The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  Stark’s eyes looked even piggier and puffier than usual, brutally torn, as they had been, from his supper by telephone and summoned back to the office. He reached for the crust of his whisky glass with a ranging wandering hand, keeping his eyes on the two figures sat on the other side of his desk. Each radiated an aura of wanting to tear at the other’s flesh like dogs.

  Frankie gave Teddy Hawkins’s soft pout a sidelong glance. He was chewing his mouth in a roundabout way, the way cattle chew cud. In his hand he held a wafting sheet of flimsy covered in type. She held in hers the stiff paper of two photographs, so freshly set from the dark room that the smell of developing chemicals was still on them. On the first photograph, the one on top, the bald eyes of Lady Thorne gaped at her from the afterlife. The flash had made a white smear of her face but the features were still distinguishable above a black swoop of cape, like a bird’s wingspan, and so was the terrible expression of blind hatred. The other picture was dimmer but she had caught the faces of two of the women, twisted round from their work on the benches. The details were too dark to make out but cuts and shapes were visible on the leather.

  Frankie shifted her hips, freshly aware of the pain in the small of her back, that one of the women from the ladies’ page had just dressed with lavender oil while she waited for the photographs. The smell reminded her of Mrs Gibbons and of her mother’s paper. In her lap her blotter shifted, and she let her brown eyes fall down, gazing through tangled lashes at her scribbled notes. She cursed the time she had spent in the developing room. Damn Teddy for being such a quickhand typist, although she suspected that he had dictated to one of the ladies on the Remington machines and she hated him even more for it.

  The stalemate silence continued while Mr Stark fondled his crusty glass and Teddy chewed his invisible cud and Frankie flicked her eyes here and there and watched Nobby silently cut a length of tape from the juddering machine.

  The telephone on Stark’s desk rang; his hand jumped on it. He barked a staccato conversation, a pattern of pauses and short ‘yes’s.

  Underneath, Teddy Hawkins spat in a low voice, ‘I had almost garnered some respect for you, Miss George.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it would have been a one-way passage so at least you’ve not wasted any effort,’ she spat back. She twisted and her burns stung again. Stark saw her mouth open in pain and snapped his hand into a fist to shut her up.

  She leaned back on her chair, and thought of Milly standing staring at Westminster Abbey. Would anyone have taken her home? Stark slapped the receiver onto its hook and she snapped out of it.

  ‘I don’t want a word out of you pair.’ His hand crept slowly to his face and he pulled his palm down from forehead to chin, as if he might stretch his skin off. Frankie noticed that he had left a little trail of whisky crust from his fingers on his cheeks. ‘What happened tonight didn’t happen.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Don’t interrupt, Miss George.’

  ‘But that’s—’

  ‘Until you hear what I have to say.’

  He clicked his fingers at Nobby who understood the signal and reached for the decanter of scotch in the desk drawer. Stark poured himself a lengthy measure then fumbled under the desk and produced two cups, smeared around the rim with thumbprints of ink. He filled one up for Teddy Hawkins and handed it over. ‘Miss George?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  Stark looked blankly at her for a second as if he had expected her to decline, then dripped a mean portion into the cup. The rim tasted chemical but she gulped it down gratefully and opened her mouth to let the heat wear off her throat.

  ‘It seems the wife of our publisher, Lord Thorne, was not a well woman. I understand from the sources quoted in your piece, Teddy,’ he nodded to the thin paper in Hawkins’s hand, ‘that there was cause to call certain members of the Special Branch police force to deal with an incident in which she became,’ he averted his eyes, ‘rather distressed before taking her own life.’

  Frankie made to get up from her chair.

  ‘Miss George, sit down.’

  She slunk her hands back along the weathered wooden arms. Stark stared forcefully at her and in his tone and his stony twitching jaw she could tell he liked the turn of events as little as she did. ‘Following a course of treatment in Biarritz—’

  ‘She wasn’t in Biarritz, she was in Holloway prison pretending to be a seamstress, rallying those girls to do unspeakable—’

  ‘Following a course of psychoanalysis, Lady Thorne was unfortunately discharged inappropriately early—’

  ‘You ask Annie Evans. Oh you can’t, she’s dead as doornails. You could ask Ebony Diamond but she’s—’ She broke off and couldn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘Miss George.’

  ‘They weren’t throwing those bombs about like madwomen, they weren’t trying to destroy the building, you didn’t see them, I did. They were stitching them into the chairs. Murderers, cold-blooded, they wanted to see politicians blown to bits through the arse. I don’t think you understand—’

  ‘Miss George, if you can’t be quiet I’ll have you removed from the building.’

  Frankie clenched her hand and picked at a cut, hoping the distraction of the pain would help to curtail her brewing rage.

  ‘And watch your language. Ebony Diamond had nothing to do with tonight’s events and her disappearance from the Coliseum that night had nothing to do with tonight’s events, as Mr Hawkins’s article attests. She was in trouble with Oswald Stoll.’

  Teddy Hawkins raised his hand from the chair arm and slid it in an ugly pantomime of tenderness onto Frankie’s arm. ‘Mr Stark has a point,’ he said. She gritted her teeth to resist flinching.

  Stark shook his head, wobbling his jowls. ‘She wasn’t at the Houses tonight.’

  Frankie opened her mouth.

  ‘She wasn’t at the Houses. And neither were you.’ He massaged his throat and took another swallow of whisky. ‘A sick old lady became caught in the crossfire of a nasty plot. A sick old lady was picking up some papers for her loving husband and encountered a scene of violence that upset her a great deal. This paper is delighted the perpetrators have been caught and will be brought to justice,’ he caught her offguard, bringing his whisky glass down on the desk so sharply she braced herself for it to shatter. ‘She’s nothing but a sick old lady—’

  ‘Sick’s the word.’

  ‘Lord Thorne, this paper’s owner, your boss, my boss,’ he pointed a thick finger at his own chest, ‘would agree. Sick is the word. And he won’t have his family dragged through Fleet Street muck because of it.’

  And then Frankie remembered and felt a sting of deep foolishness. Milly had mentioned her father worked in newspapers. She knew the name Thorne, and how could she not have recognised the fine nose and high cheekbones of the man she sat opposite that day in the Savage Club? She let out a short involuntary groan.

  ‘You might well make that noise, Miss George, but I’m afraid you have to hand over the photographs.’

  Frankie set her lips stubbornly. Four days, four deaths. Annie Evans, Olivier Smythe, Lady Thorne and the blunt shot she had heard in the Houses of Parliament. Her back was singing like an angry opera. And Ebony . . . it didn’t bear thinking about. She sat up straight. ‘I’m taking it elsewhere then. You leave us no option. Mr Hawkins and I will work together.’ She turned her eyes on Teddy. He left off massaging his lips and crossed and uncrossed his legs but said nothing.

  ‘Frankie, you can’t,’ Mr Stark said softly. ‘Thorne owns half of Fleet Street and the bits he doesn’t own he’s got lawyers on like dogs. You’d be destroyed as a journalist. Just write it off.’

  He could see the wildness rise in her.

  ‘I’ll give you some hard news stories, in the future. You can have your column back.’

  ‘I saw inside the corset shop where they planned it all. We handed the plans over to the police. Parliament, the House of Commons, don’t you care at all about publishing the truth, something th
at—’ she stopped herself, seeing a look pass between the two men.

  Teddy Hawkins uncrossed his legs awkwardly.

  ‘They had a bomb factory in Olivier Smythe’s corset shop. She, Lady Thorne, she went to prison, disguised as a seamstress, she copied a suffragette, Constance Lytton, only she didn’t want to help working women, she wanted to trick them. I saw it and there was a diagram plan of the House of Commons with distances measured on it.’ She trailed off again as a frosty blanket of silence descended over the room. The Reuters machine rattled on and Nobby quietly cut the paper.

  Teddy Hawkins was gazing out of the window, his eyebrows raised. After a while he spoke. ‘As I say in my report,’ he gestured to the flimsy in his hand, ‘Lady Thorne stumbled upon something that startled her and she committed suicide.’ He pronounced ‘suicide’ as ‘siewicide’ and it nearly toppled Frankie’s anger over the edge. What was it she had thought about Ebony, Milly and Twinkle, what core of survival, what triumph ran through those women? They fought for themselves. They made the world work for them.

  Teddy Hawkins let his breath out like a horse and Stark leaned forward.

  Frankie cast her eyes between them both again and raised a finger at the machine in the corner. Nobby, who had been staring, quickly looked away. ‘I’ll take it to Reuters. Even if no paper on Fleet Street will touch the story, they’ll wire it elsewhere. Overseas. I’ll see Lady Thorne named, and there’s nothing that you can do.’

  ‘You can’t have the plates. For the photograph. That camera belongs to me, to this newspaper.’

  ‘How did we ever manage before photographs?’ she said bitterly, standing and letting the images on her lap flop onto the floor. Teddy, startled by the sudden movement, jumped from his chair as Lady Thorne’s blurred face fluttered towards him.

  ‘Miss George. This will be the death of your career.’ Stark cleared his throat heavily as if he was trying to purge his own doubt out of it. ‘Lord Thorne is a powerful man.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Hawkins said. ‘No one will believe her anyway. There’s enough gin in her veins to drown a rat.’

  ‘Yes they will. You forget, Teddy, I’ve got my own police snitches now.’

  And as she slammed the door, sending a rattle through the Reuters machine that she could hear even as she went down the stairs, she thought of Ebony Diamond closing her eyes against a sky lit up and smoked with fireworks. And she thought of the man on the gurney being wheeled into an ambulance, with his chest torn open and his mouth repeating over and over the name ‘Clara’. The man who had given her back her camera, as if to say that he trusted her to tell the truth.

  Epilogue

  Derby Day, Epsom Race Course, 4 June 1913

  And there is Twinkle at the bandstand, sticking her pink arm into the air so that the lemon silk of her sleeve falls away, flapping her hand furiously. Frankie shudders and smiles and waves back, gesturing that she is making her way over. She had intended to take Milly to the races on her press card but Milly doesn’t return her letters or telegrams any more and someone on the Ladies’ Page of the Pall Mall Gazette said that she heard at a debutante’s ball that the Honourable Ms Millicent has gone away to France.

  That’s just like Milly, Frankie thinks. Charming Paris senseless in harem pants and sequins, as if nothing more troublesome than a dinner party indiscretion had sent her packing. She imagines her from time to time, sitting on a lionskin rug in front of some Montmartre hearth, and wonders who her friends are now and how she makes her money, and what she tells them about her past.

  Lord Thorne has sold up half his shares in newspapers and become a silent partner on the rest. Occasionally Frankie hears the second-hand tattle from the Savage Club when she’s in the Cheshire Cheese, and knows that even though Reuters made her change the names ‘on grounds of national security,’ word spread sufficiently around both the peerage and parliament. The piece was wired out that night and made the next day’s afternoon editions, once police sources were called in and details checked. ‘Parliament attacked from within’, The Times; ‘False Flag operation planned by prominent Noble to pin blame on Suffragettes’, The Manchester Guardian; ‘Mad Aristo Dead in Guy Fawkes Plot’, The News of the World. The headlines and the words belong to each paper, but the story is hers. Frankie is proud of the growing pile of news clippings adorning her new lodgings in Camden Town, although today she is slightly sore that she has been sent to cover the Derby for the Reuters’ sports wires. True, the King’s horse is running, but it is small pickings compared to Teddy Hawkins who has, if rumours are to be believed, been sent to Bristol by Mr Stark to meet a polar explorer who has just spent three years marooned off Spitzbergen living on pickled shoe leather. Once again his scoop will be front page and hers will sneak in anonymously between the back two leaves of any number of newspapers.

  A flash of colour catches her side vision and she sees a woman marching across the grass, with a short flap of fabric escaping from the lining of her jacket as if it has been pinned to the inside. The bright shades stand out immediately among the pastel crowd: Green White Violet – ‘Give Women Votes.’ Frankie clocks her straight away for a suffragette.

  Fashions are changing. Ladies’ waists are growing thicker, Frankie thinks with satisfaction, and more and more of them are ditching their huge Merry Widow hats for head-clinging cloches. Twinkle, of course, is up in arms about this and has come up with a word to try and discourage its spread: mannification. She still claims she would rather die of consumption than live to see women wear trousers in public, and insists on cramming herself into hobble skirts and taxidermied hats. Today her headwear features a woodland scene with three blind mice and a small porcelain woman brandishing a carving knife.

  Frankie watches the suffragette as she strides. She is a lanky beautiful Amazon, and there is such nervous determination in her march that for a second the earth crumbles beneath Frankie and she sees Ebony Diamond, clear as a mirage, her shadow materialising on the wall of Mr Smythe’s corset shop, then hurling Lady Thorne’s brooch at him. She hasn’t thought of Ebony for a long time but she has a picture of her, secreted from an old poster at Jojo’s that she keeps in a slit of silk, cut with nail scissors into the back of her Blickensderfer case.

  The moment unsettles her and makes her wonder for a moment if the suffragette will cause some kind of a scene. They have been increasing their attacks again lately: acid on golf courses, paintings slashed in public galleries, sometimes bombs set off in deserted buildings.

  She looks over at Twinkle, seeing her leaning against the green bandstand rail, and panic takes hold, and she feels a tweak in her back and remembers the inside of the chapel, and a residual fear she has been left with slides like cold egg yolk down the back of her throat.

  But nothing will happen with the suffragette. Not today, not while there are crowds. Mrs Pankhurst has been keen to inform every newspaper on Fleet Street that suffragettes will never endanger human life except their own. Surely it can only be a matter of time before they are granted what they fight for. Frankie is certain of it, weeks, months at most.

  Before Frankie reaches Twinkle, two more figures catch her attention, both making for the edge of the starting post. She recognises the brown woollen suit and stiff wide shoulders of Inspector Primrose – he had told her he would be at the races – and she sticks two fingers in her mouth to give a shrill whistle. He twitches his head a few times then locks eyes with her and as he moves to lift his hat she sees that the woman with him has a full pregnant belly pushing out through the fine linen of her pale pink dress. Frankie is embarrassed to have summoned him in such a common way in front of his wife, but she can’t help crack a grin, showing the gap next to her canine tooth and he nods, albeit reservedly, and turns back to his wife, whose name Frankie can’t remember although it begins with C.

  And now the gunshot has ripped into the sunny sky and the horses are off and Twinkle is impatiently snapping her fingers at Frankie to hurry up. Frankie trots the last few step
s, leaping up the bandstand railings to join Twinkle, and they lean over, watching the horses fill the air with slow thunder. People are bent forward, tense, shouting out names, waving their betting cards in the air. The cavalcade pounds round the faraway loop at the end of the course, heading back towards the crowds to finish in front of the Royal Box. Suddenly, through the tremor of hooves on turf and the cries of the crowd comes another sound, a single voice so loud it’s hard to tell if it comes from man or woman. A blur of green, white and purple is moving fast across the field, the tall woman clinging to her suffragette flag; first she is scurrying low under the race barrier, then striding high, then standing broad, reaching for the King’s horse as its whites widen round its eyes and its hooves approach, heading straight for her, making the earth shake.

  Historical Note

  While The Hourglass Factory is set against the struggle for women’s votes, it is a work of fiction, and I have frequently altered, fudged and made honest mistakes with history to suit the story.

  There are however true events and people that formed the basis for particular parts of the book, and I’d like to jot a few of them down as it’s my great hope that the story will pique a curiosity in some readers about this turbulent, shocking and inspiring time. Any historical mistakes made in The Hourglass Factory are not a reflection on the excellent sources below but are mine alone.

  Ebony’s Albert Hall leap was – as Twinkle notes – inspired by a suffragette named Isabel Kelley, who broke into Dundee’s Kinnaird Hall via a skylight during a political meeting from which women were barred. I read about this and many more of the suffragettes’ more radical activities in a book called The Militant Suffragettes (1973) by Antonia Raeburn. Other great suffragette reads are the Pankhurst sisters’ books, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (1959) by Christabel Pankhurst, and The Suffragette Movement (1911) by E. Sylvia Pankhurst, which details the ghastly violence of Black Friday. Constance Lytton’s diary is available online – although I was privileged to hold the original at the National Archives – and describes not only her heroic attempts to expose the prison authorities’ double standards over treatment of women from different classes, but also gives a chilling verbatim account of force-feeding. Speaking of verbatim, I used several of Emmeline Pankhurst’s speeches (sometimes anachronistically) when putting words into her mouth during her interview with Primrose. I hope her spirit will forgive me for taking this liberty but I wanted to convey as accurately as possible her position on violence, and this seemed to be the best way. For this I consulted period newspaper sources, but my additional suffragette research also included Votes For Women: The Virago Book of Suffragettes (2000) ed. Joyce Marlow, The Suffragettes In Pictures (1996) by Diane Atkinson, and Vindication: A Postcard History of the Woman’s Movement (1995) by Ian McDonald, all fantastic reads.