Free The World is a Wedding by Wendy Jones Page A

women in the Conway Hall. Grace glanced down at the leaflet the guest at the Ritz had given her:
Mass Meeting on the Representation of the People Act
. Grace had not seen this many women together before. She didn’t know if she was unnerved or reassured. There were women swarming towards each other, greeting each other, turning this way and that, and friends in small circles. A huddle of Indian women, draped in bright saris, stood talking animatedly, and another gathering of women in coats as threadbare as her own looked at a pamphlet. There was hair in Eton crops, confident voices, fox-fur stoles, and embroidered handbags hanging from delicate forearms. Grace waited in this mêlée, alone and uncertain, yet something within her wouldn’t let her leave, even though she sensed that, with a spark, the excited chatter could burst into hysteria. But Grace noticed she wasn’t frightened; she merely stood in the middle of this strange, foreign scene in her strange, foreign life.
    She thought back to how she came to be here, in London, and the beginning of her journey several months ago. She remembered the station in Narberth: the two well-kept platforms with hanging baskets and ironwork that was regularly repainted white. When the steam train came round the corner, curling through the grassy hills, the platform was laid out like a well-considered tea-table, carefully set and waiting, a place where one might disembark and find repose. But that day she hadn’t been arriving; she had been fleeing Narberth. Her train had passed through the green ancient fields of Narberth: there was Whitland, Carmarthen and then Neath, like a whisper of what was to come. Then Port Talbot: a valley of coiled pipes and thin chimneys puffing smoke that seeped into the train carriage. And dark clouds that cut out the sky. She hadn’t known Wales was like that: the earnest mining and smelting by people who lived close to the soil, toiling within the earth, dwarfed by the mountains. She had only known Narberth, and it had been safer and more beautiful than she had been aware of. She was frightened—and she hadn’t yet left Wales.
    Grace looked around the Conway Hall and wondered if she should talk to someone. She had come to the meeting today because it was her afternoon off and, as usual, she had nowhere to go, nothing to do and no one to see, which was too much space for her mind to fill. She wished she’d brought some books with her to London—she had been reading
Silas Marner
—but had packed so hurriedly she hadn’t thought to, taking only necessities—although reading kept her mind occupied, which was a necessity.
    A woman approached, her Wellington boots unbuckled and flapping.
    â€˜Come on!’ She commandeered Grace by the arm, chaperoning her into the auditorium, her bobbed hair swaying. ‘You’ll want to sit near the front, won’t you?’
    It was loud inside the auditorium, with voices and the clack of shapely heels on the parquet floor. A banner worked in purple and green above the podium read:
    Â 
    Mrs. Pankhust, Founder/Champion of Womankind
    Famed for Deeds of Daring Rectitude
    Â 
    â€˜Take your coat off: you’ll be blistering.’
    â€˜I’d rather not.’
    â€˜Whatever suits. Sit here. I’m Mary—Mary Richardson.’ The woman whitened the large maroon birthmark on her cheek with face powder from a compact. ‘If they extend the Reform Act I’m going to stand as a parliamentary candidate for Bury St. Edmunds. Isn’t it just ripping?’ She snapped shut her compact and it closed with a clean click.
    Grace smiled politely. All these woman, what would it lead to? The only times she had been within a group of girls—and some of these women resembled girls to her—was at school when clusters of girls formed to skip with one long skipping rope, chanting:
    Â 
    â€˜Bronwen and Llywellyn sitting in the