He did not give a date for his return.
If he had left enough money for their comfort and survival, this would have suited both Mrs Boulton (and her son Ernest) very well; her younger son Gerard had been dispatched to richer relatives; the richer relatives also dispensed largesse to Mrs Boulton when absolutely necessary. But the family finances were, frankly, incoherent.
As soon as her husband had left, Mrs Boulton (who had waved goodbye to him at the railway station, dabbing her eyes with a delicate handkerchief) came home in relief and lay upon her pretty chaise longue. She asked the one maid for Madeira wine and Ernest, both of which appeared.
‘Now, my darling. Now that your dear father has gone at last I want you to cheer me up in my immense loneliness and sadness. Especially as he is no longer here to forbid it. Oh darling boy, go and put on one of your pretty gowns and play to me.’ She indicated the piano.
‘My gowns, as you well know, have been – confiscated,’ said Ernest sulkily, helping himself to Madeira wine, and he tossed his head so that little curls, which he had worked upon with his mother’s curling tongs while she had gone farewelling, bounced and danced.
‘But you still have the several gowns that you left here earlier. The pretty primrose with the blue, for instance.’
Ernest quibbled for a few minutes, imbibed a further quantity of the Madeira, but then went away while Mrs Boulton rested from her grief; when he returned about an hour later, he simply looked like a young woman of the household, instead of a young man.
‘Oh that’s better, my darling. Oh – remember when your grandmother thought you were the maid that time – “too pretty” was what she said – she was very disapproving. “Maids should be plain, not pretty.” She never ever knew I put you up to it!’
Ernest was sorting through the music on the piano, but in the end he pushed it all away. ‘I am so bored,’ he complained. ‘Worse than bored – buried!’
He felt the skirt swishing as he walked about the room idly, the curls falling now across his forehead, the undergarments soft on his body: all the feelings he liked so much. He wanted to go out and about in the town as he was so used to doing and here he was, caged up with his mother, impecunious once more.
But Ernest was not stupid. He too dreamed terrible dreams of Newgate Prison. Then he also received messages. Ernest Boulton 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 Frederick Park. Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park would not be charged with any felonious crime, only the lesser crime of ‘misdemeanour’. It was possible he might escape without charge.
He understood that being encased with his mother, with at least also the Madeira wine, and even visits from a friend or two – for his mother was very fond of many of his friends, and liked to be entertained, and encouraged theatricals – was the most he could hope for at the moment. But he began to consider, just a little, that he might, when this was all over, go back and perform in the pottery towns where he had had some success; also, in particular, he thought of Scarborough, where he and Lord Arthur Clinton had once toured and been written about. I am, after all, famous now. Audiences would queue to see me.
‘A song, my darling!’
Ernest sighed theatrically and went back to the piano. He sat and ran his well-manicured fingers over the keys, thinking of how it had been, and how it was now, and Freddie, and Wakefield-street, and assignations, and Porterbury’s Hotel and performances, and the excitement, and the fun – for ‘fun’ to Ernest encompassed many things – they had had. He sighed again at his fate and all the things he had been deprived of. And, finally, he began to sing mournfully.
Rose in the garden
Blushing and gay
E’en as we pluck them
Fading away…
and the words suddenly struck both him and his mother as so befitting, so apt to his present predicament, that they both wept and then had some more Madeira wine.
36
Summer was long gone.
The days had turned cold and leaves fell from the trees and rattled along Gray’s Inn Road. Near Lincoln’s Inn Fields beggars huddled by the church, hoping for Christian charity.
Lady Susan Vane-Tempest, sister of Lord Arthur Clinton, had most gladly and relievedly and lovingly resumed her usual relationship with the Prince of Wales when talk of the scandal had drifted away.
But for her brother, she wept alone.
The mistresses of great men survive only if they know the limits of their situation; she understood he could not be publicly involved with her, and that there were certain things she could not share with him. So she never spoke of the pain of losing her brother. She had mothered Arthur the most, even more than his younger brother, Albert; she had teased Artie the most, and comforted him the most, and laughed with him the most. She had loved him the most in that loveless household.
But the Prince of Wales never spoke to her of Arthur and she did not share her pain.
She and the Prince of Wales now met often again, as usual, on arranged afternoons, either at her house in Chapel-street, or, especially if he was pressed for time, at the house of a discreet friend off Whitehall. His Royal Highness could be dropped off there and picked up at a pre-arranged hour without attracting notice, or too much notice, and she would arrive and leave separately, having ordered her own carriage.
But she had had a terrible fright.
So awful had been the temporary parting, so great her fear of losing him, that Lady Susan Vane-Tempest decided – next time the Prince went away somewhere – to go away herself: to France, to discuss matters with her mother.
Lady Susan Opdebeck in Paris (whose own history might perhaps have suggested she was a less than wise counsellor) nevertheless advised her daughter firmly.
‘Be guided by me, Susan. You must somehow regularise your position. You are no longer young, you are turned thirty, and more. He will be King. And if Arthur had not died and had instead been brought to court, the Prince would have discarded you for ever and you know it! No doubt the case will now be hushed up in some way – that is how things are done, Susan, I assure you – but you must now somehow find an irreversible place in his life. There are always official mistresses and they have standing and respect! You understand him; he needs you, he relies on you and of course he can pay for it – but I reiterate: you are not getting any younger; you must keep your hold over him.’
The mother reached for the laudanum.
‘Susan, in clear language you need to be bold, and you need to make yourself safe, and I speak these words to you from bitter experience as you know.’ She repeated her words. ‘You need to make a bold move now: now, Susan, before it is too late, for your future.’
At this point her daughter, shaken, reached for the laudanum also.
Mr Gladstone’s life continued extremely busy and full. In the Houses of Parliament, the Franco-Prussian War was much discussed, and reparation from France was called for, and education in Scotland was debated, and the un-English behaviour of some of the settlers in the colonies of the Empire commented upon. Mr Gladstone made many speeches, held many cabinet meetings, wrote many letters and discussion papers. He continued to be emotionally but not physically unfaithful to the matrimonial bed. He endured, no change, his uneasy relationship with Her Majesty Queen Victoria. He continued his Rescue Work with street women whom he sometimes brought home to be dealt with by his wife.
The lame girl was not seen near the Strand again but his heart was not easy over this matter: I knew I’d seen her before. I’d seen her with her brother. He somehow did not expect her to reappear, or cause trouble, but he told his wife of the disturbing meeting.
‘She said that the people in Mudeford do not believe he died of scarlet fever.’ He shook his head. ‘We may never know. Perhaps he took his own sad life, but it is over. We must leave poor Arthur where he is.’
‘Do you believe the girl even saw Arthur befo
re he died?’
‘Yes,’ he said shortly. ‘I do not like the story. But I believe it. I believe she must have talked to him because she said that he had told her to warn me that if I did not assist him he would – haunt me.’
Mrs Gladstone’s face showed her shock.
The words Arthur’s mother had once used, so long ago.
She pulled herself together. ‘Can you help her brother?’
‘Of course I cannot do anything so foolish as to interfere in – housekeeping matters of the building that do not concern me when matters are so – delicate. And they must have known, Catherine, what those fools were doing in their house!’
‘She will not follow you again? Or discuss matters with someone else?’
‘She said she would not. I cannot say why I believed her exactly, but I did.’ But his heart was not easy.
He discussed monarchical – and private – matters with the Prince of Wales. A rather large number of meetings also took place between the Prime Minister (Eton, Oxford), and the Solicitor-General (Eton, Oxford).
In prison, Mr Edward Henry Park, son of the Senior Master of the Court of Common Pleas, brother to the notorious Frederick William Park, did hard labour. Which included many hours strapped to a large treadmill in the centre of the prison, struggling uselessly on a moving wheel, endlessly, strenuously: going nowhere, getting nowhere, and then all over again. At the beginning other prisoners spat at him, a sodomite; now, as they saw his body and his spirit crumble, they felt he was under punishment enough.
In Wakefield-street Dodo made many cakes.
But everyone who had known Elijah Fortune understood what Dodo had understood: that something had happened to his spirit. His work and his home had been conjoined; they were his life. He had been at the heart of the Parliament buildings; what he had not realised was that the Parliament buildings had been at the heart of himself.
Members of Parliament missed him. He had been there always; so many of them had taken advice and tea in the doorkeeper’s cubby: ‘Where is Elijah?’ they asked. But word very quickly got around that he had been somehow involved in the scandalous business of Lord Arthur Clinton, and that of course made things tricky for his parliamentary acquaintances.
Stage-doorkeepers of London theatres, knowing him from his old days at Drury Lane, heard of his trouble, asked for news of him, didn’t give a threepenny damn about Men in Petticoats: they saw men, and women, in petticoats, often. But none had work for him. Old friends asked for him in the Central Lobby; they were told that he was no longer in the red room in the bowels of the building where he and Dodo had lived for so long, and that his whereabouts were unknown. A porter at Billingsgate heard of Elijah’s fate, said, ‘Them bleeding hypocrites!’ and went to find him at the Palace of Westminster with a large basket of fish; he was turned away most rudely from the Central Lobby. (The new Head Doorkeeper tried to keep the fish, but met his match in the Billingsgate man, whose loud and violent swearing was unmatched by mere parliamentary doorkeepers.)
Elijah Fortune, who had known everybody in London, suddenly had no job and no references, and he was the same age as the Prime Minister of England: sixty-one years old.
Finally Billy was able to obtain clerical work for him at the funeral parlour in Tottenham Court Road. Occasionally, when they were short of staff or death was busy, Elijah too had to walk with Billy behind the black horses with their funereal plumes. Sometimes they spoke as they walked, even joked with a grave black humour, but keeping their faces solemn at all times, of the Palace of Westminster. Elijah and Dodo insisted on paying Mrs Stacey something for the room; in vain she told them that there was enough money in the house: there were two salesmen from the North who still took rooms when they came to London, who were much taken with the cakes that were pressed upon them by the new lodger. Mr Flamp still lived in his small room and received cakes also, and Mattie Stacey continued to make beautiful hats.
Then Elijah, with the help of one of the many people he knew in London, found extra work, unpaid but very interesting, teaching grown men to read and write at a working men’s night school near Tavistock Square, which gave him some pleasure; he whistled occasionally. But there was something sad about him; the old Elijah Fortune was missing.
Expenses incurred by Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton remained unpaid and no memorial was placed upon his grave in Christchurch Cemetery.
37
IN WINTER, SCRUBBING our steps, I’d often hear boots walking before I could see them, with the mornings so foggy and cold. So I was scrubbing our steps one morning, God my hands were red and chilled, when I heard feet, then I saw feet – some boots stopped just by where I was scrubbing. I looked up.
‘Hello, Miss Mattie,’ said the boot owner. And guess what! it was that Mackie, that smuggler, or fisherman – the man from Mudeford who gave me rides on the back of his horse. I was so surprised that I laughed, kneeling there, which might have seemed a bit rude but he looked so out of place in Wakefield-street with his sea-cloak and that beard and wild hair like someone from history, different from most Londoners, and that deep slow rumbling voice with that different way of talking. He laughed too, at my amazed face I suppose.
‘However did you know where we lived?’ I asked him.
‘Can you believe it – even in Mudeford we read the newspapers.’
‘Well – well – that was months and months ago, whatever are you doing here?’
‘Business,’ he said. ‘You could say.’ (I supposed smuggling went on in London as well only we didn’t know about it; or he could fish in the Thames.)
‘Well – well – would you like to have a cup of tea with our Ma? We told her you were kind to us.’
‘I would,’ he said.
There is one thing that is hard having a thing wrong with your foot and that’s standing up from kneeling on our front steps. But Mackie knew of course, and helped me and picked up my bucket and my scrubbing brush.
He came down to our kitchen, Ma was making one of her big stews. She and Dodo had taken no time to have an arrangement – Dodo made her cakes really early in the morning, there was something lovely about getting dressed to the smell of cooking cakes wafting up the stairs. Billy had painted the table in their room red, we’d found some cosy red cushions and made her a comfortable chair by the window where even winter sun came in sometimes, if there was any, so when she’d finished her cakes she came back to the red room and read her newspapers and her novels. (I gave her Agnes Grey and The Woman in White.) And then Ma made stews and things later in the day. And by the way we were all getting fat in our family, because the cakes were so enticing.
So: I took Mackie in and introduced him to Ma – she offered the parlour first but he said no, then he’d feel he should take off his boots and Ma laughed and gave him some bread and jam and put a plate of Dodo’s cakes out, we all sat at our kitchen table and the fire in the stove made it cosy and warm.
‘Thank you for being kind to my children, Mackie,’ said Ma and he said, ‘I thought your children were kind too.’
‘How’s the fishing, Mackie?’ I asked (well, I couldn’t very well say, ‘How’s the smuggling?’).
He shook his head. ‘There was an almighty storm,’ he said. ‘One of those once in a lifetime storms and I was out at sea. I got back to the coast but my Annabelle didn’t make it.’ He shook his head again as if he still didn’t quite believe it. ‘I’d had her for years.’ (And I immediately imagined smuggling in storms and coastguards and wild adventures.)
‘Did you have to swim?’
‘I held on to part of the hull and one of the other fishermen found me, they’d come looking for me.’ We listened, fascinated. ‘I’ve got some work for a while on one of those ferries that ply from Blackfriars to Gravesend, we know one of the owners, he’s from Mudeford long ago.’ We all spread jam on our bread. ‘Where’s your lad?’
‘He’s gone to a funeral,’ said Ma.
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
‘Nah – he wor
ks for a funeral parlour,’ I said. ‘He got dismissed from his job as a clerk in the Houses of Parliament when our name got in the newspapers. He was so good at writing that he actually worked sometimes with Mr Gladstone – and now he’s blooming walking behind hearses.’
‘Is that right?’ said Mackie.
‘Billy might be home soon, it was a very early funeral today because the man was a burglar.’
‘Is there some logic in that?’ asked Mackie, but as if I had conjured a spirit, the front door banged and Billy in his long-tailed black jacket and with his fine top hat in his hand came down the stairs and into the kitchen. When he saw Mackie sitting at our kitchen table it was as if he had to look twice, to make sure of what he was seeing: there was the Mudeford man eating bread and jam with me and Ma.
‘Hello, Mr Stacey,’ said Mackie.
‘Hello, Mackie,’ said Billy, ‘call me Billy,’ and then he laughed, looking like our Pa. ‘Well – welcome to 13 Wakefield-street, but what are you doing here? Fishing in the Thames?’
‘Lost my boat in a storm. Looking to buy a new one, I’m working on a ferry till I decide what to do next.’
‘Aint they got boats in Christchurch?’ said Ma.
‘I felt like a visit to London,’ he said calmly, ‘just to have a look.’
‘He’s going to work on one of them ferries from Blackfriars,’ I said to Billy and I gave him a little look. Those ferries weren’t fishing boats, we knew that! They took people to Gravesend to get on huge steamers to cross the world but there might be smuggling chances there, for smugglers.
‘Well,’ said Billy. ‘I am sorry about your fishing boat. And glad to see you, excuse my funeral attire but I’ve got a couple of hours off till the next one so I’ll have some bread and jam.’ He carefully took off his beautiful jacket Ma had made and hung it behind the door and then he sat at the table and reached for the bread knife.
The Petticoat Men Page 27