But Rose will find her lodgings empty tomorrow, and Louis will return from Edinburgh soon. She told him about Silas seizing hold of her – and won’t he realize that their argument was just a tiff? He will come here and rescue her. He will.
She stares at the walls of the cellar. They are low and damp, and small crystals have formed in places. The light quivers and dips, and Silas’s gaze is searing. He does not stop looking, and she thinks it will shrivel and wither her, burn her to a crisp.
I must gaze on this for days until I’ve learned it by rote.
She is merely modelling; the ache is from sitting still, holding a pose. The eye watching her is that of an artist – of Louis, his look one of desire and love. Two dark pools she could drown in; a colour she could never mix. And soon he will tell her she can move—
She glances, minnow-fast, at Silas, and registers the hunger in his gaze, his leer a drop of black paint spreading through water, infecting her and everything with it. She tries to recall Louis, tapping his brush against the easel, learning her by heart. My Queen . . .
A thought occurs to her, and she follows Silas’s eyeline. He does not stare at her face or her breasts, but at her neck, at her collarbone which – she realizes now – is exposed, the dress cut open.
Iris bucks in the chair. Everything begins to align: why he singled her out when she has ignored every attempt he has made to engage her. She thinks of that butterfly wing trapped under glass – and the other thing Silas had with him. The skeleton and a pelt of a puppy, he said. And Louis said that he made the creatures for their paintings. What is he – a collector? A morbid collector – an assembler of bones, of dead things – and her cry ricochets off the walls. Her bladder, held tight until now, loosens. She feels the warm liquid pool and drip off the chair.
Blackberrying
Silas is in his shop, a newspaper in hand. He is perched on the edge of a barrel. Ten crows float in it, unseen behind the rusted tin. They used to sit in glass bottles in his cellar, but he decanted them when he moved all of his specimens into the shop. They are little more than a headstone to his past desire.
His room is higgledy-piggledy, objects heaped on objects. Gone is the quiet order, the clean dressers and the neatly labelled jars. Instead, the shop reflects the rupture of his mind. There is dust everywhere – he sneezes – and there is a stink, too. One of the flasks has cracked, and the fluid has leaked on to the floor, leaving the dove hearts to rot. He runs his hand over the jag of glass, over the edge of an object he can no longer identify – a bone of some description? – and finds his fingers furred with grime.
He hears a faint noise from downstairs, and he thinks of that smell, the ammoniac reek of urine. It horrified him. His beautiful, his composed, his ladylike Queen, gibbering and biting like a caged beast, and then wetting herself over the floor. He turned and left, scrambled up the rungs, willing himself away from her. He imagines her bladder within her, wet and pink like the inside of a peach, and then apart from her, dried out and white like a crisp pig’s ear.
He scans the newspaper, wishing he could read faster. He can only relax when he reaches the frivolous soap and perfume advertisements: there is nothing on Iris’s disappearance.
He needs to escape this place and its clutter and disarray, and he puts on his hat. He has to get away from her, if only for a short while. The cellar never felt small with his silent bottled companions, but she seems to grow monstrously, filling the room with her squawking and the smell of her waste. At least she is sitting and he doesn’t have to contend with her height too. A doubt occurs to him for the first time: she is different from how he thought her. And might that mean that she behaves differently too – that she fails to love him, that she continues as she is now, obstinate and ill-mannered?
He sets off on his walk. It is mid-morning, and the omnibuses rattle with workers. He chides himself: she has been there perhaps twelve, fourteen hours and he is worrying over her behaviour. Of course she is confused, of course she will take a little time to adjust. He just needs to be patient, forgiving of her foibles. And the night did pass quickly, with somebody at his side.
He watches Rose in the doll shop, for no reason except to settle his mind, and then follows her when she takes a stroll at noon. She walks to Iris’s lodgings. The matron opens the door. He can imagine their conversation, the matron stating that Iris did not return the evening before; he takes in the crease of Rose’s ruined brow, the worry that shows itself in gestures which are too abrupt. Rose knocks on Louis’s door, hammers it, but there is no answer, and she steps back into the street. Silas wonders how much Iris might have told Rose about him, and regrets again seizing her wrist at the Royal Academy. He feels nauseous at his lack of control, his lack of knowledge. She must write him the letter – she must.
He leaves Rose, and wanders through the winding alleys towards Hyde Park. He has a blister and he limps; he flags an omnibus. He tries to remember how Flick smelled. Clean, surely, not like Iris. He remembers the white purity of her, but there is a piece missing between her cramming blackberries into her mouth and then lying still and cold in the meadow. He has always had these flashes, but he has shut them away, lidded the jar precisely and firmly. It was her father who did off with her, and Silas found the body. Or the body was merely his own imagining, a vivid dream, and she escaped the factory and her father’s beatings to London.
He has worn other memories of those days as smooth as sanded porcelain. Flick’s expression as he handed her the hothouse fruits and told her that she could find more if she followed him. He didn’t have a plan then, not really. He was young and inexpert, and he just wanted to spend the evening with her, for her to love him.
She didn’t walk with him. She would never have done so, would never have endured the taunts of the other children for his sake. He could see the fresh budding of her breasts through her shift, and he wondered if they looked like the dugs of a pregnant hound, or prettier, like a kitten’s wet nose. Then she hung back from the others, and followed him deeper into the countryside where the brambles were thickest.
‘Is this it?’ she said, looking at the scraggy bush. The blackberries gleamed like rubies, but she glanced around her, her face wrinkling. ‘I thought you said there was apples and plums and them peaches, not just blackberries – there’s a scrub of these near my cottage, if I wanted ’em.’
Silas fidgeted. ‘I thought—’
‘Liar,’ she said. ‘You buyed them other fruits from the market.’
‘I didn’t,’ he insisted, but he found himself growing angry. He’d made all of this effort! He’d tried so hard, and spent so much money.
‘Where d’you nick the tin from for it?’
‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t thieve. I only wanted to show you—’
‘I should tell your mam,’ she said, and she started stuffing the blackberries into her mouth, greedy, her hands thrusting like the hammers and anvils in the factory. ‘Why d’you look like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like –’ She pulled a face like she was a halfwit, and he hated her. ‘Go home.’
‘But this is my place,’ he said. ‘I took you here. I want to show you my collection. I saved money for us – we can go to London.’
‘Scram,’ she said, as if she were wafting away a cat, and then she hurled a blackberry at him. She laughed as it burst against his shirt, and then she threw another, and he took hold of her hand.
‘Let go,’ she said, but he held on harder.
‘I want to show you my things.’ He pulled her to a shaded copse where he had laid out his treasures – the ram and the field mouse and the fox skulls, all in a tidy row – but he couldn’t fathom why she didn’t want to see them. She was trying to jerk free of his grip and scratch him, and he had to hit her across the cheek to calm her down. She kicked the ram specimen as she fought, splitting the skull in two.
And then she was lying on the meadow, her face bruised with berry juice.
He
feels a rush of anger, even now, at the cruelty of her words, her mockery. Didn’t they race through the countryside together, didn’t the sun light on her hair?
No.
He will not think of it. Instead, he stares at the grand building in front of him – the Crystal Palace, with his puppies inside. All those brats from the factory who mocked him with their sneering clay-dusted faces, will likely be dead of potter’s rot by now. Gideon, too, has failed to achieve renown, and Silas has scanned The Lancet anxiously for years. Perhaps he is dead too, of a disease contracted from a workhouse hospital.
The Great Exhibition glitters in the sun, its tiers and domed roof looking like the elaborate cakes he has seen in the confectionery shops either side of the doll emporium. Its smooth geometry pleases him.
The crowds are vast, shifting, and Silas elbows between winding lizards of schoolchildren and travellers – a woman has walked from Cornwall, she says loudly to anyone who will listen – and through the turnstiles, showing his season ticket. He takes his time today, loitering over the great black cogs of industrial machines – engines, printing presses, boilers – the press is clanging and whirring, steam puffing, and the smell of coal thickens the air. Now that he isn’t worrying over whether Iris will appear, he finds he is calmer, more appreciative.
He wanders up and down the aisles, astonished by the variety. The museum seems to contain everything ever invented or built or formed – an expanding coffin, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, a vase made of mutton fat, velocipedes and carriages. He pauses at the pieces which interest him most. The German Customs Union has submitted a collection of taxidermy frogs being shaved with bibs around their chins, and a litter of kittens sitting at a table drinking tea. He notes that the stitching is roughly done, and the small limbs protrude at unnatural angles.
He saves his own exhibit until the end, a boiled sweet in his sleeve that will taste even more delicious from the anticipation of waiting. The conjoined puppies – one pair stuffed, the other its skeleton articulated – are there on their dual mountings, his name underneath them.
‘Silas Reed.’
That is him, and this is his work.
If only Iris had come to him. If only she had come when he invited her to his shop, when he asked her to the Exhibition. Things could have been so different. If only Flick hadn’t teased him but had walked next to him and taken his hand in hers. He merely wanted to be their friend. And really, they only have themselves to blame.
Robe
Iris’s tears dampen the gag. Her cheek pricks from the salt, and her thighs itch and sting. She has soiled herself too – she could not help it, and when she moves, she feels it slide against her buttocks. She is hungry and thirsty, but the idea of eating out of Silas’s hand is too much to bear. Her situation is so desolate, so utterly pitiful, that she wonders if she will ever escape this cavern.
‘Write me a letter,’ he says, again and again. ‘That’s all I want. Just a letter.’
He uses it as currency, a shilling traded for a spinning top, a guinea for a china doll.
If she writes him this letter, he’ll untie her hands and let her eat unaided.
If she writes him this letter, he’ll let her roam the cellar without restraints.
If she writes him this letter, he’ll let her into the shop.
If she writes him this letter, he’ll – he’ll – he’ll – and still she stays tight-lipped, shakes her head.
Because she knows it is all lies. She pins so many hopes on Louis that it aches. If she loses this chance, she has nothing.
She digs her fingers into her palms. Stop crying, she tells herself. Stop it. She will not sit here weeping. She will do all she can to survive, even if it means eating and drinking from his hands like a beast. She will keep herself alive.
She distracts herself by thinking of Louis’s painting and the careful knot in the Queen’s robe, the exactitude of the brush-strokes. Just a little patch at a time, a touch more; green-blue shadow on a wet white ground, all of these dabs creating the illusion of a real person, a real scene, when actually it was nothing but pigment and sable. The tie which only Guigemar could unbind. She tries to remember the vivid colours. Here it is all brown, black, yellow, as if emerald and crimson and ultramarine exist only in her imagination.
At least Silas left the lamp, and she can see how the cloth of her restraints falls. She examines the chair: her calves, tied to the chair legs above the cross-bar. The two scrolled arms, where she is fastened just below the elbow. The way the wood tapers, thinning out where it meets the seat.
She contorts her body, wriggling the binding down to the skinnier part of the chair arm. It takes hours. In minuscule increments, the fabric starts to loosen, and she bends her hand back on itself, prising the knot between her fingers. If they can grip a pencil and move it across the page, surely they have the power to unfasten her? And right enough, the restraint starts to slip, a little at a time, until she has teased her right wrist loose.
She will be free. She will not die here. She will hear again Louis’s voice, the pitch often tipping halfway to a joke: We are here to rescue you from King Mériaduc.
She flexes her fingers – her arm is patterned with the imprint of the bandages – and pulls off the gag. She runs her tongue over her lips. Her mouth tastes sour and dense. The air is fresher.
Untying her left hand is the work of a moment, and her legs swiftly follow. She tries to stand, but her limbs buckle underneath her. She is a jelly, prised from its mould before it is set. She stands more slowly, rotating her foot and then her leg. The pain is so acute it is difficult not to cry out.
She knows it is hopeless, but she climbs the ladder rungs and pushes against the door. She might as well be trying to knock over the Royal Academy.
Instead, she plots what she will do. She picks up the lamp. It is heavy, and she swings it experimentally, imagining it colliding with Silas’s head. It will stun him, and then she will escape. She rocks it too hard, and then curses when the sudden rush of air causes the wick to stammer and die.
She fumbles for the chair, repositions herself in it, and drapes the bindings over her arms and legs so that she still looks tied up. The lantern is in her right hand, on the side facing away from the ladder, so she hopes he will not notice it at first.
She hears the scraping of the weighted item which holds down the door, and her heart rackets. It is as if he knows, as if he has allotted exactly the right amount of time for her to break free. As if it is nothing more than a game.
His footsteps on the rungs reverberate around the little cell. Light filters down like a flash of sun between clouds. He does not speak, and he is carrying an object. A chair. He grips it awkwardly, and he even falls the last few steps, cursing under his breath.
In the moment before he steadies himself, she raises the lamp. He ducks, and it glances his ear, so she wields it again, and he is knocked sideways, and stumbles to the floor.
She throws herself at the ladder – the trapdoor is open – and her hands are slippery on the rungs. The metal is hard, cold, welcome, and she starts to pull herself over the edge, into a strange, untidy room, but there is something stopping her.
He has grasped hold of her foot. She kicks, flails, and she thinks, You will not be the master of me, you will not defeat me – and jerks her ankle free. She is half in the shop, just lifting her legs up, but the hand is on her ankle again, firmer this time, as tight as a manacle.
‘Help!’ she shouts. ‘Help! I’ve been attacked! Help! Help! He’ll kill me – he’ll—’
She loses her footing, and with a roar of anger, of utter desperation, she falls back into the cell.
This might be her only chance, and she must do it. She must escape. She moves to stand, ready to fight and claw and thrash – but he is above her, and the handkerchief is in his hand.
She feels a ringing in her ears – what did he hit her with? His fist? – and she is flat against the ground. The rag nears.
‘No,’ she begs.
‘Please don’t – I’ll sit down – I’ll be good – please—’
‘I don’t believe you,’ he says, and he grips her hair. The handkerchief is around her mouth, pushed hard against her nose. She tries to focus on staying awake. She holds her breath. She writhes, keeps her mind active, but the world shimmers before her, mirage-like.
It fades.
A Companion
He’ll kill me.
Silas watches her as she sleeps. How can she think that of him? It explains her erratic behaviour, and her fear, at least. He must make her understand that his intentions are nothing but honourable, that all he wants is to be her friend. How beautiful she is – the sockets of her closed eyes, that clavicle. He feels a pulling in his crotch. What a fine truncheon.
He remembers the girl in the rookery and her falseness, the hollow timbre of her voice, the dye of her hair. The smell of that fleapit – it was almost as bad as the stench of Iris soiling herself.
After returning from the Great Exhibition, he visited a carpenter to ask him to cut a hole in the seat of a chair. It was meant to be a gift. He imagined Iris’s joy at the surprise of it. But instead, when he carried it down to the cellar, she had beaten him: and how did she find a way to break free? He nurses his wounds – cranium, ulna and digit. What a vicious beast she can be; even her features look vaguely simian in this light.
She sits, lolling forward in her new chair, a tin bucket underneath her. He has lifted her petticoats, but he did not touch her, even though he longed to look. He loosened her bindings a little, just out of kindness: the flesh was mottled and slightly bruised, like the skin of a week-old corpse. He took his lavender oil and dabbed it around her temples and her skirts, and now he breathes it in. The smell of waste is muted by the scent. So sweet, and so pretty!
Her mouth stirs. A skein of dribble hangs from it. A choking sound, and her eyelids flicker. His prisoner, his pet awakes!
The Doll Factory Page 25