Black Diamonds (9 page)

It was surely not the sort of place to bring a heavily pregnant wife and two small children. Certainly, Pointe de Meuron frightened Laura. Tilly Kingdon’s journal shows that after a fight among the half-breeds, she was so upset that she became ill:

…
the half-breeds came
from the Fort very intoxicated, and fought, and used very abusive language to each other in their own tongue, which frightened her Ladyship very much. She was very ill indeed for 2 days and nights, but gradually recovered, as she gained her strength, she found her left leg was quite stiff, and she was unable to use it. Lord Milton got her two rude sticks from out of the woods to help her along a little …

The lengths to which Milton went in order to get his family to Pointe de Meuron, and the primitive conditions he exposed them to, indicate that he had a strong reason to be there. He wanted his child to be born in British territory, but why choose such a remote and hostile spot? Why not Toronto, or some other relatively civilized place instead? There is nothing to indicate that Milton had been to Pointe de Meuron before; in both his and Cheadle’s account of their 1863 expedition, their route took them nowhere near it.

Could it have been because the small Indian settlement offered Milton the seclusion to execute his plan to swap his wife’s newborn child for Billy, if the baby was a girl?
Re-reading Dr Millar’s statement
, he said, ‘Excepting a Catholic priest and the household of the fort, there were no white people for many miles around, consequently no white women or children ever visited us, our only visitors were Indians – for the most part patients of mine – black flies and mosquitoes and plenty of them.’ But in the town of Fort William, nine miles downriver from Pointe de Meuron, there were plenty of white women. Dr Millar was Milton’s trusted physician: ‘My intercourse with Lord and Lady Milton extended over a course of four or five years during which time, with few intermissions they were under my daily observation,’ he told Billy’s lawyers. Had Dr Millar conspired with Milton to introduce a substitute baby? Might he have had the connections in Fort William to obtain one?

Implausible, but not impossible. Back home in England, at Wentworth, Milton’s family were suspicious from the outset. Flouting tradition, they refused to acknowledge Billy’s birth, let alone celebrate it.

Yet there is a danger of reading too much into their silence. The Earl had done all he could to prevent his eldest son producing an heir; it may simply have been an expression of a fervently held wish – that his grandson Billy, the product in his mind of a corrupted bloodline, had never been born.

It is impossible to know whether, in 1902, Lady Alice had a genuine case against her nephew; whether she could have proved that he had been swapped at birth. The loss and destruction of Billy’s opponents’ papers, documents that could have told the other side of the story, that might have revealed the evidence against him – if it ever existed – means that it is not possible to say.

Ultimately, the conspiracy against Billy failed. Ironically, its failure had nothing to do with documents – the minutiae of sworn witness statements, the supporting evidence of either side. It turned instead, like so many of the dramatic moments in the Fitzwilliams’ twentieth-century history, on sentiment.

Thirty years after Billy’s birth, the bitterness and acrimony had not subsided. So powerful, so raw were these feelings, that at Wentworth, hours before the 6th Earl was buried, Lady Alice and her siblings could not bear the thought of their nephew being in the same room as their dead father’s body.

A servant’s errand gives the mystery of the impostor affair a final twist.

7

On the eve of the 6th Earl’s funeral, a footman walked briskly through the Picture Gallery on the principal floor of Wentworth House. He was dressed in the Fitzwilliam livery. His hair was pomaded, he wore a stiff winged collar, a black tailcoat, knee breeches and buckled shoes. Rows of tiny silver buttons, embossed with a winged griffin and two coronets, ran up the sleeve of his jacket to just below the elbow. Instead of the usual white tie, he was wearing black tie and a black waistcoat, in mourning for the dead Earl.

He had been summoned by a bell to Cliffords Lodgings, a suite of bedrooms along the West Front. The Picture Gallery was the quickest route. A long red and white room, stretching fifty yards, bisected by impressive stone columns, it was one of the few connecting passages between the Palladian and baroque façades of the house. The intricate carving on the magnificent ceiling was picked out in gilt; the wooden friezes above the great oak bookshelves were also painted gold; so were the picture frames around the many old masters lining the walls. There was a portrait of Shakespeare that had once belonged to Dryden, a cupid by Guido, a Raphael, and a painting of Mary Magdalene by Titian. Though splendid, the gallery was cosily furnished and used as a sitting room by the family. A range of smells wafted through it: the heady scent from vases of hothouse flowers grown in Wentworth’s greenhouses, the bitter smell of coal smoke from the grates that burnt along its length; the sweet tang of lime leaves, scattered discreetly along the skirting boards, the housekeeper’s remedy for ‘keeping mice away’.

Treading softly, his feet making little sound on the parquet floor as he hurried through the gallery, the footman knew from the gossip in the servants’ hall, the flurry of hand-delivered notes and the tense, highly charged atmosphere in the house, that many of the assembled family members were not on speaking terms. Through rival camps of trusted servants, they were watching one another’s every move. The upset had been caused by a rumour. It was said that earlier that day Henry Fitzwilliam had taken his nephew, Billy, to the Duchess of Kent room to pay his last respects to the dead Earl.

Turning right at the end of the Picture Gallery, the footman entered Cliffords Lodgings. Though modest in comparison to the state guest rooms, the bedrooms here commanded fine views over the oak trees in the Park, planted in the pattern of the troop formations at the Battle of Blenheim. His journey from the servant’s cubicle at the bottom of Pantry Stairs, behind the Pillared Hall, had taken almost four minutes.

Quietly, precisely, he knocked on the door, the way he had been taught to. Henry Fitzwilliam, the Earl’s oldest surviving son and the man at the centre of the rumours, handed him a note, instructing him to deliver it to his sister, Lady Alice, who was staying in another room in the house.

The note has survived. Everything else must be pieced together.

Written hurriedly, with a quill pen, on the distinctive duck-egg-blue Wentworth House notepaper, it was the final signal to Lady Alice that Henry would have nothing to do with the conspiracy to kick Billy out.

‘
Yes,’ it read
. ‘Billy asked me to go with him to see dear Father. He said I would rather go with you than with anyone else. Father looked so calm, so peaceful – one could not wish anything else for him.

‘As to Billy I am very fond of him. I think he is of me. I want to be a good friend to him for his own and for his father’s sake.’

This last sentence, gently expressed, was dramatic in its implications. Henry had switched sides. Without his collaboration, Lady Alice was thwarted in her move to expose Billy as an impostor. Henry was the sole executor of the 6th Earl’s will: if Lady Alice challenged Billy’s identity in court, she would have to bring her case against her elder brother. After Billy, Henry was the next in line to the Fitzwilliam title and fortune. His opposition made a nonsense of any potential legal challenge. Lady Alice could hardly commence proceedings against her brother when he was not only adamant that those proceedings were inappropriate, but would ironically be the one person who stood to benefit were her claim to succeed.

Had Henry sided with Lady Alice and the other conspirators, everything might have been his: the Earldom, the coalfields, Went-worth, the fifty-room house in Grosvenor Square, the estate in Ireland, the portfolio of shares. But he turned his back on the chance to become one of the richest men in Britain.

To begin with, Henry had been part of the plot.

In the mid-1890s, when the impostor allegation was first made, he was nearly sixty years old; the lures of an Earldom and a huge fortune were tempting.

His entire life had been lived as heir ‘de facto’. He was his father’s favourite son, the one the 6th Earl had wanted to succeed him. He was the person on whom the Earl had depended in a crisis, and on whom he leant in times of grief, most notably when his brother, John, was killed on the lawn in front of Wentworth after the horse he was riding tripped and crushed him.

Henry had received a £200,000
^*
bequest from his father – substantially more than his younger brothers, who were given £50,000 each. In appointing Henry the executor of his will, it seems the Earl had left it up to Henry to decide whether to contest Billy’s succession or not.

It is possible that Henry came to doubt the validity of the evidence Lady Alice relied on to support her charge and was himself convinced by the documentation Billy had assembled to show that he was his father’s son. Conceivably, he decided to place his family’s interest above his own, electing to avoid the scandal that a high-profile legitimacy case would bring. Perhaps, if he had had a son of his own, his decision might have been different. Yet regardless of the reasoning that may have run through Henry’s mind, had he not been the man of principle that he was, if he had chosen to press the case against Billy, there is every chance he might have succeeded. In the days before DNA testing, the strange circumstances of Billy’s birth might have made it difficult for his lawyers to prove his legitimacy in a court of law. Crucially, the documents Billy kept in his safe reveal that in certain respects his solicitors believed his case to be weak.
In 1900, they were short of proof
that the Earl regarded Billy as his heir. The one letter they held had been written eleven years earlier. They had nothing more up to date.

Twenty-five years after Milton’s death, Henry’s loyalty to his brother held strong. The message he sent to his siblings on the eve of the Earl’s funeral was clear: he wanted to be a ‘friend’ to Billy ‘for his own and for his father’s sake’.

The relationship between the two brothers had been a primary one in both their lives. Henry was the one member of the Fitzwilliam family to have loved Milton unconditionally. From a young age he had been sensitive to his difficulties, and to his feelings. ‘I know he often thinks that we do not care for him,’ he wrote to his brothers and sisters, when he had urged them to club together to buy Milton a twenty-first birthday present. After Earl Fitzwilliam sent Milton into exile, Henry was the only one to see him off from Liverpool Docks. In later years, when Milton was living in self-imposed isolation in the wilds of North America, Henry continued to look after his brother. ‘Only those who have been in great trouble far away from friends and help can guess how grateful we are to dear good Henry,’ Laura wrote in 1874, after the family was quarantined by scarlet fever. ‘His case arrived a few days ago and as we unpacked it the tears ran down William’s face. He said “this is just like Henry”. He, William [Milton] is now wearing the things Henry sent out. The baby is in one of Reggie’s shirts which is just the thing to keep him warm after his scarlet fever. William gave an exclamation of delight when he saw the razors and Daisy said “Oh good old Uncle Henry to send razors to cut off Father’s prickly beard, I shan’t mind now when father kisses me.” ’

In a sanctimonious letter
to Henry, his mother also thanked him for sending the things out to the young family. ‘So you see dearest Henry,’ she wrote, ‘your kind help was well bestowed and it has given great pleasure to our dear William and anything that lightens and cheers his sorrowful existence is indeed a cause for gratitude to our Heavenly Father who does not willingly afflict the children of men.’

But perhaps the truest indication of Henry’s sensitivity to his brother’s feelings is to be found in his refusal to marry Mary Butler while Milton was still alive. Mary was the woman Milton had loved so passionately before his marriage to Laura. Henry and Mary married within five months of Milton’s death, when Henry was thirty-six, and Mary thirty.

To the last, Henry stood by his brother; it was he who rallied the family to Milton’s bedside when he died.

On Sunday 14 January 1877 a telegram arrived at Wentworth. It was from Laura: Milton was in Rouen, desperately ill. Henry left for France immediately. From Victoria station in London, as he waited to catch the train to Dover, he wrote to warn his sister Fanny, who was living in Ireland and who had also been close to Milton.

I fear that dear William is very seriously ill and that any improvement must be very slow while a turn for the worse which might come on any time would make his condition very dangerous. Darling Fan I can’t disguise from myself and must not hide from you that the time may not be long; I can not pray to have such a life of sickness and misery prolonged when if God takes him he will be so happy. As he has had sorrow here so may he have happiness in heaven.

Three days later, Milton died. He was thirty-seven years old. What he died of, and why he was in northern France, we do not know. As with so much of his life, there is no official record.

Milton was buried at Wentworth in a quiet, private ceremony. ‘There was little to indicate the exalted position of him to whose memory the last tribute was being paid,’ reported the local newspaper. ‘The funeral route was the shortest and most private which could be chosen, more than half of it being through the gardens at the back of Wentworth House, and the work of the bearers was consequently much lighter than it would have been had the road through the Park and the village been selected.’

Milton’s funeral was in stark contrast to the lavish send-off usually accorded to an eldest son.
As Michael Bond
, Milton’s great-grandson, remarked, ‘They tried to sneak him out the back way.’