The Petticoat Men (46 page)

‘Is it – a cemetery, dear?’

‘It’s an old graveyard full of good spirits, some of whom I know, and – look – honeysuckle and wild roses and daisies. It’s where I often get our flowers from.’

Dodo was so glad to rest among wild flowers; they sat together on a seat that proclaimed GOD LIVES as dusk fell. Further away children were skipping with a piece of rope among old graves:
Half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle.

‘I don’t think I’ll go again,’ Dodo said. ‘Sir Alexander Cockburn kept saying they must finish in one week. But it was the same old things, I read it all last time around. Oh, and the prosecutors tried to bring the other Mr Park into the story, Freddie’s brother, but Sir Alexander stopped them.’

‘That was kind to Freddie’s father. I expect they all know him. I keep reminding myself that we’re not the only casualties.’ Isabella bent down, pulled at a dandelion. Finally she said: ‘But – ah, Dodo – just what say Lord Arthur
had
been there, and he actually stood up and told that the Prime Minister of Great Britain had been made his guardian? – and was also in charge of the Newcastle Estate? And just what say he told that his sister was a mistress to the Prince of Wales? He was loose-tongued enough to tell somebody like Ernest, and Ernest was loose-tongued enough to tell people like us. Think of
Reynolds News
then! 13 Wakefield-street would have been quite forgot!’ And she laughed, half angrily. ‘It was indeed providential for many that Lord Arthur Clinton died.’

‘That’s what Mackie and your Billy say all the time!’

Children’s voices drifted across the shadowy gravestones.

That’s the way the money goes

POP goes the weasel!

And Isabella thought of Billy, singing in his funeral clothes:
Quash goes the conviction!

She saw some early-flowering wild roses nearby; she had a small knife that she always carried in her pocket: she got up now and cut some of the flowers. ‘Smell these, Dodo.’

And Dodo Fortune buried her face for a moment in the roses; prickles stuck to her. Isabella carefully unhooked her, pulled Dodo gently to her feet.

‘Nearly home, Dodo.’

They started walking again, but at Dodo’s slow pace, Isabella carrying her armful of roses. She said: ‘But I tell you something, Dodo, after Mattie gives her evidence tomorrow, I’m absolutely
finished
with it, this case, this business, all the bleeding difficulties,
finished, finished finished
! And that means Mackie and Billy and their theorising too! It’ll take a long time to recover from being a bawdy house in the newspapers, this just bleeding reminds people all over again. Let them have their big fat show-off trial and prove everybody’s not guilty after all and then Great Britain can live on, happy and glorious, all over the world and not a bugger in sight, magic! And we’ll be left alone at last.’

They came to their front door.

‘We’re only tiny little cogs at the bottom, Dodo, who got caught up.’ And Isabella Stacey sighed. ‘Welcome home to the criminal headquarters.’

45

M
A
CAME
WITH
me to the court when it was my turn; ‘I must see Sir Alexander Cockburn performing!’ she said in that dry voice.

Mr Tom Dent that nice legal clerk had come back to Wakefield-street and told me to expect it to be long, the questioning, and I said I didn’t care. I wasn’t nervous this time. ‘And Mr Serjeant Parry, Freddie’s lawyer as I explained, Miss Mattie, he wants you to be prepared to answer questions about prices for rooms.’

‘’What for?’

‘They have to prove that Ernest and Freddie weren’t in need of money, that they weren’t – excuse me, Miss Mattie – soliciting money in their ladies’ attire from – from other people.’ I didn’t say anything to that (but I could’ve said that I knew Ernest had been in need of money all the time we knew him!).

‘You tell Mr Serjeant Parry to ask away, Mr Dent!’

‘Would you call me Tom?’ he had said, quite shyly.

Westminster Hall and its wonderful high curving roof that didn’t fall down though there were no pillars holding it up was amazing to look at, even going to give evidence at a sodomite trial, I’d never seen it before and I stared up with my neck falling off nearly.

‘Gothic!’ people kept saying around us, craning also. ‘Gothic!’

And then we were ushered through to the Queen’s Bench area. Crowded, but nothing like the Magistrates’ Court. Ma sat down, I was taken to a side room, soon I was called, didn’t care any more about limping in front of people, once you’ve been called a crippled whore a few times it dont matter any more – I went and stood in the right place, by a little table. I looked round this new, noble court, all the lawyers all the wigs and gowns and – sleek, you know shiny gentlemen’s horses? – like that they looked: sleek. I saw Tom Dent, he gave me a tiny little hidden wave as if he wasn’t really.

And then I found Ernest and Freddie. They looked quiet and gentlemanly and each wore a flower in their buttonhole and they were both staring at me. Remembering the last afternoon in our house perhaps, and what was said. And now two other gentlemen next to them, as Dodo had told us. Ernest – he still just looked like himself, I mean how he always looked like, with a little moustache but pretty still. But Freddie was – we had already seen it when they came but that was months ago – so different-looking with his beard and his weight but so – I dunno what’s the right word – if I say
suffering
it sounds a bit theatrical. But that’s what it felt like to me standing there looking at Freddie’s face, with his brave flower in his buttonhole and his brother doing hard labour and his sad father.

Well here I was, crippled whore etc and before everything went wrong with all our lives Freddie was kind. And he had sent me a message with Tom Dent. And I had decided that today I would send Freddie one last message too.

Even though Tom Dent had warned me I could not imagine it would all last
so
blooming long and
so
many people questioning me. It was all very – calm, the whole thing, except when the lawyers got politely rude with each other. What it felt like was – was that there was no
feelings
, no emotion like there had been last time – not the applause and noise like in the Magistrates’ Court and not so much laughter, and if there was laughter it was polite. The Attorney-General was polite too, but a bit like a polite vicious guard dog I thought when he stood up and questioned me, all the usual stuff.

‘My name is Martha Stacey and I am the landlady at 13 Wakefield-street.’

‘You are unmarried and childless?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are in charge of 13 Wakefield-street?’

‘Yes.’

‘I believe your mother lives in the house. How old is she?’

‘My mother is’ – I flicked an apologetic glance at Ma, better add on a year – ‘seventy-six.’

Then we got to those same old questions: ‘Did they dress as women?’ ‘Did they bring their friends?’ After a while I was so bored I thought:
I’ll just say back to them what they say to me.

‘Mrs Stacey, you said in the Magistrates’ Court that they asked for two rooms.’

‘They asked for two rooms.’

‘But you only had one room available?’

‘We only had one room available.’

‘That meant they had to share one room?’

‘That meant they had to share one room.’

I was getting the hang of it, I could answer questions like that for hours and we could bore one another to death. I realised the Attorney-General was repeating a question.

‘If they had to share one room that meant they had to share one bed?’

‘Listen!’ I said. ‘I told it at Bow-street. Mr Park and Mr Boulton asked for two rooms and we only had one. And it had one bed in it so I suppose they shared it like I share with my mother when we are very busy. I do not make it my business to go into lodgers’ rooms in the middle of the night.’

But he went on and on. Who came to the house to see them? Did Mr Amos Gibbings have gentlemen visiting him? (And I suddenly wondered then why Mr Gibbings wasn’t arrested. Because he was a gentleman?)

And finally: ‘Did you ever meet Lord Arthur Clinton?’

‘I believe I may have met briefly with Lord Arthur Clinton.’ And I suddenly thought,
whatever would happen if I said the truth? whatever would happen if I really told about Lord Arthur Clinton, crying in Mudeford and holding Ma’s sovereigns and speaking of Mr Gladstone?

At last the Attorney-General sat down.

Then Ernest’s lawyer cross-examined me and asked the questions all over again. Sometimes the Judge chipped in with a question too, and I had to answer him as well. My leg was hurting by now but I’d faint rather than admit it. And yet: all the time I had this feeling that we were just going through the motions, so that they could say there’s been a Proper Trial.

Then Freddie’s barrister stood up and cross-examined me, he was the fourth blooming man to question me while I stood there. This was the man Tom had told me of, Mr Serjeant Parry, who spoke like an angel and cross-examined like a knife. Well I was on Mr Serjeant Parry’s side, I knew he knew it, no need to knife me.

Mr Serjeant Parry changed the subject completely. ‘I want to ask you about the prices you charged for rooms.’

I answered everything as if I never knew the questions were coming. And then Sergeant Parry looked up pleasedly at the learned Lord Chief Justice.

‘Ten shillings and six per week, my lord! Or four shillings for two people for one night which is all they usually asked for. Not an exorbitant amount of money seems to have been required for the rental of these rooms!’ and he and the Attorney-General looked daggers but I suppose that was all part of the performance we were all doing. I looked round the court – and I thought I saw Mackie standing right at the back, funny, he never said he was coming.

‘Mrs Stacey.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Did you have a permanent lodger at this time?’ Mr Tom Dent had writ that down in his notebook when he first came to see us.

‘Yes we had a permanent lodger at this time.’

‘Did he know these gentlemen went out in female attire?’

‘Course he knew, Mr Flamp. My Ma had told him. And he saw for himself.’

‘How old was he?’

I had no idea so I said, ‘Eighty-one.’

‘Was he shocked?’

‘Course not. They
weren’t
shocking.’ And I thought of old Mr Flamp, puzzled and yet pleased, at the entertainment.

Mr Serjeant Parry smiled at me, like an angel, and bowed.

And then Ernest’s lawyer said to me very courteous and gentle: ‘Mrs Stacey, did you ever, in all the time the defendants Boulton and Park were at your house, notice a look, a gesture or a word, on the part of the defendants, that was any way improper?’

‘No. No I did not! I can say with certitude that at no time did I notice a look, a gesture, or a word, on the part of the defendants, that was any way improper.’ And then I gave Freddie my last message. ‘I would also like to state so that every single person in this whole court can hear it clear, I have never known a more polite, or kinder lodger in our establishment – ever – than Mr Frederick Park.’ I didn’t even look at Freddie. But I thought he would understand.

I thought I was finished, blooming time, my leg was pulsating like a drum but blow me down a
Juror
requested to ask me a question and was given permission – that’s the
fifth
man asking me things!

‘Can she tell us please, were the dresses high-necked or low-necked?’

‘Oh – oh high-necked I should think, almost always high-necked.’

‘But never low.’

‘I dont say never, but they were certainly mostly high. Very high-necked. Whatever was fashionable.’ And I thought of Ernest, powdering his bare shoulders and his neck low low down, and the boxes of ‘Bloom of Roses’.

I went to sit by Ma when I was finished, I could have used some ‘Bloom of Roses’ myself by then, I was blooming exhausted. I looked round for Mackie, but if he had been there he was gone. People whispered that the medical evidence was coming next, and I’d seen doctors outside where I’d had to wait but we didn’t want to stay and hear again about their rectums and anuses and syphilis (and new talk about Ernest’s ‘fistula’ apparently, which Ma told me came from a burst boil in a bottom) so Ma and me were just about to leave when there was a policeman suddenly appeared, with two large parcels. He put them down on the floor in front of the Judge and undone them. And when I saw what it was I felt a little gasp inside me and I heard another loud gasp at the same time, all through the courtroom. Afterwards I thought it was the saddest part of the whole trial.

It was Ernest and Freddie’s women’s clothes.

All their exciting gowns and shawls, their boots and their corsets and their feathers and their jewellery and their chignons and their fashionable hats. But I suppose they’d been packed away in some old police cupboard for a year and they were – well most of them weren’t fun any more, or lovely, or pretty, or expensive-looking. It certainly didn’t look as if they had spent fortunes on clothes. But I suppose the prosecution wanted them to think they were the clothes of cheap prostitutes. Next to the ladies’ boots, the policeman lay everything all around the floor to show the judge and the jury, and daylight shone in bright and you could see quite clearly: most of the skirts weren’t very clean, or the bodices, there were marks on them. Stains. The chignons were dank and dull, fallen apart. All the once-beautiful gowns: the velvet and the silk and the moiré and the muslin and the satin. Some, you could see, had been elegant once – that one of Ernest’s with the pink and white roses was still lovely but they’d taken old gowns Freddie and Ernest had discarded and stuffed in an old bag as well, and now everything had all been squashed up together and now they mostly looked like things from a second-hand clothesman’s cart, they didn’t look exciting like they used to when Freddie and Ernest laughed down our stairs in the flattering, soft lamplight. And the shiny jewels that had looked so exotic were dull and broken.