The Hourglass Factory (45 page)

The wave of relief that passed over Frankie quickly sank when her eyes fell on Ebony’s far arm, wrenched backwards. Ebony saw the look on Frankie’s face and inched her neck round to
look. If she was shocked, she hid it well. Her eyes rolled. ‘God, my mother always told me to keep my arms in. Twenty years I was working with tigers and never lost a limb.’

A line of policemen in black tunics charged past them, rifles cocked. Frankie scrambled to her feet and slammed straight into a large woollen form.

In the smoky light she caught the shape of a police warrant card.

‘She needs a doctor,’ she stammered.

‘Detective Inspector Primrose, CID. What the hell do you think you are doing?’

‘Ebony, she needs a doctor.’

‘This is high treason, not an exhibition opening,’ the inspector growled, stepping past her and bending down. ‘What do you think the police are here for?’

‘You weren’t listening to us. We needed proof. We have pictures now, proof of who she is.’

‘Did you get the shot?’ Frankie looked down to see Ebony’s black eyes roaming, unfocused. She had a deep scowl creasing her clammy forehead, a fine spray of blood on her chin
and cheeks. ‘Where’s . . .’ she paused to cough. ‘Where’s Liam?’ She watched Frankie’s expression, then breathed out a slow moan, as if she had known all
along that something like this would happen. ‘Well, you have to go and get him. Jojo will kill you if anything happens to him.’

‘I’m not leaving you.’

Ebony blinked. Her gaze grew limpid and she caught Frankie in her wide black pupils. ‘I’ll take care of the camera. Now go, and don’t come back till you’ve got him.
Don’t worry about me.’ She pointed her jaw down towards the singed suffragette ribbon on her chest. A smear of blood had made its way onto the white. ‘Every peeler loves a
suffragette. Think they’re going to let me out of their sight wearing this?’ Her eyes rolled backwards. Frankie wiped the hair off her brow, where it had stuck with blood. She pulled
the camera strap off her own neck and placed it down next to Ebony’s head.

A voice cried out behind them, ‘Get down, I say.’

Another howling explosion and the short blunt shot of a gun. There came a sharp scream.

‘One woman down, sir.’

Frankie made to run but Primrose snatched both of her arms behind her. ‘Not so eager, my reporter friend.’

‘Inspector,’ she said firmly. ‘You have to let me go. There’s a boy came in with us. Lady Thorne took him from up there. You have to listen.’

‘No, you listen to me.’

‘The boy, Liam, he’s only fifteen. She’s taken him. I saw her drag him, put a knife to his throat. She’s not safe. She’s mad.’

‘You’re going nowhere, miss. You’re going to wait with the Sergeant and we’ll have you cuffed and taken to the station.’

‘He’s my . . . our . . . responsibility.’

The inspector scrutinised her for a moment before his eyes roved the dim chamber. The three remaining seamstresses had been wrestled to the floor and were now each raising merry hell for the six
police officers anchoring them down. The two bombs had caused an unsettling amount of damage, a chunk of wood and plaster ripped from the wall, a toppled bench split in two. He looked down at the
camera next to Ebony and reached for the strap. ‘I’m taking this for now. We’ll decide whether to confiscate it afterwards.’

Frankie looked again between him and Ebony. ‘Please. There isn’t much time.’

Inspector Primrose swallowed and Frankie saw a lump run down his neck. Eventually he said, ‘You stick with me. You’re only coming to negotiate. Do everything I say.’ He called
a couple of his spare men over and sent them to attend to Ebony, depositing the camera with one of them. Frankie looked back over her shoulder as she trailed him out of the chamber.

It should have been her lying there, broken boned, torn-limbed. As the two policemen bent down to Ebony’s head and feet, Ebony looked straight at Frankie, full to the brim with conviction.
Frankie seized hold of the look and followed the inspector out of the door.

‘That way.’ Frankie pointed to the door that led to the octagonal lobby. They felt with outstretched hands through the choking smoke, still hearing raw screams from
inside the Commons. Now there was a new noise too, loud and steady outside in the courtyard, hooves, and firemen giving orders. The door to St Stephen’s Hall had wedged itself ajar and was
blowing a cool draught towards them. Primrose pushed it gently. Dim electric light glowed on the cold stone walls, muting the rich colours. Shadows stretched long and dark behind paintings and
statues, twirls and ridges of intricate detail rising and latticing into the vaulted ceiling. Frankie recognised it as the old parliament from descriptions she had heard in the Cheshire Cheese. The
patterned windows, the chandeliers, the frescoes that covered the walls like storytelling bedsheets. The twelve statues, and the one with the broken sword where a suffragette had chained herself
three years previously and clipped the toe of his boot off when she was cut free.

They were barely into the hall when another scream rang out, high and choked. Then a grunt as if a woman had been winded in the gut. A lady’s cut-glass voice filled the cold air and
rattled off the stone. ‘Don’t come any further, Inspector, or I’ll blow this boy’s face to mincemeat.’

The lights sizzled off and darkness tumbled in on them. From the far end of the hall Frankie could hear feet scrambling on stone.

They moved slowly forward. After a few seconds, the door ahead swung vigorously back and forth, bringing the grand arch at the end of the hall flashing into view and out again. The inspector
swallowed heavily. ‘They’ve gone into the crypt.’

Frankie lunged ahead but he elbowed her back.

‘You keep behind me, hear?’

‘Of course I hear,’ she snapped into the darkness.

‘If she’s armed . . .’ He turned to Frankie, observing the stained glass shadows playing ghostly games across her handsome features. ‘Setting that off in the right spot,
Westminster Palace could fall. You stay behind me and you listen to what I say.’

Frankie growled an acceptance.

They moved through the swinging door into a dark stairwell, cold as a tomb, swaddling both light and sound. In the distance in front of them, Liam’s voice croaked a dry protest.

Frankie opened her mouth to shout back, but the inspector was quick and landed a soft blow in her stomach. ‘Keep it shut.’

As they reached the bottom of the stairs the footsteps ahead faded and a door slammed. They crept forward until they felt the sensation of a wall rising up in front of them. Primrose held his
revolver out, moving it around until they heard the muzzle click against a metal door handle. He slid his hands around trying to shift it. After a couple of attempts, the latch gave. He pushed the
door and a dagger of gold light cut a warm path in front of them. The smell of musty incense grew strong.

They were standing at the base of the chapel’s nave in front of a long tiled aisle, surrounded on all sides by a low vaulted ceiling of elaborate curled golden designs. Two wrought iron
gates before them hung open. Drifts of leftover frankincense mingled with the scent of cold wood pews.

‘Don’t come any further.’ It was a curter pitch than Milly’s voice but had the same intonation.

Lady Thorne stood with her back to them, facing the altar, her scarlet cloak spilling into a blood red cloud behind her. She had lit two creamy wax church candles, one on either side, and was
using their glow to illuminate something she was fiddling with in front of her. Frankie suddenly saw two feet kick out from under the cloak on her left side, and heard a boy’s high howl.

‘Liam!’

‘I hope you’re not deaf as well as stupid, Miss George. Do as the inspector says. Authority always knows best.’ There was a nasty strain in her voice. ‘It won’t
just be your friend who is buried in this stonework.’

‘What did the boy do to you?’ Primrose’s voice echoed round the barrel ceiling.

‘Helped a nasty little gossip columnist who got above her station.’

‘I have a photograph of you. It’ll be on the front page of every newspaper. Do you want the world to know what you became?’ Frankie reeled backwards as the inspector landed a
kick on her shins. The burns in her back tweaked with pain.

Lady Thorne swung round and Frankie saw her face, as clear and memorable as it had been the first day she had seen it outside a music hall years ago, handing out flyers. The eyes, she knew them
now, were the same cut crystal blue eyes she had seen on the woman with the bundled jaw. They wore the same expression now as they had then, but Frankie realised it was not zeal or anger, it was a
cold brutality, an irritation with anything that disagreed with her. That night outside Jojo’s when she had argued with her daughter, she hadn’t come to spy or to save the souls of the
punters in Soho. She had come to execute Ebony Diamond.

‘Red,’ she said, gesturing down her body with one hand, the other fish-hooking the struggling Liam by his mouth with an extraordinarily muscular and bony finger. ‘For the
Lords. I don’t know if you made the connection, I doubt it,’ she said looking at Frankie. ‘But they are the true dynastic rulers of this country, and have been for
centuries.’

Primrose raised his revolver a touch, eyeing down the barrel.

‘Don’t, Inspector,’ Lady Thorne shook her head, tutting. A yellow waxy light from the candles on either side of her danced on the crisp aristocratic bones in her face. She let
out a weary sigh. ‘Look at you. I am a shepherd leading my flock into a light they might not know they need. Just like Lloyd George thought he could lead his Welsh sheep and all the other
farmyard animals we call this country into following his revolting People’s Budget. What if some of us didn’t want that?’

‘Then you vote him out,’ Frankie called. ‘What the women are fighting for the power to do.’

Liam managed to land a kick in Lady Thorne’s leg and she twitched. She retaliated by digging her nail further into his cheek. He gagged and choked.

‘Sometimes a child doesn’t know what’s best for them. Does that mean you should give them what they cry for?’

‘They’re women, they’re not children.’

‘I’m not just talking about women,’ Lady Thorne bellowed back hysterically. ‘I’m talking about mongrels. Mongrels given status they weren’t born into. Miners
striking, match girls walking out. Trade Unions of railway workers squeezing their fingers up the rectum of England and pulling it down to their squalid level. Anarchist cells of broken
seamstresses blowing up the Houses of Parliament. That’s what happens when you give the mongrels an inch of power. We are in a hell of our own making.’

‘You tricked those women. They had nothing left. You lied to them, pretended you were one of them and the one you couldn’t fool any more you had killed.’

Lady Thorne’s mouth twitched into a trout’s grimace. ‘Not quite, I got the wrong one, didn’t I? It was a surprise for both of us, I think, when I saw her deathly little
face. Still, Annie Evans was one of the weaker links in the chain. Her courage would have failed her anyway.’

She lowered her arm and, still staring ahead, fumbled around the altar behind her until she came upon the object she was searching for. The cloak moved and Frankie saw the whites in Liam’s
eyes, wild as a shying horse. Lady Thorne held up a polished shape. Its clean, lacquered sheen caught the light with horrible perfection. One of the bombs. A nail stuck straight out of it like a
snake’s forked tongue.

‘I would ask you to consider the implications, Inspector, of trying to be a hero.’

Frankie was finding it harder and harder to breathe in the cloying air, grown hot by the candles and her own terror. She racked her brains trying to think of ways to stall. Ask her more
questions. Interview subjects love to talk about themselves. ‘Why destroy the structure that you stand for? If authority’s what you want.’

Lady Thorne took her admiring eyes from the bomb for a second. ‘You’ll note I spared the House of Lords. Someone will have to pick up the mess once these anarchist women have been
brought to justice. And when they’re all swinging from the Holloway gallows, it will be damned certain that the rulers in charge will never let a group like that ever exist again. Workers,
miners, trade unions, suffragists . . . They will shut them down. They will be despised.’

‘You want to be back in the Dark Ages?’ said Primrose.

Lady Thorne smiled. ‘They were only ever dark for some.’

‘How did you make them trust you?’ asked Frankie.

‘Very simple. They’re idiots. At our very first meeting in that diabolical shop, we established the extent of my . . . injury,’ she gestured to her jaw, waggling the bomb
dangerously. ‘It was easy to engage their sympathy, set the plan in motion. I even got them to put aside a third of their wages to pay for the terracotta and the chemistry set.’ She
shrugged. ‘Well, that’s egalitarian, isn’t it? Ebony Diamond’s anger with the suffragettes was an added bonus. I had simply planned to apprehend her in prison and offer her
something better than they could. As it happened, she was only too happy to accept.’

‘When she thought you weren’t going to commit murder.’

Lady Thorne sighed impatiently. ‘And she wonders why I didn’t trust her with the full plan to begin with. No, I started them out gently,’ she said, her voice very grave.
‘I shared with them the simple idea of setting fire to the building, eased them in. Then it became bombs, and finally, mongrel politicians’ bottoms. Ebony almost ruined the whole thing.
Her and that evil deviant friend of hers.’

‘An innocent man. You killed an innocent man.’

‘And I’ll kill more with relish.’ She brandished the bomb.

A rattle of footsteps on the stairs behind them made Frankie jump. She half turned to see shadows playing on the dark stone walls beside the door’s arch.

‘Who’s there?’ Lady Thorne’s sharp tongue cut the air.

‘I would have thought you would know the sound of my footsteps in the dark. I at least know the sound of yours.’ The long lean shadow of Milly passed into the nave. Then Milly
herself appeared through the double doors, her face and hair smudged with mud. She looked like a funeral bride standing coolly at the foot of the aisle in draping silks, cuffed in irons to Sergeant
Wilson by her left hand. On their other side stood a skinny boyish woman in a blue linen dress, a suffragette sash crossing her torso.