The Petticoat Men (16 page)

When we got home I told Billy that they’d gone back to the House of Detention and a letter had said that Ernest was
Lais and Antinous in one
and that it made a funny feeling in the court and what did it mean?

‘They’re getting a bit literary down there at Bow-street,’ said Billy in that droll voice, like Ma. ‘Lais and Antinous were both famous lovers in history. Antinous was a man and Lais was a woman. Lais was loved by many men.’ He looked at me. ‘Antinous was loved by men also.’

And Ma said, surprising us the way she does so often: ‘And if I remember rightly, both of them died in mysterious circumstances.’

14

In Paris
,
Susan Opdebeck (once the young and beautiful putative Duchess of Newcastle, now banned from English society and married to – English society found it hard to forgive this also – a Belgian courier) stared with incomprehension at the telegraph message from her daughter, also named Susan. It required her to keep Arthur with her at all cost, should he turn up, because he was in extreme trouble should he be found in London. She shrugged in exasperation.

Her son Arthur was not with her.

None of her five children was with her.

Her children were a disappointment to her. They were all somehow flighty; bereft of money, unable to support her in her old age (she was fifty-six, but still beautiful). She had thought that at least, when Linky became the sixth Duke of Newcastle on his father’s death, proper allowance would be made for her at last. But he was too busy selfishly gambling: a disappointment indeed.

A disappointment, as was her first husband, Henry, Lord Lincoln, who became later – without her at his side – the noble, honourable fifth Duke of Newcastle. But only she knew what that paragon was
really
like: upright, religious, tedious, selfishly sexually demanding. Serious. Boring. No fun. Like all those religious hypocrites among his friends.

A disappointment, as was her lover Lord Walpole, who had deserted her after they had run away to Italy together over twenty years ago, and she had borne him a son. They had put it about that the baby, Horatio, had died but she knew perfectly well that he lived in Italy still, in rude health, having been educated by nuns in a convent there.

A disappointment, as were her loving, extremely indulgent parents who had both died, unbelievably leaving her as short of money as ever, and no one with the grace to at least bring to Paris her mother’s furs.

And for her cruel fate she
still
blamed the long-ago actions of Mr William Gladstone, her husband’s best friend, who had, in their youth – she was well aware – been a little in love with her himself (and had written her dreadful poetry).

She had run away several times before: that is, before the last, fatal adventure. Her tedious husband had always taken her back after her escapades, as long as she wept many tears and grovelled with sufficient repentance (she had known the routine by heart): ‘
Henry, dearest Henry, my darling, forgive me, forgive your penitent wife. How could I have been so stupid, I believe I must have been ill, I am losing my mind, I believe I shall die, Henry,
’
tears pouring down her face as she clasped his knees
.
‘
You are the only man for me, you, Henry darling, I will be good, I promise you I will be good, you know, my darling, how very good I can be, I kiss your feet and ask your forgiveness, feel my heart, Henry, feel it, feel how it beats so fast
’ (and she would at this point take his hand and place it upon her heaving bosom). ‘
I know I will die if you do not forgive me
,’
and she would cling to him and her gown would somehow fall and she would once again endure his gross and greedy (and unfulfilling to Lady Susan, who knew very well how fulfilling sexual encounters could be) sexual appetites. After which, there she would be again, on her husband’s arm, part of British nobility and society, curtseying to the Queen. And, of course, soon pregnant once more: Linky, Eddy, Susy, Arty, Alby.

And to this day she knew still that if the sanctimonious William Gladstone had not come running after her that last time, bringing God and Duty, she could have left the illegitimate Horatio abroad, gone back to England and performed the usual grovelling apology, Henry would have forgiven her surely, and she would have become the Duchess of Newcastle. With nobody any the wiser.

Her family background was immaculate: daughter of the Duke of Hamilton, no less. Queen Victoria was fond of her children; why, her daughter, also called Susan, had been bridesmaid at the wedding of the Princess Victoria
after
the scandal!
Of course I could have returned.
Susan Opdebeck could never believe that it was actually her dreary husband, the fifth Duke of Newcastle, of whom Queen Victoria was so very fond and, therefore, the children. When Susan Opdebeck had heard that Queen Victoria had actually travelled from the Palace and visited him on his deathbed, she was amazed.

But the interfering, moralising, tedious, holy Mr William Gladstone had come charging across the Channel on a steamer as if it were a white stallion, to find her and spy on her; to take the news of her condition back to England; and later to have the effrontery and hypocrisy to say that God had led him to her, eight months with child to another man, on the banks of Lake Como.

As she thought of the past,
Lady
Susan (no one could take her own family title from her) Opdebeck sipped laudanum, which she had had to have in large doses for many years on account of her fragile nerves. For if things did not go her way she became – literally – ill: suffered from nervous prostration and spasms; her life could hang by a thread. (Only that last, fatal time had these often useful symptoms made no difference to her fate.)

In Paris now, Lady Susan Opdebeck let the telegram from London about her son Arthur flutter to the floor. She observed that the hand that let the message fall, and the arm above it, were still firm, still elegant.

The only person not a disappointment to Lady Susan Opdebeck was herself.

15

‘…
my ghost will haunt you
…’

The English weather that year had suddenly become even warmer – most unseasonably warm – but Mrs Catherine Gladstone shivered slightly as the words echoed round and round in her head:
my ghost will haunt you my ghost will haunt you…

Mrs Catherine Gladstone was not a fanciful woman in the least, but she could not shut out these words this evening as she walked with her husband. She suddenly shook her head slightly: puzzled, anxious, as if the ghost from her past was too near. William Gladstone walked, with his stick, beside her slowly, as if he was older than his sixty-one years, but he was recovering from his nervous exhaustion.

There was no proper garden at Carlton House Terrace. Mr and Mrs Gladstone were walking together, as they occasionally did, in the garden at the back of 10 Downing Street. The official residence was used for offices, and the occasional official reception; the garden was tended carefully. Tonight the evening was lowering and humid, rosebuds already bloomed and the scent of lilac lay on the air. In the distance, the sound of passing carriages; here, small birds sang and conversed as they came like a dark chorus to settle in the trees. The couple walked now in silence but they had been discussing the scandalous newspaper coverage of the trial that was the talk of London.

And they were both thinking about the same woman.

They had been, long ago when they were young, such close friends, the four of them. Lady Susan Hamilton had married Mr Gladstone’s dear friend, Henry, Lord Lincoln, who one day would become the fifth Duke of Newcastle. The aristocratic Miss Catherine Glynne married Mr William Gladstone, who would one day become Prime Minister of Great Britain. The men had been to Eton together, Oxford together, served under Peel and Palmerston together. The couples spent much time in one another’s company, lived as neighbours in London, visited one another’s country residences. Mr Gladstone had, indeed, written Lady Susan poetry – courtly poetry only of course – for he had found it hard to take his eyes from her on those long-ago memorable evenings in the noble Newcastle country mansion, when the beautiful and charming Lady Susan stood beside the piano in the lamplight, and sang so sweetly.

But all had turned to dust and ashes more than twenty years ago and the runaway wife had not only blamed Mr Gladstone for all her troubles to anyone who would listen, but had threatened, in a letter to a mutual friend, to
haunt
Mrs Gladstone if she ever spoke badly of her to her bereft children.

Mrs Gladstone had tried to care for the lost young people; never once had she spoken disloyally to the children about their mother – yet tonight the mother seemed hauntingly here anyway, drifting through the darkening leaves, blaming and accusing still.

The birds had settled now. It was almost dark.

Mrs Gladstone spoke at last. ‘Dearest William. I have said this to you many times: we cannot rewrite the past, neither our own nor other people’s. This is all twenty years ago! You did as you thought wisest, and I agreed you should go. Henry asked you to look for his wife and Sir Robert Peel himself concurred that you should and so you went to Italy.
It was a most honourable quest: to bring her back and save her marriage and her reputation – you did that for them both because they were our friends. How can it be your fault what you found!’ She sighed in the falling dark for what, indeed, had been found. ‘But those motherless children were damaged by everything that happened between their parents. Perhaps Arthur most of all.’

He seemed not to hear her. Again they walked in silence.

The Prime Minister passed his hand wearily across his face, saw himself now as he was then: young still, full of ideals, a knight on a mission: to rescue a beautiful woman. From Naples to Milan to Como he had followed her: there he had been advised that an English lord and lady were living at a large villa on the banks of the lake. He delivered a sixteen-page letter to Lady Susan there, telling her of her duty to her family and to God.

The letter had been returned unopened.

So then, intoxicated by the nearness of the quarry, he decided to go himself to the villa in the night, to try to actually speak to the maiden in distress. He arrived there with – he swallowed even now at the embarrassing memory – a
guitar
as a disguise; should there be others present he thought to appear as a musician (as if Mr Gladstone could ever look like a musician). Then, approaching the villa with his guitar clasped in his arms, he saw his old friend’s beautiful wife hurriedly departing, wrapped heavily in cloaks, but not enough to disguise her condition. Light from a lamp caught her face as she entered a carriage and fled across the lake from the friend who had wanted to save her from herself. All his dreams of heroic rescue, of scandal averted, dead from what he saw in the night. Which he then had to report to his heartbroken friend.

Then of course there was only one course of action left: a course of action almost too terrible to be thought of and, at that time, as was right and proper, available only to the very rich.

Divorce.

When this terrible event at last took place, through the House of Lords and the Ecclesiastical Church, a solicitor for the husband confided to Mr Gladstone that he thought Her Ladyship was possibly deranged. Mr and Mrs Gladstone knew that Her Ladyship was not necessarily deranged but she was certainly laudanum-addicted – and how well they understood, from their experience with Mr Gladstone’s unhappy sister Helen, that laudanum addiction and madness were closely entwined. Towards the unhappiness that led to such addictions, however, they were not sympathetic, in either case, for Mr and Mrs Gladstone both strongly believed that, in the end, Duty mattered most.

And Henry, the fifth Duke of Newcastle, had never really recovered, right up to his death five years ago.

William Gladstone spoke aloud in the evening garden his own train of thought. ‘Catherine, I miss Henry. He was my dear friend, one of my oldest friends, and we shared so much together. I owe him so much. He was a fine, honourable, deeply religious man with many burdens to bear, and he bore them with dignity.’ Mr Gladstone sighed heavily. ‘How could I not still mourn such a friend?’