Black Diamonds (25 page)

The letter George referred to was the last letter Evie wrote to Toby before his wedding. Thwarted in her attempt to prevent the marriage, she gave full vent to her spleen:

‘Under no circumstances will I ever have Beryl here again,’ she began:

I am very very sorry indeed for you as you have been let in for this marriage and I feel convinced that were you to break it off she would sue you for breach of promise.

When she first came here and saw this place with you alone she thought she was in for a real good thing, but when she saw we were opposed to the whole thing, she suddenly insists upon settlements. I have tried to trust her but failed, the reason being that when I first knew her (having first explained to her I was nobody) I asked her who her people were. She told me her grandfather owned a small property in Glos and that her mother came of a good old Devonshire family. Her grandfather was a farmer and her mother was the daughter of a draper in Exeter, so why should she try to deceive me? There is no necessity for it to me. You can show her this letter if you like. She may have told you the truth and if so why not me? I have no intention of ever meeting her again if I can possibly help it and my sympathies are with you entirely in having to marry her. She must know by this time that she will ruin your life by so doing.

The torrent of accusations against Beryl – of her lies and deceit – was, as it transpires, remarkable.

A closer investigation of Evie’s background suggests that her whole life was constructed on a lie. Though she openly confessed to being a ‘nobody’, she was in fact quite literally a nobody. It is doubtful whether anyone ever knew who Evie Fitzwilliam really was.

To her friends in the smart Northamptonshire hunting set, to her Fitzwilliam relatives and to the wider world, according to the entries she and George submitted to
Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage
and to
Debretts
, Evie claimed she was the eldest daughter of one Charles Stephen Lyster.

She rarely talked about her childhood: on the very few occasions when she did, Evie gave the impression that it had been an unhappy one. In the mid-1880s, when she was appearing as a chorus girl in London’s West End, Kate Rickards was her closest friend: ‘
She told me
that her father had been a doctor,’ Kate recalled. ‘I think they [her parents] were dead and she was brought up by a brother or a stepbrother … she was very unhappy at home and I think she ran away from home, or left home.’

In the early twenty-first century, electronic search engines make it possible to reveal what no one in Evie’s lifetime – and for many decades after her death – could have known: her identity, it appears, was false.

Evie was born in 1867. There is no record of a Charles Stephen Lyster, the man she claimed as her father, in the UK Census Records between 1851 and 1881. A search of the medical directories listing doctors practising in Britain in the mid-to late nineteenth century also draws a blank. Nor does Evie herself appear in any official records under her given name – Daisy Evelyn Lyster. Her birth, despite the fact that the registration of births became mandatory after 1837, was not recorded; in the 1871 and 1881 Census records for the United Kingdom there is no one of that name. On her marriage certificate, issued in 1888, ‘Lyster’ was the name she gave: it appears that she had even deceived her husband, Toby’s father, George.

Evie’s chauffeur was waiting for Toby when his train pulled in to Peterborough station. Meeting him on the platform, the chauffeur handed him a note from his mother, which read:

Dear Toby
Please don’t for one moment think that I asked to see you because I did not. If you want to come and say goodbye you can do so.

Toby almost turned on his heel to catch the next train back to London. There, he could at least snatch a few hours with Beryl before his regiment left for France.

He did not. So convinced was he of his own moral rectitude in the rift with his mother that he decided to go on to Milton. Not for his own sake, but for hers. ‘My feelings were, if I went out to France and got shot,’ he later recalled, ‘if I had not gone to see my mother she would have been the one to suffer.’

The chauffeur drove Toby to Milton Hall. It was a fifteen-minute journey from the station, five of them along the two-mile drive that led up to the imposing Elizabethan house. Passing the familiar landmarks in the park – the follies, the great oaks, the hedges that traversed the flat grazing fields – it was strange to see the landscape he knew so intimately. He had been brought up to believe that one day it would all be his. Yet now, after six months’ absence, it did not feel like coming home. His mother had sworn that she would ‘never have Beryl here again’: even if he were to be reconciled with his parents, which he doubted from the tone of Evie’s note, for as long as his wife was banned from Milton, he could not bring himself to regard it as home.

To Toby’s surprise,
Evie greeted him warmly. After giving him lunch, she showed him around the hospital that she and George had set up in a wing for officers wounded at the Front. ‘My mother was very correct and very nice,’ Toby remembered. ‘She did not raise any of the old rows.’

After a harmonious few hours together, Toby left Milton to return to his regiment. What he did not know then – and would only discover after he joined the long lists of casualties on the Western Front – was that Evie’s charm had been a sham.

Years later, when a barrister questioned him about the meeting, the pain at the recollection of its outcome was evident in his monosyllabic replies.

‘There was nothing in the nature of a reconciliation?’ the barrister asked.

‘No,’ Toby replied.

‘I think you were rather badly wounded in France, were not you?’ the QC continued.

‘I was shell-shocked.’

‘Were you in hospital for some time?’

‘Yes. In London.’

‘Did either of your parents come and see you there?’

‘My father came to see me, yes.’

‘What year would that be?’

‘Just before Christmas, 1914.’

‘Your mother did not come to see you? In fact, I do not think you ever saw your mother again?’

‘I never saw my mother again, no.’

‘We know that during the war your children were born.’

‘Yes.’

‘I have not got the exact dates. About 1917?’

‘1916 and 1918.’

‘Did your mother ever see your children?’

‘No, never saw them.’

Evie lived for more than a decade after her last meeting with Toby. Until her death in March 1925, despite George’s entreaties, she never forgave her elder son. ‘
Evie was a woman
of very strong character, just as George was a very weak character,’ Margot Lorne, the daughter of the secretary to the Fitzwilliam Hunt, remembered: ‘She completely dominated him, and he gave in to her every wish. They were obviously devoted to each other. She was a woman of extremes. She made friends quickly and easily, then just as suddenly dropped them and would be rude about them. She had a very vindictive and stubborn streak in her character. Once her mind was made up nothing could move her. I know that she remained vindictive towards Toby and Beryl from the time they married until she died.’

Evie’s vindictiveness began as soon as Toby left Milton – his last visit to the house in her lifetime. As he risked his life fighting at the Front, she gave instructions to her friends and to the household staff that his name should never be mentioned in her presence. Nor was it to be mentioned in the family. Toby’s younger brother, Tom, was ten years old at the time. ‘I went to school in 1914 and the war had started and Toby was never there after that date and his name was never mentioned,’ he recalled. ‘I asked where I could get his address because I wanted to write to him, and I think I was told that the butler had his address and I got it from him.’

Evie’s unnatural cruelty towards her elder son did not end there. To the shock of her friends, her vindictiveness appeared to take the form of a vendetta – even if it meant destroying her own reputation in the process. In the weeks after Toby left Milton, she cast doubt over his right to succeed to the estate by telling her friends that he had been born before she and George married. ‘A little time after the outbreak of war in 1914 I heard it said in the neighbourhood that Evie was saying that Toby was not legitimate,’ remembered Margot Lorne. ‘I heard that Toby was going to be proved illegitimate in order that Tom should succeed. She told everyone. Everyone was very fond of Toby and this shocked people greatly, because it so obviously came as a consequence of the row over the marriage. I would say this story was not generally accepted, but was attributed to vindictiveness on Evelyn’s part. This complete change of attitude caused a great deal of very adverse comment. I remember my parents coming back from Milton one day very upset because she had told them that Toby was illegitimate.’

Evie had set a time bomb ticking under the House of Fitzwilliam: almost half a century later, it would explode.

PART IV

17

Wentworth, January 1920, barely a year after Armistice Day: the house was under siege.

Thousands of black-suited
men, scarves muffled at their throats against the piercing cold, stood along the border of the lawn. Hundreds more crowded the raised grass bank at its southern edge, directly opposite the house. Many bore the wretched scars of war: empty sleeves, wooden legs, black patches worn over blind eyes.

In the grey January sky flocks of crows circled, scattered by the disturbance. The men waited, shadowy figures, flitting among the trees that edged the lawn. Winter had dulled its emerald sheen, yet still, eleven acres in extent, it stretched before them like a piece of stencilled silk. Thick parallel lines, hand-rolled by the Fitzwilliams’ groundsmen, were etched on its surface: razor-straight, they each ran to a point on the 600-yard-long façade.

As the men stood watching the house, their breath condensed on the sharp air. They were fortunate to have come home from the Great War. Fifty thousand Yorkshire miners had served in the trenches; more than 5,000 had been killed in action.

Tension from the cold, the anticipation, the knowledge that they were forbidden to be there, rippled through the crowd. It was a Sunday morning. The rules at Wentworth on the Sabbath were strict, posted on noticeboards in outbuildings and workshops dotted around the Estate. The immediate vicinity of the house was categorically out of bounds: ‘On Sundays, the Park gates are all to be closed to horses, carriages and vehicles of every description.’ No one had foreseen an invasion by foot.

The miners had come across the surrounding country, climbing into the Park over stiles a mile south at Greasbrough, or slipping through the turnstiles at Doric Lodge and Lion’s Gate. By lunchtime, 10,000 had gathered at the edge of the lawn.

An echo of war drifted across the ranks of men: coming from the direction of the Riding School behind the North Tower, a lone voice called ‘A-TTEN-TION’. It was followed by the dull rumble of hundreds of feet on sawdust.

Up at a window of the house, Billy and his guest for the weekend, Field Marshal Earl Haig, watched anxiously. They were old friends: Billy had served under Haig in the Boer War and on the General Staff in Flanders. Both men were profoundly unsettled by what they saw. Along the perimeter of the lawn, the smudgy winter colours had been obliterated by dense lines of black. It was clear to Billy that they were miners; he knew from the way some of them squatted, the pose all colliers assumed to eat their ‘snap’ underground at the pit. Jack May, the groom of chambers at Wentworth, was on duty that morning. ‘
They did not know
what to do,’ he told Billy’s cousin later. ‘They did not know why they had come. They were frightened. They thought the miners were going to storm the house.’

The two Earls debated whether to call in troops to disperse the crowd. The house was surrounded: across the Park, through the gaunt branches of the great oaks, they could see the dark silhouettes of thousands more men, massing from all directions to join their former brothers-in-arms.

It was a situation both Haig and Fitzwilliam feared, and one they had anticipated for more than a year. The Great War had destroyed their peace of mind.

In 1919 the spectre of revolution haunted England’s ruling class. Within months of the Armistice, the class conflict of the pre-war years had again erupted. Thirty million working days were lost as a result of industrial disputes, fought out in a world transformed by the apocalypse on the Western and Eastern Fronts. Ancient continental dynasties and empires had fallen; the red flag flew over Moscow: it was only a matter of time, people felt, before Bolshevism would subsume Britain.

Earl Haig’s anxieties had fixed upon the returning armies: the demobilization of four million men. The year began ominously.
In the month of January
alone there were fifty mutinies in the British armed forces. ‘For the manufacturer of revolution there is no more incendiary material than soldiers returning from war,’ wrote Haig’s biographer Duff Cooper, a Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War. ‘They have grown careless of danger and accustomed to risks. The peace to which they have long looked forward is likely to disappoint them. The homes are never worthy of heroes. They see others who have not endured the same hardships enjoying greater prosperity, and they are easy to persuade that they have much to gain and little to lose.’