The Hourglass Factory (44 page)

Frankie didn’t know where to look so made herself useful, taking the rope off Ebony as she stashed her mound of underskirts behind a cabinet. Her legs were clad in black stockings, the
upper parts covered by loose black bloomers. She discarded her hat and tightened her hairpins. ‘Are you ready for this, because you’re going to have to hold tight, you see? If you want
to get close enough for the shot.’

Frankie nodded and swallowed a trickle of nerves. She peered through the glass pane again and thought she saw a shadow moving behind one of the doors.

‘Ebony,’ she murmured, ‘look.’

Ebony had to stand on tiptoes to see through the window and Frankie only then realised she had taken off her heeled shoes. Her frame was suddenly miniature without them.

‘If they’re coming in, it’ll be through the Peers entrance, through there, won’t it?’

Ebony squinted then dropped to her heels. ‘Don’t want them to see us before we catch them.’

‘But we need to find Liam. If he came in via Westminster Palace . . .’ Frankie pulled out her notebook and looked at the skew-lined sketch she had made, then tried to fit it back
into the plan she had seen. ‘Come on, I think I know a way.’

Doubling back on themselves, they moved further along the stone-floored corridor. Footsteps rained down from somewhere but they kept going until they reached a crossroads. Ebony, only wearing
stockings, barely made a sound and Frankie wondered if this was how she had clambered into the rafters of the Albert Hall, all those months ago.

Frankie gestured ahead. ‘I think we’re going to come out at a cloister.’

‘Won’t there be guards? Or locked doors?’

She let out her breath. ‘Shit.’

‘If we go left here, we’ll end up back . . .’

‘Oi, suffragettes.’ A whisper in the dark sent a shock though Frankie’s skin. Then she noted the accent and slowly turned.

Liam was grinning like a wolf, a Swan Vesta held up to light his freckled nose and cheeks. Frankie snatched it from his hand and stamped on it. ‘Don’t waste those or we’ll have
none for the flash. Where is it?’ She raised a discreet hand to still the thudding in her chest while Liam rooted in his pockets, pulling out the corked bottle and cardboard box.

‘You see what happened to Milly?’ she asked quietly.

‘Aye, they took her.’

‘Probably for the best,’ Frankie murmured.

Ebony had already pulled open the gilded door ahead of them, leading to another holding corridor. She clicked her fingers for the carpet bag. Frankie tossed it to her. Carefully, she withdrew
the rope and wooden beam of her trapeze and began checking over the knots, threading them closer, joining them up with the spare rope she had cut earlier. Frankie took the bag back and rooted for
her camera, slung it across her shoulder and slid it round her back. She withdrew the metal flash pan from her pocket and held it loosely in her hand. It had a strange forbidding smell, burnt metal
and chemicals.

Liam swung the door quietly behind them and they traipsed along the corridor, a thinner one than before, darker, until they reached a set of stairs. ‘Can we get all the way round from
here?’ Frankie asked.

‘We want the Ladies’ Gallery.’ Ebony wedged a measure of rope into her mouth and looped the rest round her shoulders.

Frankie stopped. ‘Why the ladies’?’

‘Has the grate.’

She shook her head. ‘No, no, they took that away. Suffragettes chained themselves to it.’

Ebony pulled the rope from her teeth momentarily. ‘They put it back. We can rope to it, it’s the safest way. It’ll hold.’ She spread her mouth into a smile, one that
crept for the first time into her eyes. ‘It’ll be fine. You just have to hang on.’

Frankie followed her up the stairs, watching the curvature of her form underneath the black clothing. When they reached the top landing she gestured to Liam for the bottle and the box of
guncotton.

‘Guncotton first.’ He opened the box and Frankie reached across and teased out a small measure. ‘Magnesium.’

He grunted and took the bung from the bottle with his teeth.

‘Can you have a match handy, not struck, just ready with a surface to strike it on, so when I need it it’s there?’

‘Peck, peck peck. Can you just trust me?’

‘All right, don’t start an argument now.’

‘I’m not arguing, you’d argue with a crocodile you would.’

‘Well just as well you’re not . . .’ She stopped when she saw that Ebony had pinned open the upper staircase door with her foot and was waiting for them. The light was even
bleaker; Frankie could only just make out Ebony’s silhouette six feet away. She suddenly flashed back to the sight of her on stage, spiralling through the air, hanging from her perch, and
felt a wave of vertigo, a longing more than anything to make their mission a success, to prove she too could do something right. She dropped the camera case and hopped the last few steps to join
Ebony.

‘You’ll want to take off your shoes,’ Ebony whispered. ‘You’ll need all the grip you can get.’

They had found themselves in a corridor, where a carved finger pointed them to the Ladies’ Gallery.

‘Go down to the Reporters’ benches, it’s along and down a couple of those steps. I’m going to rig this from inside and I’ll join you.’

Frankie obeyed and led Liam along to a sign that guided them to the press entrance. As soon as she pulled open the door, the scent of leather and furniture polish drifted up from the chamber
below, and another smell lurking beneath it, pomade perhaps, or tobacco. The chamber was completely black, the air chilled and stifling, all warmth sucked into the hardwood reporter’s seats.
She wondered briefly if Teddy Hawkins had ever sat his bottom on one of those seats. Behind them, she could just make out the weaving gothic lattices of the Ladies’ Gallery grille, the shape
of a rope being fed through it. She quickly moved to the grille and took the ends of the ropes until they were through.

Though there was still no light, she thought she could detect a sound below, a scratching like mice, and waved at Liam to get down.

Without warning a naked hand landed cold on her shoulder. She flinched and just caught the gasp that tried to escape her, then breathed in
poudre d
’
amour
and found herself
looking up at Ebony’s white round face. Ebony had taken off her gloves. A puff of powder flew off her fingers and Frankie was hit by the smell again.

At that moment came a clatter and hiss, the striking of a match in the chamber below. A hurricane lamp swelled into a glow in the distance down behind the Speaker’s chair. A portion of the
green parliamentary benches lit up, and the sight Frankie beheld sent ice into her veins.

She had expected chaos. Women with their eyes ablaze, mad with passion, tossing pear-shaped bombs about like zookeepers flinging meat to lions. She had expected demons and hell. What she saw
instead was three women, so hard at work, so concentrated on the intimacy of the task they were completing, they had barely noticed the light of the fourth go on. The scratching Frankie took for
mice was the rip and pierce of leather, as each woman took a pair of tiny thread scissors and neatly sliced a line into the centre of a green bench. With quiet diligence she saw each of them take
from their knapsacks a plump bomb, insert it into the slice, with the detonator pointing ceilingwards, and stitch it closed with a hard twine needle. Frankie’s eyes raked the room for Lady
Thorne; she saw Ebony do the same, but neither could see her. Then the shrill scrape of a door on a wooden floor underneath made them sit up. Ebony clutched Frankie’s arm and gestured for her
to take off her jacket.

Directly below them, the back end of a blood red cape trailed into the centre of the chamber. Lady Thorne, her disguise discarded, her hypocrisy cloaking her like a totem, stood proudly
surveying her colleagues. ‘Good work,’ she whispered. ‘Good work.’

Ebony pulled Frankie towards the edge of the balcony. Frankie’s fingers flicked at Liam and she mouthed the word ‘match’. He kept close to them, the Vesta held between finger
and thumb while they clambered onto the trapeze.

Ebony wedged herself onto the bar first, looping one wrist round the rope. With her spare arm she pulled Frankie’s legs until they wrapped her waist and crossed Frankie’s stockinged
ankles in front of her own thighs. Frankie wriggled her shoulder out from under the camera strap and slung it instead round her neck, easing the shutter into place as quietly as she could. Lady
Thorne looked up sharply, then, distracted by the sounds of stitching and cutting, began to pace, monitoring each of the chamber exits.

Frankie was pressed so close to Ebony’s back she could feel the muscles around her shoulders pushing into her own flimsy breasts, and the heat from Ebony’s legs through her trousers.
Ebony nudged her a glance over her shoulder. Frankie nodded and looped her wrists round the rope, keeping the flash pipe tight in her left hand. They inched towards the lip of the balcony, staying
low. Just before Ebony kicked them up onto the rail she reached into the pocket of her bloomers and retrieved a crinkled ribbon. In the wisps of light Frankie could make out three colours: purple,
white and green, crested by the portcullis badge. She pinned it quickly to her chest and raised her eyes to the roof. For the first time in her life unbidden to do so – either by a nun or her
mother – Frankie crossed herself and asked the Virgin to protect her.

They swung up onto the railing. Liam shoved the match in Frankie’s right hand.

And they jumped.

Though it wasn’t a high jump by Ebony’s standards, Frankie felt as if her stomach had been scooped out of her and tossed behind as she plunged through the air into the heart of the
House of Commons. They jolted quickly, the ropes short. Cold wind gushed through Frankie’s hair, down her neck. She pressed her body forward and scraped the match head on the bar beneath
them. A wisp of gold lit the air.

One by one, each of the seamstresses looked up, stricken. Some of them cowed their faces in their hands, unsure what was happening in the dim heavens above. Ebony was breathing heavily,
beginning to use her force to heave the trapeze back, to take another swing forward, when one woman raised a pear-shaped bomb above her head and flung it. It missed and went smashing into a wall
where the hard terracotta splintered to pieces. The detonator dropped to the ground, unspent.

Frankie loosened her right hand from the rope and, holding on tight with her thighs, dropped the match into the flash pipe. She looked for the sweep of red cape, found it, aimed, just as Lady
Thorne rushed for the exit on the chamber’s right. She pressed the shutter as a blinding flash spluttered white hot into her eyes. The eye of the camera snapped open and shut. Sparks flew
down to the chamber floor.

It was bright enough in the residual light to manage another shot if she was quick. Frankie swung the camera round to catch the seamstresses, their tools spilled around the benches, the bombs
wedged half in, half out.

Hot flecks of magnesium showered onto Ebony’s neck and she squealed. The flash pan dropped to the chamber floor with a clatter. One of the women hurled another bomb at them, missing
again.

‘What now?’ Frankie yelled at Ebony. They were hanging low into the chamber. Ebony had un-looped her hands and was starting to work her way up the rope. ‘I’ll climb back
up and pull you over.’

A man’s voice rang out in the darkness below. ‘Hoy there, what the devil do you think you are doing?’

Shadowy bodies began to spill into the room, first against one wall, then the other. ‘Who’s up there? Police. Look sharp, move aside.’ A cavalry of footsteps charged into the
chamber. Wood on the door jambs split with cracks as the doors were flung back and men in black tunics came tumbling in from all entrances.

Frankie heard a piercing shriek somewhere.

Somewhere above her.

She angled her head up just in time to see a wash of red fabric moving up on the Reporters’ Gallery, a glint of silver.

‘Liam!’ she cried. She heard the grunt of a struggle, the sound of teeth biting into flesh. But it was too late. As a troupe of police thundered into the House of Commons below, Lady
Thorne stood above them, a knife pressed to Liam’s throat.

Then the unthinkable happened.

Keeping one hand pincering Liam’s neck, Lady Thorne took the knife away and sliced with careless efficiency through each of the trapeze ropes. Below and behind them another woman released
the bomb in her palm. This time it didn’t miss. Frankie felt it hot and slow, then cold and hard, a sensation similar to the weightless peak on a fairground swing. Her ears seemed to fill
with roaring water, she plummeted on a puff of air and dust towards the ground, smashing with excruciating pain onto the front bones in her pelvis, skidding on the hard floor and stretching her
arms in front to stop her before she slammed into a bench.

Sour dust filled the air and smoke spread, black miasma from the ground up. The first thing Frankie did was reach her hands up to pull her throat loose; the camera strap had
twisted round her neck. Her lungs stung and itched. Behind her came the hiss and crackle of fire and a scream from a woman’s gut, ‘No surrender!’

Frankie raised her head and her back sang out in pain. She reached gently behind her, felt a warm sticky glue holding her shirt fast to her, and knew that a patch of her skin had melted. Each
twitch she made sent cotton fibres probing deeper into the wound.

A few yards away, Ebony lay on her back, her head turned away. Her limbs were splayed into a star shape. Still on her belly, Frankie began to claw along the floorboards towards her, but even
before she got there it was plain to see the ungodly twist in Ebony’s collarbone. She slapped Ebony’s cheeks with one hand then the next, ignoring the chaos of the four women being
grabbed and collared and handcuffed by police all around her. She pinched open Ebony’s eyelids, and put her ear next to her mouth. The breath was shallow and fast.

Suddenly Ebony’s eyes jerked open. ‘Will you get off me?’ She spluttered and a foam of spittle and blood came through her lips. ‘Bloody journalists. Don’t leave you
alone even when your back’s broken.’