Mistress

A Liverpool dockworker's daughter stopped the traffic in Hyde Park, and the government asked her to stop doing it. That is not a figure of speech. When Catherine Walters rode in Rotten Row, the crowds that gathered to watch became so large and so unmanageable that the authorities made an approach. She was a courtesan — an unmarried woman kept by wealthy men, entirely outside respectable society and entirely central to it — and at her height she was the most photographed and most discussed woman in London who was not the Queen. She never married. She never had to. She died at eighty, in her own house in Mayfair, with money.

She held it by knowing things. Her clients and admirers included a future Prime Minister, a future King of England, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a Prime Minister's son, and the general who commanded the British Army — men who talked in front of her because talking to her was the pleasure they were paying for, and who assumed a woman in her position had no forwarding address for what she heard. She rode superbly, which was the currency of that world, and dressed so precisely that a habit cut for her set a fashion across Europe. She was witty and blunt and did not pretend to be respectable, which meant nobody could threaten her with exposure. She was called Skittles, after the bowling alley she was said to have worked in. She kept the name for sixty years and never bothered to correct any of the stories.

She came off the Liverpool waterfront. Her father worked as a customs officer on the docks; the family was poor and Irish-descended and there were several children, and her mother died when she was young. She went into the only trade available to a spectacularly good-looking girl with no money and no protection, and she made a series of cold, accurate decisions about which men were worth her time. The first was a Lancashire aristocrat. The last was an entire generation of the British establishment.

She outlived the era completely. She stayed at South Street, Mayfair, through the end of the century, receiving visitors long after the men who had made her famous were dead — including a young Wilfrid Scawen Blunt who had loved her decades earlier and kept coming back. She died in 1920, in a London that no longer had a category for what she had been.

Forget the horses and the dresses and the crowds in the Row. Remember only this: half the men running the country said things in front of her that they would not have said in front of each other, and not one of them ever thought to wonder what she did with it.