The Petticoat Men by Barbara Ewing Page B

wife Dodo who was a dancer and a singer in the music halls, and loved everything that was coloured red! Elijah was very fond of your Pa, your Pa missed him when he went to the Parliament, it’s a long time since I’ve seen him. A good man down to his shoes. He knows everything about everybody in London, and he’s a discreet man, thoughtful as to how he uses his information.’
    Billy and Mattie rolled their eyes. (Not so their mother could see, of course.) Elijah Fortune might know everything about everybody in London. It had been their opinion from a very young age that the same could be said about their mother.
    After Billy had seen the Prime Minister with street-girls, he said to his mother: ‘Elijah says Mr Gladstone’s been rescuing street-girls for years.’
    Mrs Stacey laughed. ‘Peg Turnball runs one of the houses off the Strand and Peg said to me a few years ago: “Listen, Isabella, that man, Mr Gladstone, he’s a bloody great nuisance and I wish he’d keep out of my street – my girls complain – Edie Barnes moans that he reads her blooming Shakespeare! Well, I don’t care about that in their own time, Isabella, but he puts people off approaching the girls, the way he hangs about them so, he’s blooming bad for business!”’
    And then his mother asked Billy, in that droll manner her children were used to: ‘Did Elijah mention Peg’s other observation: that Mr Gladstone helps only pretty girls, and young, not ugly old ones?’ and Billy had laughed too, because that indeed had been his observation also.
    ‘Where does he walk?’ asked Mattie curiously. ‘The Prime Minister of England walking in the Haymarket? He wouldn’t !’
    ‘Not the Haymarket, Mattie, he’s not stupid!’ said Billy. ‘After the Parliament business is over at night he goes up Whitehall – right past Downing Street as if he didn’t have any connection to it, and then from Whitehall he often doesn’t turn towards Carlton House Terrace where he lives still, but down the Strand instead.’
    ‘Ten Downing Street is quite small for a family,’ said their mother knowledgeably, which made her children roll their eyes at each other briefly, for it meant that, sometime, through one of her multitudinous acquaintances, Mrs Stacey had probably been inside.
    ‘And how do you know he goes down the Strand?’ said Mattie, laughing at her brother. ‘You walking the streets too?’
    ‘Mind your own business,’ said Billy mildly.
    He didn’t say he had once or twice followed Mr Gladstone, so fascinated was he by this strange and powerful man who had helped Billy get promoted, probably without realising it. And finally Mattie had seen the famous man herself. She had met Billy outside the Parliament, and Mr Gladstone had passed them in the street, and courteously raised his hat.
    ‘Say hello to Elijah from me,’ his mother said at last. ‘And to give my love to Dodo. Tell him—’ She stopped, bit her lip. ‘Tell him it all worked out in the end.’
    And Billy had looked at his mother carefully, and nodded.
    Now Billy sat at the clerks’ desks, having been banished from the Prime Minister’s office, writing neatly. But his thoughts went round and round. What is the connection between Mr Gladstone and Lord Arthur Clinton? The scene he had observed tumbled about in his curious mind. Billy had seen Lord Arthur, the Member for Newark, in the Houses of Parliament occasionally (but not often), and at the little theatre in Clapham with his pretty sister, and a few times in Wakefield-street with Ernest. Billy’s father had taught him long ago not to judge what he did not know, and Billy lived by this precept, but he had quietly thought Lord Arthur a dispiriting fellow.
    ‘He’s had a dispiriting life,’ Elijah had said.
    But this dispiriting person was no longer a Member of Parliament. He had lost, or resigned, his seat at the last election. He’d been made a bankrupt, Freddie had told them, and they had never seen him at