The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  And then another image floated into view. A woman’s face made featureless in straw and paper, with stuffing ill-fit-ted to her body, broom-handle legs and a witch’s hat, feet smouldering on a bonfire while children squealed and hot wine was passed round.

  The fifth of November, since I can remember,

  Was Guy Faux, Poke him in the eye,

  Shove him up the chimney-pot, and there let him die.

  They would burn their effigies, just like Guy Fawkes, for centuries to come. Any of them, women who were part of it, women who weren’t. Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel. No matter that the WSPU had nothing to do with it. They would blame all women’s organisations and they would burn them like they were witches dredged up from a dark past that had already killed thousands and haunted millions. Frankie had listened enough to her convent school education to know what had happened to Catholics when Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Westminster Palace. A persecuted group already, made into pariahs ripe for execution and exile.

  A stick and a stake, for King George’s sake,

  If you don’t give me one,

  I’ll take two, The better for me, and the worse for you,

  Frankie shivered. Her cell-mate noticed and took the shawl from her shoulders. ‘Would you like to huddle for warmth?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ She squeezed her arms in close to her body and jammed her hands in her pockets, and then she felt a prick on the corners of her fingertips and pulled out the calling card that Liam had found in Ebony’s dressing room.

  What had Ebony thought she was doing in the first place, leaving the suffragettes for that group? Had she not realised they were planning destruction on a mass scale? Did it not occur to her that rather than furthering the cause, an act that devastating would soon solder the idea that women were every bit as dangerous and unstable as Asquith wanted to make out? Worse still, they were working women, seamstresses. How could she not have realised the long-term danger of what she was involved in? Then the truth caught up with Frankie: she did. Just a little too late.

  But it still didn’t make sense. If Ebony had raised her doubts to the Hourglass Factory, surely it would have given them the chance to back out. Take better action, reconsider the implications of what they had planned. If the goal was to show the government that they were serious about obtaining votes for women, they would want to do it right. It was almost as if—

  Frankie stopped herself and wriggled up straighter. The thought threaded through her mind and wound ahead of itself. She pulled it back and tried to get a firm grip of where she was going.

  The picture Ebony Diamond had left. She had wanted to speak in code, to hide the meaning. She had meant it as a cry for help. The Queen of Swords, upside down. A woman who wasn’t who she said she was. A woman grown bitter by sorrow. A bigot, a prude. Artifice. They had assumed it meant Annie Evans, mistaken for Ebony Diamond by her murderer and the police.

  The thoughts came fast and tangled now.

  A woman who wasn’t who she said she was? But Annie had never professed to be anyone else. She had only dressed in Ebony’s finery to impress her lover, and had been mistaken by others.

  Frankie pulled out her notebook and looked at the fountain pen notes she had taken at the Barclay-Evanses. She came back once again to the story of Constance Lytton. A Lady who disguised herself as a seamstress to expose the prison authorities for abusing poorer women. What was it Milly had said? She was a force of good for the suffragettes, a crusader showing the duplicity of the government. But what if her goodwill, her noble idea could have been copied? Taken by someone else and used for darker gains? What was it Twinkle had said about people without open minds being dangerous?

  Someone was not who they said they were.

  Someone who knew that if they could harness a group of desperate, raging women to perform an act of reckless violence, they could have groups like them shut down and suppressed forever. Preserve the status quo, play into the enemies’ hands.

  Someone who knew the power of stunts that backfire.

  Someone who didn’t stand for women’s rights at all but who hated political progress, freedom, and the way the world was emerging from a dark historical hierarchy to a terrifying free-for-all meritocracy.

  Someone who would hate the way a showgirl could square up to a politician, a woman from Tottenham write in the newspapers, or a Lady find herself living off scraps in Baron’s Court as she struggled to make her own independent living.

  A reactionary in the guise of a seamstress.

  It came quick and fast now. The brooch, the spoon, the old lady with her face bundled up; in the Hourglass Factory, at the morgue, outside Annie Evans’s. Milly’s face on the playing cards; the woman with phossy jaw. Frankie knew she had seen those eyes before. She scrambled to her feet, kicking over the bowl of unfinished porridge, spilling a slippery mess over the floor of the cell. She grabbed the bars of the viewing hatch at the top of the cell door and rattled the aching weight of the metal as hard as she could, crying ‘Help!’ She needed to get to Milly.

  Primrose stood awkwardly in the corner of the charge room, trying to keep his fingers static, not sure whether his blood was still up from the ticking-off or his anxiety over Clara. Stuttlegate meanwhile was busying his hands like the clock had stopped and they hadn’t all just been told minutes ago about a bomb threat. He ruffled his papers, sorted his copy reports from photographs, lined his pencils up tight on the desk as if he was preparing a magic trick. Every so often he checked to see that Primrose was watching him. He paid scant attention to the prisoner, who was seated on the other side of the table, except to nod at her and say to Primrose, ‘Get the niceties out of the way, will you?’

  Primrose thought the prisoner a very curious wispy little woman – gothic pale but oddly fierce – although right now her beauty was interrupted by a small smear of beef tea to the side of her lip, which she kept trying to lick away. He pulled out his notebook. ‘Can you confirm your name for the record please?’

  ‘Millicent . . . Milly Barton.’

  ‘What is that, Miss or Mrs?’

  She eyed him coldly. ‘The Honourable Ms.’

  Primrose felt a twinge of something – annoyance, embarrassment – but he wrote it down and stood back against the wall.

  Stuttlegate had by now finished meddling, and was greasing up his hands, rubbing them first in his hair, then palms together. Primrose watched him as he paced the room, scratched his ginger whiskers with the flat of his hand, then slammed it onto the table. ‘How long have you been supplying weapons to the suffragettes?’

  Caught off guard, Primrose swallowed a yelp.

  ‘Excuse me . . .’ Milly Barton frowned.

  ‘How long have you been their go-to girl for guns?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Horse-whips, dog whips, pistols.’ He bent over the table turning over a few of his evidence reports. ‘If you don’t tell the truth . . .’

  ‘You’ll do what?’

  Stuttlegate stopped turning the papers. ‘How many other headquarters are there then, miss, that we don’t know about?’

  ‘If you’ll listen, sir,’ she said, then when she had his attention added, ‘And please don’t call me “miss”,’ She stared at Stuttlegate. ‘We had a tip-off. My friend is a reporter for the London Evening Gazette.’

  ‘That pappy rag,’ Stuttlegate snarled.

  ‘We were investigating the tip-off.’

  ‘The London Evening Gazette investigate tip-offs with guns?’ As he passed by on one of his pacing rounds, Primrose caught the scent of eel pie on his collar.

  ‘That gun is registered under my name. At least it was.’

  The Chief’s pig eyes held her for a second. He took a step back and sniffed. Finally he turned to his puzzle of manila files on the table. As he shifted the pile of photographs, the markings on the backs became visible, the Special Branch ordering stamp. The Honourable Ms Barton waited patiently. Primrose felt t
oo ashamed to look at her. He wondered what she must be thinking; perhaps that being made a Chief Inspector was a game of chance, as arbitrary as choosing nude girls for the tableaux vivants at a supper room. He dared not look at his watch.

  ‘Are you going to let me see them?’ She pointed at the pictures.

  ‘This tip-off.’

  ‘Yes?’

  The Chief said nothing but continued to stare at her.

  ‘Yes? . . .’ Still he said nothing. Milly looked up at Primrose. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ she said. ‘It came from the family of a girl called Annie Evans. I think you know who she is.’

  The Chief pounced like she had delivered him a peck of treasure. ‘She was a suffragette! One of yours. And that friend of yours, Ebony Diamond.’ Now Stuttlegate looked at Primrose, his eyes gleaming.

  ‘They left the suffragettes.’

  ‘But a leopard never changes its stripes.’

  Milly sighed. ‘Spots.’

  ‘Don’t take that tone with me. I’ve locked up men with higher titles than you before. I had a duke in here once.’

  ‘There are bombs in that workshop, I told you that, and all you’ve done is insult me and talk about suffragettes.’

  Primrose stepped forward, then lost his nerve and retreated. He thought he could feel his watch in his chest pocket ticking through his shirt, and wondered how much longer this would take. Stuttlegate stared the girl down, making a peculiar little humming sound between clenched lips. He began flipping over the scattered photographs at random. ‘You want to talk about suffragettes? Fine.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to talk about suffragettes. I want you to . . .’

  ‘Chief, should we . . . ?’

  ‘Let me take care of this.’ Stuttlegate turned his dog-taming stare on Primrose, then went back to flipping.

  ‘This one. Know her?’ He flipped more and more until it became a parody of a manic parlour game. A prison mug shot of a woman’s profile came up and he pointed. Wild black hair covered her ears above a ragged coat.

  ‘Why would I know her, Chief Inspector, and what has it to do with anything?’

  ‘Not her. How about this one then?’

  ‘Are you doing anything about the bombs?’

  ‘Not her? Fine, this one then.’

  He flipped over another image. This one was a surveillance shot of a prison yard. The image had been taken with a long lens; the woman had her head turned slightly but even so it was possible to recognise the distinctive shape of her waist and her tar-black hair. She wore stays even under her Holloway uniform.

  Milly looked up at Stuttlegate.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘That’s Ebony Diamond.’

  ‘That’s more like it.’

  ‘You know I know Ebony, you just said we were friends.’

  ‘Suffragette friends?’

  ‘Working friends.’

  He pulled his nose back into a little sneering snout. ‘Why would I believe that an Honourable Ms –’ he buzzed the word with his teeth clenched ‘– would be working with a performing tart like that?’

  ‘Because I’m a performing tart too,’ she spat. ‘Next.’

  He pushed another photograph under her nose. ‘What about this one?’

  ‘No, never seen her.’

  ‘This one.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How about this, recognise her?’ Another surveillance shot from the prison yard.

  ‘That’s Annie Evans.’

  ‘I see we’re developing a pattern here.’

  Milly Barton looked contemptuously at the Chief from beneath hooded black-lined eyelids. When she looked back down he had placed another photograph under her nose. Primrose spotted the recognition in her eyes even before Stuttlegate spoke. ‘Another suffragette friend?’

  ‘No, I know her from . . .’ she cut herself off.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Lincoln’s Inn House.’

  It was as if a gavel had come down in a music hall. He leaned back, cocked his head and bellowed. ‘Oh, really, Lincoln’s Inn House, remind me, I can’t quite remember what that is; it’s the headquarters of some organisation. My memory, my wife says, is terrible.’ He slapped himself about the head. ‘You know I put the butter in the game pantry the other day? No wait, I don’t have a game pantry, there’re for honourable ladies like you, aren’t they? Lincoln’s Inn House. That’s . . .’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, look at yourself!’

  ‘All right, Chief, perhaps we can just . . .’ Primrose stepped forward but Stuttlegate was in full swing.

  ‘Headquarters of the suffragettes!’ He slammed the table; the smack made the woman jump. ‘No, you look at yourself. You’re lying to protect that coven of witches. Right. Next.’

  He flipped over a photograph. Milly’s hand went to her mouth.

  He watched her for a moment then said quietly, ‘We are particularly interested to trace this woman. However we have hit a dead end. She gave her occupation as seamstress on the Holloway register, and we have reason to believe she also gave us a false name. It’s not on last year’s census.’ He pointed gently at the spectacles on the woman’s nose. ‘These might be false as well, and I know it’s hard to see her face through the bandages, so think carefully. At Lincoln’s Inn they say they have no record of her, no record of any woman with phossy jaw. They’re not your sisters, Lady Millicent. If you tell me lies . . .’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You don’t know her. How about this one?’ He pushed a picture under her nose and this time there was no mistaking it. She was linking arms in a prison yard with Annie Evans and Ebony Diamond. Ebony’s waist formed the centrepiece of the picture. She and Annie were laughing into one another while the third woman looked coldly at the camera. Her hair this time was blown back by the wind, and although she still wore the large horn-rimmed spectacles, her eyes cut through the glass as clear and chill as if she had the second sight and could look straight through the photograph into the eyes of the beholder. Across her mouth, a rag was drawn, almost obscuring her whole face except for the terrible eyes. ‘She’s an ugly piece of work. Must have been a match girl back in the day. One of the few phossy-jaw survivors. Our photographer says she nearly broke the lens, but that’s why they do it, don’t they? No man’s going to touch that. And they know it. It turns their insides cancerous. Makes them lash out, makes them bitter, because when it comes down to it, that’s what this is about, this voting nonsense. Jealousy, bitterness that the men have what you want, and because you can’t have what you want, because you’re a silly little woman, a silly woman with silly smears of greasepaint on your face and lips and the brain of a rabbit and—’

  ‘Enough! Chief Inspector, enough!’

  Primrose felt the room detach very quickly from his consciousness. His hands flashed with a mind of their own as they lifted, and it took a great effort, a great effort in concentration to bring them back to his sides. His face tingled, and he thought that both people in the room must now be staring at him; Stuttlegate with hatred, and the woman with hatred too for wading in like a coward, too late, and implying he could somehow protect her from this farmyard beast. Stuttlegate looked to him, in that moment, like a creature he had seen painted on the inside of his mother’s Bible, a creature from a bestiary.

  But Milly wasn’t staring at him at all.

  She was looking at the photograph. Threads of blood had begun to shoot through her eyes. She clutched her head at the ears and looked as if she might be sick on the table.

  ‘She went away earlier in the year,’ she said. ‘She said she was going to Biarritz to rest. Very fine lie, but why? Why?’ It was Stuttlegate who caught her arm as she scraped back the chair from the table.

  ‘Don’t you dare close ranks on me. I swear I’ll arrest the lot of you. You suffragettes . . .’

  Primrose made to move the table out of the woman’s way, to stop her from hitting her head as she sank towards it. ‘Inspector Primrose,’ Stuttlegate inter
cepted him with a flat hand. ‘I think you’ve done enough here. Don’t you think it’s about time you buggered off to Colney Hatch?’

  The Honourable Ms Millicent Barton was clutching the edge of the table. ‘That is no suffragette,’ she said coldly, halfway to the ground. ‘That is my mother.’

  Thirty-Seven

  ‘Somebody shut that bitch up! Can’t hear my own breath.’

  The prisoners in the other cells were starting to turn on Frankie, but she wouldn’t let up. Twice a guard had come down. Once he had slapped the hatch shut on her fingers. She banged again on the door. ‘Let me out! I know who it is. They’re going to blow up the Houses of Parliament.’

  ‘And let me guess, you’re Mary Queen of Scots.’

  She lashed the wall with her arms. The old woman in the corner was curled into a foetal position holding her head. Frankie slid back down the cold wall until her bottom came to rest on the floor, and listened to the sounds of the Bow Street cells filling her head until she was bunged up. The scrapings of bowls, the shuffling of feet. Three different songs from different cells and a whistler from a fourth. For a second she saw herself in Stark’s office, pictured herself telling him no thank you, she’d have a write-up of the Wimbledon quoits on his desk by noon the next day. If she had never clapped eyes on Ebony Diamond she wouldn’t be sitting in a Bow Street cell howling like the child who wanted the moon.

  The cell flap snapped open and she felt a cold jolt of shock.

  ‘Frankie George?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Her shoes slipped as she stood up, traces of wet gruel still forming a dangerous layer on the stone.

  ‘Someone’s asking for you.’

  ‘Hold on,’ came a cry from down the hall. ‘’Ow do you know I’m not Frankie George?’

  Frankie waited, feeling her heart speed up, as the constable fumbled and squeaked and scraped until the lock opened. A menacing dissent had started in the cells and she heard spittle hit the ground behind her as she followed the constable down the corridor. ‘That’s right, send ’er to the funny farm.’