The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  Lucy Ribchester was born in Edinburgh in 1982. She studied English at the University of St Andrews and Shakespearean Studies at Kings College London. In 2013 she received a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for the opening chapters of The Hourglass Factory. Her short fiction has been published in journals in the UK and US, and she writes about dance and circus for several magazines and websites including The List, Fest and Dance Tabs. The Hourglass Factory is her first novel.

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Lucy Ribchester 2015

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Lucy Ribchester to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  PB ISBN: 978-1-47113-930-7

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-47113-931-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  For Alex

  ‘The days are past for rioting and we do not need to have recourse to bloodshed or violence to carry on our schemes of progress and reform, because we have a fairly good franchise which is an assurance that the will of the people must prevail in these democratic days.’

  Sir Rufus Isaacs, Solicitor-General, 1910

  In the UK in 1912, women could not vote.

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  14 April 1912, London Evening Gazette Offices

  At 10 p.m. on Stonecutter Street the Reuters wires begin to tick.

  Nobby has his head slumped on Mr Stark’s desk and he jumps at the noise, the heavy morse code girding, the out-of-joint military march. The glass on top of the Reuters machine always shakes because of a loose nut or perhaps the uneven floorboards beneath the desk. He cuts the ticker tape sharp the way Mr Stark likes it, no tears or rough edges.

  And then he blinks.

  Half an hour earlier, The Royal Albert Hall, London

  Ebony Diamond had waited in the dark, her wrists bound tight as shoelaces. Her fingers had numbed to blue; the pearls of sweat on her palms were turning the mixture of flour and poudre d’amour to paste. Behind her, Annie Evans was busy tucking into two neat sacks the crowbar, ropes and chains they had used to split the roof tiles and slink down through the cold rafters. As she packed she sang gently, ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’, singing ‘lass’ instead of ‘man’.

  ‘How’s he getting on?’ Annie’s eyes were soft, but her smile was frozen with nerves.

  Ebony didn’t answer. She was watching the meeting going on beneath them, the Prime Minister working himself up into his speech. Down below, the moving sea of bowler hats in the auditorium looked like iron filings in a fish bowl.

  ‘Legs together or legs akimbo don’t matter,’ Ebony’s mother had always told her. ‘But for God’s sake keep your arms in or you’ll lose one of them.’ There were rumours that once at the Crystal Palace a trapeze artist had landed so sharply on a falling jolt that part of his brain seeped out through his nose.

  Annie wriggled back into a squat under the low beams. She would hold out here as long as she could, but they would find her too. She hoped she and Ebony would make the same prison van.

  Ebony checked the binding on her legs, squeezed a handful of flesh into a more comfortable position, ran a thumb over the sailor’s knots she had tied, and wedged the wooden bar of the trapeze between the hollows of her feet. Annie passed her the banner and she bit its silk, and grimaced as its slippery perfume coated her teeth. She had done higher leaps than this and she had felt sick before each of them too. But this time they both had Holloway to look forward to. The hunger-strike, the force-feeding. Ebony had heard tell that they didn’t clean the tube. She pushed away the thought, gave Annie a last look, climbed alone onto the wooden lip of the hole. And she jumped.

  Nobby watches the details judder in: dribs, drabs, sketches, the colour of lace in the woman’s bodice, the look on her face as she flew through the air. He crams a jellied pork pie into his mouth as he scans and scans the never-ending tape. It is better than a story in Strand magazine.

  The facts change. The Prime Minister is dead. The Prime Minister is alive. The woman is a gypsy. The woman is a Londoner. The woman had a famous mother. And as they change, the activity in the office also changes. Reporters dig out obituaries, men are being dispatched to Bow Street police station and the Albert Hall. And all the time the tape ticks and slaps and stamps as if it will never exhaust itself. By the time midnight comes round, the first galley proof is drawn and Nobby is growing bored. The pie is heavy in his stomach and he thinks he might sneak a swallow from Stark’s whisky bottle in the top drawer of his desk while the night editor is out of the room. But then the tape starts up again, and this time when he looks at it he doesn’t just blink, he cries out.

  15 April 1912, Clement’s Inn, Women’s Social and Political Union Headquarters, London

  ‘Did you get the newspapers? Did you get them all? Is she in it? Tell me she’s on the front page. Tell me the London Illustrated have dug out a snap.’

  The woman’s arms are outstretched and the sleeves of her blouse hang away from her. On her wrist a flash of emeralds, amethysts and fresh pearls catches the sunlight through the window.

  Her friend doesn’t smile and this rings a little warning bell.

  The newspapers slap down onto the oak table, spilling left and right, slipping from their covers. Mrs Pankhurst and a few of the others have entered the press room, drawn by the rush of excitement. Murmurs are circulating, questions being asked.

  ‘Did she get a clean swing?’

  ‘She didn’t hurt herself?’

  Heads are craning for a better look. ‘If she did it,’ one woman says, ‘I’
ll lead a deputation to Asquith myself, holding out them front pages like a banner in his face.’

  ‘They can’t ignore it, that’s for sure.’

  The merriment is tight and restless. Some of them were there last night; others on the blacklist for Liberal rallies who couldn’t get in have heard the stories already. They know she ‘flew like a bullet’, they know she ‘eyeballed Asquith like he was the devil’. They know about the banner saying ‘Votes for Women’. They know the crowd shouted, ‘Cut her down’, ‘Hang her from her own rope’.

  But what they didn’t know, what none of them could have known, was what was staring at them from seven different front covers. Tawdry rags, fine-printed sheets. All black-edged. ‘Titanic Sinks – 1500 Die’, the London Evening Gazette’s choice of words.

  Hush settles round the room. Some of the women look at Mrs Pankhurst as if she should say something, but her silvery blue eyes are fixed on the table. After a few moments of creaking and shifting, one woman coughs and asks, ‘Is she not in it at all? Not any of them?’

  ‘What do you think?’ another snaps, and runs from the room.

  The silence hangs a few more minutes.

  ‘Will she get second division, do you think?’

  No one speaks.

  Then Mrs Pankhurst pushes her thumb smoothly behind the cover of one of the papers and begins to leaf through it, nodding occasionally, catching her breath, and as she does so the rest of the women move forward too, and gradually the papers are distributed between silent hands and eyes.

  ‘Rotten luck,’ says a quiet voice from the corner of the room nearest the window. Mrs Pankhurst’s head snaps up. But someone else beats her to speak first.

  ‘For whom?’

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  One

  1 November 1912

  The sun was beating down as Frankie George cycled along Fleet Street, trying to stop her notebook and calling cards from flapping out of her lower pockets, and her pencils from stabbing her in the chest.

  She had been distrustful of the warm weather when she’d got up at noon to receive her editor’s telegram summoning her to the Stonecutter Street offices. Now, as she dodged boys on motorcycles puffing out violet smoke, piles of horse muck and steaming horses dragging full omnibuses, she regretted her choice of clothing; a fetching pale brown tweed trouser suit, practical for bicycling, autumnal-hued and insulating as upholstery. The Fleet Street traffic was foul with noxious vapour and it felt like cycling through hot soup. A cart full of meat pies came wobbling towards her and she thought for a second about reaching out to pinch one, but changed her mind when she saw the horse on the wagon behind breathing over the crusts. She veered off onto Shoe Lane, dodging smashed jack-o’-lanterns left over from Hallowe’en the night before and it was only then that she remembered it was All Saints’ Day. And so hot. What next? Summer Punch on Guy Fawkes night?

  Stonecutter Street was mainly made up of magazine offices, all there for the cheaper rent. For the London Evening Gazette, that meant being crammed into a tall rambling half-townhouse, six times as high as it was wide, leaving only enough space for one room per floor. The brickwork was poor and there were always new leaks and splits in the wall, new buckets strategically placed, new wads of stuffing filling a whistling gap. Frankie leant the bicycle against the railings outside, where she’d last borrowed it from, and hopped up the steps.

  The office was buzzing with its usual hysteria. Bundles of the early edition were being cut open, men in shirtsleeves and braces were flying up and down the stairs brandishing tissue-thin pieces of paper. Shouts of ‘copy’ came loud and fast from each of the floors, along with wafts of Turkish tobacco and occasionally the sound of a boy being boxed on the ears.

  Frankie fished in her pocket for the telegram and gave it to the man on the front desk.

  ‘Know what he wants?’ The man cupped his ear for her response above the din.

  Frankie looked down at the note. It read, ‘STONECUTTER STREET STARK’. She shrugged. The man shrugged back and waved her towards the stairs.

  The higher up the building, the more important the resident was. In the cellar, printers were operated by men in aprons who had grown so deaf from the noise of machinery that they bellowed at each other even when they were sat across the same table in the Olde Cheshire Cheese. One floor up in the basement, skilled men with fingers as fine as a pianist’s sat at linotype machines, setting the letters in neat little rows.

  The ground floor belonged to the sports reporters and the staffers, who could be dispatched to any part of London at a second’s notice to weasel out a story from the police, morgues, the divorce courts, loose-tongued pub landladies and vengeful servants. The obituary writers, the political correspondents and the features editor occupied the office above; theirs had the privilege of a red velvet couch that threw up dust whenever it was sat upon. Up again, the sub-editors worked at desks covered in blue pencils, bottles of paste and scissors, chopping and rearranging the text given to them by the office boys. And then, at the top sat Mr Stark himself, Editor-in-Chief, with a rickety wooden floor and a great oak desk covered in rival newspapers, scraps of flimsy, and a whisky glass with a permanent crust of the previous drink left fossilising in it.

  Stark also had the prestige of housing the Reuters machine, four pillars topped by a glass box; a tangle of electromagnetic wires that ticked and tapped out a mile a day of news. Horse-race results, parliamentary speeches, overseas events, shipping news, all came spilling out onto a thin strip of paper which Nobby, Stark’s office boy, would cut with a pair of shears and pass for Stark’s perusal. Most of Nobby’s offerings ended up in the waste-paper basket under the desk. On her first visit to Stark, Frankie had eyed the basket warily, wondering how many lovingly typed and hand-addressed journalists’ efforts had been screwed up into a ball and tossed into it like old orange peel.

  Just before she hit the landing on Stark’s floor she heard a voice calling out, ‘Oi, Georgie.’

  ‘It’s Frankie,’ she began to say, turning. She recognised Teddy Hawkins straight away; one of the reporters who had his own desk in the downstairs newsroom. He had a badly formed mouth, like it had been squashed at some point and never found its proper shape again. In his hands he carried a stack of news clippings. ‘Did you get our telegram?’

  ‘I got Mr Stark’s.’

  Hawkins brushed the remark out of the air. ‘He wants you to do a portrait piece. Half, no three-quarter page.’ He grinned.

  Frankie’s pulse sped up a little.

  ‘There’s a suffragette performing at the Coliseum tomorrow night, an acrobat. Ebony Diamond. Know her?’

  Instantly the little drizzle of excitement was replaced by a prickle of annoyance. She was on the verge of opening her mouth to say, ‘Now why would I know her?’ but Hawkins didn’t give her the chance.

  ‘None of us have a damned clue who she is. That’s why he wanted you in.’ He skimmed a glance down her trouser suit. ‘You’ll know a thing or two about suffragettes, won’t you? Anyway, deadline’s tomorrow. He’ll tell you the rest.’ He barged ahead of her into Stark’s office, leaving a reek of stale smoke in his wake.

  Frankie heard a rustle of quick conversation then Hawkins re-emerged, winked at Frankie – a gesture that made her feel slightly soiled – and jogged back down the stairs. She was gratified to see, as he disappeared, that a long streamer of flimsy from the Reuters wires was flapping off his shoe.

  She gave her suit a quick brush down and went in. Stark’s huge body was craning over a galley proof, with a single eyeglass wedged in his eye and a blue pencil behind his ear. He was an oval-shaped man, pointed at the top like an egg, with colossal features; ears, nose, blue bulging eyes that looked as if they had been stuck on with editing paste, and matched his unwieldy manner with words. He liked to call the lady journalists ‘treacle’, ‘pudding’ or sometimes ‘treacle pudding’.

  He didn’t look up. Frankie walked closer, so that her shoes were within his eyeline. />
  ‘Ebony Diamond,’ he said, still poring down the long piece of print. ‘Know her?’

  Frankie shook her head, then realised he was waiting for her to speak. ‘No.’ She cleared her throat.

  ‘She’s a suffragette.’

  ‘I don’t know her,’ Frankie said, trying to keep her voice even.

  ‘Well, I want you to get to know her. She’s been in Holloway twice now so make it sharp. Get her to tell you about the matrons and force-feeding.’

  She watched his head slide back and forth along the line of text while she waited for more. After a few seconds, he paused. ‘Still here?’

  ‘Well, it’s just that . . . Mr Stark, I’m not sure a suffragette piece, given my background. I mean there are some news stories I could think of to . . .’

  ‘This or quoits on Wimbledon Common. You want to cover the quoits on Wimbledon Common?’

  Frankie made a quick calculation of the distance to Wimbledon in her head. It was almost worth it. ‘No, sir, thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Nobby’s got some notes for you, don’t you Nobby?’

  Stark’s boy, who had been lurking in the corner, staring at the ticking Reuters machine, leant across the table and handed her a piece of paper. On the top was written in blue waxy editing pencil in Stark’s florid hand, ‘Olivier Smythe, Corsetier, 125 New Bond Street.’ The rest of the notes were Nobby’s uneven scrawl.

  Frankie creased her brow. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand. This is the address of a Bond Street corset shop.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Frankie hesitated.

  ‘Does her costumes, doesn’t he?’ Stark said as if the whole thing should have been quite plain. He went back to scrutinising his galley proof and Nobby shrugged at her and turned back to the Reuters machine. Frankie sighed, folded up the piece of paper and stuffed it in her pocket before heading back out into the hallway.

  She was halfway down the stairs when a man in a brown factory coat came dashing out from one of the side rooms. ‘Hold it, hold it.’ She stopped in her tracks as he thrust towards her a leather cube. His fingers were grubby with ink and he stank of chemicals. ‘Make sure you get a good one. Get her waist in. Nice and close, mid-body, don’t let her close her eyes. Plates are already in, quarter plates.’ He pointed to a tube, half a triangular pipe tucked in the back. ‘Lose this and he’ll have your fingers for potted shrimp. If you need it, you can buy the powder at a chemist’s. Get the Muller’s stuff.’