Excerpt from Stories from Suffragette City by M.J. Rose, Fiona Davis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Well, I'll be," the reverend remarks. "Your stepmother is a Dutch girl."

"She is?" Ash turns to study the stepma she has put up with for almost a year now, but barely known. "I thought she was a Indian. She looks like one."

"Ah," says the reverend. "More likely Black Dutch. Which only goes to show that gauging the truth of a person merely by looking is a fool's habit."

Ash sinks back in her seat as they start off down the road. The car's odd rumble tickling her feet and legs and its thrilling speed barely tug at her attention. She watches and listens, instead, as the reverend continues questioning Clarey, their loud conversing carrying on the cold breeze in that strange-sounding language Clarey long ago quit using on the farm, because nobody understood it, anyway. Now that someone hears her, Clarey has come to life. She pours out a story of some sort, her hands whirling and her face lengthening as tears pool in in her dark eyes and drip onto the quilt. Clarey has never cried before, not that Ash knows of, anyhow—not even when the too-small baby came into the world and never drew a breath.

The reverend listens, answering in soothing tones, until finally Clarey sighs and presses herself back into her seat, looking intently at the passing fields and wiping her moisture-stained face.

"That poor child," the reverend says, shaking her head. "That poor, poor child."

"What'd she tell you?" Ash can't help but ask, and wonder. And worry.

Shaking her head, the reverend considers the story for a bit, seeming to decide how much to repeat. "When Clarey was barely eleven—about your age, I'm guessing—a man came to her grandparents' farm promising that he had good factory work for her in the city. He told her grandparents she would be permitted to come back to visit on holidays, as well as to send money home to help the family save for her parents' passage over from the Old Country. But the man who took Clarey away was not a good man. He was the worst sort of man. Terrible fates have befallen this dear girl, and that is how she came to meet your father, whom she believed would help her escape and return to her grandparents, but indeed did not. He took her to the mountains and kept her for himself. I have, I can see now, been given a mission to see that she, as well as you and your brother and sister, are left in different and better circumstances before this is through."

Different and better circumstances. Ash tries to decide what that might mean. Given a mission …

Sniffling, the reverend moves her mouth as if she's working on a bite of gristle. "You asked me," she says finally, "a question some time ago as we started off on this journey." She turns Ash's way as they slow at a bend in the road, where the automobile splashes through a shallow pool of water and the wind quiets. "You asked why a woman would want a vote. What she might do with it. This girl, my dear—your stepmother by no choice of her own—is the reason. She and thousands more like her. They are the reason we fight. The reason we persist in our cause, though the way be rough and rocky. Until women and girls are given a voice, they will have no rights. It will continue to be the case that the young ones are bought and sold, forced into marriages when they are but children themselves, and that the old ones are robbed of their property and their independence. Those of us who can protest it, who can insist on fairness and justice, simply must. That is all. We must make a nuisance of ourselves when it matters. That is why we march."

"I … I guess…" Ash stammers, and tries to imagine all that has been hidden behind Clarey's silence, but she can't. Finally, she looks into the back seat at her stepma, who really isn't that at all, but just a girl taken so far from her home that she had no hope of finding her way back.

Excerpted from Stories from Suffragette City by M.J. Rose and Fiona Davis. Copyright © 2020 by M.J. Rose and Fiona Davis. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.