Nothing on Earth & Nothing in Heaven Read online

  SUSAN FANETTI

  THE FREAK CIRCLE PRESS

  Nothing on Earth & Nothing in Heaven © 2018 Susan Fanetti

  All rights reserved

  Susan Fanetti has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this book under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The stanza Nora and William recite in Chapter Nine is from “Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold (written circa 1851).

  ALSO BY SUSAN FANETTI

  The Northwomen Sagas:

  God’s Eye

  Heart’s Ease

  Soul’s Fire

  Father’s Sun

  Sawtooth Mountains Stories:

  Somewhere

  The Pagano Family Series:

  Footsteps, Book 1

  Touch, Book 2

  Rooted, Book 3

  Deep, Book 4

  Prayer, Book 5

  Miracle, Book 6

  The Pagano Family: The Complete Series

  The Brazen Bulls MC:

  Crash, Book 1

  Twist, Book 2

  Slam, Book 3

  Blaze, Book 4

  THE NIGHT HORDE MC SAGA:

  The Signal Bend Series:

  (The First Series)

  Move the Sun, Book 1

  Behold the Stars, Book 2

  Into the Storm, Book 3

  Alone on Earth, Book 4

  In Dark Woods, Book 4.5

  All the Sky, Book 5

  Show the Fire, Book 6

  Leave a Trail, Book 7

  The Night Horde SoCal:

  (The Second Series)

  Strength & Courage, Book 1

  Shadow & Soul, Book 2

  Today & Tomorrow, Book 2.5

  Fire & Dark, Book 3

  Dream & Dare, Book 3.5

  Knife & Flesh, Book 4

  Rest & Trust, Book 5

  Calm & Storm, Book 6

  Nolan: Return to Signal Bend

  Love & Friendship

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Also by Susan Fanetti

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1910

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  1911

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  1912

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  1913

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  1920

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I’ve wanted to write this story for quite some time. English suffragettes and American suffragists have been my personal heroes for most of my life, since I first encountered real information about the fight for women’s suffrage. Not long after I caught the author bug, I began thinking that I wanted to tackle a story about a woman like my heroes. But I needed to get some experience under my feet before I could feel confident enough to take on a historical project so important to me.

  When I finally started, I knew only a few things about the structure of my story: I wanted it to be a romance, or at least a love story, because, as a writer and as a reader (and just generally as an experiencer of stories), that’s the kind of relationship I respond most strongly to. I knew my female lead would be English, and I knew her love would be American. I decided that she would be nobly born because I’d read a great deal about commoners in the English suffrage movement and much less about noblewomen. There are a lot of factors that made this struggle primarily a common one, but I was captivated by the idea of the tensions and trouble for a noblewoman trying not only to be politically aware and politically active but politically controversial.

  That choice took me in a different direction from the one I had first envisioned. Instead of a woman at the heart of the suffrage movement from the beginning, my Nora, the daughter of an earl, struggles to find her place in it—and in the world itself.

  I set the story to begin in 1910 because that’s not long after the suffrage movement in England became overtly invested in a strategy of civil disobedience. I didn’t quite realize it at the time I started writing, but opening this story in 1910 put it on a trajectory with a whole array of important cultural trends and historical events in addition to women’s suffrage.

  I chose to make William, the male lead, an American industrialist and give him a suffragist mother so I could explore similar features of wealth and politics in both places. That choice, too, to make them a transatlantic couple, ended up converging my characters with important national and world events.

  Each chapter, each move forward in time, each coincidence of history and story, made this novel’s range wider, its scope grander. I don’t like the idea of using the word ‘epic’ to describe my own work—I believe that’s for other people to decide—but I’m struggling to find a better word for all that Nora and William see and experience in the ten years (including the epilogue) represented here. By the time I finally reached the end, this story was about so much more than a suffragette and her industrialist love. So I’ll simply say that this novel has an epic scope.

  And oh, such pretty clothes and places. The Edwardian era was the end of La Belle Époque—and it wasn’t known as “The Beautiful Era” for nothing.

  I’m writing fiction, and not a historical record, so I allowed myself to take some liberties here and there, serving authenticity rather than rigid accuracy. To that end, my characters take part in events they obviously were not part of in reality, and some fictional versions of real people appear in the story—and often have small speaking roles as they have cause to interact with the main characters. I’ve done my best to represent the events and people authentically, though in this story they are entirely fictional, and events sometimes transpire in my fictional world a bit differently from reality.

  Below is a list of the real people with significant fictional representations in the story, and links to information about them—beware of clicking those links, though, before you’ve read the story; some of them might be spoilers.

  This story is a true labor of love for me. The subject is close to my heart, and these characters are as special to me as any I’ve created. It’s been a joy to write this book, from start to finish. I hope you enjoy my long, sweeping journey through the Edwardian Era and the fight for women’s suffrage.

  Cheers,

  Susan

  PS: A quick final
note. As usual for my work, this story is written in dual POV. Because Nora is English and William is American, I use the spelling conventions most appropriate to their points of view. Hence the spelling variations from chapter to chapter.

  Key real people named (listed in order of mention/appearance):

  Carrie Chapman Catt

  Emmeline Pankhurst

  William Kent

  Florence Miller

  Thomas Andrews

  Margaret Brown

  Alice Paul

  Emily Davison

  To every woman who fights to be heard, to be seen, to be known on her own terms.

  To the loud, the demanding, the fierce, the difficult women who will not keep quiet, who will not submit, who ram the walls and ceilings and will not be held back.

  And in honor of and gratitude for my personal heroes: Alice Paul, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, Ida B. Wells, Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst, Emily Davison, Lucy Burns, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and every suffragette and suffragist who put her body and life on the front lines so that we might all raise our voices and be heard.

  Special thanks to Jennifer Leighton and TeriLyn Smitsky, for their friendship as well as their keen and thoughtful beta-reading skills, and to Sarah Osborne and Catherine Johnson, who made sure my British folk behaved like British folk.

  Love you ladies!

  Once they are aroused, once they are determined,

  nothing on earth and nothing in heaven

  will make women give way; it is impossible.

  ~Emmeline Pankhurst, “Freedom or Death”

  ONE

  White light blasted suddenly through Nora’s head, murdering sleep with its fiery blade. She moaned and rolled over, burying her head beneath a silken pillow. It seemed she’d closed her eyes mere moments earlier, but the sun had quite obviously risen since she had.

  “It’s time to be up, milady,” Kate, her maid, chirped as she flung open the draperies at the other windows. “I held back as long as I dared, but if you lie abed much longer, you’ll leave your father waiting.”

  “What time is it?” Nora mumbled under the pillow.

  “Nearly half nine, milady.”

  Nora pushed the pillow up and exposed her weary eyes to the sunlit room and the doubly bright glare of Kate’s smile. Her father liked to leave for their morning ride in Hyde Park promptly at ten. Now that she’d been presented at court, to the new King George V, and was a proper lady, it took thirty minutes or more to get dressed in the morning—and in the evening, much longer than that.

  If her first few weeks of womanhood were a mark by which to judge the condition, she preferred girlhood.

  But it wasn’t her maid’s fault, so Nora sat up and blinked her eyes into working order as Kate set a tray across her legs. While Nora grumpily nibbled at a piece of toast with jam and sipped the day’s first cup of tea, Kate bustled around the room, fluffing Nora’s riding habit, arranging the brushes and pins and other assorted necessities of Nora’s ablutions, and gathering up the crumpled underthings Nora had been too tired to allow her to attend to the night before—or earlier in this same morning. The bells had tolled for three while she and her father were yet in the carriage last night.

  “How was the ball?” Kate asked, setting out Nora’s boots for a polish.

  Nora finished her tea and set the tray aside. “Like all the other balls. Women preening for the men and trying not to show it, and the men browsing the women like wares on a cart. Everyone trussed up like Christmas geese and too uncomfortable to breathe, let alone enjoy the evening.”

  Kate stood at her dressing table, brush in hand, and Nora, understanding the unspoken message, slid from bed. She sat before the mirror and let Kate begin her torturous ministrations.

  “But was the Duke there? Did you dance with him?”

  Richard Jameson, The Duke of Chalford. He was the supposed catch of London, and he’d turned his eye toward Nora at most events so far this Season. He was handsome—tall and broad-shouldered, with a nicely arranged face and wavy ginger hair. At first, hearing how coveted his attention was, and seeing how pleasant he was to look at, Nora had been, she could admit to herself, dazzled in the beam of his bright blue eyes.

  But then she’d sat beside him at a few dinners and spoken with him in a few drawing rooms and during several dances. Now she knew that everything interesting about him was apparent from across a crowded room. And he didn’t like her much better. She talked too much and had too many opinions.

  Indeed, that was the growing consensus among everyone in London, whispered in tones loud enough for all to hear. Lady Nora Tate talked too much about unseemly things, like politics. Lord Tarrin had let his youngest child and only daughter run wild for too long. She thought she was a man.

  No, Nora knew full well she was a woman. She simply wished she were a man.

  She sighed and watched in the mirror as Kate began the painstaking, and painful, ritual of winding her thick blonde mane into the coils and ratted puffs of a proper style. All those pins, digging into her scalp, all the day long. Already she missed the days when she’d worn her hair loose and long—only weeks ago, but never again.

  “He was there,” she answered Kate’s question. “We had one dance.”

  Kate pulled a little face of disappointed commiseration. “Well, that’s all right. You’ll have another chance at your dinner tonight.”

  Her dinner. Before they’d arrived in London, while she was in Paris with her Aunt Martha, buying so many lovely dresses and shoes and hats, Nora had been excited at the prospect of her first Season. Now, after weeks of visits, and dinners, and breakfasts, and parties, and balls, and weeks more to go, seeing the same people over and over, either struggling dully to comport herself like a lady or scandalising the people around her by daring to express an opinion about anything more controversial than the neckline of another lady’s gown, weeks of feeling the baldly estimating gaze of men she barely knew, all she wanted was to return to Kent and the home she loved.

  Each day, the expectations for her ladylike comportment, miles wide but barely an inch deep, wore harder on her. She thought it unlikely that the Duke would find her temper any more appealing at her own dinner this evening.

  “I doubt it, Kate.”

  The robust optimism of her maid was not so easily thwarted. “He’ll have made way for someone else, then. As lovely as you are, the fine lords must be clamoring amongst themselves to claim your hand. You’re sure to have a list of proposals before the Season is out.”

  Nora studied the mirror as Kate transformed her into a lady of the Realm. In that glass, she could see everything about herself that was of value. Here in London, no one seemed to care what she wanted, or what she had to offer besides blonde hair, blue eyes, a fair figure, and a titled father.

  Like most young ladies in London during the Season, Nora rode with her father in Hyde Park every morning that the weather was fair. The effort was ostensibly intended for fresh air and good health, but truly, riding the Ladies’ Mile was an event like all the others, meant to display the young ladies to their best advantage so that they might catch the fancy of a likely gentleman.

  Nora had always loved to ride with her father, but at home in Kent, she’d been allowed truly to ride—to gallop and jump and splash through muddy pools, to sit astride and even to wear breeches, so long as there were no guests in residence who might be scandalised. When there were guests at Tarrindale Hall, and now here in London, Nora sat sidesaddle, dressed in a cumbersome and dour riding habit, a uniform virtually indistinguishable from that of all the other young ladies riding the Mile.

  She wondered whether her father would allow her to sit astride when they returned home in August, or whether, like her corsets and coiled hair, a side saddle and riding skirts were all her future might hold, now that she’d left girlhood behind.

  On this morning, like all the other London mornings, Nora and her father rode ab
reast, nodding greetings to the other pairs of riders they passed. As usual on these daily rides, her father spoke little beyond pleasantries, to her or any other. He was keenly aware of the gossip—that in his great grief at losing his wife and two of his sons all within the span of a single week, he’d left his youngest child to grow up wild in the country, and now, her manners were mannish and unseemly—and he fretted that he’d failed her, that because of him, Nora wouldn’t get the marriage proposal of which her maid was so confident, and her future wouldn’t be secured.

  Twelve years earlier, her mother, and Edmund and Peter, her two middle brothers, had all succumbed to scarlet fever. Nora herself, then a child of only six years, had been gravely ill as well, but she’d recovered. Only Christopher, the eldest, and their father had been spared the illness, if not its consequences.

  Nora didn’t remember being ill, and she barely remembered her mother or her brothers, but she hadn’t been neglected and allowed to ‘run wild’ after their deaths. She’d been raised by her father and brother, two wonderful men who’d lavished love and encouragement on her and allowed her interests to flourish and her curiosities to be sated. When she’d asked a question, whatever the question, they’d provided an answer, or directed her to the place where the answer might be found. At home alone with family, she’d been free to work out what she wanted and valued in herself and in the world. And to wear riding breeches and ride astride.

  Her father had, however, withdrawn from Society upon his grief and never fully returned to it until now. He’d rarely gone to London, and Nora had never been at all until this year. At the few country balls and dinners she’d attended before, she’d thought the other girls vapid and silly and assumed they were country bumpkins.