The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  Frankie swallowed and looked at Liam. ‘So, Scarlet Pimpernel. How d’you think to go fetch her?’

  Liam scowled. ‘Oh that’s a fine thank you.’ He thinned his weedy eyes. ‘You think I’ve cloth for brains, don’t you? I’m not the one went and got myself arrested. Jojo’s women are all the same. Can’t look after yourselves.’

  The heat rose quickly in Frankie. ‘I’m not Jojo’s woman. And where were you, anyway? Wouldn’t have been arrested if you’d been where I told you to be.’

  ‘I was outside watching when they dragged yous away. Listen, I couldn’t give a donkey’s if you two go getting yourselves banged up. I’m doing this . . .’

  ‘Because Jojo’s paying you, I know. You mentioned it. Nice to see that’s the conscience of the Irish.’

  Frankie saw his cherubic cheeks flash an angry red and she felt regretful that her tongue had lashed too quickly. A few market traders turned round, dangling their baskets, watching. She suddenly noticed Milly staring at the donkey cart full of conference pears they had passed by. She remembered the diagram, the pear shape of the bombs, and a sickly taste grew in her mouth. ‘Are you all right?’

  Milly nodded gently.

  ‘Listen, I’ve got an idea. Think you can get us into Lincoln’s Inn? It’s just that I think if anyone knows how to break into the Houses, it might be the suffragettes. Heard on the grapevine that was something they were good at.’

  Milly’s drained face told Frankie she wasn’t in the mood to laugh. She looked across to the flower market, watching the bonfire outside take further shape. Then she looked up Exeter Street.

  ‘If we go via the Aldwych we’ll be less likely to run into anyone from Bow Street.’

  ‘I’d say we were the least of their worries at the moment,’ Frankie offered.

  ‘Aye but they don’t think that way,’ Liam said. ‘That’s what you have to be careful about with peelers.’

  Milly raised her head slowly. ‘So now we have two sets of lunatics to worry about catching us.’

  As they set off, they were glad for once of the brewing gloom. Streetlamps were beginning to be lit by the lamplighters, creating little beacons to mark out the path. Once Frankie thought she heard a barrage of footsteps behind them as they turned a corner but the noise took another route and faded. What she certainly didn’t hear were the quieter footsteps much closer behind, carefully measuring the distance between the electric streetlamps and sticking to the shadows, so that the owner of the two quick-moving feet, the owner of the tightly armoured black waist would never be seen.

  Thirty-Nine

  ‘Why can’t we just let them go ahead with it?’ one woman asked, crammed into the crowd of chairs round the long table.

  ‘If they burn the building to a crisp it’ll teach them a lesson.’

  ‘And,’ said a third woman, ‘weren’t us. Not on our watch. Nothing to do with us. There’s two birds killed with one stone.’ She raised her hands into a little fluttering dove diving towards the table. A few of the others laughed nervously.

  Frankie and Milly waited for it to die down. There were almost fifty members of the WSPU wedged into the press room of Lincoln’s Inn. Some of them had hissed and whispered when they saw Frankie, but they recognised Milly and the sickly pallor of her silenced any mutinous jeers. Liam had been made to wait outside again. Frankie had donated him the last of her cigarettes out of guilt.

  There was an electric charge in the air; the women were tense and curious as to why Mrs Dale had pulled them all off their posts so late in the afternoon for an emergency meeting; tables were strewn with galley proofs for the latest edition of The Suffragette. Abandoned typewriters sat in orderly rows and Frankie thought with a prick of sadness about her Blickensderfer sitting in a pawn shop.

  A small-boned woman with a twitching nose was speaking. ‘We must be allowed to continue protesting. Stopping these girls sets a dangerous precedent.’

  Frankie laid her palms flat on the table. ‘They are not protesters, they’re murderers. Whether they set the bombs off tonight or tomorrow, there will be people in there. People will perish.’

  ‘Christabel once said,’ the woman replied, ‘that if we broke into the Houses and seized the mace we would be the Cromwells of the twentieth century.’ There were a few taps on tables and ‘hear hears’.

  Then a throaty voice sounded at the back of the room. ‘Ay, but blow up the Houses and you’ll be the Guy Fawkes of the twentieth century.’ The ladies all fell silent and bowed their heads or fidgeted with their jewellery. There was an uncomfortable sense of duplicity in the air. ‘Do you want people to think we’re as brutish as the police?’ the throaty woman went on. ‘That we care as little about people’s lives as they do?’

  A current of dissent and murmurs surged round the room.

  ‘And you’re quite certain they’re going to do this?’ Mrs Dale asked, turning to Milly.

  Milly turned her head to look at her.

  Mrs Dale nodded. ‘All right. But what if they blow it up with you inside?’

  Frankie wasn’t quick enough to disguise the look that came across her face. It belied her, it said that they didn’t quite know either. Voices rose. Mrs Dale watched the women settle. Eventually she said, ‘And how exactly are we supposed to help you?’

  ‘You have floor plans of the entrances and exits to Parliament, don’t you?’

  She raised a weak smile.

  ‘If they’re handy, can you get them out?’

  ‘It’s not as easy as you think. They’ve increased the guards on the gates. Commons’ door is still the best but you have to pass through a central gate to get to it. The Fenians did for us when they set those bombs off. We only got inside once and only by making a Trojan horse of a furniture delivery van. You won’t be doing that tonight.’

  ‘How are the others going to get in? How was Ebony going to get in?’ The question came from the back of the room.

  Milly stiffened and Frankie opened her mouth to answer when she felt a pinch on her wrist. She caught Milly’s eye. ‘Because one of them,’ said Milly, ‘is the wife of a Lord.’

  There were cries; a Scottish voice called ‘God save us.’ ‘Is this what it’s come to?’ cried another.

  Mrs Dale was raising her finger to beckon over a girl in a shabby grey dress. She had a young smooth-skinned face, though when she spoke her voice was much older than Frankie expected. ‘There’s a guard on the west door. Back entrance. He’s on shift every night and they don’t rotate them.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because he’s my brother.’ She hesitated for a second then spoke firmly. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Mrs Dale had bent down to a cupboard next to the window and was rooting through a sheaf of papers when a shattering of fists on wood below made them all jump. She sprang up, startled for a moment, then rolled her eyes even before they heard the voices outside. ‘Police! Open the door now.’

  A collective groan rose. ‘Not again.’

  The girl who had volunteered to show them into Parliament prodded Frankie in the back with a finger and spoke quickly and urgently. ‘Out the garden way. You’ll be into the back green but I’m sure it’s not the first time you’ve had to hop a fence or climb a tree.’ She yanked Frankie with one arm and Milly with the other and led them down the stairs and through the kitchen to a back door. The shadows of two constables reared in the door’s glass panel and they stopped dead.

  ‘The cellar,’ the girl said quickly. The sounds of gathering police were growing, drummings of noisy footsteps and the shifting of bodies. Someone was roaring out orders, dividing the men into packs. The girl took a kitchen knife from the draining board and prised open a hatch in the kitchen floor. A splintered ladder led down into darkness. The smell of coal and dirt rose in a gust. Frankie thought of rats.

  ‘Go now.’ The girl shoved her roughly in the back.

  ‘What about you?’

  Another tattoo of fists erupted down the hall.

/>   ‘Don’t worry about me. I ain’t done nothing wrong. They got nothing to pin on me.’

  Frankie started to say, ‘But how will we—’ but the girl had already shut the hatch on their heads.

  Milly was coughing and Frankie reluctantly clamped a hand over her mouth to quiet her. Milly took the message and shook her head when she was done. ‘Your fingers stink of porridge.’

  Frankie’s breathing relaxed. She found Milly’s cold dry hand in the dark and raised their tangled fingers towards a dim patch of violet on the wall, a window leading out onto the twilit garden behind the house.

  They shuffled towards the light, Frankie privately terrified of the strange dark objects that touched her legs, bracing herself for something that might topple and clatter or worse, something soft, furred and warm. Eventually she felt her palm make contact with brick and realised they were beneath the window. She tried not to think of the hairy winter spiders in the outdoor privy at home as she prised open the clasp, soft with cobwebs. It was shoulder height. Milly vaulted up first. Frankie heard a little grunt and the soft crunch of feet on gravel.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not high.’

  With the window open onto the air they could hear noises from inside the house. Flesh hitting wood. Men’s shouts and women’s cries.

  ‘Give us a pull.’ Frankie thought for a moment her arms might come away from her like a marionette as she was yanked up. Scraping her feet against the brickwork she eventually managed to haul herself through the window and land just off kilter on the path. Pain shot through to her knees. She winced and bent to rub them but Milly’s eyes were wide and beckoning so she swallowed the pain and scuffled along the pathway to an untidy vegetable patch backing onto the yard of the house next door.

  They prised through fences and shimmied over two walls until they found themselves back on the corner of Kingsway. The sun had sunk; the air was thick and purple with a velvety damp to it, and painfully cold to breathe. Windows glowed in houses and shops along the road. They took a few minutes to gather their breath.

  ‘Unexpected detour,’ Frankie grumbled, bent double and finally able to rub her stinging knee.

  The footsteps that came round the corner came sharp and sudden, before either of them saw movement through the fog. The long needles of a human shadow cast onto the street, mist obscuring the face, neck and shoulders of the figure. Instinctively Frankie moved to dodge out of the way, then she heard Liam’s voice. ‘I’d say that’s not the direction you want to go in. You two and peelers, you’re inseparable.’

  She turned startled, then saw he wasn’t alone. There was someone standing beside him, concealed in the mist. Their body was all but invisible. But the shadow on the ground was unmistakable.

  ‘I’d say, in fact, it’s time we banged our heads together.’

  The pockets of fog cleared and Frankie blinked. She blinked three times. Standing next to him was Ebony Diamond.

  Forty

  Primrose had instructed the driver to make haste, but the traffic down Finchley Road was clogged with omnibuses and traders’ wagons leaving their pitches early to prepare for the fireworks. When he hit Baker Street, the sludge of cars grew even heavier, four-wheelers trotting at a stately pace and lined up outside large houses where gentlemen dressed in smart wool frock coats and gloves emerged with women in enormous furs. Clara had asked if he had wanted to go to a bonfire on Clapham Common tonight but he had suspected all along he would be working, and she wouldn’t go alone. He felt a stab of guilt that he had not yet telephoned her.

  His head was reeling with the things William Reynolds had told him. The detailed plans of the Hourglass Factory, the secret meetings Annie had snuck off to, the careful cutting up of cards for gunpowder, the mysterious old woman she met in prison who claimed to be a seamstress but whom they had never actually seen sew, the sourness of Ebony Diamond after her plans were rejected by the suffragettes. Annie Evans had been loose-tongued and trusting with her lover, the man she believed would marry her one day. And the sad thing was that Reynolds had believed it too; he had believed in a world where men could divorce the women they had married too soon, too young, too influenced by parents, and join the woman they loved now, regardless of birth or class. Deep down, Primrose reflected, they both must have known it would never happen. When hopes were frustrated and had nowhere to go, violence crystallised.

  Bow Street loomed ahead, and he ordered the car to stop so that he could run. He had telephoned Scotland Yard for back-up but Stuttlegate was nowhere to be found. Hoping he was still at Bow Street, Primrose hurried along past the rows of wagons and took the steps two at a time until he was in the warmth of the station.

  It was eerily quiet inside. The desk sergeant was typing something behind the counter, punching the keys in staccato beats.

  ‘Where is everyone?’

  The typing stopped. Ribbon shunted back to its starting position and the sergeant stood up, pulling up his waistband. ‘Don’t you know? Out raiding Lincoln’s Inn. The lot of them.’

  ‘Again? But that’s preposterous. It’s not suffragettes we’re after. Who ordered that?’

  He didn’t have to wait for the sergeant’s response. Even as the word formed in the other man’s mouth Primrose could feel it take shape in his own. ‘Stuttlegate.’

  Forty-One

  She was there, in black and white it seemed, her dark body standing out against the fog. And yet Frankie couldn’t quite fathom it. She felt as if she were looking at a ghost. All this time she had known Ebony was alive, but part of her hadn’t really grasped the notion that she had ever been real in the first place. She couldn’t quite believe that the body in front of her was flesh and blood; flesh and blood armoured in whalebone and black silk.

  She was pulled in tight from hips to bosom, her neck sweeping upwards in a high collar protecting her china throat. Her hair, though flecked with straw and pungent with the scent of the outdoors, was piled neatly on top of her head, clasped by a tiny top hat. She looked straight-backed, jut-nosed, black-eyed, red-lipped. Ready for a fight.

  When she finally spoke, her voice was rough. ‘Evening, Miss George. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep our appointment outside the Coliseum. I believe you’ve been looking for me. I’ve been staying at the circus with my father.’

  ‘Told you,’ Liam murmured. Ebony pierced him with a look.

  Not for the first time that day, Frankie’s tongue stopped fast in her mouth. The mist was beginning to permeate her clothes and make her cold and damp.

  Milly looked at them each in turn, then rushed forward and embraced Ebony loosely by the neck. Ebony flinched but accepted the hug, though her fingers only made a tentative clutch on the small of Milly’s back. ‘We were worried about you.’

  ‘I can look after myself,’ she said quietly.

  Ebony turned her eyes on Frankie and cleared her throat. ‘I’ll not say a word here.’ She raised her hand and flicked open a tarnished ring on one finger of her glove revealing a tiny ticking watch, then nodded to a public house, where bronze light glowed behind a set of double saloon doors. ‘Come on in quickly and I’ll fill you in.’

  Inside the pub, cabbies and tradesmen were drinking pints of ale out of greasy glasses; pink evening newspapers with scandalous headlines were spread all over the tables. The floor was patchy with clumps of sawdust. Ebony slid into a corner table while Liam ordered a round of porter for them all. Frankie threw her last few coins onto the table for the pot.

  They waited for Liam to come back with the cups. Ebony slurped up half of hers in a couple of gulps. ‘I’m sorry,’ she wiped her mouth with a gloved hand, smearing only slightly the rouge on her lips.

  Frankie watched her put her glass back down. ‘When did you know who she was?’

  Ebony’s eyes flicked round the room. ‘I was never sure about her from the start. I can say that now. She wasn’t right. Even in Holloway, she was a strange one. Didn’t hunger strike, didn’t seem to know anyone.’ She glanc
ed at Milly. ‘Don’t take offence by what I say.’

  Milly shrugged.

  Frankie put her hand across the table. ‘Start from the beginning. Holloway, was that where you met her?’

  Ebony nodded. ‘Of course I knew about the National Vigilance Association, I’d seen her handing out her devil pamphlets, but she wasn’t playing herself in Holloway. She was in her fancy dress from the start.’ Ebony gestured to her mouth, drawing a scarf about her lips and chin in the air. ‘Why would I have recognised her with that phossy jaw get-up on her face? Damned insult. I knew women who’d worked for the match factories.’ She sat back. ‘We’d ended up in the same Black Maria van on the way to prison. She’d obviously had her eye on the suffragette window smash I was on that night, because as soon as we’d been arrested and took off, the van stopped, and in came this bent-backed drunk woman, bundled up in her face, filthy and stinking of sherry.’

  Frankie nodded to Ebony to go on.

  ‘She was in second division for stealing, so I heard. She approached me in the exercise yard one day. Why would I have known her? Filthy woman, she had cotton tufting out her mouth. I thought then it was for the disease but it must have been to disguise her voice.’

  Milly spoke. ‘We had a gardener once when I was little whose mother had been at the match factories. She came to visit.’ Her eyes darted between the tabletop and Ebony.

  ‘Well, anyway she did a good impression. She didn’t miss a trick, though it looked like she didn’t change that bandage cloth the whole time we were inside.’

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Frankie.

  ‘She asked me if I was happy with the suffragettes, and whether I thought their violence was the right way to win votes. I said I didn’t see how else we was going to do it seeing as what had happened when Mrs Pankhurst tried to be peaceful in the truce and that. She said, well in that case, don’t you think the violence needs to be upped? This I remember; “Vitriol,” she said, “and hammers are like stones in a lake, only so effective when poured and dropped. If you want to make that splash, if you want the waters to rise up, you have to throw them hard.”