The Hourglass Factory (30 page)

‘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.

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.

Milly seemed to sense that the letter was bad news for she stood up and wrapped her cold fragile fingers round the back of Frankie’s hand. ‘Come on,’ she said,
‘I’ll show you how to hop a bus fare.’

The inside of Milly’s lodgings on Talgarth Road looked like a Parisian boutique dumped on the floor of a shed. The boards were bare and dusty except for two rugs; one a
Persian carpet in red and gold, the other the skin of a lion with its mangy head still attached. Piles of silk gowns in pastel colours were scattered in various corners, draped over lampshades and
hung on the backs of chairs. There were brassieres on coathooks, furs on tables and beaded scarves hooked over the corner of canvases leaning against the wall. A bookshelf was piled full, almost to
toppling. Frankie cast her eye discreetly at the volumes. A picture book on Toulouse-Lautrec, a torn copy of
Anna Karenina
. A volume of Sophia Poole’s
An Englishwoman in Egypt
lay on its side, and placed reverently on top of the case, a copy of the Qu’ran. Anywhere there wasn’t a picture or piece of furniture there was a mirror, either hanging or standing,
echoing repetitions of the room. Cold air rippled in great tingling waves through a wall of lead-framed windows overlooking the street and beyond where London stretched out in a labyrinth of bronze
and gold dots.

‘It’s to maximise the light,’ Milly said, nodding first at the mirrors and then at the wall of windows. ‘She’s an artist.’ She whipped the cloth off a huge
canvas that was braced against the wall. ‘Boo.’ The picture was a full-length likeness of herself, naked in the pose of Botticelli’s Venus, her hair unloosed, looking down at a
snake wrapped round her waist. Frankie cast her eyes round the room with sudden nerves.

‘It’s not here. I keep it at Jojo’s. And it’s had its teeth pulled anyway. They do that to all the snakes over there.’

Frankie breathed out and Milly smiled cautiously. ‘They’re not actually the best dance partners, you know. I’d get rid of it if I could. They can be very stiff, very clumsy, I
don’t know if you noticed when I was holding it. They form shapes of their own, you have to copy them, they won’t copy you. And you spend the whole time worrying they’re going to
throw up on your costume. But I don’t think Jojo would have taken me without one.’

She gave a huge satisfied sigh, contented to finally be in her den, and looked around at the selection of chairs and couches before taking one, clearing the clothes off it into a crumpled
ball.

‘There you go. I’ll get the fire on.’

Frankie perched on the edge of the velveteen divan at first, but after a few seconds she felt herself sinking into it and couldn’t help but lean back, letting the stuffing take the weight
of the day off her. Her eyes wandered lazily round the room, watching Milly on her knees scrabbling with the coal scuttle, unfazed about the dust muddying the front of her dress. By the window lay
a strange pair of drums, an Arab tea set balanced on a leather pouffe, and next to it the same kind of water pipe she had seen at the Barclay-Evanses.

‘I could put a record on. Or do you just want to rest?’

‘I don’t mind.’ Frankie watched the fire slowly grow from a red shivering line on the kindling paper into a hissing, scratching glow, eating each coal slowly in turn.

‘If you’re fine there, I’ll stay here.’ Milly pulled the lion rug over the hearth. ‘You can join me if you want.’

Frankie smiled stiffly.

‘I know. It’s comfortable that divan.’ She watched the fire for a few minutes, following wisps of smoke up with her eyes. Abruptly she turned. ‘How did you meet
Twinkle?’

‘She knows the paper. It was chance. Luck, misfortune, black magic. I was looking for work, sending articles here and there, cartoons, bits of satire.’

‘You can draw?’

‘A bit.’ Frankie said, squirming under the scrutiny for reasons she didn’t quite know. ‘They published a cartoon of mine and I suppose Mr Stark, he’s editor there,
I suppose he was looking for someone with the right temperament to work with her.’ She gave a small snort of laughter. ‘Not that I have; I could poison her gin some days.’

Milly coughed and looked at her hands.

‘I didn’t mean – I’m not being flippant. About poison.’

‘No, it’s all right. You’re right about Twinkle. I mean, about the poison.’

They settled into silence for a while, the sounds of the street coasting through the window. The heat of the fire warmed the room quickly. Milly got up from the rug and wedged a record onto a
dusty gramophone with an enamel green and cream horn. Everything about the place stank of luxury. But a careful selection of chosen luxury and a disregard for all else. There were no electric
lights, no comfortable carpets, no polished furniture. No polished anything and no maid to polish. But there were expensive trinkets, goodies gathered from travels, family heirlooms in shrouds of
dust.

A quiet opera crackled round the room. Milly flopped down by the fire again, tucking her legs under her, and played with the lion’s fur in her long white fingers. ‘So what, did you
just send your pieces in, in little brown envelopes? How did you start?’ She flashed her eyes wide.

Frankie snorted. She had never told the truth about how she became interested in newspapers to anyone at all and didn’t know if she should now.

‘Come out with it, you’re hiding something, are you going to tell me a lie?’

‘I was an apprentice in the foundry, for a printer. Used to pour lead casts for the rolling cylinders. Man used to come to my father’s veg barrow.’

‘That sounds like a boy’s job.’

‘That’s what he said.’ She tugged her fingers through her hair. ‘He cut my plaits off on my first day.’

Milly rolled onto her stomach. The silk at her ankles rode up a little revealing a few inches of flesh-coloured grubby stocking. ‘That’s not the truth though, Frankie George.
Printers are mechanics. I know a little about the press. My father’s–’, she hesitated, ‘– he sort of dabbles in it. You don’t jump from being a foundry
apprentice to being a newspaper-girl. Your mouth is twitching, you’re itching to tell me.’ She leaned off the rug and grabbed a small copper jug. ‘Would you like some
sherbet?’

Frankie peered across. ‘I suppose. Is it legal?’

Milly grinned wickedly. ‘Is that what worries you, what’s legal and what’s not? It’s what they serve in the harems. The fancy ones.’ She collected a couple of short
thin glasses and blew the dust off them, then wiped her fragile finger round the rims. ‘But don’t let’s change the subject. Why did you decide to be a journalist? What brought
Frankie George to the
London Evening Gazette
? What created that fine marriage?’ She laughed, a gentle tickling sound.