Da’s profile was clear from where I sat at my desk. Instead of sorting slips, I watched for a change in expression as he went through the post. When he got to the bottom of the pile, he picked up the leaflet. I held my breath.

He looked it over, read the caption and considered it for a minute with a serious face. Then he relaxed into a smile, his head nodding in comprehension of the cartoon—the cleverness, perhaps? Or the argument? Instead of screwing it up, he put it in one of his piles. He rose from the sorting table and delivered each pile to its place.

“This should interest you, Essy,” Da said, as he placed a small pile of slips on my desk. “It came with the post.”

He watched me as I took the leaflet from him and looked it over as if I’d never seen it before.

“Something worth discussing with your young friends,” Da said, before walking away.

Tilda was right; I was a coward. I put the leaflet in my desk and took my newest slip from my pocket.

Sisters. I searched the pigeon-holes. Sisters had plenty of slips, and already they had been sorted and top-slips written for different senses, but comrades was not one of them.

Lizzie was spending more and more time in the kitchen since Mrs. Ballard began having her turns. The doctor had cautioned against standing for long periods, so Mrs. Ballard had taken to sitting at the kitchen table with a pot of tea, issuing instructions. When I came in, she was turning the pages of the Oxford Chronicle and reminding Lizzie to salt the bird that had just been delivered.

“Don’t be mean with it, now,” she said. “It needs a goodly amount to make it tender. The longer it sits, the better.”

Lizzie rolled her eyes but kept her smile. “You’ve had me salting the birds since I was twelve, Mrs. B. I reckon I know what to do.”

“Been some trouble in town, they say,” said Mrs. Ballard, ignoring Lizzie. “Some suffragettes caught painting slogans on the Town Hall. It says here they was chased down St. Aldate’s and they might have got away except one of them fell and the other two stopped to help her up.”

“Suffragettes?” said Lizzie. “I’ve never heard that before.”

“That’s what it says.” Mrs. Ballard read through the article. “It’s what they’re calling Mrs. Pankhurst’s women.”

“Just slogans?” I said. I’d expected arson.

“It says here that they used red paint to write Women: No more rights than a convict.”

“Didn’t your leaflet say that, Esme?” asked Lizzie, her hands in the bird, her eyes on me.

“The one who fell is married to the magistrate,” Mrs. Ballard continued. “And the other two are from Somerville College. All educated ladies. How shaming.”

“It wasn’t my leaflet, Lizzie. It came in the post.”