The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (17 page)

‘There’s a good poppet,’ he said approvingly. ‘A gentleman always enjoys a curtsey and a dipped head. Enda and Berenice have learned that to a nicety.’

I did not see him leave. I was already in the grip of ‘Miss Manticory’s’ glass eyes. I noticed that the real eyelashes were supplemented by long painted lashes all around the lids, giving ‘Miss Manticory’ an extremely alert and alluring look.

I stood her on my desk and made myself sit in front of her. I ran my finger along her feather eyebrows. The doll seemed to possess an inner confidence I’d never own. It was provocative. Provoked, I stripped her, unlacing the eyelet holes of her fitted stays, and unbuttoning each of her petticoats, her pantalets and her chemisette, right down to her lumpen composition body, clad in kid. I manipulated her ball-jointed limbs in a graceless gallop of a dance. I unclipped her tiny jade earrings. I unfastened the locket. As I unpeeled her, I was amazed afresh at Mr Rainfleury’s attention to detail. On every item I removed – from her bodice to her Balmoral boots – was sewed or glued a tiny label announcing: ‘
Miss Manticory
’
– the latest sensation from the Swiney Godiva Corporation
. Even inside the locket, Mr Rainfleury had managed to insert a tiny handbill, folded a dozen times, illustrating all seven dolls in the collection. The mesh purse contained seven tiny coins with Swiney Godiva profiles where Her Majesty’s should have been.

There was a light footstep outside my door. What if someone were to catch me in the obscene contemplation of the naked ‘Miss Manticory’? Hurriedly, I re-dressed her, forgetting one of the petticoats, and sat her on an armchair. I kicked the stray petticoat under my bed and continued my visual negotiations, searching for a way to accommodate her in my thoughts.

The footsteps passed on. I immediately started to hate ‘Miss Manticory’. Her hands were stiff claws. And her bisque skin was repellently hard to the touch. Her mouth was half open in a fly-inviting pout. I suspected her composition body of being horridly like Mr Rainfleury’s in texture. If she were to come to life, ‘Miss Manticory’ would be a cold minx with a cavity where her brain should be, and another for her heart. She would walk like a shuffling ghost. I reached a threatening hand towards her. After all, it was dolly-bashing I’d been bred to. But then I snatched it back, remembering how little I liked the feel of her under my fingers.

When the bell rang for tea, I grasped ‘Miss Manticory’ by the neck and took her down to introduce her to my sisters and their dolls.

For this auspicious occasion Mrs Hartigan had supplied a spread that would make you lick your lips to look at it. Towering sponges rubbed shoulders with seedless raspberry jellies and ziggurats of tender-fleshed scones and buttery potato cakes well peppered and studded with caraway seeds. I was suddenly sorely homesick for stirabout of Indian meal spooned up by Annora under the swinging seashell lamp in Harristown. I was surprised to discover that my sisters, even with the jam bloodying the corners of their mouths, seemed to be in the same black mood as myself, and were letting loose a bellyful of laments.

Darcy complained that her doll looked ‘iron-hard’ and ‘overly animal’, though she was also certain it would be the greatest earner. Pertilly feared hers appeared simple, yet she was relieved to find under the skirt as pretty an ankle as you’d find in Dublin. Oona worried that hers was too babylike. Enda thought Berenice’s unfairly pretty and vice versa, though in truth both dolls mimicked perfectly the twins’ slightly elfin ears and the shadows under their eyes and their smooth oat-coloured complexions.

Ida disliked the low brow of her doll, which reproduced her heart-shaped face and upthrusting chin. Its eyebrows sloped downwards, capturing her look of permanent anxiety. The lips, like hers, were wide and slightly parted. A miniature fiddle dangled from one hand and a bow from the other. To complete the resemblance, Ida had already wound around the doll’s wrists bracelets made from hair freshly pulled from her own head.

She whined, ‘The problem is that “Miss Idolatry” copies me
too much
! It is very very wicked that she should be so exactly like me.’

‘Why wicked?’ asked Berenice. ‘She is
supposed
to look like you. She is a great success!’ She smiled ingratiatingly at Mr Rainfleury. Enda’s shoulders tensed.

‘I cannot explain,’ wept Ida. ‘But “Miss Idolatry” is a demon. And she is a very rude bad girl too.’

My troubled sisters gazed into their demon-doubles’ eyes, searching for evidence of what Ida had said. From their faces, they sensed the corruption too, and yet they knew it was too late to forfend.

Mr Rainfleury, in contrast, was in seven separate raptures about his creations. He could not be stopped from fondling their hair, and waltzing them along the top of the mantelpiece, and pretending to feed them morsels of cake. He paid not the slightest attention to our complaints. I flinched at the steel that lined his emollient manners.

He shows us great respect – but only from the teeth out
, I thought.
In the end, he will not let our feelings get in the way of his empire
.

He had ‘Miss Manticory’ clapping her hands in front of the Christmas tree.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, ‘I had quite forgot.’

He produced from various pockets seven tiny gifts extravagantly wrapped. He laid them under the tree, next to our full-sized presents.

Darcy failed entirely to be charmed. ‘Christmas presents for dolls?’ she asked him. ‘I hope that they are little rolls of string? So you can operate the dolls as marionettes,’ she suggested to him sourly. ‘As you already do with their originals.’

None of us sisters wanted the consequences of reminding Darcy that it was she who had signed the contract, and she who had agreed to sell us. Meanwhile, Mr Rainfleury’s jubilations continued at industrial strength. Darcy could not dent them, not even with her spiky tongue and iron tone.

He gloated, ‘Jumeau shall die seven deaths from jealousy whenever he sees these darlings!’ he rejoiced. ‘I’ve taken out an advertisement in the
Gazette de la Poupée
, just to make sure he does!’

Then he told us how the great Parisian doll-maker had caused a sensation with his long-haired beauties, and kept whole streets of seamstresses busy sewing miniature dresses. There were entire shops that sold nothing but trousseaux for Jumeau’s creations.

‘And so it shall be in Dublin and with the “Miss Swineys”,’ Mr Rainfleury assured us. ‘So it shall be.’

Chapter 15

It was not yet a street, like Mr Jumeau’s enterprise, but the Swiney Godiva Corporation kept a large brick building fully populated with employees. A few days after a brief Harristown Christmas, we were driven – in two carriages to accommodate our skirts – to Mr Rainfleury’s factory. The unheated building hummed and rustled with the sawing, sewing and nailing of ‘Miss Swineys’ and their accessories. Shabby Dubliners of both sexes were bent over trays of eyes or sat stitching small clothes, nightgowns, skating costumes, dressing gowns and riding habits.
Posticheurs
were marrying clumps of hair to incised bisque pates. A few older women were seated at baroque-looking treadles that stabbed roads of black stitches into miles of cloth. Girls barely older than Ida sat fashioning miniature baskets, fiddles, umbrellas and photograph albums. Everyone’s fingers were white with cold, and their breath ghosted the air around them.

Mr Rainfleury purred, ‘Each item will be monogrammed, of course, and can be collected separately by the public.’

Of course the ‘Miss Swineys’ were a tint discounted in this mass manufacture. Their statures were shrunk from the magnificent thirty inches of our own dolls to an economical eighteen. The heads were still bisque, but cloth replaced the kid covering the composition bodies. Our own dolls’ silk petticoats were reproduced in cheap gauze. And the hair seethed in seven frighteningly familiar colours in great cotton bins suspended from girders in the ceiling. When I asked to see the apparatus that spun artificial hair from silk and plant extracts, Mr Rainfleury hushed me and drew me aside. ‘The room where
that
alchemy is performed must be kept locked. We cannot have our competitors spying on us! One of you girls, in your innocence, might let drop a word that could lead them to our secret formula.’

I thought his tongue should smoke from that burning lie. He, for his part, looked at me with frank dislike. All attraction for my long hair was gone: he did not like the brain that worked beneath it.

In silence, we watched the seamstresses, gluers and wig-makers. I looked under the table at their shoes, saw them thin and holed, and was sorry. Their eyes travelled over us nervously. They did not allow their faces to express any comment, but I was convinced that they must hate us for their poor wages and the cold in which they were forced to work. I was relieved when Ida said, ‘I believe we should go home directly, isn’t it?’

She meant to Annora, and Harristown, I was sure.

We had a real reason for not lingering: we had very little time. Like the newest recruits in any brothel, we were exceptionally busy. ‘Madam Rainfleury’, my latest name for him, had us working at a breathless pace.

Now he’d invested his money in us, Mr Rainfleury took a keen interest in making us more famous. The greater the legend of the Swiney Godivas, the better their dolls would sell, and the higher the prices they and their miniature accessories could command. And I believe it also swelled the private pleasure in Mr Rainfleury’s merchant heart to imagine his pets the objects of general and commercial admiration.

Darcy might have suspected how things would turn out, but she had been uncharacteristically disposed to reticence on the subject. So we younger sisters entered into this new chapter of our fame like kittens venturing out of the basket for the first time – unsure, fearful and always keeping an eye on where we might bolt back to.

But I knew there was no safe place.

After we visited the factory I crept down in the night to the desk in the drawing room. I wanted to read the grand Corporation contract Darcy had signed on our behalf. By the light of my candle, the words were plain and ugly for all the glowing wax, the black copperplate and the flourishes. The contract provided for no return, no change of heart on our side. We were bound to the Swiney Godiva Corporation without waiver.

The only person who might withdraw without penalty was Mr Rainfleury himself.

In fact – and to my surprise – ‘Miss Manticory’ made it easier for me on the stage. Although I was almost insane with my aversion to the little idol, she gave me something to cling to. According to our new Corporation contract, Mr Rainfleury’s dolls were to sell on the back of our shows, being displayed in the lobby where the audience passed the intermission. The dolls featured prominently in our act: just before the interval we all backed onto the stage, and held up our dolls above us with their bisque heads facing our customers. We made them talk in our voices – an animated conversation. Then slowly we ourselves turned round and took the dolls in our arms like babies and kissed them tenderly on their unyielding cheeks, making them seem like the most precious objects in the world.

Exactly as Mr Rainfleury had calculated, this part of our act certainly cultivated desire for the dolls in our patrons. Their sales soon accounted for far more of our takings than our admission tickets did.

The dolls had their own reviews:
‘Miss Enda’ surpasses anything we have ever seen, both in design and taste
.

One fanciful lady correspondent wrote:

It is possible to believe that these enchanting miniature beauties are capable of exercising sympathetic magic – surely tending to their magnificent locks will make their adoring owner’s grow!

‘Think of that now!’ breathed Oona.

Mrs Godlin from the Kilcullen dispensary wrote that gossip had it that the two daughters of the Master of Harristown had requested a whole set of ‘Miss Swineys’ for under their Christmas tree. She also told us that the Eileen O’Reilly had been seen with two black eyes glowering under her fringe and that her butcher father had passed a night in a stupor in the cells.

‘Shame he didn’t take the whole head off her,’ observed Darcy.

Sales of the dolls doubled and then tripled. So it seemed perfectly natural that Mr Rainfleury should take charge of the Swiney Godiva show bookings as well as the dolls. For this purpose, he bought an enormous ledger with columns for travel expenses, costume costs, beauty preparations such as Cheltenham Salts, eau de Cologne, Elder Flower Water, stage properties, set painting and teas, all of which were deducted from the takings before the rest was committed to the bank account in Dame Street, to which Darcy alone had access, and from which she doled out weekly allowances with grudging hands, dropping six coins by each of our plates every Sunday evening supper.

After a few weeks, Ida threw hers back at Darcy.

‘Want to
see
my money,’ she insisted. ‘The big money in the bank.’

‘That you would not,’ retorted Darcy, scooping up the coins and pocketing them. ‘It’s not a decent girl who’d ask such a thing. Think of your money in the bank like the geese doing the deed in the bushes and making more geese. You’d not be wanting to look at it. But you’ll be happy of the additional geese by and by.’