A Feminine Flirty Dozen

London Lark-1

London Lark

The first time I met Miss Pandora Piper, her what was to become the shining star of the Criterion and the darling of London society, she was in a right state, lying in the gutter with both legs broken and her head hanging off to one side.

“It’s proper criminal,” I told my gaffer, old Arthur the tinkerer, as folks call him, although it’s Mr Tunstall to the likes of you and me, “what the toffs’ll do to their playthings.”

Top notch goods, she was, fine featured and with soft ivory skin, so lifelike you’d almost have mistaken her for human, if it hadn’t been for the metal poking out of her poor torn limbs. Lying there abandoned in the gutter, like any other beggar what’s fallen on hard times. “It ain’t right,” I muttered.

“Now then, Hodgkins,” old Arthur said in that soothing old gin-and-baccy voice of his. He stroked his chin with a rasping sound as his calluses caught on the stubble. “We’ll see her straight, don’t you fret. Grab her shoulders—I’ll take the other end, wouldn’t want a young lad like you seeing something he shouldn’t, heh heh heh—and we’ll heave her up on the cart. And no letting that head fall, neither. She don’t need no more dents in her poor face, Lord love her.”

Now, I ain’t a lad, I’m older than I look, and I didn’t reckon Miss Pandora (as we later called her) had anything up her skirts I hadn’t seen every day of my life and twice on Sundays, that being bath night, but neither did I fancy a clip round the ear and a lost place, so I kept mum and did as I was told.

So we heaved her up on the cart, more careful like than it sounds, and old Arthur flipped a sixpence to the lad who’d run and told us where to find “a proper living doll, posh like, with all her bits and stuff.” The lad ran off sharpish, most likely to pick up his mates and head to the nearest gin palace, but as my gaffer always says, it keeps them off the streets. Then I set myself between the handles of that cart and trundled her back to the workshop in St Elegius Mews, with old Arthur walking along beside to make sure none of her ended up back in the gutter as we rattled over the cobbles.

She was a proper prize, she was. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on her. Well, them and my screwdrivers. Me and my gaffer, we fix up all sorts in the shop, but it ain’t often we get to work on quality like this. We laid her down on the worktop, her golden hair falling free from its pins and spilling out over the scarred wood like sunshine, and I turned up the gas so’s I could see what I was about.

“Costs money, gas does,” old Arthur griped, and then he clapped me on the shoulder and left to keep a prior appointment with a tuppenny’s worth of gin. He never was one to keep a dog and bark himself, ‘specially since the tremors in his hands got so bad.

“Chucked out of some toff’s carriage in the night, were you?” I murmured as I unscrewed her head from her poor neck. “Too embarrassed to take you in for repair after what he done, I’ll bet. So he ought to be, being so rough with a fine lady like you.”

I lifted her head clean off her neck, and her eyelids fluttered, then fell shut. Gave me a warm feeling, you know? Like she was trusting me to see her right while she slept.

I cut away what was left of her clothes—fine silk all torn to rags, as if there weren’t no one starving in the world—and set to work on them poor broken legs of hers first. The skin was ripped up something shocking, so I stripped it all off and sent out to the tanners for fine new lambskin. Old Arthur grumbled at the cost when he saw the bill, but like I says, no one wants rotten oysters chopped up and served as caviar. Two of the main shafts needed replacing, and the gears were twisted out of shape, but I got strong arms and I know what I’m doing with a hammer and a vice. I salvaged what I could and replaced the rest, and by the end of it all she had the prettiest pins as ever graced the boards in the London Variety, both inside and out. I seen Miss Vesta Tilley on the stage as many times as I can scrape up the pennies, both as Burlington Bertie and as principal boy in the pantomime, and I seen Miss Lottie Collins dance to Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay too, and lovely legs they may have, but they ain’t nothing on Miss Pandora’s, after I’d been to work on her.

“Seems a shame to cover ‘em in petticoats,” I said, as I stretched the new skin over the mechanics and fastened it up. “Lord, but you’re a lovely one, you are.” My eye seemed to catch a movement off to one side, and I thought for a moment her eyelids had fluttered again, but it must just have been the flickering of the candle.

“Hodgkins?” Old Arthur called into the workshop. “Yer tea’s getting cold. Come and eat, for Gawd’s sake. Yer lady-love ain’t going nowhere.”

“Goodnight, Miss Pandora,” I whispered, for I was already calling her that, when we were alone. “And sweet dreams. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Weeks it was I worked on her—I don’t say all the time, mind, as we’d plenty of other calls on us. There’s always something as wants fixing for them as can afford it. Mechanical housemaids, sweeps’ boys, even a false nose for some syphilitic toff what’d got stuck on sneezing. We always tells ‘em, they ain’t designed for so much snuff, but what toff wants to listen to a tinkerer and his lad telling him to curb his pleasures?

Miss Pandora, though, she was my labour of love, and I was at her side all the hours I could spare. I spoke to her while I worked. It can be a lonely lot, hunched over a workbench all hours, barely seeing the light of day, and the more I told her of my hopes and my dreams, the more real she became to me. It made me want to weep sometimes, I’ll not deny, for here I was pouring my heart and my soul into her, all so we could sell her off to some brute who’d like as not mistreat her as bad as her last owner had.

Her face needed some work—all squashed on one side, it was—so I took my chance while old Arthur was sleeping off the gin and worked on both sides, making her more beautiful than she had been before. Just a few subtle changes, like a little more lamb’s wool stuffing in her cheeks, so’s if the toff what had her before should happen to chance across her in her new life, he wouldn’t go recognising her and demanding his property back.

Now, most automata, you see one side of their face, you’ve seen the other, as in a mirror, like, but I don’t hold with that. Makes ‘em look like dolls—not real. Course, there’s some as says that’s just how it should be, but I ain’t one of ‘em, and if you don’t like that, you know where you can shove it. Old Arthur don’t mind what I do, and that’s what counts, if you ask me, him being my gaffer and all. He knows what I do gets us high prices.

Her neck was all torn up, so I made it new again, with the finest pipes I could craft and the softest leather, graceful as a swan. The perfect pedestal to stand her pretty head upon. Her hair weren’t so bad, so I brung in my little sister Lily, what works as a lady’s maid, to wash them golden tresses and style ‘em, seeing as how what I know about feminine fripperies could be inscribed on the head of a pin without the aid of a magnifying glass. Lily, bless her heart, came bearing a bundle of fine clothes, only slightly worn: cast-offs begged from her lady’s daughter, and they fitted Miss Pandora a treat after a stitch here and a tuck there.

“She’s a pretty one, ain’t she?” says Lily. “What I wouldn’t give to be dressing a looker like this every day, instead of the old battleaxe I work for.” She don’t talk like that when she’s working, Lily don’t. She had to learn to talk proper for her lady, which is one more reason I could put up with old Arthur’s moods, and his drinking, and his farts, and be glad of it because apprenticing to him meant I never had to go into service and learn how to be polite.

Lily gives me a nudge in the ribs. “Bet you’ll be sorry to see her go when she’s all finished, Harr.”

And I said nothing, cos much as I might not like it, she was right.