The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  ‘You tell me, Puss.’

  Frankie didn’t answer. After a moment, Twinkle reached a finger to the base of her neck and gave it a quick scratch. ‘Can I have some gin, please?’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Gin.’

  Milly began rummaging in the bedside cabinet.

  ‘What are they?’

  Twinkle rolled her mouth as if she was savouring wine. Then, as if it had turned bitter on her tongue she stopped and spat the word out: ‘Fetishists.’

  ‘Fetishists?’

  Twinkle’s chins wobbled as she nodded. ‘People who like a certain thing.’

  ‘What kind of fetishists?’

  ‘Oh, Puss.’

  Milly was making a symphony of clinks and knocks in the cabinet. Frankie scowled across at her. ‘So they get their thrills watching women dress up in clothes they can’t breathe in? A club for men who like to see women in pain? Charming.’ She raised a hand to her sore neck again and noticed to her distaste her fingers already smelled of the furs of the bed.

  Twinkle leaned forward and beckoned closer the gin glass Milly was offering. ‘What exactly did you see, Puss?’

  Frankie tried to quell a blush as she described the scene through the keyhole, from the wooden dummy with the gouged waist to the woman on the ground being laced. As she spoke, she remembered a story John Bridewell had told her about a girl whose liver had been split in two after lacing her corset up too tight; ‘tightlacing’ they called it. The warning articles that used to appear in Titbits and the News of the World came flooding back. Was that what Ebony Diamond was up to, instead of going to suffragette meetings, taking part in some terrible ritual, parading herself in front of a line of wealthy men? Was that what Olivier Smythe Parisian Corsetier did to his workers, made them into a freak show for the pleasure of his clients, siphoning him money for their titillation?

  Twinkle was staring at her. ‘Of course, it’s not the women who are the tightlacers. The Hourglass Club is for tightlacing men.’

  ‘Pardon?’ Milly dropped the glass. Twinkle sighed wearily, and twitched the satin edges of her gown out of the way of the sticky spiky mess.

  ‘Oh, you pair. Think you know everything, don’t you? You’re worse prudes than the Victorians. Which is, of course, why places like The Hourglass Club exist in the first place. You saw Olivier Smythe, in the flesh, didn’t you?’

  Frankie contemplated this. ‘I thought he was a one-off.’

  ‘Oh, Puss.’ Twinkle looked bitterly disappointed, as though Frankie had just admitted to abstinence from gin or a passion for owls. ‘There’s no such thing as a one-off.’ She ran her eyes along Frankie’s trousers and up to her waist. ‘Don’t you remember the adverts for Madame Dowding’s creations when you were a child? Military corsets for military men.’

  Frankie shook her head.

  ‘The corset letters from men in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine?’

  ‘I’m too young for that,’ Frankie said testily. She watched Milly from the corner of her eye. The graze on her head looked bad. She would have to see to that soon. ‘But what about the woman I saw in the dress?’

  Twinkle arched an eyebrow, staring at Frankie’s trousers.

  ‘That was a man?’ Frankie sat back. ‘Small relief, at least.’

  Twinkle narrowed her eyes. ‘What do you mean? It’s all right as long as it’s the men in the unbreathables? Really, Puss.’

  Frankie’s shoulders prickled.

  Twinkle leaned her head to concede. ‘A few women come to lace if it pleases them. Like Ebony. And I daresay it’s still fashionable among a certain type of girl. But most of the women there are maids. To lace the men. And the men—’

  Frankie snorted. ‘I don’t want to know.’

  Twinkle locked a reproachful eye on her. ‘The men . . . do whatever they want. Play bridge and drink tea. They’re about as deviant as an At Home in Hampstead.’

  Frankie took a glass of gin from the bedside table, where Milly had just poured a fresh round, and looked away.

  Twinkle threw up her hands and landed them in her lap. ‘Well, that just proves my point, doesn’t it? If someone like you reacts like that, try telling it to their peers and colleagues.’ She waited until she had Frankie’s attention again. ‘The club was started by a colonel back in, let me think, 1870 or so. There were rumours he had been at one of those figure training schools, you know, that you used to read about in penny dreadfuls, where the governess makes them wear steel belts and keeps the key round her waist. He had been in the Raj and then perhaps his wife followed the local fashions and refused to wear one.’ Her eyes fell very quickly onto Milly’s uncorseted waist, then she moved them away, embarrassed to be have been caught looking. ‘But they have quite a following. A wealthy one. And a powerful one at that,’ she added.

  Frankie thought back to those high-stepping horses outside the shop.

  Twinkle kicked the broken glass at her feet, making it crunch like ice. ‘Stranger things happen at sea.’ She chewed her lip. ‘And I should know. I’ve accompanied a few Grand Tours.’ A brief smile flashed on her face then, as she saw that neither of the others were amused, it vanished. ‘I thought they only met once a week but perhaps it’s twice now. Wednesdays were their originals.’

  ‘They were wearing black armbands.’

  ‘Ah, perhaps a memorial for Mr Smythe.’ Her gay smile flashed again but her eyes were melancholy.

  A cloudy silence settled. Milly eventually spoke. ‘But what does it have to do with Ebony going missing? Or that girl Annie?’

  ‘She worked there,’ Frankie said. ‘She’ll have known the lot of them.’

  ‘And Smythe?’

  ‘It would be easy as pie for one of them to smear poison on a corset. Especially if it was meant for Ebony and not him. And the cocaine at the theatre; money, contacts.’

  ‘So Ebs was about to go public?’ Milly said. ‘There must be a list somewhere in there of their names and addresses. A club secretary. And someone didn’t like it.’

  Twinkle was shaking her head vigorously. ‘No. No, they wouldn’t do that. Not to that girl, not to one of their own and certainly not two, not Olivier,’ she said firmly. ‘He was their darling.’

  ‘Oh come on, Twinkle. How can you be so blinkered?’

  ‘But they wouldn’t. They simply wouldn’t.’

  ‘Is this why you sent us chasing after bloody suffragettes?’ Frankie’s temper flared. ‘Protecting a mob of your old cronies. We could have had them by now. How could you?’ She pinched the bridge of her nose.

  Twinkle stared at her. ‘They’re gentlemen.’

  ‘She’d have created a scandal. Besides it’s against the law.’

  ‘Oh pooh, the law.’ Twinkle snorted and a fizz of gin came through her nostrils triggering a coughing fit. Milly slapped her awkwardly on the back until she raised a hand. They waited until she had finished spluttering. ‘Do you really think, Puss, that they would still be meeting in the very place they had murdered their patron?’

  Frankie pushed her hand through her hair. It felt greasy and dirty like a mop. ‘I don’t know what to think.’ A sudden wave of frustration hit her and she felt like lashing out at Twinkle, at whoever had hit her on the back of the head, at all of them. ‘Well, at least I have a story to run with if we don’t get to the bottom of it. That’ll be worth a few bob.’

  Twinkle looked at her with deep disgust. ‘You wouldn’t, Puss.’

  ‘Why not? Mr Stark would go for it, I’m sure. And if not him then someone else. The Star, Titbits, News of the World. They love all that stuff. Tightlacers, perversions. If you can’t beat ’em join ’em, I say.’

  There was an embarrassing silence that lasted a minute or so during which Frankie felt a hot current of regret rising in her. She wished that now like so many times before, she had kept her mouth shut.

  Twinkle spoke at last, her throat frogged over. ‘You would land a man in jail for the sake of a scoop, would you? Is that the sort
of woman you are, Puss? Is it? You might think that because you have the guts to go around dressed the way you do that it’s easy for everyone. Twenty years ago, before Vesta Tilley and Ella Shields dressed like that on stage, before Mrs Bloomer invented the bicycling trouser, you’d have been lynched. You know, they burned Joan of Arc alive for wearing trousers. Would you like that? Can you imagine any one of those men in a Pentonville cell?’

  Frankie avoided Twinkle’s eyes though she could feel them burning on her.

  ‘Puss, you might think it’s fancy—’

  ‘But they are deviants.’

  Twinkle had fire in her eyes now. ‘What do you think you are, Frankie George?’

  Silence settled again. The noises of chatter and laughter from the parlour ceased. Twinkle swallowed, caught off guard at her own rage. She began settling the thin folds of her gown around her, looking down and playing with the lace. ‘It’s never the deviants who are the problem, Puss. Don’t forget that. It’s people who won’t open their minds that are dangerous.’

  Thirty

  Frankie got up off the bed and went to the window. Down below, a couple were climbing out of a hansom cab and heading into the next building. She paid attention to the woman’s waist, trying to see under her coat if she too was a tightlacer. This new knowledge, that the practice hadn’t died out but was thriving above a shop on Bond Street, by monied men with chauffeurs and maids, had thrown her.

  She turned back to Twinkle, feeling her face burning with bashfulness. Milly knocked back the last of her gin and poured another round.

  ‘What about the maids? Are they forced to tightlace? Is it part of the job?’

  Twinkle pursed her lips and smoothed out a fur on the bed. ‘It wasn’t in my day.’

  ‘What do you mean, your day?’

  She swallowed. ‘I was honorary. Like Ebony Diamond. Only for a very short period, when I was on the payroll of a member.’

  ‘So they’re not . . . ?’

  Twinkle began to look weary again. ‘Puss, it has nothing to do with whether you prefer ladies or gents. Whether you like to wear it with a shirt or a frock. It’s about the corset. The corset itself provides gratification. The pain makes you dizzy, delirious. You feel cut in half. Without religion – and let’s face it, who wants to sit and listen to a man wearing purple? – it’s the closest we come to transcendence. Mysticism, a natural drug.’

  ‘And those maids believe that too?’

  She paused, tilted her head again and sipped her gin, swilling it round her mouth.

  Milly spoke up softly. ‘So it’s not about wanting to be a freak?’

  Twinkle rolled her eyes. ‘It’s about sensation.’ She glanced at Frankie, who suddenly felt self-conscious of her boyish figure. ‘If you read any of these treatises against tightlacing from the past century, they are all attacking women for indulging in an activity perceived as sexual. Women who tightlace don’t belong in the home, they don’t make good mothers, good floor-scrubbers, good cooks. They’re enjoying the feeling of being laced. Men can feel that too.’

  ‘But can’t it induce hysteria?’ Frankie said.

  ‘Only in its critics,’ Twinkle said pointedly.

  Frankie sat back on the bed twiddling the stem of her glass between her fingers. She could feel Milly breathing gently behind her, waiting for her to say the thing that was on both of their minds.

  ‘Then why did they hit us? We just got attacked by a gang of enlightened women who work for a club of male corset fetishists.’

  ‘It would seem that way.’

  ‘I understand that we were intruders,’ Frankie said, ‘and that we weren’t invited. And,’ she said, waving her glass about, ‘that they need to preserve their anonymity.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Twinkle.

  ‘But what makes you so certain that they have nothing to do with Ebony’s disappearance? She’s scared, that’s if she’s still alive, and it seems too coincidental that everyone involved has connections to this club, this place.’

  ‘Puss, I don’t have all the answers, and even if I did, I thought you were the reporter. But I know those men, and the ones I know wouldn’t commit murder.’ She tilted her head, hesitating for a moment, then put her glass down. ‘You asked me a minute ago if those maids agree with the club’s philosophy. I said I know the men. The tightlacers. I don’t know any of these maids, whether they lace or not. Whether they do it because they believe in it or,’ she sighed, ‘for the money.’ Her lips narrowed again. ‘Or whether they are quite as enlightened as one might like to think.’

  ‘We’ll go back when it’s empty.’ Frankie strode with such force Milly had to skip to keep up with her. She was tired and cold and all she could think of was a hot coal fire and a bed that wasn’t covered in fur.

  ‘You’re not going back in there without protection,’ Liam said.

  ‘Oh shove off.’ She felt guilty as soon as she had said it. Liam stopped walking and hung back under a streetlamp. The light caught the fragile gnarls of his cheekbones. They had come to the crossroads between Pentonville and Gray’s Inn Road. After walking the length of Euston Road Frankie’s legs were beginning to ache.

  ‘Don’t you think we should sleep on it?’ Milly asked. She puffed her cheeks and stopped too.

  ‘Nothing to sleep on. What’s the first rule of a murder investigation? Mary Ann Cotton, Crippen, the Chocolate Cream poisoner. You start with the people they know, the people they saw last. Only place I saw that girl, Annie Evans, was in that shop. They’re guilty. Someone in there’s guilty.’ Frankie checked for traffic and was about to cross the street when she saw Liam still waiting under the streetlamp. ‘Oh come on, I didn’t mean it. I’m tired. You’re right, we do need – look, you can sleep on the floor by the hearth, though I can’t promise it will be warm.’

  He had turned away from her. The gold light caught the tufts of his unruly mane sticking out from under his wool hat. His ears were a grimy brown. He shook his head. ‘I have things to do.’

  ‘At this time of night?’

  He gestured towards King’s Cross Station. Despite the hour the public houses were still glowing, women spilling out of their dresses, gents in sharp cut top hats holding umbrellas over their heads.

  ‘Best hour for work.’ His face flashed a grin of bravado.

  ‘Work?’ Realisation dawned on Frankie. ‘You really are a dipper?’

  He didn’t answer, just tucked his bony hand back in his pocket. He was almost out of the light and into the station shadows when he turned his head back. ‘Don’t you think the best way to find out what she was up to, is to ask her yourself?’

  ‘Oh brilliant idea. Brain of Charles Darwin there. Don’t you think I would have done that – if we could find her?’

  But it was too late. He had slunk into a group of men circled round a creosote barrel of fire and become invisible among torn tweed jackets and woollen caps.

  Frankie led Milly the few hundred yards further in silence until they reached Percy Circus. Her key jammed in the latch; she wiggled it until it gave. The house was pitch black and they scrambled gently past the sideboard in the hall and up the stairs. Frankie ushered Milly ahead into the bedroom and switched on the gaslight.

  The room was bare.

  Her papers and the Blickensderfer were gone from the desk. The fire was empty, save for a few scraps of dead coal trailing across the hearth. There were no blankets on the bed. In one corner, her clothes had been dumped in a heap, piled to a peak and capped by the lavender-tinted unopened letter from her mother. Her few books, a copy of W. T. Stead’s Government by Journalism, a dictionary and an illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland, were stacked nearby. The tin of Colman’s mustard had been swiped.

  Milly’s mouth hung gently open. Frankie crossed to the desk where a single sheet of paper flapped up and down with the draught through the cracked windowpane.

  ‘Typewriter taken in lieu of owed rent.’ There was a receipt clipped to it from a pawn shop.

&nb
sp; Frankie groaned under her breath. She knew Mrs Gibbons was tight-fisted but had never imagined she could be so cruel. Her hand clenched the paper into a ball, then she thought better of it and smoothed it out, folded it and stuck it in her inside pocket. Milly sat down on the bed.

  Frankie gave a short laugh. ‘It’s normally a lot more cosy. Coal in the fire, blankets on the bed, I even have a washstand, wouldn’t you know it.’ She looked at the empty corner by the window.

  ‘Don’t worry, you can come to mine.’

  Frankie said nothing. Her fingers trailed the cracked edge of the desk.

  ‘My flat-mate’s seldom there. She poses for a man up in Mayfair most evenings and doesn’t tend to come home.’ She nodded to the pile of clothes in the corner. ‘Do you want to collect some things to wear?’

  After a few seconds Frankie sunk her hands into the pile of clothes and pulled out a pair of trousers, a waistcoat and a tie her father had given her. As an afterthought she picked up the letter on top. Milly had stood and was pacing the cold room.

  ‘Won’t be a second.’

  She tore open the seal and took out the crisp paper inside. The smell was familiar, the special notepaper her mother had been given over ten years ago by a lady who lived in Hampstead Garden Suburb. She kept it in a drawer in the parlour and it had taken on the whiff of mothballs. Once upon a time it was scented with lavender. She only used it on special occasions; thank you letters, birthdays, congratulations. Frankie picked through the Italian, skimming the grammar. It was a notice of a wedding. Harry Tripe had met a second cousin of his on a visit to the country and proposed to her last month. Between the lines of joy and excitement there was a very sharp message: it should have been you.

  She was surprised to find her heart sinking a little. She tried to shake it off. His family were brassy, he was unappealing and she would have done anything rather than become a Tottenham butcher’s wife. But because it was dark and it was late and her room had been scalped by her landlady and there were no foreseeable ways of buying back her beloved typewriter, her only source of income, she felt the emotion rising in her throat.