The age at which they fall into evil exceeds credibility. This year, of 472 fallen, sixty-two were under thirteen. This society rescues them by hundreds—3,940 destitutes in eleven years—and begs help from the public. Nearly half were placed in domestic service, 664 returned to friends, 41 emigrated, 541 otherwise assisted, leaving 224 in the homes and 679 unsatisfactory.
Still worse was a parliamentary return on bastardy cases. Over fifteen years:
157,485 summonses.
124,218 fathers came for hearing.
107,776 maintenance orders were made.
15,981 summonses dismissed.
Thus, 1,141 children annually thrown on wretched mothers, an approximate idea of the illegitimate infant population, and especially the temptation to infanticide.
In the five years to 1860, there were 1,130 inquisitions on bodies of children under two years of age, murdered.
* * *
Brodie still had men watching the entrance, even now. They were powerless to prevent the royal carriage driving through to the inner door. Prince Bertie got out first, then her special duke.
Then she herself.
An anonymous figure descended, in red-heeled boots and velvet suit with crimson lining and gold lace. She swept into the gallery just as Brodie was being sworn in. It would have been hard to knock her off. He glanced up, discomfited to see a damask rose beneath the fashionable Parisian hat. Still, he suspected nothing.
Whatever questions the barrister cast at him, and recast, Brodie had no knowledge of. Foundation monies used to buy children. Accounts returned through his news companies. Girls enslaved in a Southwark warehouse. Lives bought. Lives sold. Cruelty to children. Infanticide.
“No, sir.” He was most sincere. “I have no knowledge of any of that.”
If it was put to him that he orchestrated the apparatus, distancing himself from the responsibility through a network of dissimulation, what would he say?
He remained implacable. “To such fantasies, I cannot reply.”
“And if I tell you there is proof?”
“Put it to me. You cannot, nor can the police.”
“Maybe not,” Skittles called from the gallery, “but I can, Walter dearest, and I shall.”
* * *
Skittles was not dead. Far from it. Back from France at the eleventh hour, under Bertie’s protection, to expose Brodie’s pantomime.
Our charade at the channel had worked a treat. Brodie’s men pursued her, as hoped. Bertie’s driver showed a flair for improvisation, wailing in sorrow as her straw hat drifted toward Calais. In the mist, Skittles simply walked on board, even as the driver was reporting her drowned.
With Brodie’s men shaken off, they proceeded calmly to Paris where she cut her hair and reinvented herself. Bertie secured her introductions to the finest salons, the top rank of cocottes, even the bally French Emperor. L’Anonyme had a ball, consorting with opera singers and acrobats, and drinking champagne right through the winter.
Now she was back.
Skittles had contracts, affidavits, dates, times and signatures appended. Disregarding court procedure, she named Brodie at once and went on to detail every aspect of his empire. Her revenge on her enslavers was exacted with the calm self-confidence inculcated in her at the nursery, while the legal i’s were dotted and t’s crossed by the one lawyer in London Brodie could not scare, Skittles’s own spoony duke. Skittles proved it all.
She still never paid back that sovereign.
PART VI
LOST AND FOUND
MARCH 25 1864, AND BEYOND
O ends of autumn, winters, mud-steeped springs, Sleep-inducing seasons.
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
HOW TO ACQUIRE A “FLASH MOTT”
1. Leave the old woman at home.
2. Go out on the lash. Choose your nightspot by the weight of your wallet. Slim pouches should keep to Southwark, or Pimlico, Wilton’s Hall, etc.; in the West End, The Holborn, The Argyll, Kate Hamilton’s; but the top class of lady is to be found in the Royal Opera dress circle.
3. Catch the lady’s eye. (For “lady”, supply whatsoever class you desire.)
4. Purchase beverage (based on the weight of your etc.).
5. Mention the amateur theatricals you are presently mounting.
6. Should she raise an eyebrow, pounce.
7. Negotiate a rate.
8. Secure accommodation (based on your etc.).
9. Visit monthly, weekly, daily or hourly, dependent upon appetite and aptitude.
10. Enjoy her charms, overlook her failings. Money cannot purchase perfection.
11. Refrain from offering marriage, parental viewings or—God forbid—cohabitation.
12. When you tire of her (or she of you), proclaim your amateur theatrical run over; clinch the separation with a dividend: two months’ pay-off, by current fashion.
13. Repeat from (3).
“Flash Bash Rodney”, Darkest London in the Sixties,
or The Fast Gent’s Guide to Shady Recesses
SHAME ENOUGH
Out it all poured. With the cork unstopped, the poison flowed out, down to the very dregs. Everything except for the ritual of breaking in the arrivals fresh in from abroad, from the shires and from the foundations; that was hard to prove. Most of the Flowers of Sin were so drugged, they recalled nothing of the gruntings and shuntings of their first night.
The unidentified remains found in the basements of one foundation were never called to account. Brodie claimed he had never been there; a daguerreotype proved that he had, but the court could not admit that. The managers were implicated by their negligence in permitting acts of inhumanity.
The women still believed they had signed their lives away.
Justice Fairchild concurred with Skittles’s duke that one cannot enslave oneself, however fanciful the contract one has signed. Individual “owners” might challenge his judgement, if they chose to, but their claims imply immorality.
Skittles produced her own contract. Her duke gave evidence on how the bargain was arrived at and monies paid. She spoke of how they took away the child she had, soon after she arrived in London, promising him a better life. She also identified the woman I’d seen that first night near Quarterhouse, Palmerston’s friend, as one of Brodie’s particular favourites; it was also established that she had visited Brodie the night before we found her, Felix and I, dead in the gutter.
Two of Skittles’s contemporaries from Kensington Gore, also known as Albertopolis, exposed the darker practices of high-class courtesanship. Steph’s friends spoke, in Cora’s memory, of the destitution with which they were threatened each day.
Two Haymarket streetwalkers, ejected from the Flowers, told how they had to make a pound an hour from as many encounters, being kept ragged, hungry and nearly naked to prevent them escaping. Diseased girls and damaged girls were shipped off to tame foundations, of which there were dozens. Any who threatened revelation were easily silenced, for who, in an asylum for fallen women, would credit such outlandish accusations?
Starched spinsters bemoaned their place in the chain of power, lamenting that they had never understood what cruelties carried on beneath their well-meaning noses. The scab-headed moon-eyed accountant was unfit to be presented in court. In exchange for a plea of criminally insane, she peaceably explained her diabolical ledgers. A system of ticks, crosses and asterisks told which children were kept, which sold, and which died—though whether of natural causes was never clear.
Stephanie at last told her story: how her child was taken, with the promise of him a better life; but she knew he was sickly. We painstakingly deciphered the ledger, and found her boy had died.
One bully made so bold as to defend his honour. “A girl who has done it before has no right to refuse it. If stopping out late, in such clothes, with perfume, they are asking for it. It ain’t rape, My Lord, if it’s between friends. If my girls accused me, that’s the ultimate whoring, for public attention. Besides, in my opinio
n, many girls need a good raping every so often.”
* * *
Jeffcoat brought seamstresses from Southwark and cooks who blinked like moles in the daylight. They fought to stammer out hasty accounts, in which they were always at fault: indebted, they said, not enslaved. A boatload of foreign women was rescued from Portsmouth Harbour. They told in breathless accents how they were lured with tales of smuggling and benefactors.
Victims brave enough to come forward were full of praise for the police. The newspapers saw it differently. Still today, more and more cases have been brought revealing how Brodie cultivated friends in high places, manipulated the police and used his celebrated status to safeguard these operations. That doesn’t excuse us; on the contrary. But it was part of his style to control in this way, right down to the street gang who scared away prying eyes, patrolling the neighbouring streets, in return for four copies weekly of the Ha’penny Gazette.
At the last, I should have been called to the stand again. It was declared improper that the barrister who bamboozled me should have been allowed to quiz me, having previously lodged a complaint against me. Even if I had been there, I had little to add to this mountain of evidence. Before making his recommendations to parliament in the strongest terms, Fairchild took the chance to thank me, Jeffcoat, and Molly and her lot, for our pains.
* * *
We cannot prevent every seduction, every misfortune, but we could start by fighting against trafficking and forgiving the ruinated. How to fight a culture of coercion and enslavement. How to safeguard women. How to teach a better way of life than flaunting their bodies. How to save unwanted babes. Are these questions of educating, or punishing, or wealth, or love? These puzzles, I cannot solve.
Pontificating about these horrors became de rigueur. Society ladies would bring up Mauve’s name, then trail off halfway through a sentence; for nothing polite could be said about him.
Men would go further, growing bold over whisky in the drawing room. “The surprising thing is not that it happens. Wherever there are weaker and stronger, it will keep happening. The surprise is that it doesn’t happen more.” A pat on the back to the man so boldly pontificating. Indignation not only sells newspapers but salves our irredeemable consciences.
What I do know is that to leave all in the hands of earnest benefactors is to licence caprice. Until it is the right of all to be protected by society, equally and fiercely, then the abject day I spent on the Caledonian Road will be repeated, not just in our nightmares but as commonplace, horrors we speak of only in order to distance ourselves from them, never conceiving that we share in the blame.
* * *
The great irony of the Enquiry was the consequent demand for Dugdale-Hotten’s books. We drew attention to the erotic genre. Maria Monk outsold Lady Audley, and when Rosa Fielding came out, Dickens was green with jealousy.
My Secret Life was never published, not openly, but everyone knew it existed. I got hold of Groggins’ manuscript, but somehow it was circulated. Was Brodie’s the only other copy? How else did so many clandestine editions appear? The demand to know the dark secrets of the mysterious “Walter” would keep it in print forever. Those in the know loved to speculate who had done what with whom—despite nobody’s ever having read the interminable epic, which made Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack seem a vague and slapdash romp. All those famous witnesses with their prettified perversions, we all knew they could have told more; now anyone could seek out their chapter from the bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge. Ah, London. People think it austere, but it is filthier than Naples, the capital of European filth.
The sub-chapter titles are enough to make the faint-hearted blanch:
Foul-tongued & hot-arsed—Sodomites & catamites—On the qualities of different cunts—Lolotte’s gamahuche—Reflexions on the change in my erotic tastes—French, fat, red-haired & thirty-five—A sphincter dilated—Lingual delicacies—Kid gloves & cold cream—Dildo buggery.
Sometimes of a Sunday, I pour a glass of gin, to mortify my taste for malts, and take to my armchair. I extract the manuscript from the dusty top shelf, and peruse it, with Groggins’ key alongside, revealing who wrote what.
I am on her, up her, a slight sob as my prick goes up with the thrust of a giant, and we are spending in each other’s embraces, mouth to mouth, belly to belly, prick to cunt, ballocks to bum-cheeks. All is oblivium and elysium. There is no uncunting; but with rigid prick still up to its roots, on again we go fucking in earnest.
At the end of Groggins’ chapter list was a coded note, which I transcribed for Miss Villiers (not wanting to be indelicate) and she decoded. That is how we found the envelope deposited with Coutts: the full manuscript, stashed by Groggins just before they got to him. Brodie got the redraft, edited for the printers; but perhaps such a work takes more than one draft, to harmonise the style of the narrators, and that is how the clandestine publishers got hold of it.
H*l*n pronounced mine to be a most wonderful amatory career, when she had read the manuscript, or I had read it her whilst in bed and she laid quietly feeling my prick. Sometimes she’d read and I listen, kissing and smelling her lovely alabaster breasts, feeling her cunt, till the spirit moved us both to incorporate our bodies.
I turn the pages with strange fascination, as phrases leap out. I cannot bring myself to read more than a few lines at a time. On some pages I recognise Mauve’s holograph and wash my hands afterward.
The grip and tenacity of her Paphian temple seemed wonderful—what muscular force, what a nutcracker! But that indeed I knew, for her cunt was perfect in every way, a pudenda of all the virtues, powers, and beauties for fucking—a supreme pleasure-giver.
Groggins’ endnotes (unpublished) confirmed that he transcribed stories from gentlemen and from the Flowers of Sin themselves, and that he was paid by Brodie. Everyone was writing erotic memoirs, but it’s clear that Groggins fancied himself the Baudelaire of Leicester Square.
Is it any surprise that revered pillars of the community have fallen to buying and selling girls and boys at will? It is the culture of the day. We all read of abasement and abominations. If the next man is tailing madly and devil take the consequence, why shouldn’t I?
It’s not in my nature to be disgusted at what another man calls natural. I can see how poor Darlington’s head overflowed with it. I find myself hoping much of it is fiction. Such strange fictions, though: some arousing, some disgusting, some illegal, but so many details, menial and touching.
She lifted up her clothes freely, and I saw her cunt. It was surrounded with fine, chestnut-brown, soft, thick hair. How is it that at a glance all this was seen and remembered ever since? Strange that a mere gap close to an arsehole should have such power. I held a candle between her thighs. “Hold your quim open—do—do.”
If truth, it tells things a man should never admit to his dearest friend, let alone on paper.
* * *
Following Fairchild’s recommendations, prosecutions were later brought, not against politicians or financiers, but only actors and singers of harum-scarum popular songs. What opprobrium heaped upon these caricatures. The cases were dismissed, of course, playing out like popular melodramas. What a fuss the papers made. The doting audience rallied round the accused, vilifying the prosecutors as the cases unravelled in shambolic confusion. “If they are guiltless, let us ruin no more lives.” It was almost as if innocents were unjustly persecuted in order to make the public lose its appetite for justice, so that the real perpetrators might go unpursued.
At first, nobody spoke of anything but these cases. Then the months passed and we scrubbed our hands of dirty thoughts, as these unthinkable crimes were overshadowed by the usual nonsense: Garibaldi’s tour, the Sheffield Flood, the District Line, Mazeppa nude at Astley’s Theatre, and Müller damnably hanged.
Some say we should be ashamed of our society, where the poor are forgotten, women ruined, the streets unsafe. But ignorance is a great tonic. Read but a page of yesteryear’s newspaper, and you learn t
hat each scandal today, each shooting and beheading, is twice outdone by those of the past. You can delude yourself through life, regurgitating stale aphorisms from a lost era, or else wake up and accept this is the only time you can live in; you may as well channel your vitriol into making it endurable.
* * *
Sir Richard retired and, within a couple of years, died.
Panizzi retired and died.
Palmerston died in office, clearing the way for Gladstone and Disraeli’s ding-dong duelling.
Dugdale was moved to the Clerkenwell House of Correction, where, deprived of books, pen and paper he died. Though his death was ruled “from natural causes” the jury recommended that books of “high intellectual character” should be made available to prisoners.
I would not suggest they were knocked off, but all were tainted by scandal.
Hotten lived longer. His publishing venture ultimately became Chatto & Windus, which has fared tolerably well.
Felix’s Phoenix Foundation was investigated and the board sacked; it was renamed the Foundation for Fallen Flowers.
Quarterhouse flourished, providing refuge for thirty or so Brothers amid the sins of the city, though the Glasshouse fell into disrepair and was dismantled.
Those who helped me were tarred with accusations. Gladstone endured malicious talk about fallen women up to his death. The Prince of Wales was dragged through the courts. I was viewed with suspicion until the day I left the Yard.
Kate Hamilton was condemned and sent to Millbank Penitentiary. Her bulk could not save her from the Tench prisoners’ vengeance.
Skittles, at least, went on to a glorious career.
And Brodie?
Brodie made to leave as Skittles commenced her testimony. He found his way from the gallery blocked. It would have made a scene to fight his way out. At the end, he came quietly. His papers fell quiet. His competitors had a field day. The punishments proposed ranged from capital punishment to mediaeval torture. Of course, with threats made and palms greased, Brodie found himself transferred to Southampton Prison. Thence to the docks by night, and the ocean liner to New York, first class.
Lawless and the Flowers of Sin Page 27