The Witch Of Clan Sinclair Read Free Page B

continue to be the chief writer for both the paper and the broadsides they printed three times a week.
    She selected two columns from the ten she read and wrote acceptance letters to the writers. Tonight, it irritated her even more than usual to sign Macrath’s name.
    One day, perhaps, she’d be able to use her own name as the proprietor of the Edinburgh Gazette . People would know that she was responsible for the success of the paper, that she was a woman of influence.
    When would that ever happen?
    The Lord Provost had looked at her like she was a beetle, one he’d found on his shoe and quickly dispatched.
    Why had he looked down his rather bearlike nose at her? Very well, perhaps his nose wasn’t bearlike, but the rest of him certainly was. He was entirely too large a man. When she was standing next to him she felt almost tiny, and she was tall for a woman.
    He epitomized those minor irritants she’d experienced all her life. Now they gathered in a ball and sat, like lead, in the pit of her stomach.
    What was wrong with a woman running a business? And the newspaper was as much a business as a millinery shop.
    She hadn’t heard anyone say she couldn’t buy Melvin Hampstead’s book because she was a woman. Why, then, wasn’t she good enough to hear his lecture?
    If she was competent enough to be editor of the Edinburgh Gazette, why couldn’t she be a member of the Edinburgh Press Club?
    Why wasn’t she treated with the same respect as a man, especially if she could do a man’s job?
    She never asked for help moving the reams of newsprint into place. She might not accomplish the task as quickly as a man, true, but she did it nonetheless.
    Nor did she ever ask a man to write her columns, or gather the information for the broadsides she wrote. How many of the men who purchased their broadsides were aware that a woman had written them?
    Perhaps that’s why she felt the insult at the press club so acutely. She’d fought inequity all her life but never lost a battle face-to-face the way she had tonight.
    She’d been treated like a beggar at a feast. Go away, don’t bother us. How dare you think yourself the equal of us?
    The injustice of it made her seethe.
    More and more women were daring to stand up and announce their displeasure with a society run by men. Josephine Butler’s campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts was a model for women who believed their gender was being treated unfairly.
    Strides were being made each day. Look at the Married Women’s Property Act passed just two years earlier.
    How did she change her own circumstances? It seemed to her that she could either continue to be treated as shabbily as she’d been tonight or act as an instrument of change. Standing in front of the Lord Provost and demanding that he treat her better hadn’t accomplished anything. He’d only smiled at her.
    There was a newly formed organization—the Scottish Ladies National Association—that was taking up women’s causes, one of them suffrage. She could almost imagine herself standing at a podium, imploring a crowd of women before her to vote for anyone other than the Lord Provost.
    A few minutes later she caught herself staring off into the distance, then brought her focus back to finishing the letters.
    Once they were done, she pulled out a blank sheet of her stationery. She knew exactly to whom she’d write, one of the founders of the SLNA, a woman who lived in Edinburgh.
    When she heard the hall clock chime midnight, she pushed back her fatigue and continued writing. A half hour later, after reviewing her letter a dozen times, she sealed it and went to bed, only to lay there staring up at the ceiling.
    Normally when she couldn’t sleep, it was because she was caught up in worry about their subscription numbers. Tonight, however, she was on fire with ideas.
    Would it be enough to just volunteer to assist a group? What could she do to awaken the women of Edinburgh?
    She rose from the bed, walked to the