The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  ‘Would anybody like me to ring for more tea?’ Mrs Barclay-Evans asked.

  They all shook their heads. ‘Very well. Where was I?’ She gave her head a little shake and remembered. ‘At the start of this year the government were still promising but dallying. It was always the next session that it would be debated. Then the one after that.’

  ‘Votes tomorrow, votes yesterday but never votes today,’ said the Major softly.

  ‘Now listen to this, if you’re looking for a reason for increased militancy.’ Mrs Barclay-Evans leant forward, hands on her knees, her eyes earnest. ‘Asquith received a visit from a gentleman, complaining of the inadequacies of male suffrage. That not enough men had yet been granted this privilege. And do you know what he did?’

  ‘I can hazard a guess,’ Twinkle said drowsily.

  ‘Extension of the male franchise. I wish I were joking but I’m not. The very next session a Bill was drawn up. No demands, no uprising. One lone man, one crusading hero just had to rap at the door of Downing Street.’ She looked darkly towards the cracking fire as if she could see right through the tapestry screen. ‘“Awake, for morning in the bowl of night, has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight”.’

  Milly snorted in recognition. ‘Omar Khayyam. My father gave me a copy.’

  ‘And mine too,’ Mrs Barclay-Evans said, returning her gaze. ‘Violence upped its force that night. Window-breaking. The stone put the stars to flight. MPs like Charles Hobhouse, who dared to say too that not enough has been shown to demonstrate our passion for the cause, found themselves with war declared. The West End smash in April. Ebony at the Albert Hall. When Asquith went to Dublin in June, one woman set fire to the theatre, another dropped a hatchet into his carriage. But the war we had declared, it was war on property, not a war on human life. Bandstands, buildings. No one could be hurt, that was the rule.’

  The Major had begun to pace in front of the fire. Frankie watched his stride, his footfalls vibrating through the legs of the chairs they sat on. ‘You’re a military man though. Don’t you think that there’s no point threatening violence if you won’t see it through?’

  He stopped and stared at her. The pupils of his eyes were huge in the light and seemed to travel back deep in his head. ‘There is a grave difference between war when your life is in danger and war when it is not.’

  ‘So what is this arson, then?’ Milly coolly met his gaze. ‘This increased violence that the Pethick-Lawrences cannot approve?’

  There was silence.

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’ Milly asked.

  The Major shifted. ‘There was never any exact knowing at Clement’s Inn. It was only ever planning.’

  ‘That’s not the point, I mean the Pankhursts must have said something to upset the Pethick-Lawrences. There must have been some specific arson plan they couldn’t approve.’ Frankie stood, slotting the fountain pen Mrs Barclay-Evans had given her between her front teeth, rattling it up and down. Mrs Barclay-Evans’s brow knotted into a disapproving frown. Frankie was halfway to taking the pen out and wiping it down on her jacket when the black sheet of window behind her sang out a high note, and shattered.

  Shards of glass spewed into the room; everyone slammed to the floor. Twinkle shrieked and clung to her hat as she flattened out prone. Frankie dived, smacking her ear off the mantelpiece. The sound of uneven hooves rattling off stone echoed away through the window’s smashed hole.

  Silence settled, along with a biting draught. The parlour door flung back and the maid came dashing through with her white hands clutched to her cap.

  ‘It’s all right. We’re all right.’ Mrs Barclay-Evans stood up, joining her husband who had risen to his feet and was fumbling around the fireplace. He pulled out a tarnished antique rifle, took aim at the window, then lowered the gun and shook his head.

  ‘Can’t see a damn thing in the fog.’

  Frankie thought of Liam and leant her head carefully through the treacherous hole to see if she could spot him. The street outside was misty and dim, the noises from the main road rumbling in muffled waves. ‘I think we’d better leave,’ she said, keeping her voice level.

  Milly was on her knees with her hand raised, grasping something about the size of a fist. She stretched her arm out. Frankie took it from her, feeling the sudden weight. It was a stone, with flecks of glass still stuck to its surface, shining. Around it was wrapped a page of newspaper. Gradually Frankie unfolded it, tamping down the creases, until they could all see plain the paper’s title: The Suffragette.

  The second the front door had closed, Twinkle scraped up her hobble skirt into one hand and retrieved a hipflask of gin from where it was strapped to her thigh. She raised it to her lips and took it hungrily like milk from a nipple.

  ‘Oi, save us some of that.’ Frankie reached out and grabbed the flat pewter bottle. ‘God strike me,’ she downed a burning gulp. ‘Well, that settles something at least. We’re staying at yours tonight.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It will make things easier in the morning.’

  ‘Puss, you just saw what thuggery passed in there. You were followed, plain and simple and I won’t put my reputation or my life at risk.’ She looked away, her neck stiff and bristling, and Frankie wondered briefly which of the two was more important to her. Curiosity caught Twinkle up and she turned back. ‘Why? What do you think’s happening in the morning?’

  Frankie passed the flask to Milly. ‘Miss Barton here is going to infiltrate the suffragettes.’

  Milly had tilted the gin bottle towards her lips but now her jaw slackened and a dribble of gin spilled to the ground. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Well, I can’t do it, I’ll never get past the front door.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Twinkle said slyly. ‘The cartoon. Does Miss Barton know about the cartoon?’

  ‘What cartoon?’

  ‘Never mind,’ Frankie said hotly.

  Milly took another slug of gin. ‘Hang on here. Apart from the obvious dangers, what exactly am I to do with the suffragettes?’

  ‘Pretend to be one. Twinkle’s sure to have a schoolmistress costume lying around, you can wear that.’

  ‘How dare you!’ Twinkle spat.

  But Frankie wasn’t listening. She was already wandering up the street to where Liam was loitering against a lamppost, playing with a box of Vestas, lighting one, burning it down then tossing it. It took her a moment to realise he was trying to keep warm. The wind had begun to howl and the street was empty with no carriages to be seen. She called over, ‘Oi dozy, did you clock who went past? Just now.’

  Liam stretched his back against the post. Frankie heard his neck bones crack. He shrugged. ‘An old dustbin man or woman with a wee barrow on the back.’ He looked at her frown, a smirk brewing on his face.

  Frankie’s tone stopped it short. ‘Didn’t you see that stone that went through the window?’

  The blood drained from his face, and for a second Frankie felt a prick of guilt at allowing a boy so young to dive into something she knew was dangerous. But then his defences sprang back up and his lips hardened. ‘It’s hard to see in the fog, what – do you expect I’ve got eyes on every fingertip?’

  ‘Well, didn’t you hear it?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe I heard breaking, but I thought it was the wind blowing about the milk bottles. I was trying to keep warm, you know.’

  Frankie frowned. ‘What did you mean just now, when you said man or woman?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Man or woman, you said dustbin man or woman.’

  ‘I don’t know, the face was all bundled up in rags for the cold.’ He scowled and pulled the lapels of his coat tighter over his shivering shoulders, stabbing Frankie with a pointed look.

  The gesture was lost. She tutted, irritated. ‘Go and get us a cab, will you?’

  Liam stared at her.

  ‘Please,’ she said flatly.

  He skulked off towards the main roa
d. Milly was on her heels. ‘Frankie, what do you mean Twinkle’s got a schoolmistress costume? You want to dress me up as a suffragette? Are you mad?’

  Frankie turned. ‘You saw what was wrapped around that stone. It was a warning. What if Ebony had uncovered a suffragette plot she didn’t like the sound of? What if she had threatened to out the ringleaders, go to the press, tell the police where Christabel was hiding? She might have thought she could spill the beans.’

  Milly set her chin firm. ‘Anyone could wrap up a stone in a copy of The Suffragette. It doesn’t mean a thing. Weren’t you listening? If anyone has reason to be after Ebony Diamond, it’s the government. Jojo told us this evening he had Cabinet Ministers come to his shows. You said they might have tried to murder Ebony if she had something on them.’

  ‘I know what I said. But unless you’ve got a bright idea of how to wheedle our way into Downing Street and casually put it to Asquith whether he and his Cabinet have been a-murdering, I’d suggest we start where we might be able to get some answers.’

  Twinkle had caught up to them both now and was surveying Frankie with a scowl. She held out her hand for the gin bottle. Milly passed it to her and she rucked up her skirt to strap it back into place. She looked both shaken and doubtful as she wriggled her outfit back down, smoothing the creases. After a moment her face softened and she closed in on Frankie, easing the wrinkled roots of her hands up onto Frankie’s lapels to flatten them. ‘Actually, I rather think Puss has a point. Infiltrating the suffragettes could be just the path to follow. And you know you’re always very welcome to bed down chez Twinkle. I’ll make it as comfortable as I can. Being on the top floor at least you’ll be safer. That’ll be my bit towards your . . . investigation, shall it?’

  With one hand clutching her skirt, she waddled ahead into the fog. ‘Of course,’ she called back, nodding towards the main road where Liam had two fingers in his mouth whistling for cabs, ‘he can’t stay.’

  Twenty-Three

  4 November 1912

  Mist was steaming up in lazy swirls from the dung and muck in the middle of Caledonian Road as Primrose rounded the corner. Half-way down Wheelwright Street Wilson sniffed the air like a connoisseur, then made Primrose pause, one eye on his pocket-watch, while he ducked along a side lane beside a public house. He re-emerged with a wink, a shining eye and half a pint of ale.

  ‘Go on, have a slug.’

  Primrose eyed him warily, wondering about this chipper mood, and whether he had been informed about the report on him. He was, however, parched, and slightly headachey from the gritty coffee he had bought at Vauxhall railway station so he took a sip.

  ‘Old boy loves us. Always leaves us a half out.’

  ‘I shall remember that.’

  ‘You never do that when you was based at the rat-house?’

  Primrose winced. The rat-house was the Section House he had lived in before marrying Clara. He had heard about the practice of leaving out ale for constables but never taken advantage of it. It always seemed easier to forge relationships with innkeepers if you had a London accent.

  Wilson plonked the glass back at the mouth of the alley and they walked on towards the entrance to Pentonville Prison. On the crisp air Primrose could smell chemical soap on laundered cotton, horses, and something almost like food. He looked up at the cold stone walls of Pentonville, the so-called model prison, now pressing in upon them among the rising fog. Behind him on the freezing street Sunday costermongers were setting up pitches, and omnibus drivers slapped their ponies to wake up. Taking their lead he blinked and clenched his hands to try and wake himself up. He still felt a churn of scepticism at the Chief’s logic. Who knew if this man was even acquainted with Ebony Diamond, and who or what he would know? His wife was right, they should have been at suffragette headquarters, trying to get an identification of the murdered woman.

  The black iron horseshoe gates loomed ahead and Primrose gave a last minute squeeze to the knot of his necktie. The thought of Clara lying curled and warm in bed, her knitting dropping from her hands where she had nodded off, crossed his mind and he felt a twist of melancholy. Prison visits made him distinctly uncomfortable. He always thought in the back of his mind that but for the grace of God he could be on the other side. A distant family member had been hauled off to Lancaster prison a generation back, for stealing milk from one of the landowner’s cows, and it had brought such shame on the family that his mother winced if she heard the man’s Christian name, even on someone else. He had always been filled with the dreadful sense that life was a precarious tightrope between morality and punishment, that the penal system was there, hovering with its jaws open, braced to swallow you if your concentration slipped for a second.

  And yet here he was, about to question a man who had smashed a window and insulted a judge defending, as he put it, the basic rights of his mother and his wife. He looked sideways at Wilson to see if he could guess what he might be thinking. Wilson belched quietly into his balled-up fist and straightened his own necktie.

  ‘You been in here before?’ Wilson asked.

  Primrose nodded. ‘Striking bargains.’

  A cloud travelled over the gate in the opposite direction as they passed through it.

  The duty officer signed them in and led them down a dirty corridor, past the chapel where the scent of dead incense and sweet wood drifted, and into the main chamber, the palm of Pentonville’s model ‘hand’. From the centre, four long corridors marked A to D splayed off. It was said that in theory an officer could stand and see perfectly down each in turn just by rotating 180 degrees. In reality, the multiple levels, the spiral staircases and the traffic constantly going on down each of the halls – washing of floors, slopping out of excrement – meant that unless it was the dead of night it was difficult to discern what was legitimate activity and what was troublemaking.

  As soon as they entered the airy chamber the smell hit Primrose: sickly bread, boiled potatoes, milk and urine, lots of it, sharp and savoury. He noted with a churn of his gut that they were heading down B Hall, the corridor ending in the condemned cells and execution chamber. He had unpleasant memories of being summoned a few years back to hear a man’s final desperate confession in one of those cells. The man, once a respectable Smithfields butcher, had hoped that by telling the police where he had hidden the missing digits of his victim, he could bargain his life back. Primrose’s superior had noted down the particulars in a leather-bound book before the prisoner was hauled off by four warders, screaming all the way to the noose.

  ‘The doctor’s with him at the moment,’ the officer said, a freckly youth who wore his hat with absolute symmetry. The further they moved down the corridor the noisier it grew; prisoners tapping out messages to one another on the hot water pipes, the echoing of water on bathhouse tiles. ‘You’ve actually come at rather an inconvenient time.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Primrose smarted slightly from the man’s bluntness. He had heard in the past that CID were not well liked anywhere other than Scotland Yard, but didn’t know if it was true or a rumour started by someone with a chip on their shoulder, like Stuttlegate.

  The man looked at Primrose squarely. ‘He’s on hunger strike.’

  Primrose moved aside as a warder with a chamber pot full of vomit passed. ‘He’s what?’

  ‘He’s on hunger strike. Sympathy with the women. And protest at being put in second division.’

  ‘It is a little harsh to put him on B with the condemned men.’

  The officer shrugged. ‘Only place we had a solitary cell.’

  Wilson was smirking. ‘So he’s given up his meat and two over votes for the ladies?’

  The officer looked tentatively between them, trying to work out whether it would be prudent to laugh. ‘We’ve had one in before who did the same. Frederick Pethick-Lawrence.’

  Primrose nodded. ‘Name rings a bell.’

  They passed a row of closed doors with the observation flaps shut and the buzz of movement seemed to die dow
n. Primrose noticed with a stab of sympathy that they were almost parallel with the execution chamber outside. The man would have a prime view of it through the bars of his window.

  ‘What’s his name again?’ Wilson whispered.

  ‘Reynolds. William.’

  Outside a painted grey metal door, peering through the observation flap, stood a man in a white coat with grey hair bushing around his ears and temples. A stethoscope dangled round his neck; shiny gold wire glasses clung to his neat face. He snapped the flap shut when he saw them and stuck out his hand.

  ‘Dr Fairwater. Very pleased to meet you. I’m the Senior Medical Officer.’ He looked back over his shoulder towards the cell. ‘It’s a slightly inopportune time, but if you do want to get anything out of him, my presence may be a good motivator, shall we say?’

  Wilson nodded. ‘Feeding time?’

  Primrose noticed the contraption in the man’s hands, a funnel attached to a long tube that glistened even in the gloomy light, as if it had been rubbed with petroleum or some other lubricant. Perched at the door was a jug filled with lumpy yellow liquid – the appearance of beaten eggs, but the scent of brandy.

  Primrose’s stomach rolled a clumsy somersault. ‘If it’s an inopportune time then of course we can . . .’

  ‘No, no,’ the doctor seemed oddly cheerful. Primrose realised with a sickening tug that perhaps there was some kind of novelty in the task, trying out a new technique on a live specimen for the first time. ‘Just have to wait for the warders. Or you want to question him first?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

  The medical officer stood aside, offering them the door. The young officer unlocked it with great care then scraped it back.

  Aside from being run down, cream paint flaking on the lower half of the wall, the cell looked clean. The small barred window high on the far wall was open, letting in a foggy breeze. On the wall above his concrete truckle bed the words were etched, ‘Under a Government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place of a just man (or woman) is also a prison.’ A shiny black jug and cup made from gutta-percha lay on the floor. The whole room had a rubbery tang to it, underneath a festering scent.