The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  ‘I know Mrs Salter wouldn’t allow it. And my family would never forgive me.’

  ‘Fine.’ He brushes a curl from his forehead. ‘In that case, you would have enough tin for an attic of your own. There’s a place on Charlotte Street for women, quite respectable, for two shillings a week. You’d make that in two hours. In time, you might make more money through your own art. But perhaps you won’t do it.’

  Her thoughts flash – Rose and the burnt paintings, the china spaniel, the sound of her sister’s piss hitting the basin.

  And then she pictures a small attic room, her own chamber pot. A little piece of privacy. More: painting every day, surrounded by artists. Her own picture hanging in the Royal Academy. She takes a feather off a shelf and toys with it.

  ‘I understand,’ Louis says at last. ‘Not everyone cares enough for art to make sacrifices for it. I can hardly blame you for that. I’ll find another Queen, though I do find it a shame for the sake of your painting.’

  ‘No!’ Iris bursts out, and everything in her, everything yearns to stay in this room. It is as if there is an anchor within her that holds her in place, that makes her want to plead, Do not let me go! Not now, not ever! Just let me stay here.

  ‘You will do it?’

  She has never had the luxury of choice before, never felt she has had a right to steer her own life. It makes her feel bilious. She thinks of the oily porter, the future stews, red-cracked hands from labour, and then this. Another life. Painting. And Louis.

  She nods so slightly it is almost imperceptible, and then presses her hands together. ‘Yes, yes, I will. And you will teach me to paint?’

  ‘I promise.’

  They discuss the finer details: her resignation, how Clarissa will make enquiries at the women’s boarding house, a tentative start date in a week. He helps her gather up her shawl and bonnet, and her fingers will not make sense of the buttons of her gloves.

  When she steps out of the front door, the air is cold and her breath plumes. She hears a window opening, and she looks up.

  ‘Farewell, dear Queenie!’ Louis calls, and Iris laughs.

  As she walks down the street, she tries to disguise her stoop. It is difficult to move without bending her figure to one side because the marble hand is heavy. At least he won’t consider her a delicate little thing any longer. She suppresses a smile.

  ‘À bientot!’

  Iris waves.

  ‘Oh, beg pardon,’ she says, knocking into a passer-by.

  Iris’s joy, that warmth within her, curdles.

  ‘Rose – I—’

  Anger has stiffened her sister, made her lift her chin when usually she keeps it bowed and furtive. Her hands are white, her nose red from the chill of waiting outside.

  ‘I hope your gentleman paid you well,’ she says, and her voice is a knife.

  A Pair of Letters

  32 Belgrave Square, London

  FIFTH JANUARY 1851

  Dear Mr. Reed,

  I write on behalf of the Great Exhibition Commission, London Local Committee, with particular regards to your correspondence both to us and Stoke-on-Trent Local Committee on 16th June, 27th July, 18th August, 8th September, 29th September – &c. &c. Forgive the delay in this reply; as I am sure you must appreciate, we have received several thousand applications, particularly considering the scale of our ever-expanding metropolis, and Stoke-on-Trent’s position as a fine manufacturing capital.

  We are interested in displaying your ‘Lepidoptera Window’ in Class XIX, ‘Tapestry, Lace and Embroidery’, provided you can confirm you are its Inventor and Manufacturer, and are willing to loan your work for the duration of the Exhibition. To confirm its suitability, it will be necessary for you to bring your product to my residence, as a member of the London Local Committee, on the forenoon of the 8th of the month at 32 Belgrave Square, London. This urgent availability has arisen due to a number of inventors being unable to complete their works to schedule.

  In addition to a sample of your product, please also bring a brief maker’s statement which should summarize the labour involved and any thematic intent. For example, item number 218 is described as follows: ‘Table-cover, consisting of 2,000 pieces of cloth, arranged into 23 historical and imagined characters. The design and execution is the sole work of the exhibitor, and has occupied his leisure hours for 18 years.’

  Respectfully,

  Thomas Filigree

  Committee Member of London Local Committee, Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations Commission

  Seabright Street

  JANUARY 7TH

  Dear Iris,

  We were most upset following your visit yesterday, and your resolve to leave your satisfactory position at Mrs Salter’s. Indeed, we rue your choice and beg you (in the strongest possible terms) to reconsider. It is not too late. We believe you have been hideously misled, tricked into a course which you cannot wish to take.

  We remain firm in our decision. We have done all we can for you, provided education beyond the station of your life, assisted you in your apprenticeship and paid the fee for this with no complaint, brought you up honest and with a strong Christian bearing, introduced a possible match in a most respectable profession (whose advances we needlessly say will cease on discovering your voluntary ruin), and are injured by the way in which you repay such kindnesses.

  We ask you, when you are ruined, to whom will you turn? We mourn it. We mourn for your sister, whose own chances will be lowered more than ever by your disgrace. At least consider her, she who has already suffered so much.

  If you alter your course before the morrow, we say, we will forgive all, and we vow never to discuss it, never to remind you of how close you came to imperilling yourself & your reputation & future. But if you choose otherwise, you leave your place in this family and may never resume it.

  We return the advance payment received from your new ‘employer’. You may keep these tainted coins.

  “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.”

  We pray you will find your way and become our daughter once more.

  Your loving,

  Father and Mother

  Robin

  ‘Please, sister,’ Rose says. It is the evening before Iris has to leave, and Rose’s face trembles with the effort not to cry. Iris’s few clothes are folded in a small bag in the corner, a chill reminder that this is their last night together.

  ‘Please,’ she says again.

  As Iris’s resolve has hardened, Rose’s haughtiness has given way, finally, to this pleading. Stop it, Iris wants to say, and she longs to provoke an argument which would ease the parting and the guilt which has even muted her appetite. She notices her sister’s fingernails, bitten until they’ve bled. Rose is staring at the bag as if willing it to unpack itself, for Iris’s spare petticoat to tuck itself into the chest of drawers, her grey linen dress to drape itself on to its hook by the door, next to Rose’s own.

  ‘I’ll buy you new paints, if only . . .’

  Iris says nothing, just fastens the last turn of her plait and climbs into bed beside her twin. The horsehair scratches her leg. She runs her palms over the mattress. ‘Where’s that—’ she says, her agitation rising. ‘That damned hair – it scratches me every night. Every night! Where is it?’ and she pummels the bedding, surprised to find herself so close to tears.

  Rose leans over, grips a small black speck and pulls it out.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ Iris says, embarrassed, but her outburst has had the effect of making anger permissible, and Rose speaks so suddenly, so passionately, that Iris knows how long she must have been stalling her words.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Rose says.

  ‘Don’t understand what?’ Iris says, with the same quick vehemence, and she finds herself relishing this final confrontation, needling it.

  ‘I wish I could make you see it,’ Rose speaks fiercely, but underneath it, there is still that pleading edge, that sadness, and Iri
s realizes – too late – that the argument will have the opposite effect, that it will magnify not lessen her self-reproach. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be ruined, to have your life wasted, to give yourself utterly to something and lose it. To wish, even now that he—’ Her voice breaks. ‘I just know – I know that he’ll destroy you, just like—’

  ‘He won’t,’ Iris said, cutting across her, and she can’t understand how her sister doesn’t see how simple her desire is. ‘I just want to paint.’

  ‘But he will. And then you’ll become like me, and—’

  ‘Oh, Rose,’ Iris says, extending her hand, under the covers, and her sister takes it this time, clasps it to her, and scorches kisses on it, again and again and again. It is such an abrupt, ferocious show of affection, so unlike anything she has experienced from her sister in years, that Iris finds herself cringing from her touch, dreading those kisses that land on her knuckles. She pulls her hand away. ‘It will be different. It’s because of painting, not because of him.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ Rose says, turning on to her side, away from Iris. ‘You’re lying, just like you were when you said you couldn’t find me at the Great Exhibition, when I know you ran from me. I saw you looking over your shoulder, trying to get away from me, like you are now—’

  ‘But I’m not lying,’ Iris insists. ‘I wish you could understand, that you could see what this means to me. You know how I’ve always wanted to paint.’

  Rose scrubs at her purpled cheeks. ‘It means more than me. You’ve made that quite clear.’

  ‘No,’ Iris says, trying to frame the words she wants to say, but she finds herself gabbling. ‘It doesn’t have to change anything. We can take walks, and look into the windows of the smart shops in Mayfair, and maybe it will be more like it was before, if we don’t see each other every day – oh, Rose, remember how it was?’

  A sharp sucking of breath. Rose moves her thumb to her mouth, and shreds the skin with her teeth, and Iris wants to tell her to stop it, that she can’t bear it.

  ‘I’ve thought on this. And you can’t choose both. You can’t. You leave me – and – I won’t ever see you again.’

  ‘You can’t mean that.’

  Rose makes a choking sound, and opens her mouth as if to speak, then closes it again.

  There is nothing left to say.

  Iris stares at the ceiling, at the pattern in the plastering that looks like a shell. The silence stretches; ten minutes, thirty. At last, she hears Rose’s breath steady as she falls asleep. The candle is still lit but Iris does not blow it out. She turns on to her side, gazes at her sister’s shut eyelids, the downward tug of her lips.

  Twice in the night she climbs out of bed and picks up a pen and begins a letter to Louis. I beg you to forgive my change of heart. But each time, she pauses, recalling the studio with its chemist-like smell of oil paints and varnish, and the convex mirrors like portholes to a new life – and she crumples the paper.

  As sunrise starts to lighten the room, Iris kisses her sister’s cheek. She can’t wake her. She might change her mind. She dresses quietly, stealthily, her fingers slipping on the strings of her corset, missing the buttons of her dress. She checks for the marble hand.

  She shoulders the bag, and allows herself one final glance at Rose. She catches the quick closing of her sister’s eye. Awake, then. Iris wavers on the threshold, inhaling that sickly sugary smell for the last time, and then she closes the door behind her.

  By the time Iris reaches the perimeter of the British Museum, her back is aching from the weight of the hand. She curses her foolishness in stealing it from Louis in the first place. The trick seems to belong to a different life, to a levity she has forgotten how to inhabit. She is no longer certain what to do with it. She pictured herself returning it to a porter, but what if he questions her, assumes it was her who stole it?

  The railings are thick, ornate, three times her height and tipped with gold. They look as if God himself could not shake them. They tell her that this is a place of private study, of intellect, of money, of men. But more than that: they look like the bars of a prison.

  She imagines a cry of Thief! Catch that girl!, a constable’s rattle, a cell in Newgate. She would accept jail as a just punishment for the betrayal she has committed. She has devastated her parents and abandoned her sister.

  Suddenly ashamed of the dramatic turn of her thoughts, Iris takes out the cloth-wrapped hand. She slips it between the railings and pushes it as far into the courtyard as she can. She hopes it won’t be cast away as rubbish; was it safer left with Louis? She knows he would have had the courage to return it properly.

  Nobody notices a thing.

  As she walks away, Iris opens her mother’s letter once more, a pinch she cannot resist delivering to herself. Ruined, injured, imperilling – the words waft free of the page, mingling with the smoke and the hot fat of frying whitebait – and she tears the paper with an abrupt violence, scattering the pieces into the street. She watches as a carriage rolls over the muddied fragments, and tries to swallow a rush of delight. She is free, and she is doing what she wants. Her sister was right: she has been given a choice, and she has snatched it, clutched it to her. She darts past a fish seller and, laughing, runs towards Louis’s house, her attic, her bag bouncing against her back. For the first time in months, years, maybe ever, her chest no longer feels bound.

  A robin is singing in a heap of splintered chicken bones, his wings oily. She reaches out a hand but he hops away.

  Coffin

  A man dressed in navy livery holds open the door for Silas. He has the smug, puffed chest of a robin.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ the butler says, and then pauses deliberately, ‘sir.’

  Silas touches the lapels of his own blue coat, the fabric cheap but neatly sewn, and thinks of some petty remark or action he can take – but nothing comes to mind, and he ducks out of the entrance into the cool green of the square. Fresh white stucco, neat railings, clipped trees: it is so pristine that it feels like a row of doll’s houses. Silas prefers this area of town with the clean geometry of its terraces. He loathes the frayed alleys of Spitalfields and Soho, where nature is left to run its course, where the men and women are not buffed and folded and pressed, where cracks of reflected light come from piss-soaked puddles not polished doorbells.

  The taxidermy puppies and their carefully assembled skeleton are in a wooden box in his arms – he made a rehearsed joke about excavating the creature from its coffin when he met Thomas Filigree, but the man did not laugh – and the butterfly-wing bauble is in his pocket. The Great Exhibition will feature all three items. Silas’s footsteps grow more bounding as he thinks of it. He expected resistance from Mr Filigree when he brought the puppies, a last-ditch chance that the Committee might display them too.

  But Mr Filigree admired the specimen, singling out the fineness of its minuscule skeleton, the spidery intricacy of ribcages, spines and pelvises, its match-sized legs. He sucked on his pipe and said, ‘Yes, I can see it will do quite well in the zoological section. There is some talk – just rumblings, I should add – of moving the exhibition to a new location when the six months are spent, and I can assure you I’ll be pushing for a dedicated palaeontology section. To think of this, and other specimens of yours besides, next to Iguanodons and Pterodactyl remains.’

  Silas tamped down his heart.

  They discussed the Lepidoptera window, of which the bauble is a small example. It will be two foot tall and wide. Silas will trap butterfly wings between two sheets of glass so that they create a beautiful pattern, almost like stained glass. He will need a hundred and fifty butterflies, maybe more, in different varieties – peacocks, red admirals and tortoiseshells. He will be rushed to complete it by the start of May, not least because it is too cold for butterflies until April, but he can prepare the frame and he’ll send Albie out to the parks with a net as soon as the weather turns. How pleased the brat will be for more work from him, his kindly patron!

&nbs
p; As he walks down the wide boulevards, past shining carriages, polished horses, bewigged roués, and fat dogs being walked by powdered servants, his success reminds him of the first recognition he received, the first guinea in his hand. The finest thing of all is that it was his mother at the heart of it: if only she knew what she had done to help him escape, when she wanted nothing more than to grind his face into the dust.

  Gin-soaked and lurching, she had found Silas’s collection one evening, sequestered in a linen bag behind the cottage which they shared with three other families. And when she shook the sack at him and demanded what was wrong with him – what this kind of witchcraft meant – Silas was afraid. The skulls jangled, a sharp chime, and he snatched the bag from her, outran her easily as his footsteps did not pitch with spirits, and hid it. He returned to the cottage, late and with the shrinking gait of a puppy which knows it has been wicked. He hoped his mother would be asleep.

  The next day, his cheek bruised, he sat next to Flick and watched as she sanded the hot plates. He would run away with her, if only he had money. His mother, in her voice as deep as a man’s, had already regaled the yard hands with the story of his collection – bellowing about the skulls and how her youngest son was wrong in the head, and she was such a raconteur that the men had recoiled and laughed.

  ‘A bag of ’em. Skulls all yellow and grinning. Like some kind of grim reaper, he is. Must’ve been his father’s influence, I always said he’d dropped him on his noggin that first summer.’

  When Silas felt the factory owner’s hand on his shoulder, he cowered. He had only seen him from a distance – him and his fussy wife and his six stamping children.

  ‘Are you the boy with the skulls?’ the man asked, and Silas’s eyes ricocheted from the brickwork of the kiln, to the soft dustiness of the unfired plates in front of him, to Flick and the basket of glaze brushes.

  He did not know what it meant to say yes.