The Hourglass Factory (16 page)

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.’

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 dresses
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.

Frankie boiled with rage and rejection for a few minutes, before putting two and two together, and beginning to see an idea that she thought Miss Bly would have been proud of. She used kohl to
subtly darken the skin on her throat and chin, and purchased a sixpence false moustache from the joke-shop floor of Gamages. She would do a woman’s exposé inside the Savage Club.

It could have worked beautifully. She was whisked through the door, name-dropping her editor without an eyebrow being raised, and found journalists she had seen on Fleet Street playing poker and
bridge in the library. Better still, in the Lounge, decorated with statues of feathered American Indians in savage poses, she saw the publisher of the paper himself, Lord Thorne, reading
The
Times
. She invited herself onto one of the Chesterfields opposite and took out a pair of wire spectacles with plain glass in the lenses, another purchase from Gamages. He nodded. She smiled.
She ordered a brandy and took out a cigarette. She drank three brandies in all, smoked two cigarettes and batted a brace of sentences back and forth with the publisher.

Parched on alcohol, dizzy with brandy she took the sensible move to order some soda water, at which point a young sub-editor next to her struck up a conversation. He worked for the
Daily
Mail
. They chatted about skittles and trains and the terror of child-snatchers. They talked about football and Frankie did not hold against him the fact that he supported Woolwich Arsenal.

Her bladder, by this point had begun to strain. She caught herself just in time before asking for the ladies’ room, and instead requested directions to the conveniences. But she was only
halfway there when she noticed to her horror that the young man was following behind. He tipped her a wink.

Inside she headed for the cubicle, flushed, harangued, fit to burst, only to find the
Daily Mail
man still following. Panicked into forgetting her disguise she shrieked an obscenity at
him in her natural voice – at which point the man, stunned only for a second, saw fit to turn the indiscretion to his advantage and began hollering, ‘A woman, a woman in the Savage
Club! She almost foxed us but here I’ve tracked her down, look, here, help!’

Before he could grab her, she darted to the door, sprang down the corridor and out into the street, praying she could hold her piddle until she reached home. She only got as far as the Camden
canal before she had to give in, and threw Nellie Bly’s book in along with it.

Frankie never tried an exposé again. As she rounded the corner into Duck Lane, dreading seeing the man with the cape and the blue cheese nose, she thought that perhaps it was time to
gather a little courage again now.

Jojo’s was boarded up fast. The posters on the front had been soaked by the rain and sagged unhappily on their tie-ribbons; ink had run down Ebony’s upside-down front, casting
streaks across her face. There was no one around, not even a lamp lit outside.

She hopped down the steps and banged on the red door, her fist stinging with the cold. The rain was starting to pick up, drips trickling down her neck. There was a scrabbling inside, the press
of footsteps, then the door opened a crack and a warm draft escaped, along with the face of the tiny woman in striped trousers she had seen smoking in the doorway the night before. She glared at
Frankie with green eyes. ‘We’re closed,’ she said in a Scottish accent. ‘Can’t you take a hint?’ She nodded to the empty lamp and the wet posters. ‘No show
tonight.’

‘But it’s Saturday.’

The woman shrugged. Her skin was covered with a thick layer of greasepaint.

‘I left my hat the other night. Thursday.’ Frankie tried to peek past her into the club but the woman cottoned on and narrowed the opening of the door. There was a kitcheny smell
drifting out, liver and gravy.

‘We’ve had no hats. You’ll have dropped it in the street.’

‘What time are you opening next?’

‘We don’t know.’ She pushed the door, and was an inch from shutting it when Frankie wedged her hand in the gap. ‘I’m a reporter. I’m investigating the
disappearance of Ebony Diamond. I knew her, I met her. If she’s in there . . .’ She held her breath, bracing her fingers for the pain of a slammed door. ‘I think she’s in
danger.’

The woman paused, then opened the gap a fraction more. The liver smell grew stronger along with the stink of old red wine. A voice Frankie recognised called from the pitch black inside.
‘Let her in.’

The small woman took a sharp breath, before opening the door wide. She stood in the way, making Frankie edge round her to get inside. Once they were both in, she slammed the door and shoved a
great bolt across the lock. It was dark in the lobby, powerfully scented with meat residue. In the gas-lamp glow Frankie could see that the walls were painted a dark blood red, like the inside of
an eyelid. She jumped as a chattering came from behind her shoulder and looked round, startled to see a monkey in a waistcoat and fez screeching at her. The small woman grabbed it by the haunches
and bundled it up like a baby into her arms.

‘He thinks it’s the show. He’s trained to do that. People think he’s Jojo’s baby.’ She gave a horrible smile as if anticipating that Frankie would be alarmed
or repulsed by something she was about to see. She led the way down the corridor, past a wooden ticketing desk to a set of double doors inlaid with stained glass. Still clutching the hissing
monkey, she pushed the doors open with her bottom.

The lights were at full blast inside, cruelly displaying the cracks in the red paint, stains on the wood floor. The room, no bigger than a large parlour with a stage at one end, was filled with
round tables draped in yellowing white cloths, and chairs with pieces of upholstery missing. The stage curtains were a dusty turquoise fringed in gold. Curios were pinned to the wall; exotic masks,
a stuffed crocodile, a print in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec, a stiff black corset with a tiny waist, signed in white chalk. The monkey struggled out of the little woman’s arms and hopped up
onto one of the tables, picking at a plate of leftover stew and pastry.