The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  ‘Are you Mo Reed’s youngest?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Come with me,’ he said, taking Silas into a cluttered office with a leather-topped table.

  The owner told him how he had heard Silas’s mother talking about his skull collection. His wife had a curiosity cabinet, see, and it had a butterfly in it and a stuffed robin and a dung beetle and other nonsense besides. He didn’t understand, preferred her needlework to this morbid and unsettling collecting urge – there was something wrong with the female condition, he was sure, but it seemed quite in vogue now, didn’t it – and the ladies with whom she spent so much time had advanced collections – a mermaid from the Indian colonies, though any fool could see it was just a monkey sewn on to a dried fish tail – but that was beside the point, wasn’t it, and would he consider bringing a couple of his skulls to show his wife, and she would pay him if they were to her liking?

  He would, but the owner was not to tell a soul. Not his mother, not anyone.

  The day that fifteen-year-old Silas sold his first skull was the hardest and best day of his life. He regretted each sale he made, each parting with a yellowed companion he had grown to love. But with every coin which slid into his pocket, he came a little closer to easing free of the factory, taking Flick with him. His family did not know that gawky Silas was the darling of the Stoke-on-Trent drawing rooms, fluffed, preened and fussed over, his blackened cheeks wiped by the servants each time he appeared at the door, as he made a sweet trade in skeletons and prepared for his escape.

  And now, as a red-breeched flunky elbows past him, he pictures how Iris will react when he tells her the news about the Great Exhibition. He converses with her often in his head, and he imagines her face creasing with delight, her hand warming the crook of his elbow. As usual, she does and says very little; he orchestrates their conversations with curated precision, and she sits or stands in awed rapture.

  ‘Tell me again what he said,’ she says to him. ‘Thomas Filigree! A man of Belgrave Square. Describe it all so I can picture myself there.’

  And he tells her, and her eyes widen, and she tips back her head and laughs at his joke about the coffin and the puppies, and he can see the pink inside of her mouth. He takes her arm, steers her through his shop, explaining the specimens to her, and she pauses over them, picking up each item as if testing its weight.

  She says, ‘Silas, I’ve thought of you often – so fondly – since Albie introduced us, and now your friendship’ (she dabs at her eye) ‘means everything to me, more than life itself’ (no, that is excessive, he scraps that sentence and her tearfulness) ‘means everything to me, as dear as if you were my own brother.’ (There, better.)

  Silas blinks, looking around him, surprised to realize he is at the crossroads of Piccadilly. He is about to continue east to his shop, when he finds himself sloping west instead, on to Regent Street. If he is good enough for the Great Exhibition Commission, then surely he is good enough for her too? He is certain she is waiting for him, always hoping that he will appear.

  He will speak to Iris. He will share his news. Didn’t they meet at the site after all, so his mentioning his inclusion in the exhibition is not at all untoward, and she herself had said she wanted to visit his collection? His heart is a drum. He will show her the puppies, give her the butterfly-wing bauble. ‘Oh, Silas, I’ve often wondered where to find you,’ she will say.

  He walks down the half-crown side of the street, the hubbub a pulse in his ears. (‘Oh, what a pleasant surprise!’ – and she will tease a frond of hair behind her ear, look at him admiringly.)

  He has passed her shop many times in the past few weeks, each diversion built on the shallowest pretext. Each time he has resisted glancing in, kept his eyes on the pavement.

  He enters.

  He sees Iris at her desk, bent over a piece of fabric. How prettily she sews! A miniature lace bobbin is unspooled on the bureau in front of her. He creeps closer, willing her to look up, waiting for the moment of recognition. A glance, a smile . . .

  She lifts her head, and he almost trips. Her face is horribly scarred. It cannot be her – she could not have become so disfigured in so short a time – but the hair, figure, everything – how can it be? Her left eye is blank and gleams whitely, the other bloodshot as if she has been crying. She has a look of intense sadness.

  ‘Iris – what has—?’

  The girl’s mouth pinches.

  ‘I am not Iris,’ she says, with the coolness of syllabub. ‘If you’re looking for my sister, she no longer works here. She left this morning.’

  ‘What? Where is she?’

  ‘What is it to me? Or to you?’

  Silas puts down his puppy box, trying not to prickle at her manners. So unlike her sister! ‘I need to find her. It’s very important. She was a good friend of mine.’

  The girl scoffs. ‘That comes as no surprise. It seems she made a number of acquaintances without my knowledge.’

  He does not know what she means. ‘Do you have an address? Anywhere I can find her? I must, you see.’

  ‘Why should I tell you?’

  ‘I mean no harm,’ Silas says, but then he catches a shift in the sister’s expression. He understands by her disgusted squint that she thinks that he and her sister were lovers. It thrills him, and he does not correct her. ‘I knew her well. She absconded from me without a backwards glance, and now I need to see her.’

  ‘I knew it,’ the girl says, twisting a piece of fabric between her fingers, and he delights at her misunderstanding. ‘Interrupt her for all I care. Give her a fright. Surprise her latest inamorato.’

  Silas does not know what the word means, and he stares at the pile of doll’s hair on the desk in front of her, willing her to yield the information he needs. ‘And where . . .’

  ‘Six Colville Place,’ she says. ‘You can find her there.’

  Silas picks up his box. ‘Thank you—?’

  ‘Rose.’

  ‘Rose. Thank you.’

  Colville Place is narrow, the houses hunched into each other. The buildings are tall – four floors – but each looks no more than a room wide. Several of the houses on the terrace are shopfronts; a chandler’s and a carpenter’s.

  He considers knocking at the door, but thinks better of it. He assumes Iris is a scullery maid or similar in this residence, watched over by an elderly widow, and she may not be permitted visitors. ‘The Fact-ory. PRB. Please – ring – bell,’ he reads carefully. So that is what the initials stood for, when he heard the artists shouting them in the Dolphin. But why were they bellowing about ringing bells? It must be some sort of street slang that young swells use.

  Silas sits and waits on a step outside a deserted shopfront, knees together, his box perched on his lap, his hand playing with a button. He is almost directly opposite the house where Iris is working. To distract himself, he inspects the broken glass of the shop window. He practises his introduction. She will be impressed that he managed to find her, of that he is sure.

  Somebody starts to play the piano. It is a mournful tune. Sometimes Silas has slipped into churches, listened to the thunder of organs, the hum of violins, of choirs. He imagines Iris is the kind of person who could be stirred by a requiem – a tender, feminine soul. He wonders if it could even be her playing. He thinks of her slender fingers racing up and down cool ivory, the swaying of her spine.

  He waits and he waits and he waits, fumbling and standing each time he hears footsteps on the street. It is never her. But at last, just when he is becoming so cold and hungry that he thinks he will leave to buy a baked potato or a pudding, she is there, turning the corner into Colville Place, taller than he remembered, less waif-like. He is surprised by the strength in her shoulders.

  Silas pats his box and stands. She walks right past him. He calls out.

  ‘Miss – Iris?’

  She turns. There is no smile, no flicker. He wets his lips, swallows.

  ‘Yes?’ she asks, but she looks about her. (‘Silas –
you have come at last.’) ‘I’m terribly sorry. I don’t recall . . .’

  Of all her responses, he did not imagine this. He was so sure that she thought of him too. ‘I – my name is Silas.’ Still her brow is furrowed. She will laugh soon, pretend it is a jest. But he continues, just in case. ‘We met at the Great Exhibition. My friend Albie . . .’

  A slight frown. It was, he thinks with a downward glance at his dog box, no jest.

  ‘Yes. Of course. Now I remember.’ She waits. He says nothing. At last she says, ‘Well, can I help you at all? Has Albie been taken ill?’

  ‘Oh no, it’s – I’ve just been accepted for the Great Exhibition.’ He nods at the box. ‘Or at least I haven’t, but a skeleton and a stuffed puppy and a window have been – I mean, a window made of butterflies. The puppies are here, conjoined.’ He clears his throat. ‘In their coffin, as I call this box. And when I open it, it’s like they are being excavated.’

  She looks perplexed.

  ‘That is just a – a small joke of mine. Well,’ he carries on, his voice only wavering a little.

  ‘I must be going,’ she says, nodding at number six. ‘I only came out briefly for a candle. It was a pleasure—’

  He says, too quickly, ‘When we met, you said you wanted to see my collection, and I wondered when might be convenient for you to visit?’

  She looks around her, and then speaks slowly. She is polite. She is unfailingly polite, and now he knows that she barely remembers him, it occurs to him that she may not want to come at all, that she may just agree to spare his feelings. And what then? A thought passes across his brain, as clear as glass. Well, then, the voice says, you must kill her. He almost laughs at himself – how ludicrous of him.

  ‘Well, if I happen to be passing—’ She touches a rosette on her dress.

  He fidgets. ‘Will you come tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Come at five o’clock.’ He reaches into his pocket, draws out the butterfly-wing pendant and hands it to her. ‘You can have this. It’s for you.’

  She looks at the blue wing, at its brown-white eye. ‘You made this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’ She does not say anything else, does not seem to mind if empty expanses of conversation linger. She is stroking the butterfly glass with her thumb, but does not seem to be aware of it. He can see the shape of her clavicle through her dress. He would like to know how the bone feels under her skin.

  ‘I can show you how I make the butterflies, if you like, but my other exhibits are much more impressive. My shop – it’s called Silas Reed’s Shop of Curiosities Antique and New. It’s at the end of a quiet passage leading from the Strand. Ask any of the clerks or letter-writing boys for directions.’

  She nods, but doesn’t appear to be concentrating. ‘And you are Mr Reed?’

  ‘You can call me by my Christian name. Silas.’

  ‘Silas?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, trying to swallow the bitterness. Albie had introduced them, after all, and he mentioned his name again in the conversation earlier, and she has remembered nothing of him.

  ‘Silas’s Shop of Curiosities, tomorrow at five,’ he repeats.

  ‘Very good. Thank you for the gift.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he says, but she has already turned away, and it is as if the ground roils under Silas, as if he is adrift on black waves.

  Gamboge and Madder

  ‘Do try not to move,’ Louis says, tapping his pencil against his teeth.

  ‘I am trying,’ she says. She holds her pose, one arm raised, the other cradled before her. She is wearing a long green dress, a belt tied loosely around her waist. ‘If my image were taken, I wouldn’t even blur. I could be mistaken for a memento-mori daguerreotype.’

  ‘Dearest corpse, please – your chin – there – better.’

  His easel is little more than two paces from where she stands. He has a small freckle on his cheekbone, which she mistook for a fleck of paint before. His eyelashes are dark against his pale skin, and his lips are as plump as a girl’s.

  Looking at him distracts her from the torment in her arms. Nobody told her that modelling would be this long, this dull, this uncomfortable, this profoundly physical. It is as if her legs have been pierced by a thousand of Mrs Salter’s needles. She pictured herself sprawled on a chaise longue, propped up by cushions, not standing endlessly until her limbs mottled.

  And Louis is looking at her. He is really looking, as if she is something to be studied, treasured, appreciated. His eye is focused on a small square of her cheek, his pencil held still against the paper. His gaze is as strong as touch.

  Does he think she is beautiful? Is he critical of the slightly uneven geometry of her nose, the spot on her forehead? Or does he merely take in contours and shadows? He told her earlier that a true painter sees the world like a tableau; a series of angles and shapes, a movement that could be paused and captured. There are so many questions she would like to ask, and she feels like a little girl again, tugging her mother’s hand, asking why pigeons have wings and why sugar is grated from cones. And her mother’s rebuke: Sit, quiet, be still, talk less, be more like Rose. Always a battening-down, and no answers given.

  It is easier to think of Louis than her family, so she redirects her mind to him. She wonders if he always looks at his models the same way, with that softness in his expression as if he is halfway through a joke. Has he pulled women to him, unbuckled himself, gripped their thighs, twisted his mouth in ecstasy, just as her sister’s gentleman did? She imagines Louis kissing her hand, his lips against her fingers. She blinks the thought away. Instead she envisages the critics pausing over her paintings, her family’s scorn turned to pride: ‘A picture by our Iris in the Royal Academy! Sold for—’ (How much do paintings sell for? Twenty pounds? She isn’t sure. She must remember to ask Louis, but perhaps it is a vulgar question.)

  Louis’s pencil strokes the paper. Across the room, she can hear the scrape, scrape, scrape of Mr Millais’s palette knife, a reminder that he is here, too. Out of the blurred corner of her eye, she glimpses the white shape of the human skull he is painting. When she first saw it, she thought of the face that was once papered on to it, the jaws which hinged open over dinner, the teeth bared in a laugh. She shudders. And now that person’s skull is just an object to be painted.

  Outside, carriage wheels grind on Charlotte Street, churning the slush to mud. Snow sits on the edgings of windowpanes. A man is singing, a woman calling out, ‘Lemons a penny, lemons a penny.’ Her sister will be in the shop, tugging her needle through stiff velvet. Everyone is going about their lives, and she is in here. She is with artists, and she doesn’t regret it a jot.

  After returning the marble hand to the British Museum yesterday, she went straight to the garret on Charlotte Street which Louis’s sister had arranged for her, just around the corner from Colville Place. The matron opened the door to her chamber, handed her a key, and it dawned on Iris anew that she had her own bed in her own room with her own washstand and dresser.

  She visited Louis to borrow two candles, and Clarissa returned with her, bringing coal and kindling for the tiny iron fireplace. Together they scrubbed the grimed panes, mopped the wooden floor, polished the brass bed frame with spit and a cloth. Clarissa said she was used to maid’s work, and she talked without pause: about Louis and his art, about her mother, about her charity work where she teaches former disgraced women sewing and household management. When Clarissa left, Iris tried not think of herself as a kept woman, tried to shut out her sister’s scorn if she could see her. Little more than a whore’s attic. She dusted her hands against her dress, crossed the room in a pace and a half, and stood by the window. She watched a young girl lead a frock-coated man down an alleyway. What even was respectability? The landlady was firm – no gentlemen visitors – so she is hardly living in a brothel. She has never even kissed a man, while her sister and her gentleman—

  The anger at Rose’s hypocrisy edged away her gu
ilt, and Iris fell back on to the bed, waking only when it was dark.

  ‘Much better,’ Louis says, picking up a stick of charcoal. ‘I know these are only preparatory sketches, but you stand so still.’

  Iris says, with the innocence of a child, ‘I was doing my best to imitate your marble hand.’

  He does not reply.

  ‘Is the marble hand larger than mine or smaller?’

  Still silence.

  ‘Perhaps we should measure my palm against it?’

  ‘Why don’t you see for yourself?’ Louis says, from behind the canvas. ‘It’s there, on the shelf.’

  Iris turns, and there it is – the clawed hand looking like it might scuttle away.

  ‘What—’

  ‘It was a good trick,’ Louis says. ‘At first I searched the house in a frenzy. I credit you – I enjoyed it when the truth dawned on me. Very sly. But I knew you’d return it, yesterday morning most likely, and I waited for you by the museum. Once you’d finished hurling papers into the street, I fished it back through the railings.’

  ‘You—’ she begins, but Louis is hidden behind his easel and she cannot catch his expression.

  By three o’clock, the light is fading and the studio is lit mainly by the fire. Louis puts down his pencil for the day and Iris revolves her shoulders, her limbs stiff and aching from standing so still. Millais is sprawled on a tapestried cushion, and he uses Guinevere as a bolster.

  ‘Shall we have your lesson now?’ Louis asks Iris, and he ushers her to the desk in the corner. He places the marble hand in front of her, scrabbles for a sheet of paper and a pencil, and says, ‘Draw the hand. Draw it as you see it.’ Then he leans back and thumbs through a journal. The Germ, Iris reads along the spine.

  Iris makes a few lines on the paper – a semicircle for the fingertip, a line for the edge of the palm.

  ‘Millais, this poem of Christina’s—’

  Iris watches the snow turn to hail outside. She puts down her pencil and cups her chin in her hands.