friend, Grace Wilson. Grace was a tall, slim woman with grey hair – no one fitting her description was in sight. But a Post Office was.

  “Do you think they will have a telephone in there?” She nodded in the general direction.

  Daniel Rokeby’s eyes widened. “Better than inside – there’s one outside. I covered the opening back in March. Over there: that funny-looking kiosk that looks a bit like a skinny garden gazebo with a kaiser’s helmet on top.”

  “There’s a phone in there?”

  “There is.”

  “But how do we pay for it?”

  “There’s a little slot you can put a penny into.”

  “Well I never! What a splendid idea, Mr Rokeby.” And with that Poppy zigged and zagged her way back across the concourse with Daniel and her trunk in tow.

  In the “gazebo” Poppy reached into her purse and found a penny. She didn’t have much money left after paying for her lunch on the train – which was far more expensive than she had anticipated. She would have to go to the bank tomorrow, but for now she hoped Grace or Aunt Dot would be home. If they didn’t come to fetch her she doubted she would have enough for the tram or bus fare to Chelsea. She opened the folded-up telegram and found Aunt Dot’s telephone number. She put her penny into the slot and picked up the earpiece. Suddenly a voice came through: “London Exchange. Can we connect you?”

  Delighted at the novelty of it all, Poppy gave the telephonist Aunt Dot’s number and waited to be connected. It only took a few moments before her aunt’s theatrical voice answered.

  “Poppy, my darling! Whatever are you doing here? We were expecting you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? No, it’s today. I sent you a telegram.”

  “Indeed you did, but the date was for tomorrow.”

  “But it said –”

  “Obviously a mixup. No harm done. Just get the bus to King’s Road. Or a cab.”

  “Erm – Aunt Dot – can you come and fetch me? I don’t have very much money.”

  “Well, that was very short-sighted of you, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize, I –”

  “I’m teasing, Poppy, teasing! I see you have your mother’s sense of humour. But there is a teensy weensy bit of a problem. We won’t have the motor back until tomorrow. It’s having a service, and as we weren’t expecting you until tomorrow…”

  Poppy sighed. There was no point reminding her that she had most definitely told her today, not tomorrow – and she had a copy of the telegram she’d sent to prove it. What was done was done and new circumstances required a new plan.

  “What if I get a cab, Aunt Dot? Will you be able to lend me the cab fare when we get to your house?”

  “But of course! What a marvellous idea. Tell the driver it’s 137 King’s Road, just opposite the Electric Cinema Theatre. And don’t worry, it will be quite safe. The newspapers greatly exaggerate the dangers to women travelling alone. They’re run by men, you see, and –”

  “Ten seconds.”

  “I’d better go, Aunt Dot. I’ll see you shortly. About an hour?”

  “Yes, that should –” They were cut off.

  Poppy came out of the booth all smiles. “Sorted,” she announced. “I’m to get a cab to Chelsea.”

  “On your own?”

  “Mr Rokeby, while I very much appreciate your concern, and your kindness – and you a virtual stranger – I have just travelled four hundred miles on my own today; a few more will not do me any harm.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Elizabeth Dorchester was enjoying a most rare opportunity to take in the late afternoon sun. It wasn’t very often her “hosts” – as they liked to be called – allowed her into the garden unaccompanied. They said it was for her own good – there were many dangers lurking beyond the walls of the facility, and solitude was not something she should make a habit of. But, Elizabeth countered, the fresh air would do her good; being close to nature would restore her soul – and the solitude helped her to think more clearly. She wasn’t sure her hosts were convinced by the last, but they seemed to think the first two might have some credence.

  She wished she could see beyond the ten-foot stone walls surrounding the garden. It had been seven years since she had seen any of the sights of London. For all she knew, she wasn’t even in London any more. It could be any garden, anywhere in Europe; anywhere with roses and hydrangeas and jasmine. She had once loved the smell of jasmine. Now it was the smell of imprisonment.

  Her hosts of course denied that she was in prison. They claimed she was “convalescing” in a healthcare facility for people of a fragile mental disposition and that she would be free to go as soon as she was better. But whenever she thought she’d managed to convince them she was better, he came; and after cloistered conversations with doctors and nurses, her hosts always came to the conclusion that she was not better after all.

  He was coming again today. She had been told that he had telephoned ahead to say he was going to be a little late, as he first had to attend the unveiling of a war memorial at King’s Cross station. But he would come as soon as he could. Her hosts said she could wait in the garden. So Elizabeth Dorchester turned up her face to the dying rays of afternoon sunshine, fearing it was the closest she would ever get to being free.

  The window cleaner who claimed King’s Road, Chelsea, as part of his patch was just finishing up for the day when the black cab pulled up in front of number 137. His horse l
ifted her head wearily and looked at the motorized contraption, not realizing that soon she and her kind would be completely redundant. But she had a few years left yet; business had not been going that well for her master since the influenza, and the man could not afford such a huge financial outlay. He had lost quite a few clients to the illness. He himself had caught it and was laid up for three months. But even when he recovered, it was with reduced stamina and he could not clean as many windows in one day as he once had.

  The window cleaner wheezed as he lifted his ladder and bucket into the back of the cart with Thompson and Son scrawled down the side in flaking green paint. He remembered when he and his son had painted it together before the war, their hopes for the business as fresh as the paint they stroked into the wood. But the son had died in a field in Flanders and in the five years since, the father had not had the heart to repaint the wagon without him.

  Now he had no one to leave his business to. Yes, he had a daughter, but unless she married and her husband wanted to go into business with his father-in-law, best he sell up and use the money for her dowry. It never crossed the father’s mind that his daughter might want to run the business herself. She had got a taste for working outside the home in the munitions factory during the war and hoped that her father would see that she was worthy to take up the mantle of her dearly departed brother. But it simply wasn’t the way things were done in their family. Thompson and Son had been passed down the male line for three generations and the father could not imagine a world where things were any different.

  So he took his pay from the lady at number 137 – the lady, it was rumoured, who had been giving girls like his daughter ideas beyond the natural order of things – then doffed his hat, and with a “Gee-up, Bess!” trundled away down King’s Road.

  Grace Wilson was just about to shut the front door when she spotted a young woman step out of the black motorized cab.

  “Looks like your Poppy has made it,” she called down the hall behind her.

  “Poppy! Darling!” came the reply.

  Half an hour later Poppy had freshened up in her room, changed into something more suitable for evening wear, and was entering the parlour where Grace and Aunt Dot were waiting for her, playing a game of snap.

  “Snap! Snap! Snap!” cried Dot and giggled like a schoolgirl. “Ah, there you are, Poppy! Come and give your old aunt another cuddle.” Aunt Dot had always been a full-bosomed woman and Poppy had memories of being suffocated in her ample chest as a small child, fearing she would never be able to clamber out. Since Dot’s accident ten years earlier, the bosom had expanded even further and it rested like a pair of giant marshmallows on layers of meringue. The whole delicious confection – clothed in voluminous peach silk – was squeezed into a wicker basket-chair on wheels.

  Dot’s hair was the same as it had been when she first stepped onto the West End stage in 1900 at the ripe old age of thirty: a nest of blonde ringlets and bows. If there was any grey in the cascade of curls, it was well hidden or dyed. Poppy looked a lot like her paternal aunt – apart from her girth – and the same bluebell eyes twinkled back at her from a plump, cherubic face.

  Grace Wilson, on the other hand, was as tall and slim as a teenage boy. Her grey hair was cut short in a no-nonsense style, and she wore a sensible grey serge skirt and blouse. But belying the severe schoolmarm look was a warm smile that embraced Poppy gently as she extricated herself from her aunt’s arms. Grace and Dot had been friends for as long as Poppy could remember. Unlike Dot, Grace had once been married. Her husband, Frank, had been one of the few men active in the women’s suffrage movement and he had been a regular visitor to 137 King’s Road in the years before the war. But then something had gone wrong. Poppy did not know what, and the most she could get out of her parents was “poor Frank”.

  Poppy sat down and accepted a cup of tea from Grace and a slice of cake from Dot. She looked around her and took in the Edwardian parlour that had not changed much since she had last been there when she was twelve years old. She and her parents had visited Dot when she first had her accident and tried to convince her to come back to Morpeth with them to convalesce. Dot would have none of it.

  “They need me here more than ever,” she had declared. “They” meant her friends and colleagues in the Women’s Social and Political Union of which she, Frank, and Grace were members. On the sideboard, bedecked with a purple and green runner in the colours of the WSPU, Poppy noticed a photograph of Dot when she could still walk. She was standing with a group of friends, including Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Wilding Davison, under a WSPU banner. Dot noticed her looking at it.

  “That’s the only picture I have of dear Emily. And some of the others.” Dot’s hand shook as she passed the sugar bowl across the silver tea tray to Poppy.

  “Poor Emily,” said Grace quietly, and she looked out of the window across the courtyard garden, lost in thought.

  “She was a heroine. They all were,” said Dot fiercely, the cherubic face galvanized with a strength Poppy knew was always just under the surface. Poppy reached out and squeezed her aunt’s hand. Dot patted hers in return.

  “I’m all right, pet.” Then she shook out her curls, brightened her smile and asked: “So how are things with the family? I’m surprised your mother let you come.”

  “Let’s just say it took some convincing,” said Poppy wryly.

  Dot’s eyes twinkled and she knew her aunt was imagining the scenario when Poppy took the letter to her parents in which she was being offered formal employment as a companion and nurse to her invalid relative.

  “Father had to keep reminding her that I am now twenty-two, so legally I can do what I like.”

  Dot giggled again. The schoolgirl was back.

  “And of course he couldn’t help mentioning that I had so far failed at securing a husband and needed to start earning my own keep unless I was to remain living off them for the rest of my life.”

  Grace’s mind had returned from wherever she had wandered to a moment earlier. “But weren’t you helping them at the mission?” She was referring to the charity shop and food kitchen run by the Methodist church in Morpeth, of which her father was the minister.

  “I was. Running the shop and doing the bookkeeping. But I was never good at figures and they both knew it couldn’t last long.”

  “You take after me, darling. A woman of words, not figures. Thank heavens I have Grace, or His Majesty’s Customs and Excise would have had me in Holloway years ago!”

  “So I really am grateful to you, Aunt Dot, for offering me this job.”

  “Job? What job?” she giggled again. “There’s no job, darling! I just wrote that so they would let you go without too much of a fuss.”

  Poppy had a sinking feeling in her stomach. “What do you mean, there’s no job? You said you needed a companion. And you would pay for it.”

  “Whatever could you do for me that Grace does not do already?” She squeezed her friend’s hand warmly, but Grace pulled away and stood up, glaring down at her.

  “Don’t be so cruel, Dorothy! I told you it was not a very good joke. And just like I predicted, no one finds it funny except you. This is so typical of you!”

  Dot patted the chair beside her. “Oh, do sit down, Grace. I’ll explain it all to Poppy. Like I told you – and I will tell her – it’s for her own good.”

  Grace was only slightly mollified, but she did as she was bid.

  “As you say, Poppy, you are twenty-two and not getting any younger.”

  “But I don’t want to get married.”

  “I’m not talking about marriage; I’m talking about starting a career.”

  “A career?” Poppy could not mask the surprise in her voice.

  “Oh, do stop repeating my words like a parrot; it’s very annoying. Yes, a career. There aren’t too many work prospects in Morpeth for a bright young woman, and Newcastle isn’t much better; but London, in London you will have a chance. I just needed to get you away from your parents – go
od as they are – and show you the opportunities that are available for you here. Grace, pass the paper.”

  Grace again did as she was bid. Dot opened the newspaper to the situations vacant section and showed Poppy a cluster of red-pencil circles. “Look here: secretary wanted, central London law firm; assistant manager, Oxford Street stationer’s; editor’s assistant, The Daily Globe –”

  “The Daily Globe? Let me see…” Poppy took the paper from her aunt and ran her finger down the column until she came to the correct circle. “That’s a newspaper, isn’t it?”

  “It’s this newspaper,” answered Dot.

  “And you think I would have a chance if I applied for this job?”

  “More and more women are working these days,” agreed Grace. “I would be if I didn’t have your aunt to look after.”

  “How many times have I told you, Grace? You can work if you like. We can employ someone else to help me.”

  Grace reached out and took her friend’s hand. “But you know they wouldn’t look after you like I do. And besides, no one else would put up with your nonsense.”

  Dot laughed in agreement. “That’s true.” Then she turned to her niece. “Would you like to have a career, Poppy?”

  Poppy’s heart was racing. A career? Earning her own money? Making decisions for herself? It was all a bit too much to take in. “I don’t know, Aunt Dot. What would Mam and Dad think? They only let me come because they thought I would be working for you.”

  Dot sighed then raised her hand to her forehead. “Grace, I think the wrong Poppy Denby has arrived. This is not the young girl who spent her days here reading women’s suffrage tracts and writing letters to newspapers.” She nodded to the dresser. “Top drawer please, Grace.”

  Grace seemed to know exactly what Dot wanted, as she opened the drawer and pulled out a small pile of letters tied with a pink silk bow.

  Poppy gasped. “You kept them?”