The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  His legs feel strangely liquid, like hot iron bent under the hammer of a blacksmith. He thinks of Iris, her fingers stroking the rosette he made her, how she gave him sixpence when his sister was sick, the five pounds for his teeth. His mind is cluttered as he barrels towards Oxford Street, less than five minutes from Colville Place. He is distracted, his thoughts roaring in his ears, and this time he does not look, does not check for the shapes and the horses and the hiss of danger.

  A clunk, a grind of iron on iron, a splintering of wood. The horse screams.

  And in the moment of impact, as the hooves clatter his chest, as he is tossed like a rag doll under the churning wheels of the cart, in the quiet pause before the iron splits his skull as easily as an eggshell, before the little thread of his life is snipped short, he does not think of his sister. He does not think of love or his dreams or even Iris, really. He just thinks of her finger, one day in the doll shop, sliding down the seam of a miniature skirt and cracking the back of a flea. It made such a sound – such a pop – and the bead of blood was so pretty.

  Lumley Court

  14 Lumley Court

  Dear Miss Iris,

  We are not acquainted but I write on behalf of Miss Rose. She has suffered an accident. She was attacked when walking on the Strand. The villain has been apprehended. I have taken her into my abode – she passed me your address and begs you to come at once. You can find me on Lumley Court, at the end of the street. Her injury is not grievous, though a doctor has been summoned so do not trouble yourself on that account.

  Sincerely,

  Mr. T. Baker

  The Cart

  There is a commotion on Oxford Street. A cart is on its side. As Iris hurries down the road at a half-run, pushing past the craning passers-by, she tells herself not to look. She can hear screams, and a lady has fainted to much hysteria and scurrying. Looking will only distress her, but as if pulled by invisible strings, Iris cannot resist turning her head. In that short, snatched glance, she sees juddering hooves pawing at sky, bone showing on the horse’s knee, red foam from its mouth pooling in the gutter. She sees the coachman trying to comfort the horse, lamenting that it will be shot – that the urchin didn’t look. And she sees a little body, shrouded in cloth, but with muddy toes peeping out like tiny shells.

  There is a girl with white-blonde hair crouching over the boy. She wears a plain blue dress, freshly pressed and neat – Iris recognizes the fabric and the cut as identical to the garments she sewed for Clarissa’s society for fallen women – and the girl shakes the body. She is weeping piteously, screaming at the man, ‘My brother – my brother!’

  ‘He didn’t look! He dashed out!’ the coachman is shouting to a constable, and he cracks his whip at a child who is trying to make off with a wheel spoke.

  Iris turns away, shaking her head as if to loosen the image. It seems that there is a contagion in the air. First Sylvia so close to death, Rose attacked, and now this urchin, knocked down just around the corner from her. She tries to bury her fears; it happens all the time. She has seen more dead bodies on the streets than she can recall. Some are burnt into her memory: a pure collector frozen on a doorstep, an old gentleman clutching his heart, a sobbing pauper gripping a grey baby. And yet, no matter how many she sees, they do not lose their power to shock her.

  She wonders how badly Rose will be maimed, hopes that it is a broken arm and not her face which is shattered again, worse. She remembers her sister, stretching out her hand to Louis, swallowing any vestiges of jealousy she felt.

  She will forgive him; when he climbed into the cab he said he would marry her, but she was too angry, too hurt to take him seriously. ‘I want you to want to, not because I’ve begged you,’ she’d said. When the letter arrived about Rose’s injury, Iris’s temper had cooled and she was gathering her cloak to follow Louis to the docks, to clear their argument before he left on the steamer. She will write to him instead, in Edinburgh.

  The city hums around her, lives continuing, and all she wants is to hold her sister and Louis. Her breath rasps in her throat. A green-frocked girl shoves a pair of down-at-heel shoes at her (‘Tuppence, miss’); a child grasps her arm and proffers a basket of mackerel which glint like silver combs, and Iris has to swerve to avoid knocking the fish into the dust.

  Iris zigzags this way and that, slowing to a walk when the crowds thicken and the muck is too dense underfoot. The streets are winding, clogged, and every so often, she’ll take a wrong turn down an alley and have to double back. As the stink from the Thames intensifies, a drunken gentleman topples out of Rules restaurant and grins at her, but she pushes on, closer to the river, to the Strand, where she is spun in the tumult of hurrying clerks, a colony of ants spilling from a disturbed nest. She wonders where this house can be – she expects it must be grand because the letter was written on a fine, thick card.

  ‘Lumley Court – do you know it?’ she asks a child, stooped under the weight of a basket of mottled soap. His shirt is pure gamboge.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he says, pointing to a decrepit tunnel. ‘There it is.’

  How peculiar, she thinks to herself, but perhaps Mr Baker isn’t as wealthy as his paper led her to believe. She thinks of Louis modelling for her painting, the handsome boyishness of him, his dark curly hair – she would shadow it with emerald.

  She does not look twice at the alley as she runs down it, barely noticing that her shoulders have grazed the stone entranceway and stained her dress. She searches for a house – but the sun from the street has blinded her now that she stumbles into gloom, and the crack against the back of her head takes her unawares.

  Part Three

  Ses sires l’ad mis’en prisun

  En une tur de marbre bis,

  Le jur ad mal e la nuit pis.

  She was locked in a grey marble tower, where the days were bad and the nights worse.

  Marie de France,

  ‘Guigemar’ (c.11th century)

  My life is dreary,

  He cometh not.

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson,

  ‘Mariana’ (1830)

  The Séjour

  Iris is lying on the floor of Silas’s cellar, and he reaches out to her. She is pale, white, her lips parted like a wound. He edges down her high-necked dress. There it is, just as he has seen it all those times. At the Great Exhibition, in the painting at the Royal Academy, in the streets when her shawl fluttered loose. A twist of skin over bone. The texture is pleasing, like the knotted wood of a hand-worn banister. He smiles: he has done it. Everyone who laughed at him, who mocked him – his mother, the boys in the pottery yard, Gideon – they would not have achieved what he has. To have her in his museum, here on a séjour.

  She appeared in the alleyway with the daylight streaming behind her, and she ran right past him. Of course, it was difficult to bring the bone against her head, but he always knew it would be, and where would the satisfaction lie if it were easy? It was like making a plate: if it didn’t need two firings and the throwers and the turners and the glazers, then where was the joy in turning over the smooth porcelain?

  He timed it perfectly. She staggered a little and moaned, but he had the chloroform-soaked cloth and he clamped it to her face. She was so stunned that she barely struggled; she flailed, groaned, but passed into sleep so easily and so pliantly that he was sure she wanted it. His letter was in her fist, and it relieved him. That was the greatest risk he took: that she’d leave it behind and Louis would know where to look for her.

  He stares at her again, and he feels a sudden sadness. He does not understand it. It is a bitter taste that lurks at the back of his throat, and no amount of swallowing will rid him of it. He sighs, and then lifts her on to the chair. He wraps her legs and wrists tightly with strong bandages, knots the fabric more times than he needs, and then he sits back.

  He will leave her to adjust to the situation on her own. Later, he will bring her food and they will talk. They will begin to learn one another’s habits and stories. When he trusts he
r more, he will untie her hands and they will dine together. She will tell him about her life in the doll shop, and they will laugh over her awful tales about Louis. (‘That swine – I know it is undainty to use such language but I pray heaven will forgive me! Thank goodness you have freed me from his clutches.’)

  He smiles, his black mood soon forgotten. And by the time he is in the shop, his Lepidoptera cabinet pulled over the trapdoor, he is laughing, a loud, hammering guffaw that he feels could propel him anywhere. He can do anything, anything he wants, and he tears up to his chamber and back down to the shop with the energy and mindless glee of a Bedlamite.

  Quiet

  When Iris opens her eyes, it makes no difference. She is in a coal blackness that she has never seen before, a silence she has never heard. It is a darkness that admits no moonlight, no faint yellow from a gaslight across the street. It is a quiet that does not carry the lilt of a drunk, the distant mew of a baby or whinny of a horse. It is thick, syrupy and heavy, like being bundled into a roll of dark velvet.

  When she commands her hands to her face, she finds that they are bound tight. She wills her fists harder, but they do not shift at all; and the bindings chafe her wrists. Her legs, too, are stiff and secured, her feet swollen from where the blood has pooled. She is giddy. Her head hurts.

  She tries to moan, but there is something covering her mouth and the sound is muffled, her breath ricocheting warm against her cheek. She gasps, but the cloth sticks to her lips. She spits, writhes.

  She feels a creeping sense of panic that winds her. Where is she? What has happened? For a joyful second, she attempts to square it away: it is Louis who has done this for a prank – but she knows it isn’t, and she feels queasy, flattened, beaten by waves of fear.

  She is barely conscious of what she does, just of sudden surges of pain: her feet, which she bangs against the floor, her fingers, which she writhes and twists. She rocks the chair until it tips over. She hits the ground sideways, and pain sings through her ribs and hips. Her arm is trapped under her, her elbow digs into her stomach. Her face is packed tight against the earth, and the back of her throat tastes musty, of the tannin of wine. The more she squirms and knocks against her confines, the greater her terror.

  Nggggghhhh, she tries, choking on the soft wad of cotton. Nggggghhhh.

  She can’t breathe – she gasps for air, but each lungful feels like it reaches only the front of her teeth. Nothing. The dull pulse of her breathing intensifies, her limbs as chilled and stiff as china. She retreats into the sheer giddying physicality of fear. It makes her bowels ache with the need to release them.

  The shackles bite; and then she understands.

  Silas.

  The bindings searing her flesh are his fingers on her wrist. That grip – how she fought against it! The earth is his clasp, his damp smell. The gag is his mouth on hers, as limp and cold as an icy flannel. He lured her here with the letter, and she danced for it, like a dog drawn by a lump of rotten meat.

  Her thoughts turn monstrous, and she tries to rein them in. Silas’s hands on her, air choked out. What will he do when he comes for her? Or will he just leave her to die, a rat ensnared in an upturned pail?

  She is alive. She is breathing, steadier now. She thinks of her fingers, spread against the wallpaper, the blue veins ferrying blood; she dredges comfort from the knock of her heartbeat.

  But all the while she shakes.

  Caramel Truffles

  Silas hurries through the streets, a green paper bag in his hands. He knows that he is being irrational, that the butterfly cabinet is heavy and there is no way she could have escaped the restraints, but he worries that his jewel will find a way of slipping between his fingers. He will come in the door, hear silence, and it will have been nothing but a dream. He will be alone once more. The solitude is a lash. He has always pretended that he enjoys it: he has no choice in it, so why rue what has come to pass? But the loneliness of his shop, the cool expanse of bedclothes next to him, the only conversations his own mutterings and the knocking of his thoughts – he has felt hollowed out.

  And now he has his magnificent creature. When she sees he has brought her favourite sweets, from her favourite vendor, any distress will fall away. How can it not? She is a lady, schooled in gratitude.

  He opens the door and listens. If he cranes his ear to the floor, he can hear a faint noise, a straining, but it could be a cat or a child in a nearby building.

  He pushes away the Lepidoptera cabinet, lifts the trapdoor, and the whimpering intensifies. He considers shushing her, reassuring her that he is her saviour, her comforter. He does not pause to examine how he sees her and himself – is she his prisoner, his guest, his maiden or his specimen? And is he in turn captor, host, rescuer or collector? Really, the only thing which really matters is that she is here, with him.

  He holds the oil lamp in his hand, and the paper bag in his teeth as he descends, and when he reaches the bottom step of the ladder, he turns and sees that she has knocked the chair on to the floor. Her eyes are wild, the whites threaded with red.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he says, but she cowers when he approaches. He sets her upright. ‘I have a gift for you.’

  She stares at him, and he fiddles with his sleeve. The look of fear on her face! He cannot understand it. There is nothing extraordinary in what he has done. It has happened to thousands, to millions of women across the stretch of time. She herself appeared in a painting of one such lady.

  He whisks the green bag from behind him, and that glare is as sharp as a blade. ‘Toffee dipped in chocolate,’ he says, but her expression does not change. He tries another tactic. ‘If you are good, I’ll remove your bindings.’

  He coughs. He is not used to this power. It is not unpleasant, but it leaves him uncertain what to do with his hands.

  He unties her gag. She works her jaw, and does not say anything. She does not scream.

  ‘I can feed you the chocolates,’ he says, but he wishes that he did not have to suggest it. It is uncouth to be fed food like this, as if she were a baby, or a dog.

  ‘Let me go,’ she says, and her voice is so surprising, so pleading, that he almost drops the bag. ‘Please – let me go. I won’t tell anyone about you – I won’t say anything – but I beg you, please, let me go.’

  ‘They’re from your favourite vendor,’ he says, trying to change the subject and hoping that she will not notice.

  ‘What do you want from me? If it’s money, Louis will pay whatever you ask. You must let me go.’

  ‘Toffee centres,’ he says, holding one out. ‘A penny for a dozen of them.’

  ‘I don’t care about the chocolates!’ she shouts, and then her eyes do that wild dance again. ‘Please, let me go.’

  ‘I only want to be your friend.’

  ‘And then you’ll release me?’ She seizes on this as a hound would fall on a dropped steak. She gabbles. ‘Of course I’m your friend – just please, let me go and I’ll show you.’

  ‘I need you to prove your friendship by writing a letter.’

  ‘A letter?’

  ‘Telling that –’ he levels his voice – ‘man you mentioned, that you are safe and not to worry.’

  ‘But I’m not!’

  ‘But you are,’ he says, with equal conviction. ‘You are safe with me.’

  She starts to rock on the chair again, back and forth, back and forth. ‘I don’t know what you want,’ she says. ‘I’ll be your friend – I’ll do anything – just—’

  ‘I want you to write the letter,’ he insists, and then as his tone sounds unnatural and too high, he tries to say it in a more commanding way, ‘You will write the letter.’

  But she shakes her head. ‘Please let me go,’ she repeats. ‘I’ll do anything.’

  He feels a rush of distaste. ‘I told you. I told you I would when I know you’re my friend.’

  ‘I am – I am – just tell me what I need to do to prove it.’

  ‘I brought you your chocolates,’
he says, sickening at her repeated laments, and he holds out a truffle on a flattened palm as he would to a horse.

  She rears her head and bites his finger with a strength and a sharpness that he could never have expected. He wrenches his fist free, knocking her teeth at the same time. He nurses the digit. She might have broken the bone.

  What follows is worse. Her screams fill the cellar, a piercing baying that echoes back and round, and he wants to clamp his hands over his ears, to hit her hard against the skull. It is not a faint wail, like he imagined coming from her lips, but full and throaty and bestial, punctured only by strained gasps for more air.

  ‘Stop it!’ he says, scrambling for the bottle in his pocket, and he pours the contents on to the rag, and she screams and screams. It feels like hours until it takes effect. She flounders and bucks until all she can do is snuffle until – finally – silence, and she slumps forward.

  Collarbone

  Silas’s eyes glow yellow in the reflection of the lamp.

  What did you do to me? she wants to ask, but behind the gag, she can barely make a sound. She does not understand it, but the handkerchief seems to send her into a thick sleep, impossible to resist, as if he is some kind of magician. What could he do to her when she can’t fight or scream?

  ‘If you won’t behave, then I won’t let you speak.’

  No speaking, no walking, no eating except from his hand – and worse, her bladder is full. She fights against it, longing to try and break free. She must master herself, not let the fringes of terror descend. Despite everything, she feels a twinge at her lack of composure, at the rawness of her screams, at the way she challenged him. She has always been taught to button her passions, not to shout, to respect the opinions of men. Her emotions have always simmered more than they should, and now they boil over. She could suffocate in her anger.