The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  ‘Disappearing is in her character, after all,’ he begins.

  ‘What do you know of her character?’ Louis snaps.

  ‘She didn’t tell you?’

  ‘Didn’t tell me what?’ Louis steps forward, and Rose continues her glare, her eye as piercing as a carriage lamp.

  ‘A lady’s business – well,’ Silas says, with the same teasing tone as if he were withholding a secret. The thrust of his heart will give him no rest. ‘Well – it would be indelicate.’

  ‘How dare you,’ Louis says, but he lets Silas speak.

  ‘I’m not quite sure how to say this – but, well –’ Silas bites down on his lip – ‘we were – romantically involved. Venereally involved.’

  ‘You were not—’ Louis says.

  ‘Liar!’ Rose says. ‘I’d know.’

  ‘Oh, Rose. She carried on under your nose.’

  ‘You’re a villain – a monster—’

  Silas feels his control ebbing. ‘When she worked at Mrs Salter’s – didn’t I come to the shop to find her?’ He marvels for a second over his own memory. Sometimes it has the haze of a pea-souper, other times it is pin-sharp, ‘You remember that?’

  ‘When was this?’ Louis demands, turning to Rose. ‘What does he mean?’

  ‘I – I was angry at her. As if my sister could associate with someone as foul, as rotten as him.’

  Silas’s fingers close over the handle of the blade. But he steadies his gaze on a hare floating in a jar, and takes a breath.

  ‘It is true we were not involved long – I cared for her – she invited me to the Royal Academy private view, said her portrait was hung there – and what’s this nonsense about me seizing her, attacking her?’

  ‘You grabbed her wrist,’ Louis says. ‘And wouldn’t let go.’

  Silas scoffs. ‘I did no such thing. She invited me, we conversed civilly – unless this was a story she concocted to gain your pity, your attention—’

  ‘Liar,’ Louis says, but his voice falters. ‘I don’t believe you – that Iris would lie.’

  ‘It was vexing.’

  ‘What have you done to her?’ Louis demands again.

  He reaches into his pocket – how long until Iris wakes? They must be gone.

  ‘Nothing – truly – I’ve done nothing at all. She has a habit – a habit of disappearing. I’m sure you didn’t quarrel, but well – if you did. She left her sister easily enough, didn’t she?’

  ‘That was different,’ Rose attempts, but he speaks over her.

  ‘And she discarded me as carelessly as an apple core. See for yourself.’

  He takes the letter from his pocket, torn off where it began ‘To Guigemar’. Silas could recite it by heart.

  ‘Our love affair has soured. I have little to say except farewell. You are not to worry about me. I ask only that you do not try to find me or correspond with me. Yours, Iris.’

  Louis snatches it and Rose cranes over his shoulder.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ Louis demands.

  ‘She sent it to me – isn’t it in her hand?’

  And Louis covers his face. ‘By God, I can’t believe it.’

  ‘It isn’t true,’ Rose says. ‘I don’t know what trickery he used to get this.’

  ‘I – really don’t believe it,’ Louis says, but he sounds like a deflated bellows. ‘I won’t let her go, damn it! I won’t give up.’

  ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I have business to attend to.’

  Louis lunges forward, his fist raised, but Rose stops him, a gentle hand which has the same effect as if he were checked by a prizefighter. He sags, a slow emptying of air, and allows Rose to lead him from the shop. ‘This isn’t the end – you haven’t heard the last of it,’ he says, but his words have lost their bite.

  Silas slams the door shut.

  There is a sudden hammering.

  ‘I don’t believe you – not a jot,’ Louis shouts. ‘I’ll get to the bottom of it – if you’ve hurt her, you’ll be sorry – I love her . . . and Silas realizes that the man is sobbing.

  ‘Come. There’s nothing to be gained,’ Rose says, and the door judders with a final kick.

  There is a moment of sweet silence before Iris’s mewls begin again.

  Pigeon

  When Iris and Rose were children, a bird seller used to call out his wares on the pavement outside their house. He wore a buff waistcoat and a cocked hat, and he wielded wooden cages containing pigeons and greenfinches, their feathers painted in the colours of exotic birds.

  ‘Canaries a bob, parrots two bob,’ he cried, and Iris lingered there each morning, transfixed by the gummed wings of the creatures, their listless squawks, the way they would stand poised as if to fly, but only thump the edges of the cage.

  She could not bear to see the birds in their confinement, and she and Rose told him so, her sister with wide-eyed supplication, Iris by stamping her feet and demanding he release them. He wafted the twins away, cuffed Iris about the head, and said she’d make a poor hawker if she weren’t willing to do brown and think up such dodges.

  ‘One as sweet as a strawberry, and the other a sour redcurrant,’ he said of them.

  ‘You shouldn’t like it if it was you stuck in that cage,’ Iris spat back.

  ‘Oh, please let them go,’ Rose begged.

  Every time they passed him, Iris’s anger grew, until it was as hot as a fire iron. One day, she was in disgrace for some reason – it could have been dirtying her pinny, or sitting tight-lipped at dinner and refusing to eat a dish of brown-boiled vegetables, or laughing in church, or singeing her eyebrows on a candle to see what happened – and she whispered to Rose to divert him.

  ‘What are you intending?’ she tried, looking at Iris fearfully.

  ‘Just – distract him.’

  As Rose gabbled about pigeons and asked whether humans could learn to fly, and the man chortled and said, ‘Mankind fly? We’ll sooner stroll on the moon,’ Iris grabbed one of the cages. She tried to undo the latch, but it was held fast. The birdman was still prattling, so she snapped three of the wooden bars, which were little wider than matches. ‘Fly,’ she urged the painted pigeon, but it only stared at her, perplexed, and coo-cooed.

  ‘Go,’ she pleaded, giving the cage a shake, but the bird would not move.

  The seller noticed Iris, and moved to grab her just as the creature hopped free.

  She imagined it would soar into the sky, a brightly coloured pigeon like a miniature peacock. She pictured it settling among the dull greys of its species, the rapture with which it would be greeted. It hadn’t occurred to her that the paint glued its feathers together, preventing it from spreading its wings. It waddled into the street, its neck jerking with each step.

  ‘No,’ she cried, but it was too late – it was minced under the wheel of a dog cart.

  She hated herself then. She’d meant so well. Rose wept as the birdman struck Iris with the leather of his shoe, and he chased her parents for two shillings too.

  Iris doesn’t know what prompted her to think of this. Other thoughts and imaginings cram into her mind.

  Louis, the beat of his body against hers as they lay on the rooftop together, her skirts around her waist, his trousers bunched at his knees. There in broad daylight, tupping under the sky. Unabashed, brazen. I love you I love you I love you whispered into the conch of her ear.

  He has not come. There has been no rescue, no Louis racing down the ladder and undoing her restraints. She is helpless, ignorant of any flurry that could be going on around her, the release which could be mere minutes away.

  My life is dreary. He cometh not.

  She imagines him finding her in this room. Dirty, stinking, feverish and soiled, the real face of imprisonment: little more than a pig in a trough – not the idealized face in his painting, pale and clean, turned towards the light.

  She longs for the scrape of the trapdoor, but it does not come. She hears Silas overhead, pacing up and down, and his detachedness terrifies her. S
he needs him to be frenzied and affectionate, to have him reassure her that he does not want to hurt her, that he only wants to be her friend.

  Visit me, she wills him, talk to me. Give me food.

  What she means is, Do not leave me here to die.

  Terror claws at her.

  The bird.

  Its gummed feathers.

  Now it is her in the cage, and there is no child to snap the wooden bars.

  It is then that a thought occurs to her. A distant idea.

  The Royal Academy

  Silas wakes after noon. A newspaper is on the bed. If Iris hadn’t forged that false Guigemar on the letter, he wouldn’t have noticed the wording in the bottom left-hand corner. It has been a mere day since Louis visited, and he has wasted no time in placing an advertisement. Perhaps Silas’s insinuations provoked him to it.

  Silas picks up the broadsheet, the print contorting in his grasp. He stumbled over the words first of all, but now he could recite them with his eyes shut.

  My Queen,

  I will not cease looking for you; I love you and I know you love me in return, that our quarrel was little more than a tiff. I will find you, and I will marry you, if you will accept such a shabby prospect – please, write to me – I cannot do without you.

  Your Guigemar

  It is so infernally sentimental. So unoriginal, so grotesque – Louis has no concept of love, of the patience required, the planning, the care – Silas stands, and stares at the costumed mice on the shelf. He feels a dryness in his mouth, a deep pain as if he has been split open like kindling.

  He cannot blink away his recollections any longer. There is the pottery mouse. Small, snuff-coloured and holding a plate.

  The beady face was Flick’s, clay-dusted, dented by her father’s fist. She, not smiling, but snarling, afraid, underneath him. Liar, she said, Liar, and she kicked at his prized specimen in her haste to escape. It was the ram with its curling horns – he can remember it vividly – and she split it in two, and that was what really pushed him into the roiling pitch of heat and anger and lashing fists. Before he knew what was happening, she was below him, his hands on her neck, her face purpling and swelling and that nought of her lips – he had done it. He joined in the hunt for her, visiting her body twice, tracing his fingers over her skin as it bruised and decayed. He wanted to explore the pillars of her bones, but the search frightened him, and he buried her one night in the woodland, watched only by the sickle of the moon and a fox which ran from him. The leaves of the trees seemed to curl away in horror, the owls hooting the secret of it into the air, beetles scuttling to unseen places.

  He puts down the Flick mouse. Next to it sits the only male mouse, dressed in the habiliment of a medical student: tiny glazed cap, flannel jacket and apron. The creature’s pink paw clutches a needle for a scalpel.

  It is Gideon.

  It was a blustery night, speckled with rain, and Gideon was so late leaving the university that Silas wondered if he had missed him. He waited, a blade in his hand and resentment thick in his heart.

  He runs his finger across the mice and sucks on his teeth. He recalls Iris as the Queen in the painting, regal.

  He cleans himself for the first time in weeks, scrubbing at his armpits and genitals with a cloth, teasing away the human smells with his clean scent. When he is dressed, he takes a scalpel from the dresser drawer, the sharpest one which he uses for the initial incision in his creatures, and he leaves his house.

  He turns into the din of the Strand. An omnibus is disgorging black-whiskered lackeys and working women, a herd of bobbing mushrooms with their broad-tipped bonnets. The masses part before him. All his life, he has been mocked and slighted and it has made him miserable and so, so alone.

  He marches across Trafalgar Square, and he does not even flinch when he knocks into a hot-potato seller whose orange coals spark and hiss on to the pavement.

  There is a man at the entrance of the Royal Academy and Silas will not be stopped. He does not cringe at the sight of two companions, taking the steps arm in arm, does not turn away when he sees a girl whisper in a man’s ear. The knife is in his pocket – he feels its promise – and he cuts a straight course through the maze of grand, painting-papered rooms to the West Room.

  There she is.

  She was so sweet then, so clean, so pure. When he was last here at the exhibition preview, he was so hopeful. He felt it rising, a hot-air balloon of desire and certainty that she would love him. He thought he would always be happy if he could see her each day, hold her collarbone, speak with her. He pictured her face turned to his, joyful at her captivity, just like in the painting. He would trust her enough to let her roam the cellar, and he would heap food at her feet: silver goblets filled with wine, fresh loaves, porcelain bowls crammed with strawberries and figs, and she would look always dainty, pristine, her hair falling down her back, her skin soft and pure, her skirts smoothed.

  But the small, perfect world he was promised is unravelling by the day. She has revealed herself to be a soiled beast, her skin rubbed pink and raw from her gag. Her language, foul and base; her temper, intolerable. What’s more, the constable or Louis could return. They could be at his shop now, heeding her cries, lifting the butterfly cabinet and cutting her free. He rubs his chin.

  He peers closer at the Queen’s face, sees a hint of a brush-stroke on her cheek, the daub of light in her eye, the inside of her mouth a lurid, unnatural green. Close up, the painting reveals itself as nothing more than a feint. It is a trick, just like that wench’s deceitful red hair. He cannot endure falseness; it is the worst thing of all.

  His hand is shaking as he draws out the knife. He waits for the crowds to thin, for a particularly raucous conversation to reach its pitch in the corner. He presses the blade into the edge of the canvas. It is as hard as wood, but the scalpel is sharp, and it punctures the canvas with a snap. The painting is not large; it is the length of his arm.

  In a smooth, tugging motion, he pulls the knife across it. The sound is throaty. The paint chips, the threads fray. The Queen is severed at the waist, the window cut in two. He smiles, tucks away the blade, and he enjoys the clip of his footsteps across the parquet, down the steps, across the courtyard, and into the clamour of the street.

  Water

  Iris’s legs are as useless as if Silas had clipped her knee tendons. She imagines a pair of glinting surgical scissors in his hand. Snip, snip.

  The moment she hears him leave, she tries to inch herself on to her toes, a hunchback pushed forward by the chair. But she cries out at the pain of it – the muscles in her legs are so stiff and wasted – and rocks backwards again.

  She pants into her gag, and her breath is so foul, so putrid, the skin around her cheek so sore, that it gives her strength to try again. She must escape; she must breathe fresh air, smell something other than her waste, see something other than this black void – and in her second attempt she manages to shuffle the chair to the wall. She rests her forehead against the cold, damp stone, bites hard on her lip at the cramping of her muscles.

  I am alive, she thinks.

  At first, she is anxious not to maim herself as she rocks the armrest into the wall. A scrape of wood on stone, a stuttering of two textures colliding. She catches her forearm, gasps, feels the warm running of blood. She does not care. She takes a perverse joy from this: she can endure anything.

  Pain stabs at her legs, her arms, her head with its slow pulsing headache, but she hurls herself at the wall again and again and again. Sometimes she is sure she hears a slight splintering, but when she tries to rotate her wrist, the wood does not give. She just needs one arm free, and then she can untie herself. Just one arm . . .

  Sometimes she closes her eyes and tells herself it is hopeless, and she feels herself tugged as if by an invisible current, weighed down by the pitifulness of her situation. She will never escape him, never be free. She coughs until her throat is raw. The world swims with giddiness, and she feels so sick, so feverish, that
she is tempted to fall asleep.

  But she will fight it. She will. She must.

  Her arm is cut, her legs burn, and she counts the number of times she tips herself at the wall. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen.

  She imagines that her limbs are nothing but china, her soiled, torn dress the smart habiliment of a porcelain doll. She wears stiff satin with a frothy lace trim, and her feet are black with tiny painted buttons. The pain is nothing more than the accidental pricks of Rose’s needle as she stitches the skirt closed over her cloth body.

  ‘Dead or alive?’ she asks Rose, who conceals a smile.

  ‘Sister, must you always play this game?’

  ‘Her eyes are a little blurred. I think—’

  Dead or alive – is she—

  She roars, and the strength in her legs surprises her as she throws herself at the wall one final time and then – at last – the most glorious sound. The wood snaps.

  She feels it at once: the sudden release of the binding. Pain crackles through her wrist, up her arm, and for a moment the work and the agony flatten her. But there is a solace in carrying on beyond the limit of what she thought she could bear. She works her fingers into the other three knots, stretches her wrists, her ankles. Soon she will try and stand.

  She hears Silas pacing. The ceiling creaks. His footsteps pause above the trapdoor.

  If he comes down, he will see the broken chair arm, the restraints lying at her feet, and she has no plan prepared. She is weak, helpless. He will tie her up again, tighter, in a different way to prevent her from smashing herself free once more, and she will never escape.

  She hears the object being pulled back and she could scream and curse and rail. The door opens, and the cellar walls are lit, as yellow as gangrene. Her arm is scratched, bloody, her clothes soiled and stained. She hears the clank of the lamp, the scratch of his boot, and he will be here soon—