The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  A guard stepped from the hollows of New Palace Yard straight into their path, his boots crunching on the icy ground. Frankie’s breath froze.

  ‘Stop.’ He raised his palm.

  Without warning Ebony suddenly swooned towards Frankie, throwing her full weight on Frankie’s shoulder and chest. Startled, Frankie caught her just in time with a groan. The guard’s hand flew out to grab Ebony’s spare arm.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t feel well at all,’ Ebony gasped. ‘I’m . . . I’m . . .’ She clutched her belly.

  The officer took a moment to absorb her meaning, then ran his eyes up and down her corseted form and flashed Frankie a filthy look. ‘You let your wife go about dressed like that in her state?’

  Frankie felt temporarily affronted and defensive, the shock of Ebony’s improvised plan, the sudden weight of five foot six of muscular acrobat bearing down on her, and the guard’s admonishment stopping her tongue. Ebony seized the advantage. ‘Oh, I’m fine really,’ she said, making a pained show of the opposite. ‘I just need a little water, a little warmth, ow, a telephone to call our chauffeur, you wouldn’t have . . .’ She looked past his shoulder to the gate where a wooden security hut glowed in the weak glare of a bullseye lantern. ‘No, I don’t suppose. It’s just that we have to get back to Hampshire tonight, and I know our chauffeur is in the club. He’s very easily reached, he’s nearby on Whitehall, I could give you the number, I just don’t know if I can . . .’

  Frankie marvelled at the stream of sudden and convincing drivel trailing effortlessly from Ebony’s mouth. Seeing the guard’s hesitation, she dropped the timbre of her own voice. It came out not quite as low as she had hoped, more like an effeminate Harry Tripe than a man whose chauffeur visited clubs on Whitehall. ‘Darling, don’t let’s trouble this man. You’ve taken turns before.’

  The guard’s head wavered, then turned towards his hut for a second. Then he said, ‘Come on inside, there’s an office. One of the sergeants will be happy to telephone on your behalf. What name should I . . . ?’ He pulled Ebony’s upper arm a little too forcefully away from Frankie and began leading them past the Westminster Palace entrance.

  ‘Hawkins,’ Frankie said quickly, noticing that cries and heavy footfall were coming from inside the courtyard, where Liam had stolen the guard’s keys. ‘Mr and Mrs Theodore Hawkins.’

  The guard glanced over at his colleagues bustling round the gates. ‘Very well.’ With breathless efficiency he marched them out of New Palace Yard and along the length of the narrow gothic building. Ebony took the liberty of peeking over her shoulder at Frankie, who had been subtly manhandled to the rear of the party. They turned a corner signposting the Sergeant-at-Arms’s residence, passing another security hut where a guard quickly tucked away a newspaper as they approached. They filed through a concealed unlocked door straight into the building.

  ‘We’ve been having a bit of trouble tonight,’ he apologised as they walked an echoing corridor. ‘Some nonsense about women and bombs. I told them, there’s no chance anyone’s getting in here that doesn’t belong, we’ve got as many guards as there are politicians. Still, we have to be on alert.’ He paused as they approached a cubby office. From underneath the wooden door came a thin streak of gold light. He knocked twice and the door opened inwards smartly. Still loosely clasping Ebony’s arm the guard poked his head inside and said, ‘Here governor, I’ve got a woman in a – delicate condition, taken a funny turn. I don’t suppose . . .’ He didn’t finish his non-supposition.

  Ebony stuck her hand into the room, grabbed the man’s waist and pulled on his keys so hard the fabric of his breeches ripped. His hands dashed to his belt.

  ‘Bag,’ Ebony blurted.

  Frankie whipped it open. Ebony shouldered the man into the little cubby and slammed the door by its brass handle, leaning her full weight away from it, her muscles bulging through the silk of her dress. She slicked the key into the lock and turned it. ‘Rope,’ she barked.

  Frankie up-ended the bag and a long snake of rope tumbled to the ground. She picked it up and watched Ebony thread it round the bulbous handle and across the short corridor they stood in, until it reached the handle of the door opposite. She looped it across both handles twice, weathering the tugs and bangs from within the cubby, then bit her gloves off one by one, and worked the ends into a knot with mechanical speed. She was breathing heavily now with the exertion. Frankie stood by, her eyes bulging.

  ‘There’s a knife in that bag, pass me it, will you.’

  Frankie dipped her hand into the bag and scrabbled at the bottom until she came upon a small hard bone handle. She tossed it to Ebony who trimmed the ends off the rope quickly. Ebony squeezed her hands over the knots, nodded and breathed out, then tucked the knife into her waistband.

  Frankie realised her heart had shot up to a gallop. She tried to control her breathing. The door of the cubby thumped and rattled but each time the two men inside pulled on it, they tautened their rope.

  ‘Come on, let’s find Liam,’ Ebony moved off into the darkness of the marble-floored corridor, frowning as a fresh set of violent jolts shot through the door and onto her cat’s cradle prison.

  Forty-Three

  Lady Thorne had selected red for the occasion. It was no use hiding it from the girls any more, not since the embarrassment of Ebony Diamond’s discovery, and not since she had set her mind that the best disguise for their purpose was to waltz in, in full view of the guards. A full red cloak of the nicest, most luxurious wool. And ‘red for the workers’. She had managed a wink at the girls in the carriage parked on Victoria Embankment when she said that.

  Now she wished they would watch their feet on the carpet outside the Lords’ chamber. It was a plush pile and had been there since Victoria’s early days on the throne. She could remember standing on it as a girl, her palm in her father’s, fascinated by the patterns on it that looked like goblin’s faces. She had stood there many times since too.

  A known opponent of the women’s movement.

  A known figure of the utmost propriety.

  A known warrior against vice and intemperance.

  A devoted wife picking up some papers from her husband’s office.

  The sergeant on the door to the House of Lords had slammed the door in her face at first. Orders to be on the look-out for suffragettes. Then as if she was Black Rod himself he had peered through the hatch and let her in, apologising and ‘yes ma’aming’ and keening his head like a whelp that had piddled in the parlour.

  The fact that she had not one but four of her ladies-in-waiting (sorry-looking courtiers though they were) only served to emphasise the importance of her mission at this late hour, and her dedication as Lord Thorne’s wife. And besides, she wanted to show the poor wide-eyed lambs inside the House. A charitable woman of the utmost propriety.

  Her hand hardened its clutch on the bag, partly to stop the ceramic cases from chinking against one another, partly to remind her why she was here, in the presence of four creatures who disgusted her. In the high gold-leafed corridor leading to the Lords’ chamber she took stock of their faces like a grocer counting his cabbages on the shelves. Tilly Westcott, a fat furious little woman with poxed skin and blistered fingers who had worked in the match factories at the time of the strikes and still carried a terrible sulphurous smell about her. Victoria, ‘Vicky’ Crook, a keen snub-nosed willow who had started out fighting off black-leg labour on behalf of the trade unions and ended up fighting anyone she could get her fists on. Sue Milkfield, a brainless, breathless desperate sheep in curls and rags. And Danielle Boyd, a girl who had bullied her way through every workhouse in London and who hated the world with a bitterness that Lady Thorne found admirable.

  She had given them ways to channel their anger, beyond any of their dreams.

  She found herself thoroughly relieved that the two disenchanted suffragettes Annie Evans and Ebony Diamond had been disposed of. They had mouths on them. They asked too many questions. They wanted answers for their a
ctions, political ends. They did not simply hate.

  And Lady Thorne knew how deeply hate could run in your veins and how powerfully it could stamp on every nerve in you if you let it. That look on her wretched daughter’s face, that awful creature, half-man half-woman who stood before her outside her own house today cemented it: as if she needed any more reminders that the blood in her, the blood that had come from her had turned to muck in a single generation. Her heart, which had already spread over with a leather crust, turned as hard as marrow and, like a marrow, began to rot from the inside.

  Millicent might have thought it was a joke to humiliate her family by marrying in Egypt, and then to twist the knife further by casting herself as meat in a vice-show. Millicent might have thought it was funny that girls disobeyed their mother’s orders and ran off to London and had their own latchkeys and squandered their fortunes and, worst of all, befriended the wretched new-monied Americans who had been flooding London for the past decade. Millicent had thought it amusing to put her fingers in the groin of a vegetable boy. But she hadn’t witnessed her grandfather, Lady Thorne’s own father, put a rifle in his mouth in the garden shed after the land redistribution acts, death duties and new land taxes lost him half his estate, half his workers. She hadn’t heard the awful sound of gunmetal on teeth, and then the blowing of the whole world to bits. That was what happened when the classes mixed, when you gave the workers an inch of power and they took a mile.

  Twenty years ago to the day. But the hour for commemoration, the time for anniversaries, churchyard vigils, was past.

  What they would do tonight would be so horrific it would stitch a fear as thick as catgut into the soul of England, so that no suffragists, trade unionists, no women or collective workers would ever be allowed such free rein again to meet, to plot or even to exist. The Lords would take back what was theirs by birth. And she would use the workers to do it.

  Frankie caught pace with Ebony quickly in the gloomy corridor. As they walked, Ebony surveyed the leftover rope in her hands. ‘I hope there’s enough.’ She lengthened her stride and Frankie found herself puffing to keep up. They passed ornate doorways leading to libraries and offices, tapestries and sculptures. Every shadow on the wall, every wood or marble carving made Frankie start, her heart quiver. Just as the corridor was beginning to look as if it would never end, Ebony turned sharply into a side lobby.

  In front of them stood a pair of glass-panelled doors. Frankie raised herself to her tip-toes and peered through. Beyond the doors lay a sumptuous lobby, illuminated in weak electric lighting. Benches lined the walls, statues protruded from the floor, carved from chalk-white marble, their curves glowing faintly in the light. Quickly trying to orient herself from the plans and the direction they had walked in, she deduced that they were outside the famous octagonal lobby, the Central Hall, Peers entrance on one side, Commons on the other.

  She turned back to see that Ebony had begun taking off her skirts, and felt a blush rise. Ebony noticed and scoffed a laugh. ‘Convent school, was it?’ Her small scarlet mouth wove into a wicked smile.

  Frankie didn’t know where to look so made herself useful, taking the rope off Ebony as she stashed her mound of underskirts behind a cabinet. Her legs were clad in black stockings, the upper parts covered by loose black bloomers. She discarded her hat and tightened her hairpins. ‘Are you ready for this, because you’re going to have to hold tight, you see? If you want to get close enough for the shot.’

  Frankie nodded and swallowed a trickle of nerves. She peered through the glass pane again and thought she saw a shadow moving behind one of the doors.

  ‘Ebony,’ she murmured, ‘look.’

  Ebony had to stand on tiptoes to see through the window and Frankie only then realised she had taken off her heeled shoes. Her frame was suddenly miniature without them.

  ‘If they’re coming in, it’ll be through the Peers entrance, through there, won’t it?’

  Ebony squinted then dropped to her heels. ‘Don’t want them to see us before we catch them.’

  ‘But we need to find Liam. If he came in via Westminster Palace . . .’ Frankie pulled out her notebook and looked at the skew-lined sketch she had made, then tried to fit it back into the plan she had seen. ‘Come on, I think I know a way.’

  Doubling back on themselves, they moved further along the stone-floored corridor. Footsteps rained down from somewhere but they kept going until they reached a crossroads. Ebony, only wearing stockings, barely made a sound and Frankie wondered if this was how she had clambered into the rafters of the Albert Hall, all those months ago.

  Frankie gestured ahead. ‘I think we’re going to come out at a cloister.’

  ‘Won’t there be guards? Or locked doors?’

  She let out her breath. ‘Shit.’

  ‘If we go left here, we’ll end up back . . .’

  ‘Oi, suffragettes.’ A whisper in the dark sent a shock though Frankie’s skin. Then she noted the accent and slowly turned.

  Liam was grinning like a wolf, a Swan Vesta held up to light his freckled nose and cheeks. Frankie snatched it from his hand and stamped on it. ‘Don’t waste those or we’ll have none for the flash. Where is it?’ She raised a discreet hand to still the thudding in her chest while Liam rooted in his pockets, pulling out the corked bottle and cardboard box.

  ‘You see what happened to Milly?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Aye, they took her.’

  ‘Probably for the best,’ Frankie murmured.

  Ebony had already pulled open the gilded door ahead of them, leading to another holding corridor. She clicked her fingers for the carpet bag. Frankie tossed it to her. Carefully, she withdrew the rope and wooden beam of her trapeze and began checking over the knots, threading them closer, joining them up with the spare rope she had cut earlier. Frankie took the bag back and rooted for her camera, slung it across her shoulder and slid it round her back. She withdrew the metal flash pan from her pocket and held it loosely in her hand. It had a strange forbidding smell, burnt metal and chemicals.

  Liam swung the door quietly behind them and they traipsed along the corridor, a thinner one than before, darker, until they reached a set of stairs. ‘Can we get all the way round from here?’ Frankie asked.

  ‘We want the Ladies’ Gallery.’ Ebony wedged a measure of rope into her mouth and looped the rest round her shoulders.

  Frankie stopped. ‘Why the ladies’?’

  ‘Has the grate.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, no, they took that away. Suffragettes chained themselves to it.’

  Ebony pulled the rope from her teeth momentarily. ‘They put it back. We can rope to it, it’s the safest way. It’ll hold.’ She spread her mouth into a smile, one that crept for the first time into her eyes. ‘It’ll be fine. You just have to hang on.’

  Frankie followed her up the stairs, watching the curvature of her form underneath the black clothing. When they reached the top landing she gestured to Liam for the bottle and the box of guncotton.

  ‘Guncotton first.’ He opened the box and Frankie reached across and teased out a small measure. ‘Magnesium.’

  He grunted and took the bung from the bottle with his teeth.

  ‘Can you have a match handy, not struck, just ready with a surface to strike it on, so when I need it it’s there?’

  ‘Peck, peck peck. Can you just trust me?’

  ‘All right, don’t start an argument now.’

  ‘I’m not arguing, you’d argue with a crocodile you would.’

  ‘Well just as well you’re not . . .’ She stopped when she saw that Ebony had pinned open the upper staircase door with her foot and was waiting for them. The light was even bleaker; Frankie could only just make out Ebony’s silhouette six feet away. She suddenly flashed back to the sight of her on stage, spiralling through the air, hanging from her perch, and felt a wave of vertigo, a longing more than anything to make their mission a success, to prove she too could do something right. She dropped the camera case an
d hopped the last few steps to join Ebony.

  ‘You’ll want to take off your shoes,’ Ebony whispered. ‘You’ll need all the grip you can get.’

  They had found themselves in a corridor, where a carved finger pointed them to the Ladies’ Gallery.

  ‘Go down to the Reporters’ benches, it’s along and down a couple of those steps. I’m going to rig this from inside and I’ll join you.’

  Frankie obeyed and led Liam along to a sign that guided them to the press entrance. As soon as she pulled open the door, the scent of leather and furniture polish drifted up from the chamber below, and another smell lurking beneath it, pomade perhaps, or tobacco. The chamber was completely black, the air chilled and stifling, all warmth sucked into the hardwood reporter’s seats. She wondered briefly if Teddy Hawkins had ever sat his bottom on one of those seats. Behind them, she could just make out the weaving gothic lattices of the Ladies’ Gallery grille, the shape of a rope being fed through it. She quickly moved to the grille and took the ends of the ropes until they were through.

  Though there was still no light, she thought she could detect a sound below, a scratching like mice, and waved at Liam to get down.

  Without warning a naked hand landed cold on her shoulder. She flinched and just caught the gasp that tried to escape her, then breathed in poudre d’amour and found herself looking up at Ebony’s white round face. Ebony had taken off her gloves. A puff of powder flew off her fingers and Frankie was hit by the smell again.

  At that moment came a clatter and hiss, the striking of a match in the chamber below. A hurricane lamp swelled into a glow in the distance down behind the Speaker’s chair. A portion of the green parliamentary benches lit up, and the sight Frankie beheld sent ice into her veins.

  She had expected chaos. Women with their eyes ablaze, mad with passion, tossing pear-shaped bombs about like zookeepers flinging meat to lions. She had expected demons and hell. What she saw instead was three women, so hard at work, so concentrated on the intimacy of the task they were completing, they had barely noticed the light of the fourth go on. The scratching Frankie took for mice was the rip and pierce of leather, as each woman took a pair of tiny thread scissors and neatly sliced a line into the centre of a green bench. With quiet diligence she saw each of them take from their knapsacks a plump bomb, insert it into the slice, with the detonator pointing ceilingwards, and stitch it closed with a hard twine needle. Frankie’s eyes raked the room for Lady Thorne; she saw Ebony do the same, but neither could see her. Then the shrill scrape of a door on a wooden floor underneath made them sit up. Ebony clutched Frankie’s arm and gestured for her to take off her jacket.