by Ellen Datlow
“How are you, Theophilus?”
“Row, row, row your boat. I’ve been on the river. What a glorious day.”
Even if Theophilus could leave the debtors’ prison, the closest waterway was the Manchester Ship Canal and outside was a pewter sky that threatened rain.
Alice gently took her father’s hand to stop him picking at the flesh of his forearm. His skin was red and angry, peeling away in strips.
“Make these damn ants stop, Alice. They crawl and bite.”
Mr Selby frowned but transformed his face with a bright, false smile when Theophilus looked at him.
“What the hell do you want?” Theophilus said, as if he’d only just noticed his visitor. Then he stood, picked up his chair, and turned it to the wall and sat down again.
“I’m sorry. He’ll be better tomorrow.”
“Perhaps I’d better see the hats.”
Alice fetched one. Mr Selby took it, turning it around in his hands. The felt gleamed as if polished.
“I’m deeply saddened to see such a craftsman so reduced. Such a pity he let his affairs go so astray.” Mr Selby had a smile for every occasion. This one pretended concern. “I still don’t understand how he amassed such debts.”
“Pelts are expensive. We had the money but…”
Alice had raged at him when she found the tin box where they kept all their money empty.
“I do wish your father had agreed to work solely for me. I’d have been in a much better position to help him. Such a shame that no one else will touch him. Still, I’m here now. If I take what’s left as agreed by the courts, then it might help you a little. Unfortunately this hat’s a little broader than his previous ones. Stove pipes are the thing.”
Tall, narrow hats.
“You don’t come to a hatter like my father if you want to follow fashion. A man like my father sets the style.”
She took the hat back, all reticence and fear gone.
“Look, it’s not just wider in the body but the brim too. The curve of the top is more marked. It’s less dandy. More sober. The band is the finest grosgrain. This is what the finest gentlemen should be wearing this year.” She put it on, as if to demonstrate.
Mr Selby leant back in his chair, considering her.
“Hhhmm, I’ll take a chance on it. How many do you have?”
“A dozen.”
“I’ll take the lot. Just to help you.”
“The Queen waits,” Theophilus slurred. “Knight takes pawn. Poor pawn.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s nothing, Mr Selby. He likes chess.”
Mr Selby counted out the money. It lay between them on the table, reducing craft to filthy commerce.
“They’re worth double.”
“You shouldn’t be so impudent. Not with me.” His languid grin was incongruent with his words, the curve of his lips had a language that she didn’t understand. “I do business with your father, not you.”
“I speak for him when he can’t speak for himself. You said yourself how fine his work is.”
Her anger seemed to excite him.
“Sell them to someone else if you can. You’ll get pittance. His reputation’s ruined.”
Alice pocketed the money, her hands shaking in defeat. Or maybe it was the cold. It was always cold and her hands were always shaking. Mr Selby put a cupped hand behind his ear, an eyebrow raised in expectation.
“Sorry, sir. Thank you.”
“Very good,” he beamed. “All’s forgiven.”
“May I…”
“What is it, Alice?” Mr Selby was now solicitous.
“Perhaps I could work for you, like my father did. I can make hats. He taught me. I needn’t work here if you don’t like the idea. I’m allowed to leave. I’m not a prisoner. The sentence is my father’s, not mine.”
“A girl hatter? What delicious nonsense!”
“Bonnets, then?”
“I have dozens of girls for that.”
All she’d been able to find was piece work, stitching gloves late into the night. Her means to make a living had been taken with all their tools.
“Bless you, girl. Your father’s hats are in the past. Beaver pelts are scarce. Soon all toppers will be silk and made in factories. The future marches on us all.”
Machined millinery. Outrageous. A machine couldn’t understand the anatomy of a hat.
He walked to the door, his hand at the small of her back now.
“How old are you, Alice?”
The question made her queasy.
“Sixteen.”
“It’s tragic how you suffer for your father’s lack of,” he paused, searching for the words, “economy and sense.”
Alice wasn’t sure what he expected of her. It was too dangerous to speak. Her father wasn’t a large man but he was bigger on the inside than the out. He could pull all these people from out of himself. He tried to teach her this trick. Be tiny. Be giant. Adapt to the dictates of the situation.
She willed herself small.
“Perhaps I could help you after all. How would you like a little house of your own with a maid?” Alice slipped her rough red hands into her pockets. “I could visit you there. I can be very kind, when I choose to.”
The thought of him smiling at her in the dark was too much.
“I can’t leave my father,” she whispered.
Dinah, Alice’s cat, came from under the table. Alice had brought her with them. She was Alice’s one solace even though she was now a grand dame who rarely strayed far from the fire. Dinah stretched and shook herself, scattering tiny silver drops from her fur. The mercury was all that remained of the Hargreaves’ hat making. It was the one thing that Theophilus had refused to leave behind. He made such a fuss that the bailiffs shrugged their shoulders and left them the big stone jar.
“Bad girl. You’re into everything,” Alice chided.
“If the arrangement were to be successful perhaps I could see my way to clear your father’s debts.”
Alice scooped up Dinah, holding her against her chest like a shield.
“There aren’t many gentlemen who’d be willing to pay attention to a girl in your position.”
“No, Mr Selby. Thank you.”
Gentleman, my eye. Sniffing around like a dirty old tom cat.
“Well—” Mr Selby picked up his hat and gloves. “I’ll send my man up for the hats.”
He turned back suddenly, the motion startling Dinah, who hissed. “I’ll call on you in a month. Give you a bit of time to think over my offer. And Alice? Don’t let Theophilus drink so much.”
She was about to protest her father’s temperance but he was gone. She closed the door. Theophilus twisted around in the chair and called, “What did that infernal smiler want?”
* * *
When Alice was five Theophilus laid a beaver pelt on her knee. She buried her face in it, trying to imagine this marvellous creature floating on the water. There weren’t any beavers in Manchester.
Dinah’s fur was soft and fluffy. This was thicker than the kitten’s and contained the making of her father’s craft. Dinah was scant compensation for her siblings but Alice loved everything about her from the tender pink pads of her paws to the notch in her ear from some previous scrap that she’d come off the worse from.
“It’s important that you watch and be careful. This is very expensive. We can’t afford to spoil it. See these long hairs? They’re called guard hairs.” He picked up a pair of tweezers and pulled out a few to demonstrate. “They ruin the felt.”
Alice took the tweezers from him and set about the task. Her father sat opposite, watching.
“Oh, Theo,” her mother chided him as she put down the teapot, “isn’t she a little young?”
“No, Maria. Alice has an excellent temperament for this. Look how patient she is.” He put an arm around his wife’s waist and drew her closer.
“So, is she just to help with plucking or are you going to teach her how to make hats?”
Neither of them mentioned Harry. Alice wished one of them would. Harry would’ve learnt hats, had he not been swept away on a tide of burning throats and fevers that killed so many the previous winter. Lorina and Edith had died the year before. So many children gone into the ground.
“A lady hatter? Why not?” The idea seemed to please him.
He motioned to the picture propped up on the mantelpiece; it was a soap advertisement that Maria had kept of a boy blowing bubbles. He had curly blond hair. His close resemblance to Harry was never mentioned. The handsomest boy that ever lived.
“Children are cherubs, unless they’re poor and then they’re stuffed up chimneys or lose limbs to the loom. You’re right. Alice should have the means to a decent living.”
Maria kissed the top of his head in approval.
So began the apprenticeship of Alice Hargreaves.
* * *
The debtors’ jail and the main prison faced one another, their exercise yards divided by a wall, so they formed a mirror image of each other. Alice looked out on it from their window.
“Let’s go down and get some fresh air.”
“I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.” Theophilus’ eyes grew large and round.
She wanted to shake him. To shout in his face. Instead she put an arm around his shoulders. “You can sit in the sun with everyone else.”
“I don’t want to.”
He wouldn’t be moved. When in this mood he’d sit and stare at nothing for hours, sweating, even though he didn’t have a fever.
Alice went back to the window. They were all out there, crowding into the rectangle of light. There was Johnny O’Hare, who sold fruit from a barrow and went into debt when he broke his leg and his wife ran off with all they had. He was talking to Dorian Hamley, a printer who’d been undone by narcolepsy and overindulgence in rare books. Then there was Mr Neil who was driven into debt by patenting his ridiculous inventions.
The prison-proper was over the wall, containing the desperate, wicked and downright dangerous. She could see a strip of their yard.
Even after a few weeks Alice had come to recognise the rhythms of the day inside. At this time there were only a dozen convicts out there, shuffling around in shackles and wearing identical grey uniforms.
One man leant against the wall. A few others milled around him, talking. Occasionally one would look at him to gauge his reaction to what was being said. She’d come to recognise him because he always stood in the same spot.
Alice, four floors above him, forgot caution. She looked at his long face, his fine cheekbones and brow. In the moment that she was gazing at him, he tipped his head in her direction and looked straight at her. Then he did a remarkable thing. He smiled. Not like one of Selby’s smiles, but something genuine as though she was a true friend recognised.
Alice stepped back into the shadows where he couldn’t see her.
The man beckoned and a warder came over as if he were the man’s foot soldier and not a jailor. She recognised the warder because of his whiteness. His hair and skin were like unsullied snow. It was Mr Cotton, the albino, who worked in both prisons. He looked up, red eyes squinting at the light, to Alice’s window where the man was now pointing. He said something and Mr Cotton shook his head and started to walk away but the man clamped his wrist and held him fast, talking urgently. Mr Cotton closed his eyes.
* * *
Stitching gloves didn’t give Alice the same satisfaction as making hats. Each week she’d drop off the completed work to a man on Eccles Road and collect pieces of leather or satin for the next lot. He always complimented her neat stitching. Frustrating work that paid little and wore out her eyes and fingers. She missed the grand architecture of a crown forming under her hands.
The alternative to gloves was a job as maid-of-all-work, but she’d have to live in and there’d be nobody to get her father up and help him dress, to remind him to bathe and eat.
Alice sat close to the candle, attaching mother-of-pearl buttons to a pale blue satin glove. There was a knock at the door. Too late in the night for the Duchess to be bringing visitors.
It was Mr Cotton.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Good evening.” He was always kind. He wiped his palm on his trousers, shifting from foot to foot, glancing up and down the corridor. “May I come in?”
When Mr Cotton stepped into the light she saw the bruise spoiling the perfect white skin of his cheek. He turned his face away, embarrassed.
“Who is it, Alice?” Theophilus called from his bed. “Oh, Mr Selby, the hats will be ready tomorrow.”
“He’s getting worse, isn’t he?” Mr Cotton scratched his ear. “Alice. I’m sorry. There’s someone who wants to meet you.”
“Who?”
“Please, you have to come.” He took his watch from his waistcoat pocket. “There’s not much time.”
“Alice, where are you going?”
“Sshh, Father, go back to sleep.” She tucked him in and kissed his forehead.
“Alice, he says I’m to fetch you, whether you want to go or not.” He grasped her arm.
“Who says?”
“You’ll see.”
Alice already knew who “he” was. She could tell Mr Cotton was determined; he’d haul her out if she struggled.
“You’re better than this, Mr Cotton, procuring girls for convicts. You should work somewhere better than this.”
Tears spilled down his cheek.
“How many people would give me a job? Most spit on me and call me a freak.”
“I know.” She wiped his white cheek. “You’re far too kind for here.”
“You don’t know what I am,” he wept, “and what I’ll do to survive. I’m as bad as the next man. Only lock and key divides me from them.”
“It’s the man you were talking to in the yard today, isn’t it?”
“He wants to see you.”
“Did he do that to you?” She was looking at his bruise.
“No. It was my colleagues.”
Alice couldn’t think of an answer to that. The debtors’ prison was cast in darkness. She’d never seen it in the quiet of night. Its corridors and stairwell were made of moonlight and shadow. The fancy brown tiles looked grey. There was a door under the staircase.
She hesitated.
“Where are we going?”
“The warren. It’s the run of cells beneath the main prison.”
What sort of crimes demanded incarceration down there?
Alice hesitated, then followed Mr Cotton down the rabbit hole and underground.
* * *
Mr Cotton’s lamp swung to and fro in the narrow tunnel. The bare brick walls smelt damp. Cobwebs brushed her face. He unlocked the iron grille door. Beyond it were the cells.
Mr Cotton stopped halfway along, fumbling with his keys until he found the correct one.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice.”
He rounded on her.
“My life’s intolerable. You’ve no idea what it’s like to be bullied and mocked. To be apart and unloved.”
Unexpected passion from this nervous, twitching man. Then he was deflating, anger ebbing now they were here, but he grasped the last gasps of it. He shoved Alice into the cell.
The cell was dark, a candle throwing light on one corner. The man’s face was hidden in a patch of shadow. She could hear him breathing, then a deep sigh.
“I don’t mean you any harm.”
“Not meaning harm doesn’t mean you won’t cause me any.”
The man laughed.
“Where are my manners?” He stood, offering her his seat, coming into the light. He doffed an imaginary cap. Up close his hair was golden.
“You’re the girl that makes hats.”
“My father, not me.”
“If you insist.”
The cold seeped from the stone bench through her dress. She gambled
that boldness would protect her more than meekness.
“So what is it you want? A top hat?”
“The last time I wore one was for the opera.”
“And I’ve left my ball gown at home.”
“It’s true.” He talked like a toff, to be fair. “Don’t you want to know why I’m in here?”
“That’s your business.”
He smirked at that.
“You come and go as you please, I understand.”
“The debt’s not mine. It’s my father’s.”
“I need you to run an errand for me.”
“Mr Cotton’s in your pocket. Send him. In fact, he can just let you out, can’t he?”
“Getting out of here’s easy. Getting out of England’s harder. Blackmailing rich men is a mug’s game. It’s made me lots of enemies.” He winked. “Luckily I have lots of friends too. There’s something Mr Cotton can’t be seen doing. And between us, I wouldn’t wholly trust him.”
“I can’t waste my time running errands for you. I have work to do.”
“This won’t take long.”
“And what do I get in return?”
“Some girls would do it just to please me.” His smile produced a dimple in his cheek.
“Better ask them then.”
“So what would persuade you?”
“Money. Money would persuade me.”
* * *
Theophilus taught Alice carrotting at seven.
“It’s just the two of us now. Would you like to learn the next step to make a hat?”
Death was a familiar visitor to the Hargreaves. It ended Maria with a dead baby inside her and profuse bleeding that wouldn’t be stopped when she delivered it.
“Yes, Daddy.” She itched to try what she’d only watched him do. She’d have said yes anyway, just to make him happy.
“I’ll show you how to make mercury nitrate, but put the cat out first.”
Dinah had followed Alice into the workshop and was climbing up her legs. Alice picked her up and the cat became boneless, trying to slide from her arms.
“Alice, keep her out of here or I’ll make her into a hat.”
Dinah was banished.
“Put one ladle of mercury into this flask. That’s it.”
Theophilus kept the mercury in a jar. Alice saw just how quick and silver it was as she poured it out, slipping and sliding, separating as if trying to escape.