Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (36 page)

July. After the play. Despite my relegation to props mistress, the play has been a thorough success. True to his word, father refused to grant an audience to the Queen. Refused the Queen! Just as well, with his ridiculous costume and make-up streaking down his face.

Our meeting with Her Majesty was brief, but her son was more personable. Yes, the Prince of Wales himself! He snuck out the back, filched a cigarillo from one of the actresses and stood joking with us that his mother will have him hung, drawn and quartered if she discovers his filthy habit. Secret information about a prince. How thrilling! A most charming boy. The interest he took in the actresses over us ladies was lamentable, but doubtless provoked by the performance.

1858: The Semi-Professional Drama and the Soirées

I am quite distraught with the repeat of last year’s travesty in casting. After the success of the Frozen Deep tour, father has decided that professional actresses are quite the thing. Following a number of jaunts, they have cast Mr Collins’ new piece, The Lighthouse. Father will play opposite the actress from last year, Ellen, for whom he seems to be developing great affection. Two of the other roles are assigned to the vulgar actresses he refers to as his Haymarket hoofers.

At our rehearsals chez Colonel Waugh of Nether Stonehaugh, however, I discovered a silver lining to this cloud. Watching the rehearsal was a charming fellow named Berwick Skelton. He spoke to me courteously and intelligently, offering me tea, and asking me did I not think it daring that my father should present such a blatant attack on the maladministration of the war before the Queen. Having read the play more as domestic melodrama in two acts, and less as political allegory, I struggled to think which war he meant, let alone to deliver an intelligent reply. Like a true gentleman, he noticed my discomfort without alluding to it and changed the subject, complimenting the costumes. I blushed: can he have known I was the seamstress?

Mr Skelton’s only failing is that he chaperones one of the vulgar actresses, Nellie. Nonetheless, I will prevail upon father to invite him to our evenings.

What gay times we have had!

I shudder to think what father means by his “sybaritic jaunts”. Beastly. Mr Collins and Mr Skelton have become his firmest friends, sharing with him a taste not only for literature but for long walks and the low life. Still, it is hard to begrudge father his illicit pleasures, when he returns in such high spirits. If it takes a visit to a beastly music hall or public house to rouse him from the darkness that beset his spirits through the winter, can I berate him for it?

But I do like Mr Skelton. He is not a gentleman in the strict sense, but I care not for such gentlemen. I say it is the way a man acts, not the size of his stables, that counts. Last night, the conversation was being dominated by Roxton Coxhill. I used to think him a card but he was a bore yesterday, declaring there to be no substitute for breeding. Everyone nodded sincerely.

“Were everyone offered education,” Mr Skelton suggested, “they might in time acquire breeding.”

“Berwick,” said Mr Mayhew, the Punch writer, “it’s an admirable project, but if you expect the masses to gain taste and refinement, you may be disappointed.”

“Disappointed?” Coxhill burst out. “You are deluded. Not for nothing have the ruling classes remained the ruling classes for centuries.”

“Many ordinary folk buy your magazine, Mr Mayhew, and your books, Mr Dickens, and the rest would if they could read.”

Father looked troubled. “Berwick, how I wish that you were right. I hope my books are popular, but a basic level of intelligence – dare I say, of breeding – is required to follow them.”

Mr Skelton looked shocked.

Wilkie Collins piped up. “Dickens, what an old Whig you’ve become. Always the same. We who were heartfelt liberals in our youth become canny conservatives in our dotage.”

“Give me an army of street children,” said Berwick, “and I will deliver you in ten years an educated, well-bred fighting force to give the pillars of society such a shake as they have not felt since Samson.”

Coxhill chuckled uneasily. “Why does society need to be shaken?”

“Because it is run by cankered noblesse and inbred royalty.”

Now it was father’s turn to look shocked. Indeed, the whole room fell silent.

“Beware, Berwick,” Collins warned him. “Dickens will stomach insults to anything except his beloved Queen.”

Everybody laughed, though, to me, Mr Skelton looked sore disappointed. As polite conversation resumed, he invited Mr Collins and myself out to the street, an impish glint in his eye. Sneaking out as quietly as we could, we met some little urchin friends of Mr Skelton’s, a young vagabond with a couple of waifs in his charge. They greeted Mr Skelton on familiar terms and us most courteously, then proceeded to exchange a repartee infinitely more entertaining than the tripe being spouted inside.

“Is this how the other ’alf live, Mr Skelton?” said the young ruffian. He launched into a string of jokes about the other half, and two halves making a whole, and holes in your pockets; pigs, prigs and Whigs, swigs, swag and scallywags; and who knows what else.

Mr Collins and I were soon hooting with laughter. Before long, ten more urchins appeared, making it a street party of bows and curtseys. They serenaded us with bawdy street songs in close harmony. Agnes brought out the porter for us and lemon sherbet for them. The mood was most jocular and Mr Collins declared that he had never passed a more enjoyable evening.

It was over the detestable habit of gentlemen retiring to smoke that Mr Skelton clashed with Mr Coxhill last night.

“Why are ladies so treated?” he asked one day, as the men headed for the drawing room following a fearsome game of Pass the Slipper. “We men enjoy parlour high-jinks and word-puzzles.” He himself was a regular demon at acrostics. “Why can ladies not revel in the social debate?”

“You believe in women’s rights?” Coxhill sneered. “Some of us know what ladies are good for and would like to see them stick to it.”

Mr Skelton, to credit him, maintained a cool silence, until he was egged on.

“Come now, Berwick,” urged Mr Collins. “We cannot leave it at that.”

“I have observed,” Mr Skelton replied levelly, “that prejudice is its own begetter. Those prejudiced about race are often of mixed breeding. Snobs are insecure about their class. Those biased about sex – well, perhaps I had best not finish the thought.”

I glared at Mr Coxhill to back up the point. After all, I had heard father’s secret view of the man. How his father left him a packet of money from the White Conduit Club; how he drank away his fortune; how he was fixated on “the next big thing” to make his name in business, and all his friendliness was a sham.

I am sorry to note that Mr Skelton is still taken with his actress. Although she has striven to better herself in accents and demeanour, her plain features and over-developed bust cannot but betray her common background. It pains me that a man of such taste and intelligence can swoon before the vulgar charms of this (dare I write it?) tart.

1859: The Lighthouse

What a prism of disasters. It started during the tour of The Lighthouse. Now that Mama has – the shame of it – moved out of our family home, I have to suspect father’s motives for his tour of the North-East.

A coldness has developed too between Mr Skelton and his fiancée. I was not sorry to see it at first, but now it seems we have lost a dear friend. How recently he and father were thick as thieves, as if they shared a dark secret. Perhaps it is simply regard for the virtues of hard work and honour, through which they have both prevailed.

Father invited Mr Skelton to write about the boroughs he grew up in, which remain to us of more fortunate birth as mysterious as the Orient. What things he wrote. Trails of woe through Bethnal Green. Misery in Clerkenwell. Disenfranchised hordes and multitudes made homeless by the advance of progress. The pieces were filled with exquisite paradoxes. The poor die of miasma, so politicians are loath to devote taxpayers’ money to solve it. Projects such as the underground train are meant to benefit the common man, but instead block his roads and destroy his borough, while the empowered waft away such schemes from their vicinity.

I found it strange that father did not publish the pieces in Household Words, though Mr Berwick was pleased with the interest of father’s friends from Punch and the Illustrated London News.

One night, the gentlemen sat down to a game at cards, after a particularly strenuous game of leapfrog, while we ladies retired to the bow window. The talk revolved around the financing of newspapers by businessmen, whose interests sometimes clash with the duty to report the news impartially. It used to surprise me how well a commoner like Mr Skelton held his own amongst the editors, entrepreneurs and engineers who frequent our soirées. But he has an unquenchable belief in his own capacities; indeed, in everyone’s.

“You were lucky,” said the editor of Punch to father, “to get out of that Daily News debacle before the brute Hudson got his teeth into you.”

“Mr Lemon,” Coxhill piped up, emptying coins noisily onto the table. “Mr Hudson was a friend of my father and I’ll thank you not to slander him.”

“Mr Coxcomb,” Berwick smiled, “will you resolutely defend any friend of your father whether he be the local butcher or the butcher of Cumberland?”

“I know nothing of this Cumberland chappy, but loyalty was one of my father’s attributes, and if your father had more of it, perhaps you’d be in better shape yourself.”

Mr Skelton looked at him coldly. “I’ll thank you not to speak of my father.”

“The thing is,” ventured Mr Mayhew gamely, “it’s not simply that a financial backer has the opportunity to meddle. The power of the media is such, there’s times he’d be a fool not to.”

Lemon nodded. “Hudson sold a lot of railway shares that way.”

“Then it’s up to the discerning editor,” said Mr Skelton, “to resist the backer.”

“That’s not always possible,” father burst out.

“Is it not?” said Berwick, looking at father strangely.

“Of course it is,” said Lemon, gathering up his winnings.

“I used to think so,” said father quietly, “but I’m afraid the System is stronger in the end.”

“One must stand up,” said Lemon, “and fight it.”

“Then you will lose,” said Coxhill smugly.

“Should one really,” said father wearily, “stand up to such forces simply in order to be mown down?”

“My dear Boz,” said Mr Skelton earnestly, and looked father in the eye, “if you stand on your own two feet, unsuspected forces will appear, in admiration and solidarity, to support you. And if enough people stand up in protest then even the wheels of commerce may be turned aside.”

“Those wheels will run such jokers down,” said Coxhill gleefully.

“Some may fall,” Mr Skelton agreed. “I see no shame in that. But the machine will run smoother if the driver yields and goes around them.”

Mayhew clapped Mr Skelton on the shoulder. “You are a revolutionary of the old school, what?”

“I like to think that my school is still current,” Mr Skelton quipped. But he folded his cards and got up from the table, and I caught him glancing at father strangely.

“Bloody hell,” Coxhill burst out. “Can somebody lend me a couple of guineas?”

Lemon pushed two notes across the table, but kept his fingers upon them. “This how you finance your business, old man?”

“My business is sound enough,” Coxhill sounded offended, his tone unnecessarily sharp. “I have the Prince of Wales’ assurance–”

“Can you give me the Prince’s assurance on these two guineas?”

Mr Skelton moved away from the table to sit with me and my sisters.

“Is it true, Mr Skelton,” I said, “that you are of the reforming persuasion?”

He laughed pleasantly. “I suppose I am, if you must give in to the mania for classification.”

“No wonder you clash with father so,” I nodded, “now that he’s an old Whig and opposes improving our prisons.”

“Reforming what?” asked my little sister.

I ignored her. “When will we see one of your articles in father’s paper?”

“Oh, no, I’ve had done with that,” he said. “I’m going into construction. Your father has written me recommendations to Bazalgette, Fowler, Paxton and all the best engineers. So I won’t hear a word against your father’s politics, young Kate, you hear?”

“Engineering, Mr Berwick? What a departure.”

“Not really. My father worked on Brunel’s tunnel. You know, under the Thames.”

“Where they had the fête last summer?”

“The fête? Yes, that’s right. In a way, constructing a piece of writing is no different from making a tunnel or a bridge.”

“Is your father still in that line of business?”

“My father passed away.” He looked at me squarely. “An accident, many years ago.”

I murmured my condolences. We fell silent. I had to give my sister three stern looks before she understood that I wanted her to leave us together. In those moments I felt very close to Mr Berwick, so much so that I felt, had the gentlemen not been across the room, I might have forgot myself and embraced him. Thankfully, I remembered myself and thought to ask after his fiancée.