Read Online The Wicked Boy by Kate Summerscale - Free Book Online

justified in sending his letter. The disgrace to Sharman should have been devastating – the penalty for a homosexual assault was life imprisonment – but he was practising again in the East London courts by the end of the month. A call in the press to have him struck off the rolls went ignored, and though he resigned his post as Conservative agent for the constituency of West Ham North, by 1895 he had been reappointed even to this.
    Sharman had spent the summer of 1895 working as election agent for Ernest Gray, the Tory candidate in West Ham North, and his efforts paid off when, on 15 July, Gray took the seat from the Liberal incumbent. Since Gray had been absent through illness during the campaign, Sharman claimed the credit for the win. He seemed to be riding high when he took on John Fox’s defence, thoroughly restored to his position of influence in the district.
    Ernest Baggallay reached the courthouse before 10 a.m., much earlier than he had done on the previous Thursday. The reporters and the public pushed in to find their seats as soon as the court opened. When the usher called ‘Silence!’ they rose to their feet and Baggallay entered to take his place on the bench. He began by dealing with the charges against the men and women who had been arrested the previous day and held overnight at police stations in West Ham. The Coombes brothers and John Fox were called at 11.15 a.m.
    The court was hushed as Fox, Nattie and Robert walked in. They climbed the steps to a raised platform in the middle of the room, enclosed on three sides by iron rails and guarded on the fourth by a burly police constable. Fox looked even scruffier than before. He was no longer wearing Mr Coombes’s Sunday best, and instead had put on a greasy, ragged blue serge suit – it was ‘the sort of thing one expects to see on engine cleaners and stokers’, said the reporter from the
Star
. The
Evening News
correspondent described Fox as ‘a short squat man, clad in loose, wrinkled garments that hang flabbily from his sloping shoulders. He is limp and dingy looking, his hair tumbled, and a weedy growth of dark moustache and beard showing against the soiled pallor of his face.’
    Robert, by contrast, was a picture of composure and wellbeing. He was ‘a slim, active-looking lad of average height, healthy, and browned with open air and sunshine’, reported the
Evening News
: ‘such a boy as we see in scores on any playground of the people on a summer’s afternoon, wearing a dark blue tennis coat, piped with silk cord, white flannel trousers, turned up at the end, and brown leather shoes. He is cleaner than most boys of his class, his turn-down collar white, his sunburnt face well washed, his close cropped dark hair brushed off his forehead.’ To wear a shirt with a collar was a mark of respectability – the labouring classes usually went collarless – and the cricket flannels and tennis blazer also smacked of social aspiration: whereas football was a predominantly working-class game, both cricket and lawn tennis were preferred by the middle and upper classes.
    The
Evening News
reporter allowed himself a brief meditation on how Robert’s mother might have troubled herself over the burst of hair lifting off his forehead: ‘There is no curl in the bunch of it that rises stiffly from his brow,’ he wrote; ‘it is such obstinate hair as mothers labour at in the hope to coax it into a neat parting, and one thinks that a dead hand has often wrestled with its stubbornness when the church bells were ringing on a Sunday morning.’
    Nattie was wearing pale breeches, dark stockings, and a jacket with a white sailor collar. Though there was only a year between the brothers, he was dressed in the clothes of a schoolboy and Robert in those of a young man. Robert seemed quite the Cockney dandy, a worldly Dodger to Nattie’s wide-eyed Oliver Twist.
    Guy Stephenson,