The Hourglass Factory (43 page)

Two guards were careering towards them; they dodged outstretched arms just before the men crashed into the railings. Ducking to the right, they ran parallel to the length of Westminster
Abbey.

‘Liam!’ Frankie suddenly realised and turned.

‘No time,’ Ebony shot back over her shoulder.

‘But he’s got the flash powder. We won’t be able to get a clear shot without it.’

She heard a thump behind her and peeped over her shoulder, trying at the same time to keep pace with Ebony who was surefooted in the mud. Milly had slipped and fallen and was sliding around on
her knees in wet muck. She was trying to get purchase on her hands but it was too late. A guard reached for her waist and toppled her again, wriggling a pair of handcuffs from his waistband with
his spare hand. ‘Got ya!’ Frankie heard him cry. ‘You behave yourself and you’ve got nothing to worry about.’

The guards were going berserk, grabbing anyone they could lay their hands on, knocking them to the ground with truncheons, jamming them in headlocks and armlocks until they could be cuffed.

As they reached the corner of the square and ran into the traffic Frankie saw that Liam had managed to dodge them all and was barrelling towards the public entrance to Westminster Palace. She
did a quick check around her and saw that there were guards stationed on every corner. So the police had taken them seriously. She wondered if anyone was watching the Peers’ door. They
stopped in the shadow of another lamppost and Frankie ducked to her haunches. Ebony joined her.

‘How’s he going to get in?’ Ebony jerked her head towards Liam who, a hundred yards off, was hanging back beside the public gates to Westminster Palace, where the majority of
the guards had run from. Frankie looked and saw him poke his head out of the shadows, scanning the street. Suddenly a white hot spark flared and a sharp cry rang out. Liam, his fox-tail hair
flaming under his hat, threw a flash of guncotton and magnesium in the face of a guard. Frankie couldn’t see clearly but suspected from the swaying of the guard’s body and the shape
around him that Liam’s fingers were working his pockets for keys like a squirrel, while he was blinded. A second later the guard hit the ground; the fox tail was gone.

‘That’s how,’ she murmured. Liam was in. ‘Fat lot of good it does us, though.’

Frankie turned back to Ebony and found her staring into the distance towards the Thames. After a few seconds she pulled Frankie close. ‘If we follow parallel to the river we’ll come
to the Peers’ carriage court. There’s an entrance there.’

‘Yes but . . .’

‘Will you grab the bag?’ She pushed the rough carpet bag into Frankie’s arms. Frankie took the camera off her neck and slipped it inside. They rose and began to hurry in the
foggy direction of the river. They hadn’t made it fifty yards when a black shadow swelled up ahead of them.

A guard stepped from the hollows of New Palace Yard straight into their path, his boots crunching on the icy ground. Frankie’s breath froze.

‘Stop.’ He raised his palm.

Without warning Ebony suddenly swooned towards Frankie, throwing her full weight on Frankie’s shoulder and chest. Startled, Frankie caught her just in time with a groan. The guard’s
hand flew out to grab Ebony’s spare arm.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t feel well at all,’ Ebony gasped. ‘I’m . . . I’m . . .’ She clutched her belly.

The officer took a moment to absorb her meaning, then ran his eyes up and down her corseted form and flashed Frankie a filthy look. ‘You let your wife go about dressed like that in her
state?’

Frankie felt temporarily affronted and defensive, the shock of Ebony’s improvised plan, the sudden weight of five foot six of muscular acrobat bearing down on her, and the guard’s
admonishment stopping her tongue. Ebony seized the advantage. ‘Oh, I’m fine really,’ she said, making a pained show of the opposite. ‘I just need a little water, a little
warmth, ow, a telephone to call our chauffeur, you wouldn’t have . . .’ She looked past his shoulder to the gate where a wooden security hut glowed in the weak glare of a bullseye
lantern. ‘No, I don’t suppose. It’s just that we have to get back to Hampshire tonight, and I know our chauffeur is in the club. He’s very easily reached, he’s nearby
on Whitehall, I could give you the number, I just don’t know if I can . . .’

Frankie marvelled at the stream of sudden and convincing drivel trailing effortlessly from Ebony’s mouth. Seeing the guard’s hesitation, she dropped the timbre of her own voice. It
came out not quite as low as she had hoped, more like an effeminate Harry Tripe than a man whose chauffeur visited clubs on Whitehall. ‘Darling, don’t let’s trouble this man.
You’ve taken turns before.’

The guard’s head wavered, then turned towards his hut for a second. Then he said, ‘Come on inside, there’s an office. One of the sergeants will be happy to telephone on your
behalf. What name should I . . . ?’ He pulled Ebony’s upper arm a little too forcefully away from Frankie and began leading them past the Westminster Palace entrance.

‘Hawkins,’ Frankie said quickly, noticing that cries and heavy footfall were coming from inside the courtyard, where Liam had stolen the guard’s keys. ‘Mr and Mrs
Theodore Hawkins.’

The guard glanced over at his colleagues bustling round the gates. ‘Very well.’ With breathless efficiency he marched them out of New Palace Yard and along the length of the narrow
gothic building. Ebony took the liberty of peeking over her shoulder at Frankie, who had been subtly manhandled to the rear of the party. They turned a corner signposting the
Sergeant-at-Arms’s residence, passing another security hut where a guard quickly tucked away a newspaper as they approached. They filed through a concealed unlocked door straight into the
building.

‘We’ve been having a bit of trouble tonight,’ he apologised as they walked an echoing corridor. ‘Some nonsense about women and bombs. I told them, there’s no chance
anyone’s getting in here that doesn’t belong, we’ve got as many guards as there are politicians. Still, we have to be on alert.’ He paused as they approached a cubby office.
From underneath the wooden door came a thin streak of gold light. He knocked twice and the door opened inwards smartly. Still loosely clasping Ebony’s arm the guard poked his head inside and
said, ‘Here governor, I’ve got a woman in a – delicate condition, taken a funny turn. I don’t suppose . . .’ He didn’t finish his non-supposition.

Ebony stuck her hand into the room, grabbed the man’s waist and pulled on his keys so hard the fabric of his breeches ripped. His hands dashed to his belt.

‘Bag,’ Ebony blurted.

Frankie whipped it open. Ebony shouldered the man into the little cubby and slammed the door by its brass handle, leaning her full weight away from it, her muscles bulging through the silk of
her dress. She slicked the key into the lock and turned it. ‘Rope,’ she barked.

Frankie up-ended the bag and a long snake of rope tumbled to the ground. She picked it up and watched Ebony thread it round the bulbous handle and across the short corridor they stood in, until
it reached the handle of the door opposite. She looped it across both handles twice, weathering the tugs and bangs from within the cubby, then bit her gloves off one by one, and worked the ends
into a knot with mechanical speed. She was breathing heavily now with the exertion. Frankie stood by, her eyes bulging.

‘There’s a knife in that bag, pass me it, will you.’

Frankie dipped her hand into the bag and scrabbled at the bottom until she came upon a small hard bone handle. She tossed it to Ebony who trimmed the ends off the rope quickly. Ebony squeezed
her hands over the knots, nodded and breathed out, then tucked the knife into her waistband.

Frankie realised her heart had shot up to a gallop. She tried to control her breathing. The door of the cubby thumped and rattled but each time the two men inside pulled on it, they tautened
their rope.

‘Come on, let’s find Liam,’ Ebony moved off into the darkness of the marble-floored corridor, frowning as a fresh set of violent jolts shot through the door and onto her
cat’s cradle prison.

Lady Thorne had selected red for the occasion. It was no use hiding it from the girls any more, not since the embarrassment of Ebony Diamond’s discovery, and not since
she had set her mind that the best disguise for their purpose was to waltz in, in full view of the guards. A full red cloak of the nicest, most luxurious wool. And ‘red for the
workers’. She had managed a wink at the girls in the carriage parked on Victoria Embankment when she said that.

Now she wished they would watch their feet on the carpet outside the Lords’ chamber. It was a plush pile and had been there since Victoria’s early days on the throne. She could
remember standing on it as a girl, her palm in her father’s, fascinated by the patterns on it that looked like goblin’s faces. She had stood there many times since too.

A known opponent of the women’s movement.

A known figure of the utmost propriety.

A known warrior against vice and intemperance.

A devoted wife picking up some papers from her husband’s office.

The sergeant on the door to the House of Lords had slammed the door in her face at first. Orders to be on the look-out for suffragettes. Then as if she was Black Rod himself he had peered
through the hatch and let her in, apologising and ‘yes ma’aming’ and keening his head like a whelp that had piddled in the parlour.

The fact that she had not one but four of her ladies-in-waiting (sorry-looking courtiers though they were) only served to emphasise the importance of her mission at this late hour, and her
dedication as Lord Thorne’s wife. And besides, she wanted to show the poor wide-eyed lambs inside the House. A charitable woman of the utmost propriety.

Her hand hardened its clutch on the bag, partly to stop the ceramic cases from chinking against one another, partly to remind her why she was here, in the presence of four creatures who
disgusted her. In the high gold-leafed corridor leading to the Lords’ chamber she took stock of their faces like a grocer counting his cabbages on the shelves. Tilly Westcott, a fat furious
little woman with poxed skin and blistered fingers who had worked in the match factories at the time of the strikes and still carried a terrible sulphurous smell about her. Victoria,
‘Vicky’ Crook, a keen snub-nosed willow who had started out fighting off black-leg labour on behalf of the trade unions and ended up fighting anyone she could get her fists on. Sue
Milkfield, a brainless, breathless desperate sheep in curls and rags. And Danielle Boyd, a girl who had bullied her way through every workhouse in London and who hated the world with a bitterness
that Lady Thorne found admirable.

She had given them ways to channel their anger, beyond any of their dreams.

She found herself thoroughly relieved that the two disenchanted suffragettes Annie Evans and Ebony Diamond had been disposed of. They had mouths on them. They asked too many questions. They
wanted answers for their actions, political ends. They did not simply hate.

And Lady Thorne knew how deeply hate could run in your veins and how powerfully it could stamp on every nerve in you if you let it. That look on her wretched daughter’s face, that awful
creature, half-man half-woman who stood before her outside her own house today cemented it: as if she needed any more reminders that the blood in her, the blood that had come from her had turned to
muck in a single generation. Her heart, which had already spread over with a leather crust, turned as hard as marrow and, like a marrow, began to rot from the inside.

Millicent might have thought it was a joke to humiliate her family by marrying in Egypt, and then to twist the knife further by casting herself as meat in a vice-show. Millicent might have
thought it was funny that girls disobeyed their mother’s orders and ran off to London and had their own latchkeys and squandered their fortunes and, worst of all, befriended the wretched
new-monied Americans who had been flooding London for the past decade. Millicent had thought it amusing to put her fingers in the groin of a vegetable boy. But she hadn’t witnessed her
grandfather, Lady Thorne’s own father, put a rifle in his mouth in the garden shed after the land redistribution acts, death duties and new land taxes lost him half his estate, half his
workers. She hadn’t heard the awful sound of gunmetal on teeth, and then the blowing of the whole world to bits. That was what happened when the classes mixed, when you gave the workers an
inch of power and they took a mile.

Twenty years ago to the day. But the hour for commemoration, the time for anniversaries, churchyard vigils, was past.

What they would do tonight would be so horrific it would stitch a fear as thick as catgut into the soul of England, so that no suffragists, trade unionists, no women or collective workers would
ever be allowed such free rein again to meet, to plot or even to exist. The Lords would take back what was theirs by birth. And she would use the workers to do it.

Frankie caught pace with Ebony quickly in the gloomy corridor. As they walked, Ebony surveyed the leftover rope in her hands. ‘I hope there’s enough.’ She
lengthened her stride and Frankie found herself puffing to keep up. They passed ornate doorways leading to libraries and offices, tapestries and sculptures. Every shadow on the wall, every wood or
marble carving made Frankie start, her heart quiver. Just as the corridor was beginning to look as if it would never end, Ebony turned sharply into a side lobby.

In front of them stood a pair of glass-panelled doors. Frankie raised herself to her tip-toes and peered through. Beyond the doors lay a sumptuous lobby, illuminated in weak electric lighting.
Benches lined the walls, statues protruded from the floor, carved from chalk-white marble, their curves glowing faintly in the light. Quickly trying to orient herself from the plans and the
direction they had walked in, she deduced that they were outside the famous octagonal lobby, the Central Hall, Peers entrance on one side, Commons on the other.

She turned back to see that Ebony had begun taking off her skirts, and felt a blush rise. Ebony noticed and scoffed a laugh. ‘Convent school, was it?’ Her small scarlet mouth wove
into a wicked smile.