Fanny and Stella (31 page)

Over the following week, more details of Lord Arthur’s final days and hours emerged. ‘We are in a position to give a trustworthy account of Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton’s fatal illness,’ the
Lancet
confided to its readers (though quite why the
Lancet
should take such an interest in Lord Arthur’s untimely death was curious, to say the least).

On Monday, 13th June, doctors attending Lord Arthur ‘found him suffering from sore throat and other symptoms of Scarlet Fever, which has been widely prevalent in the neighbourhood’, the
Lancet
continued. ‘Lodgings in the village were procured for him, and thither he was safely removed. The disease, though virulent, ran a normal course, and the patient appeared to be gaining ground.’ But complications set in on the morning of Thursday, 16th June, and Lord Arthur was unable to void urine. ‘The patient’, the
Lancet
reported, ‘had sunk very low, and, in spite of the free administration of stimulants, failed to rally. Telegrams were immediately despatched to his friends, and at five minutes past one on Saturday morning he died.’

Among those ‘friends’ of Lord Arthur who were telegraphed when his condition worsened was the ubiquitous and unsavoury Mr W. H. Roberts, his solicitor, who arrived in Muddeford early on the Friday morning to find his client still conscious and still rational, but in a state of ‘utter prostration’.

Just hours after Lord Arthur expired, Roberts took the extraordinary step of releasing a letter purportedly dictated by him from his ‘bed of sickness’. It was a deathbed denial of the accusations of sodomy made against him. ‘Nothing’, Lord Arthur declared, ‘can be laid to my charge other than the foolish continuation of the impersonation of theatrical characters which arose from a simple frolic in which I permitted myself to become an actor.’

If Mr Roberts and the late Lord Arthur (wherever he may be, looking down hopefully, or up, more probably, given the general dissipation of his short life) thought that this deathbed declaration of innocence would, to use a vulgar phrase, ‘wash’ with a hostile and sceptical public, they were much mistaken. The letter was greeted with universal incredulity and howls of raucous laughter.

On the ‘sad and wasted’ life of Lord Arthur Clinton, the
Daily Telegraph
confined itself to a few choice words. ‘There was nothing specially notable in his Lordship’s career,’ it wrote, ‘and it is expressing only the bare truth to say, that what was known reflected on him no credit whatever.’ Under the banner headline ‘A MIS-SPENT LIFE’,
Reynolds’s Newspaper
denounced him as ‘dissolute, debauched, reckless, and brainless’, ‘the disreputable scion of the Newcastle family’ and ‘a blackguard Lord’.

‘Lord Arthur’s inclinations’, the
Porcupine
wrote, ‘seem to have led him into the worst society, into the maelstrom of London dissipation, and he ended in being charged (wrongfully, let us hope) with one of the most abominable of crimes.’ The
Porcupine
concluded its moral spasm with a homily which might have been taken directly from the pages of the Old Testament. ‘Verily,’ it intoned piously, ‘those of us who are apt to envy the lot of high-born personages may take the lesson of Lord Clinton’s life and death profitably, though painfully, to heart.’

Lord Arthur’s funeral took place on what would have been his thirtieth birthday. ‘The funeral was unusually plain,’ the
Weekly Times
reported, ‘and the grave, though in a secluded spot was a common one.’ The main mourners present were Lord Arthur’s older brother, the present Duke of Newcastle, his uncle, Lord Thomas Clinton, and the ever-present Mr Roberts.

It was, in the opinion of many, a decidedly hole-and-corner affair, conducted with a mere nod to ceremony and with almost indecent haste. Lord Arthur’s family, it seemed, were falling over themselves to bury both his memory and his mortal remains as deep in the Hampshire earth as they possibly could.

Lord Arthur’s corpse was enclosed in no fewer than three coffins, one of them rumoured to be made of lead, a precaution for the prevention of contagion which struck some observers as really quite excessive. Engraved under the figure of Our Blessed Lord on the silver breastplate of Lord Arthur’s outer coffin was the simple text: ‘He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.’ Opinion was divided as to whether this text was a reference to Christ in his capacity as Redeemer, or whether it was the family’s sad and poignant commentary on Lord Arthur’s short and dissolute life.

Even before the coffin was lowered into the yawning and hungry grave, there were those who openly doubted whether Lord Arthur was dead at all. The
Nottingham Daily Guardian
, which might be thought sympathetic to the Clinton family because of the local connection with the family seat of Clumber, reported that certain ‘persons of the critical and legal cast of mind profess to doubt the authenticity of Lord Arthur Clinton’s death’. ‘Is Lord Arthur Clinton really dead and buried?’ the
Porcupine
asked, speaking for many. ‘It is no secret that persons of a suspicious mind have been heard to say that the death of Lord Arthur is “all moonshine”.’

The sudden and strange disappearance and death of Lord Arthur Clinton raised more questions than answers. Why had he gone to ground in the small town of Christchurch, taking the
nom de guerre
of Captain Edward Gray? If he was, as he proclaimed, as innocent as the day is long, then why misdesignate himself in this way? It was a suspicious thing to do and plainly suggested that he did not wish to be found.

And why Christchurch? Mr Roberts’s assertion that Lord Arthur had gone there for a fishing holiday was unconvincing. Though the fishing in and around Christchurch was reputed to be excellent, anybody who knew Lord Arthur would swear that his passions were theatrical, and emphatically not piscatorial. Indeed, it was said that he did not know one end of a rod from the other and he thought that a reel was an Irish jig.

For stern logicians like Inspector Thompson, the whole affair was baffling and bewildering. ‘It is understood’, the
Daily Telegraph
confided, ‘that Inspector Thompson has been specially employed to inquire into the circumstances of Lord Arthur Clinton’s decease.’ Clearly there were doubts, strong doubts, within the Metropolitan Police, within the Treasury, and quite possibly within 10 Downing Street, where Lord Arthur’s affectionate godfather, Mr Gladstone, still held sway.

But there were certain immutabilities that Inspector Thompson could grip hold of. Either Lord Arthur Clinton was dead or he was alive. If he was dead, he had died of natural causes, or he had taken his own life, or he had been murdered. Of these three possibilities, Inspector Thompson discounted murder. With the exception of poisoning, which could be tricky to detect, murder usually meant blood and gore and signs of violence. And there was not a scrap of evidence to suggest that Lord Arthur had been done away with.

Natural causes or suicide were both possibilities, but Inspector Thompson was unpersuaded. In his experience, the Lord Arthurs of this world did not willingly resign themselves to death or to doing the decent thing. And if Lord Arthur had planned to take his own life, why had he gone to the bother of disappearing and living under an assumed name? Why not simply blow his brains out in the comfort of his own home?

No. There were too many inconsistencies, too many contradictions. In Inspector Thompson’s experience, death was starkly factual and rarely admitted to the confusion and fancy footwork which characterised this particular case. Nothing was quite right, nothing seemed to fit: the strange six-hour cab ride, ‘Captain Edward Gray’, the posthumous letter, and the three coffins, one of lead – to make assurance triply sure? It might be supposed that this latter was a certain means to prevent poisonous miasmas leaching out from the corpse and spreading the contagion. On the other hand, it might equally be a clever means of keeping prying eyes out of the coffin and keeping Nosy Parkers, like himself, at bay.

Lord Arthur had died in Prospect Cottage in Muddeford, attended, at the hour of his death, by only a boy. It was odd, too, that the death was notified to the authorities by this boy, Sambrooke Newlyn, the son of a coal merchant-cum-hotel proprietor. It seemed a heavy responsibility for one so young. No fewer than three doctors had attended the gentleman in Prospect Cottage suffering from scarlet fever. But curiously, not one of them could say that they actually saw him die.

Inspector Thompson’s instinct told him that it was a put-up job, that Lord Arthur had not died, but merely staged his own disappearance. He doubted that the theatre-loving Lord had the necessary low cunning to carry out so audacious a plan. But Mr Roberts was, in his opinion, more than capable of conceiving and executing such an elaborate scheme. Roberts was here, there and everywhere, with a finger in every pie and a perfect – too perfect – answer to every question. He was the spider at the centre of this very strange web of lies and deceit.

Short of exhuming the body encased in its three coffins, Inspector Thompson would never know whether Lord Arthur Clinton was dead, whether he had left for America or Paris or Buenos Aires, or indeed, whether the coffin was filled with a sack of sawdust. In any event, an exhumation based on a hunch would never be permitted.

Lord Arthur Clinton had evaded the law. He had escaped with help from his family and from his friends in high places. There was a forlorn hope that justice might still be done. Lord Arthur might make a mistake. He might one day return and be recognised in the street, in the theatre, or at Ascot.

Inspector Thompson smiled to himself. He could wait.

I 
n his offices in Moorgate only a day or so after Lord Arthur’s funeral, Mr Roberts also smiled to himself as he sealed the envelope addressed to Mr Ouvry, the Pelham-Clinton family solicitor. Mr Roberts specialised in trouble. It was his stock in trade, his meat and drink. He was never very far from trouble, it followed him and found him out. He delighted in trouble, in solving trouble, in making trouble disappear, and making troublesome peers vanish, as if by magic. Lord Arthur was gone, and though not quite forgotten, would soon gently fade from memory like a watercolour left in the sun.

Mr Ouvry tut-tutted to himself when he opened Mr Roberts’s missive. He was, he had to confess, a little taken aback by the promptitude – a promptitude verging on indecent haste – of Mr Roberts’s bill for £251 of ‘expenses’ incurred on behalf of Lord Arthur Clinton. Not even a week had passed since Lord Arthur’s interment. But Mr Roberts’s claim was special, not to say unique. Mr Ouvry immediately advanced the sum of £50 but was unable to settle the bill in full because, as he explained in a private letter to Mr Gladstone, now Lord Arthur’s executor, ‘nothing was coming to Lord Arthur’s estate’. Unfortunately, Lord Arthur’s debts had not died with him and his estate was besieged on every side by angry creditors.

But in Mr Ouvry’s opinion, this bill was a debt of honour that must be met by the family. ‘It is impossible that the family should allow Mr Roberts who has really behaved most kindly in this matter to be out of pocket,’ he wrote confidentially to Gladstone. Lord Arthur’s father, the late and unfortunate Duke of Newcastle, Mr Ouvry said, ‘would have paid for getting him abroad, and I would have thought would not have hesitated to meet this claim’.

There it was, in black ink on white paper, in the crabbed hand of the respected and respectable Mr Ouvry. There could be no doubt about it. Mr Roberts had got Lord Arthur abroad, he had spirited him out of the country to start a new life free from debt, free from taint, and free from the best endeavours of Inspector Thompson and his detectives. All for the not inconsiderable but still very reasonable sum of £251.

And the beauty of it all, at least from Mr Roberts’s point of view, was that everyone – or almost everyone – believed that at that very moment the worms of Hampshire were feasting upon what remained of Lord Arthur’s fleshly being.

24

This Slippery Sod

The management of the case for the prosecution on the part of the police is entitled to the utmost praise. Inspector Thompson, of Bow-street, has displayed throughout an acuteness, tact, and shrewdness reflecting the greatest credit on that officer. ‘Involuntary’ witnesses have been ferreted out, subpoenaed, and placed in the box, with a celerity that perfectly astounded them.

Reynolds’s Newspaper
, 29th May 1870

M 
r Charles Ferguson of Abbey Green in Lanarkshire gave an involuntary start when he heard the doorknocker so vigorously engaged. It was not yet nine o’clock and he was not expecting visitors, especially at so uncivilised an hour. He had not yet breakfasted and was still
en déshabille
. Visitors were the very last thing he wanted or needed today or, indeed, any day.

If Fanny and Stella’s troubles were not enough to be going on with, enough to worrit him and fret him and make him feel ill, John Safford Fiske and Louis Hurt had been taken into custody four weeks ago. The net seemed to be closing, the noose was tightening, and he could not help wondering how many more friends, how many more acquaintances, would be rounded up, let alone whether he would be among their number.