The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  She lowered her arm and, still staring ahead, fumbled around the altar behind her until she came upon the object she was searching for. The cloak moved and Frankie saw the whites in Liam’s eyes, wild as a shying horse. Lady Thorne held up a polished shape. Its clean, lacquered sheen caught the light with horrible perfection. One of the bombs. A nail stuck straight out of it like a snake’s forked tongue.

  ‘I would ask you to consider the implications, Inspector, of trying to be a hero.’

  Frankie was finding it harder and harder to breathe in the cloying air, grown hot by the candles and her own terror. She racked her brains trying to think of ways to stall. Ask her more questions. Interview subjects love to talk about themselves. ‘Why destroy the structure that you stand for? If authority’s what you want.’

  Lady Thorne took her admiring eyes from the bomb for a second. ‘You’ll note I spared the House of Lords. Someone will have to pick up the mess once these anarchist women have been brought to justice. And when they’re all swinging from the Holloway gallows, it will be damned certain that the rulers in charge will never let a group like that ever exist again. Workers, miners, trade unions, suffragists . . . They will shut them down. They will be despised.’

  ‘You want to be back in the Dark Ages?’ said Primrose.

  Lady Thorne smiled. ‘They were only ever dark for some.’

  ‘How did you make them trust you?’ asked Frankie.

  ‘Very simple. They’re idiots. At our very first meeting in that diabolical shop, we established the extent of my . . . injury,’ she gestured to her jaw, waggling the bomb dangerously. ‘It was easy to engage their sympathy, set the plan in motion. I even got them to put aside a third of their wages to pay for the terracotta and the chemistry set.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, that’s egalitarian, isn’t it? Ebony Diamond’s anger with the suffragettes was an added bonus. I had simply planned to apprehend her in prison and offer her something better than they could. As it happened, she was only too happy to accept.’

  ‘When she thought you weren’t going to commit murder.’

  Lady Thorne sighed impatiently. ‘And she wonders why I didn’t trust her with the full plan to begin with. No, I started them out gently,’ she said, her voice very grave. ‘I shared with them the simple idea of setting fire to the building, eased them in. Then it became bombs, and finally, mongrel politicians’ bottoms. Ebony almost ruined the whole thing. Her and that evil deviant friend of hers.’

  ‘An innocent man. You killed an innocent man.’

  ‘And I’ll kill more with relish.’ She brandished the bomb.

  A rattle of footsteps on the stairs behind them made Frankie jump. She half turned to see shadows playing on the dark stone walls beside the door’s arch.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Lady Thorne’s sharp tongue cut the air.

  ‘I would have thought you would know the sound of my footsteps in the dark. I at least know the sound of yours.’ The long lean shadow of Milly passed into the nave. Then Milly herself appeared through the double doors, her face and hair smudged with mud. She looked like a funeral bride standing coolly at the foot of the aisle in draping silks, cuffed in irons to Sergeant Wilson by her left hand. On their other side stood a skinny boyish woman in a blue linen dress, a suffragette sash crossing her torso.

  ‘You’d murder your own daughter?’ Frankie asked quietly.

  Lady Thorne’s face seemed for a second as if it might melt into an expression of warmth. ‘My daughter.’ Then it hardened back again like stale dough. ‘She murdered me.’ The pear teetered in her hand. She smiled and Liam landed a small punch in her belly.

  ‘Don’t move,’ the voices of Frankie and the two policemen yelled.

  Lady Thorne coughed and recovered. ‘My daughter started this mess in the first place. What kind of society lets a girl humiliate her family? As if my daughter hadn’t proven the cancer of the age we live in by marrying an archaeologist. An archaeologist?’ she shrieked. ‘A French archaeologist. A man who digs up bones and feeds off snails. Did Agincourt never happen? Then she bares her breasts for photographers and her belly on stage for money.’ Her eyes were suddenly empty as gun barrels. ‘“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is—”’

  ‘“To have a thankless child,”’ Frankie finished the quote, and groaned as a memory dredged up; the night outside Jojo’s, Lady Thorne had spat that at Milly. King Lear and his thankless daughters, she should have known.

  Lady Thorne looked briefly appalled at the notion of Shakespeare in Frankie’s mouth, then went on. ‘You would be doing me a favour, you, whoever you are, if you were to garrotte my daughter in front of me, here in this church.’ Her voice was an icy reptilian hiss.

  Then, like lightning from above, hell broke loose.

  Lady Thorne dropped Liam, hunched her shoulder back high over the altar and hurled her bomb with the force of a bear. It turned somersaults in the golden air, cutting a clean, spinning, clockwise path, arcing up almost to the ceiling before hurtling down again. A reeling cry of pain came sharp and deafening. A man’s cry.

  Inspector Primrose took the full force of the bomb as the nail tore through his shirt and split the muscle on his chest. He stumbled back against the pew; they all heard the crack of his spine on the wood as he fell. His revolver spun out of his hand and into the air where it whacked the low vaulted ceiling and pelted back down.

  Frankie dived onto the icy stone, waiting for the heat and the ash and the dust. But the blast never came. She saw Liam ahead of her crawling like a lizard on his belly out of Lady Thorne’s reach.

  The revolver slammed the floor inches from Frankie.

  ‘Fire it. Frankie, fire it!’ It was Milly’s voice.

  Frankie stretched her hands for the gun, feeling the dried flesh on her back tear open again. Lady Thorne rose against the altar, reaching into her leather bag for another grenade. The smooth metal, still warm from the inspector’s grip, slid into Frankie’s hand. She raised the gun.

  ‘Fire it, Frankie.’ Milly’s voice was desperate. Sergeant Wilson groped for his revolver on the side of his chest but his right hand was cuffed to Milly’s and he struggled to get a grip on it with his left.

  Frankie’s fingers jammed against the trigger. ‘I don’t know how . . .’ She ran her left hand over the top of the gun.

  ‘The safety catch, the safety catch, left hand side.’

  Metal gave way underneath her thumb and Milly screamed a bitter scream one final time, ‘Just fire it!’

  Frankie clenched her fingers down to the bone and pressed the trigger. Gunpowder spat back at her face, a shower of hot black pepper, and a shattering roar ripped through the chapel.

  Lady Thorne, leaning against the altar, spluttered and gaped as if she had been given a nasty shock at the card table. Red foam bubbled on her lips and her mouth gave a terrible undignified belch as she slid into the pile of scarlet cape at her feet. The bomb in her hand slipped back onto the hard marble of the altar, rolled with a musical tinkling noise towards the candle and stopped silently against its wax.

  The world paused for a moment. Then a powerful ringing filled Frankie’s ears, the underwater feeling again. A moan rose out of the dark.

  ‘Primrose.’ Iron rattled behind her and Sergeant Wilson dragged Milly over to the twitching body on the ground, lying between two pews.

  ‘Don’t touch,’ Frankie yelled and shoved her hand back to shoo them off. She crawled over to the inspector’s body and saw that his eyes were pinned wide with fear. His shirt had ripped, his jacket had fallen open and from the gash the inverted pear stuck out, its fangs wedged into his flesh. A small creeping patch of blood was growing on his shirt.

  ‘It’s going to go,’ he whispered. His forehead was rinsed with sweat.

  Frankie reached into her pocket and grabbed a handkerchief. An unfamiliar man’s voice sounded behind her, telling everyone to move aside, and she momentarily turned. The woman in the suffragette sash was pushing Wilson and Milly out of the way and kneelin
g down. In her efforts she knocked the wig off her head and the mass of brown curled hair artfully arranged in French twists became a crop of fine blonde. Frankie could see it now, the male features in the face. She had taken them to be simply strong. Baffled, she let the man in the dress press her out of the way calmly as he bent on all fours over Primrose’s chest.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I had no time to change when Wilson called me off suffragette surveillance. We would have been here faster but that Sergeant on the lobby door wouldn’t let us past. Didn’t recognise me in a dress.’

  Primrose managed a weak twitch of a smile. ‘I told him not to let any women past.’

  ‘I’ll thank you for that later, sir. Now keep still.’

  ‘I don’t blame you if it . . .’

  ‘I’ve seen one like this before and there’s every chance it won’t go off. It needs a spark. Now I know why you wanted me off Irish Branch. Not just a pretty face?’ He kept up the trembling banter as his fingers moved over Primrose’s chest prising a wider hole around the bomb. ‘I’m not a doctor, mind.’

  Milly, who had been staring at her mother’s body on the ground, suddenly snapped from her trance and turned. ‘Roberta. Roberta Jenkins. I saw you at Lincoln’s Inn House. You were the new recruit, that day, you wanted to know about Ebony.’

  ‘I prefer Robert. Or just Detective Constable.’

  The inspector winced.

  ‘Try not to breathe too deeply, sir. I need a second pair of hands but I warn you it might not work. Clear out, the rest of you. Up the stairs.’

  ‘No,’ Milly said.

  ‘Miss . . .’

  ‘Don’t “Miss” me, Roberta.’

  ‘I’m staying too,’ Frankie murmured. She looked back over her shoulder and called, ‘Liam, get out of here.’

  There was a pause then a little choking voice came back. ‘No.’

  Jenkins rolled his eyes up to the low chapel ceiling. ‘At least we’re in the right place to pray for a miracle.’

  ‘I have a message for Clara—’ Primrose’s finger lifted off the ground then he dropped it again and his eyes squeezed. Frankie noticed that Wilson had discreetly taken the inspector’s hand and was holding it tentatively like a dog’s wounded paw.

  ‘Make yourself useful then,’ Jenkins nodded at Frankie. ‘Stretch the flesh against the grain of the muscle. Horizontally, like you’re stretching meat. As far as it will go. He’ll cry out and howl but you just keep stretching and don’t stop. All right?’

  She nodded briskly feeling her heart quiver like the jelly on a pork pie, and braced her hands against Primrose’s clammy shirt, trying to get a purchase on the skin. Jenkins reached into a small tool kit concealed in his dress and pulled out a tiny pair of jewellers’ pliers. He snapped them a few times then jerked a nod at Frankie to keep stretching. The inspector’s mouth hung open, pouring out twisted moans like a butchered animal.

  Jenkins inched the pliers round the detonating wire, his tongue lolling sideways in his mouth. The detonator caught and stuck a few times, then, like a plant root loosening from the earth, the barb slid free. ‘It’s done, it’s out.’ His hand was streaked with a thin line of crimson as he cupped the ceramic pear loosely in his palm.

  Frankie looked down at the wound on the inspector’s chest, raw and textured, like the belly of a gutted salmon. She could feel tears conspiring behind her eyeballs for them all, for Milly and for Ebony, for everything, and she ground her jaw to will them away. She didn’t deserve to cry. She would not cry.

  Then an Irish voice crept up softly behind her. ‘Your back looks like steak and kidney. You should get that seen to.’

  Outside, the lawn was crisp with white feathers of frost. Three fire wagons had drawn up. Their horses pawed the ground. In the distance fireworks shattered luminous gold and silver into an opaque sky. The bonfire on Parliament Square had been razed to a pile of black ash.

  Some of the police were standing idle, smoking cigarettes while others loosened their tunics and pushed their helmets back off their foreheads. Their faces seemed a blur to Frankie, from where she stood, at the mouth of a horse-drawn ambulance, holding Ebony Diamond’s ungloved hand, a hand surprisingly small and doll-like without its sheath.

  Ebony’s face was smudged with soot and bomb-smoke, blood and sweat; her breathing had shrunk impossibly shallow in her chest. Someone had ripped the front of her corset open, revealing a black cotton shift underneath. Her arm had been swaddled to her side by a sheath of blankets. She tried to crane her neck off the stretcher to look at something and Frankie followed the line of her gaze to see the Black Maria with the three remaining Hourglass Factory women being loaded and chained inside. The horses leading the wagon stamped their hooves on the hard ground and tossed their manes.

  Ebony took a sudden gasp of cold air and Frankie’s head snapped down to her. ‘I think,’ she said weakly, ‘they have done for me.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Frankie held her voice carefully. ‘You’ve . . . you’ve tamed cats, jumped off buildings, scared the knickers off journalists. Come on. They’ll look after you at the hospital, you’ll see.’

  She shook her head delicately and Frankie saw then what she had seen the day they found Olivier Smythe. The other side of Ebony Diamond, the side that turned away from the crowds when she was on her trapeze, swinging outwards; the back face of the tarot card. She squeezed her own eyes tightly, swallowing a gulp of pain from her back, and held Ebony’s hand tighter.

  ‘Frankie, you have to publish those photographs. I don’t want the suffragettes, the Women’s Freedom League, any of those groups taking the blame. People need to know why she planted those bombs. It wasn’t for us.’

  ‘They will.’

  The suffragette badge on Ebony’s chest was rising and falling in a quick flutter.

  On Frankie’s other side, Inspector Primrose was being levered on a gurney into an ambulance, while Wilson and Jenkins made notes in their blotters. Liam was being patched up by a nurse with iodine and gauze where Lady Thorne’s fingernail had pierced a hole in his cheek. Over by Westminster Palace, Milly had dropped her coat to the ground and was holding her arms in the thin silk, staring up at the knotted façade of Westminster Abbey.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t keep my promise, to meet you,’ Ebony said.

  Her words pinched inside Frankie’s chest. ‘I understand.’

  ‘I was frightened,’ she said, then softer, ‘I’m frightened now.’

  The ambulance attendants were done strapping Primrose down and came towards the stretcher where Ebony lay. Frankie suddenly found herself seized by a desperation, an absolute refusal to let go of Ebony’s hand. The attendant prised it free finger by finger.

  ‘I mean it, Frankie. Let me down over those photographs and I’ll haunt you. Gypsies make for evil ghosts, did you know that? I’ll come back as a house fire, finish that damned camera off.’

  She reached for Frankie’s arm again, and let go only as the men bundled her backwards into the van. As they closed the doors Frankie was overwhelmed with a sudden well of deep pain. She felt again the plummet they had taken from the gallery, inside her, but this time she found herself landing in cold black ice, alone. The attendant closed the ambulance door.

  She waited until the horses had started up a clop, and began to walk over to where Milly stood. A glow of cigarette over by one of the police cars caught her attention and made her stop. There was a man standing slightly apart from the officers, nodding intently, scribbling in a notebook. The nose, the eyes were too familiar even smudged by distance. Then she saw the pout of the lips.

  How could he possibly have known?

  Teddy Hawkins caught her eye and flipped the cigarette out of his mouth. ‘Frankie,’ he jogged over quickly, his polished shoes skittering a little on the icy ground. ‘Cigarette?’ His hand extended a pewter case as he approached.

  Frankie shook her head blackly. ‘Don’t you dare, Teddy.’

  ‘What?’ He shrugged, a sudden bundle of innocence.
His big lips pursed on the cigarette and she saw his eyes fall callously to the camera bag at her waist. They had given it back to her without question. Primrose had insisted.

  ‘I took a trip to hell in there.’

  ‘Sounds like a regular week with Twinkle.’

  ‘I’m not laughing, Teddy.’

  He scanned her face then flicked the cigarette onto the ground and pulled her arm confidentially towards him. ‘We go halves. You tell me everything that went on in there and I’ll help you write it up.’

  Frankie’s back was aching as if the small of it would pop out of her and onto the ground, her head swam with horror. She wanted to ball her freezing cold hand into a fist and knock it square across Teddy’s ears, or draw blood from his cruel lips. ‘Someone once told me that’s not the way the world works.’

  He saw the change in her face and tilted his chin to the clutch of police. ‘See him,’ he pointed out Wilson. ‘He was down there with you. If I don’t get it out of you I’ll get it out of him. What would you prefer?’

  She chewed her tongue. It felt bitter and bloody and she realised she must have cut it at some stage. Thoughts of Ebony swam in her mind, threatened to take her over. She pushed them down. Slowly she rolled a ball of spittle in her mouth and deposited it softly on Teddy Hawkins’s polished shoe.

  His lips hardened into a stony pout. ‘Then it’s a race to Stonecutter Street.’ He touched his hat between two fingers and barged his way towards Wilson.

  Frankie swallowed her burning pain, took the camera in two hands and ran.

  Forty-Five

  Mr Stark’s office was lit only by a pair of wall-mounted gaslights and a paraffin lamp he kept on his formidable oak desk. The gaslamps threw stains of light up the wall and cast hollow shadows on the face of Nobby, diligently flicking his eyes to and fro over the wire tape rattling through the Reuters machine.