“Not as much as it currently bothers you.” Her friend rolled over so that her back faced Portia. “Read your silly pamphlet till your eyes bleed if you have to, but in the name of all that is holy, kindly shut up so that I can head back to dreamland.” Kitty’s head burrowed beneath her pillow in an attempt to do just that and groaned when Portia yanked it away.
“We need to change the world, Kitty, just like Mary Wollstonecraft says. We need to end the aristocracy’s prolonged tenure of tyranny that is held together with nothing but pomp, tradition, and our oppressors’ lies.” She raised a righteous finger and jabbed the air. “We need to shout the truth from the rafters and stand up for the rights that those with ill-gotten hereditary power work so hard to deny us. It is our civic responsibility, as the next generation, to save all future generations from their suffocating and soul-destroying influence. Surely you can see that?”
“Right at this precise moment, all I want to see is the back of my eyelids, but if you want a revolution, by all means go ahead and start one.” Kitty yanked her pillow back and flopped back down on it. “But don’t blame me if you end up guillotined for it!”
And there was the rub!
Dare question the oppressors and you’d probably end up punished for it. It was a vicious cycle that would not stop until a few brave souls stuck their heads above the parapet and enlightened the rest of the oppressed to both the truth and the alternatives.
“Perhaps I will start the revolution.” Because they had never guillotined people here in England. They didn’t even chop people’s heads off nowadays either, so she wouldn’t allow fear to put her off doing what was right. Reforming the entire system from the top all the way down to the bottom was a daunting prospect for a sixteen-year-old girl with no actual prospects—but Portia had never shied away from a challenge. Especially when it suddenly felt like her overwhelming destiny to rise to the occasion. “And perhaps, when I’ve freed you and the rest of the working masses from the shackles of servitude, you’ll thank me for it.”
When Kitty failed to reply, Portia poked her in the ribs. “I shall not rest until I do it, Kitty Blackstone, and I will. You mark my words.”
Although quite how a down-at-heel gamekeeper’s daughter from Somerset was going to do all that when she grew up was anyone’s guess.
Then it came to her—her second epiphany of the night—she would use her words just like Mary Wollstonecraft! And those words, those irrefutable, truthful arguments, would be relentless until the world listened and agreed to change things.
The days of entitled earls and detestable dukes controlling everything were numbered.
She was so inspired, she got up and went in search of a pen and some paper and, to mark her epiphany, set about writing her first-ever essay. Putting all her tangled thoughts on paper, organizing her arguments and backing them with evidence.
Blithely unaware of how just the significance of writing it all down was going to end up changing her life in ways that she couldn’t yet imagine.
Chapter
TWO
THE CITY OFBATH, LATEMAY1821…
Portia’s tummy was doing somersaults as she walked across Pulteney Bridge toward the less-populated outskirts of Bath. The bulk of her nerves were due to excitement at the new challenge ahead, but there was enough self-doubt and fear to make her question the unpopular and very hasty choice she had just made. Because while her three best friends, Kitty, Lottie, and Georgie, had all wished her well on her adventure, they had also made no secret of the fact that they agreed wholeheartedly with Miss Prentice. That it was rash to potentially throw away everything for an impassioned whim.
Aside from the fact that she didn’t have any clear idea what she was letting herself in for, giving up a well-paid position as a governess in Mayfair to become the temporary assistant editor ofEquitas, the reforming periodical that Portia had written periodically for these past five years, was a huge and reckless gamble. One that Miss P had urged her repeatedly to reconsider. “Principles are all well and good, dearest,” she had said with a shake of her head, “but they do not pay the bills. And who is going to employ you here again in Mayfair when those principles are exposed?”
Miss P was right, of course.
Always a committed overachiever, Portia had worked hard since she had graduated Miss Prentice’s School for Young Ladies to excel as much as a governess as she had a political writer. Furthermore, unlike Kitty and Lottie, who had frequently managed to get themselves dismissed, she had a largely unblemished record as a governess. But that wouldn’t mean a thing if word of her involvement with this newspaper ever leaked out—which it doubtless would with her name printed in it weekly.
Thanks to a tumultuous few years, the government and the majority of the ton sawEquitasas the enemy. An instrument of sedition and the mouthpiece of radical revolutionaries who wanted to crush the aristocracy and destroy the very fabric of British society. At best, she would be branded a troublemaker of the highest order if her words and deeds caused the authorities consternation. At worst, she would be tried as a criminal! In the last five years alone, two of the newspaper’s former editors had been imprisoned. One on trumped-up charges of treason, which had been quickly dropped, and the other for incitement to riot. That the latest one of those, whom she was so hastily replacing, looked to be imminently sent to a penal colony in the New World was a cause of grave concern that she couldn’t ignore. Nobody would employ a governess with a criminal record, and she sincerely doubted anyone would need one if she ended up transported to Botany Bay.
And if all that wasn’t gamble enough to make her question her snap decision to come here, as much as it galled her to admit it—even to herself—she also had to factor the problem of her sex into the equation. Reformers liked to think of themselves as an egalitarian bunch; however, it was no coincidence that all the leaders of the movement were men, and men, as a general rule, tended to think of women as the weaker sex.
Portia had constantly been pushed to the rear as a result. Relegated to creating pamphlets or writing other people’s speeches, rather than taking on the more important and influential role at the forefrontof the movement that she craved. It did not matter that she had a unique and convincing way with words, or that she was twice as clever and had worked twice as hard as any of the men she tirelessly campaigned beside at the United League for Reform’s headquarters—this was ultimately still a man’s world. That she had been given the position atEquitassimply because her predecessor had just been arrested and was currently awaiting trial in a Bristol prison did not help her plight either. Portia was the last-minute, make-do replacement while the men in charge waited either for the original candidate to be released or, if he was sent down, for a more suitable male replacement to be found. Hence, they had been at great pains to caveat her position here at the newspaper as only “temporary.”
Yet despite those many obstacles, here she still was.
Because she felt in her gut that this was her chance to shine.
To make a real difference in the war for reform.
Because principles mattered.
The truth mattered.
The rights of men—and women—mattered.
Because she believed too passionately in the cause to not take this risk and because, even after she had debated all the pros and cons in a soul-searching essay to herself that had extended to ten whole pages, she had come to the irrefutable conclusion that this was the right thing to do.
She walked down to the quay and scanned the row of ramshackle buildings, comparing them to her instructions. The office ofEquitaswasn’t easy to spot, but then she discovered it was the shabbiest warehouse of the lot. She wasn’t surprised by that. The United League for Reform ran on a shoestring and the newspaper had to move thrice since it had been forced out of London three years ago. There weren’t many respectable landlords who would rent space to “trouble,” especially trouble that infuriated the government.
