Free Fanny and Stella by Neil McKenna Page A

often than not – she gave them what they wanted, in small, strange hotel rooms; in little out-of-the-way lodgings; in small houses where wives and children and maids-of-all-work were out; in parks and garden squares, after dark, behind trees and bushes; down alleyways, along towpaths; in closes, courtyards and crooked ways; in urinals and cubicles and public conveniences; in the dark, always hiding, always hidden; always watching, always fearing; always ready to fly when danger threatened.
    Sometimes they told her that they loved her and they wanted her. Sometimes they said nothing. Only a few ever kissed her. Which disappointed her. Most only wanted one thing. They would hug and hold and squeeze her and then fumble clumsily with her trousers until they were down and off and then the deed was quickly accomplished. They would spend in her mouth or in her hand, and sometimes between her buttocks. If she felt like it, if she had that curious feeling, like an itch but not quite an itch, if they were not too big – or even if they were – she would let them penetrate her and spend in her bottom.
    Afterwards they would wipe themselves and wash themselves vigorously, as if they were ashamed of what they had done. She was surprised at how many would start to cry. Sometimes they would kneel and pray for forgiveness from God. And sometimes they would hand her a golden sovereign and beg her forgiveness. Stella never knew what she had to forgive. But she said she forgave them nonetheless because it made them feel happier, and she always pocketed the golden sovereign.
    Thankfully they were not all like that. Some men wanted to stay, to talk, to kiss, to embrace. And a few, more than a few, said they wanted to see her again and seemed to mean it. Such ardent swains could be very persistent and very cloying. Some of them begged her to share their lives, begged her, with tears in their eyes, for her love. But such love affairs were doomed, Stella concluded. They did not so much want to love her as to possess her, to own her as their plaything, as a china doll to be dressed up prettily in a suit or a satin gown.
    Some of the coarse young men from the uncharted erotic swamp of nameless streets and alleyways, the working men, the soldiers and sailors and dark-skinned foreign men, just wanted to fuck her again and again until she could hardly bear the pain. She would leave drenched in the smell of their sweat and their seed and she would feel different. She would feel replete. And again and again she found herself drawn back to these men, drawn back by their feral bodies and their feral smells and, through the strange alchemy of lust, find rest and repose.
    Stella loved them all. She knew that she could saunter on to the streets – in drag or out of drag, as Stella, Star of the Strand, or as plain Ernest Boulton – and that sooner or later a man, or several men, would proposition her. She drew notice. She compelled notice. They told her she was beautiful and that they desired her. They wanted her, they needed her. And Stella knew that it was within her power to make them happy.
    In her mind, Stella compared going with men – for love or for money – with her life as a great actress. Were the two things really so very different? She was kind to men, she gave pleasure to men, to many men, to lonely and unhappy men. She brought joy to their lives, and they returned the favour with pretty gifts. She gave everything she had. She gave herself, body and soul. She performed – consummately – for each and every one. Each encounter was magical and memorable, and until the time came when she would find fame and fortune and marry the younger son of a Duke, she lived in a rosy hue of love and adulation. 

7
    Becoming Fanny
And all that’s madly wild, or oddly gay,
We call it only pretty Fanny’s way.
    Thomas Parnell,
‘An Elegy, to an Old Beauty’, 1773
    N  umber 35 Wimpole Street was a house of sorrow, and the early years and youth of