The Hourglass Factory (38 page)

‘Can I have that?’ she crackled.

Frankie pushed it towards her. The woman, who had been singing ballads about London cats since she arrived, slurped at the filthy brown liquor until she began to choke and splutter.

Frankie banged the back of her head gently against the wall of the cell and tried not to breathe in too deeply. The air was rancid with mushroom spores. Her arms were bruised where the constable
had frog-marched her and Milly into the van and stowed them each in a compartment, an upright coffin, caged with wire on all sides. They had rattled like cargo over the cobbles towards Bow Street.
It was the most miserable and undignified way to travel and she thought with a sting of shame about the women who had made their journey to Holloway in the back of those vans.

The police hadn’t cared a jot about their protestations, the pieces of paper they brandished with the bomb diagram or the floor plans. Both peelers had a look in their eye, casual but
determined, practical and practised. They had seen it all before. Strange vagrants pillaging a locked shop’s contents, high as two kites on mescal or Limehouse opium, squawking about the end
of the world or the end of something-or-other. Frankie was exhausted from the pleading and the protests; her mouth was too tired to force any more words out, her brain too tired to form them.

Still a ball of dread bounced around inside her.

She had questions. How did the bombers plan on getting into Parliament? Since the Fenian Brotherhood had set off dynamite in the Crypt, there were legions of guards at every entrance. The
suffragettes had made it in a few times, once in a tradesman’s van armed with paint and pamphlets; another time, during the census, inside Big Ben. But on both occasions they had broken in
before nightfall, either during regular traffic or as tourists, and hidden in the vaults and crannies, or taken their chances and used brazenness as disguise. A horrible thought struck her. What if
the Hourglass Factory women were in there already? What if that was where Ebony was now?

And then another image floated into view. A woman’s face made featureless in straw and paper, with stuffing ill-fit-ted to her body, broom-handle legs and a witch’s hat, feet
smouldering on a bonfire while children squealed and hot wine was passed round.

They would burn their effigies, just like Guy Fawkes, for centuries to come. Any of them, women who were part of it, women who weren’t. Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel. No
matter that the WSPU had nothing to do with it. They would blame all women’s organisations and they would burn them like they were witches dredged up from a dark past that had already killed
thousands and haunted millions. Frankie had listened enough to her convent school education to know what had happened to Catholics when Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Westminster Palace. A persecuted
group already, made into pariahs ripe for execution and exile.

Frankie shivered. Her cell-mate noticed and took the shawl from her shoulders. ‘Would you like to huddle for warmth?’

‘I’m fine, thank you.’ She squeezed her arms in close to her body and jammed her hands in her pockets, and then she felt a prick on the corners of her fingertips and pulled out
the calling card that Liam had found in Ebony’s dressing room.

What had Ebony thought she was doing in the first place, leaving the suffragettes for that group? Had she not realised they were planning destruction on a mass scale? Did it not occur to her
that rather than furthering the cause, an act that devastating would soon solder the idea that women were every bit as dangerous and unstable as Asquith wanted to make out? Worse still, they were
working women, seamstresses. How could she not have realised the long-term danger of what she was involved in? Then the truth caught up with Frankie:
she did. Just a little too late.

But it still didn’t make sense. If Ebony had raised her doubts to the Hourglass Factory, surely it would have given them the chance to back out. Take better action, reconsider the
implications of what they had planned. If the goal was to show the government that they were serious about obtaining votes for women, they would want to do it right. It was almost as if—

Frankie stopped herself and wriggled up straighter. The thought threaded through her mind and wound ahead of itself. She pulled it back and tried to get a firm grip of where she was going.

The picture Ebony Diamond had left. She had wanted to speak in code, to hide the meaning. She had meant it as a cry for help. The Queen of Swords, upside down. A woman who wasn’t who she
said she was. A woman grown bitter by sorrow. A bigot, a prude. Artifice. They had assumed it meant Annie Evans, mistaken for Ebony Diamond by her murderer and the police.

The thoughts came fast and tangled now.

A woman who wasn’t who she said she was? But Annie had never professed to be anyone else. She had only dressed in Ebony’s finery to impress her lover, and had been mistaken by
others.

Frankie pulled out her notebook and looked at the fountain pen notes she had taken at the Barclay-Evanses. She came back once again to the story of Constance Lytton. A Lady who disguised herself
as a seamstress to expose the prison authorities for abusing poorer women. What was it Milly had said? She was a force of good for the suffragettes, a crusader showing the duplicity of the
government. But what if her goodwill, her noble idea could have been copied? Taken by someone else and used for darker gains? What was it Twinkle had said about people without open minds being
dangerous?

Someone was not who they said they were.

Someone who knew that if they could harness a group of desperate, raging women to perform an act of reckless violence, they could have groups like them shut down and suppressed forever. Preserve
the status quo, play into the enemies’ hands.

Someone who knew the power of stunts that backfire.

Someone who didn’t stand for women’s rights at all but who hated political progress, freedom, and the way the world was emerging from a dark historical hierarchy to a terrifying
free-for-all meritocracy.

Someone who would hate the way a showgirl could square up to a politician, a woman from Tottenham write in the newspapers, or a Lady find herself living off scraps in Baron’s Court as she
struggled to make her own independent living.

A reactionary in the guise of a seamstress.

It came quick and fast now. The brooch, the spoon, the old lady with her face bundled up; in the Hourglass Factory, at the morgue, outside Annie Evans’s. Milly’s face on the playing
cards; the woman with phossy jaw. Frankie knew she had seen those eyes before. She scrambled to her feet, kicking over the bowl of unfinished porridge, spilling a slippery mess over the floor of
the cell. She grabbed the bars of the viewing hatch at the top of the cell door and rattled the aching weight of the metal as hard as she could, crying ‘Help!’ She needed to get to
Milly.

Primrose stood awkwardly in the corner of the charge room, trying to keep his fingers static, not sure whether his blood was still up from the ticking-off or his anxiety over
Clara. Stuttlegate meanwhile was busying his hands like the clock had stopped and they hadn’t all just been told minutes ago about a bomb threat. He ruffled his papers, sorted his copy
reports from photographs, lined his pencils up tight on the desk as if he was preparing a magic trick. Every so often he checked to see that Primrose was watching him. He paid scant attention to
the prisoner, who was seated on the other side of the table, except to nod at her and say to Primrose, ‘Get the niceties out of the way, will you?’

Primrose thought the prisoner a very curious wispy little woman – gothic pale but oddly fierce – although right now her beauty was interrupted by a small smear of beef tea to the
side of her lip, which she kept trying to lick away. He pulled out his notebook. ‘Can you confirm your name for the record please?’

‘Millicent . . . Milly Barton.’

‘What is that, Miss or Mrs?’

She eyed him coldly. ‘The Honourable Ms.’

Primrose felt a twinge of something – annoyance, embarrassment – but he wrote it down and stood back against the wall.

Stuttlegate had by now finished meddling, and was greasing up his hands, rubbing them first in his hair, then palms together. Primrose watched him as he paced the room, scratched his ginger
whiskers with the flat of his hand, then slammed it onto the table. ‘How long have you been supplying weapons to the suffragettes?’

Caught off guard, Primrose swallowed a yelp.

‘Excuse me . . .’ Milly Barton frowned.

‘How long have you been their go-to girl for guns?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Horse-whips, dog whips, pistols.’ He bent over the table turning over a few of his evidence reports. ‘If you don’t tell the truth . . .’

‘You’ll do what?’

Stuttlegate stopped turning the papers. ‘How many other headquarters are there then, miss, that we don’t know about?’

‘If you’ll listen, sir,’ she said, then when she had his attention added, ‘And please don’t call me “miss”,’ She stared at Stuttlegate. ‘We
had a tip-off. My friend is a reporter for the
London Evening Gazette
.’

‘That pappy rag,’ Stuttlegate snarled.

‘We were investigating the tip-off.’

‘The
London Evening Gazette
investigate tip-offs with guns?’ As he passed by on one of his pacing rounds, Primrose caught the scent of eel pie on his collar.

‘That gun is registered under my name. At least it was.’

The Chief’s pig eyes held her for a second. He took a step back and sniffed. Finally he turned to his puzzle of manila files on the table. As he shifted the pile of photographs, the
markings on the backs became visible, the Special Branch ordering stamp. The Honourable Ms Barton waited patiently. Primrose felt too ashamed to look at her. He wondered what she must be thinking;
perhaps that being made a Chief Inspector was a game of chance, as arbitrary as choosing nude girls for the
tableaux vivants
at a supper room. He dared not look at his watch.

‘Are you going to let me see them?’ She pointed at the pictures.

‘This tip-off.’

‘Yes?’

The Chief said nothing but continued to stare at her.

‘Yes? . . .’ Still he said nothing. Milly looked up at Primrose. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ she said. ‘It came from the family of a girl called Annie Evans. I
think you know who she is.’

The Chief pounced like she had delivered him a peck of treasure. ‘She was a suffragette! One of yours. And that friend of yours, Ebony Diamond.’ Now Stuttlegate looked at Primrose,
his eyes gleaming.

‘They left the suffragettes.’

‘But a leopard never changes its stripes.’

Milly sighed. ‘Spots.’

‘Don’t take that tone with me. I’ve locked up men with higher titles than you before. I had a duke in here once.’

‘There are bombs in that workshop, I told you that, and all you’ve done is insult me and talk about suffragettes.’

Primrose stepped forward, then lost his nerve and retreated. He thought he could feel his watch in his chest pocket ticking through his shirt, and wondered how much longer this would take.
Stuttlegate stared the girl down, making a peculiar little humming sound between clenched lips. He began flipping over the scattered photographs at random. ‘You want to talk about
suffragettes? Fine.’

‘No, I don’t want to talk about suffragettes. I want you to . . .’

‘Chief, should we . . . ?’

‘Let me take care of this.’ Stuttlegate turned his dog-taming stare on Primrose, then went back to flipping.

‘This one. Know her?’ He flipped more and more until it became a parody of a manic parlour game. A prison mug shot of a woman’s profile came up and he pointed. Wild black hair
covered her ears above a ragged coat.

‘Why would I know her, Chief Inspector, and what has it to do with anything?’

‘Not her. How about this one then?’

‘Are you doing anything about the bombs?’

‘Not her? Fine, this one then.’

He flipped over another image. This one was a surveillance shot of a prison yard. The image had been taken with a long lens; the woman had her head turned slightly but even so it was possible to
recognise the distinctive shape of her waist and her tar-black hair. She wore stays even under her Holloway uniform.

Milly looked up at Stuttlegate.

‘Well?’

‘That’s Ebony Diamond.’

‘That’s more like it.’

‘You know I know Ebony, you just said we were friends.’

‘Suffragette friends?’

‘Working friends.’

He pulled his nose back into a little sneering snout. ‘Why would I believe that an Honourable Ms –’ he buzzed the word with his teeth clenched ‘– would be working
with a performing tart like that?’

‘Because I’m a performing tart too,’ she spat. ‘Next.’

He pushed another photograph under her nose. ‘What about this one?’

‘No, never seen her.’

‘This one.’

‘No.’

‘How about this, recognise her?’ Another surveillance shot from the prison yard.

‘That’s Annie Evans.’

‘I see we’re developing a pattern here.’

Milly Barton looked contemptuously at the Chief from beneath hooded black-lined eyelids. When she looked back down he had placed another photograph under her nose. Primrose spotted the
recognition in her eyes even before Stuttlegate spoke. ‘Another suffragette friend?’

‘No, I know her from . . .’ she cut herself off.

‘Where?’

‘Lincoln’s Inn House.’

It was as if a gavel had come down in a music hall. He leaned back, cocked his head and bellowed. ‘Oh, really, Lincoln’s Inn House, remind me, I can’t quite remember what that
is; it’s the headquarters of some organisation. My memory, my wife says, is terrible.’ He slapped himself about the head. ‘You know I put the butter in the game pantry the other
day? No wait, I don’t have a game pantry, there’re for honourable ladies like you, aren’t they? Lincoln’s Inn House. That’s . . .’