The Hourglass Factory by Lucy Ribchester

important to trouble herself with suffragettes. She don’t need to. She got a job with the menfolk.’
    Mr Piggot looked up. ‘Yes, there was something I recall, wasn’t it a cartoon?’
    ‘Oh, don’t go bringing that up now.’ Frankie put down her toast and wiped her fingers on a fresh napkin.
    ‘I recall when you first came here,’ Mrs Gibbons said, ‘wasn’t there an incident with one of them?’
    Frankie concentrated on the newspaper. ‘Says there were over two hundred arrested.’
    ‘That’s right,’ Mrs Gibbons went on, as her pointy fingers began folding the napkins. ‘Didn’t you want to write for that paper they sell about votes but they said
your English weren’t good enough?’
    ‘It wasn’t anything like that,’ Frankie snapped. ‘Why would I write for them for nothing when I can earn a perfectly good living on Fleet Street? Oh, of course I’d
love to afford to support the cause but some of us have rent to pay.’
    ‘Speaking of rent, it was due yesterday.’
    ‘I get my cheque on Saturdays, you know that.’
    ‘Just as long as it comes in. More than a week late and I’ll have to charge interest. Got a living to make myself.’
    Suddenly Frankie sat up straight. She looked back down at the newspaper. ‘Over two hundred suffragettes arrested.’ Frantically she read down the thin columns until she found it.
‘Due to be sentenced at Bow Street Court.’ She checked the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. It was quarter to twelve. A suffragette window smash? Ebony had to have been on that. She
would be in court today for certain. Perhaps that was why she was so agitated yesterday at the corset shop.
    ‘Have to dash, Mrs Gibbons, breakfast was a treat, thank you.’
    Mrs Gibbons looked like she had been slapped with a fish. She watched speechless as Frankie sank her coffee and ran out of the door leaving it open behind her. ‘Cheek,’ she spat.
    ‘Sorry,’ Frankie called over her shoulder, ‘but I’m a working woman.’
    The Black Marias were pulling up thick and fast. Van after van drew to a halt outside Bow Street Police Court where a thin line of constables in dark wool tunics struggled to
contain the crowd. The horses leading the vehicles were growing restless, hoofing the ground, tossing their heads. Someone threw a stone at one of the vans, scoring a dent into the metal. If there
was a cry that came from inside, no one heard it above the din of the protests.
    Frankie didn’t have a press card but used her elbows to barge her way to the front of the public gallery queue. On her way she passed placard holders, jeering women and the shopkeepers who
had divided themselves into those allied to the cause and those against it. Some of the placards said, ‘Send ’em to second division,’ while others declared, ‘Let the
Government pay for my broken windows.’
    Inside, bodies were squeezed into every inch of the court’s dark wood galleries: women in hats, families and children in their Sunday best, newspapermen with yellow notebooks on their
laps, lady journalists in slender skirts. The air was close and stifling with a stew of fragrances. From beyond the dock a rattling of metal from the cell passage filtered through.
    Frankie wedged into a seat between a woman with a pair of seagulls taxidermied to her hat, and a father with two children. The younger, a little boy in a brown suit, was staring through the
wooden bars at the magistrate.
    Frankie followed the little boy’s gaze to a plump man wearing pince-nez and a wig that had yellowed at the fringes with tobacco stains. She had seen him on the bench before, but he looked
dog-tired today. On the way in, two laywers had been discussing a rumour that he had a police escort now – constables on bicycles following him to and from court – owing to the number
of threats he had received from the WSPU.
    She looked round the court for Ebony but couldn’t see her. Women were being brought up in groups of ten, squashed into