Frankie woke with a start, realising she hadn’t closed the drapes. A dusty gold cloud of light was pouring in. She checked her pocket-watch. It was ten o’clock.
Clumsily, she pulled on a pair of tweed trousers, a shirt, neckerchief and cardigan and rushed downstairs to see if the post had arrived. On the sideboard at the bottom of the stairs a pile of letters had been tucked under one of the pot plants, to stop it from falling off as the ‘citizens’ dashed about.
She picked through the pile, feeling for the small brown envelope with the stamp of the Evening Gazette and the slender cheque inside. It wasn’t there. A wave of panic passed across her, as she remembered Mrs Gibbons’s demand for rent. Quickly checking again, she spotted that there was in fact something with her name on it. A folded telegram. She looked closer at the little blue print in capital letters on the fragile paper and her heart dipped. It said, ‘STONECUTTER STREET STARK.’ On the next line was another word, three extra characters’ worth of cost underlying the message’s urgency; ‘NOW.’
Traffic on Fleet Street was slow at this time of day and as she sat in the back of a hansom cab, with an almost comatose horse plodding through the tangle of omnibuses, Frankie cursed the newspaperboy who had sped off on the office bicycle she usually borrowed. The printing presses were spewing out first editions of the evening papers; the paper boys were gathering like geese in the distribution rooms waiting for the bundles of hot newsprint to appear all wrapped up in string. There were Reuters boys on their bicycles weaving in and out of horses and trams. Runners on dirty motorcycles were taking bundles out to the suburbs. Subs’ boys were already squirrelling first editions of the rival papers back to their masters who were ready to stop the linotypes at a word and rearrange a paragraph here, an exclusive there, re-write the lower half of the page with stop presses and sports results. The smell on the street was suffocating; printer’s ink and motor exhaust all but masking the subtler perfume of barber’s soap, coffee stands and hops from the public houses. And the noise; it was as if all the sounds in London had been squashed into one tiny pocket of street, the roaring basement print machines, the cries of ‘copy’ from open windows, the sound of builders working on shiny new edifices along the Aldwych, throwing up buildings as tall as dreams.
The hansom stopped abruptly as a man ran across the street clinging to his hat. Frankie leaned forward in the cab for a closer look. On the other side of the road an old man in a raincoat was making a lewd gesture. ‘That will serve you right for milking our copy, you swine.’
The cabbie hissed at them and summoned the horse on with a snap of the reins. Frankie’s gut lurched as she saw the hapless young journalist still desperately clinging to his hat, pounding at the door of his own paper with his fist. No one would let him in.
‘Stonecutter Street,’ she directed the cabbie and he swerved them off the main road. She paid him with sixpence, taken from her emergency fund she kept in a slit in the back of the Blickensderfer case, and straightened the edges of the papers she had brought with her. With a tipping stomach she made her way up the staircase and knocked on Stark’s door.
‘Come,’ the voice spat from inside.
She swallowed and tweaked open the door.
Stark was seated at his desk, bent over a collection of scattered papers, his wide hand fumbling in a pot of blue pencils. He looked oblivious to the clacking tape machine behind him and to the slumped form of Nobby staring at it. There was a sharpness in his eyes, which he turned now on Frankie as she approached the desk, keeping her papers neatly folded in front of her.
‘Ebony Diamond.’ He un-wedged the monocle from his eye with some difficulty. ‘I wanted a portrait on her, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Frankie kept half an eye on Nobby in the corner.
He looked into the distance. ‘Force-feeding. Matrons. Suffragettes. I think those were the instructions. Tantalising tales from inside the prison. Not difficult.’
Frankie tried to stifle her nerves.
Stark seemed to read her mind. ‘Do you see Nobby over there? He does the Reuters flimsy, he cuts the cable and gives me the stories he thinks are worth looking at. Do you know, Nobby’s only fourteen years old, isn’t that right, Nobby?’
The boy nodded, his eyes still on the ticking tape.
‘Right now, Miss George, I wouldn’t trust you with Nobby’s job.’
Frankie took a breath. ‘No sir.’
‘Do you have the photograph I asked for?’
Frankie shook her head. Her fingers were beginning to sweat onto her typed copy.
‘Why not?’
‘Miss Diamond was not amenable to having her picture taken.’
Mr Stark’s fat face cracked a nasty smile. ‘Do you think many ex-convicts are?’
‘I wrote up what I thought was an important story.’
Stark was shaking a finger at her. ‘It wasn’t what I asked for, and with forty years in the business I’ll trust my own opinions on what I think’s an important story. And that’s another thing, where was your damn column?’
‘I only had time to . . . because Ebony was at Smythe’s . . . and—’
He cut her off by placing his fingertips very suddenly and deliberately on the table between them. ‘Do you know why I hired you?’
She shook her head, before realising that was the worst response possible.
‘To prove a point, Miss George. To prove a point. You know W. T. Stead, God rest his soul?’
Frankie’s eyes flicked to the copy of the Pall Mall Gazette, open on the desk in front. ‘Yes, sir.’ The former editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, famous for his exposés and political crusades had been something of a hero of Frankie’s.
‘Stead was a good friend of mine. He was a smug bugger and there weren’t many things he was wrong about, unfortunately, but he once said to me, “Edward, never trust a mannish woman.”’
Frankie shifted her weight and dared to look up at his tiny black eyes. ‘With respect, sir, I know there’s more to Ebony Diamond than she cared to admit. I was following my instincts.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Frankie, it wasn’t what I asked for. That piece was supposed to be about the grime in prison, women getting held down by other women and force-fed. I’m here to sell papers, not make up fairy stories about the likeness between cons and murdered prostitutes.’ His fingers furrowed around for something to play with, finding the crusty edge of the whisky glass.
‘The girl on Tottenham Court Road? She wasn’t a prosti– sorry, sir.’
‘Anyway, whether or not our subs could extract anything from that garbled mess of a portrait I’ll never know. I wasn’t so angry about that as I was about you missing a deadline on your column.’
‘But Mr Stark, it was supposed to—’
He glared at her. Her stomach began to feel heavy. She couldn’t begin to face the thought that there would be no cheque this week. She would have to bide her time and sneak in and out of the boarding house after dark. She had a couple of cans of corned beef in her room. She could fry them up on her gas stove, perhaps go via Exmouth Market and beg the dregs of a baker’s leftovers, or an onion. She realised her mind was wandering and Stark was still talking.
‘I don’t think you realise the full extent of the hot water you’ve put me in. I only gave you half the story about Twinkle when I hired you.’ He sighed and cast a glance towards Nobby, as if wondering for a second whether he could be trusted to stay. ‘Twinkle was on the verge of suing this newspaper. I can’t go into details but she’s not a woman whose feathers we like to ruffle. You know who takes the blame whenever this paper is up in court? You know who the buck stops with?’
Frankie cleared her throat.
‘That’s right. You may well cough. But it’s not your behind that’ll be sitting in Bow Street Court, it’s mine. And that’s not something I can risk. As of this moment you are suspended from this newspaper.’
‘Mr Stark,’ Frankie cried before she could stop herself.
He he
ld up a fat hand. ‘You’re damned lucky you’re not out of a job. I’ll have none of your protests, and don’t you go grovelling to the Savage Club again; that didn’t impress our publisher last time and it won’t impress him again.’ Frankie’s eyes widened and her lips dropped open involuntarily. ‘Yes, I know about that escapade, we all do.’
She suddenly found herself unable to meet his eye. Her face felt as if it were beginning to roast. He knew about the Savage Club. How could he know about her trip to the Savage Club?
‘You see, Frankie, your quirks are funny when you’re winning. I’d even go so far as to say they are endearing. But what I don’t think you realise is that this is not a joke. You’ve been lucky to get where you are. You’ve got pluck more than talent but at some point you’re going to have to understand that following instructions puts food on the table.’ He took a breath and the cushions of his face seemed to soften a little. ‘Do your job. You’re not an editor, you don’t decide what goes in and what doesn’t. Do as you’re told, manage your time and for God’s sake learn to accept your limitations. Or next time it will be worse.’
He shoved a copy of yesterday evening’s paper across to her. The paper she had been too nervous to open. The ticker machine suddenly paused for a second and the room became unbearably silent. Frankie peeled open the rag to page eight. In lieu of her column there was a three-quarter page advert for the Aeolian Orchestrion, a coin-operated pianola with drums, cymbals and glockenspiels. ‘We were lucky they were ready to stump up the cash,’ he said coldly.
‘But the portrait? The “Ebony Diamond’s life in danger” piece?’
‘I binned it. I told you force-feeding and you gave me some rot about a circus girl who looked like a tom crying over a dead corset maker.’
‘She wasn’t a prostitute. She was a seamstress who worked for Smythe. And don’t you know what happened last night?’
He scratched his balding head. ‘I know very well what happened last night. Ebony Diamond fell off a rotten trapeze and Oswald Stoll’s trying to cover it up. He’s always been known for his cheap equipment. I hope it bites him where it hurts. Mr Hawkins is on the story already.’
‘Mr Hawkins thought Ebony Diamond had been murdered yesterday. The body was misidentified and he didn’t bother to check. Next night Ebony Diamond disappears. What does that tell you? Two things. Firstly that—’
Mr Stark leaned back in his chair. ‘Frankie, what exactly do you want?’
‘Just let me investigate. Pay me expenses only, I don’t care, I just need enough for my rent and food; I know there’s something going on; I know I can get to the bottom of it.’
Mr Stark’s expression was now one of full condescension. ‘I can’t do that. You’re not a reporter. You write for the ladies’ page. I gave you a chance with that suffragette portrait and look what you did with it.’
‘Mr Stark,’ Frankie felt the nerves taut in her voice, ‘a portrait is hardly a chance. Something terrible is happening, right now, something involving Ebony Diamond. I’m sorry if I disappointed you but if you take a proper chance, give me time to do my investigations, I can do as well as those men on the news desk, I swear it . . .’ She swallowed. Rage was backing up behind her eyeballs and she fought it bitterly. To lose her temper in here would be more than her life was worth.
Stark shook his head and began to wedge the eyeglass back in. The clicking tape had started again, the noises from the street below filtering in. He swivelled in his chair for a few seconds. ‘I’ll think about reinstating you once I’ve heard what Twinkle has to say. Prove me right, please, Frankie. Don’t make yourself an easy target. Stick to what you can do.’
Frankie didn’t respond.
‘What’s that in your hand?’
She blushed. ‘It’s a report of the full story. It’s what I saw last night.’
He reached out. ‘Let me see.’ He took it and flicked through quickly, his eyes scanning the type with practised speed. ‘Our boys downstairs have spent years learning how to handle a story, how to wheedle information out of folk.’
‘With respect, that’s what I did at the Tottenham Evening News.’
‘With respect, the Tottenham Evening News is not the London Evening Gazette.’ He shuffled in his chair. ‘What’s this on the back?’
‘Sorry, sir,’ Frankie mumbled, ‘I had no clean paper.’
He stared at the text for a few seconds. ‘I’ll give you ten shillings for the recipe. For the ladies’ page.’
Sixteen
Frankie didn’t know whether to feel devastated or furious, whether to kick the railings or her own shins. She had almost yanked the lapels of the sub-editor when he asked for the camera back.
‘It’s being cleaned. I’m having it cleaned.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Nothing, I’m just a conscientious reporter, that’s all.’
He snorted and because she was feeling sensitive she took his scorn to be because she had called herself a reporter. Conscious that her temper was up and liable to get her into even more trouble, she had marched out of the building as quick as possible.
She walked past a scrapheap on St Giles where a group of street children were performing a scene from Oliver Twist on an apple cart. When they saw Frankie’s trousers one of the boys stopped his speech and shouted ‘Suffragette!’ They all joined in, making obscene gestures. The boy started to sing, ‘Mrs Pankhurst, with a nine-pound hammer in her hand, breaking windows down the Strand. If you catch her, lay her on a stretcher, knock her on the Robert E. Lee.’ He slapped the bottom of one of the little girls, who shrieked then turned and boxed him hard on the ear.
On the steps outside Percy Circus, she could hear the grandfather clock indoors chiming noon. As she stuck her key in the lock, a postman in a cap appeared behind her. ‘Number six?’ Frankie nodded. ‘Letter for you.’
She took the envelope and her heart sank as she recognised the handwriting, the elaborate curls and flourishes; a letter from her mother was the last thing she wanted to see. She heaved a sigh and opened the door. There was an eerie weekend quiet about the place as if the ornaments and clocks in the hall were lazily watching her. Thankfully Mrs Gibbons was nowhere to be seen. She went upstairs and lay flat on her bed, her head swimming. The letter sat in her hand like a threat. She knew what it would say: ‘When are you coming home? The butcher’s son will not wait for you forever.’
Frankie tossed it onto the pillow and prised herself up. Her room was filthy with dust; Mrs Gibbons had given up sending the girl in to clean it. Dirty grey light streaked through the window, hitting the desk where her typewriter and the broken camera lay. She reached for her notebook, lying open at the page she had been reading the night before, and ran her finger down the text, smudging the lead writing. ‘Corsets, costumes, top hats, carriages.’
Stark was right. It was a mess. She looked across at the unopened letter on the bed and a shudder ran down her back. The butcher’s son. Harry Tripe. It was his real name, although everyone thought it must be a joke. ‘Couldn’t you have gone for sirloin?’ they asked, or ‘It’s an offal coincidence.’ He was not a bad looking boy. Last time she saw him, he’d grown stocky from his work heaving carcasses onto great meat hooks. They had an uncle with a pawn shop who always lent them expensive suits left by his clients, and there was a whiff of flash about the whole family. Francesca Tripe. She rolled the words in her mouth. It made her nauseous. She picked up her notebook, swallowed her hunger and headed out again into the gloomy day.
First stop was a watchmaker’s shop on Gray’s Inn Road where she deposited the camera. The man behind the counter was Italian and suspicious of her, as if she might have been the sort of woman who sold dirty photographs. He took two or three short sniffs of the leather bellows before handing her a collection ticket.
She then headed on foot to Soho in drizzling rain. The sky was falling heavier and closer with each cloud that blew in. The wet road crackled as wheels passed down it; women’s dresse
s trailed on the ground. In the golden shop windows, cakes, hams, and wines were lit up, glowing. Frankie felt a twinge of sadness as she passed by the street her grandfather used to live on. His grocer’s was now a Hungarian bakery, the signage all changed. Generations passed. Would he have expected his granddaughter to write in a newspaper when he barely spoke English himself? And would she just fall back into the fate she was bred for, a costermonger by blood, destined to be a wife like every other woman in London?
But not every woman was destined to be a wife. Ebony Diamond wasn’t a wife; it hadn’t been in her cards. Or Twinkle’s. As she walked past a suffragette handing out pamphlets for a meeting at the Caxton Hall she felt a strange combination of envy and regret. It took courage to go to Holloway for a thing that some said didn’t really matter. But it did matter, and all she had done was mock them. Mock them because when she boiled it down, a tart-mouthed woman at the Clement’s Inn Votes for Women office had told her exactly the same thing Edward Stark had just told her, that she needed to take better care with her work. The only difference was it was easier to take revenge on them; they were sitting targets. The last time she had tried to take revenge on Fleet Street . . . She shivered at the thought. Of course Edward Stark had known about the Savage Club, who wouldn’t have, in a room full of journalists? She was only glad they’d had the courtesy not to print it in the papers the next day.
It was her coverage of a bicycling race down at the Camden canal that had got her noticed by London on Sunday, a sister paper to the Evening Gazette with the same publisher. She was twenty-three and proud and for a treat had bought herself the autobiography of Nellie Bly from a kiosk outside Chancery Lane tube station. Nellie was the founding mother of exposés and had gone undercover in a New York lunatic asylum. Frankie devoured the book like it was a box of Fry’s chocolates and the following week invited herself along to the Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street where the journalists congregated, and where she felt she must now belong, having had a piece printed in a real Fleet Street paper. Only there was no one there. Eventually an old soak with a blistered nose told her that Tuesday night they all went to the Savage Club. Men only.
The Hourglass Factory Page 12
