Louisa’s family had maintained the sort of cultivation, restraint, and dignity that was expected of those descended from the English colonists who arrived in the New World on the Arbella or the Mayflower. However, Louisa knew that she and her brother had enjoyed freedom that was uncommon to their class, largely due to their father’s continued absence as a trade merchant in Hong Kong. Their mother had been so caught up in her own social aspirations that she had hardly noticed her children at all. Charlotte West’s entire reason for living had always seemed to be to maintain an old aristocratic lifestyle in order to cement her social standing. Now, Louisa could see that her mother had dedicated herself to creating a replica of English life in America. Louisa grasped that she had not really understood either the motivations behind her mother’s behavior, or the roots of social structure until she came to England.
Duty, restraint, discretion, these were ideals that Louisa’s mother stuck to with a genteel smile. Charlotte West made an art form of cultivating the correct dress, manners, deportment, character traits, and personal virtues that were expected of her class. She devoted herself to the arts, to charity—hospitals and colleges—and to the good works of the Episcopal Church.
But Louisa had been blessed with a governess who had opened her mind to the fact that women should have better rights, rights equal to men’s. Louisa had been so drawn to the idea that women deserved to determine their own destinies that she had read more on the topic over the last few years. Her governess shared with her Mrs. Pankhurst’s pamphlets advocating universal women’s suffrage through her Women’s Franchise League. Louisa was inspired by the fact that Mrs. Pankhurst had taken up an interest in women’s rights at the age of fourteen, and she felt drawn to the woman’s ideas.
She appreciated that Mrs. Pankhurst was a European woman living in the very society where Louisa found herself now, but Mrs. Pankhurst was leading the way for women in the New World too. The suffragettes proposed an alternative way to that of Louisa’s mother. And that excited Louisa.
But Charlotte had found Louisa’s pamphlets and had been furious at her new ideas. Charlotte had informed Louisa that being labeled a bluestocking would mean she’d never be seen as a suitable wife. Any sort of activism among their class would simply not be tolerated, and Louisa would be dismissed from society faster than she could read one of her own silly pamphlets.
Charlotte sacked Louisa’s governess and sent Louisa packing to England. Here she was kept under the watchful eyes of society and under a grueling social calendar to distract her, and to keep her from her unsuitable revolutionary ideas. Charlotte made it clear that Louisa would not be welcome back in Boston unless it was with an English husband, and that were Louisa to set foot near Mrs. Pankhurst in London, she would no longer be a member of the West family at all.
Samuel had been instructed to accompany Louisa on his way to Hong Kong, and here she was about to see him off. Her mother’s plan had not worked so far—Louisa had not been distributed to a suitable husband, and she only wished that she could go to work in Hong Kong too.
She stood up. Samuel, ever intuitive, stood up too. Louisa held her parasol up against the sun, appreciating the coolness of the shade on her white cotton dress, with its high collar and full sleeves.
“I’m going for a walk,” she said to the party on the terrace.
Guy Hamilton’s sister, Alice, and her young friend smiled, waving Louisa on, while Louisa’s dear friend Meg raised her hand in a nonchalant sort of response. It had struck Louisa that Meg had become very content here—no doubt confident in the knowledge that she would spend hundreds of afternoons just like this one, with her new husband, Guy, who was famous for his good humor, his fine jawline, and the fact that he had never fallen in love until he met Meg.
Feigned delight at his engagement had fanned its way through debutante circles, while the innocent Meg remained oblivious to the fact that she was the object of both envy and hatred throughout half the English countryside. But Louisa sensed it, that tightness beneath the politeness of the other girls and their mothers, and she felt an odd need to protect Meg. She turned away from the terrace. Her mind was filled, as always, with too much. Which was what her mother always said.
“I’ll join you.” Samuel removed his white suit jacket, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and smoothed back his corn-colored hair. His face was lightly tanned. The English summer suited him, Louisa thought.
“You are agitated,” he said, holding his arm out for her to take.