“Like chess,” Delacorte ventured hopefully.
“No, with chess the winning is in the winning,” Kirke said wickedly.
Delacorte deflated a little in his chair. He knew he was about to lose.
“You only start losing when you stop fighting. If you were, for instance, buried by an avalanche and you see a pocket of air, would you stop digging? I don’t pause to wallow in disappointment or fantasize about outcomes. You dig until there’s daylight. You never stop. You explore every avenue. And, well, you know I come from mining stock. I can hardly stop digging.”
He winked at Mrs. Pariseau, to her absolute delight.
“How do you make a law?” Dot asked.
Delacorte hissed in an involuntary warning breath, clearly worried that she’d just opened the floodgates to orating.
Kirke was thoroughly undeterred. “Well, it works a little like this. Let’s say, for instance, you live at The Grand Palace on the Thames and feel oppressed by the fact that you can’t curse a blue streak in the sitting room. You might campaign for that particular rule to be struck from The Grand Palace on the Thames’s rules. You would have to persuade everyone here that it’s a good idea. You might have to give a speech. Maybe many speeches. Form a political party. Perhaps you could call it the Blue Streak party. And then you would hold a vote.”
“This ishypothetical,” Angelique hastened to add. “It is merely anexample. We will not be doing this.”
“What if we vote to clap instead of using a curse word?” Mr. Delacorte wondered.
Catherine laughed.
“What if we wanted to add a law that says only one certain person is in charge of answering the door?” Dot asked innocently.
“You would need to persuade everyone that this is a good idea,” Delilah said dryly. “And I can tell you what your chances of that will be.”
“Mind you,” Lord Kirke added, “what I’ve just said isquitea simplification.”
“Do you think women ought to be able to vote the way men are able to vote, Lord Kirke?” Mrs. Pariseau asked.
Catherine’s breath stopped. It seemed to her a question so daring it plucked her nerves to hear it aloud.
She understood that some women who owned property—usually inherited—were allowed to vote, but usually through an appointed male proxy. Women were at the mercy of men in nearly every way, until, apparently, they were widows. But she in truth knew very little about it.
“Yes. I do. One day they will.” Lord Kirke said it as casually as “would you please pass the peas?”
There fell another loaded little silence.
She knew men in her village would immediately push such talk away as “daft” or “lunacy” or even “heresy.” She could imagine the mutterings about it in the pub now. People said those kinds of things out of fear of change, and always had dozens of reasons why things should remain the same. She wasn’t even certain whether her father would agree. It was so easy to dismiss anything that hadn’t been done the same way for hundreds of years.
But when Lord Kirke said it, shekneweveryone in this room could picture it. Such was his presence and conviction. One would have to be mad or utterly fearless or some combination to say such things, let alone attempt to lead a populace towardthem. She supposed they were fortunate he had chosen to use his powers on behalf of the weakest among them.
She was momentarily held fast by awe. It suddenly seemed outlandish that she’d ever had the nerve to speak to him, because history—the sort recorded in books—was made by people like him.Statueswere often made of this sort of person.
“Those who have the power are loathe to relinquish or share it,” he continued. “And they fight to keep it out of fear—fear of the loss of power. This has been true throughout human history. Fortunately, every generation, a few mad bast”—Delacorte cleared his throat noisily, and Dominic nodded his thanks. “A pigheaded few like me are born, and we attempt to push the whole of the world closer to justice for all humans. I firmly believe we all suffer when the weakest among us suffer. Oh, women voting probably won’t happen, not in our lifetimes. But one day. Mark my words.”
Kirke looked over at Captain Hardy and Lord Bolt and raised his brows at them in a “Well?” sort of way. It was, after a fashion, a dare.
Bolt and Hardy were amused, and yet not, at his capriciously stirring potential uproar in their sitting room, and of putting them on the spot. But it was only what was to be expected.
Captain Hardy sighed heavily and leaned back in his chair. “Very well. Bolt, Delacorte, and I are partners in our own business, the Triton Group. Our wives own The Grand Palace on the Thames and make the decisions about everything and everyone in it, and they run it beautifully,” Captain Hardy said. “You can see for yourself the results ofit. If only our country were run so well. I cannot think of a single reason women ought not to vote.”
“And they were clever enough to marry men who were happy to leave them to it,” Bolt added.
Cat thought she was witnessing a different sort of politics, the kind men learn when they’re married.
Delilah and Angelique were both wearing contented, approving expressions, as if they’d known this all along about their husbands.
“If only the world were run like The Grand Palace on the Thames,” Delacorte added, “with an enormous Epithet Jar to fund things like... road improvements.”