Black Diamonds (23 page)

Vendors at the news-stands shouted the headlines of the war: ‘
Gallantry of
London Scottish’, ‘Allies’ Steady Progress’, ‘Many German Deserters’. The dreadful casualty lists printed that morning told a different story: stark beacons in a fog of censorship, it was evident, even to the civilians on the platforms, that matters at the Front were grave.

Toby Fitzwilliam, Billy’s twenty-six-year-old cousin, eased his way through the crowds. Wearing the service dress of an officer in the Mounted Brigade, he was taller than most of the soldiers around him, and slighter: a round-shouldered, slightly hunched figure with thinning blond hair. Moving against them, he headed towards the platforms from which the trains disgorged their loads of troops.

The soldiers were en route to the southern ports to join the battalions of Territorials being rushed to the Front. The very fact that they were being sent to the line at all was an indication of the critical state of the war. The first battle of Ypres was in progress. Three days previously, on 31 October, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had come perilously close to being defeated at Ghievault. They would call it Ypres Day: in the years to come, the men who fought and survived would wear blue cornflowers in their lapels in remembrance of those who fought and died. At lunchtime on Ypres Day, Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, had little doubt that ‘the last barrier between the Germans and the Channel seaboard was broken down’. His soldiers at Ghievault had been outnumbered by four to one: a heroic last stand by the Worcesters, the Scots and the South Wales Borderers had proved him wrong. But for how much longer could the line be held? The battles of Mons, Le Cateau, the Marne and the Aisne had taken a heavy toll.
Whole brigades
had been reduced to the strength of single battalions, battalions to the strength of companies, and some companies to little more than platoons. In the space of three months, 86,000 of the 100,000-strong BEF that had set out in August, confident of victory by Christmas, had been wounded, killed, or were missing in action. In a matter of months, the BEF had suffered a casualty rate of 90 per cent.

In the coming days, Toby Fitzwilliam’s regiment would also cross the Channel to the Front. ‘All leave was prohibited, we were going over at any moment,’ he later recalled. ‘I went to see my Commanding Officer and explained the situation and said I felt I must see my mother and father before I went overseas.’ The Colonel of Toby’s regiment was an old family friend. Knowing Toby’s circumstances, he had been sympathetic. He had given him special leave to return home to Milton Hall to make one final attempt to be reconciled with his parents.

That morning, the wind was in the north at King’s Cross, confounding the ingenuity of the Victorian engineers. Smoke from the steam trains that had collected in the steep narrow tunnels that led into the station, dug deep under the Regent’s Canal, blew through the double mouth of the terminus. Toby stood waiting for his train at the point where the smoke gathered – in swirling, choking clouds, above the barriers to the platforms. He felt he was embarking on a pointless journey. He held out little hope of being reconciled with his parents: in the preceding weeks, they had not even wanted to say goodbye.

In the space of six traumatic months, Toby had become the black sheep of the Fitzwilliam family. The eldest son of George Fitzwilliam, the 6th Earl’s nephew, in the spring of 1914 he had been banished by his father from the 23,000-acre estate at Milton. Toby had not spoken to his parents since. Despite his repeated efforts, his father and his mother, Evie Fitzwilliam, had refused to see him.

‘
I believe
, as I pointed out to Mother, if I saw you both together I could in a very few minutes clear up so many misunderstandings,’ he implored his father in a letter written at the end of May. ‘Misunderstandings that are making my life miserable and which I am certain you and Mother would like to have removed. I am absolutely sincere in this and I believe I could convince you of my sincerity if you would let me put the whole of my case before you. I am, your loving son.’

George’s reply had been terse and unforgiving:

You have insulted your mother.

You have sent her a half-hearted apology which you never meant except so far as it suited your purpose.

You are not to go to Milton under any pretext whatever.

Yrs George W Fitzwilliam.

Beneath his signature, he had added a postscript: ‘You’ve put the lid on it this time.’

It had been longer still since Toby had heard from his mother. The very thought of her last letter, even after the passage of time, made him wince.

The journey from King’s Cross to Peterborough was painfully slow. The trains were running to military timetables. The Great Northern line served the big army camps beyond Grantham at Belton Park and Harrowby, and further north at Ripon, Clipstone and Catterick. Toby’s route was clogged with passenger trains commandeered to carry reserves to their units and the battalions to the ports; thousands of Belgian refugees, fleeing from the German advance in Flanders, had placed an additional strain on the service.

Progressing slowly at speeds that at times amounted to little more than a shunt, Toby knew he would be hard-pressed to get up to Milton and back to his regiment at Winchester within the twenty-four hours allocated for his leave. Depressingly, as the hours dragged by, he had plenty of time to reflect on the coming meeting – and the whole ghastly business that had led up to it.

Toby’s rift with his parents had been caused by his marriage. His crime in their eyes had been to marry for love. Five months earlier, against their wishes, he had married a girl called Beryl Morgan. The ceremony was followed by a reception at 4 Grosvenor Square, Billy Fitzwilliam’s house in Mayfair. Neither of his parents had attended.

The so-called ‘insult’ was the reason they gave for their absence. Yet such were the bitterness and anger on both sides that the row had long since escalated beyond rationality. The ‘insult’, the slight against his mother for which Toby could not be forgiven, had been made when he had returned her wedding present.

In what his father called ‘a damned insolent message’, three weeks before the wedding, on 19 May, Toby had sent him a note:

My dear Father,
On my return to London today from Oxton I found a silver tray waiting for me from Mother. Will you please point out to her how impossible it is for me to accept a present from one who feels towards the girl I love and am shortly to make my wife as recent letters show that Mother feels towards Beryl.

I have returned the tray to Garrards and asked them to keep it pending further instructions from you or Mother.

Six months on, his father’s accusation still rankled. According to the manager at Garrards, Evie had expected her present to be sent back. Contrary to his father’s charge that, following his ‘damned insolent’ note, Toby had merely sent her ‘a half-hearted apology’, one that he had ‘never meant’, he had in fact written a grovelling letter of apology:

My dear Mother
I am so sorry to hear from Father that he considers my letter insolent, and I take this immediate opportunity of apologizing to you and to him for having written a letter which should even appear to bear any signs of ingratitude or insolence.

One word in explanation of my hasty action.

Beryl means to me more than all that the world and its contents can mean to anyone and I have felt very very deeply the letters which I have received from you, my mother, about her, and I thought that in accepting a present from you it might be taken as some sort of tacit admission on my part of the truth of some of these statements.

I adore Beryl with all my heart and soul. I am convinced that the girl I love, if it were possible loves me even more than I love her.

Think then what a letter from you must mean which tells me that she is marrying me, not because she loves me but for what she thinks she can get out of me.

Whether Beryl and I will ever be able to convince you how much we mean to each other only the years to come can show, and I am sure they will show it.

In the meantime I can only repeat that if the letter I wrote to father appeared or was insolent, I retract it and apologize for it most sincerely and I should like to have the first opportunity of telling you personally how sorry I am.

Evie did not allow him the opportunity. The following day, Toby went to see her at the Berkeley Hotel where she was staying on one of her periodic visits to London. She refused to see him: sending a note via a servant, she told Toby that she was busy with engagements until her return to Milton Hall.

Where Evie led, George followed, so Toby believed. He did not blame his father for the rift. He was convinced that it was his mother who had turned his father against him. If there was to be any chance of making it up with his parents before he left for the Front, he would have to be reconciled with Evie first.

Toby had sent a telegram to Milton Hall to let her know he was coming. Knowing his father would not be there, he was dreading the meeting. Evie was notoriously quixotic, her moods unpredictable, often unfathomable. Even at times when their relations had been harmonious, there was little intimacy between them. Years later, in front of a packed courtroom, a barrister would grill Toby about his relationship with his mother: ‘
There are some people
with whom it is easy to discuss intimate and personal matters and some people with whom it is not. How did you feel, with your mother, about discussing that sort of thing?’ ‘It is awfully difficult to explain the relations between my mother and myself,’ Toby replied. ‘Do you know, I never got to know her well, never really got to know her well; I was very frightened of her.’

Few people ever knew Evie well. Her life, loves and ultimately her lies form the core of the third Wentworth mystery. In 1951 it would unravel in a court case fought between her two sons: Toby and his younger brother, Tom. In his summing up, the judge presiding over the case would describe Evie as ‘a beautiful woman possessed of very considerable charm, personality and character’. In every other respect, his verdict was damning; she was, he concluded, ‘temperamental’, ‘obstinate’, ‘intransigent’, ‘unreasonable’, ‘quarrelsome’ and ‘capable of displaying considerable hardness and obstinacy in important matters’.

Toby’s train, bearing the apple-green and black insignia of the Great Northern Railway Company, pulled into Peterborough, the station nearest to Milton Hall, shortly before lunch. It had none of the grandeur of the cast-iron cathedrals of York and Edinburgh further up the line. There were very few people about. The rain, dripping off the clapperboard awning and down the spindly pillars that ran the length of the platform, lent it a desolate air: the effect was of an empty pier in midwinter in an unfashionable seaside resort.

What was to follow in the course of the next few hours was predicated, as in all family rows, by what had gone before.

In the spring of 1914, Toby had deposited a file of correspondence with his father’s solicitor. It contained the letters Evie had written to him and his then fiancée, Beryl Morgan, during their engagement. Some of the letters had been so vituperative that Toby had felt compelled to caution the solicitor in the attached note. ‘I trust letters of the sort which Miss Morgan and I have received lately will now cease,’ he wrote. ‘If not I feel that some sort of steps must be taken to put a stop to them.’

The file Toby lodged with the solicitor has survived. The letters reveal that, as he embarked on his first meeting with his mother in six months, he had every reason to feel the way he did. More intriguingly, they offer one of the few glimpses into the character of Evie Fitzwilliam – the woman on whom, almost half a century later, the fate of the Fitzwilliam family would turn.

Toby Darling,
I find I need not go to the Girls Club tomorrow so we can have the day to ourselves. I am so looking forward to meeting Beryl, Much Love, Thine, Mother.

To begin with, in the autumn of 1913, Evie had been delighted at the news of Toby’s engagement. ‘My dear Beryl,’ she wrote, dashing off a note of congratulations to her future daughter-in-law, ‘Toby has told me the news and I am delighted and hope you will both be very happy. I am much looking forward to seeing you tomorrow and hope you will get here early.’

Beryl’s first visit to Milton was a resounding success. To celebrate the engagement, George and Evie gave a party for the Fitzwilliam Hunt. ‘My father was secretary of the Fitzwilliam Hunt of which George Fitzwilliam was master,’ Margot Lorne, whose family lived at nearby Tansor Court, recalled. ‘My parents and I therefore knew George and Evie and their children intimately. We were asked over to Milton to meet Beryl and we went. They had a big meet with the hounds, where she was introduced to all the farmers and the people of the Hunt as Toby’s fiancée. And then we had a dinner party to celebrate. There were one or two tables, I should say there were about thirty people present. There was no doubt that Evie was delighted at the engagement. She told us so and obviously was. She said, “Both George and I love her”.’

So enchanted was Evie with Beryl that she insisted she return the following weekend. ‘Beryl Darling,’ she wrote, ‘I am counting the days till Friday and want you much! Can’t you get rid of Toby for a few days so that I have you to myself!! He really must let me have a bit of you. Yours very loving, EWF.’

Beryl and Toby had become engaged within weeks of meeting.

In the late summer of August 1913 they had met at a country-house dinner party given by the Weigalls, who lived in a large half-timbered mansion in Lincolnshire. ‘
Beryl wasn’t extremely pretty,
but she was very attractive,’ a cousin recalled. ‘She had the most wonderful kindly nature. She was terribly bright and terribly nice. It was not surprising that Toby fell for her.’