Fanny and Stella (30 page)

One of Fiske’s most urgent tasks the day after he arrived was also far from congenial. It was downright distasteful. The indefatigable Mr Abrams had opined that both he and Louis Hurt should take the precaution of being examined for signs of sodomy by an eminent medical man. Though Mr Abrams remained optimistic, if the worst came to the worst, it might prove very useful, very useful indeed, to have irrefutable medical evidence that neither he nor Louis had ever indulged in sodomy. Dr Alfred Harvey was the man he had in mind. He had already minutely examined Boulton and Park and detected no signs of sodomy.

Fiske’s next task was equally uncongenial. He had to call at the Legation of the United States for a painful interview with Mr John Lothrop Motley, United States Minister in London. ‘Mr Fiske called at the Legation on the 4th instant,’ Motley wrote in a confidential memorandum to the Secretary of State in Washington:

in order to communicate the fact that his name was implicated in the disgraceful affair of the men in women’s clothes, and to request some introduction in writing from the Legation to the Counsel charged with their prosecution. He thought he could make explanations to that personage which might relieve him from the suspicions resting upon him.

In the course of the interview, Fiske revealed the extent of his friendship with Erné.

He admitted that he had made the acquaintance of the prisoner Boulton at Edinburgh, that he had introduced himself to him, that he had requested him to put on his female attire, that he had received him familiarly at his own house (not in women’s clothes, however) by invitation eight times, and that he had written letters to him, three of which were in the hands of the prosecution.

Fiske turned up at Mr Poland’s chambers the following day to request an interview, only to be sent word through his clerk that Mr Poland regretted that such an interview between a prosecuting barrister and a potential witness – and perhaps even a potential defendant – was impossible and unthinkable.

Fiske was left reeling. It was a serious and unexpected reversal. Had the twin goddesses of Fortune and Fate ceased to smile upon him? He shivered and – as he returned to Edinburgh – for the first time in his life he was frightened of what the future might hold.

T 
he wheels of justice might grind slowly but they ground inexorably. Inspector Thompson’s telegram was handed to Detective Officer Roderick Gollan of the Edinburgh City Police on the morning of 9th June, kindly requesting him to call upon Mr John Safford Fiske at his chambers at 136 George Street and search the premises for any evidence, written or photographic, that might connect him to Ernest Boulton.

Fiske was still at home when Detective Officer Gollan called at George Street mid-morning. He did not appear to be at all surprised by the policeman’s visit. In fact, he seemed to be expecting it. Gollan began to methodically work his way through the cupboards and drawers in the sitting room and the bedroom, slowly and thoroughly reading every letter he came across. In the pen drawer of his desk he found three letters and two telegrams signed ‘Louis’, and concealed in a hatbox in the bedroom were a dozen or so photographs of young men (rather effeminate young men, it seemed to Detective Officer Gollan) and some newspaper cuttings about the case of the Young Men in Women’s Clothes.

‘I asked Mr Fiske if there was anything else,’ Gollan testified in court later. ‘After a little hesitation he said if I would leave the room he would produce the remainder that he had that could refer to the case.’

‘What did you say to that?’

‘I said I would not leave.’

‘What took place then?’

‘He said, “I will admit to you my weakness”, and he went and produced from behind the grate of the chimney piece a box containing an album containing a number of
cartes de visite
.’

‘Had you seen it when you were searching?’

‘No.’

‘What further took place?’

‘He said, “I have got a number of letters from Mr Boulton, but I have destroyed them.”’

‘Did he say anything further?’

‘He said, “I have written some foolish notes to Boulton but meant no harm by them.”’

Detective Officer Gollan left George Street having spent almost two hours searching. He sent a telegram to Inspector Thompson listing what he had found and awaited further instructions. They were not long in coming. At around 4 p.m. the same day, John Safford Fiske heard a loud knock at the front door. Detective Officer Gollan had come to arrest him and to take him into custody.

M 
r John Lothrop Motley despatched a confidential memorandum to the Secretary of State in Washington:

In cipher:

Mr Fiske – Facts as to his imprisonment in London and application for bail.

I have now to state that John S. Fiske, United States Consul in Edinburgh, was on the 9th instant arrested at that place and brought to London the next day. He is now held in Newgate on a Bench Warrant awaiting his trial.

He was required to find bail in four sureties of £500 each. He has employed able counsel as I am informed for his defence, and I have requested the United States Vice-Consul General at London privately to watch the case.

Mr Fiske of course hopes to establish his entire innocence of any misdemeanour, but he does not, as I understand, deny familiar acquaintance with Boulton, one of the men in women’s clothes indicted for felony, for conspiracy and for misdemeanour, nor the authorship of certain letters to him now in the hands of the prosecution.

I am informed that he wishes to send in his resignation, but if his letter to that effect can only be written on Newgate paper, I have caused it to be intimated to him that it should not be written.

For John Safford Fiske, Fortune and Fate had turned into the Furies and wreaked their wrath upon him. If convicted he would face many years in a filthy English prison, and if he emerged at all, he would be a broken man. Even if he were to prove his innocence, such as it was, there would be no return to the life of hopes and dreams and vaunting ambition.

If there was one consolation, it was that he was not entirely alone in his ordeal. Erné Boulton and Fred Park were in Newgate too, though there were bitter feelings in his heart towards Erné, once his ravishing and beloved Laïs and Antinous in one, now the spring and the source of this terrible nightmare in which he found himself trapped. Even cautious, clever, charming Louis Hurt had been arrested at the same time on the same charges and was also in Newgate. They made a strange quartet. They were tied together by dark and invisible threads of lust and love and they would stand, or most likely fall, together.

23

Dead or Disappeared

We have it on the authority of a usually well-informed daily contemporary, that peers of the realm are implicated with the dirty proceedings that will shortly come prominently before the public in a court of justice.

Reynolds’s Newspaper
, 26th June 1870

V 
ery few people were surprised when the warrant for Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton’s arrest was finally issued in early June, five weeks after the arrest of Fanny and Stella. Indeed, the only surprise was that it had taken so long, given that Lord Arthur had been so publicly implicated in the scandal of the Young Men in Women’s Clothes from the very start.

As the weeks went by, there had been mounting public indignation over what was seen as deliberate foot-dragging on the part of the authorities in bringing Lord Arthur to justice. Rumours began to circulate that powerful forces were at work on his behalf. As the son of the fifth Duke of Newcastle, who had been Secretary of State for War, and as godson to Mr Gladstone, the current Prime Minister, the recently retired Honourable Member for Newark, it was said, was being shielded from prosecution.

As the evidence unfolded, it was clear to everybody that Lord Arthur was up to his aristocratic neck in the scandal. He knew both Boulton and Park: he had performed in public with Boulton and lived with him in private, apparently and astonishingly as man and wife. There were compromising letters, suggestive photographs, and at least two dozen sworn statements that put Lord Arthur at the dark heart of this wicked sodomitic conspiracy.

But the powers that be still hesitated, still delayed. Why? There were mutterings that Lord Arthur was being given time to settle his affairs and make good his escape; that he was about to flee abroad; indeed, that he had already flown and was now safely beyond the clutches of the Metropolitan Police.

Some newspapers, like the
Pall Mall Gazette
, were convinced that Lord Arthur knew too much. If he was arrested and brought to justice, there was a danger that he would implicate others – peers and politicians and personages – in the vast spider’s web of sodomy and scandal, and that the cankerous corruption at the heart of the ruling class would be exposed. ‘Peers of the realm are implicated with the dirty proceedings’ was the unambiguous verdict of
Reynolds’s Newspaper
, which prided itself on taking up the cudgels for ordinary folk against the bastions of birth and privilege.

The
Pall Mall Gazette
called for steely ‘resolution on the part of the Government’ not to yield to the influence of ‘the highest classes of society’ who were ‘on the side of hushing up a scandal of this magnitude’.

The suspicions of those who believed that the Government was intent on hushing up the scandal were strengthened, rather than diminished, when, on the day that the long-looked-for warrant was belatedly issued for his arrest, Lord Arthur Clinton was nowhere to be found. He had vanished off the face of the earth, leaving not a trace.

T 
he last person to have seen Lord Arthur was a cabman. At around two o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, 28th May, Lord Arthur hailed a cab and told the cabman that he would need him to drive him around upon a variety of errands until that evening.

‘I took up my fare at the Opera Hotel, Bow-street,’ said the cabman, ‘and on depositing him at the same hotel at night I was sent to Long’s Hotel with a letter addressed to a gentleman stopping there. But the gentleman had gone abroad (so I was informed), and when I got back to the Opera Hotel to report the result, and to get my money, I was informed that Lord Arthur had gone also.’

And that was the last sighting of Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, at least as far as Inspector Thompson and his detectives could establish. The ports were being watched and his description had been circulated. But where he had gone was a mystery.

For those with a suspicious turn of mind, like Inspector Thompson, there was something not quite right about Lord Arthur’s six-hour cab journey around London. Why would a man who was about to disappear, seemingly in a puff of smoke, go to the trouble of bilking a cabman for a fare of £1? And why, if you were going to bilk a cabman, would you be at pains to reveal that your name was Lord Arthur Clinton and that you were residing at the Opera Hotel, Bow Street?

Inspector Thompson could smell a rat. He had a nose for such things. He suspected that this seemingly aimless, six-hour cab journey was nothing more and nothing less than a diversion, a clever and cunning attempt to lay a false trail. The police would be trying to trace the movements of the man claiming to be Lord Arthur from the time the cabman deposited him at the Opera Hotel around eight o’clock. But what if the real Lord Arthur had crept away hours or perhaps even days before?

Speculation was rife. ‘We understand the police believe that Lord Arthur Clinton has gone to America,’ the
Weekly Times
reported. The
Observer
agreed, but added that ‘there are people who have affirmed that His Lordship has been seen in London, and notably at Ascot’.

Rumours of the death of Lord Arthur Clinton first began to filter through to Fleet Street during the afternoon of Saturday 18th June, just in time for the final editions of the evening papers. Facts were in short supply but it appeared that the troubled Lord Arthur had died in the remote village of Muddeford in Hampshire. Or was it Huddeford, as the
Illustrated Police News
reported? Or Nuddeford, as the
Weekly Times
had it?

There was speculation – hope even – that, as an officer and a gentleman, Lord Arthur had done the decent thing and shot himself through the head with a single silver bullet. Such a course of action was very much to be desired. It would have been Lord Arthur’s admission of guilt and a demonstration of his remorse. A clean and contrite conclusion to a sodomitic conspiracy which had caused a convulsion of the national mind. No washing of aristocratic dirty linen in public. No risk of further revelations. No need for a damaging and debilitating trial to further sap the nation’s sense of strength and virility.

But such sanguine – not to say sanguinary – hopes were dashed when it emerged that Lord Arthur had died of natural causes just a few days short of his thirtieth birthday. ‘The rumour which was current late on Saturday regarding the death of Lord Arthur Clinton is confirmed,’ the
Daily Telegraph
reported two days later. Lord Arthur, it appeared, ‘had been in the neighbourhood of Christchurch for some time, on a fishing excursion, passing under the title of Captain Edward Gray’.