The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  Frankie shook her head fast. ‘What do you mean?’

  He tilted his head. ‘Come on, Frankie, you know all the Fleet Street tricks. Who gets the story first? What do you call it, milking, when you steal someone else’s newspaper story . . .’ Frankie continued to stare at him. ‘Well, you know, she had her face all bundled up. With a scarf. All filthy, like. Worked for him, my eye. If she did, I’d not have let her out in public. What’s that thing they get at the match factories?’

  Frankie frowned. ‘Phossy jaw?’

  ‘Yeah. Phossy jaw. Awful.’

  Frankie said quietly, ‘She does work for him.’

  John Bridewell shrugged. ‘Oh well, goes to show what I know. Anyway, I didn’t give it to her.’ He looked down and rummaged in the manila folder then pulled some papers free. ‘Now about this letter.’

  Frankie took a second to snap back out of her thoughts. Then she smiled weakly and took the paper from John’s outstretched hand.

  The Lyons tea room was at the tail end of its opening hours when Frankie arrived. She was shown to a plush table big enough for four, decked out in velvet. A brass chandelier was reflected in the gilt mirror on the wall in front of her.

  It was only end of the day food left. Scones were off, éclairs were off, tarts were finished, profiteroles done for. There was no cucumber left for sandwiches. Just meat paste and tuna fish.

  ‘We have toast and cream fingers,’ a waitress in a Lyons’ pinny offered with her notepad poised in flushed hands.

  Frankie ordered cream fingers and tea for two and waited for Milly, slowly flicking through the pages of her notepad, trying to decipher her own shorthand. She had decided what it was they would do next, whether Milly would join her or not.

  At quarter past six she saw a figure dashing past the window, blurred by the steamed-up panes and the hazy streetlight. She didn’t wait to be shown to the table, bustling her way past pairs of ladies in wide hats with Fortnum’s bags at their feet.

  Milly sat down with a thump and exhaled in one long breath until her cheeks were sucked flat. She clumsily took off her hat, leaving strands of her hair pricked up with static electricity in the wake of the felt.

  ‘Calm down. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  She met Frankie’s eye with a cold look of disbelief. ‘I feel like I have. Ebony’s.’

  Twenty-Five

  They waited for the waitress to pour the tea. Frankie could feel Milly’s leg hovering and twitching under the table, counting the seconds for the girl to leave.

  ‘That’s quite an operation they have in there,’ she said when they were alone. Her eyes were fixed on the plate of cream fingers. Impulsively she reached out for one and crammed it between her lips. ‘I’m famished. They gave us tea at four but it was shared between about sixty of us. Their stomachs must have all shrunk, being in Holloway. Where’s the boy?’

  Frankie shrugged. ‘Haven’t seen him since yesterday.’

  Milly spoke with her mouth full of cream. ‘They’re planning something. There’s a closed office upstairs, no one’s allowed in but the committee.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I spent most of the day in the press room writing letters to prisoners. If you can write you get to do that. If not, it’s banner-stitching or making trinkets for the next bazaar. They tried to send me out on the streets to hawk papers but I resisted. First time, you see, I had a good excuse.’

  ‘What about Ebony? What did you mean about her ghost?’

  She wiped her mouth with a napkin. ‘I got talking to an old woman called Mrs Dale. We bonded. We both left our husbands.’

  She dropped it in as casually as if she were talking about hats. Frankie frowned but didn’t dare interrupt.

  ‘By the time I arrived, there had already been one meeting. There’s a couple of women coming out of Holloway tomorrow so they’re organising a deputation. They’ll put on a feast and, bizarrely enough, a bagpiper because one of the women is Scottish. Flora Drummond, she’s the one they call “The General”, she’s arranging that.’ She took a mouthful of tea. ‘That’s better. It’s icy cold out there.’

  Frankie looked down at her own clothes. She couldn’t bear winters, and wasn’t looking forward to getting back to her room and the meagre pile of coal Mrs Gibbons considered a fire. ‘So what happened when you arrived? What did the building look like inside?’

  ‘Be patient and I’ll tell you.’ Milly looked for a second at the plate of cream fingers then took another one, nibbling it more delicately this time. ‘There’s a hallway where you go in, and that’s where the noticeboard is. They have all sorts up, notices for bazaars, calls for demonstrations, a register of political meetings that you can put your name down to attend in secret and they’ll sort you out with some help. And then there’s the pictures and postcards, morale boosters; there’s one by Bovril that says, “After having my Bovril now they need six officers to arrest me rather than one”, that sort of thing.’

  Frankie raised a smile.

  ‘Downstairs is the press room, that’s where Mrs Dale sent me first. There were a few new ladies today, she said, and I ended up sitting next to quite a singular girl called Roberta. I wasn’t sure whether I liked her; she was one of those boyish women, quite cold. I didn’t mean—’ She looked at Frankie’s suit jacket and her fingers flew to her mouth.

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Well, you know what I mean. She had strong cheekbones, that sort of thing. Maybe I’m just jealous, her clothes hung off her the way they do off models these days. And I was thinking to myself, I suppose this must be what suffragettes look like. Then I started to wonder what they must have thought of me. Anyway, we wrote letters to prisoners all morning, mostly to women in the north-east, congratulating them on their effort, telling them about the fight. The press room was used for the journalists who worked on Votes for Women, but that’s changed now they’ve launched The Suffragette. They have a few typewriters set up, two telephones. Mrs Dale said the police are always trying to cut them off. And there are three very stern looking women who wear navy blue and do the sub-editing.’

  ‘Sounds about right.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Nothing, go on.’

  ‘Well, then there’s the office, where the treasurer and secretary sit. It looks like it was once the study of the house. It’s the only room with a decent fire. And I suppose they take charge of donations and funding for all the costs of publishing pamphlets and zooming women around the country on trains. And in what I suppose would have been the parlour or dining room, there were women boxing up little posies of lavender and designing brooches to sell in the next bazaar. Did you know,’ she frowned, ‘that they are encouraged to melt down their jewellery and have it re-set in the suffragette colours, amethyst, emeralds, pearls. There’s some of the most expensive jewels you ever saw on some of their throats. Family heirlooms, gone,’ she flicked open her hand, ‘just like that. Would you do that to your jewellery?’

  ‘Do I look like I own jewellery?’

  Milly blushed. ‘No, well, neither do I. I sold mine to pay for my passage back to England.’ She hesitated, breaking gaze with Frankie. Once again Frankie burned with the urge to ask her about her past, but before she could open her mouth, Milly suddenly said, ‘This skirt is so itchy, you know.’ She reached down under her blouse and, as discreetly as she could, gave her waist a good scratch. A bulbous-eyed woman at the next table glared.

  Frankie sighed and tried to keep focus. ‘So what about Ebony?’

  Milly’s eyes darkened and she looked up slowly. ‘She hadn’t attended a meeting there for nearly a month. No one had seen her after her last time in Holloway. And do you want to know something else? No one missed her.’ She shook her head.

  Frankie sat forward, nearly toppling her teacup as she caught the edge of the tablecloth. ‘What?’

  ‘Not a soul. I’d say if she hadn’t abandoned them, she’d have been kicked out before too long. Funny thing was, this girl,
this boyish little Roberta, Miss Jenkins, she wanted to know all about it too. Like she was some kind of crazed fanatic who’d gone along just to find out about her.’

  ‘She might have thought the same about you.’

  Milly nodded thoughtfully. ‘She might.’

  ‘So who told you this, about Ebony?’

  ‘Well, like I said, at four o’clock we broke for tea. There’s a kitchen at the back of the house and some of the older women, by that I mean the ones who had been there for a while, went to prepare bread and dripping, and pots of tea. So naturally I offered to help. So did Roberta Jenkins. She was the one who first asked about Ebony.’

  ‘Did you ask how she knew Ebony?’

  ‘She didn’t. She said she had read about her. She was there at the Albert Hall that night, so she said. And Mrs Dale stopped stirring the jam pot, cold, and she said, “I wouldn’t go bandying that name about here if you want to stay on folks’ good sides.” She was perfectly serious. Her face was as sour as I saw it that day, because she really was a very nice amiable woman. But the mention of Ebony . . .’

  Milly took some of her tea and kept the warm cup in her hands. ‘And so I pretended I knew very little about her. And I asked what it was she had done. Frankie, it was like a fisherman opening a bag of maggots and watching them spill out all over the table. The things Ebony wanted them to do, the plans she made. July this year, you remember Mrs Barclay-Evans said they called a truce. Ebony had grown very agitated at this, according to Mrs Dale and had begun making all sorts of schemes. Instead of flying a hot air balloon over parliament and throwing pamphlets overboard she wanted to throw pebbles. She didn’t understand until one of the women who has a bachelor of science degree explained to her that from that height a pebble could kill someone. She wanted to ambush the Prime Minister at his country home, to take him hostage. She wanted to throw him tied to a trapeze off Big Ben. And this one you’ll like.’ Milly dropped her voice. ‘She wanted to release the tigers from London Zoo and set them loose on the streets with a note round their neck saying “Deeds Not Words”.’

  Frankie swallowed uncomfortably. Suddenly all the cream and tea in her stomach was making her feel sick. Could it be that the woman she had seen at the corset shop, on stage that night, had not been frightened at all, she had simply been unhinged? Was her agitation the twitchings of a woman who belonged in the Bedlam? ‘It’s all talk though.’

  ‘She said they had drawings on file, no written plans, Ebony could barely write her own name, let alone spell. They wanted rid of her. Her stunts, they said, were getting out of hand.’

  ‘But what about the militancy? The arson, what the Barclay-Evanses said about the split? They said militancy was on the up anyway.’

  ‘Not like this. They’re very strict about not harming anyone.’

  ‘And you think she’s a liability? That someone wants rid of her for good?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think. Mrs Dale swore blind that she hadn’t seen her since the last time in Holloway. She was in for window-smashing I think, or she might have thrown a stone at a cabinet minister’s car.’

  ‘And was it universal? I mean did everyone hate her or was anyone behind her?’

  ‘She had one friend in the movement. A girl she met when she first joined. They were thick as thieves, Mrs Dale said. She helped her rig the trapeze at the Albert Hall and they’d been in Holloway together a couple of times. She was working as a parlourmaid but she lost her job for some reason a few weeks before the last time they ended up in prison. Ebony helped her find a new job, somewhere, and then after they came out of Holloway they left the WSPU. That is to say, no one saw either of them again.’

  ‘And her name?’ Frankie asked softly.

  ‘It was Annie. Annie Evans. It was her. The girl in the papers, the one that was killed on Tottenham Court Road. I saw a photograph of them both at a rally.’

  Frankie put her face in her hands and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘One down, one to go. Maybe they weren’t after Ebony that night after all, they wanted both of them.’

  Milly nodded gently. ‘I couldn’t write anything down, of course, I was trying to take it all in.’ She took a long blink. ‘I don’t know what to think of Ebony now. What was she thinking? Could she have gone through with her plans? I just don’t want to think.’

  Frankie watched her carefully. Without her hat, her hair looked scruffy and wild and in the plain brown suit she could from a distance have passed for any ordinary governess or working woman. But there was still something in her face, the way the muscles round her mouth moved when she talked, something in her lips and vowels. After a while her shoulders fell back in the chair, exhausted. ‘Anyway, how did you get on at the morgue?’

  Frankie filled her in quickly. The poison in the corset; the brooch found on Smythe; the woman who had come for his clothes. She took out her notebook and passed the rubbing across to Milly. ‘Did you ever see Ebony with that?’

  Milly looked at the sketch for a long time. Her eyes roamed its rough lines from the top to the point at the base. After a while she looked away and rubbed at her eyelids. ‘It’s hard to make out what it is.’

  ‘Looks like a family crest.’

  ‘I’ve never seen it before.’

  ‘Did she have a lover? An admirer who came to the club? You know Jojo talked about cabinet ministers.’

  Milly was looking sceptically at her. ‘I’ve never seen any cabinet ministers. He talks himself big, Jojo.’ She sighed. ‘If Ebony had a lover she was as clandestine with him as she was with everything else. Like where she was going for the past month when we thought she was at suffragette meetings.’

  Frankie thought for a moment or two then looked Milly in the eye as she took back her notebook. ‘I have a hunch about that. But we won’t find out about it until tonight.’

  Milly cast her eyes down at the scrappy remnants of their tea. Her brow became creased with rows of little lines. ‘I’m tired, Frankie. And I have to work tonight. Club’s open again.’

  ‘So we go afterwards.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Smythe’s. The corset shop.’

  Twenty-Six

  Annie Evans. The name sat on the tip of Primrose’s tongue as he strode down the mucky road the omnibus had deposited him on, back towards Pentonville Prison. Robert Jenkins had telegraphed the office with the information that afternoon, and now Primrose had in his pocket a Judge’s order for William Reynolds’s discharge, if, and only if, he could be of reasonable use to a police investigation. It had been procured during Mr Justice Curtis Watkins’s medicinal nap, taken after Sunday lunch and, as Stuttlegate continued to remind him, at great inconvenience. But as the prisoner was male, and therefore more likely to make rational decisions when issuing blackmail threats, Stuttlegate did not have a problem signing off the telegram.

  There had been no dental records to verify the identity, but a strong-stomached suffragette had agreed to view the body. Photographs were sourced from the Holloway files. Doubt was erased. The methods they had set Jenkins up with for gathering his information may have been unorthodox, but the facts were correct. It was Annie Evans.

  Primrose’s nerves jangled in his great skeleton as he walked, still dizzy-headed from his own interrupted afternoon nap that he had managed to snatch in his office, his clothes creased and pulled from their usual shape, his limbs warm in some places, cold in others.

  A guard pulled open the front entrance gate. The yard was empty of horses now; the shells of Black Marias lay shining in the crisp cold sunlight. Reception was busy: visiting afternoon. Primrose wedged past the crowds of wives, brothers, sons and mothers, scrubbed, combed and in their Sunday best, and approached the front desk.

  There was a different officer on, who all but sneered as Primrose displayed his warrant card.

  ‘CID? It’s Sunday.’

  ‘It’s extremely urgent. I have a court order, and I need to speak to the Senior Medical Officer.’

  ‘Yo
u’re having a laugh.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  The man bared a set of rusty old teeth in a frosty smile. ‘He’s at afternoon tea.’

  ‘Afternoon tea? In Pentonville?’

  The officer gestured to the crowd. ‘Stand aside please, we’re very busy.’

  Primrose turned to see a woman behind him, dabbing at her eyes with a threadbare handkerchief, and a creep of dread swam over him, not anchored to anything in particular. He turned back to the officer. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to need to be dealt with before these people.’

  The officer scratched his freckled chin and ran his finger down the ledger book, humming a ditty. ‘What’s the prisoner’s name you’re after?’

  ‘Reynolds. You’ll know him, he’s the suffrage man.’

  The officer looked puzzled for a second, then nodded. ‘Yeah, I do.’ He didn’t offer any more, just continued to peruse his italic scribblings in the ledger. Just as Primrose felt a jostle in his back, the officer snapped his head up. ‘He ain’t here.’

  ‘What? That’s preposterous, I visited him this morning, he’s here.’

  ‘Well, he ain’t.’ The man shrugged. ‘You’re the second person come looking for him just now.’

  ‘Well what do you mean ain’t’?

  ‘Isn’t.’

  Primrose stemmed a well of vitriol. He looked into the man’s blue eyes and slowly clawed back his temper. ‘Men don’t just disappear from prison.’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ the man said, enjoying himself. ‘He was discharged.’

  Primrose reached a heavy hand across the desk. ‘Let me see that ledger.’

  The man stiffened but let him take it, aware of the boundaries he could push. CID men were the bane of his existence, swanning in with their thick coats and fancy hats, flapping their warrant cards.

  ‘Can I speak with the Governor?’

  ‘Governor’s at afternoon tea,’ the man said levelly.

  Primrose scanned down the slick pattern of handwriting until he found the name. In the ‘admitted’ column the date was 2 November, two days ago. The convictions were vandalism of property and contempt of court. Then in the discharge column, beside the governor’s signature, a set of initials had been scrawled. ‘CH.’