Fanny and Stella (37 page)

Mr Straight, who was assisting Mr Sergeant Parry in Miss Fanny Winifred Park’s defence, was of the opinion that the word was ‘campish’, but Mr Sergeant Parry overruled him peremptorily. ‘It is “cawfish” in my copy,’ he declared emphatically. ‘What “campish” means I cannot understand, but if he had written “scampish” he would not, I think, have been using an improper word.’

The Lord Chief Justice felt that matters were drifting dangerously off the point. ‘Whatever it may mean it is certainly “campish”,’ he decreed firmly.

The Attorney-General had marshalled no fewer than thirty-one witnesses for the prosecution, an impressive array by any standards and one which held the promise of exciting and extraordinary revelations. First to go into the witness box was Mr Hugh Mundell, who had barely changed in the course of a year, except that he blushed and stammered and swallowed and hesitated more than ever. Why the Attorney-General had chosen this bumbling young man, who seemed rather younger than his years, as his star witness whose testimony would encapsulate and exemplify all the sodomitic evils of Fanny and Stella was beyond comprehension.

He was there, in theory at least, to confirm the very worst suspicions about ‘Miss Stella’ and ‘Mrs Fanny’, as he insisted on calling them. He was there to state in no uncertain terms how Miss Stella and Mrs Fanny, sometimes dressed as women and sometimes as men, had by ‘painting their faces’ and ‘powdering their necks’, by their ‘studied air of effeminacy’ and by their ‘amatory airs and gestures’ conspired to induce and inveigle him to fondle and toy with them, conspired to dupe and deceive him into committing sodomy. In theory at least.

But Hugh Mundell turned out to be a witness for the defence. Miss Stella and Mrs Fanny had, he said, for the avoidance of doubt, informed him repeatedly, verbally and in writing, that they were men dressed as women, but he had wilfully refused to believe them. And far from inducing and inveigling him to fondle and toy with them, when, unprompted and with no encouragement, he had attempted to take indecent liberties with Miss Stella, she had most firmly rebuffed him.

From the way his eyes shone when he spoke, it was apparent to everybody that Mr Hugh Mundell was still more than half in love with Miss Stella and would not hear a word said against her, let alone speak ill of her himself. It was a dismal, not to say disastrous, beginning to the case for the prosecution, and it was universally agreed that Sir Robert Collier would have to work very hard if he was to save his ship from crashing onto the rocks.

There was a surprising number of new witnesses, among them some eminent medical gentlemen and a positive phalanx of new witnesses from Scotland, including Mrs Agnes Dickson, Louis Hurt’s landlady, and Detective Officer Roderick Gollan of the Edinburgh City Police, who had discovered the cache of compromising photographs and
cartes de visite
hidden in the chambers of Mr John Safford Fiske.

There was Police Constable Thomas Shillingford who, in 1867, had arrested – or more properly, rescued – the young and very beautiful Miss Stella Boulton and her companion, the young and not-at-all-beautiful Martin Luther Cumming, from a mob of battle-scarred and very angry whores in the Haymarket. Both Stella and the Comical Countess were in drag and had aroused the rightful ire of the Haymarket whores by daring to trespass on their hallowed pads and patches.

Mrs Jane Cox, the widow of Mr Francis Kegan Cox, the gentleman who had so unadvisedly and so passionately kissed Ernest Boulton full on the lips in his office in the City, had bravely agreed to stand in her shamed spouse’s shoes, and her dignity in the witness box as she listened with a stricken face to her late husband’s deposition elicited many fitting murmurs of sympathy.

Miss Eleanor Colton, a most ladylike attendant at the Lyceum Theatre, told how Stella, dressed in mauve satin, had used the convenience in the Ladies’ Retiring Room to relieve herself while Fanny stood guard at the door. Miss Colton’s testimony aroused feelings of righteous indignation and utter revulsion. It was one thing to dress up as a woman and dupe and deceive unsuspecting men, but to violate and pollute so sacred a sanctum as the Ladies’ Retiring Room made the blood of every true Englishman boil over with anger. ‘If every
roué
can by assuming feminine garb enforce his way with impunity into the chambers set apart for our countrywomen,’ one editorialist declared, ‘then we call upon Law and Justice to aid us in exposing these outrages on decency.’

Mr William Kay, of the long-established firm of Outfitters and Dressmakers that bore his name in Russell Square, was called to give his expert opinion on the costumes confiscated at Wakefield Street. A number of portmanteaux, baskets and boxes were brought into court and disgorged a dazzling array of feminine attire. There were no fewer than seventeen dresses and gowns; quantities of skirts and petticoats; bodices and blouses; cloaks and shawls; shoes and boots and gloves; a bewildering assortment of ladies’ unmentionables; a single muff; seven chignons, two long curls, ten plaits and – sitting rather oddly like a cuckoo in this nest of femininity – that artificial grey beard.

By the time everything was unpacked and laid out for the consideration of the Jurymen, the court resembled nothing so much as a fripperer’s shop in one of the less salubrious parts of the city. After their long incarceration in those assorted portmanteaux, baskets and boxes, the clothes showed ‘the crush and spoil of age’, as Mr Digby Seymour, defending counsel for Stella, most poetically put it. They were fusty and frowsy, and there was that decidedly unpleasant smell that always pervades shops dealing in second-, third- and fourth-hand clothing, a smell of unwashed bodies and unwashed linen, of dirt and want and overcrowding, of cheap scent and cheap sex, of unfulfilled dreams, disappointments and death.

Mr Kay had, he said, ‘thoroughly’ examined each and every item of clothing and declared them ‘very much tumbled about’ and ‘not as clean as they might have been’ (which was a polite way of saying they were filthy). In consequence, they were of little or no value. ‘I wouldn’t have them as a gift,’ he declared contemptuously.

A cheap and theatrical stunt it may have been, but this display of tawdry feminine finery did its work well. ‘A thrill of horror ran through the jury box,’ reported the
Daily Telegraph
, as the clothes were unpacked and displayed. To be told that Fanny and Stella had dressed as women and walked the streets was one thing. To see the very clothes they had worn while so promenading was quite another. All the letters of love and longing in the world could not state the case so concisely and so compellingly as these tumbled-about women’s clothes had done.

Then there were those witnesses who had already appeared at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court and who were now obliged to stand again in the witness box, like Slow Eliza from Norfolk and Sharp-eyed Maria, the bickering housemaids of 36 Southampton Street, where Lord Arthur and Stella had lived as man and wife. Mr John Reeve, the taciturn and gloomy staff supervisor at the Royal Alhambra Palace, spoke to the scandalous and shocking behaviour of Fanny and Stella and of the accompanying gaggle of other like-minded painted and powdered young gentlemen when they regularly descended upon the Alhambra and wreaked moral havoc with their oglings and their chirrupings and their tongue-wagglings.

And then there was Miss Martha Stacey who, in company with her elderly mother, ran the infamous house of accommodation in Wakefield Street where Fanny and Stella and Carlotta and Sissy had lodged and dressed, and where, it was strongly suspected, they ‘entertained’ – for want of a better word – ‘gentlemen’ – again for want of a better word – even though nobody could prove it. If Miss Martha Stacey knew of the gentlemen callers at her establishment, she was most certainly not saying so. She was not saying very much at all, and her frequent glances towards Mr George Lewis sitting inconspicuously at the bar might have suggested – to a suspicious mind – that that gentleman had coached her in what and what not to say.

Martha Stacey exemplified a curious feature of this trial. To the very evident frustration of the Attorney-General, the testimony of several witnesses for the prosecution seemed to have changed subtly. What had been established facts and adamantine certainties at Bow Street a year earlier were now something less than established, something less than adamantine. A small and almost imperceptible degree of doubt had crept into the testimonies of Miss Martha Stacey, Mrs Louisa Peck (the chatelaine of Southampton Street) and Mr Arthur Gladwell, the occupier of the second-floor front in Southampton Street (and now the proud husband of Mrs Peck’s sister, Sarah Jane). None of them had done anything as obvious as retract or change their evidence, but now they seemed fractionally more hesitant, more ready to believe in the possibility that they may have been mistaken in their observations. It was enough to unsettle and undermine the case for the prosecution and to lead to the unworthy thought that the £5,000 so generously put up for Fanny and Stella’s defence (reputedly by the wealthy Miss Carlotta Westropp Gibbings) had been well spent by Mr George Lewis on bribes.

There was, however, no such hesitation, no such doubt on the part of the formidable Miss Ann Empson. Back by popular demand, Miss Empson delighted her audience by reprising her role as the fearsome and fire-breathing Dragon of Davies Street. She fumed and smouldered with indignation, she scowled and snorted with rage, and she so frequently spat out small balls of fire and brimstone in the general direction of Fanny and Stella that those two young gentlemen must surely have felt themselves fortunate not to go up in flames like the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah. When Miss Empson turned her eye upon any particular gentleman in the courtroom, he was seen to step back and stumble, and even the Lord Chief Justice himself appeared to recoil from Miss Empson’s Gorgon-like gaze.

B 
ut ‘the most sensational event of the day’, according to the
Daily Telegraph
, ‘was the cross-examination of the ex-beadle of the Burlington Arcade’. It was a barnstorming
tour de force
by the policeman-turned-beadle-turned-loafer, a man who had begun his career with high and manly ideals and who, over the years, had progressively sunk to his present unfortunate state, a slave to the demon drink, living off the largesse of his mother-in-law at best, and at worst, off the immoral earnings of prostitutes.

His performance melded tragedy and comedy in equal measure and was full of self-delusion and self-pity. One minute he was the cock of the walk, a braggart and a blusterer, his chest puffed out like a pigeon’s with manly self-importance; the next, his voice was choking with emotion, and tears were running down his reddened cheeks as he was made to confront the depth and depravity of the abyss he had fallen into.

Mr George Smith was a liar. An habitual liar. He lied, and he lied, and he lied again. He lied to cover up his lies. He lied so much that he forgot what he was lying about, and then would accidentally reveal the startling truth his lies were designed to conceal. There were ‘roars of laughter’ as he was caught out – again and again and again – in deceit and dishonesty, as ‘one damaging confession after another was wrung out of him’ in cross-examination.

It seemed that Mr George Smith had taken money in the form of tips and bribes from almost everyone: from the gay ladies in the Burlington Arcade he was supposed to keep out; from the wealthy gentlemen he introduced to those selfsame gay ladies; from the shopkeepers in the Burlington Arcade who tipped him to encourage those gay ladies and their gentlemen followers to patronise their establishments; from his mother-in-law and from his friends; from Inspector Thompson; from the Treasury Solicitor; and from anyone else who was prepared to pay him. Indeed, the only persons that Smith had not taken money from were Fanny and Stella, or so he said.

It was left to the Lord Chief Justice to bring Mr George Smith’s devastating cross-examination to an end. ‘Do you think it is possible’, he asked Mr Sergeant Parry with withering irony, ‘to prove this witness to be less credible than you have shown him to be already?’

It was a disaster, there was no other word for it, a downright disaster. Even if Smith was telling the truth about the haunting of the Burlington Arcade by Fanny and Stella, by Sissy Thomas and the Comical Countess, and by all the other painted and powdered young men looking for wealthy gentlemen, no one would believe him, no one could believe him.

The case for the prosecution was in tatters. Apart from the
coup de théâtre
of producing Fanny and Stella’s extensive wardrobe of feminine finery in court, the Attorney-General had yet to make any sort of a case against them or the other six defendants, present, absconded or dead. His star witness, the hapless Hugh Mundell, had effectively been a witness for the defence. Martha Stacey, Louisa Peck and others had cleverly sown seeds of doubt about their own testimony, and George Smith had, quite literally, been laughed out of court.

It was clear that the tide was beginning to turn. When Fanny and Stella emerged from Westminster Hall at the end of the second day’s proceedings, the large waiting crowd in Palace Yard cheered and clapped them, drowning out the feeble chorus of boos and hisses.

After spending the day observing the trial, it was not surprising that Simeon Solomon was in no doubt about the outcome. ‘Of course they will be acquitted,’ he told Swinburne.

As Fanny and Stella were whirled away in their cab, Stella, wreathed in smiles and looking radiant, blew kisses to all and sundry.