The Savage Heart

The older woman’s eyes twinkled. “Tess, then. I hope you achieve your goals. My generation will not live to see it, but perhaps yours will eventually gain the vote.”

Tess went to her own room, happily having diverted them from any discussion of her surprising interaction with Matt. It wouldn’t do to have people in the boardinghouse speculate about the two of them. She refused to do any speculating on her own, either. She buried Matt’s odd behavior in the back of her mind and got ready for bed.

Outside the wind was blowing fiercely; snowflakes struck the windowpane. She closed her eyes, hoping for a heavy snowfall. She always felt curiously happy, often content, too, on snowy days.

Chapter Three

Saturday’s march was lively. It was held after dark with torches to light the path of the marchers. More than four hundred women showed up, carrying placards. Tess marched between two women she knew vaguely, but she missed the company of her friend Nan.

“Isn’t this exciting?” the girl beside her asked. “We’re bound to win with such large numbers of us demanding the vote now.”

Tess agreed, but less wholeheartedly. She’d learned one terrible truth in her young life, and that was the bullheadedness of government in the face of demands for change. Regardless of how just the cause, the people in power in Washington were avid in supporting the status quo. Roosevelt was keen on creating a safe place for wildlife and showing pride in the American spirit. But he was also a believer in Manifest Destiny, and a manly man. Tess wondered if he shared the same attitude toward women that most men of his generation harbored—that women were created only to keep house and bear children and look after men.

Demonstrations inevitably attracted spectators; Tess glanced around at them. A man waving a flag that read Up With Labor stepped from the street into the ranks of the women, bringing a small body of cohorts with him.

“This is not your group!” one woman yelled at him.

“This struggle is also the workers’ struggle!” the man yelled back, and kept marching. “We support your cause! Down with oppression of all kinds!”

“You see?” one of Tess’s companions grumbled. “We cannot even hold a rally without having a man step in and try to lead it. Well, I’ll just show him a thing or two!”

The small, matronly woman turned in the throng with her placard held like a club and beaned the advocate for laborers with it right on his bald spot.

He yelped and dropped the banner, and the few men and women who were in his group started attacking the women’s rights marchers.

Tess stood very still and gave a long sigh as she heard the first of many police whistles start to sound. The authorities had looked for a way to break up this march, and the communist had given it to them. The small scuffle became a melee.

As she tried to move back from the combatants, Tess was aware of a newcomer who didn’t seem to be part of either group. He was tall and young, expensively dressed, and he carried a cane. He seemed to be looking straight at her. While she was wondering about the odd incident, she was suddenly knocked down and all but trampled as the fighting accelerated.

She never lost consciousness, but she heard a metallic sound through the commotion of loud voices. She rolled to avoid being stepped on, and as she did, her arm was hit a mighty blow. It throbbed, and even though the light was dim, she could see that the sleeve of her jacket and blouse seemed to be ripped through.

Two policemen were on either side of her when she looked up again. One of them, kindly and older, assisted her to the sidewalk. Muttering about people who couldn’t live and let live, he left her on the stoop of an apartment house. Two small boys played with a hoop and gave her curious stares.

She wished that she could open her blouse and look at her arm because it felt wet as well as bruised under her torn jacket, but to do something so indecent in public would start another riot. She wondered how she was going to find the carriage and driver Matt had insisted on hiring to take her to and from the hospital and her suffragist meetings as soon as she’d received the nursing position and found the group of women she wanted to join. Her driver, Mick Kennedy, was a prince of a fellow, and she’d asked him to wait a number of blocks away from the demonstration for her. Now the streets were in such an uproar and she was feeling so very disoriented that she wasn’t sure precisely where he was or how to find him.

As luck would have it, Mick Kennedy found her. Worried by what he’d seen on the fringes of the demonstration, he’d hitched his team to a streetlamp, plunged into the crowd, and spent the last fifteen minutes or so searching for her. He was visibly relieved to find her.

“Hurt in all this, were you?” At her nod, he added, “Some mess, I’ll say. Shall I get you back to your boardinghouse?”

“Oh, yes, thank you, Mick.”

“Well, now, just take me arm and I’ll have you back there in no time, or me name’s not Mick Kennedy!”

In short order they were out of the crowd, and Mick was helping Tess into the carriage. His fine team was swiftly under way, drawing the impressive black carriage through the thinning crowd.

By the time they reached the boardinghouse, Tess’s arm was much worse.

“Shall I help you up to your door, ma’am?” Mick offered.

“No, thank you. I can manage.” She smiled, then made her way slowly up the steps.

Mrs. Mulhaney met her at the door. At the sight of Tess, dirty and disheveled, her hat askew and her hair coming down, she exclaimed, “Why, Miss Meredith, whatever has happened?”

“A man from the workers’ party infiltrated our ranks and provoked one of our number to violence.” Tess groaned. She leaned against the wall, wincing and nauseated, as she regarded the staircase with uneasy eyes and wondered how she was going to get to her room.

“Is my cousin Matt in this evening?” she asked suddenly.

“Why, I’m sure he is. I haven’t seen him go out. You wait here, my dear. I’ll fetch him!”

Mrs. Mulhaney rushed upstairs and quickly came back down with Matt, who was shrugging into a jacket as he walked. He eyed Tess with an expression she was too wounded to contemplate.

“Are you hurt? Where?” he asked immediately.

“My arm,” she said, breathing unsteadily. “I was trodden on, and I think it may be cut, as my sleeve is.”

“Can you send for Dr. Barrows?” he asked Mrs. Mulhaney.

“I can—and shall. At once. Can you take Miss Meredith to her room?”

“Yes.”

Without another word, Matt swung Tess up in his arms and climbed the staircase as easily as if he were carrying feathers.

She clung to his neck, savoring his great strength as he covered the distance to her door.

“Who did this?” he asked under his breath.

“There was a riot,” she explained. “I don’t know who did it. Several people were fighting, and I seem to have got in the way. My arm throbs so!”

“Which one?”

“The left one, just above the elbow. I didn’t even see how it happened. I rolled away from a very heavy man who was about to step on me. I remember a man with a cane looking at me before I fell, just before something stabbed at my arm. I think it might have been his cane. I wish I’d bitten his ankle.”

The mental picture of Tess with her teeth in a man’s ankle amused Matt and he chuckled softly.

“Here, open the door for me, can you?” he asked, lowering her.

She turned the crystal knob with her good hand and pushed the door open, trying not to notice the faint scent of his cologne and the warm sigh of his breath close to her lips. Matt shouldered into the room and carried her to her bed. He put her down very gently on the quilt that covered the white-enameled iron bedstead.

Wary of Mrs. Mulhaney’s return, he closed the door and then matter-of-factly began taking off Tess’s jacket.

She was panting, but not from the pain. “Matt, you…mustn’t!” She feverishly tried to stay the lean, strong hands that were unfastening her blouse.

His black eyes met hers with a faint twinkle. “Feeling prudish, Tess? You saw as much if not more of me after I was shot at Wounded Knee.”

“I was fourteen then,” she said, aware even as she spoke that it was a nonsensical answer. “And you mustn’t handle me…like this.”

“Where are all those slogans you were spouting about a woman’s rights?” He glanced down again at the buttons. “Don’t your more radical sisters even advocate free love?”