The Hourglass Factory (12 page)

The orchestra played the opening of a melancholy waltz. After a few bars she recognised the tune. ‘Once I was happy, but now I’m forlorn . . .’

Ebony Diamond began to swing gently, back and forth, catching the melody’s three-beat circle at the peak of each swing. When the trapeze was in full motion, she twisted her legs to a stop
several feet up the rope and held herself there, using gravity to fly for a split-second before she plunged, catching the bar upside down with the tops of her feet.

There was a gust of applause. The tune faded to the end of its first run, and Ebony hung among the stars.

A rush of strings, and it whipped itself up to a fiercer volume, repeating the chorus. Some people in the stalls had begun to sing along. ‘She flies through the air with the greatest of
ease . . .’

Ebony twisted and her hands caught the bar before she took off again, swinging and catching, swinging and catching, knees, ankles, then elbow joint, using the thick ropes to snake round her
thighs that strained through their bloomers, then flipping again, catching the bar only with her fingers, hoisting herself up, spinning with the wood nestled in the crook of her pelvis,
somersaulting, somersaulting among the stars, as the trapeze whipped faster back and forth. In the crowd, the voices fell silent. There was only the pitch of the maddening waltz. ‘. . . And
my love she purloined away . . .’

Her body became a twirling ball, a shooting star, a Milky Way of its own. She was joined to the trapeze like another limb, a lover she could charm and entwine. She spun for minutes and minutes,
and as the second run of the song came to an end, she dropped suddenly and hung from her neck, facing the crowd while the whole of the stalls stood to applaud.

The ovation lasted a full minute and she hung there, not moving a muscle.

Then came the third verse. This time more slowly, statelier, while she slipped her ankle round one of the ropes and swung upside down. The music continued and she pulled herself upright, waiting
patiently as a leather hoop on a chain slid down the rope towards her. She clipped it to the middle of the bar. Frankie’s stomach jumped. She had heard of acrobats holding on by their mouths
before but never seen it.

‘. . . The daring young lass on the flying trapeze. Her movements were graceful, all the world she could please . . .’

She began to swing again. The orchestra sped up the dizzy waltz. Her swing grew wilder. The strings of tiny lights flickered back and forth in the current, and soon were moving at different
paces at different times, a black sky shimmering with diamonds.

Frankie could barely keep her heart from her throat as Ebony swung faster. The final round of the chorus was coming to an end; the audience could hear it in the violins, pelting out against the
wall of trumpets and brass. ‘Her movements were graceful, all the world she could please . . .’ She leapt into the air like a jackdaw, spreading her arms. There was a giant wave of
exclamation. And Ebony disappeared.

It looked at first in the silver gauze of the footlights as if she was falling fast. But if she was, she never made it as far as the ground. There was no thump, no body to see. The stage was
nothing but an empty black sea, sprinkled with the firefly lamps. No smoke, no mirrors, no changes in the light. Just a swinging trapeze and a woman who was somersaulting one minute and gone the
next.

There was a collective holding of breath, then a few people began to applaud. The idea began to cotton on that this was it, the end of a brilliant act. The leather strap had been a ruse, she had
no intention of catching it. The applause grew until it was louder than the Great Foucaud’s. People began jumping to their feet. The stalls turned into a garden of swaying colourful hats. The
vigour of the clapping grew overwhelming. Young men put their fingers in their mouths and whistled.

Frankie’s hands stayed on her lap. Looking down she saw that she was trembling slightly. She waited and waited for Ebony to appear. The stage stayed black, the lanterns still swinging with
the current of the trapeze that was flinging itself back and forth as if a ghost rode it now. People began to clap in rhythm, demanding her, summoning her. The rhythm swelled, fell into a beat,
one, two, three, four. Voices joined in, cheering for ‘The Black Diamond’.

A movement at the back of the stage caught Frankie’s eye. She breathed out in relief, for a second struck dumb by her own stupidity, realising she had been tricked again. But it
didn’t draw any closer. At least not at first. And gradually it sunk in, sickly and slowly, that it was not the movement of a woman striding out to take her bow. It was the inching of
something prowling left to right along the backcloth of the stage, stripes catching the footlights every now and then. It didn’t waste much time before it made towards the crowd, a thin,
slinking predatory lope; a tiger heading straight for the centre aisle. And Frankie was glad for the first time that evening that she had been given a seat in the gods.

The tiger stumbled as it snaked down the side steps into the stalls. Men and women jumped on their seats, grabbed umbrellas and canes. One man made a valiant attempt to clasp
his wife to him before swooning back into a faint, toppling into the next row. A stampede began towards the back doors of the auditorium. Frankie knew for certain it was no trick when the ushers
threw their trays of cigarettes and ices into the air and joined the crush.

The tiger was busy licking one of its heavy paws, idling on the front aisle that ran along the orchestra pit, blithely unaware of the chaos it had caused. It sniffed the footlights and turned
its nose away then stared down the aisle at the screaming swarm. It pulled back its shoulders, stretched its front paws and bowed like a kitten, twisting its head, enjoying the strain on its
muscles. A thought crossed Frankie’s mind, and reaching for her notebook she began to move, not towards the fire escape, but down through the empty red corridor that led to the stalls.

She took the steps two at a time, but when she got to the grand circle her nerve faltered. It wouldn’t be prudent to get too close. She squeezed back into the auditorium against the grain
of a fur-perfumed crowd heading reluctantly for their own fire escape. ‘Most drama we’ve had all week,’ one lady laden down with gemstones lamented to her companion.

Frankie reached the lip of the gilded balcony just in time to see a curl of gold-black tail lingering in the left fire exit, beside the pit. Two stagehands in brown aprons were waggling sand
buckets at the cat’s rear, creeping closer, until one took courage enough to reach out and grab the fire door behind it, then slam it shut with a crash.

Some of the crowd turned tentatively to look. Word quickly spread and screams turned into sighs, shrieks to weeping. Men breathed out, and put back down their canes; some women took off their
hats to look for signs of damage in the crush. The auditorium seemed to relax its huge belly.

Frankie exhaled slowly and was annoyed to find that she too was now shaking. People continued to make their way out but at a slower pace now, aware that the one place the tiger was not prowling
was the auditorium. Frankie pushed back into the corridor and continued down to the stalls.

As she nudged her way in, she tried to scribble down snippets of conversation. For once Teddy Hawkins was nowhere to be seen, though she could be certain he would be dispatched to the Coliseum
like a fusty old bloodhound the second the wires tapped into Stark’s office. She touched a man on his elbow. ‘Excuse me.’ He turned, and after a second, frowned at her trousers.
‘Sir, were you sitting close to the stage when the tiger came out?’

‘What?’

‘I’m from the
London Evening Gazette
. Did you see . . . ?’

Frankie tailed off as the man smirked, turning back to his wife.

She cursed him under her breath. A cane patted her shoulder. ‘You the press, are you?’ She twisted her head to see a short man with military medals pinned to his blazer. ‘I
did, I saw the tiger. Captain John Barnes. I saw it open its mouth, teeth big as a walrus. He was a hungry beast. I was in the second row.’

There was a tug on her sleeve. ‘Miss Mildred Gibson. I saw it too. It came right at me. I had goosebumps all down my spine, thought I was a goner I did. Never seen anything like
it.’

‘Excuse me, mister,’ a poke in her back, ‘you write this down for your paper. That beast nearly had my wife. James Horlicks, Stroud Green Road. It looked right at us, I had to
lift my cane to stop it leaping across the seats . . .’

Suddenly the throng was upon Frankie. Names were flung at her, wild claims thrust at her notebook. She peeled slender clammy fingers off her elbows and dodged the tap of heavy hands on her
shoulders. Everyone had valiantly fended off the tiger, single-handedly, everyone had been in grave danger. It had licked its lips; it was furious; it was three times the size of a circus beast;
they didn’t know what Mr Stoll thought he was doing letting it loose in a theatre; he was lucky no children had been eaten.

Frankie made a show of scribbling it down, then politely ducked under a cane at the moment it was raised to tap her shoulder, and picked her way into the auditorium. The front twenty rows were
clear, the back still jammed with people trying to force their way free. Some folk had given up and were fanning themselves, complaining of dizziness.

That was when Frankie looked up and saw the tiger was back.

Without fuss or noise it paced a quick path onto the stage from the rear. The footlights were now at full blast and caught the blazing colours of its fur. But there was something different now
about its appearance. It seemed agitated where before it had been languorous. The stage manager staggered on, brandishing a chair, the Great Foucaud behind him, half-dressed and sweating profusely,
his braces bashing his knees. And then the big cat opened its mouth and let out a roar that sent ice into Frankie’s blood.

Pandemonium re-erupted. The few who had sat back down leapt to their feet and the pushing began again. This time blows were thrown and people emerged from the crowd with red smarts and dark
scratches on their faces and hands. Frankie stood frozen as the safety curtain began to crank down. ‘Faster, man,’ called one of the stagehands. ‘It’s as fast as it will
go,’ came the cry back from the wings.

The stage manager had the tiger cornered against the back wall but it was beginning to growl and pace. Foucaud was fiddling with a bottle of something in his hands. A slab of dripping meat flew
at him from backstage and he caught it, splashing his shirt, then soused it in liquid from the bottle and threw it to the tiger. The tiger arched its neck and locked the meat in its teeth, smacking
the sinews apart. Everyone watched and waited. It wavered, moved forward. The stage manager dodged back.

‘Just wait,’ snapped Foucaud.

The tiger’s shoulders rocked and faltered. Frankie could have sworn she saw a glint of betrayal in its amber eyes as it looked first at the stage manager, then at its sweating owner, then
collapsed in a bleary-eyed thump that made the ground shudder.

She took a step closer. The iron curtain was still cranking down, but there was a gap of a few feet, which, if she was quick, she could make it through. Fighting her instincts to run in the
other direction, she dashed into the orchestra pit, scaled the bars and burnt her hand on a hot footlight as she hauled herself onto the stage. A few more seconds and the metal curtain slammed to
rest on the wood.

Lit by the stage lights, technicians and stagehands had started to approach the sleeping tiger. ‘Is it dead?’ one of them asked.

‘Dead?’ said Foucaud. ‘Do you know how much one of those costs?’

‘Laudanum,’ the stage manager said.

The stagehand backed off.

‘Don’t worry,’ Foucaud said, ‘he’ll be out for a good hour with that dose. But I’ll need your men to help get him back in the cage.’ The men all
suddenly found fascination with their boots or bits of the stage curtains. Then one of them clocked Frankie.

‘Hey, who are you?’

‘Francesca George,
London Evening Gazette
.’ She patted her pocket for a press card to flash and in the end settled for waving her notebook aloft.

‘No, no, no,’ the stage manager said. ‘We run a respectable theatre here. We have it under control. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.’

He started towards her. Suddenly the tiger snorted and everyone jumped. All eyes watched it as silence settled again, muffled by the iron curtain. Finally, the Great Foucaud pulled himself to
his senses and fetched a rope from the wings. With a weariness that suggested he had done it all before, he began binding the beast’s twitching legs.

The stage manager looked up and down at Frankie. ‘Out.’

‘Hold on, hold on,’ Frankie dodged his manhandling. ‘I don’t care about your bloody tiger. What I want to know is: hasn’t anybody bothered to ask where Ebony
Diamond is?’

She watched each of their faces carefully for traces of something. Reassurance, contempt, knowledge that it was a trick and she had been duped. Instead there came an uneasy shifting of eyes. A
passage of alarm passed from the lighting technician in his brown coat, down to the stagehands holding a tarpaulin over the heaving belly of the cat, to the stage manager, who swallowed twice.
‘She’s bound to be somewhere.’

‘Did you know about the end of her act?’

He made a show of scoffing. ‘Damn gypsies never tell you anything. These circus folk are always trying to get one up on us. Think they can . . . you know . . .’ He tipped his chin to
one of the young stagehands, a Chinese boy in overalls too large for him with the sleeves and trousers rolled up. ‘Check her dressing room. And clear off you.’ He nodded at Frankie then
turned round to supervise his men from a distance as they dragged the glossy body of the tiger onto the tarpaulin by its bound paws and tail. It was as sorry a sight as Frankie had seen, sedated,
its shining teeth rendered useless by a stupefied brain. It somehow reminded her of Ebony the day before, vomiting and wailing on the pavement kerb.