The Hourglass Factory (29 page)

‘Mine?’ Frankie’s hands began to root around her trouser pockets.

‘Top pocket.’

Gingerly she raised her arm, wincing at a pain in her shoulder that extended from her neck muscles. Her fingers dipped carefully into the fabric, as if what lurked in there might be laced with
poison or razor-sharp. Instead she found a card, a heavy embossed card with eggshell finish on it and a pearly sheen. It looked blank on both sides, but someone had scrawled a note in an uncertain,
jerky hand. ‘Invitation only.’

Frankie turned it over in her palms, seeing nothing but the scribble, when she began to detect underneath her fingers a slight denting of the paper in parts, a textured valley under her thumbs.
She moved towards the mouth of the yard.

‘Be careful,’ Milly croaked.

In the weak streetlight, misted with rain, she could just make out the outline of an imprint, deep in the card, pressed by the heavy metal hand of a machine: an hourglass.

There was nothing else on it, no address, no post office box, not even a telephone number. The scribbled ink began to run, smearing the finish to a charcoal grey. Milly’s voice came from
the pitch dark of the alley. ‘Frankie? You saw something through the keyhole. I heard you gasp.’

Frankie tried to snatch back the memory. It was bent out of shape, the edges blurred, the way dreams were when she woke up. She remembered a woman rolling on a stocking, and that steel thing
braced on the wooden dummy. A woman lying on the floor while another pulled in her laces. But she wasn’t quite sure she hadn’t dreamt it while she was unconscious. The only real things
she had were the card in her hand and the pain. She sniffed; her nose was threatening to run in the cold. ‘That old witch fobbed me off twice, and what have we got to show for it but boiled
eggs on the back of our heads? Come on, last time I promise.’

Milly and Liam both looked at her. ‘Where now?’ Liam asked.

‘Twinkle’s.’

The rain kept up its assault all the way. Milly huddled close under Frankie’s jacket for shelter, their feet trotting in quickstep. Once or twice a cab passed them, spewing fountains of
water from the street onto their ankles.

Twinkle’s new maid answered the door with a finger on her lips. Frankie pushed past her, sliding the coat off her head and squeezing water from the soaked edges onto the doormat. Milly
tossed her hair, shedding drips onto the wall.

‘Sorry about that,’ Liam said gently, fixing the maid in his gaze and removing his hat.

Frankie knocked once then smartly opened the boudoir doors.

From the chaise longue Twinkle sprang up straight-backed at the waist, as if rising from the dead. In her hands she held open the pink pages of an evening newspaper. When she saw who it was she
released her breath and her expression darkened for a second, then the gauze went back up like a stage curtain and she beamed enthusiastically.

‘What opportune timing. I was just reading about a mistress who stabbed her secretary with a pair of curling irons. Can you believe it? How did you fare with the old insufferables? Finger
a murderess yet? Any newspaper headlines imminent? Hmm?’

Frankie reached into her pocket and flicked the card across the room. Twinkle held her gaze as it spun through the air then floated down onto the chaise. It sat for a second before she bent to
pick it up. She held it delicately in her stiff hand and her smile vanished. After a few seconds she rubbed her lips together. The room grew chilly; Liam’s and Alice’s voices drifting
in from the parlour died away.

Twinkle sat back. ‘Pleased with yourself?’

‘I don’t know yet.’ Frankie scanned the furs on the bed then took a tentative seat on the edge. Milly hovered by the door.

‘They’re not what you think.’

‘And what is it I think?’

‘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.’

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.’