The Crimson Rooms (3 page)

James was on my side. “The main argument is: tradition dictates that women should not be lawyers and the law is governed by tradition. Just wait and see, Evie. Tradition is usually overturned in the end by historical imperative. One day you and I will be partners in a firm called Gifford & Gifford. And we won’t deal with property, like Father, we’ll deal with crime and family law. We’ll speak for those least able to stand up for themselves.”

But when I finished school in June of 1911, Mother put her foot down and said my gadding-about days were over. She had me fitted with stays and rustling silk petticoats and hooked me into high-necked muslin day dresses and revealing evening frocks with tiers of lace in the skirt. Meanwhile, I fumed and fretted at the wasted time spent piling up my hair, filing my nails, changing for tea, and talking to stupid women in the drawing room where I wasn’t even permitted to read a newspaper. Whenever I dared, I pleaded headache, stomachache, fatigue, faintness, anything to escape to my room, where I had squirreled away books and files borrowed from a clerk in Father’s firm. With my sharp elbows resting on the dressing table, I made careful notes in a series of red exercise books.

When war was declared, James was seventeen. Gripping him by the lapels, I butted him playfully in the chest. “Oh, how terrible it must be, poor Jamie, to have a choice. Save the country or go to Wadham. Poor, poor little James Gifford, which shall he do?”

“Father says I have no choice. He says fighting for one’s country is the greatest glory a man can hope for. He says he wishes he were me.”

“But you might die. Has Father thought of that?”

I had spoken flippantly—at that time, the war was not
real
to me—and I was stricken by the dread in his aquamarine eyes. But he went to war and I signed on for work at the censorship office. And afterward, when it was all over, I thought well at least I can work, at least that is left to me. When I pleaded to be sent to Girton, Father was too deep in mourning to refuse.

In 1922 the Law Society at last opened its doors to women. But as I soon realized, passing exams was only half the battle, because who, given the choice, would employ a female? The handful of females I knew who qualified with me and actually found employment had usually done so by family connections. Though I applied to perhaps thirty firms in search of articles, none would look at me. In the end, I disguised my name and college on the application letter by writing
E. Gifford, graduate of Cambridge
, but the shock when I appeared in person wearing a four-year-old gray wool two-piece with drooping pockets in the jacket and a skirt ending three inches above my ankles was always too much. Interviews rarely lasted more than ten minutes. Nobody wanted a woman, however she was clothed. “We must give priority,” said the pinstriped legal gentlemen who deigned to give me an interview, “to the poor fellows back from the trenches. And in any case, my dear young lady, the law is no place for a woman. What would your father. . . ?”

As they well knew, my father would rather have employed a criminal half-wit than me, provided he was male. It was one thing to give your head-strong daughter an education, quite another to let her into your office. So I filled my time in those tense and dreary months of unemployment (during which I had to put up with a nightly chorus of lamentation from Mother and Aunt Prudence that I would even dream of becoming a lawyer) reading the
Law Society Journal
and applying for clerkships. Most mornings were spent observing in courts across London. A couple of afternoons a week I volunteered at Toynbee Hall, a settlement in the East End that offered education, cultural activities, and advice, including legal help for those who couldn’t afford a lawyer. Occasionally, at Toynbee, there’d been a burst of joyous camaraderie with other students past and present: Appelbe, the MP Clement Atlee, and Carrie Morrison, a friend from Girton with whom I became an expert in the law concerning rent arrears, employment rights, and death duties. On the whole, though, it was a lonely time, haunted by the knowledge that it should have been James, not me; that if James were alive, his path would have been smoothed by a combination of his own talents and Father’s connections. The obstructive legal world became in my mind associated with guilt.

But at Toynbee I made a vital though tenuous connection. A name that Carrie mentioned often as a champion of the poor was Daniel Breen, and one day, from the public benches of Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, I witnessed a performance by this famous Mr. Breen himself.

The defendant was a woman in threadbare overalls, disheveled after a night in the cells. From her appearance, one would judge that she could not have afforded a cup of tea let alone a solicitor to speak for her, and yet she was represented by a smartly dressed, snapping-eyed lawyer who berated the police for imprisoning a woman overnight merely because she had stolen a secondhand scarf from a dealer in the Old Kent Road.
“Secondhand,”
he said, glowering at the bench, and I noted that his vowels were not quite as polished as my own, “worth a farthing at most, I’d say. Of course the police were only doing their duty in arresting her, we can’t have an
honest
secondhand clothes’ dealer stripped of his assets” (a raised eyebrow, a glint in the eye inviting the bench to share the joke), “but what’s wrong with a caution? Admittedly my client has numerous previous convictions for like offenses, but the temperature yesterday afternoon was below freezing, and she has only the clothes she stands up in. Small wonder she was tempted by a scrap of moth-eaten wool. If I were addressing a less-experienced bench, I might despair, but you, Your Worships, with your considerable knowledge of these types of cases, will seek not just to punish but to reform. Now I have found her a place in a hostel for. . . .”

Breen thereby alternately hectored and flattered the magistrates until they were so full of compassion and largesse that the defendant, who had appeared dozens of times in the courts and was surely due for a lengthy spell of imprisonment, was given half a crown from the poor box and sentenced to a night in the cells, deemed to have been already served.

Afterward, I pursued Breen, who scurried out of court so fast that I could scarcely keep up with him: “I was wondering, sir, do you need a clerk?” He stood stock-still and regarded me with his head on one side, like a blackbird. “I heard your name mentioned at Toynbee Hall and I have been looking out for you. I’m a bachelor of law and I need to be given a chance. Nobody will take me, because I am a woman. But you, sir, I think you might.”

His best features were his fiery eyes and exceptionally fine skin, otherwise he was unremarkable-looking, perhaps forty years old, blunt-nosed, balding but with a frizz of wild hair above his ears, and barely an inch taller than me. “You know nothing about me.”

“I know you by reputation. My friend Carrie Morrison speaks very highly of you. And I saw you in court today. I guessed you would listen to me at least.”

“Put it in writing. I can’t stop now.” And he was off, clapping his trilby low on his brow as he hurried down the courtroom steps. But I had noted a flash of interest and knew he wouldn’t forget me, so I found out his address from an usher and within an hour had written my letter.

Later, I discovered that my application to Breen could hardly have failed, given that the source of his immense energy was a passion for proving everyone else wrong. It was therefore a characteristically Machiavellian move to take on a female. The fact that I had been turned down by dozens of firms with partners educated at private school and Oxbridge rather than grammar school and London, like himself, inflamed him further.

However, his championing of my cause had not so far extended beyond accepting one hundred and fifty pounds by way of a fee (a crippling amount that drained the entire fund my father had set aside for my dowry) and allocating me sad and unsavory cases usually involving women in marital difficulties; a mountain of paperwork, such as the copying out of wills and writs; and a very unpleasant space in which to conduct my business.

Breen & Balcombe occupied
the ground floor and basement of a sixty-year-old terraced house in Arbery Street off the Euston Road. My so-called office was in what was once the basement kitchen. No sunlight had ever shone there, and the room was still equipped with a greasy stove and a wooden rack on a pulley for drying laundry, which I sometimes employed as an extra shelf for documents. Over the past twenty or so years, the old kitchen had become the last resting place for files, so that I worked in a gloomy nest of paper and cardboard harboring a host of black beetles.

Aside from Breen and his partner, Theo Wolfe (the Balcombe half of the partnership was never mentioned and, I believe, had died out several generations back), the only other employee was Miss Drake, the secretary, a thin-haired woman who had perfected the art of speaking without moving her lips, and who viewed me as an upstart traitor to her sex and therefore contrived not to communicate directly with me at all. On my first morning, Miss Drake, instructed to give me a guided tour of the premises, had done so without once looking me in the eye and had ended by showing me a cupboard in the kitchen, housing a stinky mop and stiffened dusters, as if to suggest that my true vocation actually resided there.

Nevertheless, when I pushed open the street door and descended to my fusty office, I usually felt relieved to be out of reach of the clinging tentacles of home. Even on the Monday my nephew exploded into my life, when part of me longed to run back and reassure myself that the boy really was asleep with his mother in the spare room, I was glad not to be a part of the inevitably tortuous conversation between the females of Clivedon Hall Gardens and the interloper Meredith over the toast and marmalade. Though the events of the past twelve hours hung about my consciousness like black drapes and my eyes stung with lack of sleep, I tucked my chair up close to my pitted desk, dipped my pen, pulled closer a spike holding a pile of bills awaiting payment, and began writing the first of a series of polite but firm reminders.

So, James had fathered a son. James, my lovely, soft-haired young brother had embarked on a love affair. (I scrunched up a page spoiled by too many errors and hid it in my pocket—among Breen’s many pet hates was wastage of paper.) James was so careful, so intact. James deliberated every action before embarking upon it. James, as my father always said after a whiskey or two, would have made a wonderful lawyer because he relished order. (Another sheet of paper wasted.)

The telephone rang in Miss Drake’s office on the floor above. She liked to maintain the myth that her fingers were worked to the bone, so never answered until the ninth or tenth bell, and my nerves jangled as the vibrations trilled along my thin ceiling. In the end I moved to answer it myself and was halfway up the basement stairs before she at last picked up the receiver. “Breen and Balcombe . . . Mr. Breen is not expected back from his holidays until later today . . . Mr. Wolfe is at a meeting . . .”

Long silence as a voice spoke on the other end of the line.

“Well, there is no one else here,” drawled Miss Drake then added, after a significant pause: “unless you’re prepared to have Miss Gifford . . . Articled clerk . . . I presume she’s qualified . . . Yes, you heard correctly, she is female. Capable of taking notes, I believe . . . Well, if you’re sure . . . Yes, I can leave her a message. If you want . . .”

Five minutes later, a typewritten note was pushed under my door.
Telephone Shoreditch Police Station.
447
. A lawyer is needed. Case of kidnapping.

I was still novice enough to be awed by the responsibility of representing a client, and that Monday in particular, my nerves jumping with the impact of Meredith’s arrival, I would almost rather have stayed hidden in my basement. On the other hand, I could not help marveling, as I clapped on my hat, that Evelyn Gifford had been called on to deal with a crime so sensational.

At the police station, I braced myself for the tedious business of convincing the duty officer that I was indeed a qualified advocate. “But you’re a woman.” His pink-rimmed eyes were insolent.

“I believe the secretary at Breen and Balcombe mentioned that I would be attending the case.”

“I’ve never seen a woman lawyer before. Are you sure you’ll be of use?”

“I presume you know Mr. Breen? He trusts me completely.”

“It was Mr. Breen the prisoner was after, as you were told back at the office.”

“Mr. Breen is away.”

The officer raised his brows, made a note in his ledger, and allowed me through the smoky back office to the narrow flight of steps leading to the cells. In the lobby, a plump jailer manned a small desk, his stomach so vast that his short arms could barely reach to write in the ledger. “So you’re the lady they said was coming from Breen and Balcombe. Well, madam, I hope you’re ready for this.”

Hauling himself up, he led me to the last cell in the row, where he opened the wicket and showed me a woman called Leah Marchant, dressed in an assortment of skirts, blouses, and shawls, feet shoved into men’s shoes, hair falling about her face, complexion dead-white, and eyes red with weeping. She stood with her back to the wall opposite the door.