The Hourglass Factory (31 page)

Frankie prickled again, feeling as if she was somehow being put to a test in this bohemian den, as if she might be found out for a fraud any second and sent packing. But she was too exhausted to
make up a lie. ‘I don’t suppose you had an outdoor lavvy when you were little?’

It was Milly’s turn to blush. ‘No, we didn’t.’

‘Well, I did. And my father, or next-door’s, they would cut up newspaper to put in there. Bumf. Bum fodder.’

Milly tilted her head to the side curiously as she poured the pinkish liquid.

‘There were all kinds of stories in there. Mrs McGunnery’s divorce goes all the way to the High Court as she battles to out her husband as a white slave trafficker. A woman in
Bristol gives birth to three brown rabbits. Dairy cow learns to tell the time.’

‘
Tit-Bits
common in your street was it?’

‘I think that one was
News of the World
. And then the theatre reviews. The West End, Shaftesbury Avenue, The Strand. Shows my family never could have afforded to go and see. But you
could read about it while you were spending a penny.’

Milly handed her a glass. It smelled like Turkish delight.

‘You are joking, Frankie George. You decided to be a journalist because you fell in love with newspapers while in the privies?’

Frankie shrugged. ‘Believe it or not.’ There was a pause while they sipped their drinks. The sherbet was sweet like lemonade but more pungent, strong with rose water. Frankie sighed
looking round the room. She had heard of women like Milly but never thought they really existed. She thought of her dancing in the baths in Cairo the way she had danced at Jojo’s, thought of
her and Ebony backstage at Jojo’s, eyeing up each other’s talent.

Milly was stretching her back out on the rug. It cracked musically and she winced.

‘So go on then, if we’re sharing secrets: do you ever miss Cairo? Do you ever wish you were back there?’

Frankie watched her tip the dregs of her sherbet into her mouth.

‘Miss it, yes, but I would never go back. I took everything I wanted with me.’

‘What was that?’

She rubbed her lips together and put the glass down on the hearth. ‘I know what you’re thinking. Why you’re looking at me like that. You’ve read about the harems, you
think women are kept under lock and key. Well, they are in a sense. But you will never know freedom until you have travelled down the street in a riding cloak, veiled from head to toe. Even your
hands. You could be anyone underneath it. No one to judge who you are, what class you come from, how high your cheekbones, how thin your waist. It is the most exquisite disguise.’

‘But don’t you take . . .’

‘My clothes off when I dance? Is that what you were going to ask?’

Frankie shrugged. ‘It didn’t seem like much of a disguise tonight.’

Milly took a few moments to answer and Frankie thought for a minute she had said too much. Then she cracked her neck to both sides and stared frankly at her. ‘Well, you would think that.
But something comes over me when I dance and I’m damned if I can explain it. When I start up, when I hear that particular kind of drumbeat, it feels, don’t laugh, but it feels like
I’m being uncrumpled. Like paper has been curled inside me for a long time. And it slowly unfurls and straightens out as the drumbeat goes on and on until it’s tingling every nerve of
me, and the more it tingles the more like myself I feel than I have ever felt before. I feel happy. There aren’t many things that have ever made me that happy.’

‘I should try it.’

‘Everything is funny to you.’

‘Well, it’s just that you don’t look happy when you dance.’

‘Don’t I?’ Her gaze was more than a question, it was a challenge.

‘No, you look fierce.’

She looked at the fire. ‘Perhaps I’m concentrating.’

Frankie let her bristling subside and felt guilty for saying anything. But Milly seemed to brush it off quickly. ‘Doesn’t anything make you feel like that, like you have been lying
asleep and someone has suddenly woken you up?’

Frankie’s eyes shifted from the fire to Milly’s curled legs, which she was now hugging close to her, and back again. She shrugged.

The fire had calmed down a little and Milly reached for a cashmere shawl by the hearth. She wriggled her feet out of their slippers so they could be closer to the glow. ‘I was given this
on my wedding day by a woman who lived opposite us. She was a lay judge. People would come to her to solve their disputes. And she would stay behind her latticed windows and whatever judgement she
made had to be stuck to. People respected her. She was a spinster. Do you think anyone in this country respects a spinster?’

Frankie was silent for a moment, feeling her untravelled unworldliness creeping in on her, making her feel both insecure and defensive. ‘Who knows how people feel respected? Everyone has
their own ideas. Is it having your own money, not being tied to a husband, not having to scrub floors for a living, scrubbing floors to make your own living?’ She shrugged. ‘Having the
vote. That’s certainly what Ebony thinks.’

Milly was quiet for a moment. She began to play with the lion’s scrappy mane between her toes. Wrapped up in the shawl she looked somehow wise, like the old woman in a fairy tale, the
light picking out the lines curling round her mouth and across her brow. ‘I think Ebony wants people to respect her. All the girls who have a trade in the circus are independent, and
they’re stronger than half the men. Some of them could lift a donkey. But when you come to a city like London and you suddenly find you don’t have equal rights to the men, the wages are
unequal, mothers don’t have rights to their children, I mean you can’t even drink port in the dining room after a meal or whatnot, what can you do?’ She tilted her head. ‘Is
that why you’re so interested in what’s happened to Ebony? You want to get involved in the votes movement?’

‘I’m interested because a woman and a man died and another might be in danger.’

Milly looked taken aback and Frankie realised her tone had been spiky. She sighed. ‘But yes, perhaps I ought to become more involved. Afterwards.’

‘You certainly look like a suffragette.’

‘What, these?’ Frankie gestured to her trousers. Despite her usual feelings about that statement there was something innocent in Milly’s tone. ‘They’re comfortable.
I don’t know,’ she shrugged. ‘You get involved with who you fall in with, don’t you? Pick your battles. I ended up busying myself making my own way on Fleet
Street.’

‘But you agree that it’s important?’

Frankie bit her lower lip. ‘I used to think you just had to look after yourself and if everyone did that we’d all be hunky-dory. But I’m learning.’ She met Milly’s
eyes and sunk back into the divan. Her hand went unconsciously to the back of her head, where the ache was. She peered into the bottom of the sherbet glass and saw that the mixture had formed a
lump.

Milly looked across. ‘Would you like a spoon?’

Frankie stared down into her glass.

‘For the bottom. It’s the best bit.’ She began rummaging in a copper pan by the fire and pulled out a little silver ship with engravings carved all over its hull. Small
thin-handled pieces of cutlery were strung from the rigging on hooks. She extracted a spoon and tossed it through the air. Frankie caught it and began to churn up the clogged sugar. There was a few
minutes awkward silence, then she said, ‘So what about this marriage? Who was he? An Egyptian?’

Milly watched the fire, her lips poised to curl either way, into a smile or a frown. When she looked back at Frankie her eyes were drained, the crease on her brow had deepened. ‘A
Frenchman. An archaeologist. Dr Frederic Barton. I daresay you would have heard of him if you moved in those kinds of circles. I was in the middle of a world tour by ship and he took me to see
Heliopolis, just outside of Cairo. The old city of the sun. We’d docked for a few days to give us the chance to see the citadel and the pyramids, but I didn’t fancy the pyramids.
I’m claustrophobic; I think Doctor Freud would say it probably stems from that evil nanny. Anyway, along comes a handsome Frenchman speaking perfect Turkish and Arabic and whisks me
away.’

‘And you stayed.’

‘To the horror of my family. Yes I did. I think the tour was supposed to iron out my wayward tendencies. My terrible latchkey girl ideas.’

Frankie swallowed the last of the syrup. Her thumb moved comfortingly back and forth over the pattern on the spoon’s fine handle. Another family heirloom, she thought to herself.

‘What went wrong?’

‘My husband.’ Milly picked at a thread on the shawl with her slender fingers. Fingers meant to wear rings and droop languorously around a necklace or lace collar, or a well-groomed
hound. ‘You’re looking at me in that way you do. Your face is creased up at the eyes. Trying not to judge.’

‘I’m just concentrating.’

‘I don’t really have a problem with infidelity. People think that children don’t know what goes on in their own houses. When I was little I knew fine enough when the
room-swapping was going on overnight. At breakfast time it didn’t make a difference. It happens, Frankie, maybe not in your world, but it happens in mine.’

Frankie felt a prickle but she bit her tongue. She was watching Milly carefully, observing the fresh violence in her voice. Her shoulders propped the shawl round her, her jaw was set, her mouth
moved in a little pout. She looked as defensive as Ebony had when she doused perfume on the camera and set it alight. Frankie played with the handle of the spoon, sticking it between her fingers.
She had managed to lick most of the residue off but there was still a little stickiness. Annoyed, she looked down to see if she could pick off the sticky patch and when she saw the pattern on the
handle she started.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ she said quickly. ‘So what did go wrong?’

‘Bad luck comes in threes.’ Milly didn’t elaborate at first, going back to stroking the lion’s head. Then she leant back, opening out her torso and propping herself up
with her elbows. ‘As well as being a cheat, he was selling artefacts to the British Museum, creeping into certain kinds of bath houses, that sort of thing.’

Frankie swallowed. ‘Did you divorce him?’

‘No. I left in the night. I packed quietly, caught a boat to Alexandria and the next merchant ship to Dover. And on the boat there was a man with a basket of toothless snakes.’

‘So you bought one?’

‘To remind me. Better to share your life with a snake than with Frederic Barton.’

Silence settled in the air between them. The opera had come to an end and the record was clicking round the turntable. Milly reached across and slipped it off. Frankie didn’t know how she
was expected to react and no words came naturally to her so she said nothing. The noises of the street had died down, the gaslamps beginning to fade out. It was late. She thought of the day ahead
of them tomorrow and wondered whether Liam had gone back to Jojo’s to sleep.

Milly dragged herself to her feet and rummaged in the open trunk. She pulled out another cashmere shawl and tossed it at Frankie. ‘I hope the fire stays warm enough.’

‘I’ll load it with coal if it goes out.’

‘Usually I’m on the divan too but I suppose if Lilian’s not here—’

Frankie looked at her empty face. She didn’t know how she was meant to reply so she just nodded. ‘All right.’

‘Right. I’ll use her room.’ Milly scratched her head through her bundle of hair. ‘You’ll wake up with the sun. Through those windows.’

‘I’m sure I will.’

‘Wake me if I’m not through.’

Frankie tugged her jacket off and laid it across her. She dragged the blanket to her chin.

Milly paused in the doorway, her hands carrying a tin bowl full of coal, the red shawl hanging off her shoulders. ‘I don’t give up on people. I want you to know that, Frankie.
I’m not just dogging you because I told Jojo I would. I left Frederic because I had to.’

Frankie nodded quickly, perhaps, she thought to herself afterwards, a little too quickly. She hunkered down into the blanket, already starting to gather a layer of her own cosy body warmth.
Underneath it, clutched close to her chest, her thumbs still worked away curiously at the pattern she had spotted on the handle of the spoon.

5 November 1912

Kingsway’s wide thoroughfare was scattered with carelessly parked vehicles, police wagons and press cars. Some had beetled up onto the kerb, others were discarded
diagonally to the oncoming traffic, causing swerves and hoots. A crowd of newspapermen moved in an uneven throng along the street, cat-calling, shoving, pausing only to load up flash tubes. The air
was smoked with magnesium, the pops came blinding fast.

‘Freddie!’ A hand stuck out from the grand door of Lincoln’s Inn House, beckoning Primrose through the police line. As he squeezed past he noticed the uniformed officers had
shotguns slung idle across their forearms. It was like the Sidney Street siege all over again.

The stout hand grabbed his collar just as a knot of reporters tried to force their way through the line in his wake. Stuttlegate pulled him inside, slamming the door on a journalist’s
fingers.

‘Freddie, glad you could come. Red hot out there, isn’t it?’

‘Actually, sir, I wasn’t thrilled at finding out through the newspapers. I was under the impression this was my investiga—’

‘Never mind, you’re here now.’ He slapped him between the shoulder blades.

‘Chief, if you don’t mind my asking, what brought this about? I read a headline or two, but I know what rot these men come up with.’ He looked around. The atrium of the
building was packed with policemen, cuffing and searching women, leaning against the Greek columns scribbling in notebooks, tossing piles of paperwork into heaps on the floor. He swallowed, and
found he could still taste the decaying pork pie he had grabbed outside Colney Hatch Station and sank on the underground.

Stuttlegate’s response was to shove into his hand a brown file with a mass of papers haphazardly piled in it. Some of the notes were Wilson’s writing; some were labelled at the top
of the flimsy with Robert Jenkins’s name. Pinned to the top was a typed copy of a cable that had been intercepted earlier in the day, a simple message from Christabel Pankhurst to Suffragette
HQ: ‘Please burn down Nottingham Castle.’ Primrose understood the symbolism; Nottingham Castle had been scorched to the ground at the time of the men’s suffrage uprising. He had
seen the telegram already, late in the afternoon before leaving for Pentonville and dismissed it as a hoax, too bald, too convenient. And that word ‘please’. It reminded him of the
decoys of herself she sent leading them a dance all over London when the fancy took her.