Fanny and Stella (27 page)

No doubt it reminded them both of an unfortunate incident eighteen months earlier when Louis had dragged a reluctant Stella off on a tour of post offices in Wales and the West Country – for the good of her health, he said. The ‘rustics in Devizes and Newport’ had taken it upon themselves to write to the Postmaster-General himself accusing his roving inspector of travelling upon official business with a woman disguised as a man in tow. If it had not been so serious, it would have been funny, especially when the said rustics intimated their belief that Mr Hurt’s companion was a woman of low repute, little realising how close they had come to hitting that particular nail on the head. It had taken the urgent intervention of Lord Arthur Clinton, MP, to clear matters up.

Mr Flowers, the magistrate at Bow Street, also appeared to be convinced that Fanny and Stella were in fact women, or some variation on a womanly theme, despite the weight of evidence and despite their own assertions and protestations: ‘I really thought they were women, and I expressed that opinion at the time,’ Mr Flowers said in court some three weeks after Fanny and Stella’s first appearance there. ‘I was in hopes that the defence would be that they were women.’

Of course, there were some men whom Stella was quite happy
not
to tell: steamers or punters, the men
she
picked up (because she was nothing if not choosy) in the Haymarket and round and about, the men who paid her money, and good money too, thinking she was a beautiful young whore, so different from the usual run of ruined and raddled harridans. It was easier for them not to know, and it was not hard to keep them in the dark. Most were so drunk they didn’t know whether they were coming or going, let alone by the front or the back door, and even if they were sober, they hardly cared.

Some of them, of course, knew she was a man because they had had her before, or they had guessed, or they had groped her and found something they were not expecting. Or she had told them on an impulse or out of caprice to see what, if anything, would happen. Usually they carried on regardless; most were past the point of no return. A few even seemed curious and asked if she was one of those rare and wonderful creatures that was man and woman in one, the very idea seeming to arouse them sexually.

In his riotous and unreliable
Recollections
, Jack Saul, the celebrated Mary-Ann, recounts Stella confiding in him that she once seduced a handsome gentleman by the name of Mr Bruce in the Star and Garter Hotel in Richmond by purporting to be a hermaphrodite.

‘I pretended to resist his attempts to get at my cunny,’ Stella said, ‘and at last blushingly told him that I was one of those unfortunate beings (which perhaps he had heard of) who had a malformation, something like the male instrument – in fact, it was capable of stiffening, and always did so under excitement, exactly as a man’s would do.’

‘But, darling,’ Stella said, addressing herself to Mr Bruce, ‘It is quite harmless, and can do no mischief like the real male affair. Now you, I know, will be too disgusted to want to kiss me, although I am dying for you to afford me that pleasure.’

Mr Bruce assured Stella that he had often heard of hermaphrodites and was curious to know more.

B 
ut despite Stella’s many triumphs in the endless battle of love, there were occasional defeats. Another admirer who believed, at first at least, Stella to be a woman was Mr Francis Kegan Cox – or Captain Cox as he preferred to be called. Captain Cox was every inch the swell. He was a partner in the auctioneering line, having had what might tactfully be termed a chequered past. After nine years in the army he had sold his commission and spent the several years knocking around Australia and New Zealand looking for opportunities, of which none presented themselves.

Back in London, he landed on his feet and secured an enviable position as Secretary to the Civil Service Club.

‘I resigned that office voluntarily,’ Captain Cox admitted in court. ‘There was a complaint made against me.’

‘Like mistakes in arithmetic?’ Mr Straight, for the defence, enquired sarcastically.

Captain Cox cleared his throat and swallowed hard. ‘Sums were entered into the books without names, carelessly,’ he countered.

From the debacle of the Civil Service Club, Captain Cox found his way to the City where he and an unnamed gentleman set themselves up as auctioneers. In September 1868, Stella was sitting at luncheon in the Guildhall Tavern, Leadenhall Street, in company with Lord Arthur Clinton and Mr W. H. Roberts, Lord Arthur’s solicitor, loan arranger and general fixer, when the Captain walked in.

It transpired that Captain Cox and Mr Roberts were previously acquainted. Introductions to Lord Arthur and Stella were effected, and Captain Cox was invited to join the luncheon party. He needed no pressing. He was strangely and powerfully drawn to the young man who had been introduced to him as Mr Ernest Boulton, but Captain Cox was dashed and damned and blowed if he believed that for an instant. Even though ‘he’ was dressed from top to toe in male attire, it was clear to him that Boulton was a girl, a very pretty girl, and a very flirtatious girl at that. There could be no doubt about it. She was coming on exceedingly strong to him.

‘It was from the manner Boulton’s hair was done, and from the smallness of his hands and feet, as well as his general manners, that I formed an opinion he was a woman,’ the Captain said later in Bow Street.

Stella was equally smitten. The Captain was a fine, swaggering figure of a man and, at thirty-five years old, in the prime of his life. He was the cock of the walk. Tall, strong, upright and confident in matters of the heart (and other organs), he did not scruple to indicate in every possible way that he was very taken with Stella.

Stella, in turn, was flattered, flirtatious and on flamboyant form.

‘Oh you City birds have good fun in your offices’, Stella said in a tone of mock complaint, ‘and you have champagne!’

The Captain rose gallantly to the bait.

‘You had better come over and see,’ he replied meaningfully, and that very afternoon a radiant Stella and a less than effervescent Lord Arthur Clinton turned up at 1 Gresham’s Buildings, being the Captain’s flashy rented offices.

‘My partner arrived whilst we were there and we had champagne,’ Captain Cox continued. Lord Arthur’s nose was clearly out of joint. After all, he and Stella were living together as man and wife, and he had not long since ordered – but not yet paid for – engraved cards bearing the legend ‘Lady Arthur Clinton’. Of course, Arthur knew that Stella frequently went out on the pad to sell herself to men for much-needed cash to keep them afloat. Though he was not exactly happy about this arrangement, he could see the advantages. What he did not care for, not one jot, was being made to play the cuckold in public. And after one particularly loaded exchange between Stella and this man Cox, he left the room and slammed the door, and went for a walk to cool his heels and cool his head while the flirtation continued apace.

‘I treated Boulton as a fascinating woman,’ Cox said later.

‘Have you had a large experience in fascinating women?’ asked the sarcastic Mr Straight. Captain Cox objected to this question, very strongly. But Mr Straight was not to be deflected. ‘Have you had a large experience in fascinating women?’ he repeated.

‘I have known a great many women in my time,’ was the guarded reply.

‘Were you in the habit of making advances of this sort on your first acquaintance?’

‘It would always depend whether there was an advance made,’ the Captain answered.

‘Do you state that there was an advance made by him?’

‘I do. Boulton went on in a flirting manner with me, and I kissed him, she or it, at the time believing he was a woman.’

There. He had said it. He had kissed Ernest Boulton.

Captain Cox’s confession brought forth gasps and giggles from the public gallery.

‘But you don’t mean to say Boulton kissed you?’

‘Well, he did something very like it,’ Captain Cox replied.

‘You anyhow kissed him?’

‘I certainly did.’ (Laughter.) ‘Shortly after that Boulton complained of being chilly. My partner whipped the cloth off the table, put him in an armchair, and wrapped up his feet in the cloth.’

A few days later, Lord Arthur and Stella attended one of the Captain’s auction sales at the Roebuck Tavern in Turnham Green. Lord Arthur’s spirits seemed entirely restored and a jolly time was had by all. There was a piano in the public bar and Stella sat down and sang divinely, later taking the opportunity to slyly slip the handsome Captain a photograph of herself in men’s clothes.

As in all the best romances, the dashing Captain Cox had sealed his love with a kiss and it was left to the imagination of the gentle reader, or, in this case, the minds of the coarse-grained, foul-mouthed chorus that comprised the public gallery of Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, to determine if the love affair between Captain Cox and Stella was ever consummated. And if the raucous laughter, squints, leers and half-mumbled lewd comments emanating from that quarter were anything to go by, the public gallery had already reached its unanimous verdict.

There was an unhappy coda to the romance. Somehow or other Captain Cox got wind of Stella’s true gender.

‘I afterwards heard something about Boulton’s sex,’ Captain Cox told the court, carefully avoiding naming who it was who had tipped him off, though the odds were on the dubious Mr Roberts who was simultaneously trying to prevent Lord Arthur from being cuckolded and the Captain from being cruelly duped. When he found out, Captain Cox was incandescent with rage.

‘After this I went to Evans’s. I saw Boulton there. Park and Lord Arthur Clinton were with him. I went up to the table where Boulton, Park and Lord Arthur were sitting, and used abusive language. “You — infernal scoundrels,” I said. “You ought to be kicked out of the place.” I said more to the same purport, and kept walking up and down by the table. I afterwards promised not to create a disturbance, and left.’

M 
r Pollard, the most senior solicitor at the Treasury, had been very sympathetic and understanding. With scrupulous politeness he had called him Captain at every possible opportunity, tut-tutted over his treatment at the hands of the Civil Service Club and listened to stories of his army life and his Antipodean adventures with every appearance of animated interest.

It was with the greatest delicacy and the greatest difficulty that Mr Pollard brought the conversation round to the vexed topic of his giving evidence. Captain Cox shuddered and shivered. He was understandably reluctant to appear as a witness and admit to kissing – if that was all it was – a woman dressed as a man who turned out to be a man after all. He was a former officer and still some sort of gentleman.

Mr Pollard urged and persuaded. In cases like this, he said, cases of interest and importance to the Crown, cases which reflected on the national character and the national honour, there would of course be expenses.
Generous
expenses. Mr Pollard underlined the word ‘generous’. A man like Captain Cox could hardly be expected to neglect or abandon his important business to help secure the conviction of two pernicious sodomites without some adequate disbursement from the Crown for his time and his trouble. And so it had been agreed. A dusty Treasury ledger records the receipt of ‘a letter from Captain Cox applying for his expenses as a witness’.

Sadly, Captain Cox did not live to collect his disbursement from the Treasury, though his widow and his children were no doubt very grateful. The gallant Captain died two weeks to the day after he gave his evidence in Bow Street, of smallpox, the death certificate stated, and also quite possibly of shame.

21

A Bitches’ Ball

I have heard of ‘a bitches’ ball’. It might mean two things. It might be a ball for prostitutes, and it might be a ball for men prostitutes. I have taken part in a ball for male prostitutes at my father’s house about two years ago.

Malcolm Johnston,
The Maid of Athens, 1884

Miss Carlotta Westropp Gibbings requests the pleasure of your company at a Ball at Haxell’s Hotel, West Strand on Friday, 7th April at 9 o’clock.

T 
here was the greatest excitement about Carlotta’s ball. It went without saying that it was to be the most perfect and the most dazzling ball ever given. A brilliant ball to launch a brilliant season, the most brilliant season they had ever known – and by the end of it none of the young men who liked to dress as young ladies expected anything less than to be engaged to be married to a peer of the realm or a prince from foreign parts.

It would most emphatically not be one of those poky, secretive, sad little balls they sometimes attended, in a room above a public house or in a low tavern in some out-of-the-way place no one had ever heard of, with a solitary pianist picking out ancient waltzes on a rickety piano and the air thick with cheap tobacco smoke, beer and sweat. And there was to be no riff-raff, only the
crème de la crème
of gentlemen and the choicest ladies from their circle. Certainly no trollops off the streets (though, strictly speaking, this meant that many, if not most, of their friends would face disqualification).