The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  But now, as she sits at the desk next to her sister, clasping a china doll and a scuffed brush, she is struggling to stifle a yawn. It is a weight of exhaustion she never could have imagined, a drudgery greater than if the shop were a factory. Her hands are red and cracked from the winter cold, but if she greases them with tallow, the paintbrush slips from her grasp and she botches the doll’s lips and cheeks. She looks around her, at the dressers which are not ebony but cheap oak painted black, at the gold varnish which peels from the brackets due to the heat of the candle flames, and her least favourite thing of all: the balding patch of carpet where Mrs Salter paces daily, now worn thinner than her mistress’s hair. The sickly smell of confectionery, the airlessness of the room, and the staring rows of dolls, make it seem more like a crypt than a shop. There are times when Iris struggles to catch her breath.

  ‘Dead?’ Iris whispers to her twin sister, nudging a daguerreotype towards her. It is a small sepia image of a little girl, her hands folded as neatly as doves in her lap. Iris glances up when Mrs Salter enters the shop and sits by the door, the spine of her Bible crackling as she opens it.

  Rose tries to silence her with a look.

  It is one of Iris’s few enjoyments, even if it does make her feel guilty: assessing whether the children in the daguerreotypes are dead. For a reason she can’t explain, she likes to know whether she is making a mourning doll, to be placed on the grave of a deceased infant, or if she is painting a plaything for a bouncing, living child.

  Mrs Salter derives the bulk of her income from this custom doll service. It is winter now, and the cold and its sicknesses doubles their workload, often tipping their working hours from twelve to twenty. ‘It is understandable,’ Mrs Salter will say in her customer-voice, ‘and indeed natural that you would want to commemorate a dear passed spirit. After all, as it is in Corinthians, “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.” Their soul is gone, and this doll is a symbol of the earthly vessel they left behind.’

  Deducing whether the children in the images are dead can be a subtle operation, but Iris has learned the clues. Sometimes it is easy. The child appears to be sleeping surrounded by flowers. There might be a clear prop behind the infant, even a person holding them who is hidden to look like upholstery; or if there are other people in the daguerreotype, the exposure will blur all but one child, who is picked out in perfect, unmoving clarity.

  ‘Alive,’ Iris decides. ‘Her eyes are blurred.’

  ‘Silence! I will not tolerate chatter,’ Mrs Salter barks, with the sudden flare of a lit match. Iris dips her head, then mixes a slightly deeper pink for the shadow between the doll’s lips. She does not look up, dreads inviting one of Mrs Salter’s pinches which are delivered to the soft inside of her elbow.

  The girls sit side by side for the day, barely speaking, barely moving, pausing only for a meal of beef dripping and bread.

  Iris paints the porcelain faces, threads the hair through the holes in the scalp, sometimes curls it with irons heated in the coals if the child has ringlets. Meanwhile, Rose’s needle rises and falls like a violinist. Her job is to add the finer, more skilled detail to the rough skirts and bodices which the slop sewers make through the night. Seed pearls, ruched sleeves, passementerie trimmings, tiny velvet buttons as small as mouse noses.

  Even though they are identical, the twins could not be less alike. As young girls, Rose was always singled out as the real beauty of the two, their parents’ favourite, and she clutched this understanding like a treasure. Iris’s warped collarbone, a birth defect which causes her left shoulder to hunch forward, invited a protective kindness from her sister which only occasionally irritated Iris. (‘I’m not an invalid, you know,’ she would snap as Rose insisted on carrying any parcels, striding ahead as if expecting Iris to fall in line behind her.) They squabbled too, arguing over the largest roast potato at dinner, over who could skip the longest, write the neatest. They could deal blows of quick cruelty because they knew that with each fight, there would be a reconciliation: limbs overlapping as they sat by the fire, dreaming up details of their imaginary shop Flora, its shelves brimming with flower trinkets, wall brackets stuffed with irises and roses.

  But when the sisters turned sixteen, Rose contracted smallpox which nearly killed her. She said she wished it had when she saw the thick rash of boils covering her face and body, the cloudy roll of her blinded left eye. Her skin soon cratered and turned purplish, worsened by her endless scratching. Her legs dimpled with scars. ‘Why me? Why me?’ she wailed, and then, only once, a hissed whisper that Iris wondered if she misheard: ‘It should have been you.’

  Now, at twenty-one, their hair is the same dark auburn, but Rose wears hers as a penance, draped forward to cover as much of her pocked cheeks as possible. Iris’s is waist-length and gathered into a long, dense plait, her skin tauntingly smooth and white. They no longer laugh together, they no longer whisper secrets. They do not talk about the shop.

  Some mornings, Iris will wake up and see her sister staring at her with an expression which is so blank and cold that it frightens her.

  Iris feels her eyelids begin to sink, as heavy as if they had been sewn with lead weights. Mrs Salter is attending to a customer, her voice a melodious hum.

  ‘Most delicate care is taken with each commission – pure porcelain from the Northern factories – we are a kind of family – indeed, such honest girls, so unlike those squawking bonnet touters on Cranbourne Alley – immoral, the lot of them.’

  Iris digs her fingers into her thighs to stay awake. As she lolls forward, she wonders if a few moments of sleep would really be so terrible—

  ‘Lawks, Rosie,’ she whispers, jolting upright and rubbing her arm. ‘I should wonder you require a needle with elbows like that.’

  ‘If Mrs Salter had seen.’

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ Iris whispers. ‘I can’t.’

  Rose is silent. She worries a scab on her hand.

  ‘What would you do if we could escape here? If we didn’t have to—’

  ‘We are lucky,’ Rose murmurs. ‘And what else can you do? Abandon me here, become a mollysop?’

  ‘Of course I should not,’ Iris hisses back. ‘I should like to paint real things, not these endless china eyes and lips and cheeks, and – ugh.’ Without realizing it, she is balling her fist. She unfurls it, tries to think of the pain she is causing her sister. But her illness was not Iris’s fault, and yet she is punished for it every day, pushed out from any affection. ‘I can’t stand it here, living in the den of Madame Satan.’

  Across the shop, Mrs Salter’s head revolves as sharply as an owl’s. She frowns. Rose jumps and jabs herself with the needle.

  The door slams in the wind. Iris strains her eyes through the grimy-paned windows. She sees the carriages rolling past and imagines the ladies cocooned inside.

  She bites her lip, shakes out a little blue powder and dabs her paintbrush into the bottle of water once more.

  Pups

  ‘Now, you naughty pups,’ Silas says, the black wing of his hair falling forward as he takes his seat at the cellar desk, ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this. But if you hadn’t helped yourselves to Cook’s marzipan, things might have been different.’ He laughs, pleased with the history he has contrived, and lines up three knives of varying sizes. The conjoined puppies lie before him, bellies up.

  He thought at first of pickling the beasts, but instead he will make two specimens out of the pair, by both stuffing and articulating them. When he builds his marble-walled museum, the taxidermy form and skeleton will sit side by side in the entrance hall, guarded by stucco columns.

  He wipes his forehead, which sweats even in the November cold. He flexes his fingers. The largest knife chills his hand.

  He makes a small incision in the left puppy’s abdomen and tugs the fur with an even pressure. His breath is a thin whistle between his teeth. He is careful not to puncture the flesh and the organs nestling be
low it, all packed tight behind a purple membrane. He shifts an inch to the left so that the hounds fall into the lamplight, and then severs the pelt as far as he can, stopping short at the soft paw pads and the lozenge-shaped nose with four nostrils. The shadows make accuracy difficult, so he works more slowly, easing the smaller scalpel into the final cuts. As day turns to dusk outside, he detaches the fur in a single piece.

  ‘All those guests, with no marzipan to go with their hothouse fruit and cream. Such mischievous pups,’ he says, picturing them pristinely stuffed. If Gideon were to see him now – how he has improved in the fifteen years which have elapsed – but Silas swallows the thought. He is determined to enjoy this part, when the potential of the corpse lies before him, before its promise sours. The thrill is as fresh as it was when he found his first skull.

  ‘Walk with me,’ he said to Flick that day, as they left the pottery factory together, but for a reason he can’t remember, he ended up alone in the countryside.

  It was then that he happened on the decaying corpse of a fox. He was disgusted at first, and cupped his nose, but then he saw that its fur was as red as Flick’s hair. The fox was perfect, fragile, each nugget of bone neater than a jigsaw. The creature had lived, breathed, and now existed in the curious liminality between beauty and horror. He touched its skull, and then his own.

  He visited it each day, watching as maggots seized it, as its skin wasted and the intricacy of its white structure became apparent, like the slow bloom of a flower. He noticed new things each time: the surprising thinness of its thighbone, the laced webbing of the cranium. When he flicked it with his fingernail, it rang dully. Once the skull was entirely cleaned of meat, he wrapped it in cloth and took it for himself.

  That summer, his skin coated in a thick paste of dust and sweat, he raked over each tuft of grass, each hillock, each copse and riverbank, until he had fifteen skulls. He set traps, whittled sticks into spears, and crept up on the old, slow rabbits, and pushed the air out of their throats with his fingers. They scrabbled and kicked for the first minute, and he often held his breath with them. Then they would limpen, and still he would cling on, just in case.

  How neatly he arranged the skulls! He thought he would be content with five, ten, but he needed more. Each item made him happier and more anxious than the one before it. And now, he has this treasure. This furred, spidery beast, finer than anything he ever could have imagined as a boy, and he does not think he will ever want again.

  His work is as complete as he can manage that day, and he has learned from experience that he will ruin the specimen if he continues without pause. It must be almost five o’clock; he yawns, decides to rest. He places the skinned pups into a tin bucket. Later, when he has boiled off the meat, he will assemble the skeleton with tweezers, glue and wire as thin as thread.

  He climbs the ladder to the shop, and then the stairs to his attic. As he pulls on his nightgown, he glimpses the shelf of stuffed mice next to his bed. Each is dressed in a tiny costume.

  Silas picks up a brown mouse. He strokes its worsted skirts, the shawl he crocheted with the thinnest wool, the small round plate it grips in its paws. He places it back on the shelf and snuffs out the candle.

  He is almost asleep when he hears a knocking.

  He pulls a pillow over his head.

  The knocking becomes a dull thunder.

  ‘Silaaaas!’

  He sighs. The impatience of the man! It’s a blessing Silas has no neighbours to disturb, and can’t he read the ‘closed ’ sign?

  ‘Ouvrez la porte!’

  He groans, sits up, pulls on a jacket and trousers, lights a stuttering candle, and shoulders his way down the narrow staircase.

  ‘Je veux ma colombe!’

  ‘Mr Frost,’ Silas says, opening the door. A tall, slender man in paint-spattered rags stares back at him. He has a kind of frenzied magnetism about him, an entitlement and self-belief that leaves Silas torn between wanting to please or despise him. Louis smiles.

  ‘There! I knew you were in. I’m here for my dove, if I haven’t frightened him off his perch.’ He doesn’t wait for a reply, but bellows at a figure silhouetted in the alley entrance and beckons him over. ‘Here! Over here! Late, as ever.’

  It is almost nightfall, and at first Silas struggles to identify the man trotting up the alley, swerving the fetid mounds of vegetable peelings and cinder dust. He comes closer; his face glints off Silas’s lamp. Johnnie Millais. He is so thin that he looks like an emaciated pony.

  ‘Goodness, Louis, what happened to your clothes? I wouldn’t dress my dog in that shirt.’

  ‘A treat to see you, Millais, as always,’ Louis says, entering the shop without either being invited, or cleaning his boots on the iron scraper.

  ‘It’s a bit of luck you’re still open,’ Millais says, following him in, and Silas doesn’t contradict him.

  ‘Silas’s arranged my dove. Where is he, then?’ Louis lifts the lion’s skull with both hands and pretends to throw it at Millais. ‘Rar!’ he says, with a snort.

  Silas tenses, wishing he had the courage to ask him to put it down; instead he busies himself retrieving the dove from the cabinet.

  ‘Heavens! It’s splendid. Just what I had in mind,’ the artist exclaims. He seizes it, strokes its head. ‘If only my models would sit as still as you.’ Louis presses a guinea into Silas’s palm, double what they agreed. ‘And Millais, you must buy a mouse for the corner of your Mariana. To add movement to that bare patch of canvas.’ He lifts a stuffed brown mouse from a shelf by its tail and says, ‘I’ll take this too.’

  ‘She’s fragile—’ Silas attempts, but Louis seems not to hear him, and crams the bird and the mouse into a satchel, head first.

  Silas watches the two men run down the narrow passageway, Louis’s hands on the back of Millais’s shoulders, performing some kind of skip on each third step. His lamp picks out Louis’s ankles, the white flash of his wrist. It reminds him of Flick, her touch that he has not felt in over twenty years.

  When they vanish into the darkness, Silas looks around his little shop, at its low ceiling, its small chipped dressers which he has done his best to paint, and the corners of his mouth press downwards.

  ‘No more attacking cress sellers, eh,’ he says. ‘Your new friend wouldn’t like it.’

  The Painter

  Despite her drowsiness earlier, Iris cannot sleep. The smell of burnt sugar is making her head ache, and a whisker of horsehair pricks her thigh through the mattress. She shifts, casts a sticky arm outside the counterpane and lets it cool. She tries to concentrate on being still and peaceful, to time her breaths with her sister’s. But her mind ticks. She wants to paint. She pictures the slim metal tubes of Winsor & Newton watercolours, the oyster shells on which she mixes them, and her own stock of sable-hair brushes which she finally purchased after half a year of careful thrift.

  She nudges her twin.

  ‘But I haven’t seen the parakeet,’ Rose mumbles, and Iris knows she will sleep soundly until St George’s tolls five. Through the wall, she hears the locomotive groan and whistle of Mrs Salter’s snores. She is as good as dead after her nightly swigs of laudanum.

  When Iris can bear it no longer, she pulls herself free of the covers. The wooden boards squeak underfoot, and the latch of the bedroom door, which Iris keeps oiled, gives easily. She feels a strange compulsion to laugh, but stifles her rising giggle by clapping a hand over her mouth.

  As she passes into the hallway, her nightgown whisked by a slight breeze, Mrs Salter’s door is ajar, the light from her lamp casting the floor with a jaundiced glow. There is a stench of stomach acid. Iris is sure Mrs Salter’s illness is caused not eased by her nightly battery of pills: ‘Mother’s Friend’ for her gastric aches, ‘Dr Munro’s Harmless Arsenic Complexion Wafers’ to conceal her pimples. Iris tires of scrubbing the vomit-stiffened rug, her hands stinging with vinegar. Worse, of bearing Mrs Salter’s slaps on days when her hallucinations crystallize into certainty that she is shelterin
g twin harlots in her house, and that Iris is on the brink of being seduced by a green-skinned gentleman with tusks.

  If only the apothecary would lace her medicine with rat poison, Iris thinks to herself, as she tiptoes down the edges of the stairs where the creak is quietest.

  The cellar storeroom is small and cramped, damp staining the walls. The smell of mouldy plaster blocks out even the slightest aroma of sugar.

  Iris walks to the open dresser in the corner. It is stacked with baskets containing unpainted porcelain arms, feet and heads. A cloth bag holds the bales of human hair, shorn off the scalps of South German peasants. Iris lifts this, and takes out the top painting and her supplies which are hidden below it. She carries them to the desk, sits.

  The scale of her face is just as wrong as she remembered. At first Iris feels overwhelmed by a despair that she is not, and never will be, good enough. But when she peers closer, she finds a starkness which she likes, a brightness too. If only the head did not drift so absently at the top of the page, if only she could anchor it more. She is loath to cut up the paper; it is a small sheet already. Perhaps she can salvage it after all, find a way to fill the empty space.

  The honest texture of her nightdress – white flannel with yellow stains under her armpits – scratches her neck. Before she thinks what she is doing, she stands and pulls it over her head. Her figure, on which the candlelight catches, is as pale and glossy as a minnow.

  For a moment, she imagines her parents’ disgust at what she is doing, their unswerving emphasis on morality. But there is no risk of them catching her here; more alarming is the thought of Rose’s disappointment, or worse, Mrs Salter stumbling into the room, her horror amplified by laudanum. The names she would call her (‘whore’, ‘strumpet’), the real possibility that Iris would lose her employment, and with it twenty pounds a year. But she does not dwell on this thought; she mixes her watercolours, the chair cold against her thighs.