The Petticoat Men by Barbara Ewing Page B

apprised of certain matters appearing in the newspapers,he went quickly, in a hansom cab, to the Chapel-street house of his most long-standing mistress (although Sunday was not usually his day for visiting in hansom cabs).
    Instead of getting down to business immediately, as they sometimes did when time was short, the Prince lit one of his large cigars. Lady Susan Vane-Tempest smiled and reached for tobacco also; she lit a long thin Turkish cigarette. They had known each other since they were children, and smoked together often too; she was two years older than he and had given him his first cigarette. When his elder sister, the Princess Victoria, aged seventeen, became a royal bride (her father had arranged a most suitable marriage with the heir to the Prussian throne), the eighteen-year-old Lady Susan had been a bridesmaid. Bertie (as the Prince was called by his family) and Susan had danced together that day, regally as they had been taught, and smiled demurely. And then later, together with Bertie’s younger sister, Alice, they had smoked cigarettes and drunk purloined champagne and giggled, in a hidden place.
    ‘My dear Susan,’ he said now.
    She, surprised (but delighted) by this unexpected Sunday visit, was alerted at once by his tone of voice, became very still: she knew him so well.
    ‘My dear, to come, at once, to the point: you may not have read the newspapers today. You know it is absolutely impossible for me to be involved in another scandal. I regret to inform you that you and I cannot be alone together again under any circumstances, until and unless this Gentlemen in Female Attire business is quickly dismissed. My contacts tell me it is certain that your brother Arthur is involved.’
    Her face paled. She had indeed read the newspapers and had at once understood better than he knew; she had hoped he would not hear so immediately of Arthur’s connection. Quickly she put the cigarette to her lips so that she would not speak without consideration. She could not lose him – she had always been part of his life; after his marriage other ladies always came and went or turned insane, but Lady Susan had not only known him since childhood, she had also been his mistress now for over three years; they loved each other, of course.
    Who is to say which of them knew about love?
    Who is to say which of them had had the most unhappy, privileged childhood? Small Bertie, the Prince of Wales, or little Susan, Lady Susan Clinton, only daughter of the fifth Duke of Newcastle? These unmothered children.
    Bertie’s mother had admitted she could not love her eldest son and even as a young child he had been aware of this fact.
    Susan’s mother had run away for the last fatal time from her husband – and from her five children – when Susan was nine years old; the girl wept night after night at this abandonment. Mrs Catherine Gladstone, who lived next door to their London town house, sat beside the bed trying to comfort the weeping, trembling little girl, whose mother never returned.
    For years, Prince Albert, impatient at what he saw as his son’s stupidity, at how easily he was swayed by other people, insisted that Bertie be educated alone, with no companions. For years also, in another stately home, the cold and cuckolded Duke of Newcastle watched his growing, only daughter sternly, over-anxiously; all the time wondering if she had inherited not just the name, but the proclivities, of her dangerous, degenerate mother.
    Lady Susan, aged twenty, rebelled first. Perhaps tired of lovingly and respectably mothering her motherless brothers, just as she sometimes mothered the unmothered Prince, she insisted to her father that she wanted to marry a wealthy and exciting (but extremely unstable) nobleman, Lord Adolphus Vane-Tempest, who had declaimed to her, passionately and with much extremely expensive jewellery, that he was unable to live without her.
    ‘I absolutely forbid this marriage, Susan. You will do nothing so