The Petticoat Men (29 page)

‘Yes,’ said Billy at once. ‘We are the visitors for Mr Hamilton.’

‘Come then.’

And she led the way, back along the road towards the quay, ahead of us, not with us, but every now and then looking back.

‘You were right,’ said Billy dryly. ‘If it was just me I might not have been so lucky. Somehow a limping girl is a guarantee!’ but he’s my brother so he knows how to tease me without really annoying me, though I flicked him with my shawl.

‘Why do you walk funny?’ The little girl threw the words over her shoulder.

‘I’ve got something wrong with my leg.’ I saw her look back again, and then shrug.

‘No one will marry you,’ she said, ‘you’ll be like the egg lady.’

‘Who’s the egg lady?’

‘She keeps hens and lives by herself because she’s a humpback.’

She stopped outside an old cottage, dark and unkempt and damp-looking, perhaps it was more cheerful in the daytime, I wondered if it was the egg lady’s cottage.

‘In here,’ said the girl.

She opened the door of the cottage and lit a little lamp from a shelf. She led us upwards – the stairs were so narrow and so steep that I had to pick up my petticoat and my skirt and hold them in front of me with one hand while I held on to the wall with the other so that I wouldn’t fall.

‘I’m here,’ said Billy. ‘Just behind you.’

The girl knocked on the door of the room at the top and then stood back so that we could squeeze in. She gave the lamp to me and disappeared downstairs.

The heat of the tiny attic room hit us because the window was closed and the curtain drawn. Lord Arthur Clinton was lying on a small bed in his clothes but without his jacket. There was an old blanket beside him. No one else was there, well that was lucky because no one else could have fitted into the room anyway with me and Billy there, and the ceiling so low and it being so
hot
.

‘What is the message?’ he said, sitting up as we entered. ‘Have you brought money?’

He was pale and perspiring. I put the lamp on a tiny table beside the bed.

‘I believe Elijah is trying to arrange to send you money, Lord Arthur,’ said Billy. ‘But in the meantime I have – two sovereigns for you.’

Lord Arthur’s face fell. ‘That’s nothing!’ he said but he put out his hand quick for Ma’s sovereigns nevertheless. ‘I sent Elijah a message asking him to send some. I thought he had sent it with you. That’s why I agreed to see you. Where’s the money? When’s the money coming?’

‘I know he’s trying to raise a sum,’ said Billy. ‘He told me himself yesterday. And Elijah is one of the most reliable men I know.’

‘Well he should have sent it by now! I cant wait longer!’ Lord Arthur picked at the old blanket with the hand that wasn’t holding the sovereigns, and sweated, and our three shadows mixed together on the sloping walls as the lamp flickered.

Billy waited for a moment. And then he said, very politely: ‘Lord Arthur. What is the Prime Minister to you?’

Lord Arthur wasn’t expecting such a question it was clear; he stopped picking at the blanket. ‘Where are all my friends?’ he said plaintively. ‘Why are you people here at all if you haven’t brought money?’ He was clutching our mother’s sovereigns while he spoke. ‘Why am I by myself?’

Silence in the small, stuffy, shadowy room. Breathing. My breathing. Billy’s breathing. Lord Arthur’s strange nervous breathing. Scuffling sounds in corners.

Finally: ‘What did Stella say?’

‘I have seen them both,’ said Billy. ‘I went to Clerkenwell, to the House of Detention. Before they were sent for trial at the Old Bailey. They were sent to Newgate Prison at the end.’

Lord Arthur seemed to literally flinch, as if he heard clanging gates. ‘I am not going to prison! I would rather die. I have the means!’

‘We do not want any of you to be in prison,’ said Billy patiently. ‘Not you, not Freddie and not Ernest.’

‘What did Stella say?’

The trouble with Billy is he’s hopeless at lying, even when it is useful. Billy really tried, bless him. ‘He – we were wondering where you were, how you were. But – he and Freddie are – in a very distressful position.’

Tears came in Lord Arthur’s eyes and then they fell down his cheeks, poor thing, and I remembered Ma and me saying about him how he was ‘berserk with love’. I felt in my cloak for a handkerchief, I wanted to throw off my cloak in the stuffy sweating room, open a window, anything.

‘Stella broke my heart,’ he said.

I leaned towards him, gave him the handkerchief, my strange shadow leaned with me across the sloping ceiling.
I have to open the window.
I moved towards it.

‘Why didn’t Mr Gladstone stop the trial?’ Lord Arthur cried out very loudly, stopping me, now he was clutching the handkerchief that our Ma had embroidered, as well as her sovereigns. ‘He is the Prime Minister of England, why didn’t he stop it for my sake!’ He sounded insane.

I watched Billy’s face. He didn’t show anything. ‘I do not think even the Prime Minister of England has that sort of power, Lord Arthur,’ he said, very still.

‘Well he
never
helped me anyway, and my father and my grandfather helped
him
and he wasn’t even the nobility. His family were just business people, owners of slave plantations in the West Indies, not nobility, like us. Yet my family gave him his first seat in Parliament because he was my father’s best friend, my grandfather owned the seat. Thanks to
us
he became Prime Minister of England but when I wrote to him and asked him to help me get a position at Court – that would have solved all my problems and none of this would have happened – he didn’t assist me in any way whatsoever!’

By now Lord Arthur’s voice was harsh and crying but Billy’s was so quiet, calm and gentle, like a little brook going quietly along under trees.

‘Was it because he was grateful to your family that he should have helped you?’

Lord Arthur’s voice went higher. ‘What’s a guardian for if he doesn’t guard you?’

‘
What?
’ Yet even in such surprise Billy somehow kept his voice low.

Lord Arthur was silent but only for a moment. ‘Well why shouldn’t everybody know! He was made one of our guardians, years ago. One of the times our mother ran off. He was legally made one of our guardians, me and my sister and my brothers, my father insisted, in case my mother’s family tried to – claim us.’

Silence. Perspiration pouring down Lord Arthur’s pale face, Billy’s face, my face, and of course I couldn’t open the window for his wild shouting words. Moths already in the room were banging against the lamp on the little table now, wanting the light, hurling themselves at death. He picked again at the old blanket.

‘Mrs Gladstone was kind. She used to take us to the zoo.’

Silence.

‘
And
he’s a trustee for the Newcastle Estate, my family’s estate. He’s not even the nobility – and all he does is withhold our birthright. He never lets any money out, not for anything, and
I need money
! Look at me here! Me: Lord Arthur Clinton, my brother Duke of Newcastle, my old guardian the Prime Minister of England in charge of our noble estate – and yet me in this room in this place with no money, not a penny, and charged with buggery!’ The word shocked out.

‘There was a legal person spoke for you,’ I said, trying to be calm like Billy now, ‘at the end of the first trial. I was at the trial, I think his name was Mr Roberts. Maybe Mr Gladstone arranged that.’

Again Lord Arthur was silent for a few moments before he spoke.

‘Not Mr Gladstone. There’s a lawyer for the Newcastle Estate, Mr Ouvry. Linky – my ridiculous, useless, selfish brother who’s now the Duke – is always trying to get him fired because he was our father’s lawyer and holds on to the money too and wont give us extra, he says it is to run the estate, and Linky’s a gambler and always in debt and says, “Bugger the estate”, but – he’s – Ouvry’s all right. Ouvry would have arranged for Roberts to speak for me. Roberts helped me before, when I was made – when I had some little difficulty. He used to be one of my father’s private secretaries in the Parliament years ago – so he knows all the family secrets.’ He wiped his face with his spare hand. ‘Anyway I’m sure if my actual family were involved at all – which I doubt – they only arranged a solicitor to speak for
them.
To protect
them
,
not to help me. I know that. He was there to protect
them
,
not me!’

‘What do you mean,
them
?’ said Billy.

‘The Family. The Duke my brother. The Newcastle Estate.’ He shrugged in his little bed. ‘The Family. Everybody.’

I thought of our little everybody: me and Ma and Billy.

Silence in the hot room again.

‘Why did you come to Mudeford?’ asked Billy finally.

‘Royalty used to come to Mudeford,’ said Lord Arthur. ‘And the nobility, like us. There’s a castle along the shore and beautiful houses. That’s where I
should
be.’

Our breathing in the small, unbearable, un-noble room. The mad moths, banging.

‘I thought I might get to France. My mother lives in France. There is no such crime as buggery in France.’

‘Shall you go?’ I asked him.

‘How can I go?’ he burst out. ‘No one will help me! You haven’t brought enough money and I haven’t got the money to pay someone to take me! The King’s Arms wouldn’t give me more credit so I end up in this rat-hole! I cant go back to London! I wish I was dead!’

Tears fell down his face again and this time I couldn’t help it, I took the handkerchief, the mad way he was clutching at it, and wiped his face, I wished there was some water to make it cooler for him.

‘Lord Arthur,’ I said, as I wiped at his tears and his perspiration, ‘I dont of course have any personal interest in the case – except that Freddie and Ernest kept their clothes at our house and stayed there sometimes, as you know. But I was thinking – and one of the lawyers said this also. The case is about Ernest – about Stella really, isn’t it? Not Freddie.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Freddie is – different.’

‘
Different?
’ Lord Arthur started to laugh but it was a very hysterical kind of laugh. ‘Fanny is less beautiful, that is all! Fanny is on the town looking for chances every night of every week, Stella or not! Everyone in London knows his arse is as big as the Thames Tunnel, and most of them have been through it!’

I stepped back from the bed as if he had punched me in the stomach. Moths banged at last to their death against the lamp and fell downwards.

‘I am going to see Mr Gladstone, Lord Arthur,’ said Billy. ‘What would you like me to say to him?’

‘Tell him he has to help me! Tell him to send money absolutely immediately so that I can go to my mother in France. He loved my mother, she told me so. We laughed about it. His best friend’s wife, he used to write her love poetry and then talk to her about God, for God’s sake! “He is a hypocrite,” she told me, “like all the rest. It’s his fault I had to leave your father,” she told me.’

‘Have you been attended by a doctor, Lord Arthur?’ Billy asked him.

‘Whatever for? Because I am telling the truth about the man of the people, Mr Gladstone? You needn’t think I am delirious! I know of what I speak! You would be ill if you were me! Shut up in this shit-heap with no air! Scared of every footstep! Wondering if I’m going to be thrown into prison as a debtor or a bugger! That would make anybody ill. If you hadn’t mentioned Stella and Elijah you would never have found me because I am in hiding – and you have brought me nothing!’

(But he was holding very tightly to Ma’s sovereigns as he struggled up in the bed again.)

‘Listen! I will kill myself rather than go to prison – and I have the means to do it – tell them that! Tell them all! Tell Stella! Tell Elijah! And make sure you tell the Prime Minister I will blame him as my mother blames him, and my ghost will haunt him, tell him that!’

His face was now so red and terrible I felt quite frightened for him, I couldn’t think what to do, all I really wanted to do was get out of that room, but I tried to calm him, to smooth his arm but he pushed me away violently and clutched the sovereigns to him.

‘How dare you touch me!’ he said. ‘Just because Fanny and Stella kept their gowns in your cheap and nasty little establishment it does not make them your friends – and it certainly does not make
us
intimates!’ but his poor face looked really terrible and he sounded delirious.

‘We will send a doctor,’ said Billy. ‘Just in case.’

‘Get out! Get out of here!’

‘Only a doctor that Johnny Hewlettson suggests. No one else. I promise.’

It seemed most terrible to leave him but in truth I went quick as I could manage down the narrow stairs, I couldn’t wait to get out of that awful, unforgettable
boiling
room and the awful, unforgettable words, I left the handkerchief that Ma had once embroidered so beautifully. But Billy went back up the stairs for a moment with a cup of water he got from the little girl, who was still waiting downstairs with another small lamp. I wondered if she’d understood all that mad shouting upstairs. But I couldn’t speak. I wanted to get out of the cottage but that seemed even ruder.

Lord Arthur’s words about Freddie went round my head:
Fanny is on the town looking for chances every night of every week. Everyone in London knows his arse is as big as the Thames Tunnel, and most of them have been through it.

Now I know what speech-less means.

Billy came back down the stairs. ‘Is Johnny Hewlettson your pa?’ he asked the little girl.

‘Might be. Might not be.’

‘We need to speak to him.’

She shrugged. ‘He’s out.’

‘Is this your house?’

She gave a funny sharp laugh. ‘No.’

He squatted down to her level. ‘Where’s your pa, little girl?’ he said gently. ‘We really do need to speak to him to help the poor man upstairs.’

She stared at him.

‘My name’s Billy,’ said Billy. ‘What’s your name, little girl?’

‘Marigold.’

‘That’s a pretty name.’ She stared at him a moment longer.