The Savage Heart

“Just a minute,” a musical voice called. “I’m coming.”

The door opened and a tiny woman with gray-streaked blond hair in a bun looked way up at Matt and then at his companion.

“Why, Mr. Davis, have you found a wife at last?”

Tess flushed scarlet and Matt cleared his throat.

“This is my cousin, Tess Meredith, Mrs. Mulhaney. Her father has died, and she has no relatives except me. Is that room on the third floor still vacant?”

“Yes, it is, and I’d be delighted to rent it to Miss Meredith.” She smiled at Tess, a thousand unspoken questions in her blue eyes.

Tess smiled back. “I’d be very grateful to have a place to stay near Matt.” She looked up at him with sickening adoration. “Isn’t he just the sweetest man?”

“Sweet” wasn’t an appellation that had ever connected itself with the enigmatic Mr. Davis in Mrs. Mulhaney’s mind, but she supposed to a kinswoman he might be.

“He is a kindhearted soul,” she agreed. “Now, Miss Meredith, you can have meals with us. Mr. Davis will tell you the times, and there’s a laundry just three doors down run by Mr. Lo.”

Matt stifled a chuckle. “I’ll show her where it is,” he promised.

“Let me get the key and I’ll take you to your room, Miss Meredith. It has a very nice view of the city.”

She went off, mumbling to herself, and Tess lifted both brows as she looked up at Matt. “And what was so amusing about the laundry?”

“Don’t you remember? Whites used to call us Mr. Lo.”

She frowned.

He made an exasperated sound. “Lo, the poor Indian…?”

She laughed. “Oh, good heavens. I’d forgotten our jokes about that.”

“I haven’t,” he murmured. “You and I joked. Everywhere else being called Mr. Lo or ‘John’ most of my life was not funny.”

“Well, you’re anything but a poor Indian now,” she said pointedly, her gaze going over his rich paisley vest in shades of magenta and the dark gray suit and white shirt he was wearing with it. Even his shoes were expensive, handmade. For feet that size, she thought wickedly, they’d have to be handmade! She searched his dark eyes with a smile in her own. “You look filthy rich to me!” she whispered.

“Tess!”

“I’ll reform,” she promised, but hadn’t time to say more because Mrs. Mulhaney was back with the key.

Chapter Two

Chicago was big and brash, and Tess loved to explore it, finding old churches and forts and every manner of modern building. Lake Michigan, lapping at the very edge of the city and looking as big as an ocean, fascinated Tess, who had spent so many of her formative years landlocked in the West.

She rather easily got a nursing position at the hospital in Cook County. Her experience and skill were evident to a number of the physicians, who maneuvered to get her on their services. Since she wasn’t formally trained, however, she was classified a practical nurse.

The matrons who lived at the boardinghouse were less approving. They considered nursing a dreadful profession for a well-brought-up single woman and said so.

Tess took their comments with smiling fortitude, mentally consigning them to the nether reaches. They couldn’t really be blamed, though, considering their upbringing. Change came hard to the elderly.

Fortunately, she discovered a group of women’s rights advocates and joined immediately. She eagerly worked on every plan for a march or a rally aimed at getting the vote for women.

Matt kept a close eye on her. He often saw her as an unbroken filly that no hand was going to tame. He wouldn’t have presumed to try. There was much to admire in Tess, and much to respect.

TESS MADE A GOOD FRIEND right away in Nan Collier, the young wife of a telegraph clerk, who attended suffragist meetings with her. Matt had insisted that she not go out at night unaccompanied. It was the only restriction he’d placed on her, and since she didn’t consider it demeaning, she abided by it. And Nan was good company, too. She wasn’t an educated woman, as Tess was, but she was intelligent and had a kind heart.

As they grew closer, it became obvious to Tess that Nan had problems at home. She never spoke of them, but she made little comments about having to be back at a certain time so that her husband wouldn’t be angry, or about having to be sure that her housework was done properly to keep him happy. It sounded as if any lapse in what her husband considered her most important duties would result in punishment.

It wasn’t until the end of her first month in Chicago that Tess discovered what Nan’s punishment was. She came to a suffragist meeting at a local matron’s house with a split lip and a black eye.

“Nan, what happened?” Tess exclaimed, her concern echoed by half a dozen fierce campaigners for women’s rights. “Did your husband strike you?”

“Oh, no!” Nan said quickly. “Why, this is nothing. I fell down the steps, is all.” She laughed nervously, putting a self-conscious hand to her eye. “I’m so clumsy sometimes.”

“Are you sure that’s all it is?” Tess persisted.

“Yes, I’m sure. But you’re sweet to worry about me, Tess,” Nan said with genuine affection.

“Don’t ever let him start hitting you,” Tess cautioned. “It will only get worse. No man has the right to beat his wife, regardless of what she’s done.”

“I fell down the steps,” Nan repeated, but she didn’t quite meet Tess’s eyes. “Dennis gets impatient with me when I’m slow, especially when those rich friends of his come over, and he thinks I’m stupid sometimes, but he…he wouldn’t hit me.”

Tess had seen too many victims of brutality to be convinced by Nan’s story. Working as a nurse was very informative—too informative sometimes.

She patted the other woman’s shoulder gently. “Well, if you ever need help, I’ll do what I can for you. I promise.”

Nan smiled, wincing as the motion pulled the cut on her lower lip open. She dabbed at it with her handkerchief. “Thanks, Tess, but I’m okay.”

Tess sighed. “Very well, then.”

The meeting was boisterous, as often happened, and some of the opinions voiced seemed radical even to Tess. But the majority of the members wanted only the right to be treated, at least in the polling booth, as equal to men.

“The Quakers have always accepted women as equals,” one woman said angrily. “But our men are still living in the Dark Ages. Most of them look upon us as property. Even the best men think a woman is too ignorant to render an opinion on any matter of public interest.”

“Yes!” came cries of assent.

“Furthermore, we have no control over our own bodies and must bear children again and again, whether we’re able or not. Many of our sisters have died in childbirth. Many others are so overburdened by children that they have no energy for any other pursuit. But if we mention any sort of birth control, especially abstinence, men brand us heretics!”

There were more cries of support.

“We cannot even vote,” the woman continued. “Men treat us either as children or idiots. A woman is looked down upon if she even shops for her own groceries!”

“Or if she works away from the home!” another added.

“It is time, past time, that we demanded the rights to which any man is legally entitled at birth. We must not accept being second-class citizens any longer. We must act!”

“Yes, we must!”

“Yes!”