The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  ‘Is something the matter? I admit that it can sound—’

  ‘No. It is nothing,’ she says.

  ‘Here, just here,’ Clarissa says to a girl who places a gold-fringed plate on the table. It is heaped with white de-crusted sandwiches. Clarissa chews thoughtfully, gestures to Iris. ‘If Louis achieves the fame that he deserves, don’t forget that you will be immortalized on his canvas. Just think of it! To be admired a hundred, two hundred years from now.’ She takes a sip of tea, her little finger pointed outwards. ‘Besides, you would be paid a shilling an hour, which I imagine far exceeds your current salary.’

  ‘A bob – I should say, a shilling – an hour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Iris tries to swallow. She has forgotten how. She pushes the food into her cheek. ‘And I would be, well, how to say it—?’

  ‘I assure you it is respectable,’ Clarissa replies briskly, and Louis looks at her in a way that implies it is quite the opposite. ‘I myself have sat for him. And if you wanted to bring a chaperone . . .’

  Rose. She remembers flashes of their argument. The stolen paints, the burnt pictures, the slap. Iris’s mouth tightens.

  ‘I see that perhaps there is nobody suitable? If you wanted me to be present, I would gladly oblige.’

  ‘Is it because – I –’ She gestures at her collarbone. She bows her head. ‘Do you want to paint this?’

  ‘What?’ Louis says, speaking at last. His voice is educated, deep, syrupy. ‘No! It’s because you are interesting. You have a certain majesty. Your face – half beautiful, half bewildering. And your hair! A forest of pins couldn’t tame it, I’m sure. So extraordinary.’

  She feels a tremor, and doesn’t know if she should be flattered or insulted. She tries to focus on the sandwiches.

  ‘Besides, I fancy you are the perfect Queen. No, you are Regina herself.’

  Clarissa cuts in. ‘You see, he’s working on a painting. The Imprisonment of Guigemar’s Queen. Louis can be a little obsessive. He forgets that the rest of us do not always share his enthusiasm for medieval lays. In brief –’ she looks up, and her voice takes on a dull intonation from repeating well-worn lines – ‘a Queen is imprisoned by her jealous husband. A chap called Guigemar finds his ship is wrecked nearby, and they fall in love. But of course it can’t endure, and they’re discovered by the King, and cast out – but she knots his shirt in a way only she can untie, and he does likewise with her dress – is that correct?’

  Louis nods through a mouthful.

  ‘And then she escapes the husband, and finds herself at the castle of King Mériaduc, who tries to seduce her but she refuses. Then she meets Guigemar by chance at a tournament and proves who she is by untying Guigemar’s shirt – at least, I think – and then he besieges King Mériaduc and rescues her. How was that summary, Louis?’

  ‘It will do,’ Louis says, rapping out the syllables with his fingernails. ‘And we are here to rescue you from King Mériaduc.’

  ‘Who?’

  He snorts. ‘That grey-haired crone, with the mouth as pinched as a dog’s hindquarters.’

  ‘Oh! Mrs Salter.’ Iris conceals her laugh as a cough. She glances at Louis and then says so quietly that it comes out as a whisper, ‘Can you teach me to paint?’

  ‘Teach you?’

  His incredulity pricks at every insecurity. She rises. ‘I should be going. I’m late on my errand, after all. Thank you for the tea.’

  ‘Do stay a little,’ he says, reaching out. His fingers settle on the soft inside of her wrist where her sleeve meets her glove.

  The licence of it stuns her. She pulls her arm away.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry for this, but it is quite simple. You must be my Queen.’

  ‘Must be your Queen?’

  He ignores her. ‘I knew it the moment I saw you.’

  She feels her irritation rise. ‘Well, I knew the moment I saw you, that you are very impolite.’ He laughs, and she remembers her sister’s words. There is something wicked in you. She raises her chin. ‘I’m sorry you think it so amusing that I’d like to learn to paint.’

  He straightens his face. ‘Forgive my impertinence. I hadn’t expected it, though I suppose that Miss Siddal, one of our other models, paints too. Very well. A shilling an hour to be my model, and I’ll teach you to paint for an hour a week.’

  ‘But I’d like to learn properly, not just as a pastime.’

  He laughs again. ‘Quite the woman of business. So be it. Tuition for half an hour a day. And you can use my paints when you aren’t modelling.’ He looks at her askance, and adds, ‘Oh, Miss Whittle – do agree to it.’

  Iris steadies herself on the table. She wants it more than anything – and yet she does not know Mr Frost, or Clarissa. She has been brought up on tales of innocent girls lured in by promises which are not kept, warned of all the dangers which lie in wait like a wolf in the shadows – seamstresses offered well-paid roles in shady establishments, maidservants hired by ill-reputed rakes who are then subjected to all sorts of horrifying abuse – but then, painting, education, escape – if it is true . . .

  Clarissa pats her hand. ‘Listen. My brother can be a little enthusiastic. A bit of a pup. Why don’t you visit the studio, just to see it first of all? Surely, nobody can object to any impropriety there. And then you can decide.’

  Iris pauses, sets her bonnet straight on her head. She is trembling as she gathers up her basket.

  ‘When can I come?’ she asks.

  Part Two

  Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted

  For my sake the fruit forbidden?

  Must your light like mine be hidden,

  Your young life like mine be wasted,

  Undone in mine undoing,

  And ruin’d in my ruin,

  Thirsty, canker’d, goblin-ridden?

  CHRISTINA ROSSETTI,

  ‘Goblin Market’ (1859)

  Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may,

  Old Time is still a-flying;

  And this same flower that smiles

  today

  Tomorrow will be dying.

  ROBERT HERRICK,

  ‘To the Virgins, to Make

  Much of Time’ (1648)

  Megalosaurus

  Albie is on a tea clipper. It is tilting and grinding in the breeze, its sails the pulses of a heartbeat. Its chambers are coffered, hammocks slung out. His sister is with him, her hand in his, and he’s got new teeth in his mouth. If he closes his eyes, he can feel the gnawing of wind and sea on his cheeks, can race from prow to stern, try out the words that a seaman once taught him – Clew up courses! Spanker to windward! Lee ho! Helm’s a-lee! All around him, the horizon hums without end, a blue line of sea meeting sky meeting cloud.

  The ship growls more violently, and his sister whimpers a little. The smack of the sails grows louder and more percussive, a slap-slap-slap in the wind. He is on a ship. He is on a ship. His sister clasps his hand more tightly.

  Now he is below deck – in his hammock, with another just above it. In the storm, the ricochet of the wind causes the bed – no, the hammock – above him to press down on his nose with each gust. He is on a ship. He is.

  The storm passes with a final roar, a digging-in of his sister’s fingernails, and he would like to kill the wind, to strangle it in its tracks, to beat the last puffs and pants out of it.

  When the door slams, he crawls out from underneath the bed. His hand aches. There are four red half-moons dug into the back of it.

  His sister flinches when he reaches out his hand to tuck her pale hair behind her ear.

  ‘He weren’t violent this time,’ Albie says. ‘Was he?’

  She shakes her head, counting the grubby coins on to the pillow. She bites them. He counts too. Six pence. She’ll make at least five times that when the night’s over. She’ll be busy what with her influenza, Albie knows: she’s passed it off as consumption and put her rates up by a penny. Dying girls are the most treasured of them all. At the thought, he squirms closer to h
er and buries his face in her hair. ‘Much better’n factory work.’

  She stands, and he stays on the bed, picks up a needle and thread, and sings to himself. The old coal room is as small as a snuffbox, and from where he is sitting on the bed, Albie can touch all four walls and, if he kneels on the narrow mattress, the ceiling too.

  ‘The first I met a cornet was

  In a regiment of dragoons,

  I give him what he didn’t like,

  And stole his silver spoons.’

  Out of the sliver of his eye, he watches his sister, crouched over the basin of vinegar, a plunger in hand, her pubic hair a greasy whorl. He longs to say to her, ‘Let’s leave! Let’s sneak on a ship, let’s go—’ but won’t it always be the same? Wherever they are, it will be the same. He hates it. He hates it in sudden, unexamined flashes, though he accepts it too, and does not think of his life in terms of happiness or unhappiness, just as survival, a keeping-out of the way of the workhouses or coffins – he feels an urge to run, to sprint, to escape it all with each pounding footfall.

  ‘Is you being strangled?’

  ‘It’s called singing,’ he says, in a matter-of-fact voice, wielding his sewing needle. ‘’Sides, I’m armed. I’ll prick any attacker’s eyeballs as easy as piercing a gooseberry.’

  He returns to his stitching. He is making a rosette as a Christmas gift for Iris out of the offcuts of slop, but he daren’t tell his sister for fear she’ll call him a petal. He has thought often of that coin which Iris pressed into his palm, and it only confirms his belief that she is a sort of queen. He recalls her other kindnesses: a loaf sneaked into his sewing bag, a spinning top that she said was hers as a child.

  His sister tucks herself under the cover. ‘I’m going to sleep, afore more of them come,’ she says.

  ‘Oi!’ A clattering on the window grate above them. ‘Oi, Alb – there’s a dog—’

  ‘Don’t even think about bringing its stinking corpse back here again,’ his sister says, but he is running, through the curtain which stands for their door, up the stairs and over the rotten step into the street, an empty Dead Creatures bag in his hand.

  ‘How bad? How old?’

  ‘Dunno. But the cart got it,’ the boy says.

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Oh, no. Howling fit to wake the corpses in St Anne’s. Better be quick.’

  The sun is dipping, a faint yolk filtering through the coal dust and the smoke. The two boys rocket off, catapulting along the skinny streets – Old Compton, Frith and Romilly – until they hear the dog’s whine. As they run, they negotiate – a sweet, a bag of scratchings – and Albie settles on buying his friend a bag of candied ginger for the tip-off.

  The dog’s hind leg is trapped under the wheel of a cart, mangled and fleshy, the bone showing. The hound squirms to free itself, but each time it moves, its wails become more pitiful. Blood seeps into the gutter.

  ‘Someone put the bitch out of its misery,’ a man says. ‘A few kicks’d soon do it.’

  ‘Leave her to me,’ Albie says, and he approaches the dog carefully. ‘Hush, hush.’ He fears a bite which will make him go mad and froth at the mouth. The leg is ruined; the dog can only die. It’s as raw as the butcher’s cuts he’s seen the beggar boys tuck up their sleeves for sympathy pennies.

  ‘You’re a pretty little thing, ain’t’ya?’ he says, and he strokes its back. The dog quietens, its eyeball white with fear. It trembles. ‘Hush, hush, princess.’

  He signals to his friend, who hands him a cobblestone. Albie closes his eyes. It is better this way, better than leaving the animal to die slowly in pain, or to be beaten by a group of boys for a lark. And besides, this way he might squeeze another shilling out of Silas, one step closer to his new teeth. He would be better off strangling the dog, and he’d fetch more money as the skull would be in a single piece. But he couldn’t bear to scare the hound like that, to watch the scrambling panic as its pulse faded.

  A thump, a crack, and silence from the dog. Albie sits on his haunches, panting. The hound’s eyelid flickers, but he knows it is dead. He wipes his face with his hand, his fingers shaking as he frees the dog’s mashed leg from the cart’s wheel.

  ‘I’m sorry, princess,’ he says, and he means it, too.

  Megalosaurus, Megalosaurus, Megalosaurus.

  Albie can’t remember where he heard the word or what it means, but it gives a rhythm to his paces. He repeats it under his breath as he dashes and weaves, hurtling to Silas’s shop in Covent Garden. The dog in his sack is still warm – poor beast. One day he’ll wind up like it, his body lain out in one of the charnel houses, good for nothing but the surgeon’s slab. He shudders. His sister is always telling him to slow down, not to dance in and out of the jams of carriages, the rearing horses, the coachmen with their silver whips. It was how he lost most of his teeth; whacked sideways by a cart when he was four, and his new ones never came in. He flicks his lone fang with his tongue.

  Megalosaurus, Megalosaurus, Megalosaurus.

  Down the sweeping boulevard of the Strand, through the ant trail of hurrying clerks, and into a dead-end alley, barely a shoulder’s width – he takes a breath, as the smell is abominable – and he trots to Silas’s shop. There is a small sign next to the door. When Silas first put it up, he instructed Albie that it informed customers that they should knock and ring, and so Albie pulls the bell and pounds the door. It is coal black, no candles in the windows, no wretches in the passageway. A cat is crying, scraping at a wall.

  ‘What is it?’ Silas demands. He looks even more gaunt than usual, his eyes unable to settle. They scan Albie, then the alley, back again. He fidgets with a thread of hair.

  ‘I’ve got a right jewel,’ Albie says, though he knows that this haul isn’t his finest. ‘Or at least I had a diamond, ’cept I had to throw it at a cur what chased me down.’

  ‘What was it?’

  Albie scratches his head. ‘If I remember rightly, it was a Megalosaurus, just a small one, but s’pose you’ll have to do without it now.’ He shrugs, but it seems Silas has not heard him. ‘But wait ’til you see this, sir—’

  He pauses, fearing the dog will be met with scorn – he can already see that Silas’s attention is fraying. All the same, he grips the dog with both hands, pulls it out, and looks up with hope in his eyes. The ivory teeth are four guineas and he only has twelve shillings saved. At this rate, he’ll be all gum until he’s thirty.

  Silas says nothing. He seems to stare through him. Albie continues, but his sing-song voice has dulled a little. ‘Sir – a most fresh specimen, just dead, not even stiffened – think yourself of the skeleton of it – all laid out, sir – skin turned to gloves, fur to trimmings. And the bones – you could whittle ’em, sir, make whistles and combs and whatnot – or dog-bone pian-ner keys – or—’

  ‘That girl,’ Silas cuts in, batting Albie’s hand.

  The dog falls to the ground, and Albie picks it up. He strokes its crown absent-mindedly. ‘What girl?’

  ‘You know.’ He touches his collarbone, and Albie tries to arrange his face into confusion, though he understands at once.

  ‘I don’t know who you mean, sir.’

  ‘The one from Mrs Salter’s. Iris.’

  Albie wrinkles his nose and pretends to scratch it. ‘Don’t say I recall nobody of that name, sir. Nope.’

  ‘At the Great Exhibition site. You introduced us, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘No – you must’ve imagined it,’ he insists, hoping he can prey on the man’s distorted way of seeing the world, his delusion. ‘Sir, I didn’t introduce you to nobody. You must’ve dreamed it. Nobody of that name. I know nobody.’

  But Silas looks past him, pulling his hair, chewing his already torn lips.

  ‘Please, sir, you didn’t see no girl.’

  There is no reply.

  And Albie knows it is no good.

  Correspondence

  The Factory, 6 Colville Place

  JANUARY 2ND

  To nobody’s Q
ueen,

  I apologize: it has been more than a month since we met. I have been called to Edinburgh twice in that time, and was most grievously unwell. But fear ye not: you can recall your summons for a black ostrich feather and full mourning garb, for my darling Guinevere has nursed me back to rosy health. My sister was most unkind & said I suffered from a rheum particular only to gentlemen hypochondriacs. If you had heard the bone-breaking coughs which racked my feeble frame, I am sure you would not have been so cruel.

  I write only to say, flee King Mériaduc, your captor, at once! I have never been one to observe the Sabbath (by no means the least of my many vices), so if you can do without your genuflections & whatnot, I will await your presence on the twelfth of this month.

  Bring a sample of your drawings etc. and I will assist with some brief lesson.

  I shall ask Clarissa to be present.

  I remain &c. &c.

  Louis Frost PRB

  Mrs Salter’s Doll Emporium, Regent Street

  JANUARY 2ND

  Dear Mr. Frost,

  I am glad to hear you are recovered. Who is Guinevere?

  I can take an hour on Sunday after church, no later than 3 o’clock. As we discussed over tea, I will attend only for interest etc. I cannot be your model. My mistress and parents would not allow it, so I beg you not to rest your hopes on it.

  Respectfully,

  Iris Whittle

  The Factory

  The house is both shabbier and finer than Iris imagined; tall, narrow and brick, with the look of a rake gone to seed. Its windows stare. One is broken. Ferns and palms froth out of every orifice; over window boxes, out of terracotta pots and planters, around the sides of hanging baskets. The straw-strewn lane is barely passable when a horse and cart trots by, and Iris almost has to crouch in a plant pot, a fern tickling her face.

  Once the cart has rounded the corner, she clears her throat and looks down at her dress. She wears a small silk rosette on her chest, a Christmas gift from Albie, and she smooths its ragged edges. She picks at a soup stain on the sleeve of her gown. It is her finest outfit, greyed cotton that was once blue. She used to like the way it pulled in her waist, the pert sleeves that made her arms look slender. But now, she thinks she looks like a poor maiden aunt, not the sort of person likely to indulge in perfect triangles of cucumber sandwiches or cream so rich it gave her a stomach-ache.