Chapter 1

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.