‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do. As well as all that other stuff.’
We ended the call and I sat for a second, thinking. So the axe was swinging above our heads after all. What had started as a project to save my career was suddenly a project to save a school. Was I up to the task? Was it worth it?
I glanced at the pile of corn dollies on my shelf, waiting for Jeff to put up a display for me.
‘We could do with a bit of that luck now,’ I muttered. I’d have to call a staff meeting, let everyone know what was going on. Urgh. Maybe I should buy some wine, to help the news go down a bit easier?
‘What would you do, Esther?’ I looked up at the photograph that I’d not yet managed to move. ‘Would you roll over and let them close the school or would you fight?’
Esther looked at me, her expression fierce, and I looked back at her, and a tiny idea took seed. She founded this school, I thought. Maybe she had a story we could use. Get us some publicity.
I studied her photo. She was staring, unsmiling, at the camera wearing a severe black skirt and high-necked white blouse with a sort of flouncy cravat-type creation. Her chin was lifted and she looked snooty, to my twenty-first-century eyes. She didn’t look like she was the type to put up a fight about anything.
I opened my laptop and typed Esther Watkins and teacher into the search engine then blinked in surprise at the first entry, which seemed to be a court report from a newspaper dated 1910.
‘Esther Watkins, aged twenty-one, schoolteacher, sentenced to ten weeks in Holloway Women’s Prison for public disorder offences,’ it read.
‘That can’t be right,’ I said to myself. I glanced over at the photograph where our Esther’s names and the dates 1889–1970 were written on the frame. I added up in my head. If our Esther had been born in 1889 then she would indeed have been twenty-one in 1910.
‘Well, well, well,’ I said. There was obviously more to Esther Watkins than I’d imagined. I felt a small flicker of excitement followed almost immediately by crushing disappointment. An ex-con’s story was hardly going to prove that Elm Heath was a vital part of the community, was it? I was just going to have to come up with something else.
1910
I walked the long way round to the house, clutching my bag to my chest as I tried to remember the name of the suffragette who lived there. Agnes, I thought. I couldn’t recall her surname. It was a long walk up the hill from Stockwell, and when I eventually found the house, hot and bothered and with my cheek throbbing, Agnes wasn’t in.
I pulled the bell and heard the noise echoing round the empty house and then, completely out of ideas and energy, I sat down on the stone step. I’d wait, I supposed, until she came home. It wasn’t as though I had anywhere else to go.
Leaning against the iron railings I found my eyes closing but I forced myself awake. I may have been on my uppers but I wasn’t about to start sleeping in the street like an urchin.
‘Are you waiting for me?’
I looked round to see a woman, older than me – in her thirties I guessed – hurrying up the stairs. She looked vaguely familiar.
‘I’ve seen you at meetings,’ she said now. ‘I’m Agnes Oliver.’
‘Esther,’ I said, standing up. ‘Yes, I was hoping you could tell me where I could find Mrs Pankhurst.’
‘Oh, heaven knows, that woman is never around when we need her.’
Faintly amused by the woman’s sense of entitlement, I smiled. ‘She is often busy.’
‘We’re all busy,’ Agnes said. ‘She wants me to put together this blessed newspaper and it’s all well and good, but when I’m spending all the hours God gives me on that, she forgets I’ve also got three children who need looking after. And she promised she was going to find me a governess but has she? No, she has not …’
Without stopping to think, I interrupted her tirade. ‘She has,’ I said. ‘Found you a governess, I mean.’
Agnes blinked at me and I stuck my hand out for her to shake.
‘It’s me. I’m Esther Watkins and I’m a schoolteacher. At least I was.’
‘What happened?’
I screwed up my face and took a chance. ‘I lost my job because I was in Holloway.’
Agnes nodded slowly. ‘The school won’t have you back?’
‘No.’
She was looking at me, sizing me up, I guessed. I tried to stand up straighter, aware that I was not at my best, and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear.
‘What happened to your cheek?’
‘I tripped over a tree root on my way here.’
Agnes nodded again, her eyes never leaving my face.
‘Is it a live-in position?’ I said, hoping beyond hope that it was.
‘I would prefer it to be live-in but if that’s a problem, we can discuss it. Did Mrs Pankhurst not explain all this when she told you about the position?’
‘I must have forgotten,’ I lied. ‘So much has happened.’
‘Hmm,’ she said. For a moment, I thought I’d made a big mistake and that this wasn’t going to be the answer to my prayers but then she clapped her hands together.
‘You’ll be perfect,’ she said. She gripped my arm tightly. ‘Could you possibly start today?’
Relief flooded me. ‘I could.’
‘Wonderful. I can get you a cab and we can collect your things.’
‘I have all my things,’ I said, gesturing to my carpetbag. ‘I don’t have much. And, well, I can’t go home because my mother is of the same mind as my former headmistress.’
Agnes’s face softened. ‘Doesn’t approve?’
‘Not in the least.’
The familiar frustration and rage that I felt when I thought of my mother began to build.
‘We lost everything when my father died because of mistakes he made,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘We had to sell the house. But still she thinks women are supposed to suffer and that this is just the way it shall be.’ I took a breath. ‘Sorry.’
Agnes shook her head. ‘Don’t apologise,’ she said. ‘We all have our reasons for finding our way to each other.’
She picked up my battered bag. ‘Now, shall we go in?’
She unlocked the large front door and I followed her inside. I hadn’t even asked how many children I would be teaching. I hoped it would be two quiet little girls rather than four boisterous boys, but I felt I couldn’t ask because I’d pretended that I knew all about the job.
‘Edie?’ she called. ‘Edie?’
A woman wearing an apron came rushing through the hall from the back of the house. ‘I was hanging out the washing,’ she said. ‘Have you been knocking?’
‘Not at all,’ Agnes said, peeling off her gloves. ‘This is our new governess, Esther. Esther, this is Edie our housekeeper.’
Edie and I nodded hello to each other.
‘Are