The Secretary Read Online Free PDF Page B

hiding place. Then she went to the washstand and carefully pulled off her wig, cap, and moustache, wincing as the gum pulled away from the skin above her lip. She put a little salve there, hoping to avoid a red mark. She would look rather silly going about as a woman with a rash beneath her nose. People would think she had la grippe .
    Mrs. Simms had shown her how to roll her hair into pin curls, which she had painstakingly done that morning, and now she carefully removed each little pin and dropped them into a cup on the washstand. She could not afford to lose any of them. As the masses of hair fell down around her shoulders, she stared at her reflection, at the woman in the mirror dressed in a man’s suit. It was nearly as strange as the boy in a dress she had seen in the Simms’s shop.
    When all her hair was loose she braided it carefully and then began removing her suit. The simple cravat came untied easily. She made a mental note to repair the loose button on the waistcoat and press the collar of the shirt as she hung them up.
    At last she stood in only her drawers and the long band of cloth she had wrapped around her breasts. She had made it as tight as she dared, and she thought it had done the trick. Her bosom had never been large anyway, but she had still worried about the profile of her chest giving her away. But, she thought as she wincingly undid the last layers, that smooth profile did not come without a price. She had never worn a corset—her father had thought they restricted the mind as well as the body—but she imagined the sudden, blessed rush of air that filled her lungs as she pulled the fabric away from her body was similar to the relief ladies felt as that restrictive garment was removed at the end of the day.
    Dressed at last in her nightgown, she washed her face and crawled into bed. When her father had still been alive, she had regularly stayed up past midnight assisting him with his work. But over the last year she had grown accustomed to an earlier bedtime, and she felt exhaustion washing over her as she laid down and pulled the covers up. She would just have to get used to the late hours again.
    If she could do all the others things she had done today, she could certainly accomplish that.
     
    After Mr. Ford departed, Anders sat at his desk for a while, finishing the bill Leo had sent him. For all his bravado about not being as devoted to politics as Anders was, Leo still cared a great deal about the noble causes they addressed in the House of Lords. This bill, for instance, was a proposal to reform the Poor Laws, to fundamentally change the way the government cared for those who could not support themselves. It was a good start, he thought, but there were some on the other side who would strongly oppose the tone of the thing. Leo had always been, in Anders’s view, a bit of a bleeding heart, and the dearest of his concerns had always been the welfare of the poor. Anders respected his friend’s desire to improve their living conditions, and this bill attempted to make necessary changes, proposing new measures of sanitation and standards of housing. But some of the language was rather inflammatory. It would need to be worked over before it was introduced. Anders made a few notes in the margin and then turned to the table, staring down at the neat piles. Which one had Ford said the things Anders wanted him to look over should go in? Top left? Bottom right? When Anders at last located the correct pile, he laid the bill atop it and sighed as he took in the rest of the papers lying in wait. There was still a great deal to be done, and the session opened in thirty-six hours. But he was optimistic. Ford had done something no secretary before had dared to do—he had taken charge. Anders hadn’t realized before how much he had needed someone to do that. He had grown accustomed to his system—if it could be called that—and had always presumed that his secretaries had understood his unique method