by Neil McKenna
But out of this treacherous swamp of lies, certain truths began to emerge vaporously. The arrest of the two young men in women’s clothes was not as haphazard or accidental as the police and the prosecution liked to make out. Taken together with the evidence of Police Constable Charles Walker, who said he had been covertly watching the movements of Fanny and Stella in and out of Wakefield Street for a fortnight before their arrest, and the evidence of Detective Officer Chamberlain, who said he had been keeping his beady eye on them for a year past, the arrest of the young men in women’s clothes took on a very different complexion. Clearly, it had been planned and schemed over and thought about for some time in advance, and things were not quite so simple, not quite so cut and dried as first they might appear.
12
A Victorian Romance
At length I am a bride! Lord Arthur was so pathetic, and appealed so earnestly to every sentiment of my love, that I could not do otherwise than entrust my happiness to his keeping, and agree to a speedy marriage. I need hardly tell you how the thoughts of becoming a bride fluttered my virgin heart, only to think of being naked in bed with a fine fellow like Arthur, who I only too truly guessed would be formidably armed with a Cupid’s spear commensurate with the very ominous bunch in his trousers, which always had a peculiar fascination to me. So rather more than a week ago we were made man and wife.
Letters from Laura and Eveline, 1903
L ike all the best love affairs it had been as accidental as it had been unexpected.
For well over a year now, Louis Hurt had been Stella’s ardent and devoted swain, and she was only too well aware that her Mamma thoroughly approved of him. Indeed, Mrs Mary Ann Boulton was doing everything in her power to promote the match. Louis was constantly at the house, invited to luncheons and dinners, and frequently asked to spend weekends with the family. On one occasion he had stayed for an entire fortnight.
Stella liked Louis and sometimes she even fancied herself a little in love. He was predictable, gentlemanly, hard-working and, most importantly, utterly devoted to her. But these virtues were also his vices. Louis wanted her, but he wanted her on his own terms. His spaniel-like attentions could be irksome and he was possessive to the point of jealousy when it came to other beaux, which meant that Stella was very sensibly rather less than frank with him about her nocturnal escapades in the West End.
Truth be told, dear Louis was really rather dull and disapproving. He was not at all in favour of fun or frivolity, and he was very decidedly against dragging up. It was only on very rare occasions, on high days and holy days, that he could be persuaded to consent to accompany her to the theatre or to a ball or a party in her full drag glory.
And though he certainly had considerable charm of manner and equally considerable charm of person, his conversation could be dreary and repetitive. When he was not droning on about his work with the Post Office, he would talk about Alderwasley, about his ten brothers and his four sisters, until her poor head ached with trying to keep up and sort the one from the other. And he spoke rather too much about ‘Mother’, who sounded very formidable and dragon-like and not at all the sort of person that Stella felt she would like as her Mamma-in-law.
Louis was never in the right place at the right time. Whenever she did want him he would be away – in Wales or Wiltshire or Worcestershire or some other wild place – and when she did not want him, there he was, with his fine grey eyes which seemed to be imploring and beseeching her, and yet at the same time judging her, reproaching her, constraining her. So much so that Stella found herself looking forward to his long absences, and dreading his returns.
F or Mrs Mary Ann Boulton these were the happiest of happy days, and 1867 the happiest of happy years. Ever since Ernest, at her behest – nay, upon her insistence – had given up work in the January, he had blossomed forth. He seemed happier than he had ever been, and the dark, gloomy days of the London and County Bank were quickly forgotten. His health still gave her cause for concern. She still fretted and worried that he was consumptive (there was a decided propensity to consumption on Mr Boulton’s side), and he was often pale and exhausted.
But Ernest had such a gift for friendship, and she so much enjoyed meeting his friends and helping them in their little theatrical enterprises. There was Mr Frederick Park, Mr Martin Cumming, Mr Charles Pavitt, Mr Cecil Thomas, Mr Albert Wight and half a dozen others whose names she could not possibly be expected to remember. They were constantly at the house. Indeed, Frederick, or Fred, or even ‘Fanny’ as the others had called him in jest, was so much with them that he seemed almost like a brother to Ernest.
Boys would be boys, and there was much joshing and many colt-like high spirits. And why ever not? She had been highly amused when Ernest first told her about his new name. ‘He laughed and told me that he did go by the nickname of “Stella”.’ Stella. In Latin, star. Most pretty and most appropriate, and when the boys were gathered together in her home, sometimes she could not help herself from joining in the fun and addressing him as ‘Stella’ too, to hoots and whoops of delight.
They were all mad for the theatre, and constantly singing and playing and dressing up and putting on little private theatricals. She had never seen anything as comical as plump Mr Cumming playing a dowager duchess, and Fanny and Stella, as she now started to think of them, made extremely convincing ladies. Fanny, it was true, made a handsome – rather than a beautiful – woman, and looked older than his years, unlike her Stella, who utterly astonished and silenced all and sundry with his beauty, his conspicuous beauty, as a young woman.
Mrs Mary Ann Boulton was much in demand as prompter, stage manager and wardrobe mistress. ‘On one or two occasions I gave a dress,’ she said later. In truth, it was more like a dozen dresses when she added them all up in her mind, but who was counting? It was a little embarrassing for the boys to procure dresses for private theatricals, and yet so easy for her to help with buying bits and pieces, pinning and sewing, making and altering. Besides, she enjoyed being a part of it all. But she needed all her skills of diplomacy to smooth and soothe those little differences of opinion which seemed to flare up with alarming frequency. It was not for nothing, she had begun to realise, that acting was also called the histrionic art.
Then in the autumn of 1867 came an invitation to dinner at the home of Mr and Mrs Richards. The invitation was not especially unusual or unexpected. Mr Richards was a stockbroker, a friend of Mr Boulton’s and connected to him by way of business. But when Mrs Richards had whispered so confidentially to Mrs Boulton that a personage, none other than Lord Arthur Clinton, the Honourable Member for Newark, and son (but not heir) to His Grace, the late Duke of Newcastle, was attending she had got herself into one of her states and dressed herself with the utmost ceremony for the occasion, almost as if she were going to be presented at court.
For some reason – which Stella could not now recall – neither her Papa nor Gerard were able to go with them to the Richards’s. It was to be just Mamma and herself. Of course, she was only too well aware that she would be expected to sing for her supper. But she was quite happy to do so.
Stella was, she freely admitted, more than a little intrigued at the prospect of meeting Lord Arthur. As far as she was aware, she had never met a real Lord before, and it would be interesting to do so. She had no idea of what to expect. He might be ninety years old and deaf as a post. Or, like so many of the men she met, he might want to talk about huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ all night, and she would have to sit there and politely try to stifle her yawns.
Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton could not be described as handsome in any conventional sense. He was of the middle height, slightly built and inclined to stoop. He wore a small, neat moustache and long side-whiskers. The top of his head was already as bald as an egg, a fact he cleverly disguised by combing over the hair from one side of his head to the other and plastering it down with plenty of Rowland’s Macassar Oil, a remarkable product guaranteed, it was said, to ‘nourish and preserve t
he hair, and make it grow thickly on all bald patches’.
Lord Arthur seemed older and wiser than his years. There were dark shadows under his eyes, and his lips were full and red, making a strange and not unpleasing contrast with the pallor of his complexion. There was something about him that caught Stella’s attention from the moment they were introduced, a certain gleam in his eyes, a certain vigour in his handshake, a certain smile, a certain intense gaze, a certain je ne sais quoi, as Fanny would have it with her cheap French phrases.
Stella blushed and smiled, and smiled and blushed, and was suitably modest when she felt that modesty was called for, and suitably bold when she needed to be bold. Sometimes she would look up and catch him gazing at her appreciatively and would find herself colouring under the penetrating scrutiny of his dark eyes.
Lord Arthur made a special effort to put her at her ease. He begged her to call him Arthur, asking her for her opinion and asking her questions about herself before hastening everybody into the drawing room to hear, he said with a smile that melted her heart, young Mr Boulton sing. And so Stella had sung the hauntingly sad ‘Fading Away’, and sung it with such sweetness and with so much intensity that she felt the first prickings of a tear or two in her large and very beautiful blue-violet eyes.
Rose of the garden,
Blushing and gay,
E’en as we pluck thee,
Fading away!
Beams of the morning,
Promise of day,
While we are gazing,
Fading away!
As she took her bow, which was really more of a curtsey, she looked over to Lord Arthur and thought she saw the glint and glimmer of an answering tear in his eyes. And then she was certain.
Her friendship with Lord Arthur had, to use her Mamma’s phrase, very quickly ‘ripened into intimacy’. Arthur, as she must now learn to call him, had asked her Mamma that very night if he might call upon them in Dulwich, and naturally Mamma was in transports of delight at the prospect, though Dulwich was, of course, just another of Mamma’s pretty fictions, as their house was firmly within the rather less genteel borders of Peckham Rye.
The household was thrown into a feverish frenzy of expectation and preparation. Though Papa very manfully decreed that Lord Arthur must take them as he found them, Mamma worked herself up into a state of the greatest excitement and the greatest agitation. Within a day or two of their first meeting, she had told anyone and everyone in Peckham Rye about Lord Arthur, and was happily discoursing about the late and dear Duke as if they had been on terms of the most intimate acquaintance.
When, upon Arthur’s first visit, it became clear that Stella was his particular object, all thoughts of Louis Hurt flew the rickety coop of her Mamma’s mind. With a variety of sage nods and winks, knowing looks and sighs, and with many significant shakings of her artificial curls, she gave Stella to understand that she, and therefore her Papa (though Stella had never known him to give an opinion upon any of her beaux), thoroughly approved of her new suitor. Where once ‘dear Louis’ had held sway, now ‘Lord Arthur’ reigned supreme. Though pressed repeatedly to call him Arthur, Mrs Mary Ann Boulton invariably used his title, laying particular and empathic stress upon the word ‘Lord’.
There were luncheons, dinners, evening parties and musical parties. Arthur’s public passions were theatrical. He could play and sing and act, and though his talents in these arenas could in no way compare with Stella’s, they were complementary. He would play her accompaniments, sing duets with her, and act the part of the handsome hero to her dazzling heroine in the two-handed drawing-room entertainments that Stella loved to perform.
Lord Arthur was constantly at Peckham Rye. He was shown off, like a prize ox, casually displayed for the delectation and edification of Mrs Mary Ann Boulton’s friends and neighbours, who had, she felt, never fully appreciated her or her family’s true gentility. Quite apart from what he could and would do for Ernest, Lord Arthur, with his social and political connections, would, she thought, be of immense help to Mr Boulton and his business, and no doubt he would be able to put something in Gerard’s way when the time came. At last, she thought to herself, things are finally coming right.
But the path of true love did not always run smoothly. Within weeks of their first meeting, there were those two unfortunate and disagreeable episodes to contend with.
Ernest and Mr Cumming were arrested in the Haymarket. It was all a mistake, a lark. In an excess of youthful zeal, and perhaps even a little in their cups, they had donned their stage costumes and gone out to carouse among the gay ladies. They had meant no harm, and it was of course completely preposterous of those ladies of the night to assume that either Ernest or Mr Cumming was – and here Mrs Mary Ann Boulton shuddered – ‘interfering with their calling’. And then, by a terrible fluke, the same thing had happened again, this time with Ernest’s friend, Mr Campbell, a gentleman with whom she was not acquainted (and frankly with whom she had no wish to be acquainted).
Mr Campbell was apparently ‘a man perfectly well-known to the police’, though of course Ernest could not possibly have been aware of that fact. How the police and the newspapers dared to insinuate what they did was beyond her. They had had the temerity to suggest that Ernest and Mr Campbell were ‘apparently plying for men, so much so that a disturbance ensued’. Thankfully Mr Boulton had arranged matters, and Ernest had been released with a small fine and a stern talking-to. They had decided as a family that it had been much ado about nothing, a comedy of errors – a conclusion which, fortunately and very much to her relief, Lord Arthur Clinton seemed to share.
Mrs Mary Ann Boulton’s ears had pricked up with alarm when, during the early days of the courtship (for surely no other construction could be placed upon it?), Lord Arthur casually made a reference to ‘my fiancée’. And she had bristled defensively a week or so later when she read in The Times that ‘a marriage is arranged to take place between Lord Arthur Clinton, M.P., and Miss Matthews’.
Love or money? It sounded like the title of one of the plays that Ernest and his young friends were so fond of performing. Mrs Mary Ann Boulton knew that in the world of the theatre love would always triumph in the end, but away from the limelight, in the dark and difficult present, she feared that gross Mammon often won the day. She trembled at the thought. All she could do was hope and pray, and double and redouble her efforts to snare Lord Arthur for Ernest. Fortunately, her fears proved groundless when Lord Arthur announced that he had relinquished his engagement to Miss Matthews, or as some of the less savoury newspapers hinted, Miss Matthews had shown him the door.
And then there was the question of Lord Arthur’s bankruptcy. Mrs Mary Ann Boulton’s poor fuddled head could not understand the ins and outs of it all, but it appeared from the crumbs that Lord Arthur let drop, and from what was reported in the newspapers, which she could not keep herself from reading avidly, that he had been ill advised – not to say wilfully misled – over money matters by unscrupulous people and had got himself into difficulties. It was so easily done, so very easily done, and she had every sympathy, though debts of £34,134 did seem extraordinarily excessive and beyond her ability to comprehend.
There were some unsavoury details: Lord Arthur, it seemed, had unfortunately availed himself of the services of a pawnbroker, a Mr Attenborough, and pledged a number of items with him, the tickets for which, she had read with incredulity, had been stolen by a servant. It was very much to Lord Arthur’s credit, she reflected, that in the absence of proof, Lord Arthur had not informed the police of the theft nor, indeed, dismissed the man in question.
It appeared that Lord Arthur had a generous nature – Mrs Mary Ann Boulton might even go so far as to say an over-generous nature. The sum of £1,694 owed to Messrs Ortner, Houle and Co. for items of jewellery given as presents was very considerably more than what she herself spent annually on keeping house. She was surprised to discover that Lord Arthur had given his intended bride ‘in all, five diamond rings’. She could not h
elp comparing – a little uneasily, it had to be said – the cost of one of these diamond rings, apparently £75, with the huge sum of £210 for ‘a chest containing plate and cutlery’ given as a gift to one Lieutenant Jones, a fellow officer of Lord Arthur, which bespoke a deal of manly friendship and affection existing between them.
It was unfortunate, it had to be said, that Lord Arthur’s generosity, his over-generosity, cast a slight shadow over Ernest’s coming-of-age party in the December of 1867. Mrs Mary Ann Boulton had been planning it for months, if not years. A supper party for family and friends in their house in Dulwich to celebrate her darling boy’s majority. There was to be champagne, a full supper, presents and surprises, and entertainments, both musical and dramatic. Naturally, she wrote to Lord Arthur first as guest of honour, and she received a charming reply:
My dear Mrs Boulton,
Pray accept my most sincere thanks for your most kind invitation which I accept with the greatest pleasure, especially as it is to celebrate the coming of age of your son, Ernest, for whom I entertain the most sincere regard. Believe me to remain
Sincerely yours,
Arthur Pelham-Clinton
‘Your son, Ernest, for whom I entertain the most sincere regard.’ Mrs Mary Ann Boulton savoured those words over and over again.
Then, at the very last minute, Ernest had informed her that Arthur had ‘said he would be very pleased to send any little thing down to supper if Ernest would like him to do so’. When she finally got to the bottom of things, she was horrified. It seemed that Lord Arthur had ordered and intended to pay for an entire supper from Buck’s the Caterers. Apart from throwing her into complete disarray (and how typical of menfolk to be so oblivious of her existing arrangements), Mr Boulton had put his foot down and decreed that they could not accept such a gift, especially when Lord Arthur had been declared a bankrupt barely a fortnight earlier.
