Fanny and Stella

by Neil McKenna

  Mrs Mary Ann Boulton asked Ernest to most politely decline Lord Arthur’s offer. ‘My answer to my son when he told me of having received the letter was: “Then write and tell Lord Arthur that it would not do for you to name such a thing to your Mother or she would be offended.” Those were my words,’ Mrs Mary Ann Boulton declared. ‘Everything was provided.’

  But matters had not ended there.

  ‘When I was dressing for the evening on my son’s birthday, two persons arrived from Buck’s and said they had been desired by Lord Clinton to provide a supper and my words were these: “I feel sure that Lord Arthur means this kindly but it is a mistake.”’

  Lord Arthur wrote her a very pretty letter of apology: ‘I fear I offended and caused annoyance to you on Friday last – if so pray let me offer my sincerest apologies &c &c.’ And so the matter was forgotten, and the perfectly smooth surface of their relations polished back to full lustre. When she reflected upon the incident, there was, she concluded, more to delight than to dismay. It had all sprung from Lord Arthur’s ‘most sincere regard’ for Ernest, from an ebullition, from an excess, of those manly feelings of affection towards her darling boy.

  And really, what on earth could be wrong with that?

  13

  Lord Arthur’s Wife

  MARRY! If you are for pleasure, marry; if you prize rosy health, marry; and even if money be your object, marry. A good wife is Heaven’s last, best gift to man, his angel and minister of graces innumerable, his gem of many virtues, his casket of jewels. Her voice, the sweetest music; her smiles, his brightest day; her kiss, the guardian of his safety, the balsam of his life; her industry, his surest wealth; her economy, his safest steward; her lips, his faithful councillors; her bosom, the softest pillow of his cares; and her prayers, the ablest advocates of Heaven’s blessings on his head.

  The Ladies’ Treasury, March 1867

  F anny could not give two hoots for the law, for Chelmsford, or for the firm of Gepp and Sons. But her allowance from Papa depended on her sticking her articles out. Fortunately Mr Gepp Senior was not a harsh taskmaster. Indeed, it sometimes struck her rather forcibly that Mr Gepp Senior was as eager to see the back of her as she was to see the back of him. Fanny’s absences from the firm multiplied. Her recent and severe bout of scarlet fever had meant blessed months away from Gepp and Sons, and even then she was still as weak as a kitten and would often feel unwell and unable to face her duties. Weekends were stretched and stretched until they almost joined up. Then there were holidays to be taken, and of course rehearsals. Endless rehearsals. Mr Gepp rarely questioned her absences, and her pleas to be excused – so she could rehearse or perform or have a costume fitted for such worthy causes as the Benefit for the Infirmary – were greeted with a combination of bewilderment, resignation and, truth be told, sighs of relief.

  Fanny ended up spending rather more time in London than she did in Chelmsford. She was in London almost every weekend, and when Stella fell in love with Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton and they moved into Mrs Peck’s establishment in Southampton Street, Fanny was a regular and welcome visitor. She slept in the little dressing room which opened off Stella and Arthur’s bedroom. It was not an entirely satisfactory solution from either of their points of view. It was perfectly understandable that a young married couple in the first flush of passion needed privacy, and Fanny had no perverse wish to listen to Stella squealing like a stuck pig every time she brought a steamer home or Arthur chose to exercise his conjugal rights. It was all most unladylike.

  Equally, the same problems arose on those rather less frequent occasions when Fanny wished to entertain a gentleman overnight, or just for an hour or two. Indeed, there were times when Mrs Peck’s first-floor front bore a passable resemblance to a cheap knocking shop, and come the morning Fanny was never sure who she would find there in various and interesting states of déshabille and disarray, and it would require all her reserves of skill and cunning to smuggle out these waifs and strays without either Sharp-eyed Maria or Slow Eliza from Norfolk spotting them.

  There were other difficulties to contend with. As the older, unmarried and – she was not ashamed to admit it – plainer sister, living with her quite exceptionally beautiful younger sister and her sister’s aristocratic husband in the cramped surroundings of Mrs Peck’s first-floor front, Fanny sometimes felt that she was playing gooseberry to Stella and Arthur, that she was in the way, that she was under their feet. But when she voiced these nagging concerns, Stella would fly into a fit of hysterics and declare that she could not, she would not, do without her dearest Fanny; that they could never, would never, be parted.

  T here was much muttering and much speculation in the servants’ hall of 36 Southampton Street about the new tenants on the drawing-room floor. By common consent, it was felt the he was all right. At least he was polite and nearly always said please and thank you and the like. And even if he didn’t have two farthings to rub together, it was still something to have a real Lord, the son of a Duke, in the house after so many to-ings and fro-ings of plain and ordinary Misters.

  But young Mr Boulton was another kettle of fish altogether. He might be called Mr Boulton, but everyone was convinced that he was, in truth, a she.

  Secretly, Eliza Clark rather liked Mr or Miss Boulton. He was only a year or two older than herself and, if he was in the mood, he would chat to her in a friendly, interested sort of a way and ask her questions about her life in Norfolk before she came to London; about her previous service; and about her sweethearts. Eliza could always tell straight away what sort of mood he was in. Some mornings he would smile and bustle about and sometimes even give her a hand with the dusting or the bed-making. On other days he would sit silently, scowling, lost in his own angry thoughts, furiously smoking thin cigarettes or cigars.

  ‘I thought Boulton was a female all the time he was there,’ Eliza said later. It was the small things that convinced her, like the fact that he (or she) ‘used powder to her face’ and sang very prettily with ‘a womanish voice’.

  One thing she did puzzle over was the dresses that Mr Boulton and Mr Park wore when they went out in all their finery in the evening. They were not the sort of dresses that respectable ladies wore. Quite the opposite. ‘I have been to the Theatre and have seen Ladies dressed as Boulton and Park were,’ was the only way she could blushingly phrase it in court; she could not bring herself to speak the word ‘whore’ in front of gentlemen. ‘When they went out dressed as Ladies, Boulton wore white muslin, and Park, black silk, made low, and like ladies wear.’

  ‘I used to accuse him of being a female,’ Eliza said. As the weeks went by, she had become quite bold, and as she bottomed out the rooms every morning, she used to think of a dozen different ways of getting him to admit that he was in truth a she. It was their little bit of fun. But she could never get a straight answer. ‘He used to pass it off as a joke.’

  Maria Duffin, by contrast, was a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, inquisitive, clever sort of a girl, a cockney girl who had seen far more of the world than was strictly good for her, and quite the opposite of Slow Eliza. ‘I never could satisfy myself whether Boulton was a man or a woman,’ Maria said. And it was true. Sometimes she was convinced that he was a woman in disguise. At other times she was not so sure, and she sometimes suspected that he was a man, a man who dressed up as a woman.

  ‘Boulton generally dressed as a Lady,’ Maria said. In the mornings he would wear a loose flowing gown or wrapper, the kind of gown, she was reliably informed, that gay ladies wore to their ‘work’ inside houses of ill-repute. ‘When he went out with Lord Arthur in an evening he always dressed in women’s clothes. I have seen him only once or twice dressed in gentlemen’s clothes.’

  And then there was Mr Park, Boulton’s particular friend, who used to come at the weekends, regular as clockwork, and stay two or three nights. Here was more perplexity, more bewilderment, more confusion. What exactly was Mr Park? Was he a man or a woman? Maria was not sure. Sometimes he would be dr
essed as a man and sometimes as a woman.

  Certainly, the sleeping arrangements had struck Maria as decidedly odd. ‘When Boulton was there he slept in the same room, and in the same bed with Lord Arthur Clinton,’ she said, frowning at the memory. ‘There was a small dressing room leading out of Lord Arthur’s bedroom. There was a bed in that room, and Park slept in that bed. The entrance to the dressing room was only through Lord Arthur’s bedroom. There was no other door to the dressing room. When Park was away, Boulton did not occupy that bed, but continued to sleep with Lord Arthur Clinton.’

  Maria Duffin knew this because it was her job to take the hot water into the bedroom every morning. Of course she would give a cursory knock and, with barely a second’s pause, enter the bedchamber. It was a game. She wanted to catch them out, she wanted to catch them at it, to find out once and for all whether Boulton was a man or a woman or some sort of in-between. And there they would be, huddled together, half-asleep and half-entwined, and quickly covering themselves over with the bedclothes.

  It was she who first saw the card with ‘Lady Arthur Clinton’ engraved upon it. It was true that at the time she was poking and prying about the room while Lord Arthur and Boulton were absent – she could not remember exactly when – but most likely when they were away in Scarborough in the October. When she pointed it out to Eliza, she of course had taken it as proof positive of what the household had suspected all along: that Boulton was a lady dressed up as a man.

  But still Maria’s doubts persisted. There was something not quite right, something that did not fit. But she could not, for the life of her, put her finger on what it was. One morning, as she was making the beds, Maria decided to come right out and ask him.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said, ‘but I really think you are a man.’

  Boulton had looked at her a little oddly and then laughed gaily.

  ‘I am Lady Clinton’, Stella had said grandly, ‘– Lord Arthur’s wife,’ laying particular stress on the word ‘wife’. Then she waggled the fingers of her left hand in front of Maria’s face and invited her to look at her wedding ring and keeper. Maria had looked, and she knew that that should have settled matters. But she was still left feeling uneasy and confused. Despite Lady Clinton’s dramatic revelation, she was still all at sea, still uncertain, and had a feeling deep down that Lady Clinton was not a Lady at all. Turning it over and over in her mind, she felt very uncomfortable. She would take her mother’s advice and leave this house. Perhaps Mr Lindley in Catherine Street would take her back.

  F anny and Stella had sworn that they would never let Arthur come between them, but of course he did. It had all begun innocently enough and with the best of intentions. Fanny was used to listening to both sides of the story. It seemed to help both Stella and Arthur to have a third party, a confidential friend, a sister, a sister-in-law, someone to whom they could pour out their troubles, who would do her best to try to smooth out their differences. And what troubles and what differences! There were a thousand and one irritations, a thousand and one little altercations peppering every day. To be quite candid, Stella was highly strung. At her worst, she was a hissing, spitting Virago, and there were raised voices, slammed doors and flouncings-out at least half a dozen times a day.

  If she was not spitting venom, Stella would sit with a darkening face in a darkened room, gazing into nothingness, contemplating the unfathomable abyss of her own mind. She was not getting on with Arthur. She wondered if they had ever got on. And more importantly, she questioned whether they ever would get on and whether it had been doomed before it had even begun.

  She was very much afraid that Arthur had misled her, if not deceived her. His courtship had been assiduous. He had flattered her and attended her and bombarded her with expensive trifles and bijouterie. He had made out that he was a man of means, prepared to take her to wife and keep her in a style befitting Stella, Lady Clinton.

  But she had been sold a pup – or rather, a puppy. Arthur was a declared bankrupt. He was a wastrel, a feckless profligate drowning in an ocean of debt so vast and so deep that it was improbable, if not impossible, that he would ever escape. And still his debts mounted. Still he spent money like water. Still he borrowed. They were sinking lower and lower, and the bitter irony of it all was that it was she who had to venture forth nightly and sell her arse to passing trade to put food on the table and pay the rent. She should have listened to and profited from those endless and tedious lessons about the importance of money that dear, dull Louis Hurt had tried to drum into her.

  O f course, if Stella had bothered to ask Fanny for her opinion before rushing headlong into matrimony, Fanny could and would have told her that marriage was not a state to be entered into unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly, as she believed the Form of the Sodomisation of Matrimony ran, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly and soberly. (On this last point, Fanny could testify that Stella was certainly not sober before her marriage to Arthur, and had rarely been sober since. Not that she was judging her. If Fanny had a sovereign for every time she herself had fallen down dead drunk, she would be a rich woman.) But Stella had been so determined to have Arthur’s ring on her finger that she was deaf, dumb and blind to all advice and sisterly counsel.

  Stella was wilful, vain, moody, petulant and quarrelsome. At the same time she was loyal, brave, exciting and beautiful. Stella’s beauty was her greatest gift and her greatest curse. She was a perfect beauty, and that meant she could get more or less whatever she wanted simply by snapping her fingers or fluttering her eyelashes.

  In Fanny’s considered opinion, Stella’s account of Arthur’s courtship was partial and jaundiced. It was certainly true that Arthur had laid siege to her, but only because she had wanted him to lay siege to her. From the moment she first met Arthur, Stella had set her cap at him. Her ambition knew no bounds. She wanted to be Stella, Lady Clinton. And more. If Fate so decreed that his two older brothers were to die suddenly and without issue, Arthur would be Duke of Newcastle and she his beautiful Duchess, and then the whole world would have to bow and scrape and curtsey to her. She had visions of living at Clumber, or in the grand town house in Pall Mall, and driving in the park in an open carriage emblazoned with her personal cipher.

  But, upon reflection, Arthur was a far from ideal husband for Stella. Stella was too volatile, too explosive. She needed a strong man, a man who would stand for no nonsense, a man with a firm hand who would give her a good slap (as Fanny herself had had to do upon occasion) when she got out of control. Stella was utterly oblivious to Arthur’s finer qualities: to his kindness and his thoughtfulness, to his loyalty and his devotion. It was true that Arthur had not been quite honest with Stella; true that he was mired in the most terrible debt; true that he lacked direction and drive; but Stella’s withering contempt, her constant carpings and criticisms had reduced him and diminished him. She had humiliated and emasculated him. And – Fanny asked herself with a rhetorical flourish – what had it profited her?

  Arthur, it was clear, needed the love and support of a good woman. He needed a wife who would encourage him, a wife who could organise him, a wife who could direct him. A wife who was a helpmeet to her husband; a quiet, good, kind wife, but a wife nonetheless who could stand beside her husband as an equal; a wife who could mingle effortlessly with his family and friends, at ease in the drawing rooms of London and at home in the country. A knuckling-down sort of wife, unafraid of hard work and hard times. A wife, in short, like the kind of wife that Fanny thought she would make. There. She had dared to think it. She had dared to whisper it. And once thought, once whispered, she could not unthink it, she could not unwhisper it.

  Fanny, Lady Clinton. It had, she thought, a certain ring about it. Really, quite a definite ring about it.

  14

  The Toast of the Town

  Oh! the dresses, neat, eccentric,

  Individualised and queer;

  Oh! the dresses various coloured,

  As the flowers that deck the year;

/>   Oh! the dresses, breezy, airy,

  Most expansive, startling, grand;

  Oh! the dresses, quite peculiar,

  As the fossils on the strand.

  ‘Cantab’, ‘The Spa at Scarborough:

  A Reminiscence’, 1864

  T he Scarborough Gazette and Weekly List of Visitors (founder, publisher and proprietor: Mr Solomon Wilkinson Theakston) was the most venerable and the most select of the dozen or so newspapers that served the genteel resort and spa of Scarborough.

  Those with a curiosity to discover what was going on in the wider world – in, for instance, the North Riding of Yorkshire; in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland; in Continental Europe; or in far-flung countries sweltering under scorching suns – did not turn to the Scarborough Gazette and Weekly List of Visitors. Nor did those who wished to read of war and revolution, of famine and pestilence, of great adventures and daring deeds, give themselves the bother of consulting the Scarborough Gazette and Weekly List of Visitors. And those Mr Gradgrinds from the world of manufacturing, trade and commerce who needed hard facts and adamantine figures as mental grist for their dark Satanic mills were emphatically not subscribers to the Scarborough Gazette and Weekly List of Visitors.

  The Gazette (the abbreviation used by all but its most particular readers) held no truck with such worldly events. News was an unwelcome and unpleasant intrusion into its elegant and serene pages. It had been published, week in and week out, since 1845, which was the very year that the railway came to Scarborough and the very year that the town’s first built-for-purpose hotel – the Crown Spa Hotel – opened for business.