The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  He glances about him, rubs his hands together, and starts to scale the side of the building.

  The Private View

  The black-coated men draw to one side, their faces turned in raven sneers. Silas thought that they might not admit him even with his ticket, which he has paid vastly over the odds for, but after a little wrangling, they let him pass.

  In previous years, he has waited outside and drummed up trade with the painters, several specimens with him to prove his abilities. He doesn’t doubt that Louis will be here today; the artists always are, and he is sure he will want to show Iris his work.

  He walks through the cavernous rooms. The disorder is unnerving – he wants the pictures neatly laid out, their frames uniform and precisely measured, but instead they form a monstrous, ornate wallpaper. The ceiling, at least, is moulded into symmetrical scrolls, and he looks at it to calm the whirlpool of his mind. He knocks into a whiskered gentleman who regards him as if he is a mere fart lurking under his nose – Gideon, Gideon – and Silas feels again that he does not belong. He was never accepted in Stoke – even his mother loathed him – and yet the society to which he aspires treats him either like a stray dog or a jester. He tries to focus on the thought that soon Iris will be here, that he will see her. He craves just a glimpse of her, an understanding to pass across her face that he is part of the establishment, that he too can secure tickets for this private view.

  What a start it will give her, to see him surrounded by this crowd! Silas wanders through the clouds of pipe and tobacco smoke, barely looking at the paintings. He wonders what he will say, whether he dare approach her. Should he rebuke her for her failure to visit his shop, to attend his exhibition yesterday? It was unfair of her, heartless even. ‘I am sorry,’ she will say, bowing her head, ‘I could not come unchaperoned.’

  He casts a glance around the room, and then – he can hardly believe it – she is here, on the wall. He pushes through the throng, elbowing a man who barrels round and scolds, ‘Excuse you, sir,’ but he is set on his course.

  It is Iris. Lifelike, perfect, stilled. The exactness of it astonishes him. He feels as if he could climb in and join her in the painting, feel the warm pulse of her throat, the cool silk of her hand against his chest. Her look – so afraid, yet so hopeful – seems directed only at him. She wears a gold coronet in her hair. A Queen, then, as Louis said all those months ago in the Dolphin. Silas notices a group of men admiring the painting, but they must not gaze on her. He does not want these imposters absorbing the puck of her lip, the twist of her collarbone, the wide spacing of her eyes. She is his Queen.

  When the gentlemen have moved on, he looks more closely at the scene which surrounds her. He notes the bars of the cell, her expression of longing. And the bird that flutters past – isn’t it his dove that she cranes towards? Each feather is so perfectly rendered that it does not seem far-fetched to imagine the creature sweeping free of its painted cage.

  He reads the inscription below it. ‘My life is dre-dreary – he com-eth-not,’ and then something more that he tries and fails to decipher.

  All his imaginings crystallize. He realizes shakily, gratefully, what he must do. How he can earn that look, how he can have her all to himself. How he can delight her, scrub away her sadness.

  Joy flushes through him, a trembling, hesitant thrill that he cannot name and would bottle if he could. This is greater even than racing across the meadowland of Staffordshire, the ecstasy of seeing the curled skull of a ram, of having Flick all to himself at last, her mouth his alone.

  She will be his.

  On the Line

  ‘My darling,’ Iris says, pulling Louis’s arm. ‘You lumber slower than Guinevere. There are more important things to discover, after all, like whether I’m on the line.’

  ‘Come, be dignified,’ Louis says, but he laughs, and turns his walk into a skip. ‘I’m sure it won’t be – that it’ll be shut off in a corner like Hunt’s Rienzi last year.’

  The Royal Academy is before them, a huge edifice of smoke-blackened stone. Men in dark top hats congregate, pipe fumes ribboning in the breeze. They stand square, firmly planted, their confidence echoed in the squat solidity of the building and its pillars. It looks like an earthquake could not rattle it, the windows as impermeable as rock. Iris thinks for a moment of her chewed canvas, but again she is glad it isn’t on display. Next year she will make her entrance. Her painting will be flawless, ambitious – five foot tall at least. She will not be afraid to take up space.

  A porter holds open the door, nods his greeting, and they are waved past the waiting queue. There is a tenseness in the way Louis grips her arm as they climb the marble steps, and she feels a swell of desire. An image flits: her lips tight against his prick, his mouth parted as she rises and falls above him – she blushes, stifles a laugh.

  He doffs his hat at various people whom Iris does not recognize – or doffs Millais’s hat rather, another of his cast-offs – and she notices that there is a dab of blue paint in his hair. He whispers their names under his breath – ‘That is Brown, I have heard mighty things of his Chaucer, oh – Eastlake – and Lady Eastlake with him – and over there Reynolds – Leighton . . .’

  There is a roar of chatter, a thick haze of billowing smoke. Louis delves into his pocket for his pipe and chews the end. They enter the first room. Louis glances around him, first scanning at eye level, and then above and below it. And Iris tries to join him, but her eyes cannot settle. She has imagined this day for so long, picturing a neat row of pictures. But this – it is chaos, beautiful chaos. The walls are a patchwork of gilded frames from floor to ceiling. She can scarcely comprehend all the toil and labour that went into this room – tens, hundreds of years when all stacked in a single place. She tries to take in a picture of a Scottish burn, and she imagines each mix of pigment, each dab of the paintbrush. This is a room hiding careful consideration and ticking minds, all of which exist beneath these paintings like the machinations of a clock behind its plain face.

  ‘It isn’t here,’ Louis says, pulling her into the next gallery. Her skirts sweep the parquet, and they edge through the crowds. Some stare at the art, others point and laugh. All of London seems to have gathered in these rooms to chatter.

  ‘How many paintings do you think there must be?’ she asks Louis.

  ‘What?’ he says, and she repeats her question. ‘Oh, over a thousand, at least. But where is it?’

  She pulls on his sleeve. ‘There, there,’ she says, and he marches towards it.

  It is on the line. Perfectly, squarely on the line, in the centre of the West Room. Its colours gleam amongst the brownish paintings around it.

  She is on display to the world. He has pinned her down in paint, hemmed her in with the four edges of the golden frame. She is there – life-size, stilled in a fleeting moment.

  And how beautifully he has captured her!

  It has been a month since she last saw it. The Queen, she, stands in the cell, her face half in profile, one hand by her side and the other reaching out to the dove which flies past the barred window.

  She wonders how she could ever have questioned whether Louis loved her, now she realizes the tenderness with which she is painted, the affection of each brush-stroke. It is a love letter.

  ‘I should have done more with the ivy,’ Louis says, frowning. He takes a step back.

  ‘It’s on the line,’ she whispers to him. The room feels reverent, despite its noise, and she wants to preserve this moment between them.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, it is. And look –’ He points. ‘There is The Return of the Dove to the Ark, on the line too, and Mariana, a little below it.’

  She imagines her own painting hanging here, next to Louis’s. She has only just begun it, traced the contours of shade and light on to the hard white canvas: the curve of a bowl of strawberries, the vase bursting with flowers. This afternoon, she will add the first dabs of paint, and she longs to return to her studio.

  ‘Mr Frost,
’ a man says, tapping him on the shoulder, and Louis turns and bows, introduces Iris, and the man says with a chuckle, ‘What a majestic creature she is! So tall! There’s really no mistaking her – but is she for sale too?’ and Louis does not smile. They make small talk for a moment, discussing how Ruskin has already visited, how marvellous it is for London to usher in two exhibitions within two days.

  ‘Though ours is the greater,’ the man says, ‘but the Great Exhibition has pinched most of our crowd.’

  Louis scoffs. ‘Such a want of individuality, I have heard, such a gorged medley of designs. And did you hear, that there is no space for fine art unless a painting is submitted to illustrate improvements of colours – imagine, recognized not by artistic skill but as a mere preparer of paints!’

  Iris has listened to his complaints before, and after a while, she stops listening and merely watches their mouths. The man has a maggot-shaped scar on his cheek which twitches when he speaks. He taps Louis’s elbow, screening Iris out of the conversation, and says, ‘May I introduce Mr Boddington – who has already expressed an interest in purchasing your Imprisonment of Guigemar’s Queen.’

  The men bow, and Iris turns away, blinking. ‘Please excuse me,’ she says, but nobody seems to have heard her.

  She gazes at the canvas again, at the tenderness in her expression, the passivity of her unsmiling face. She feels a weight within her, a flattening. She starts to see it not as a celebration, but as a trap which has snapped around her. The woman in the painting has become her twin, like her and yet nothing like her. She has suffocated her, until Iris does not know where she ends and this image begins. She has escaped one half of herself for another.

  She wonders how it did not occur to her that Guigemar’s Queen would be for sale. She imagined, somehow, that Louis would want to keep her, that the picture came with too many memories to part with, that she would not be sold. But it is not her, she reminds herself, and yet it is, too.

  ‘Of course, it is not to everybody’s taste. I understand some of the critics have been rather relentless in their abuse of your sweet sugarplum already. But I admire it intensely, and wondered the price?’

  Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Louis smile, nod, and he says, ‘Not that I wish to be a tradesman here, but I would not part with it for less than four hundred.’

  Four hundred pounds! That is her worth. She stares again at the painting, at the paintings of other women about it – their images, too, will be preserved for hundreds of years, there for anybody to criticize or gaze at – and they all have a price. This is little more than a prettied-up shop, where rows and rows of wan, painted women are for sale. And she is among them.

  She drifts away and sees a Frenchman scoffing at Millais’s Mariana and she does not care. Mariana – for sale, too. She tries to control herself, to consider that Louis is an artist, that it is a trade and he must make a living, that he transacts for models just as he transacts for paintings. But there had been a way that he intellectualized his work and made her forget it was rooted in commerce. She recollects Millais’s words: By Jove, I’ll need to find a stupendously beautiful creature for it! And now: What a fine creature she is!

  She feels a hand on her arm, and she jumps. It is a hard grip, the fingers pressing into her elbow, and she thinks of Mrs Salter. A smell hits her – sour, unwashed – and she cannot bear the touch.

  ‘I understand it all,’ the man says, and she stares at him. His breath is putrid, his lips purple and glistening. The intrusion is as sharp as a bite, so unexpected that for a few seconds she can do nothing. She feels that he could lead her from this gallery as mutely as a child going with its mama, so shocked is she, so taken aback. She stares at the room as if through a veil, opens her mouth but no sound comes out. She is a fly, paralysed by the wrapped thread of a spider.

  ‘You must be my Queen.’

  It is only now that she recognizes him; the man from the shop who gave her that bauble so strangely – Elias? Cecil? Silas, that was it – and she tries to bend her arm away, but he will not release her. The harder she thinks of escape, the tighter he clings. She cannot breathe, cannot bear his cold, clammy grip. She needs to steady herself: her vision swims, and she chokes at his stench.

  His fingernails dig in, and the shock of the pain causes her to recall herself, that she has strength, too. ‘Let me go,’ she says, and she tears back her arm with an abrupt violence, unsettling a group of gentlemen behind her. They sigh and tut, and Iris blushes. She has ruffled the polite waters of this occasion.

  As she turns away, she half-expects him to follow her, to clutch her tighter. But he is motionless against the braying crowds, and his face is snarled with pain, as if her touch has scorched him.

  Mice

  The room is dark, and Albie blinks. Yellow shapes float across his vision, and his knee aches from where he knocked it on the ledge when he thrashed his way through the window.

  He takes in Silas’s old metal bed frame, the sheets surprisingly clean. The far wall is lined with little balls of fluff, and Albie peers closer.

  It is only when his eyes have adjusted that he realizes the baubles are stuffed mice, some white, some brown. They are almost all dressed in skirts and corsets and bonnets. They remind him of the rows of frilly, passive-faced dolls at Mrs Salter’s. He picks up the smallest specimen. The mouse wears a knee-length dress, its claws closed around a small circle. There is a dab of red fur glued to its head.

  Albie shudders, though a part of him also admires the mice, and at any other time, he would imagine setting up a street scene and playing with them. A clock chimes and he jumps; he takes a breath and descends the stairs to the shop below.

  The room is quiet. He can hear little from the Strand. The eyes of the stuffed creatures follow him around the shop. The skulls bare their teeth at him. He realizes he has no idea what he is supposed to be looking for; it feels laughable that he imagined Silas might have a murdered woman in this room, or have sketched plans for an attack on Iris. But the silence chills the boy, and he feels the texture of a huge yellowed bone with his fingertips. A sparrow is trapped in mid-flight, its needling beak poised. It is as if the wheel of time has ground to a halt, stopping these creatures as they fly or settle or sleep.

  He must keep his mind on the task at hand: he scrabbles through the drawers of the dresser, finding nothing but odd pieces of paper, fragments of pottery. Even if there were some incriminating note, Albie wouldn’t be able to understand it. Hand-penned squiggles fade in and out of focus.

  It is so still, so eerie. At the back of the shop, he notices a deerskin rug on the floor, its nose flat and shiny. He wonders where Silas makes his specimens – surely not in this cramped shop? There were no tools in the bedroom either. He looks about him for another room, but the far window abuts a courtyard, and there are no doors except the one facing the street.

  He coughs from the dust. The chemical smell makes his head ache. He should leave. He imagines again what Silas might do if he found him, and he pats his pocket. Good; the knife is still there. He recalls the man’s surprising strength, the shock of the punch and his lost tooth, his head that hummed for over a day. What is he playing at? Dicing with a madman, breaking into his house? He tries the door, but it is locked, and he takes the stairs two at a time, his feet slipping. He is sweating, his shirt dampening under him. He has to escape.

  But as he hurries across the floorboards – they creak with the mew of a kitten in pain – he catches sight of a pink feather under Silas’s bed. He doesn’t know why it unsettles him, but he crouches and dusts it against his finger. There’s nothing wrong with keeping such a thing – the man collects enough clutter, most of it far stranger – and yet, Albie feels a crawling sensation, as if Silas were running his fingernails up and down his spine.

  It reminds him of somebody who wore a pink feather in her hair. She once had the room next to his sister, and was famed for the false trill of her satisfaction. But she left, became a finer lady, pegged her way
up from the St Giles rookeries to the better part of Soho. Bluebell; that was her name. Hundreds of girls pass through his brothel, and he hasn’t thought or heard from her in years. He wonders if Silas bought the feather from the same street vendor, a little girl with a grubby face who cried out the coloured plumes.

  He thinks again of his sister, counting the greasy coins, and he pushes the feather back under the bed and stands. Albie is in such a hurry to contort his little figure through the window frame that he half tumbles to the ground, landing on his bad foot. Even the stench of the dead animal in the alley is a blessed relief.

  Rooftops

  ‘And tell me again what he said?’ Louis reaches for the decanter as they lie in a little dip in the roof. They climbed out of the attic window, skittling tiles down the edge of the building, and Louis insisted on bringing his port, leaving only one hand free to grab hold of the parapet. From the rooftop hollow, they can see nothing of London except the tips of steeples pressed down by fog and smoke.

  ‘I can’t remember exactly,’ Iris says, and she looks at her arm. Four red spots where his fingers dug in. ‘Something about understanding me – or maybe understanding something, and about being his Queen – oh, I don’t know. It was peculiar.’

  ‘And this man – he grabbed hold of your arm?’ Louis swigs from the decanter, and then Iris pouts and he tips the port into her mouth. ‘He sounds as though he’s quite mad. Did he approach anyone else?’

  ‘Not that I saw,’ Iris says. It really doesn’t seem much, and yet it unnerved her, made her feel vulnerable. ‘But he came here once before – he asked me to visit his shop.’ A thought occurs to her. ‘Do you think it can have been him who wrote to me with that ticket?’