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A few mornings later, Hannah popped her head round the doorjamb as Ophelia reached the bottom of the stairs, then a moment later, pressed a cup and saucer into her hands.

The steam from the cup warmed Ophelia’s face, and she smiled at the first sip.

Hannah had made it just the way she liked it—too sweet and milky for anyone else’s taste.

She grinned at her friend and hummed her appreciation through another sip.

“Sleep alright?” Hannah asked, sliding into her seat at the table.

“Mhmm,” mumbled Ophelia, joining her. “My back and arms ache from cutting back the field, but I slept like the dead.” She pulled the plate of thick sliced bread toward her and buttered a piece before topping it with a slice of cheddar and slumping into her chair.

She fidgeted with her teacup while she chewed, squirming in her seat like a child at church.

“What is it, Ophelia? You’re jumpy as a cat this week,” said Hannah, around a mouthful of toast.

Ophelia looked up, wondering if she could truly say what was on her mind. She took a bite of her breakfast to buy herself some time.

Hannah didn’t usually wear the heavy WLA tunic; instead she wore a man’s linen shirt tucked into her breeches with elasticated braces and a kerchief at her neck.

This morning, she was still in her shirtsleeves, the indigo kerchief around her neck, but unknotted.

She had pulled her braces on, bunching the worn fabric of her shirt at the shoulder, and she sat sprawled in her chair, one socked foot propped up on the chair next to her.

She looked like a gentleman pirate, Ophelia thought, or perhaps a robber queen.

Her hair was wild and thick, pulled into a loose roll at her nape, and she still had the dregs of sleep about her eyes and mouth.

Somehow in their months of friendship, Ophelia had never really noticed how beautiful Hannah was.

Sitting across from her now, Ophelia saw a wild, wary beauty.

An uninhibited honesty in the way she moved, worked, was still.

She inhabited her body in a way Ophelia found confounding and attractive; she didn’t seem to feel the need to make her physical presence small or tidy, and yet there was something welcoming about her.

She seemed at home in herself and Ophelia couldn’t quite understand how she achieved that.

Growing up, Ophelia had always understood that women were to fit themselves around every situation like particularly useful furniture.

Helpful, but unobtrusive. So she didn’t quite understand how Hannah could be both radical and generous.

It had been her experience that women were either desirable or denigrated, and it had gone without saying at Wood Grange that women who were not quiet and malleable were denigrated.

As her friendship with Hannah deepened, Ophelia was coming to see that the aspects of Hannah that made her an excellent companion in fleeing one’s father were also things that made Ophelia uneasy, wondering whether she would ever feel brave enough to truly step into a new life, expect equality as her due.

“So?” Hannah asked again, her long fingers playing with the handle of her teacup while she waited for Ophelia to answer.

“I—” Ophelia hesitated, then plunged in.

“I find myself thinking far too often of Silas, wondering what he’s thinking .

.. and, well, I’m distracted ... not doing a good job, I think.

I’m already slower than you and Bess and”—she could feel her cheeks heating with embarrassment—“and I wish I knew what to do about it. Him, I mean.”

There. She had said it aloud. The secret shame she had been fretting about since Silas’s arrival. She almost couldn’t look at Hannah, worried her friend would be staring at her in horror.

Hannah’s laugh rang out in the kitchen. “Is that all?” she cried, her wide grin echoed in her laughing eyes.

“Yes, but?—”

“But nothing, Ophelia! You’re a woman who’s come face-to-face with a man with whom she shared .

.. well, something,” Hannah said plainly.

“Of course, you’re distracted, you’re wondering where he’s been, why he left, what’re you to do now you’re here together.

” She reached across the table and patted Ophelia’s hand.

“Thinking of someone or even wishing for something with someone doesn’t mean you aren’t doing a good job.

Lord, half the world would shut down if people couldn’t work while having feelings for someone else! ” She laughed at the thought.

“I do not have feelings for him,” Ophelia protested, hotly.

“To be sure,” replied Hannah with a wry twist of her lips. “But his being here is stirring something up, yes?”

Ophelia nodded.

“You think his being here means you can’t start afresh, as you planned?” She watched Ophelia carefully as she asked her next question. “Or perhaps you aren’t quite as immune to him as you thought you were?”

Ophelia picked at the rough skin around her thumbnail, thinking she needed to remember hand salve tonight.

She didn’t know what to say to Hannah’s questions, wasn’t sure what she felt.

She had thought it was because Silas left so abruptly, but now she wondered what she had expected him to do differently.

So she was angry, but maybe more at herself than at Silas.

For being hurt when he left and for feeling caught out when he arrived on the farm and for doubting herself when her past showed up in her present.

Ophelia didn’t want to feel anything for Silas, certainly not an inconvenient amount of desire.

“I, oh, I don’t know ... I had thought when I left the estate and joined you here that I would be free of those things that were part of my old life.

I thought I would feel certain, not being in my father’s house any longer .

..” She trailed off, not sure how to express the surprise and hurt that Silas’s assignment had caused.

“I thought I had left behind childish things, and him being here nettles me somehow. Everything feels so upended, I feel upended ... not at all like an adult who might make their own decisions.”

“Ophelia, the past isn’t a coat you can just cast off and walk away from,” said Hannah.

“You have to carry it around with you, until you decide how you’d like to deal with it.

It’s what you do with the things you’ve learned that determine if you go forward on solid ground.

” She poured more tea into her and Ophelia’s cups.

“Believing in suffragism and equality doesn’t make one more or less brave, it is only a lens through which we might see the world and make our decisions. ”

“But do you think it’s compatible? Attraction and suffrage, I mean?

I suppose part of what I thought I was leaving behind was concern with those things, someone else having power over me because of them .

.. and now that he’s here, I’m not sure what to think anymore.

” She floundered around for the words. “Can someone who believes in the cause also believe in love? Want it for themselves? I mean, if you’re attracted to someone, are you letting down the cause? ”

It was the mostly clearly she had ever articulated what plagued her about Silas’s arrival, what had been tangled up in memories of the past, and his arrival.

She felt both nauseous and relieved to have spoken it aloud.

Hannah was silent for a long moment, her head nodding almost imperceptibly. Then she spoke.

“Well, I’ve come to see there are as many different experiences of suffrage as there are womanhood.

In any consideration of the problem of equality, we must always keep that in mind.

Bess, for instance, has lived a life different than you or I or Mrs. Darling, even considering the shared factor of being female.

But your question was about love and equality, wasn’t it, and to my mind there is only one answer. ”

Ophelia waited.

“Love is at the heart of equality, I think, for why else do we undertake risks to our person, our livelihoods, our reputation, but out of love for others, for ourselves? We believe that all women are equal, that all people are equal, worthy of respect and dignity. That is love, is it not? And what of Silas and the other soldiers? Going to war to protect those they love, but protecting so many more they will never know.” She began tying the knot in her kerchief, her fingers moving through the motions while her eyes held Ophelia’s.

“I don’t think love is frivolous, nor is it only relegated to romantic love, mind .

.. I felt more loved among my friends in the WSPU than any time I can remember.

” She finished her tying and stood up. “Love can make us brave, Ophelia. Don’t forget that in your fretting about your situation. ”

“I-I’ve never thought of it that way,” Ophelia said slowly. “Love was really more guilt or power in my family, not something noble. I’ve wondered if it was a weakness, something I must push away if I care about suffrage.”

“Anything can be a weakness, but I don’t think the cause demands that we be alone.

’Twas only through people coming together that Mrs. Pankhurst was able to effect any change at all.

What is it all about if not for giving women the freedom to choose our own paths, meaning marriage or not, careers or motherhood, voting or abstaining, as we see fit. ”

“But sometimes ownership might seem like love, mightn’t it?

Someone wanting to protect you, that isn’t love, is it?

It’s assuming you aren’t capable, that you’re a child who must be cosseted away from the reality of the world.

” She took a breath, realizing her voice had risen, her words coming out high and breathless. “I mean?—”

“I have a feeling we’ve left the abstract and entered the personal,” Hannah said, dry as sand.

Ophelia felt herself colour. “I-I don’t know how to tell, I suppose, what is kindness and what is control,” she said lamely.

“Well,” said Hannah, “I suppose that would depend very much on the man.”

She watched Ophelia, her intelligent eyes missing little. When Ophelia remained quiet, mulling over her words, Hannah pushed back from the table.

“On with the day, then? Now we’ve set the world to rights.”

Getting her hat from the hall, Ophelia turned over her conversation with Hannah, lost in her thoughts.

Her friend’s points seeming to chip away her stagnant thinking, letting her see the situation in new light.

It had seemed prudent when she left Wood Grange to exchange her old beliefs for different ones, ones she had thought were more aligned with what she was hoping for.

Ophelia saw now that she had only replaced one set of rules with another; if she was truly going to be the mistress of her own life, she would have to get comfortable with nuance and truly thinking for herself.

It was more daunting than ploughing this new field.

She would have to develop her own sense of direction, not relying on her father’s rules any more than she could rely on another woman’s rules for her own decisions.