Fanny and Stella (16 page)

‘Yes I have,’ replied Smith defiantly. ‘I have had two or three half-pints of ale.’ But judging from Mr George Smith’s florid complexion and his ‘flippant and impertinent’ manner, which seemed to verge on insolence, it was clear to one and all that he had imbibed at least double that quantity, and perhaps a tot or two of brandy as well.

That same drink which made Mr George Smith so combative, so flippant and so impertinent in court also made him loquacious and incautious. He had a great deal to say about the circumstances of the investigation into the young men in women’s clothes, a great deal too much to say.

Smith claimed he went to see Inspector Thompson in a positive frenzy of public-spiritedness. But then he let slip a shocking admission.

‘I have been getting up evidence for the police in this little affair,’ he boasted. ‘They asked me to do so on Sunday, 24th April. I told Inspector Thompson what I knew about the defendants.’

Mr George Smith’s revelations caused rather more than a murmur or a ripple of surprise in Bow Street. They caused a minor sensation. After all, Miss Stella Boulton and Miss Fanny Park had been arrested only on 28th April, fully four days
after
Mr George Smith’s meeting with Inspector Thompson. And though he corrected himself later on – ‘I see now I have made a mistake as to the date’ – it was hard for anyone present in Bow Street Magistrates’ Court to believe that there was any conceivable confusion or ambiguity concerning Sunday 24th April, about which Mr George Smith had been so emphatic.

Not only that. Smith’s choice of words was particularly unfortunate. ‘Getting up evidence’ was a phrase commonly understood to mean contriving and fabricating evidence to incriminate the innocent. It sounded rather as if Mr George Smith had been toiling away, poking his reddened nose into dark corners, sniffing out odds and sods of information, putting two and two together and making ten.

‘I have been seen at the Treasury-office,’ he continued in a bragging sort of way. ‘I gave the same evidence as I gave to Thompson, with one or two corrects caused by thinking over the matter again –’ and here Mr George Smith abruptly paused, as he caught sight of Inspector Thompson’s darkening, thunderous face. ‘I – I mean additions,’ he added lamely.

‘I
may
be paid by Mr Thompson for attending this court,’ Mr George Smith added injudiciously. ‘He said I should be paid for my trouble in giving evidence and I shall not object. I should not object to a situation if the Treasury should give me one.’

Taken all in all, the testimony of Mr George Smith was disastrous for the prosecution. He was like a bull in a china shop, a drunken, blundering, crashing, self-serving oaf. He was vain, greedy and corruptible. He freely admitted to helping the police gather evidence against Fanny and Stella in return for money or for help with a situation, or both, and he appeared to give the impression that at least some, if not all, of the evidence against them was ‘got up’. With his various ‘additions’, ‘corrects’ and contradictions, it was clear to everyone that Mr George Smith was a liar, and a bad liar at that.

But out of this treacherous swamp of lies, certain truths began to emerge vaporously. The arrest of the two young men in women’s clothes was not as haphazard or accidental as the police and the prosecution liked to make out. Taken together with the evidence of Police Constable Charles Walker, who said he had been covertly watching the movements of Fanny and Stella in and out of Wakefield Street for a fortnight before their arrest, and the evidence of Detective Officer Chamberlain, who said he had been keeping his beady eye on them for a year past, the arrest of the young men in women’s clothes took on a very different complexion. Clearly, it had been planned and schemed over and thought about for some time in advance, and things were not quite so simple, not quite so cut and dried as first they might appear. 

12

A Victorian Romance

At length I am a bride! Lord Arthur was so pathetic, and appealed so earnestly to every sentiment of my love, that I could not do otherwise than entrust my happiness to his keeping, and agree to a speedy marriage. I need hardly tell you how the thoughts of becoming a bride fluttered my virgin heart, only to think of being naked in bed with a fine fellow like Arthur, who I only too truly guessed would be formidably armed with a Cupid’s spear commensurate with the very ominous bunch in his trousers, which always had a peculiar fascination to me. So rather more than a week ago we were made man and wife.

Letters from Laura and Eveline
, 1903

L 
ike all the best love affairs it had been as accidental as it had been unexpected.

For well over a year now, Louis Hurt had been Stella’s ardent and devoted swain, and she was only too well aware that her Mamma thoroughly approved of him. Indeed, Mrs Mary Ann Boulton was doing everything in her power to promote the match. Louis was constantly at the house, invited to luncheons and dinners, and frequently asked to spend weekends with the family. On one occasion he had stayed for an entire fortnight.

Stella liked Louis and sometimes she even fancied herself a little in love. He was predictable, gentlemanly, hard-working and, most importantly, utterly devoted to her. But these virtues were also his vices. Louis wanted her, but he wanted her on his own terms. His spaniel-like attentions could be irksome and he was possessive to the point of jealousy when it came to other beaux, which meant that Stella was very sensibly rather less than frank with him about her nocturnal escapades in the West End.

Truth be told, dear Louis was really rather dull and disapproving. He was not at all in favour of fun or frivolity, and he was very decidedly against dragging up. It was only on very rare occasions, on high days and holy days, that he could be persuaded to consent to accompany her to the theatre or to a ball or a party in her full drag glory.

And though he certainly had considerable charm of manner and equally considerable charm of person, his conversation could be dreary and repetitive. When he was not droning on about his work with the Post Office, he would talk about Alderwasley, about his ten brothers and his four sisters, until her poor head ached with trying to keep up and sort the one from the other. And he spoke rather too much about ‘Mother’, who sounded very formidable and dragon-like and not at all the sort of person that Stella felt she would like as her Mamma-in-law.

Louis was never in the right place at the right time. Whenever she did want him he would be away – in Wales or Wiltshire or Worcestershire or some other wild place – and when she did not want him, there he was, with his fine grey eyes which seemed to be imploring and beseeching her, and yet at the same time judging her, reproaching her, constraining her. So much so that Stella found herself looking forward to his long absences, and dreading his returns.

F 
or Mrs Mary Ann Boulton these were the happiest of happy days, and 1867 the happiest of happy years. Ever since Ernest, at her behest – nay, upon her insistence – had given up work in the January, he had blossomed forth. He seemed happier than he had ever been, and the dark, gloomy days of the London and County Bank were quickly forgotten. His health still gave her cause for concern. She still fretted and worried that he was consumptive (there was a decided propensity to consumption on Mr Boulton’s side), and he was often pale and exhausted.

But Ernest had such a gift for friendship, and she so much enjoyed meeting his friends and helping them in their little theatrical enterprises. There was Mr Frederick Park, Mr Martin Cumming, Mr Charles Pavitt, Mr Cecil Thomas, Mr Albert Wight and half a dozen others whose names she could not possibly be expected to remember. They were constantly at the house. Indeed, Frederick, or Fred, or even ‘Fanny’ as the others had called him in jest, was so much with them that he seemed almost like a brother to Ernest.

Boys would be boys, and there was much joshing and many colt-like high spirits. And why ever not? She had been highly amused when Ernest first told her about his new name. ‘He laughed and told me that he did go by the nickname of “Stella”.’ Stella. In Latin, star. Most pretty and most appropriate, and when the boys were gathered together in her home, sometimes she could not help herself from joining in the fun and addressing him as ‘Stella’ too, to hoots and whoops of delight.

They were all mad for the theatre, and constantly singing and playing and dressing up and putting on little private theatricals. She had never seen anything as comical as plump Mr Cumming playing a dowager duchess, and Fanny and Stella, as she now started to think of them, made extremely convincing ladies. Fanny, it was true, made a handsome – rather than a beautiful – woman, and looked older than his years, unlike her Stella, who utterly astonished and silenced all and sundry with his beauty, his conspicuous beauty, as a young woman.

Mrs Mary Ann Boulton was much in demand as prompter, stage manager and wardrobe mistress. ‘On one or two occasions I gave a dress,’ she said later. In truth, it was more like a dozen dresses when she added them all up in her mind, but who was counting? It was a little embarrassing for the boys to procure dresses for private theatricals, and yet so easy for her to help with buying bits and pieces, pinning and sewing, making and altering. Besides, she enjoyed being a part of it all. But she needed all her skills of diplomacy to smooth and soothe those little differences of opinion which seemed to flare up with alarming frequency. It was not for nothing, she had begun to realise, that acting was also called the histrionic art.

Then in the autumn of 1867 came an invitation to dinner at the home of Mr and Mrs Richards. The invitation was not especially unusual or unexpected. Mr Richards was a stockbroker, a friend of Mr Boulton’s and connected to him by way of business. But when Mrs Richards had whispered so confidentially to Mrs Boulton that a personage, none other than Lord Arthur Clinton, the Honourable Member for Newark, and son (but not heir) to His Grace, the late Duke of Newcastle, was attending she had got herself into one of her states and dressed herself with the utmost ceremony for the occasion, almost as if she were going to be presented at court.

For some reason – which Stella could not now recall – neither her Papa nor Gerard were able to go with them to the Richards’s. It was to be just Mamma and herself. Of course, she was only too well aware that she would be expected to sing for her supper. But she was quite happy to do so.

Stella was, she freely admitted, more than a little intrigued at the prospect of meeting Lord Arthur. As far as she was aware, she had never met a real Lord before, and it would be interesting to do so. She had no idea of what to expect. He might be ninety years old and deaf as a post. Or, like so many of the men she met, he might want to talk about huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ all night, and she would have to sit there and politely try to stifle her yawns.

Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton could not be described as handsome in any conventional sense. He was of the middle height, slightly built and inclined to stoop. He wore a small, neat moustache and long side-whiskers. The top of his head was already as bald as an egg, a fact he cleverly disguised by combing over the hair from one side of his head to the other and plastering it down with plenty of Rowland’s Macassar Oil, a remarkable product guaranteed, it was said, to ‘nourish and preserve the hair, and make it grow thickly on all bald patches’.

Lord Arthur seemed older and wiser than his years. There were dark shadows under his eyes, and his lips were full and red, making a strange and not unpleasing contrast with the pallor of his complexion. There was something about him that caught Stella’s attention from the moment they were introduced, a certain gleam in his eyes, a certain vigour in his handshake, a certain smile, a certain intense gaze, a certain
je ne sais quoi
, as Fanny would have it with her cheap French phrases.

Stella blushed and smiled, and smiled and blushed, and was suitably modest when she felt that modesty was called for, and suitably bold when she needed to be bold. Sometimes she would look up and catch him gazing at her appreciatively and would find herself colouring under the penetrating scrutiny of his dark eyes.

Lord Arthur made a special effort to put her at her ease. He begged her to call him Arthur, asking her for her opinion and asking her questions about herself before hastening everybody into the drawing room to hear, he said with a smile that melted her heart, young Mr Boulton sing. And so Stella had sung the hauntingly sad ‘Fading Away’, and sung it with such sweetness and with so much intensity that she felt the first prickings of a tear or two in her large and very beautiful blue-violet eyes. 

Rose of the garden,

Blushing and gay,

E’en as we pluck thee,

Fading away!

Beams of the morning,

Promise of day,

While we are gazing,

Fading away! 

As she took her bow, which was really more of a curtsey, she looked over to Lord Arthur and thought she saw the glint and glimmer of an answering tear in his eyes. And then she was certain.

Her friendship with Lord Arthur had, to use her Mamma’s phrase, very quickly ‘ripened into intimacy’. Arthur, as she must now learn to call him, had asked her Mamma that very night if he might call upon them in Dulwich, and naturally Mamma was in transports of delight at the prospect, though Dulwich was, of course, just another of Mamma’s pretty fictions, as their house was firmly within the rather less genteel borders of Peckham Rye.