The Petticoat Men

by Barbara Ewing

  ‘Isabella Stacey!’ she said and she still had that smiling voice she had when she was young. She gave the boy a cake, smiling at him. He sat awkward with one leg tied and devoured the cake, pushing it into his mouth fast and getting it all over his face.

  There was a chair. I put the chair by her and took the plate of cakes from her. She bent to sit in it, but awkwardly, smiling and smiling, and a sound of pain came out even as she smiled.

  ‘I met your lad,’ she said. ‘He looked just like Joe.’ I nodded. She looked terrible but cheerful.

  ‘Are you and Elijah staying here, Dodo, or are you perhaps just visiting?’

  ‘We haven’t had time to properly organise ourselves and Freda has so kindly let us stay here just till we do. I am so useless of course and Elijah must find another position urgently, but they wouldn’t give him a reference paper which makes it more difficult, especially a man of his age. I was so sorry that your lad lost his work as well.’

  I nodded again. ‘Where’s all your lovely red cushions and curtains? Billy told me you still had them all in the Parliament. And your clothes and that red table you always had? Where’s all your things?’ I was still stood there, holding the cakes.

  ‘There wasn’t time. A big new doorkeeper fellow – already in a uniform – came down early one morning, I was hardly out of bed, Elijah just about ready to go upstairs. But this man – in a Head Doorkeeper’s uniform, only Elijah was the Head Doorkeeper! – was carrying some cases and bags and told us to go, and that he was the new Head Doorkeeper, and was moving into our home. He had some other new men with him and we had about five minutes.’

  Her smiling voice told their sad story.

  ‘Elijah rushed about of course, looking for people to stop this nonsense, he knows so many Members, course he does. But the House doesn’t sit in the morning and any doorkeepers who were still there, well obviously they was terrified of losing their jobs too, like Elijah and your Billy. He knew at once it was because he’d tried to get some money together for Lord Arthur. Do you know, some of the clerks and porters were calling out “ponce” and such words. “Sodomite.” So many years he’s been in that place. It’s damaged his spirit terribly, Isabella. I’ve never seen him so sad.’ She suddenly looked very distressed, but then she smiled again, Dodo always smiled. ‘But Freda has been very kind. We managed to bring some of our blankets with us and we put them on the floor for sleeping.’

  I saw the blankets neatly folded in a corner. I tried to imagine Dodo getting down on the filthy, greasy wooden floor.

  ‘That’s a lovely hat you’re wearing, Isabella.’

  ‘Mattie my daughter made it. Do you remember her when you two used to come back to the theatre to see me and Joe?’

  ‘Course I do. She ran about Drury Lane, that pretty little child, as if there was almost nothing wrong with her leg at all.’

  ‘That’s Mattie. She shall make you a lovely new red hat, Dodo, I promise.’

  ‘CAKE!’ the boy shouted and I gave him another so that we could go on talking and Dodo said something but I could not hear.

  ‘I’m deaf now, Dodo,’ I said. ‘We’ve all grown old. Though I can hear quite a lot all the same,’ and it was true, I was sure I could hear that tied-up boy eating, stuffing cake so noisily into his mouth and giving little grunts of pleasure.

  ‘Elijah, he will find another position very soon,’ Dodo said, louder. ‘He knows lots of people. It is only that this – this petticoat business seems to have put a curse on people.’

  ‘On the wrong people,’ I said firmly. ‘Of course he’ll get another position, Elijah knows everybody! In the meantime, I’ve got a big room free on the ground floor in my house in Wakefield-street, near Kings Cross. What about you and Elijah come and stay there for a while, Dodo? You know about that house from the newspapers now I’m sure, but you know about it too, from long ago, and how I got that house.’

  And Dodo nodded, of course she knew about Mr Rowbottom, but she knew the reason also, because she had known Joe.

  ‘Me and Billy and Mattie will come tomorrow night and carry what you do have. Would that be suitable? See what Elijah says.’

  She looked at me. ‘We have some money—’

  ‘I dont want money at the moment, Dodo,’ I said. ‘Billy’s found another job, Mattie makes hats, we’ve got enough in the meantime. You’d be doing me a real favour frankly, Billy is so downhearted just like Elijah and maybe they’ll cheer each other up. Till everyone’s settled again. We’ll come tomorrow evening before it gets dark. And if Elijah is against it because of it being’ – I had to say it – ‘13 Wakefield-street and Mr Rowbottom and you decide not to come, then at least he and Billy can say hello.’

  Dodo looked quite shocked. ‘Me and Elijah never, ever judged you, Isabella, you should have known that!’

  Then Dodo looked at the room and the boy and the blankets and the dirt. ‘Thank you for inviting us,’ she said. And then she said, ‘O Isabella Stacey! Of course we’ll come!’

  I heard the boy yelling, ‘CAKE!’ as I left.

  Next day me and Mattie got up very early and made red velvet flouncy curtains, and a soft bedcover from material with red and pink flowers I had in my big store cupboard. We got everything as nice as we could in the downstairs room that once held that bad Ronald Duggan, and then Mr Amos Gibbings’ glories. And now was hard-pressed to find a cotton salesman, ha. I told Mattie about smiling cheery Dodo remembering her, about her singing and dancing in some of the early music halls when Joe and me and Elijah were working at Drury Lane, and how ever since she was young, Dodo had loved red, she said it made her feel warm and happy.

  ‘I’ll make her a red hat,’ said Mattie.

  We all went back to Peacock-street the next night. I hadn’t seen Elijah for years, but I thought he looked terrible, not the way Billy had described him at all. And I suddenly saw him so clearly: standing outside the stage door at Drury Lane, tall and young and whistling. Still, anyone could’ve seen how pleased Billy and Elijah were to see each other, and Mattie and Dodo were greatly taken with each other at once. In the room the younger children were asleep in a big drawer and Freda in a world of her own didn’t seem to mind or notice whether Elijah and Dodo came or went.

  But the boy who had been tied up was untied now and sitting close to Elijah when we arrived, listening intently to a story; he took no notice of us coming in but when he realised that Elijah was leaving he screamed and kicked and yelled and wept and finally Freda just grabbed him and grabbed the rope round the big heavy table, and knotted them together. And then she sat down on the chair and fell asleep. Elijah bent down with the book, and gave it to the boy who looked at it for a moment. But it was clear the words meant nothing, only Elijah could tell them, and the boy yelled and wept and kicked again, while we stood about like simpletons. Then, exhausted, he lay down on the floor with his arms round his head and I saw a cockroach scuttle away across the bare floorboards.

  ‘I will come back and see you, Henry,’ said Elijah.

  But Dodo had gone out of the room and come back again. ‘Henry,’ she said. ‘Look.’ She was bent enough to almost reach the floor. He looked up. She had a cake and somehow she had wrote HENRY on it. ‘That is your name,’ she said.

  He looked at the writing on the top of the cake, and looked at Elijah. ‘Does that write Henry?’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘Does that mean the whole cake is mine?’

  Elijah looked at Freda. But Freda was asleep.

  ‘It does,’ he said. ‘But if you write your name on that paper I gave you before you eat it, with that pencil I gave you, then you will always be able to write your name.’

  The paper and the pencil were on the big table which was covered with newspaper and dirty plates. The boy could not reach it for being tied. He started to stuff the whole cake in his mouth but Elijah stopped him, very firm, and gave him the paper and the pencil.

  ‘Write first, Henry,’ he insisted.

  And we al
l stood there, almost holding our breath while Freda snored and Henry looked at the cake and looked at the paper. Finally he copied the word, more or less. H. E. N. R. Y. Mattie in relief clapped her hands.

  ‘That’s very good, Henry,’ she said.

  ‘You’re clever, Henry,’ Billy said.

  ‘Did I write me name?’ said Henry to Elijah. ‘What I writ says HENRY?’

  ‘You wrote your name, lad. You wrote Henry. And I’ll come back and teach you more.’

  As we left the last thing we saw was Henry not smashing the cake into his mouth but eating round the edges, so that the word HENRY was still there.

  All the way home on three omnibuses, with all five of us, even Dodo, holding belongings, cases, a coat, some tins and pots, on our backs or in our arms and trying not to knock ladies’ hats off. Billy’s face. It looked almost like his old face, so pleased he was. But Elijah’s face, I could see it, was thin and pale. He and Billy laughed with each other about unimportant things and I could see that they was bursting to talk about the Parliament but the omnibus was full and they could hardly do that. Nobody even gave up a seat for poor Dodo and we were all carrying so much stuff it was hard to kick people so we stood around her to stop her being too shaken and pressed, but she smiled and the horses trotted and the conductor rang a bell.

  Then Dodo saw the red curtains in her new room.

  It was the only moment the smile went from her. Her face crumpled up and she looked at me with tears in her eyes and she put her hand that looked like a claw up to her mouth to try to stop herself from making any sound.

  35

  Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park were quietly released on bail. Very small paragraphs in newspapers.

  And then Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park seemed quite to disappear.

  Dodo Fortune’s favourite newspaper was the Illustrated Police News; she delighted in it for days after its weekly publication. She delighted in particular, as Mrs Stacey and Mattie did, in the large violent drawings on the front page: scenes of mayhem and murder; people stabbing each other to death with knives; bold blackmailing ladies; a woman attacked by a rattlesnake; one particularly ferocious murder evinced dead bodies strewn across the whole front page. For some weeks of course the Men in Petticoats had been drawn most dramatically; now it was as if they had not existed.

  And the headlines – sometime Dodo longed to turn them into music-hall songs: EXTRAORDINARY ESCAPE BY LADY ATTACKED BY INDIANS (this turned out to be telegraphed from America); EXTRAORDINARY DISCOVERY IN LADY’S CHIGNON (in this case a rat jumped out, followed by a tribe of little rats).

  Today however, in her new and wonderful accommodation in Wakefield-street, Dodo gave a little cry of surprise.

  THE MEN IN PETTICOATS

  CONVICTION OF PARK’S BROTHER

  At the Middlesex Sessions on Monday, Edward Henry Park, 26, brother of the Park who has been so notoriously mixed up with Boulton in recent proceedings, was indicted for neglecting to appear at the sitting of this court on 7 April 1862 and plead to an indictment charging him with having indecently assaulted one George White, a police constable, on 1 April 1862. The bench and court were densely crowded by persons anxious to hear the trial.

  Dodo thought perhaps there was some mistake. Brother? 1862? Eight years ago? Elijah was out looking for work. Laboriously but determinedly, Dodo made her way down to the basement kitchen, holding the Illustrated Police News in the best way she could manage.

  ‘Isabella?’ she said. ‘Mattie?’

  But they were reading also.

  ‘It says here, CONVICTION OF A FILTHY FELLOW: EIGHT YEARS LATER,’ said Mattie. ‘It says here, Edward Henry Park, a robust man of regular features and a good figure, brother of Park, associate of Boulton, and son of the Master of the Court of Common Pleas.’

  She looked up at her mother and Dodo in disbelief.

  ‘It says here, This case was remarkable, not merely for the nature of the charge, but for the length of the time between the commission of this offence and the offender being brought to trial. It says here that Mr Edward Henry Park asked the policeman to go down a mews and then he—’ Mattie sighed, then read on quickly. He exposed his own person, and laid his hands upon the private parts of the constable and kissed him. The prisoner was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

  And Mattie thought of the old man she had met with the strained, anxious face in the dingy office where she had waited all day. She knew Mr Park, and she knew his proper title because Freddie had told her: Mr Park, the Senior Master of the Court of Common Pleas.

  ‘We’re not the only people to have our lives changed by all this,’ she said. ‘That Mr Park’s face was so – troubled. He must have known about this other son too.’ And then a memory, like smoke, drifted.

  ‘I miss my favourite brother Harry who has gone away,’ Freddie had said, as he held her.

  The extremely respectable household in Isleworth of Mr Alexander Atherton Park, the Senior Master of the Court of Common Pleas (perhaps not now considered so respectable as it once had been), was cold and silent – and filled with sadness. Anger, disgust, condemnation, censure – Mr Park had long used up such feelings. Now every Victorian nook and cranny and ticking clock and carved table-leg seeped pain.

  Mr Park could not understand. He had somehow, among his other, most sensible, children, sired two sons with Tendencies of a Sodomite Nature. Their mother had died, but he had been loving as well as strict. He knew perfectly well his beloved elder son Edward Henry, known to them all as Harry, had gone to Scotland when he had skipped bail. He had lived there for years quietly under an assumed name and his father had sent him an allowance; occasionally he even saw Harry, brother of Freddie, but mostly he had learned to live without him. But the police had found him through the case of the other son (although the court had somehow managed to mostly keep the connection from the newspapers at the time of the trial). For when Ernest Boulton had gone to Scotland to spend time with wealthy admirers, Harry, brother of Freddie, had of course gone to see him. A letter to ‘Stella’, mentioning filthy photographs and glycerine, signed by ‘Harry P.’, had been discovered with an address upon it, and the police had quietly put it to one side to be dealt with later.

  They had decided that if they were to be thwarted of one brother, they would have the other.

  And now they had.

  Sometimes now Mr Park could hardly breathe, for the pain.

  When the case for absconding had been brought (almost as soon as Freddie was released on bail), the assistant judge who was hearing the trial leaned down to speak privately to Harry Park. ‘I have some slight knowledge of your father and your family and it is to me a most difficult task to pass sentence upon you but I can do no other.’

  And then he did indeed pass a sentence. Twelve months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

  As the gaolers were taking him away Harry looked only for his father who he knew was in court. Even the police officers moved away slightly in deference to the distress of the father, whom they of course knew. Harry clasped the old man in his arms.

  ‘You know that I am a sodomite and a fool, dearest, dearest Papa,’ Harry had whispered. ‘And I cannot help myself. But as I told you so often – those policemen trapped and enticed me in the mews all those years ago – it is what they do. Tell Freddie to trust no one.’ And for one more moment he held his father tightly and then he stood straight, and was led away.

  Who better than Mr Park, Senior Master of the Court of Common Pleas, to know what hard labour meant in England’s prisons? It was treadmills and back-breaking work and the birch and punishment.

  He still attended the Court of Common Pleas with diligence every day, as he had always done, where of course everybody knew perfectly well his family disgrace. Where once callow and youthful young clerks had nudged each other and winked about the Men in Petticoats as he appeared, they were now somehow silent. For they saw a face that seemed smashed with suffering.

  F
rederick William Park had always loved his elder, sodomite brother also.

  Frederick William Park had now been re-articled to a legal practice near Isleworth run by a cousin of Mr Park’s brother-in-law. Frederick worked unseen, in the back offices, never viewed by members of the public. Had he been seen, as time passed, it would have been harder and harder to believe this young man had earlier been arrested as one of the notorious Men in Petticoats, for he was fatter, hairier, broader. And his face was harried in a new way: he had nightmares.

  The first weeks were the worst. Every time the door-knocker echoed through the sad house, every delivery, every letter – although reassurances had been quietly given – everything contained the possibility of the inevitable call to court or – the worst scenario – a return for Freddie to Newgate Prison. But then various messages did arrive. Frederick Park was to keep his head down, name no names, and the case would not be called again until at least the following year. He was not to have any contact at all with Ernest Boulton. Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park would not be charged with any felonious crime and only the lesser crime of ‘misdemeanour’. Higher powers had intervened. If they kept quiet now, it was possible they might escape without any charge at all.

  Freddie thought of Ernest. He thought of Wakefield-street. He thought of their nights in the theatres, at the balls. He went to work as an articled law clerk. He came home to his father’s house. He saw his father’s suffering face. He thought of the weeks in Newgate Prison and dreamed of that place, often.

  And now his loved brother Harry had been sentenced to hard labour for the same offence. Freddie had seen a treadmill now. He had heard many stories.

  Living now as he was, under such restriction and guilt in mind, body and spirit, Frederick William Park bore the look of a man who had been to hell. And who, inside his head, still resided there.

  Things were somewhat different in the Boulton household in Peckham. Mrs Boulton considered Ernest’s health to be so delicate that it was inconceivable to her that he might ever go back to the bank where he had worked briefly years ago, or indeed that he should work at all. But the family finances were in dire straits. Mr Boulton, a stockbroker, had decided that he needed to go abroad on certain business.