The Petticoat Men (56 page)
‘Nan! Nan! Nan!’ Young Will was bored now, ran over and pulled at me to play but I held him tight by the hand for a moment more.
‘Thank you for coming and letting us know about Freddie,’ I said.
‘Thank you, Ernest,’ said Mattie. ‘I have never ever forgot his kindness to me.’
‘He was kind,’ said Ernest.
But he was looking now for his hat, and Gerard though he had remained very manly throughout was clearly embarrassed by the whole conversation.
‘What do you do now, Ernest?’ said Mattie.
‘Oh we perform still, of course! Round England. We do very well, Gerard and I,’ but it sounded like bravado, he was not like a pretty young girl any more, and Ernest tossed his hair from his eyes, anxious to go now. Mackie still held the clipping about Freddie. Now he gave it back to Ernest.
‘Thank you, lad,’ said Mackie and he put out his hand and Ernest shook it in his limp way.
‘Ernest,’ Mattie said.
He looked at her, but almost as if he knew.
Her face was pale but she smiled at him. ‘I can play,’ she said. ‘Once more for the good times and – in memory of Freddie in Wakefield-street, shall we, Ernest?’
That Ernest, he couldn’t resist it, even now. He immediately put his hat back down on the table and touched his hair fussily, and stood beside the piano as Mattie played the first note. And – yes – he could still sing. I turned away slightly until the song had finished.
Which is the fairest gem?
Eileen Aroon.
As Billy took them to the front door they passed Dodo’s room. She waved.
‘That was lovely, dear,’ she said to Ernest from her red sofa. ‘I was so glad to hear you sing again, young man. Thank you.’
When Ernest and Gerard had gone we went down to the basement kitchen where one of my eternal stews was simmering by the fire. Mattie and Tom were putting the children in bed.
‘It’s all been a very strange tale!’ said Elijah to me wryly, and he took two platefuls and went upstairs again to sit with Dodo and tell the story. And Mackie held me for a moment, beside the stove.
Billy’s wife, Emily, cut up some parsley she had brought home to scatter on the top of the stew. ‘That was such a beautiful song,’ she said to me. ‘Did he used to sing it here in the old days?’
‘He did,’ I said, and I thought one more time of Freddie with his hands very still on the piano even as the notes echoed, the final time he came to 13 Wakefield-street. ‘Ernest used to sing it here in the old days. It was Mattie’s favourite.’
And Emily smiled across at Billy and said: ‘I am so glad then, that I have heard it too.’
And Mattie and Tom came down into the kitchen, young Will still awake, his arms clinging round Tom’s neck, and we served out the stew to our dear people.
So I suppose you might say – in the most unlikely way from this most unlikely story of the Men in Petticoats which has been quite forgot – that we all lived happily ever after.
Except for Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton who died in whatever way he died, aged twenty-nine in Mudeford, and Frederick William Park who died in whatever way he died, not much older in America. Young men die all the time, including in accidents at Kings Cross long ago.
But they were near Billy’s age and I felt sad for them all, all the casualties.
With both his hands, Elijah held Dodo’s small, bent, swollen one. ‘I have been
so
lucky,’ she whispered, smiling still.
When Dodo Fortune died in her beloved red room in Wakefield-street, Mattie’s daughter, Dorothy, who had been named for Dodo and who had inherited her love of baking, made a beautiful cake decorated with a pretty lady in a red dress, smiling and dancing.
At the death of Mr William Ewart Gladstone – Prime Minister of Great Britain four times, the last time when he was over eighty – there was possibly cake also. And so greatly was he held in the people’s affection that his casket lay, in public, in Westminster Hall (that same famous Gothic edifice of the final trial of the Men in Petticoats). Queen Victoria, still going strong, refused to attend his funeral, but the Prince of Wales, still the Prince of Wales, loyally, with his son, actually helped carry the casket into Westminster Abbey, incurring his mother’s wrath although he was by now a man in his late fifties.
Concerning also death, and loyalty: Lady Susan Vane-Tempest died, (perhaps of rheumatic fever as obituaries advised), aged thirty-six. Scandal had been averted in that matter, certainly (she had not embarrassed Royalty), and some time later Dr Oscar Clayton was discreetly knighted ‘for personal services to the Prince of Wales’. That morning pomade of roses filled the air in royal corridors.
At the time, the newspapers had called the Men in Petticoats story THE SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY. Yet despite all those headlines, miraculously – as if by some sleight of hand, which indeed you might say it was – in the end there was no case at all to answer. Which did not happen later (Isabella and Mattie and Billy noted) when Mr Oscar Wilde was arrested. Possibly the fact that the nobility was on the other side made a difference; Lewis and Lewis, solicitors, popped up again, but not for Mr Wilde, who was sent to prison, with hard labour.
But nobody heard of the Men in Petticoats ever again, nobody even remembered the names, despite Ernest Boulton still trying valiantly to tour the country, still singing (to smaller and smaller audiences) of ‘Fading Away’ and ‘Eileen Aroon’, and a bishop who had once been in the House of Lords was praised in many circles
for his zealous Christian influence, in Africa.
For in England’s partially green, and partially pleasant, land, there are always secrets. And there have always been ways of dealing and concealing (as Billy Stacey had noted all those years ago), when scandal threatens power.
I
STILL
MAKE
hats.
I still work in this room, me and Hortense with her red lips I painted and her big eyes, and the hats and the long work-table and the big mirror. The children love Hortense and Dorothy used to stroke her face and say, so serious, ‘You are Us too, Hortense.’
Not much time for writing though, and the story about the Men in Petticoats has been over for years. Except… life’s not exactly a straight line is it? And things are never
over
exactly. I saw Jamey in the moon the night I walked on the arm of Mr Gladstone in the Strand.
That night, after Ernest and his brother had come and told us about Freddie being dead, I came in here in the darkness with a lamp when everyone else was asleep. And in the shadows – just sudden and odd – I found I was remembering that time when they were in the House of Detention and I had crept with my same little lamp into Freddie and Ernest’s room and there was that petticoat sticking out of a wardrobe like a ghost and hairpins on the floor, and ‘Bloom of Roses’. And in my workroom as I sat there knowing Freddie had died now, it seemed like something drifted, like it brushed the air and the mirror. Drifting, and a bit cold, and I felt a tiny shiver or a memory or – well I dont blooming know what it was but tears came in my eyes.
I wonder if that’s what ghosts are? Memories?
And I quickly turned the lamp up high and there was Hortense and a half-made hat with ribbons hanging down and the sounds of – of Us – sleeping all around me and Freddie dead in America.
I loved Freddie. Yes for the hundredth time I
know
, I know I loved him because I was lonely and he was kind whatever else he was as well. I made it up. But I did love Frederick Park all the same – and it was through him that I am so happy now. And I sat with my little lamp that night beside Hortense and thought about him dying in another country far away and I
wished
I knew that he, well – well what I wished for Freddie was that there was somebody holding on to his hand tight, when he died.
I thought
I was just writing the story of us in 13 Wakefield-street because I was so wild at it being called a bordello which it wasn’t and the big rude writing on our walls and me being called a crippled whore which I wasn’t and all the lies and secrets that we found. But all the time that I was writing things were changing: Billy losing one position and finding another, and Emily; and Mackie riding into our lives in the early morning along the Mudeford Road and Dodo and Elijah living with us and Tom Dent working for Lewis and Lewis.
I’ve read all those novels and – they’re about places and people and the sea and thieves and madness and murder, but – really – I think most of them are about love and maybe I’ve been writing about love too, all different kinds of love, and it was like I said all those years ago, you cant always tell your heart what to do.
This Men in Petticoats was about certain people in charge wanting everyone to love the same. Someone should tell them that everyone is not the same and love is not the same but, whoever we are, we have to fill up that big waiting space inside our hearts.
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This historical novel started off being about something else, with the 1870 trial of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park as background. But as I began to research this slightly mysterious trial, I by chance found some surprising new information; I finally realised the novel had to be about the trial itself. I have woven three primary sources into my story and quoted from them freely: the extraordinary trial records, the huge newspaper coverage of the scandal at the time, and some unpublished letters. All letters in the novel are genuine.
The trial records used can be found in the National Archives at Kew, where patient staff made big boxes of these original papers available. The newspaper reports quoted can be found in the British Library Newspaper Collection, where again I was assisted by helpful staff: at Colindale, and in the newly-opened premises at the British Library in St Pancras. And I am grateful to Mr C. A. Gladstone for permission to use the genuine 1870 letters, all but one unpublished, which I found in the Gladstone collection in the Additional Manuscripts Room at the British Library and in the Glynne/Gladstone collection at the Flintshire Record Office. I was not able to receive permission from the Royal Archives to use the 1871 letters of Lady Susan Vane-Tempest (nee Clinton) to the Prince of Wales, but these can be found in both the biographies of Edward VII listed below.
I have received an enormous amount of help and support while writing this novel. My thanks for their advice to Sarah Baxter at the Society of Authors; Caroline Kelly from the Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections at Nottingham University; and Claire Harrington and Sue Copp at the Flintshire Record Office. I was given invaluable legal information by Nicholas Bamforth, Fellow in Law at The Queen’s College, Oxford University and have received much support from Professor Richard Parkinson at The Queen’s College, Oxford University, author of the British Museum’s
A Little Gay History.
Gratitude also to Ben Campbell and Dick Drinkrow for emergency technical advice, and to Kitty Williston for research in America.
My ongoing journey took me to all sorts of places: I was taken through Burlington Arcade by the present Head Beadle, Mr Mark Lord – including down to where a real underground tunnel did once run. I was shown all around the House of Commons – including the basement – by Austin Mitchell MP and had many questions patiently answered by his Parliamentary Assistant, Matthew Kay. I was taken through the corridors and offices of the House of Lords by Lord Alan Hawath. In Christchurch I was given invaluable information about funereal history by Mr Stuart Major of the funeral directors Miller & Butler, and by Christine Mockett of the Christchurch Borough Council; and shown historical records and graves in Christchurch Cemetery by the caretaker, Steve Ryan.