Heads turned as the two strikingly handsome women swept imperiously into the pale-green and gilded foyer of the Strand Theatre and made their way to the private box, booked under the name of Mrs Fanny Graham, where two young men – Mr Hugh Mundell and Mr Cecil Thomas were the names they had given to the boxkeeper – were already waiting for them.

In the flurry of excitement, nobody noticed the three ordinary-looking, moustachioed men who had slipped quietly into the theatre on the heels of the two women and then quickly melted away into the darker recesses of the stalls and promenade.

The boxkeeper was excited. He thought that he recognised one of these two divinities as none other than the Duchess of Manchester, the great society beauty whom the Prime Minister, Mr Gladstone, just five days earlier at a state banquet, had praised as among ‘the very fairest of our land’.

But the male members of the audience at the Strand Theatre were not so easily fooled. ‘The general opinion throughout the house,’ one observer reported, ‘was that they were two fresh stars in the firmament of the demi-monde, and that their beauty, their fascination, and their paid-for smiles would, before the London season expired, cause many a poor dupe to curse the hour in which he had been born.’

The recently rebuilt Strand Theatre was one of London’s largest, and seated over a thousand people. It was famous for three things: for the quality of its air, for its burlesque productions, and for its reputation as a place of successful sexual assignations. Air quality was a prime consideration. Most theatres and music halls reeked of unwashed humanity, a hot and heady mixture of sweat, body odour, pipe and cigar smoke, cheap scent and alcohol. When it was rebuilt in 1865 the Strand was the first theatre with a purposely designed ventilation system and the first to install an industrial-sized Rimmel’s Vaporiser, invented by the parfumier Eugene Rimmel, which released clouds of perfumed steam to sanitise and deodorise the air.

London was in the grip of a new theatrical craze for burlesques and burlettas, for light operas, comedies, farces, melodramas and pantomimes where women dressed as men and men dressed as women. The pursuit of love with all its thorny and tangled turnings, all its comic and tragi-comic complications, was the proper subject of burlesque. That young women dressed as men fell in love with young men, and young men dressed as women fell in love with young women, far from confusing the audience, seemed to add a delightful frisson of sexual excitement to the proceedings. And the Strand Theatre was the very epicentre of burlesque mania, mounting a never-ending succession of ‘Grand Burlesque Extravaganzas’ which guaranteed full houses night after night.

Above and beyond its technical marvels and its burlesque extravaganzas, the Strand was notorious as a place where men could meet women for sex, and had been patronised on many occasions by no less a personage than the Prince of Wales. It was, as the cartoonist Alfred Bryan slyly insinuated, one of London’s ‘Noted Shops for Tarts’, and a crude but popular limerick made explicit reference to the Strand’s erotic reputation: 

If there was any lingering doubt that the two strikingly handsome women in Mrs Fanny Graham’s box were expensively dressed whores, their behaviour soon put paid to such notions. They nonchalantly leaned over their box, waved their fans, twirled their handkerchiefs and ‘lasciviously ogled the male occupants of the stalls’. They smoked, they giggled, they nodded and they winked as they waggled their tongues at men in such a way as to leave absolutely no doubt of their sexual intentions.

And they chirruped – so loudly that at one point some members of the audience complained that it quite drowned out the performance. Chirruping was a sucking noise, made with fluttering lips and usually reserved for babies and kittens, but used by whores and their punters alike to signal sexual desire. Sometimes chirrupers were arrested for causing a public nuisance. One persistent chirruper taken up by the police excused himself at the Lambeth Police Court by claiming ‘he thought there was no harm in it’.

After half an hour or so Mrs Fanny Graham and her companion, Miss Stella Boulton, stood up, smiled and curtseyed to the gentlemen of the stalls and left their box to go to the theatre’s refreshment bar, squired by Mr Mundell and Mr Thomas. Again, nobody paid the least attention to the three moustachioed men who had so unobtrusively followed them into the theatre and who now reappeared in the Strand’s saloon bar looking for all the world as if they were fixtures there.

It was clear that Mrs Graham and Miss Boulton had already been drinking quite heavily, and they now proceeded to consume brandies and sherries at breakneck speed. They were immediately besieged by a gang of curious and admiring swells and gallants and some dubious and not-so-dubious gentlemen eager to sample the charms of these two dazzling demi-mondaines.

Miss Stella Boulton was seemingly the younger of the pair and was resplendent in a brilliant scarlet silk evening dress trimmed with white lace and draped with a white muslin shawl. She was more than just pretty. In the glittering, flattering, faceted lights of the Strand’s saloon bar she was quite beautiful. She was tall and slender, with a narrow waist and a magnificent bosom, her finely shaped head topped by raven hair fashionably dressed in the Grecian style with coils of plaited hair held in place by a crosshatch of black velvet. Her pale face was captivating, with large liquid violet-blue eyes, just a becoming blush to her cheeks, perfect full ruby lips and pearly white teeth. She seemed to scintillate and shine like a star, and the men could hardly take their eyes off her. If she was indeed a whore, she was an exceptional whore. A veritable queen among whores.

By way of contrast, Mrs Fanny Graham was (and this was putting it charitably) on the plain side and was possessed of what the Evening Standard called, diplomatically, ‘sterner features’. She seemed older, matronly and more worldly-wise, and her cascading flaxen curls seemed to sit oddly with her dark skin and dark eyes. She wore a rather unbecoming dark-green satin crinoline trimmed with black lace and a black lace mantilla. Her eyes were a little too small and closely set together, her nose a little too large, her brows a shade too heavy, and her cheeks more than a little jowly.

But Mrs Fanny Graham was withal a fine figure of a woman with an expression of great good humour and animation. She was handsome in a mannish sort of way. Her dark eyes sparkled when she spoke to her companion, whom she addressed variously as ‘Stella’, ‘Stell’, ‘Sister’ and ‘Dear’ in a loud theatrical voice which seemed to ricochet around the refreshment bar. Stella’s voice, by contrast, was sweet and musical, though equally theatrical. She called her companion ‘Fanny’ and ‘Sister dear’.

So Fanny and Stella were, it seemed, sisters both by birth and by profession, and if the men crowding around them had paused for thought, they might have reached some bracing conclusions about the cruelty of a bestowing fate which had endowed the one sister with such beauty and the other with such decided plainness. Both women were ‘painted’, Stella quite subtly and effectively, Fanny with considerably more artistic licence. And both wore rather a great deal of jewellery: necklaces, lockets, rings, earrings and bracelets.

Fanny and Stella were hard to fathom. They had behaved with such lewdness in their box in the stalls as to leave not the faintest shred of doubt in even the most disinterested observer that they were a pair of hardened and shameless whores. And yet, close up, Stella was revealed as a beautiful, almost aristocratic, young woman who showed flashes of an innate, and most decidedly un-whorelike, dignity and grace. One newspaper said later that she was ‘charming as a star’, another christened her ‘Stella, Star of the Strand’. And despite all the opprobrium that would later be heaped upon her, despite all the mud that would be slung at her and all the mud that would...