The Petticoat Men

by Barbara Ewing

  Ernest showed Gerard the hallway, and the narrow staircase they used to sweep down in such excitement. I looked in on Dodo, she loved to have visitors, but she was asleep on the red sofa. Her clawed hands held a copy of the Illustrated London News to her breast. So I took them along to the back parlour: the old piano and the Joshua tree, both of them polished and shining, the way we always kept them still. Children’s voices and laughter echoed up from the downstairs kitchen but Ernest didn’t hear perhaps, or think about it. He looked about the parlour.

  ‘We twirled our gowns round here sometimes,’ he said to Gerard.

  ‘Where are you, my love?’ I’d left the front door open, Mackie would have seen the chair still there on the top step where I waited for him.

  ‘In the back parlour! We have visitors.’

  Mackie did get a surprise to see Ernest, and Ernest to see him. He still looked like a fisherman, or a smuggler, Mackie, even though he was now the captain in charge of all the Gravesend ferries; he still had the beard and the long hair. Like Joseph the carpenter, someone once said long ago.

  ‘This is Gerard, Ernest’s brother. This is Mackie.’

  They nodded to each other.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ said Ernest to Mackie. But not coy; angry rather for some reason.

  ‘What are you doing these days, lad?’

  ‘We went to America for a while, Gerard and I – Gerard had talent for the stage, and though I say so myself, I took New York by storm!’ From his pocket he took some old newspaper clippings. He looked at them carefully, handed one to me. ‘It’s a poem dedicated to my talents. “Ernest Byne”, that’s what I called myself.’

  ERNEST BYNE

  Your airs and graces make us all

  Believe you must be feminine;

  Your acts, though you’re no Harlequin,

  Do well deserve a column, Byne.

  ‘Columbine, you see!’ said Ernest modestly.

  ‘I do see,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you’ve had success, Ernest. And what about Freddie?’

  ‘Nan! Nan! Nan! Nan! Nan!’ Children ran in, followed by Mattie and Elijah.

  ‘Blooming heck! Ernest!’ Mattie was so surprised she stood stock still in the middle of the room. She automatically put out her hand to seven-year-old Dorothy (after Dodo), and stared at him and the boys stopped their running and calling for a moment and stared too. After a moment she said: ‘We’ve got no rooms left, Ernest!’ but she said it with a smile.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘we dont need rooms. This is my brother Gerard.’

  ‘Sit down, Ernest,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  He didn’t sit but he carefully took another of the old news clippings. It was to Mackie he spoke. ‘Last time I came here you accused me of not caring about old friends.’ He tossed his head just a little. ‘I didn’t mean to remember your words but I did, though I never thought to see you again. Anyway, it was said Lord Arthur escaped to France, or somewhere.’

  ‘He didn’t escape, lad. I helped put him in the coffin that the local man made.’

  The room was silent. The children still stared, all shy at the visitors, big eyes looking out from the safety of their mother.

  ‘Where’s Billy?’ said Ernest to me at last. ‘Did he get his job in the Parliament back? We were found not guilty of anything!’

  ‘He’s a teacher, Ernest. With a wife who’s a teacher also. He didn’t want his job back in the end.’

  ‘I got mine back,’ offered Elijah. ‘The second day I was back, Members were coming crying to me with their problems as if I’d never been away! So it was all right, after all.’

  And then we heard Billy and Emily talking together as they too came in the open front door.

  ‘In the parlour!’ I called.

  ‘Well! Ernest!’ said Billy, and he shook his hand and grinned at him, seemed really pleased to see Ernest after all this time. ‘This is Emily, my wife.’ ‘This is Gerard, my brother.’ And there was some rather embarrassed hand-shaking all round.

  ‘Go on, Ernest,’ I said. But I think I knew.

  He simply handed the newspaper clipping to Mackie. Mackie winked at Billy before he read it, for now Mackie could read to us as well as anyone. I had loved to see them with their heads together evening after evening and books on the table and now Mackie reads to me sometimes.

  But then the smile was gone. He read it out.

  FREDERICK WILLIAM PARK, an Englishman. Died Newark, NJ, 29 March. Several years ago he entered the dramatic profession under the name of Fred Fenton but he never rose above small business. He was at one time at Fifth-Avenue Theatre. His remains were sent to Rochester, NY, where he had made his residence for some years, and were interred in Mount Hope Cemetery 2 April.

  And then the room was quite silent as if some of us could hear kind Freddie laughing and rustling down the stairs in one of his satin gowns. I looked at Mattie’s face. I wished Tom was here also. She held Dorothy very tightly to her against her apron.

  ‘How did he die?’ said Mattie. ‘Were you with him, Ernest? Did he have friends in America? He was only your age, Billy.’

  Ernest shrugged. ‘He was ill,’ was all he said. And then he turned back to Mackie. ‘You once accused me,’ he said again, ‘of not caring for my friends and living a life without caring. You know nothing of our lives, or what we might die of, but I remembered what you said. I’ve been carrying it around with me for over a year, I kept it for Mattie really, but I’m glad you are here.’ And he tossed his head as if he didn’t care at all.

  ‘I’m sorry about your friend,’ said Mackie. ‘I remember what he said to us that day you came.’

  And I could see Freddie sitting there with his hands quite still on the piano as the notes died away and saying he was sorry for our trouble and I who never cry felt tears in my eyes of all things, for it was me who had been hard on them, not Mackie, not really, and our lives had been so changed.

  Into this silence Tom Dent walked, in his solicitor’s suit and with his shiny, open face. ‘Ernest Boulton!’ he said in amazement.

  ‘Tom Dent!’ said Ernest in surprise. ‘From Lewis and Lewis! Whatever are you doing here?’ but he saw my two grandsons run to their father. Tom looked across at Mattie, his dear shining face and she walked across to him at the doorway with Dorothy, stood close to him.

  ‘We met because of the trial, Ernest,’ she said simply.

  ‘Mr Park sent me here,’ said Tom. ‘He told me to ask for Mattie, and how glad I am that he did.’

  ‘Mr Park is dead in America,’ said Elijah.

  ‘Oh – oh I am so sorry,’ said Tom, shocked. ‘I’m so sorry, Ernest, I liked him very much. Did he get my letter? Telling him I was to marry Mattie. I thought he would be pleased, for he sent me here, to her, he sent me here on purpose, I’m so sure he did. I posted the letter to his father’s house in Isleworth.’

  ‘I dont know if he got it,’ said Ernest. ‘His father died soon after the trial. I – I didn’t see Freddie so much after that. He went to America before we did. And I hardly even saw his brother. He was never the same again, Harry – and he had been such good fun and’ – Ernest shrugged his still elegant shoulders – ‘fun! But – even though he was very fit and strong the treadmill in the prison damaged him too much. He died.’ Ernest shuddered slightly. ‘Freddie was – changed. We tried to work together again in America at first but—’ He shrugged again. ‘It was no good. He was too changed.’

  I was looking at Mattie. She stood surrounded by her family and listened grave and pale to the conversation.

  ‘Freddie didn’t, after all, have your resilience, Ernest,’ I said and I remembered the day in court when I had thought that. Ernest was the tough one after all. And I saw that it was me had to make the final peace at this strange meeting. ‘Ernest, I was very hard on you both that day you came to apologise to us. It wasn’t Mackie, not really. I was angry at what had happened to our lives, especially Billy losing his position and Mattie – for her to be called a cri
ppled whore because of you seemed unforgivable. But’ – I looked across at all the dear faces in the room – ‘other things happened after all.’

  ‘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.

  57

  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.

  58

  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 an
d 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.

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  For more information, click one of the links below:

  Acknowledgements

  Barbara Ewing

  An invitation from the publisher

  Acknowledgements

  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.