Fanny and Stella (21 page)

‘I cannot echo your wish that I should live to be a hundred,’ Fanny continued archly, in reply to Arthur’s earnestly expressed hopes, ‘though I should like to live to a green old age – green! did I say?
Oh
Ciel!
, the amount of paint that will be required to hide that very unbecoming tint!

‘My “campish” undertakings are not at present meeting with the success which they deserve,’ she confided, ‘whatever I do seems to get me into hot water somewhere but
n’importe
, what’s the odds so long as you’re happy? Once more with many many thanks, believe me, Your affectionate Sister-in-law, Fanny Winifred Park.’

‘What’s the odds so long as you’re happy?’ It was a joyous sentiment, and so typical of Fanny. It was an attitude of mind in contrast, in marked contrast, Arthur could not but help thinking, to the sullen moods and gloomy introspections of Stella. Fanny lived for the moment. She was careless of tomorrow. If she got into hot water, as she called it, she would laugh gaily and simply shrug it off. It was, Arthur reflected, a very appealing quality, a very attractive quality.

‘Is the handle of my umbrella mended yet?’ Fanny jovially enquired. ‘If so, I wish you would kindly send it to me, as the weather has turned so showery that I can’t go out without a dread of my back hair coming out of curl. Let me hear from you at any time,’ she concluded. ‘I am always glad to do so, Ever yr affectionate Fanny.’

‘Ever yr affectionate Fanny.’ These words stayed with him. To be sure, they were innocent and innocuous enough, but for reasons he could not immediately fathom, the words took root in his mind and he was surprised to feel a curious lightness in his heart when he thought of them, as if Fanny’s joyous spirit had in some mysterious fashion entered into his soul.

16

The Dragon of Davies Street

Ann Empson, a lady of determined appearance, who eyed the prisoners with no friendly aspect.

Reynolds’s Newspaper
, 5th June 1870

M 
iss Ann Empson was a lady of singular, not to say startling, appearance. She was tall and spare and grey, and she scowled a great deal. And when she was not scowling, her face wore a fell and determined expression, as if life were a battle that must be fought to the bitterest of bitter ends.

Miss Ann Empson was conspicuously unmarried, and it was clear from the very severe and resolute tone with which she declared her state of spinsterhood in court that she had never contemplated matrimony and never would, which came as something of a relief to London’s eligible bachelors as Miss Empson was not an easy person. Not at all an easy person.

Miss Ann Empson maintained a small establishment at number 46 Davies Street, in the fashionable environs of Bond Street, where she condescended to let lodgings – chambers, as she grandly termed them – to suitable single gentlemen with an irreproachable character. But such suitable single gentlemen rarely stayed for long after they discovered, in very short order, that Miss Ann Empson was a fire-breathing Dragon, clearly descended from a long and distinguished line of fire-breathing Dragons.

There were long lists of rules and regulations, strictly enforced and invigilated by the indefatigable Miss Empson herself, who policed and patrolled her kingdom with admirable – if fearsome – zeal. Infringements and infractions rarely, if ever, escaped detection, and were invariably punished by a vigorous tongue-lashing or by summary expulsion from her kingdom, and very often by both.

Miss Ann Empson constantly seethed and was always out of temper. If it was not this, it was that. If it was not one thing, it was another. If it was not some
thing
, then it was some
one
giving her cause for complaint. She fumed and smouldered and burned with perpetual indignation and rage at the world, so much so that there were those who swore they detected a faint bituminous odour about her, though it was more likely that these sulphurous exhalations were a consequence of the numerous nips of brandy she felt it necessary to imbibe throughout the day to help settle her stomach.

M 
iss Ann Empson was still seething, still fuming, even after all this time. It was disgusting. There was no other word for it. She felt physically sick every time she thought about it. Under her roof. In her bed. (Not
her
bed, exactly, but near enough.)

It had all begun so well. Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Blood, after all, was Blood, and having little or none of that commodity coursing in her own veins, Miss Empson was all the more eager to have a resident gentleman of irreproachable Bloodstock. Lord Arthur was a Lord, the son of the late Duke of Newcastle, no less, and an Honourable Member to boot.

What with it being so close to Christmas, Miss Empson had been resigned to not getting a let for the drawing-room floor until after the festive season had passed. And then Lord Arthur had turned up out of the blue and charmed and delighted her so much that she was putty – yes,
putty
– in his hands. Indeed, so charming and so delightful had he been that she had waived her usual month’s deposit, and even advanced him the not inconsiderable sum of ten golden sovereigns on a note of hand. In retrospect, she thought that she must have taken temporary leave of her senses. Either that, or Lord Arthur had unusual powers of Mesmerism which he had exercised in order to make her agree to things that went so very much against the grain.

Matters had not stopped there. Incredibly, given her strict and sacred injunctions against overnight visitors in any shape or form, Miss Empson found herself weakly agreeing to allow Lord Arthur’s country cousin, a Mr Ernest Boulton, to stay in Davies Street on those occasions when he was up in town, and she was even persuaded to buy – yes,
buy
– a single bed for that express purpose. As she said, she was putty in his hands.
Putty
.

Things started to go wrong almost immediately. Lord Arthur moved in, and within a day she had smelt a rat. Or rather, two rats, in the form of the two young men – though that was rather a loose description – who arrived very shortly after him. One of them was Mr Boulton, the country cousin, the other a Mr Park – but she could not remember which was which, which was not at all surprising as they seemed to be two peas from more or less the same pod. All she could say with any certainty was that one was dark and one was fair, and that one was pretty and the other plain.

T 
he manner of Miss Ann Empson’s giving evidence at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court was refreshingly bracing.

‘Are you married?’ Mr Straight, for the defence, gently enquired of her after she was sworn.

‘Certainly not!’ she replied with a snort of contempt. ‘I am a
single
woman,’ she said, glaring at the assembled multitude, daring any or all to contradict her.

It was clear from her abrasive tone that Miss Empson was angry and aggrieved and spoiling for a fight.

Mr Straight tried another tack. ‘Have you been drinking this morning?’ he asked.

It was a reasonable enough question. The unhealthy pallor that so many fashionable young ladies struggled to achieve by dint of draughts of strong vinegar and copious quantities of ingested chalk was emphatically not exhibited by Miss Ann Empson. She spurned such fashionable conceits and instead defiantly sported a ruddy and flushed complexion entirely congruent with numerous nips of brandy. There was something, too, about the way she slurred certain words, about the gleam and the glaze of her eyes, and about the fixity of her fell expression, which suggested she had not, for the time being at least, taken the Pledge.

‘Have you been drinking this morning?’ Mr Straight asked again.

‘I could not speak so well as I do if I had,’ Miss Empson replied combatively. There was loud laughter. For some reason, the spectators crammed into Bow Street appeared to find Miss Empson funny, and she had barely to open her mouth before guffaws of laughter broke out. Miss Empson was simultaneously offended and pleased by the laughter and played up to it wonderfully.

‘You had better answer the question,’ Mr Flowers the magistrate sternly interjected.

‘Have you been to a public house to-day?’ demanded Mr Straight.

‘On my oath I have not,’ answered Miss Empson, swaying slightly. ‘I have not had any drink at home. A policeman brought me here in a cab, but I don’t know who it was.’

There was much more in the same vein, but slowly, with much difficulty, Mr Straight got down to the meat and drink of Miss Ann Empson’s evidence. Lord Arthur Clinton had lodged with her for a fortnight before she was obliged to evict him. Shortly after he had taken possession of his rooms, his young cousin from the country had turned up and enjoyed ‘a mutton chop and bitter beer at Lord Arthur’s expense’ and had stayed that night. So far, so good.

Miss Empson rarely hesitated when it came to exercising her ancient rights and privileges as a landlady and regularly entered her tenants’ apartments for a good snoop around while they were out. So on the morning after his country cousin had spent the night, Miss Empson found herself in Lord Arthur’s bedroom feeling puzzled and perplexed.

‘I was surprised,’ she said, ‘to see that the new bed I had bought had not been slept in.’ Had Lord Arthur’s cousin changed his mind and returned to the country? It was possible. But a thorough examination of the bedding suggested that the country cousin had ‘slept with Lord Arthur in the same bed’, which raised some unpleasant, some very unpleasant, speculations in her mind.

A night or two later, while on one of her regular patrols, Miss Empson had seen a woman coming out of Lord Arthur’s rooms, which was strictly forbidden under the draconian laws of the establishment.

‘I saw Lord Arthur go on tiptoe to let her out,’ she said. ‘I saw him through the kitchen stairs letting a lady out, as I considered.

‘I complained to Lord Arthur that he had brought a woman to my house. He said it was a man. Lord Arthur assured me it was a man. He represented him as his cousin.’ But Miss Empson was quite certain of what she had seen. There was no two ways about it. It was a woman.

‘I complained of it as an abuse of my latch-key,’ Miss Empson declared indignantly, much to the amusement of the public gallery. But, shocking and disgusting as the presence of this woman in her house was, at least it put paid to those earlier and very unpleasant speculations.

A day or so later, she had caught the two young men, Mr Boulton and Mr Park, in the very act of moving in, which again was strictly forbidden. This sort of cheap trick might pass unnoticed in certain common lodging houses, but it would not do in Davies Street. It would not do at all. There they were, bold as brass, in Lord Arthur’s rooms with their boxes just brought up and about to be unpacked. Miss Empson confronted them.

‘I said to them, “You have brought your boxes up, and I will make you take them down.” I did so. One of them turned round and said, “I wish never to see your house again,” and I replied “I’ll take good care you don’t.”

‘He said, “Why not?” and I replied, “Because I let the rooms to Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton.”’

‘I’m not having this,’ she told them in no uncertain terms. ‘I
will
not have it. I
shall
not have it.’

Miss Empson was ruddy with the glow of this remembered triumph and glared out defiantly at the courtroom, armed and ready to repel all boarders, doubters and naysayers.

Not long after this, Miss Empson mounted an expedition deep into the heart of Lord Arthur’s territory. No stone was to be left unturned, no drawer unopened, no letter unread. She went through everything with a fine-tooth comb. She pried and probed and poked about her, and she was rewarded, if that was the right word, by the discovery of an entire wardrobe of ‘lady’s wearing apparel: bracelets, necklets, chignons and the like, silk dresses, shawls and everything that ladies wear, kid boots and more’. There were pots of paint and rouge and powder, and an assortment of other feminine necessities, the particulars of which she felt it indecorous to enter into.

Miss Empson put two and two together. It dawned upon her that when Lord Arthur said that the woman he had surreptitiously let out was a man, he was almost certainly telling the truth. Miss Empson was shocked and revolted. Under her roof, in her bed. If that was their pretty game then they were out, out on their ears, that very night. Of one thing she was sure. She would need a nip or two of brandy – and probably several nips – before her stomach could be settled that night.

In Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, Miss Empson was confused. Boulton and Park were there in the dock and she recognised them both as the two young men she had turned out. One was dark and one was fair. One was plain and one was pretty (though not so pretty now, she noticed with satisfaction). But which was Boulton and which was Park? Lord Arthur had told her that his country cousin was called Boulton, but surely this could not be so. In court, Boulton had been identified as the dark, pretty one, but she was as sure as sixpence that the young man who had spent the night in Lord Arthur’s bed, the young man whom she had seen dressed as a woman, was the plain, fair one. She pointed to him in the dock.