Fanny and Stella (4 page)

To begin with, the conversation was a little stilted. Unlubricated by beer, sherry or other intoxicants, Hugh Mundell was more than usually tongue-tied and embarrassed. But Stella and Fanny’s high spirits soon lifted the atmosphere, and before too long there were gales of laughter. Had he, by the bye, still got that letter they had given him the night before last at the Surrey Theatre, enquired Stella in her most playful tone.

‘I said I had,’ Mundell recalled. ‘I took it out of my pocket and had it in my hand. They asked me to give it to them. I said I wouldn’t. Then we had a little tussle for it.

‘They both tried to get it from me,’ he continued. ‘They did not succeed. Afterwards I gave it to them and they returned it to me torn. I said, “I don’t want it.” I did not accept the pieces.’

Hugh Mundell’s refusal to accept the fragments of the letter was a symbolic repudiation of an unwelcome truth. Deep down, in his heart of hearts, he may have suspected, may even have known, that Fanny and Stella were telling the truth when they said they were men. But how could he reconcile this with his powerful yearnings for Miss Stella? And if he could admit – did admit – that he loved Stella
and
that she was a man, he exposed a truth about himself too awful to contemplate.

Doubts were already beginning to assail him. If Mrs Fanny was really a woman, why did she have a card with the name Frederick Park engraved upon it? And why did the girl who answered the door talk about ‘the gentlemen’ being at home? Surely Miss Stella and Mrs Fanny only dressed up as men occasionally as a lark. It was all becoming very confusing.

Fortunately, there were more duets at the piano to take his mind away from such unwelcome contemplations. Stella gave her heart-rending version of ‘Fading Away’, a syrupy lament about the transience of life, quickly followed by a series of comic, not to say downright bawdy songs.

‘They were talking constantly about performing and playing,’ Mundell said later. An album was produced with photographs of their theatrical triumphs. Stella seemed to always play the young tragic heroine, the beautiful widow, the friendless girl cast adrift in a cruel world, while Fanny for the most part seemed to play old women, and ‘principally dowagers’.

When it was decided that the party should go out to lunch, Fanny and Stella disappeared into a bedroom for the best part of an hour and came out dressed as ladies. It was like two butterflies emerging from their drab chrysalises, Hugh Mundell thought in a sudden flight of poetic fancy, though rather more prosaically he did notice that, in the unforgiving light of day, Fanny and Stella’s frocks were worn and stained, and that the flounces of their petticoats were quite obviously in need of laundering.

Luncheon was a long and decidedly drunken affair during which Fanny and Stella declared that if they did not go to the Strand Theatre to see the new Easter burlesque
St George and a Dragon
that evening, they would quite simply fade away and die.

At eight o’clock that evening Hugh Mundell found himself in a box at the Strand Theatre. Fanny and Stella were late and there was only one other gentleman to talk to. His name was Mr Amos Westropp Gibbings, a wealthy if rather effeminate young man with a pronounced lisp, who clearly knew Fanny and Stella very well.

‘Who
are
they?’ Hugh Mundell asked plaintively. ‘I am quite in a myth about it. I sometimes think they are men, and sometimes that they are women.’

Mr Gibbings’s reply was emphatic. Both Fanny and Stella were men, men who enjoyed dressing up as women.

‘I have my doubts very much about Mrs Fanny,’ Hugh Mundell retorted, ‘but I am certain that Miss Stella is a woman.’

Much to his dismay, Fanny and Stella were clearly the worse for drink when they finally arrived, and their behaviour was considerably less than ladylike. It was not merely coarse, it was downright obscene. Hugh Mundell blushed and flushed and stammered and stuttered more than ever. The more he looked at Mrs Fanny, the more his doubts resolved themselves into certainties. Mrs Fanny
was
a man dressed as a woman. He felt sick.

And if Mrs Fanny was a man, where did that leave Miss Stella? Was it possible that this beautiful young woman really was, as she herself had consistently, insistently proclaimed, really a man? ‘I am not a lady. I am a man,’ she had kept repeating. ‘I am not a lady. I am a man.’

In the gaudy, mirrored saloon bar of the Strand Theatre, Hugh Mundell felt as if he had wandered into a waking nightmare, the distorted reflections of Fanny and Stella crowding in upon him, reproaching him, mocking him. He did not know what to do. He gulped his brandy and watched and waited while a gaggle of admirers surrounded Fanny and Stella. When Mrs Fanny commanded him in ringing tones to go and call a cab, it was a relief to get out into the chilly night air and try to clear his befuddled wits.

A few moments later all hell broke loose.

‘There was a great deal of confusion,’ Mundell recalled, ‘and I hardly know what occurred, but I found myself in a cab on the road to Bow-street. I was very flurried. I don’t know how it was.’

‘I don’t know how it was’ was a metaphor for poor Hugh Mundell’s life. He found it hard to make sense of the world. He was constantly in a quandary: confused and perplexed – ‘quite in a myth’, as he put it – about everything to do with Fanny and Stella. It was as if the world had connived and conspired against him, to mislead him and to misdirect him. Again and again his complaint was that he had been ‘led on’, ‘led away’, ‘sold’, told or otherwise persuaded that Fanny and Stella were really women when it was he and he alone who had convinced himself that they were women. No wonder he was flurried.

Barely a quarter of an hour later he was sharing a cell with two young men in female undergarments, trying to make some sense of the awful calamity that had overwhelmed him. 

3

The Slap-Bum Polka

One day a cute detective chap,

Who of their game had smelt a rat.

Declared he would get on the track,

Of those two He-She ladies.

So he bolted up to Regent Square,

And soon espied this worthy pair.

They hailed a cab, who took his fare,

Says the police, ‘I am after you my dear’.

                        ‘The Funny He-She Ladies’

A 
t ten o’clock on the morning after the arrest of Fanny and Stella, in the first-floor front of an inconspicuous lodging house in Wakefield Street, Bloomsbury, Mr Amos Westropp Gibbings (known as Carlotta to all of her many friends) and Mr Martin Luther Cumming (or the Comical Countess) were in the middle of an extremely agitated conference with their landlady, Miss Martha Stacey, when they heard a loud and prolonged knocking on the front door.

They froze and looked at each other. Carlotta Gibbings tiptoed to the window and carefully peered out to see a man standing on the doorstep. She guessed he was a detective in plain clothes. She knew the type. Tallish, shabby, sharp-eyed and shifty with a self-important, bullying air about him. A nasty piece of work and, nine times out of ten, corrupt and corrupting.

‘Police,’ she mouthed silently.

There was an agonising wait while old Mrs Stacey, Martha’s arthritic mother, shuffled up from the basement kitchen and fumbled awkwardly with the locks on the front door. When she finally managed to open the door she found a grim-faced man planted firmly on the doorstep who said he was a policeman. Before she knew it and with hardly so much as a beg-your-pardon or a by-your-leave, he had unceremoniously pushed his way past her into the narrow hallway and begun firing off a series of questions to which old Mrs Stacey, flustered and agitated as she was, could give no coherent answers.

Upstairs, Carlotta Gibbings and Martha Stacey looked at each other. The muffled exchanges from below were getting louder and more heated. Something had to be done. Martha Stacey nodded and, putting her finger to her lips, closed the door very quietly and went down the stairs to see what all the commotion was about.

Detective Officer Chamberlain curtly introduced himself to Martha Stacey. He had no time to waste, he said. There was urgent business, police business, that needed attending to.

‘He asked whether two gentlemen lived there who dressed in female attire. He said they were in custody,’ Martha Stacey recalled a week later. ‘I forget the answer I gave but I said I was astonished.’

‘What were they taken for?’ she asked him.

‘Either it was a freak or a lark,’ Chamberlain replied shortly. ‘Which room do they occupy?’

‘I said they dressed in the one adjoining the ground floor,’ recalled Martha Stacey. ‘He went into the room and commenced searching it.

‘Chamberlain did not show me any warrant, and I did not ask him for it,’ she added. ‘I was too confused.’

Once inside, Chamberlain began methodically opening boxes and portmanteaux, pulling out dresses and bonnets and boots, tipping out drawers, leafing through piles of papers and rummaging through boxes of jewellery.

‘My mother remonstrated with him about it,’ Martha Stacey testified. But Chamberlain merely shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. ‘He said he had a right to do it and that he would take them away with him and
sell
them if he thought proper.

‘He also took away some letters,’ she continued. ‘I can’t say how many. Chamberlain looked at an album and took what portraits he thought proper out of it. He also took some more from another album. I should think about twenty in all.’

Clutching a pile of papers and photographs, Chamberlain locked the door and pocketed the key. No one, not a soul, was to enter those rooms under
any
circumstances, he said. There was important evidence which needed to be taken into custody. He would return in an hour or two.

Martha Stacey was in trouble and she knew it. ‘Houses of accommodation’ like hers were common in London and came in all shapes and sizes. They were not exactly brothels but they were places where people went to have sex, away from prying eyes and with no awkward questions asked. On the very lowest rung of the erotic ladder, they were places where for a shilling, sixpence or even less, streetwalkers could take their punters to a room where there would be a bed with filthy sheets, a verminous mattress and a bucket for the punters to wash in before and after doing the business. But at least there would be privacy. At the upper end of the scale, sumptuously appointed rooms or suites catered for wealthy gentlemen to pass an hour or two with a high-class whore.

Martha Stacey’s house of accommodation was somewhere in the middle range. Though there was a problem with the whores in nearby Brunswick Square, Wakefield Street was, by and large, a respectable and quiet residential street, the ideal street for a respectable and quiet house of accommodation. The houses were very often owned and run by former prostitutes who in sharp contrast to the prevailing notion of the natural history of the profession – seduction, ruin, degradation, disease and premature death – had often saved a comfortable little nest egg from the game and wanted to invest it. Running a house of accommodation was a safe bet. They knew the business; they knew the girls; and they knew there would always be a demand for rooms from everyone from the poorest streetwalker to the grandest concubine.

Martha Stacey was most likely a former prostitute herself. She was certainly not the shy, retiring or easily shocked type. Quite the opposite. Even old Mrs Stacey may have been in the business once. Prostitution ran in families, and successful prostitutes would teach their daughters the tricks of the trade. Even Frances Stacey, Martha Stacey’s niece, who came in to help with the chores at Wakefield Street, may have been on the game some of the time.

Martha Stacey’s establishment was, as far as she knew, unique in London, and its very uniqueness made it vulnerable and made it dangerous. It was a house of accommodation for young men who liked to dress up as young women and go out on the spree, for young men who liked to get themselves up ‘in drag’ – as Mr Gibbings used to call it, though for the life of her she couldn’t see why.

Running her house for the ‘so’ young gentlemen who liked to drag themselves up had seemed like a good idea to Martha Stacey. They were certainly a cut above the professional Mary-Anns, or male whores, she had met. There was Mr Gibbings, Mr Thomas, Mr Boulton, Mr Park, Mr Cumming and Lord knows how many other young gentlemen who used to come to her house. They were clean, always polite to her, and ever so friendly. She liked her boys when they were boys and she liked her boys even more when they were girls. What a lark it all was! She had often joined in the ‘laughing, chaffing and joking’ when her boys were getting dragged up, and in the mornings when they recounted their adventures of the night before.

Besides, it was good business, very good business. They always paid on the nail. She charged five shillings a night, and a bit more besides if one of the young men entertained a gentleman – or two – overnight. She didn’t know and she couldn’t say, she was sure, how often this happened or if the young ‘ladies’ ever took money from their gentlemen callers. Her boys had their latchkeys and what they did in or out of their rooms was no concern of hers. She never saw anything – well, not much anyway. Mind you, she was quite ready to admit, you’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to have an inkling of what went on. Some nights there was an awful lot of to-ing and fro-ing; doors banging; moans and groans and giggles and screams. Judging from the state of the sheets, she had her suspicions – certainties, more like. Those boys certainly knew how to dance the ‘Slap-Bum Polka’!