Fanny and Stella (18 page)

But young Mr Boulton was another kettle of fish altogether. He might be called Mr Boulton, but everyone was convinced that he was, in truth, a she.

Secretly, Eliza Clark rather liked Mr or Miss Boulton. He was only a year or two older than herself and, if he was in the mood, he would chat to her in a friendly, interested sort of a way and ask her questions about her life in Norfolk before she came to London; about her previous service; and about her sweethearts. Eliza could always tell straight away what sort of mood he was in. Some mornings he would smile and bustle about and sometimes even give her a hand with the dusting or the bed-making. On other days he would sit silently, scowling, lost in his own angry thoughts, furiously smoking thin cigarettes or cigars.

‘I thought Boulton was a female all the time he was there,’ Eliza said later. It was the small things that convinced her, like the fact that he (or she) ‘used powder to her face’ and sang very prettily with ‘a womanish voice’.

One thing she did puzzle over was the dresses that Mr Boulton and Mr Park wore when they went out in all their finery in the evening. They were not the sort of dresses that respectable ladies wore. Quite the opposite. ‘I have been to the Theatre and have seen Ladies dressed as Boulton and Park were,’ was the only way she could blushingly phrase it in court; she could not bring herself to speak the word ‘whore’ in front of gentlemen. ‘When they went out dressed as Ladies, Boulton wore white muslin, and Park, black silk, made low, and like ladies wear.’

‘I used to accuse him of being a female,’ Eliza said. As the weeks went by, she had become quite bold, and as she bottomed out the rooms every morning, she used to think of a dozen different ways of getting him to admit that he was in truth a she. It was their little bit of fun. But she could never get a straight answer. ‘He used to pass it off as a joke.’

Maria Duffin, by contrast, was a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, inquisitive, clever sort of a girl, a cockney girl who had seen far more of the world than was strictly good for her, and quite the opposite of Slow Eliza. ‘I never could satisfy myself whether Boulton was a man or a woman,’ Maria said. And it was true. Sometimes she was convinced that he was a woman in disguise. At other times she was not so sure, and she sometimes suspected that he was a man, a man who dressed up as a woman.

‘Boulton generally dressed as a Lady,’ Maria said. In the mornings he would wear a loose flowing gown or wrapper, the kind of gown, she was reliably informed, that gay ladies wore to their ‘work’ inside houses of ill-repute. ‘When he went out with Lord Arthur in an evening he always dressed in women’s clothes. I have seen him only once or twice dressed in gentlemen’s clothes.’

And then there was Mr Park, Boulton’s particular friend, who used to come at the weekends, regular as clockwork, and stay two or three nights. Here was more perplexity, more bewilderment, more confusion. What exactly was Mr Park? Was he a man or a woman? Maria was not sure. Sometimes he would be dressed as a man and sometimes as a woman.

Certainly, the sleeping arrangements had struck Maria as decidedly odd. ‘When Boulton was there he slept in the same room, and in the same bed with Lord Arthur Clinton,’ she said, frowning at the memory. ‘There was a small dressing room leading out of Lord Arthur’s bedroom. There was a bed in that room, and Park slept in that bed. The entrance to the dressing room was only through Lord Arthur’s bedroom. There was no other door to the dressing room. When Park was away, Boulton did not occupy that bed, but continued to sleep with Lord Arthur Clinton.’

Maria Duffin knew this because it was her job to take the hot water into the bedroom every morning. Of course she would give a cursory knock and, with barely a second’s pause, enter the bedchamber. It was a game. She wanted to catch them out, she wanted to catch them at it, to find out once and for all whether Boulton was a man or a woman or some sort of in-between. And there they would be, huddled together, half-asleep and half-entwined, and quickly covering themselves over with the bedclothes.

It was she who first saw the card with ‘Lady Arthur Clinton’ engraved upon it. It was true that at the time she was poking and prying about the room while Lord Arthur and Boulton were absent – she could not remember exactly when – but most likely when they were away in Scarborough in the October. When she pointed it out to Eliza, she of course had taken it as proof positive of what the household had suspected all along: that Boulton was a lady dressed up as a man.

But still Maria’s doubts persisted. There was something not quite right, something that did not fit. But she could not, for the life of her, put her finger on what it was. One morning, as she was making the beds, Maria decided to come right out and ask him.

‘I beg your pardon,’ she said, ‘but I really think you are a man.’

Boulton had looked at her a little oddly and then laughed gaily.

‘I am
Lady
Clinton’, Stella had said grandly, ‘– Lord Arthur’s
wife
,’ laying particular stress on the word ‘wife’. Then she waggled the fingers of her left hand in front of Maria’s face and invited her to look at her wedding ring and keeper. Maria had looked, and she knew that that should have settled matters. But she was still left feeling uneasy and confused. Despite Lady Clinton’s dramatic revelation, she was still all at sea, still uncertain, and had a feeling deep down that Lady Clinton was not a Lady at all. Turning it over and over in her mind, she felt very uncomfortable. She would take her mother’s advice and leave this house. Perhaps Mr Lindley in Catherine Street would take her back.

F 
anny and Stella had sworn that they would never let Arthur come between them, but of course he did. It had all begun innocently enough and with the best of intentions. Fanny was used to listening to both sides of the story. It seemed to help both Stella and Arthur to have a third party, a confidential friend, a sister, a sister-in-law, someone to whom they could pour out their troubles, who would do her best to try to smooth out their differences. And what troubles and what differences! There were a thousand and one irritations, a thousand and one little altercations peppering every day. To be quite candid, Stella was highly strung. At her worst, she was a hissing, spitting Virago, and there were raised voices, slammed doors and flouncings-out at least half a dozen times a day.

If she was not spitting venom, Stella would sit with a darkening face in a darkened room, gazing into nothingness, contemplating the unfathomable abyss of her own mind. She was not getting on with Arthur. She wondered if they had ever got on. And more importantly, she questioned whether they ever would get on and whether it had been doomed before it had even begun.

She was very much afraid that Arthur had misled her, if not deceived her. His courtship had been assiduous. He had flattered her and attended her and bombarded her with expensive trifles and
bijouterie
. He had made out that he was a man of means, prepared to take her to wife and keep her in a style befitting Stella, Lady Clinton.

But she had been sold a pup – or rather, a puppy. Arthur was a declared bankrupt. He was a wastrel, a feckless profligate drowning in an ocean of debt so vast and so deep that it was improbable, if not impossible, that he would ever escape. And still his debts mounted. Still he spent money like water. Still he borrowed. They were sinking lower and lower, and the bitter irony of it all was that it was she who had to venture forth nightly and sell her arse to passing trade to put food on the table and pay the rent. She should have listened to and profited from those endless and tedious lessons about the importance of money that dear, dull Louis Hurt had tried to drum into her.

O 
f course, if Stella had bothered to ask Fanny for her opinion before rushing headlong into matrimony, Fanny could and would have told her that marriage was not a state to be entered into unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly, as she believed the Form of the Sodomisation of Matrimony ran, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly and soberly. (On this last point, Fanny could testify that Stella was certainly not sober before her marriage to Arthur, and had rarely been sober since. Not that she was judging her. If Fanny had a sovereign for every time she herself had fallen down dead drunk, she would be a rich woman.) But Stella had been so determined to have Arthur’s ring on her finger that she was deaf, dumb and blind to all advice and sisterly counsel.

Stella was wilful, vain, moody, petulant and quarrelsome. At the same time she was loyal, brave, exciting and beautiful. Stella’s beauty was her greatest gift and her greatest curse. She was a perfect beauty, and that meant she could get more or less whatever she wanted simply by snapping her fingers or fluttering her eyelashes.

In Fanny’s considered opinion, Stella’s account of Arthur’s courtship was partial and jaundiced. It was certainly true that Arthur had laid siege to her, but only because she had
wanted
him to lay siege to her. From the moment she first met Arthur, Stella had set her cap at him. Her ambition knew no bounds. She wanted to be Stella, Lady Clinton. And more. If Fate so decreed that his two older brothers were to die suddenly and without issue, Arthur would be Duke of Newcastle and she his beautiful Duchess, and then the whole world would have to bow and scrape and curtsey to her. She had visions of living at Clumber, or in the grand town house in Pall Mall, and driving in the park in an open carriage emblazoned with her personal cipher.

But, upon reflection, Arthur was a far from ideal husband for Stella. Stella was too volatile, too explosive. She needed a strong man, a man who would stand for no nonsense, a man with a firm hand who would give her a good slap (as Fanny herself had had to do upon occasion) when she got out of control. Stella was utterly oblivious to Arthur’s finer qualities: to his kindness and his thoughtfulness, to his loyalty and his devotion. It was true that Arthur had not been quite honest with Stella; true that he was mired in the most terrible debt; true that he lacked direction and drive; but Stella’s withering contempt, her constant carpings and criticisms had reduced him and diminished him. She had humiliated and emasculated him. And – Fanny asked herself with a rhetorical flourish – what had it profited her?

Arthur, it was clear, needed the love and support of a good woman. He needed a wife who would encourage him, a wife who could organise him, a wife who could direct him. A wife who was a helpmeet to her husband; a quiet, good, kind wife, but a wife nonetheless who could stand beside her husband as an equal; a wife who could mingle effortlessly with his family and friends, at ease in the drawing rooms of London and at home in the country. A knuckling-down sort of wife, unafraid of hard work and hard times. A wife, in short, like the kind of wife that Fanny thought
she
would make. There. She had dared to think it. She had dared to whisper it. And once thought, once whispered, she could not unthink it, she could not unwhisper it.

Fanny, Lady Clinton
. It had, she thought, a certain ring about it. Really, quite a definite ring about it.

14

The Toast of the Town

Oh! the dresses, neat, eccentric,

Individualised and queer;

Oh! the dresses various coloured,

As the flowers that deck the year;

Oh! the dresses, breezy, airy,

Most expansive, startling, grand;

Oh! the dresses, quite peculiar,

As the fossils on the strand.

‘Cantab’, ‘The Spa at Scarborough:
A Reminiscence’, 1864

T 
he
Scarborough Gazette and Weekly List of Visitors
(founder, publisher and proprietor: Mr Solomon Wilkinson Theakston) was the most venerable and the most select of the dozen or so newspapers that served the genteel resort and spa of Scarborough.

Those with a curiosity to discover what was going on in the wider world – in, for instance, the North Riding of Yorkshire; in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland; in Continental Europe; or in far-flung countries sweltering under scorching suns – did
not
turn to the
Scarborough Gazette and Weekly List of Visitors
. Nor did those who wished to read of war and revolution, of famine and pestilence, of great adventures and daring deeds, give themselves the bother of consulting the
Scarborough Gazette and Weekly List of Visitor
s. And those Mr Gradgrinds from the world of manufacturing, trade and commerce who needed hard facts and adamantine figures as mental grist for their dark Satanic mills were emphatically not subscribers to the
Scarborough Gazette and Weekly List of Visitors
.

The
Gazette
(the abbreviation used by all but its most particular readers) held no truck with such worldly events. News was an unwelcome and unpleasant intrusion into its elegant and serene pages. It had been published, week in and week out, since 1845, which was the very year that the railway came to Scarborough and the very year that the town’s first built-for-purpose hotel – the Crown Spa Hotel – opened for business.