Those Wild Wyndhams (9 page)

Arrangements proceeded as normal: the wedding presents arrived at Belgrave Square and, as customary, were displayed for inspection by family, friends and household (although some, such as Stanway, the Gloucestershire manor house given by Lord Wemyss to the newlyweds, were not capable of display). Mary began work on hundreds of thank-you letters: ‘I have thanked eight presents (long elaborate letters) & August is two hours old!’ she complained to Hugo.
⁶⁸
Last-minute adjustments were made to Mananai’s and Pamela’s bridesmaid dresses and Mary’s trousseau was packed in tissue paper in preparation for her honeymoon. Early on the morning of their wedding day, 10 August 1883, ‘the dawn of the day which I hope through all our lives we shall look upon as a blessed anniversary’, Hugo wrote to Mary anticipating their meeting in St Peter’s Church in Eaton Square later that day: ‘Darling God give you strength to go through it all – & make me a good Hogs worthy of the little angel Mogs … Goodbye my darling soon to be mine only and really.’ He sketched for Mary a cartoon: a small round Mary (not entirely representative, it must be said, since Mary was tall and slender) with a tall thin bridegroom by her side shouting ‘hurrah!’
⁶⁹
Several hours later, as reported by
The Times
, Mary, dressed in white and decked with orange blossom, walked down the aisle of St Peter’s, past relations, friends and royalty in the form of Princess Christian, towards ‘Lord Elcho M.P.’, and became his wife.
⁷⁰

As the assembled masses waited in the cool church for Mary to make her entrance on Percy’s arm, it was Madeline Wyndham’s nerves that were most frayed. ‘It
was
an awful bit that in the Church before
you came
– it felt
so long
,’ Madeline told Mary later, heady with relief that all had gone as planned. ‘The organ played
such a tune
… I could
have screamed
to the man, to
stop
his twiddles … & then, like hot & cold or magic music, as you drew near he played louder & louder!’
⁷¹
Normally such a thing would have given Mary and her mother the giggles: this time it only gave Madeline a feeling of ‘teeth on edge’.

The service was followed by a short reception at Belgrave Square. At a quarter past four, the bride and groom departed: first for Easton Lodge in Essex, lent to them by Lord and Lady Brooke, and then to Gober, in the Scottish Highlands, where Hugo was to go stalking. The Wyndhams settled in for a quiet evening at Belgrave Square. Madeline and her sisters, Julia and Lucy Campbell, alternately laughed and cried over the events of the day. Then George and Guy Wyndham went to a play. The rest of the family dined with Fräulein. After dinner, as Mananai sat and pulled apart Mary’s bouquet in order to make nosegays for Mary’s friends as keepsakes, her mother was reminded of her eldest daughter: ‘sitting there with a melancholy face picking and pulling at all the lovely flowers!’
⁷²
The comparison did not bode well given that all Mary’s bouquets and buttonholes had been to do with Hugo.

Three years later, when the sheen of marriage had long started to fade, Mary reproved Hugo for spending their honeymoon stalking. At the time, she had seemed happy enough to yomp across the moors after Hugo, and she revelled in a sense of recklessness as the Elchos drank champagne and played piquet by night. The Wyndham family was by now summering in Hyères, and Madeline Wyndham was missing her eldest daughter desperately (‘I cannot get
reconciled
to being without you,’ she told Mary some two years after her marriage),
¹
but Mary’s letters to her family glowed with delight in her marital state. One evening, she told Guy conspiratorially, the Elchos had got so ‘drunk’ on champagne ‘to cheer our spirits’ after Hugo failed to bag a stag that Hugo fell over.
²
At this liminal honeymoon stage Mary had been freed from childhood’s bonds without yet assuming matronly cares.

The little cartoons the Elchos sent one another in their marriage’s early years, and coy references to ‘lonely little cots’ when they were apart, suggest that sexually the union was a success. Not for the Elchos the horror stories of the Ruskins, whose marriage was never consummated, or of the young scientist Marie Stopes, who only realized her abusive husband was impotent after six months of study in the British Library.
³
Madeline and her daughters were extremely frank with each other about all health matters, microscopically recounting any oddities in relation to ‘Lady Betsey’, their term for their menstrual cycle. Mary was enthusiastically descriptive about gynaecological matters. It seems likely that Madeline gave all her daughters some kind of warning about what a wedding night entailed. What Mary told her mother after the event must remain a mystery. Madeline Wyndham kept ‘letter books’ containing her children’s correspondence over the course of their lives. On pasting in Mary’s first letter to her following her wedding, Madeline redacted it, so that it tells us only that Mary had ‘a headache’, before the next three lines are scrubbed out vigorously with black pen.
⁴

Romance was in the air at Gober. As Mary and Hugo ate their dinner by firelight, backstage in the little hut Hugo’s valet Williams seduced Mary’s maid Faivre. Prophylactics, not uncommon in the city, were hardly readily available in the Highland wilds; perhaps Faivre was also one of many unversed women who did not know how babies were made. Faivre consequently found herself unmarried and pregnant – ‘ruined’, as Mary put it.
⁵
It was a highly unfortunate position for any young woman, an untenable one for a lady’s maid.

In most cases, Faivre would have found herself immediately dismissed without a reference. When the Elchos’ friend George Curzon found out that a housemaid in his employ had been seduced by a footman, he ‘put the little slut out into the street’ without a qualm. His contemporaries considered his attitude unremarkable.
⁶
Mary responded quite differently. With the help of Madeline and Percy she helped Faivre find lodging with a tolerant North London landlady; assisted her financially from her own pin money (Hugo’s valet had long since scarpered); and visited Faivre once the child, a little boy, was born in the spring of 1884.
⁷
Most of Mary’s friends thought her admirably liberal attitude towards staff overly indulgent. Servant troubles became a constant footnote to her daily life. Her anxiety never to hurt anyone’s feelings did not serve her well as an employer.

On 14 August 1883, a few days after the Elchos had arrived at Gober, Hugo wrote a private letter to Percy. The subject was Mary’s dowry. Hugo told Percy that he had proposed ‘with no idea what Mary was to have or whether she was to have any[thing] at all’, as unconvincing a statement as the rest of his letter was disingenuous.
⁸
Mary’s marriage settlement had been negotiated in the weeks between the engagement and the marriage by Percy on the one hand and Hugo’s solicitor, Mr Jamieson, on the other, as was the convention.
⁹
Mary received £15,000 (roughly £
1.25
million today), the interest on which would produce an annual income of £500.
¹⁰
Hugo had thought that £100 or more of this £500 would be given to him for his own use. Now conversations with Mr Jamieson had made it clear that Percy intended the whole for Mary’s use as pin money.

Hugo’s frantic letter to Percy argued that Mary should not have an allowance disproportionate to the Elchos’ income, lest she learn bad spending habits. His reasoning, while in line with contemporary attitudes, was both patronizing and misleading. His concern was not that Mary’s spending habits should be curbed but that his own should be supported. Mary was innately frugal, and remained so all her life. She spent almost no money on clothes (far too little, her friends complained). Her eldest daughter never remembered her buying even a trinket or a bottle of scent for herself. She invariably travelled third class. Hugo, who travelled in first, and liked expensive cigars, was not otherwise extravagant in his living habits, but his gambling habit on the London Stock Exchange was improvident. ‘As far as his children could make out all he wanted money for was to have plenty of it to lose!’ wrote his eldest daughter Cynthia.
¹¹

Hugo’s haste to have this issue determined while on honeymoon suggests he was in yet another financial scrape. From his sheepish tone, even he realized that his behaviour was grasping. Percy agreed that Mary should have only £350–400 a year as pin money, with the remainder going to the Elchos’ common expenses.
¹²
From the occasional sly comment over the years it is clear that Percy knew full well why Hugo was so keen to reduce Mary’s pin money. Mary knew nothing of this until stumbling across this letter years later. ‘Typical’, she scrawled across it in irritation, that on their honeymoon Hugo should have written to her father ‘not on love but Money!’, adding, correctly, that Hugo’s master was ‘Mammon’.
¹³

From Gober the Elchos travelled to Gosford, the Wemysses’ family seat just outside Edinburgh. For a century, the family had lived on another property on the estate. Now Lord Wemyss was adding two vast wings on to an Adams-built centre completed, but never lived in, a century before.
¹⁴
During the course of the works, Mary persuaded the builders to let her go up in the crane used for the building. She drew a picture for her mother to illustrate it: a tiny figure swinging high over a bare landscape.
¹⁵

Mary hated Gosford on sight. A chill east wind whipped around the property, which looked out to the glassy grey Firth of Forth. Seagulls wheeled overhead in a ‘complaining chorus’.
¹⁶
In later life she described the rebuilt house as ‘like a large & gilded, dead & empty Cage’.
¹⁷
Her daughter Cynthia echoed her: ‘a great block of stone that seems to me very still-born. It has no living atmosphere.’
¹⁸
Lutyens likened it to a rendition of ‘God Save the King’ sung flat.
¹⁹
As a newlywed, Mary dreaded the time when Hugo would succeed to the Wemyss title, requiring her to relocate to the north.

Gosford was enough to induce homesickness in anyone. Just days after they arrived, Hugo went rabbit shooting, leaving his new wife alone in the bosom of his family. He had accepted the invitation before his engagement, and claimed he could not in good conscience cancel. It was an early indication of his ability to costume selfishness as honour. In Hugo’s absence, Mary attended Aberlady Church with the family, went for long solitary walks and wrote endless letters to her husband. Evan Charteris, on finding her at her writing desk once again, marvelled teasingly that she had anything further to say. Annie Wemyss visited her in her bedroom before dinner and in her own stiff way ‘thimpashized’ with her doleful daughter-in-law. Nonetheless Mary felt marooned in a strange place and wondered what she was doing there. ‘You
must
come back soon … the very first instant you can … it is too horrid – & … dreary & dismal … everything is rainy & black & miserable & Mogs feels very sad,’ she told Hugo.
²⁰
Hugo’s sympathetic replies showed no sign that he intended to change his plans.

At dinner the Wemysses lectured Mary upon the dangers of separation in marriage. Annie Wemyss noted proudly that she and Lord Wemyss had barely spent a day apart. Already, the Elchos seemed to have exceeded their tally, and Mary’s solitude forced her into contemplation. ‘I think
now
that Hugo & I shall always love being together by ourselves better than anything else … [but] the habit of living together as one cannot be acquired in a minute any more than any other habit … the wedding day is but the
beginning
of the marriage not the “fait accompli”,’ she told her mother. She had taken as her mantra ‘I bide my time’. With that she could ‘
remove Mountains
!’
²¹
But Mary’s brave words rang hollow. She was beginning to realize that moulding Hugo into the husband she wanted might be even more difficult than she had anticipated.

A few weeks later the Elchos returned to London. Hugo had taken a small house near his parents at 12 North Audley Street, off Grosvenor Square. The Elchos stayed at Belgrave Square while waiting for works on the rented house to be completed.
²²
Both their mothers warned Mary about the dangers of city life, full of distractions to drive an emotional wedge between a young husband and wife. Once installed in North Audley Street, the Elchos made a good fist at domesticity. Sometimes they dined alone. Over champagne, Hugo practised the speeches he intended to make the next day in the Commons, speeches they both hoped would gain the attention of the party leadership and raise him out of the backbenches in due course. On other evenings Hugo read poetry to Mary as they sat by the fire.

Yet far more frequently Mary’s diary recorded evenings spent in the company of others. In her journal the companions of her youth, cousins and Wiltshire neighbours, fall away. Instead she went with her sisters-in-law Evelyn de Vesci and Hilda Brodrick to watch the debates from the Ladies’ Gallery in the Commons, or spent evenings at the ‘New Club’ (the New University Club on St James’s Street) drinking champagne and ‘getting lively’ with Arthur Balfour, Hugo and Evan Charteris as they debated that day’s point of interest with dazzling lightness and speed. With Hugo, Laura Tennant and Alfred Lyttelton, Mary passed evenings at the bachelor lodgings of Godfrey Webb where the company reclined in armchairs, played the piano and indulged in ‘nice long talk’.
²³
Webb was somewhat older, and had originally been a friend of Percy and Madeline’s. A clerk in the House of Lords, and celebrated wit and raconteur, ‘Webber’ was described by some of the group as their court jester.
²⁴
That group, of which Arthur was the undisputed king, began to refer to itself as ‘the Gang’. In a few years its members would become ‘the Souls’.