Excerpt from The Hourglass Factory by Lucy Ribchester, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
The Hourglass Factory

Twinkle, Frankie's writing partner whose name was printed significantly larger than hers on their shared column, lived just off the Edgware Road. The rich strawberry red of her building meant that the turn-off was always easy to find. A whiskered porter let Frankie into the hydraulic lift and she rose with a jerk. In the safety of the metal cage she sniffed herself. She had the whiff of public house on her, tobacco and beer. Twinkle would probably try to attack her with the eau de toilette. She wrinkled her nose. So long as it wasn't violets.

The crank lifted to a halt on the top floor, glowing in the dainty yellow light. There was no one about. Frankie had never seen anyone coming or going in her visits to Twinkle. The whole place had an eerie quiet about it, nothing like her own lodgings on Percy Circus where there was always a noisy communist meeting going on upstairs, or an Italian family shouting at each other in the street. She straightened her shirt and knocked on the door.

In her day Twinkle had apparently been quite something to talk about; the last of the great Courtesans, so it was said. Books were dedicated to her, paintings made of her in the classical style, and hung in Mayfair drawing rooms under the guise of art. Legend had it that a poet once threw himself into the Thames over her, though he had thought better of it and swum ashore, only to die of cholera weeks later. She had been an icon of fashion, seen at Ascot, at the Savoy, riding along Rotten Row with an entourage of copycats. The papers never called her by her real name, which Frankie didn't know, and not even by her nickname, which she had earned, so she claimed, for being 'the little star of our times'. She had always just been 'fair anonyma' or 'the muse'. Rumours flew round society circles like flies in a dirty cake shop about who her clients were or had been. Names that read like a roll call of the House of Lords were bandied about as blackmail currency.

Boredom had settled on Twinkle like dust in recent years. Itchy to dip her toes back into the limelight she had been on at Mr. Stark about a column. The trouble was, he said, she was a little 'balmy on the crumpet' these days; she would need a helping hand to make sure her ideas were fit for the public to consume. So four months ago, on the 30th of June, the Ladies' Page Friday column 'Conversations from the Boudoir' was born and suddenly Frankie found that every Saturday on her doorstep, a little cheque for one pound and one shilling would appear. She couldn't say that she had ever had pride over the work. But it was bread, it was a pot-boiler, and pot-boilers were never to be sniffed at.

She waited minutes before the parlourmaid answered the door, a pale-cheeked girl with ginger freckles. Frankie didn't recognise her. Twinkle went through parlourmaids like most women went through handkerchiefs.

'Sorry to keep you, Ma'am,' she dipped at Frankie.

'It's all right. I'm late anyway.' Won't last a week, thought Frankie as she stepped inside.

'She's in the boudoir.' The maid led the way down the hall with fragile steps, towards a pair of lavishly etched glass doors. From beyond, a muffled voice trilled, 'Is that you, Puss?'

Frankie winced at the nickname. The maid paused to pick up a tray of tea from a Japanese sideboard and pushed open the doors with her hips.

At first Frankie wasn't quite sure what she was looking at. Twinkle's body was concealed inside a box, the kind magicians used when they wanted to cut women in half. Except this one was upright and only her head poked out of the top, her plentiful grey hair whipped into a turban like cream on a trifle. She must have been sitting down or crouching because the box was wide and squat and was making streams of perspiration stream down her face. Above her, leaning precariously, a contraption had been rigged; a tilting hat-stand held in place by a pulley roped to the legs of the enormous bedframe. Attached to it, two ribbons had been looped through the upper corners of a newspaper, holding the pages apart. Twinkle's face was half-covered by a thick rubber band circumnavigating her head, strapping a pair of horn opera glasses in place to magnify the paper's text. She turned slowly towards Frankie until she had her in her sights, looking for all the world like a terrifying mechanical owl.

Excerpted from The Hourglass Factory by Lucy Ribchester. Copyright © 2016 by Lucy Ribchester. Excerpted by permission of Pegasus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.