“Mrs. Evans is always right,” Petra said with a chuckle. The housekeeper had been with the Rutherford family since she and Jonathan were children and her word was always law.

“If you rest your foot on this stool, Miss Petra, I’ll put some on for you.” Dottie pushed a velvet stool to the table, drew the cork on the bottle and sprinkled some of the liquid onto a gauze pad.

Petra obliged, offering up first one foot and then the other for her maid to daub with the soaked gauze. “That feels so cool and soothing. Thank you, Dottie.”

“They don’t look too bad to me,” the girl said, peering closely at the soles of Petra’s feet. “Why’d you go and do something daft like that, Miss Petra?”

Dottie, who was about the same age as her mistress and had been looking after her since Petra had first put up her hair, never stood on ceremony and Petra never thought twice about the informality of their relationship.

“Maybe I’d had a glass of wine too many,” she offered with a grin, buttering a slice of toast. “It seemed perfectly logical at the time.”

Dottie laughed, shaking her head as she began to lay out undergarments on the bed before turning to the wardrobe for the shirt and skirt. “I went along to the meeting at Caxton Hall last night, miss. Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst was speaking. She said we was a suffrage army in the field. I never thought of it like that before . . . an army . . . means fighting, don’t it?” She paused in the act of smoothing the folds of the skirt. “Makes me a bit uneasy, miss, if I tell the truth. Don’t see meself marchin’ into battle.”

“No, and you won’t have to, Dottie. No one will have to do anything they don’t want to do,” Petra reassured. “There are other ways of supporting the cause. Leafletting, joining a parade, going to meetings.”

“Well, I don’t mind doing any of that,” the girl said, laying the skirt carefully on the bed. “But there was talk of throwin’ things at the police an’ stuff. I don’t hold with any o’ that. It’s as much as my job’s worth.”