The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  It was only then that it dawned on her what the box was. ‘I have taken a photograph before, you know,’ she said. She hadn’t, but she had had her photograph taken, which was near enough the same thing. She carefully lifted the camera out of its box and stared at it. It had stiff red bellows and shiny brass tracks and a yellow enamel circle that said, ‘J. Lizars Challenge. Glasgow, London, Edinburgh’.

  She tucked it away and slid the cracked leather strap of the case over her shoulder, then stepped back into the sunshine, letting the heat soak onto her face. She was trying to sedate the little prickle that had risen in her outside Stark’s office when Teddy Hawkins told her why she had been offered the job. Of course Teddy Hawkins didn’t interview suffragettes; he topped up peelers’ ale cups and greased politicians’ hands in the Savage Club.

  Suffragette. She’d give him a suffragette. One look at her trousers and everyone just assumed she was a bloody suffragette. It wasn’t even a real word anyway, it was a name someone at the Daily Mail had made up to distinguish Mrs Pankhurst’s hammer-throwers from Mrs Fawcett’s tea-drinkers. There were suffragists and suffragettes and Nusses and Spankers and Wasps, and they all looked the same in their blouses and tailor-mades, hawking pamphlets on street corners in taxidermy hats.

  And now she was supposed to just pirouette along to a corset shop on the look-out for a suffragette acrobat she had never set eyes on before. It was all a big joke to them, with their oiled hair and their Turkish tobacco. She pictured them all gathered in the newsroom, laughing like monkeys into their coffee cups.

  She swallowed and lifted her chin up. It was work, extra work. And portraits were a step up from the column she did with Twinkle, and her odds and sods cartoons. Besides, Audrey Woodford’s Journalism for Women said you never turned down work. She ran her fingers through her tufty brown hair, tucking it tightly down behind her ears, hoiked the camera case tighter over her shoulder, and headed towards the railings. She arrived at them just in time to see a newspaper boy, still crammed between the wooden leaves of his sandwich board, swinging his legs over the bicycle and wobbling off down the street.

  ‘Oi!’

  The boy picked up speed, knocking his knees against the board as he pedalled. Frankie sighed and drew her grandfather’s old pocket-watch out of her jacket. Quarter past three already. Bond Street was miles away, the centre of town clogged. If she took the underground, she might just make it.

  The tube train was crowded but not unbearable, and Frankie found a bit of standing space against the shaking wall. As the tube skated though pitch-black tunnels its windows became a mirror, allowing her to see what she looked like for the first time that day, for as usual she hadn’t bothered to check before leaving the house. Her paisley neckerchief was crooked, her brown eyes shiny round the sockets. The olive oil her mother had given her to cook with was working a treat to keep her hair in check. Her hair had been short ever since her first day as a compositor’s apprentice at the Tottenham Evening News, when the head compositor had taken a pair of shears and without warning sliced off her pigtails. Did her cheeks look chubbier than normal? She had always taken pride in being lean, but lately her waistband had been feeling tighter. Too many gin sessions with the old girl Twinkle, cooking up the weekly column, and too much ale in the Cheshire Cheese.

  She slunk back against the window wondering how long it would take to find the shop or if this suffragette would even be there. If she could do a good job of the piece, it mightn’t be the last interview Mr Stark sent her on. It was true, for weeks now she had been pestering him to give her something more than the Twinkle column, something juicier. At the Tottenham Evening News she had covered for staff reporters on sick days, and been sent to court hearings and occasionally the morgue. But it didn’t seem to be the Fleet Street way to let women loose anywhere other than the opening of tailors’ houses, the launch of debutantes, or sensational exposés inside laundry rooms.

  By the time the lift operator at Bond Street underground station had cranked her up to street level, the sun was already beginning to sink. The sky had darkened, giving way to a tea-brown fog blowing in from the Thames.

  Frankie pulled the lapels of her jacket in tight, glad of her tweeds for the first time that day. There were a few trams lined up along the junction with Oxford Street while further down New Bond Street horse-drawn broughams idled. Gas and electric lights shone from inside the shops, glowing veils of silver and gold around the goods in the windows. Shoppers huddled along, dashing to make their purchases before the weather turned.

  She checked her pocket-watch – quarter to four, still in good time – and took a fat Matinee cigarette and a box of matches from a case inside her jacket. Let herself warm up to it first. She lit the cigarette and trampled on the match.

  Taking the smoke in slowly, Frankie walked between the row of cabs up for hire and the shop fronts. She was halfway between a tall hansom and a snuffmonger’s when a shape in the next cab window along caught her eye. She walked up to it and leaned closer. At first it looked like a dismembered body, shrunk to dizzyingly small proportions, perching on a shelf inside the cab. She blinked, then realised what she was looking at and turned around. Behind her, silhouetted by golden gas lamps, hung a mauve silken bodice in a curved shop window. As she moved towards it, peculiar repetitions of the form began to emerge in the window’s milky light, dangling from the ceiling, poised on wood figurines. She looked up at the sign. ‘Olivier Smythe; Parisian Corsetier.’ Below it a Royal Crest was lacquered in gold and black relief.

  So this was where Miss Ebony Diamond sourced her smalls. Frankie hadn’t known the music halls paid so nicely. Relieved she hadn’t been sent on a goose chase, she peered through the window. There was a man behind the counter and a tall elderly woman in a pastel flowered hat making shapes in the air with her hands.

  How did journalists approach such matters anyway? Audrey Woodford had conveniently forgotten to say. She sucked the last bitter hit of the cigarette then pulled out her notebook and chanced a glimpse at the leaf of notes Stark’s boy had given her. ‘Acrobat, suffragette, tiger-tamer. Attacked Asquith, April. Works at Jojo’s Cocoa Bar, Soho. Coliseum, Friday. Wouldn’t pick a fight with her.’ The latter was underlined in blue. She raised an eyebrow.

  The customer smiled and accepted her boxed purchase, then glided back out into the street, tinkling the shop’s bell, bundling her furs at her throat. Frankie watched the man, whom she took to be Mr Smythe, straighten the garments on display in the window. There was something odd about him that she couldn’t put her finger on, a delicacy in the way he held himself. Buttoning up her jacket, she tried her best to look smart, lamenting the way her shirt never seemed to tuck evenly into her waistband. As she strode towards the shop door, a boy with a large cap tugged low over fiery ginger hair stepped out of the shadows and pulled it open. Frankie rummaged in her pocket in search of a penny for him, but she could only find one sticky shilling that she wanted to keep hold of for her tube fare, so she pulled her palm back out empty and smiled instead.

  The bell’s jangle set her nerves going. She crossed into the dark panelled sweet-smelling chamber and calmly set about flicking through the racks of fabric, as if shopping for a corset was the most natural thing in the world. The truth was it all made her feel a little nauseous: the liquid satin, the rough-textured lace. Something about the place reminded her of an effete butcher’s shop, a slightly creepy hairdressing salon, somewhere Miss Havisham and Sweeney Todd might have set up business together. She had in her hands a cream and caramel number – a colour combination that reminded her of straitjackets – when she heard footsteps behind her.

  ‘Can I help?’

  Frankie turned and it was then that she realised what was so odd about the man. He was corseted to a gruesome size; fourteen and a half, fifteen inches. She tried not to stare, concentrating instead on his face. His cheeks were sharp, like they had been cut by tailor’s scissors, his round brown eyes large and curious.

  She cl
eared her throat. Could she ask outright for Ebony Diamond? She hesitated. ‘I’d like to buy a corset.’

  Mr Smythe couldn’t conceal his amusement as his gaze roved her trouser suit. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, I have a wedding to attend. On Saturday,’ she added curtly, thinking that corset shoppers were most probably curt. She was in the process of dreaming up some monstrous dress to tell him about, the kind her mother might have made her wear if she did indeed have a wedding to go to, when she spied a shadow springing into shape on the side wall of the shop. Smythe seemed to notice it too for he stepped in front of her, trying to block her view and began rambling loudly about the extraordinary weather and whether an autumn wedding was something he would prefer, or a spring one. But Frankie had already seen the silhouette. Now, all of a sudden it dawned on her what the photographer man at the Gazette had meant when he said ‘get her waist’.

  It was Ebony Diamond. It had to be. She could have been cut from a Victorian novel, swooping into full view now from beyond the curtain covering the rear of the shop. A black old-fashioned gown was sculpted around her, curving up to her neck and down in pleats and layers to trail along the ground behind her as she rushed. But it was her waist that caught Frankie’s eye. She was corseted to a size every bit as tight as the shop’s proprietor. It made Frankie want to belch imagining how tightly squeezed the food and organs were in there. Frankie had only ever worn stays for a week when she was thirteen – the nuns called them ‘stays’, ‘corsets’ were for the Mary Magdalenes of the world – but the pain from being birched for not wearing them was outweighed by the pain from wearing them so she had given up.

  The woman’s hands were coated in tiny black gloves and struck ahead, keeping her balance as she ran into the shop crashing into racks of carefully spaced bodices, knocking them over, tripping over her skirts. She dashed past Frankie, leaving a pleasing sweet smell drifting behind her, poudre d’amour and gin. Suddenly her ankle became tangled in the serpentine straps of a corset that had fallen and she stopped for breath.

  Smythe coloured from the neck up, and made a weak attempt to direct Frankie towards the fitting room with his hand to her back. She nimbly slipped his grasp.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he muttered, and edged past her, picking up a couple of fallen garments as he went. ‘Ebony,’ he hissed. Frankie was surprised at his use of her first name. ‘What has got into you? You’re trembling like a kicked dog.’

  The woman in the black dress spun to face him. ‘She’s up there, isn’t she?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know perfectly well. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll come with me and not come back.’

  ‘Now is not the time.’

  With a shaking hand Ebony reached down inside her lacy bosom and pulled something out. ‘You want to ask her –’ she gestured with her head towards the ceiling of the shop where scuffling, workshop sounds were rumbling away, ‘– where she got this from.’ Holding the thing up to the light, Frankie saw it was a brooch, a large silver one, with a winking, glinting, gold pattern carved onto its surface. ‘’Cos it didn’t fall off a tailor’s dummy.’ Ebony tipped her arm back, pausing for a second, then hurled the thing forcefully at Smythe. He ducked, cowering his hands to his head, and it went plummeting into the green velvet drape covering the back of the shop, then hit the floor with a bullet’s whack.

  ‘Ebony!’

  Ebony stared at him. Her black eyes burned. For a second Frankie thought she might be about to start weeping. Then her gaze hardened again. ‘Ask her,’ she said, tipping her chin towards the ceiling once more. She flung another rack of clothing out of the way, swung open the door of the shop, making the bell jerk, and slammed it shut.

  So that was Ebony Diamond, Frankie thought. The Notorious Madame Suffragette. Striking face, somewhat tempestuous, but then Stark’s boy had said not to pick a fight with her.

  Suddenly Frankie remembered the camera still slung across her back.

  ‘Wait!’ She reached round her shoulder, unclipping the latch on the box. The brass tracks slipped out so fast she nearly dropped it. She wriggled the strap over her head and let the case fall to the floor. ‘I need a photograph.’ Tripping over the spilled clothing she raced towards the door.

  Frankie could see Ebony Diamond moving quickly along the street, her black hourglass figure melting into the fog. She yanked open the door, letting in a rush of cool damp air. ‘Wait!’ she cried. ‘I’m a journalist! Wait! Miss Diamond!’

  Ebony began picking up speed, her swift walk becoming a jog, then a run, her skirts skating out behind her like raven wings. Frankie gritted her teeth and ran after her, feeling the tightness of her trousers catching, regretting the amount of ale she had drunk over the past few weeks.

  Up ahead at the crossroads with Brook Street, Ebony had to stop as a chain of trams went sliding past tinkling their bells. A Fenwick’s shopwoman in an apron approached Frankie brandishing a bottle of the latest Guerlain Eau de Parfum. ‘Musk!’ she barked. ‘Musk direct from the Musk Ox!’ Frankie dodged her spraying hand and dipped round in front of Ebony Diamond.

  ‘Miss Diamond.’

  It took a second for Ebony’s black eyes to latch onto her. Her face was white as the moon with a short upturned nose and a wide scarlet mouth. ‘Are you following me?’ she spat.

  Frankie was out of breath but managed to pant, ‘I just want to ask you a few quick questions. About Holloway prison. For the portrait page. The newspaper. How does that sound?’ She stuck her hand into her pocket and pulled out one of her calling cards.

  Miss Diamond looked startled for a second, then took the card and ran her finger absently over the embossed surface. She studied the letters slowly. ‘Francesca George, Contributor, London Evening Gazette.’ The lines on her face straightened out; she looked like she might have something on the tip of her tongue. ‘A journalist, you say?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Frankie was beginning to line up the camera. If she could just keep her in one place for a few seconds. Truth be told, she could probably make the rest up. Facts were fairly sticky at the London Evening Gazette. And that tiff at the shop was a winner whether it was about tax or pink knickerbockers.

  Suddenly Ebony rammed the card back towards her, sending the camera stabbing into Frankie’s face. ‘You’ve got some nerve, giving this to me.’

  Frankie stumbled backwards. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I just need to ask you a few questions. About the force-feeding.’

  ‘Force-feeding my eye.’ She jabbed the corner of the card at Frankie. ‘You’re the one drew that cartoon for Punch, aren’t you – “Take it up the nose Maud I will, pass the tea”.’

  Frankie’s stomach sank. She had known this was going to happen as soon as Teddy Hawkins mentioned the word ‘suffragette’. It was why they had chosen her, she was certain. They’d all be in the Cheshire Cheese by now, knocking back pints of porter, sharing pork scratchings and smirking.

  The cartoon in question had been drawn by Frankie several months ago, and had been intended for Punch. Frankie had been trying for years to have a piece printed there and was always told that her drawings weren’t satirical enough, except this one which the boy on the Punch reception desk, who didn’t look old enough to be in long trousers, had coughed at before handing back. After Punch rejected it, it had floated down the murky Fleet Street food chain, before landing at the door of the London Evening Gazette, a rag with circus-style lettering for its title, and the strapline, ‘The Greatest Newspaper on Earth’. The cartoon was perfect Evening Gazette material, Mr Stark had said. A group of women poised over cakes and scones – her figurines were ‘superb’, he said, ‘just like Punch’ – while one was busy fixing to the teapot a long tube of the kind used in Holloway Gaol to force-feed women on the hunger strike. Ebony Diamond had misquoted her. The caption was, ‘No Mildred, I think I’ll take it through the nose this time’.

  Mr Stark himself had called her into his office the Monday after it was published, shook h
er hand – the only time he had looked her in the eye – and offered her a Friday column which he billed as a ‘guide to society’ with Twinkle, an ageing ‘lady about town’.

  ‘Look, I just need one photograph. You don’t have to say anything. But if I turn up without a picture, my editor’ll hang my guts for a laundry line.’

  ‘Get that thing out of my face.’ Ebony’s black skirts rustled as she pushed past Frankie. The traffic had cleared, creating an opening. Frankie ducked in her way, raising the camera to face height.

  Suddenly Ebony lunged. As Frankie snapped the shutter, the full force of Ebony Diamond’s right hook whipped her jaw round. Ebony was as nimble as she was strong and her hands danced over Frankie’s until she had a firm purchase on the camera. In one sharp movement she had ripped it away and was striding back towards the Fenwick’s woman.

  ‘It’s not mine. Give it back.’

  ‘You should have thought about that.’ Ebony tossed the camera to the ground and for one terrifying moment Frankie thought she might be about to stand on it.

  ‘It’s not mine, for pity’s sake!’

  Ebony took a step back, then reached across to the Fenwick’s woman and snatched the bottle of musk perfume out of her hand.

  ‘Have you gone mad?’ Frankie realised with a strike of horror what she was up to and could only watch as Ebony cracked the atomiser off the top of the bottle with the side of her hand and poured perfume all over the camera. She reached into her dress pocket, pulled out a match, struck it off the sole of her boot and dropped it.

  Shoppers and clerks sprang back as blue-gold flames washed up the sides of the leather. The protective gloss began to sizzle and burn.