The Hourglass Factory (39 page)

‘Oh for goodness’ sake, look at yourself!’

‘All right, Chief, perhaps we can just . . .’ Primrose stepped forward but Stuttlegate was in full swing.

‘Headquarters of the suffragettes!’ He slammed the table; the smack made the woman jump. ‘No, you look at yourself. You’re lying to protect that coven of witches. Right.
Next.’

He flipped over a photograph. Milly’s hand went to her mouth.

He watched her for a moment then said quietly, ‘We are particularly interested to trace this woman. However we have hit a dead end. She gave her occupation as seamstress on the Holloway
register, and we have reason to believe she also gave us a false name. It’s not on last year’s census.’ He pointed gently at the spectacles on the woman’s nose. ‘These
might be false as well, and I know it’s hard to see her face through the bandages, so think carefully. At Lincoln’s Inn they say they have no record of her, no record of any woman with
phossy jaw. They’re not your sisters, Lady Millicent. If you tell me lies . . .’

She shook her head.

‘You don’t know her. How about this one?’ He pushed a picture under her nose and this time there was no mistaking it. She was linking arms in a prison yard with Annie Evans and
Ebony Diamond. Ebony’s waist formed the centrepiece of the picture. She and Annie were laughing into one another while the third woman looked coldly at the camera. Her hair this time was
blown back by the wind, and although she still wore the large horn-rimmed spectacles, her eyes cut through the glass as clear and chill as if she had the second sight and could look straight
through the photograph into the eyes of the beholder. Across her mouth, a rag was drawn, almost obscuring her whole face except for the terrible eyes. ‘She’s an ugly piece of work. Must
have been a match girl back in the day. One of the few phossy-jaw survivors. Our photographer says she nearly broke the lens, but that’s why they do it, don’t they? No man’s going
to touch that. And they know it. It turns their insides cancerous. Makes them lash out, makes them bitter, because when it comes down to it, that’s what this is about, this voting nonsense.
Jealousy, bitterness that the men have what you want, and because you can’t have what you want, because you’re a silly little woman, a silly woman with silly smears of greasepaint on
your face and lips and the brain of a rabbit and—’

‘Enough! Chief Inspector, enough!’

Primrose felt the room detach very quickly from his consciousness. His hands flashed with a mind of their own as they lifted, and it took a great effort, a great effort in concentration to bring
them back to his sides. His face tingled, and he thought that both people in the room must now be staring at him; Stuttlegate with hatred, and the woman with hatred too for wading in like a coward,
too late, and implying he could somehow protect her from this farmyard beast. Stuttlegate looked to him, in that moment, like a creature he had seen painted on the inside of his mother’s
Bible, a creature from a bestiary.

But Milly wasn’t staring at him at all.

She was looking at the photograph. Threads of blood had begun to shoot through her eyes. She clutched her head at the ears and looked as if she might be sick on the table.

‘She went away earlier in the year,’ she said. ‘She said she was going to Biarritz to rest. Very fine lie, but why? Why?’ It was Stuttlegate who caught her arm as she
scraped back the chair from the table.

‘Don’t you dare close ranks on me. I swear I’ll arrest the lot of you. You suffragettes . . .’

Primrose made to move the table out of the woman’s way, to stop her from hitting her head as she sank towards it. ‘Inspector Primrose,’ Stuttlegate intercepted him with a flat
hand. ‘I think you’ve done enough here. Don’t you think it’s about time you buggered off to Colney Hatch?’

The Honourable Ms Millicent Barton was clutching the edge of the table. ‘That is no suffragette,’ she said coldly, halfway to the ground. ‘That is my mother.’

‘Somebody shut that bitch up! Can’t hear my own breath.’

The prisoners in the other cells were starting to turn on Frankie, but she wouldn’t let up. Twice a guard had come down. Once he had slapped the hatch shut on her fingers. She banged again
on the door. ‘Let me out! I know who it is. They’re going to blow up the Houses of Parliament.’

‘And let me guess, you’re Mary Queen of Scots.’

She lashed the wall with her arms. The old woman in the corner was curled into a foetal position holding her head. Frankie slid back down the cold wall until her bottom came to rest on the
floor, and listened to the sounds of the Bow Street cells filling her head until she was bunged up. The scrapings of bowls, the shuffling of feet. Three different songs from different cells and a
whistler from a fourth. For a second she saw herself in Stark’s office, pictured herself telling him no thank you, she’d have a write-up of the Wimbledon quoits on his desk by noon the
next day. If she had never clapped eyes on Ebony Diamond she wouldn’t be sitting in a Bow Street cell howling like the child who wanted the moon.

The cell flap snapped open and she felt a cold jolt of shock.

‘Frankie George?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Her shoes slipped as she stood up, traces of wet gruel still forming a dangerous layer on the stone.

‘Someone’s asking for you.’

‘Hold on,’ came a cry from down the hall. ‘’Ow do you know I’m not Frankie George?’

Frankie waited, feeling her heart speed up, as the constable fumbled and squeaked and scraped until the lock opened. A menacing dissent had started in the cells and she heard spittle hit the
ground behind her as she followed the constable down the corridor. ‘That’s right, send ’er to the funny farm.’

‘Don’t bring her back, officer. She’s got a tongue like cow-hide. Needs a good spanking.’

Brandied steam curled up from the cup in Milly’s hands as she lifted her head. Her eyes took a second to focus and for a moment Frankie, standing in the doorway, thought
she might be one of those people who become lost forever, for whom something just disconnects in their head like a jigsaw piece fallen out of place and down the back of the table never to be found
again. Then all of a sudden her pale eyes were lucid.

‘Nerves steadier?’ Frankie nodded at the cup. It smelled metallic: black tea and brandy.

Milly looked patiently towards the officer at the door as he cast his eyes between her and Frankie. ‘Five minutes,’ he murmured and retreated back into the corridor, locking the door
behind him. When the clink of his keys had faded, Milly dropped her voice.

‘We have to break out of here.’

Frankie crossed to the hard little bed and sat down next to her, looking at Milly’s bone-white wrists holding the hot cup. She thought for a second she might touch her, but a heaviness
kept her own hands in her lap.

‘The police are looking after it now. You’re in shock, you’re not in a state to—’

‘I’m not the one who was in a state, from what I heard. Could have heard you in Covent Garden, so they said. Sailors with cleaner tongues.’ She stiffened and took another
little sip of the spiked tea. ‘How did you know?’

‘That card. Queen of Swords reversed. What you said before, about malice and bigotry. Deceit. Annie wasn’t deceiving anyone. So why would Ebony have meant her? Then there was that
brooch, your family brooch. But most of all,’ she breathed out and looked at the cup’s pool instead of Milly’s face, ‘it was those bombs.’ Milly looked down at the cup
too, paying attention to the ribbons of steam that rose and vanished. ‘No one would be stupid enough to think that would do their cause any good. What would violence like that bring? People
declare war on you. They fight against you. And then I knew we weren’t looking for someone who wanted change, but someone who wanted to preserve things the way they are. Someone who wants the
authorities to turn on their supposed cause. Someone who believes that even theatre is a vice that opens people’s minds too far.’

‘Silly Ebony,’ Milly said quietly. ‘Why didn’t she just say?’

‘Would you have believed her? She might not even have known who Lady Thorne was. She just had that brooch to go on.’

Milly looked at her lap for a long time, rubbing her fingers over the silk threads of her gown. ‘So you have your scoop,’ she said after a while. ‘All neatly
bundled.’

‘I’d say the only thing that matters is that they’re stopped.’

Milly shook with a bitter laugh. ‘Well, that wouldn’t be such a good story, would it?’ She raised her hand to her face and pinched the skin above her brows. Then she turned and
looked Frankie in the eye and Frankie was struck the same way she was the first time she saw her, by the absolute clarity of her gaze. Like blue quartz. She put the cup down on the hard ground and
began re-fixing the pins in her hair. ‘When I was a little girl, she told me I must grow up to marry the king. Or a prince, at least. I think a duke was the worst-case scenario. That was what
she pinned her hopes on, her only hope because I had no brothers or sisters. She took a dislike to my father, and that was that.’

Milly took a high gulp of air and Frankie’s hand went to steady her, to make its way round her back or onto her leg. Milly saw the movement from the corner of her eye and flinched away,
then looked up at the tiny window cut into the wall of the cell.

‘I dreamed of the boys that came to the house. Not the greasy little fops her friends would bring round who never knew how to play properly. How to make nests in the wood, or carve a spoon
out of a branch, and smelled of wood or car oil or earth. I would like to say I fell in love but there were too many of them. A valet, a gardener’s boy, a delivery boy. She only caught me
once and only because the silly woman wanted to pick her own raspberries. Can you imagine! Lady Thorne lifting a finger! I was at the very bottom of the garden, completely out of sight. And I had
my hand . . .’ She shook her head and looked down through the tangled lace of her long eyelashes at her skirt. ‘I’m so ashamed, Frankie. I wasn’t then but I am
now.’

Frankie felt her lips clamp up. She longed to say something but the words wouldn’t make the short journey between her brain and her mouth. After a silence she managed, ‘There’s
nothing to be ashamed of. Boys get away with those things, why shouldn’t we?’

‘Giving birth to a hussy, with an appetite, who runs away to Cairo?’ The poison on Milly’s voice took her by surprise. ‘You don’t know what she is capable of.
Nobody does, except those seamstress girls she has lied to.’

‘So what are we going to do?’

Milly put her cup down on the stone floor and reaching out, smothered the palms of Frankie’s hands with her own, still warm from the cup. ‘You’re going to do what you set out
to.’

‘But . . .’

‘If my mother can find a way to dupe vulnerable women into dynamiting parliament, we can find a way out of here.’

‘But we don’t have to be there. I know enough now to write about it. The police can take over. You don’t have to be there.’

‘I do.’ Her blue eyes had softened now; the resolve in them was perfect, alarmingly calm. ‘I’m the only one who can bargain with my mother in the dark.’

The high window in the wall of the cell hung open like a question mark, moving back and forth in the slow breeze. There was no way either of them were going to fit through.
Even if Milly’s slim hips had managed to wedge through, there were bars on the other side, and there was no chance Frankie would even make it that far.

Milly had tried with her hairgrips in the keyhole but it was a more sophisticated bar system than household locks and she couldn’t even get the wedge placed well enough to click it.
Frankie was pacing the square cell, aware that their time was fast draining from them.

‘What about when the guard comes back? I could punch him – he won’t expect that.’

Milly raised a sluggish eyebrow at Frankie. ‘They’ll raise the alarm within seconds. Besides, did you see the size of him?’

‘Faint? They’ll have to take you to hospital.’

‘With my hand cuffed to a stretcher. And what about you? They won’t fall for that one twice.’

Frankie chewed her lip. Her stomach was beginning to grumble and she half wished she hadn’t given away her gruel. Milly pressed her hands back through her knotted hair.

‘Just tell them the truth,’ Frankie said. ‘Tell them we need out so we can help them.’

‘They’ll let a reporter come along for the fun of it? A female one? That horror of a man who interviewed me wouldn’t even trust a woman to button his collar.’ She
wrinkled her mouth.

Frankie sat back down on the bed, pulling up her trousers from the ankles. Her bottom had no sooner sunk into the coarse grain of the mattress than they heard the rattle of the key in the lock.
They looked at each other. Frankie saw in Milly’s face what she felt in her own chest: it was over. Five minutes were up. They had failed.

The door juddered across the hard stone floor, catching the uneven texture with a horrible scrape. Frankie breathed in and sighed. She looked up, and she squinted.

The silhouette in the doorway was much larger than the man who had shown her in, with shadows of lace spouting in stiff arcs from the neck and wrists. A raised hand dangled a set of prison keys
insouciantly. Frankie’s eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the light coming in from the corridor when the familiar voice emerged.

‘Tut. Tut. Tut.’ The enormous hatted head shook slowly. ‘The shame. Oh, Puss, the shame. Dragging a respectable woman down to the Bow Street clink to fish you out. I can barely
look at you. And yet to my credit, benevolence has always been a part of my soul that will not shake, no matter how hard it is pushed.’ On the last word, the two steel tips of her eyes
focused on Frankie.

‘Twinkle!’ Milly cried.

‘Well,’ Twinkle replied drily, ‘are you both enjoying the thrill of underbelly life so much you’re just going to just sit there like the knaves who stole the jam tarts?
Or are you going to say thank you and come with me?’

‘How did you . . . ?’ Frankie began.

Twinkle held up a palm that crunched with thick metal jewellery. ‘Hush, Puss. Questions later. Suffice to say that a certain Police Commissioner is an old acquaintance of mine who may
– or may not, as the official line is – have needed a little companionship in his youth.’ She put the hand with the dangling keys to her lips. ‘Now just shut up and follow
me, it’s embarrassing enough being seen with you in public anyway, never mind down here.’