The Petticoat Men (38 page)

Freddie thought of Ernest. He thought of Wakefield-street. He thought of their nights in the theatres, at the balls. He went to work as an articled law clerk. He came home to his father’s house. He saw his father’s suffering face. He thought of the weeks in Newgate Prison and dreamed of that place, often.

And now his loved brother Harry had been sentenced to hard labour for the same offence. Freddie had seen a treadmill now. He had heard many stories.

Living now as he was, under such restriction and guilt in mind, body and spirit, Frederick William Park bore the look of a man who had been to hell. And who, inside his head, still resided there.

Things were somewhat different in the Boulton household in Peckham. Mrs Boulton considered Ernest’s health to be so delicate that it was inconceivable to her that he might ever go back to the bank where he had worked briefly years ago, or indeed that he should work at all. But the family finances were in dire straits. Mr Boulton, a stockbroker, had decided that he needed to go abroad on certain business.

He did not give a date for his return.

If he had left enough money for their comfort and survival, this would have suited both Mrs Boulton (and her son Ernest) very well; her younger son Gerard had been dispatched to richer relatives; the richer relatives also dispensed largesse to Mrs Boulton when absolutely necessary. But the family finances were, frankly, incoherent.

As soon as her husband had left, Mrs Boulton (who had waved goodbye to him at the railway station, dabbing her eyes with a delicate handkerchief) came home in relief and lay upon her pretty chaise longue
.
She asked the one maid for Madeira wine and Ernest, both of which appeared.

‘Now, my darling. Now that your dear father has gone at last I want you to cheer me up in my
immense
loneliness and sadness. Especially as he is no longer here to forbid it. Oh darling boy, go and put on one of your pretty gowns and play to me.’ She indicated the piano.

‘My gowns, as you well know, have been – confiscated,’ said Ernest sulkily, helping himself to Madeira wine, and he tossed his head so that little curls, which he had worked upon with his mother’s curling tongs while she had gone farewelling, bounced and danced.

‘But you still have the several gowns that you left here earlier. The pretty primrose with the blue, for instance.’

Ernest quibbled for a few minutes, imbibed a further quantity of the Madeira, but then went away while Mrs Boulton rested from her grief; when he returned about an hour later, he simply looked like a young woman of the household, instead of a young man.

‘Oh that’s better, my darling. Oh – remember when your grandmother thought you were the maid that time – “too pretty” was what she said – she was very disapproving. “Maids should be plain, not pretty.” She never ever knew I put you up to it!’

Ernest was sorting through the music on the piano, but in the end he pushed it all away. ‘I am so
bored
,’ he complained. ‘Worse than bored – buried!’

He felt the skirt swishing as he walked about the room idly, the curls falling now across his forehead, the undergarments soft on his body: all the feelings he liked so much. He wanted to go out and about in the town as he was so used to doing and here he was, caged up with his mother, impecunious once more.

But Ernest was not stupid. He too dreamed terrible dreams of Newgate Prison. Then he also received messages. Ernest Boulton was to keep his head down, name no names, and the case would not be called again until at least the following year. He was not to have any contact at all with Frederick Park. Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park would not be charged with any felonious crime, only the lesser crime of ‘misdemeanour’. It was possible he might escape without charge.

He understood that being encased with his mother, with at least also the Madeira wine, and even visits from a friend or two – for his mother was very fond of many of his friends, and liked to be entertained, and encouraged theatricals – was the most he could hope for at the moment. But he began to consider, just a little, that he might, when this was all over, go back and perform in the pottery towns where he had had some success; also, in particular, he thought of Scarborough, where he and Lord Arthur Clinton had once toured and been written about.
I am, after all, famous now
.
Audiences would queue to see me.

‘A
song
, my darling!’

Ernest sighed theatrically and went back to the piano. He sat and ran his well-manicured fingers over the keys, thinking of how it had been, and how it was now, and Freddie, and Wakefield-street, and assignations, and Porterbury’s Hotel and performances, and the excitement, and the
fun –
for ‘fun’ to Ernest encompassed many things – they had had. He sighed again at his fate and all the things he had been deprived of. And, finally, he began to sing mournfully.

Rose in the garden

Blushing and gay

E’en as we pluck them

Fading away…

and the words suddenly struck both him and his mother as so befitting, so apt to his present predicament, that they both wept and then had some more Madeira wine.

36

Summer was long gone.

The days had turned cold and leaves fell from the trees and rattled along Gray’s Inn Road. Near Lincoln’s Inn Fields beggars huddled by the church, hoping for Christian charity.

Lady Susan Vane-Tempest, sister of Lord Arthur Clinton, had most gladly and relievedly and lovingly resumed her usual relationship with the Prince of Wales when talk of the scandal had drifted away.

But for her brother, she wept alone.

The mistresses of great men survive only if they know the limits of their situation; she understood he could not be publicly involved with her, and that there were certain things she could not share with him. So she never spoke of the pain of losing her brother. She had mothered Arthur the most, even more than his younger brother, Albert; she had teased Artie the most, and comforted him the most, and laughed with him the most. She had loved him the most in that loveless household.

But the Prince of Wales never spoke to her of Arthur and she did not share her pain.

She and the Prince of Wales now met often again, as usual, on arranged afternoons, either at her house in Chapel-street, or, especially if he was pressed for time, at the house of a discreet friend off Whitehall. His Royal Highness could be dropped off there and picked up at a pre-arranged hour without attracting notice, or too much notice, and she would arrive and leave separately, having ordered her own carriage.

But she had had a terrible fright.

So awful had been the temporary parting, so great her fear of losing him, that Lady Susan Vane-Tempest decided – next time the Prince went away somewhere – to go away herself: to France, to discuss matters with her mother.

Lady Susan Opdebeck in Paris (whose own history might perhaps have suggested she was a less than wise counsellor) nevertheless advised her daughter firmly.

‘Be guided by me, Susan. You must somehow regularise your position. You are no longer young, you are turned thirty, and more. He will be King. And if Arthur had not died and had instead been brought to court, the Prince would have discarded you for ever and you know it! No doubt the case will now be hushed up in some way – that is how things are
done
, Susan, I assure you – but you must now somehow find an
irreversible
place in his life. There are always official mistresses and they have standing and respect! You understand him; he needs you, he relies on you and of course he can pay for it – but I reiterate: you are not getting any younger; you must keep your hold over him.’

The mother reached for the laudanum.

‘Susan, in clear language you need to be bold, and you need to make yourself safe, and I speak these words to you from bitter experience as you know.’ She repeated her words. ‘You need to make a bold move now:
now
, Susan, before it is too late, for your future.’

At this point her daughter, shaken, reached for the laudanum also.

Mr Gladstone’s life continued extremely busy and full. In the Houses of Parliament, the Franco-Prussian War was much discussed, and reparation from France was called for, and education in Scotland was debated, and the un-English behaviour of some of the settlers in the colonies of the Empire commented upon. Mr Gladstone made many speeches, held many cabinet meetings, wrote many letters and discussion papers. He continued to be emotionally but not physically unfaithful to the matrimonial bed. He endured, no change, his uneasy relationship with Her Majesty Queen Victoria. He continued his Rescue Work with street women whom he sometimes brought home to be dealt with by his wife.

The lame girl was not seen near the Strand again but his heart was not easy over this matter:
I knew I’d seen her before. I’d seen her with her brother.
He somehow did not expect her to reappear, or cause trouble, but he told his wife of the disturbing meeting.

‘She said that the people in Mudeford do not believe he died of scarlet fever.’ He shook his head. ‘We may never know. Perhaps he took his own sad life, but it is over. We must leave poor Arthur where he is.’

‘Do you believe the girl even saw Arthur before he died?’

‘Yes,’ he said shortly. ‘I do not like the story. But I believe it. I believe she must have talked to him because she said that he had told her to warn me that if I did not assist him he would – haunt me.’

Mrs Gladstone’s face showed her shock.

The words Arthur’s mother had once used, so long ago.

She pulled herself together. ‘Can you help her brother?’

‘Of course I cannot do anything so foolish as to interfere in – housekeeping matters of the building that do not concern me when matters are so – delicate. And they must have known, Catherine, what those fools were doing in their house!’

‘She will not follow you again? Or discuss matters with someone else?’

‘She said she would not. I cannot say why I believed her exactly, but I did.’ But his heart was not easy.

He discussed monarchical – and private – matters with the Prince of Wales. A rather large number of meetings also took place between the Prime Minister (Eton, Oxford), and the Solicitor-General (Eton, Oxford).

In prison, Mr Edward Henry Park, son of the Senior Master of the Court of Common Pleas, brother to the notorious Frederick William Park, did hard labour. Which included many hours strapped to a large treadmill in the centre of the prison, struggling uselessly on a moving wheel, endlessly, strenuously: going nowhere, getting nowhere, and then all over again. At the beginning other prisoners spat at him, a sodomite; now, as they saw his body and his spirit crumble, they felt he was under punishment enough.