The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  She tries to shout at him, to swear, but she is so thirsty she cannot form the words. Her throat will not obey her. She barely recognizes the monstrous gargle which comes from within her.

  Do not come down, she urges him in her head. Do not—

  And then – she can hardly believe it – he closes the door, and his footsteps recede.

  When she pulls herself out of the chair, her legs falter. She remembers when she tried to move after posing with her feet tucked under her for an hour, and how Louis had laughed. She tilted as if drunk, and fell sideways on to the sofa. He holds her now, coaxing her upwards, propping her as she adds weight to her limbs, a touch at a time. Rose whispers encouragement. Try again, sister.

  Her only weapon is the chair-arm. She searches the floor for anything – even a mere shard of glass – but he has been too careful. She remembers then the bell which rang in the corner; could she prise the wire loose? She isn’t sure how it will help, but it might be something. She must try, at least.

  She runs her fingers along the stone roof of the cell, one row at a time. It is damp, slimy, and the crystals crumble in her hand.

  She lights on cool metal. The bell is domed with a little hammer beside it. Spider’s webs catch on her. She fumbles for the bell and teases it free, carefully so that it does not drop and make a noise. It is the hammer which is linked to the wire, but the cable is taut and will not give. She saws it back and forth, pulls at it with all her weight, then slips and falls. She tries once more. There is a distant thud, a crack, a hiss of unspooling metal, and Iris inches the cable through, bit by bit, flinching at every sound. There are no footsteps above, no shouts. He must be asleep or out.

  She wonders again what she will do with the wire, but it reassures her that she has something else if the chair-arm breaks. Could she tie him up? Garrotte him? This time, she will be unafraid of maiming him. When she swings the wood, she will put her weight behind it. She practises, whipping it through the air.

  All she needs is for Silas to appear.

  She waits and waits and waits.

  She sleeps in the one-armed chair, her eyelids sinking of their own accord. She tries to conserve her strength by sitting still, walking every so often in case her muscles seize, but she feels weaker by the minute, and the mistiness starts to return. Thirst. Hunger.

  She has never experienced thirst like this. It hollows her out, gnaws at her insides, makes her head feel swollen with the sharp pain of it. She dreams of water, of dipping her brush into a jar of murky liquid and then drinking it all down . . .

  She blinks, and tries to concentrate on her body. On her breath.

  She is alive.

  Why doesn’t he come?

  She licks moisture from the wall until her stomach convulses. There is nothing for her to vomit. She considers biting her arm and sucking the blood, but what good will that do, and surely that will only loosen her grip on the world even more?

  She is swimming in a clear lake, and she dives down, opens her mouth and lets the cool water flow in. She seizes hold of a stone, but it is the china head of a doll, stained by the paint water she knocked over it. When she looks again, it is the skull of a girl, her skull, and the lake bed is dense with them. Rows of dolls, rows of painted women, rows of skulls. Dead, dead, all dead.

  Where is he? How much longer until she has nothing left in her?

  She has fought all she can, and now she is gutted.

  Louis’s face looms out of the blackness, and she feels his breath on her cheek.

  ‘We should go inside,’ he says, nuzzling her earlobe.

  ‘Let’s stay here,’ she says, and he pours the sun-warmed port into her mouth until she splutters. It stains her dress, and he kisses her and kisses her, until she feels nothing.

  The darkness is so soft and so warm, a goose-down counterpane. She settles into it, into Louis, and she is with him at last.

  Needle

  Silas glues the tiny pieces of wood together. They are the same size as four matchsticks. He lifts the final edge – there – the outline of a golden square.

  He picks up the white mouse, dressed in a plain blue dress, neatly stitched. Like many of the surgeons whose conversations he has overheard, Silas is as comfortable with a needle as with a scalpel. He used to listen to them brag about their ability to darn socks, the sewing practice they undertook on their daughters’ doll’s clothes, their talk of the annual surgical embroidery prize.

  ‘Aren’t you a beauty, my Queen,’ he says to the rodent, stroking the soft fur of her head and securing her on a stand. He dangles a fly from the frame to represent the dove Iris grasped for in the painting, and props it in front of the mouse.

  He regards the finished piece. It isn’t perfect, but it will do. In the evening, he will carry it upstairs to join the other mice.

  He hasn’t heard Iris for over a day. There have been no whinnies, no poundings, nothing at all. The silence chills and comforts him in equal measure.

  And how still, how eerie it is without any noise, without anyone to talk to! In truth, it is a relief. No baying, none of the interminable screeching, none of her cunning facility with words that made him consider releasing her. No; it is better this way, even if he did not intend it. Soon, he will be able to move all his jars and specimens back down to the cellar.

  He dusts the bell jars, polishes the bones with oil and a cloth, rearranges the stuffed pelts. He picks up a snippet of The Lancet, reads about the way the clavicle knits to other bones, about its articulation with the manubrium of the sternum and the sternoclavicular joint. There is a knocking, and Silas calls, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Mabel,’ somebody replies. ‘About a butterfly brooch for my mistress.’

  He opens the door, and a servant stands before him.

  ‘Your bell, sir. It seems to be broken. And your sign says to knock and ring.’ He looks where she points: there is an empty socket in the wall and the ringer is upended in the dirt. He curses.

  ‘Can I come in, sir?’

  He smiles, assumes his customer mask. ‘I’ve been away, I’m afraid, and the shop is chaos. Chaos. But if you return in two days, everything will be quite as it was.’

  When she leaves, Silas inspects the bell. It must be this sudden heat, melting the fastenings. He will go to the cellar, see how he can fix it.

  He pushes back the Lepidoptera cabinet, shines his light down. Iris is slumped forward in the chair.

  He presses his handkerchief to his nose and descends the ladder one-handed. He tries not to inhale.

  At the base, he turns and she is there.

  Her skin is whiter than it ever was in life. Sweat has gathered on it, like the damp on pork rind. She tried, he knows that. She tried harder, kicked harder, than Bluebell, than Flick, than any of the others.

  He loves the fall of her hair. He pulls a strand of it through his hand. It is as soft as fur. Gold mixed with auburn mixed with brown. He tugs it. It is a little matted, but he will tease each knot free with a lover’s care.

  It reminds him of that first fox he found, its red pelt, the downy belly hairs as white as alumina. The powerful strength of the jawbone, putty-coloured, and its interlinked teeth. It was once so full of movement, and then its skeleton was a mere monument to its former self.

  It is then that the tears boil up in his throat, and he pours out all the emotion and worry and fear and love he has kept at bay over the last ten days. Ten days was all she stayed with him for! Ten days to trap this beautiful mouse, this sweetling. A new wave of sobs; they come from a deep well within him. For something this stunning not to exist any longer!

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, again and again.

  Her eyes are hidden by the fall of her hair and he covers his face and weeps.

  The Butterfly Cabinet

  When he pulls her hair, she imagines that he is merely tugging a doll’s curls, stitched from the shorn locks of a South German peasant. Her lips are carmine pigment. Her limbs are cold, fired porcelain. Her eyes are g
lossy green marbles. She is stiff on Mrs Salter’s shelf, a metal stand pinning her in place. His hands – his greasy hands – he is just a boisterous child, toying with her, and she will not flinch.

  He doesn’t seem to have noticed the missing chair-arm, the restraints draped loosely, the wire that hangs from her palm. His odour has changed, become chemical and clean. He smells of Mrs Salter’s medicine drawer with its crushed pills and lotions and syrups, all promising eternal youth and health. He smells of turpentine and freshly cleaned brushes.

  Her vision falters, and she knows her only chance is surprise. He must continue to believe she is dead. She is sure that he must hear the gasp of her heart, her shallow inhalations.

  When he starts to sob, a shred of pity only galvanizes her loathing. She despises him with a force that almost makes her cry out, but she must stay still. Queenie, do not move.

  I could be mistaken for a memento-mori daguerreotype. If my image were taken, I wouldn’t even blur.

  He crouches and covers his face with his hands.

  But the air feels mud-thick, and when she tries to lift her arm, it will not obey her. It hangs by her side, as if it belongs to somebody else, as dead as if it had been tucked underneath her for hours, slowly numbing. She must do it little by little – a slow building of colour – a twitch of her finger, and then the turn of her wrist.

  Louis sits at one side, her sister at the other. She imagines seeing them again outside their shimmering presence in the cellar walls, seeing them as they are. Seeing them truly. Her sister, the mistress of a shop, pencilling sales in her ledger, an apprentice at her side; Louis, painting next to her, the corners of his mouth twisting into an imagined joke, and the strength of his hands as he draws his brush across the canvas – and her painting, finished in the Academy, on the line or just above or below it.

  With the final kicks of a drowning woman towards air, she lifts her arm and it is easy. Her body arcs as she slams the chair-arm across Silas’s head. It is a clean smack – she can feel the vibration of his skull up her shoulder. The world takes on sudden flashes, a rough score of a palette knife, the abrupt violence of hurled paint on a finished piece. Silas flounders, turns, and she raises the wood once more, pounds it across his brow. It arms her with more hatred, more anger, until she is trembling with it, drunk on it. There is blood then – a shock of pure madder.

  He howls, and his hands thrash the floor, grappling for her legs. She reaches for her bucket, brimming with waste, and she empties it over his head. He is fearfully close, and she beats him again with the arm of the chair, all while the world spins and dips around her. She hears the crack of bone – his ribs most likely – and the splintering of wood. She steadies herself on the wall, and the cellar swims.

  The rungs of the ladder are before her, deliciously cold. But her progress is slow, hampered by fatigue and by her skirts, bunching and catching against her feet. The wire is wrapped around her wrist. She is only aware that she has cut her palm by the sight of blood. She stops, the world racketing around her, shapes looming from nowhere, and her fingers slip.

  Silas is groaning, groping towards her. She sways with exhaustion and dizziness. This is her last chance, she tells herself. She will live – she must live.

  She regains her grip and moves slower, more carefully. She can hear him below her, but she tries to shut it out. She must not fall. One more step, her petticoats kicked out of the way. Then another. And another. She is half in the shop.

  The sun is sudden, pure. A slant of light, so bright she feels she could snag it between her fingers. She narrows her eyes against it. She can hear the distant hum of carriages on the Strand. Normal people going about their normal lives. The air, too, is cleaner, and pickled animals stare at her from their clouded jars. She moves to pull herself into the room.

  She feels it again. His hand on her ankle; she turns and sees the oily crease of his hair below her. She kicks him, but it is not enough and she is fading. The wire; she remembers the wire, and she lashes it across his knuckles. A cry – she could not say whose.

  The shackle around her foot is released.

  It is enough time for her to lift herself on to the floor of the shop. The light! She wants to drink it in, to savour every last drop. But she hears him below, the hollow smack of boot on ladder, and she pushes the trapdoor. It slams shut, the edges misaligned. Already, the corner is lifting, his hand pressing it upwards. She looks around her, but she does not have the strength to move the cabinet. She cannot even stand; she sits in a pool of her torn soiled skirts, her cheeks raw from the cut of the gag, her arm scabbed from the rocking of the chair against the wall.

  She crawls to the other side of the cabinet – it is heavy mahogany and glass – and leans on it. The dresser shifts slightly, and she throws her weight behind it. It swings, hovers as if on a string, and then crashes downwards. The dust billows, the wood cracks, and fractured glass and butterfly wings sprawl across the shop.

  It is only when she knows that he is trapped that she keels forward. She pulls herself towards the door, the world blurring and bending and twisting around her. There are shards of glass in her fist, blood on her knees, her skirts ruched up. She falls into the passageway outside.

  She flounders, and rights herself.

  She can smell frying food and the eggy stink of the Thames and pipe smoke and wood fires and rotten vegetables and a thousand other things besides. The cinder heaps are as dry as dust, and the churn from the carriages makes her cough. Through it all, the sun shines, slipping between the tall buildings. It is all beautiful, all hers. The peace of a stilled moment.

  She thinks there is nothing left within her.

  And yet.

  And yet, she stumbles forward. Towards the melee and the hiss and the hurrying clerks.

  But most of all: the sight of it. She could gaze on it for days, years, and never tire of it. The chipped brick of a building, the outstretched arm of a boy calling out letters, the fading perspective of the Strand as she bursts on to it. She wishes she had her easel and paints, Louis at her side, showing her how to use the colours – the black of a topper, the unmixed emerald of a whisking carriage, and a girl with loose red hair – running.

  London

  MAY 1852

  The Painting

  Royal Academy: Second Notice. Our Critic Among Paintings – excerpt of review in the Illustrated London News, 22 May 1852

  I have, in past years, rapped my pen over the palette of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but this year I must be less severe in my censure. Indeed, upon entering the East Room, you find your eye immediately drawn to a medium-sized canvas a little below the line, and showing such a dignified feeling that I spent the most joyful hour regarding it. While it shows some defects in delivery, and no doubt the artist has room for technical improvement, her response to Nature is pleasing.

  In common with the work of the so-called PRB, it is painted in lurid colours with an interest in light, and with an evenness of focus which attaches equal significance to each object. The issue with this approach is, of course, that little things are copied with great attention; great things paid little heed. A mouse escapes the grip of a cat, a vase is filled with irises and roses, all yet to bloom fully, and a blonde maid sits in the background and helps herself to a bowl of strawberries while her mistress’s eyes are averted. These unnecessary details detract from the true intimacy at the heart of this work, namely the embracing lovers. They turn towards each other as if on the brink of laughter, and are arranged with such a stark naturalness, such a sweetness, that the scene is prevented from tipping into a sickly sentimentality.

  A convex mirror is discernible on the wall, portraying a broader dimension outside the scope of the painting. An overused trope in modern art, here the mirror’s inclusion justifies its purpose by the doubling of its subjects. In the reflection, an almost-identical figure to the central woman sits at a desk, her focus absorbed by a brass cash register. This is well done, and her disfigured face hints at
the passing of time and decay, with the register as a modern scales, symbolizing metaphysical judgement and the counting out of days.

  The white-haired maid, meanwhile, finds her double in the similar features of a small boy in blue breeches, caught in a pyramid of light from the window. He reaches his hand towards the viewer, as if beckoning them into the frame, or perhaps begging for a coin.

  This simple, though cluttered, painting may not take its cue from poetry or Shakespeare, but its quaint and honest rendering of a domestic scene has left this critic – scurril-knave and mocker that he so often is – filled with an admiration for the natural loveliness therein.

  Author’s note: At the time this novel is set, Lizzie spelled her surname ‘Siddall’, but Rossetti later persuaded her to change it to ‘Siddal’ as it sounded more elegant.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you –

  To Maddy – champion, powerhouse, friend, and the best agent there is. For the teas, and later the fizz; for your belief in me; for your expert guidance and calm. To all at the Madeleine Milburn Agency: Anna Hogarty, Giles Milburn, Hayley Steed and Alice Sutherland-Hawes.

  To my superb editor Sophie Jonathan, whose hawk eyes and insights have made this book what is – thank you, a thousand times over. To my US editor, Emily Bestler, for the invaluable suggestions, commentary and enthusiasm. I am so grateful to both of you.

  To those at Picador, including Camilla Elworthy, goddess among publicists, and Paul Baggaley, Lara Borlenghi, Katie Bowden, Gill Fitzgerald-Kelly and Katie Tooke. To those at Simon & Schuster in the US, particularly Lara Jones and Libby McGuire.

  To my workshop group in London, the best and most talented of friends: Megan Davis, Richard O’Halloran, Sophie Kirkwood, Campaspe Lloyd-Jacob and Tom Watson. Extra special thanks to Emily Ruth Ford, whose editing, support and friendship mean everything to me.