The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England

by Jenifer Roberts

  Yolande sat in one of the front pews, ‘a frail little figure in black’, accompanied only by her lady’s maid. At the end of the service, Croucher took the collection in the nave:

  I started, with an empty plate, to where Mrs Lyne Stephens was sitting. She seemed lost in contemplation, with bowed head, and the impertinent thought, ‘You have done so much and I won’t disturb you’, crossed my mind. I was passing on when a small hand waved and I came back. She picked up her reticule, found a little purse and after much peering therein, placed a coin on the plate. It was a shilling.2

  After the service, a luncheon was held in the Devonshire Assembly Rooms, which Yolande had neither the strength nor the inclination to attend. The Duke of Norfolk took the chair, with Arthur Riddell on his right and Christopher Scott on his left. There were toasts to ‘The Pope’ and ‘The Queen’, after which Scott ‘proposed the health of Mrs Lyne Stephens, who is absent on account of her recent bereavement’.

  During the speeches, Scott ‘condoled with Mrs Lyne Stephens upon her loss by the death of General Claremont, who had taken such a great interest in the building of the church, although himself a Protestant’. He referred to ‘the interest taken … by poor people’, including ‘a poor woman who died in great distress but, forgetting her own misery, asked God with her last words to bless this church’. He told the story of a ‘hearty workman who came all the way to Cambridge on purpose to see the church and who asked God’s blessing on Mrs Lyne Stephens’.3

  By the time Scott made this speech, Yolande was already in Lynford Hall, having taken the train to Brandon immediately after the service. She remained in Norfolk for five weeks before summoning up the energy to return to Roehampton on 22 November. ‘I need not tell you how I felt in entering this place,’ she wrote to Harry on the 27th. ‘It was more dreadful than ever.’

  This was the fifth turning point in her life. Now there was only Harry to take charge of her affairs but he had recently been diagnosed with tuberculosis. Shortly after the opening service in Cambridge, he was ‘laid up with congestion of the lungs’. Ordered by his doctor to spend the winter months in Switzerland, he and his family left for Davos in November and would remain there until the spring. As Yolande wrote to Arthur Riddell at the end of the month:

  I wish I could write to you in my own language … I cannot say much yet about myself. My health could help me a little in what I wish to do, but the state of my spirit is still unequal to the requirement of my work. The illness of Mr H. Claremont, which has obliged him to leave England at once for some months, has added a new misfortune to the existing one … I need not say that this will cause me much discomfort, being now quite alone to manage everything.4

  She had only her servants for company. ‘I cry and sob enough to break my heart,’ she wrote to Harry on 27 December. ‘The trial is too great, too awful for anyone to bear … a very cruel time, so much sorrowful recollections. All is gone, never to come back.’ Two days later, she wrote again to Arthur Riddell:

  Many thanks for your most kind letter. It has done me great good in my extreme solitude. May I say in return that my heart is full of gratitude and I should like to express to you all that I feel … You are very right, my affliction is great. I have lost a friend so devoted and unselfish that no one could ever replace him. Every day I feel it more and more. I try to think, as you tell me, that all happens for the best, but I do not yet see it and my misery speaks louder than the voice of resignation. I am living quite alone … Mrs Claremont is not with me, nor anyone else. She found it too great a trial being here.5

  ‘I find Mrs Lyne Stephens in health but fretting dreadfully for the dear General,’ Horace Pym wrote to Harry after a visit to Grove House in January. ‘There is no doubt in my mind that it is exceedingly bad for her being alone at Roehampton and I shall be very glad when the weather permits her to get to Paris, and still more so when you are well enough to return to her assistance.’

  One morning in mid-January, when thick layers of snow lay on the terrace outside the drawing room windows and the lake was covered in ice, Yolande wrote to Kitty who was with her husband in Davos:

  I have no news to give you. What I could tell you of my wretched life would make you very melancholy. To talk of what one feels constantly would be misery. Solitude is not a word to express what I endure. Picture to yourself a poor woman whose mind and body is lost in this house much too big for a party of six, having to sit to every meal without a soul. I had no idea I could bear so much. I am so enervated, so terribly low that I hardly know what I can do to allow me to end this letter without saying a word more.

  It was during this cold spell that Yolande’s neighbour, Constance Smith, was surprised to find her in residence:

  Romance and mystery hung around Grove House for, though Mrs Lyne Stephens had lived there for many years, no one visited her … and hardly anyone had even seen her … She allowed us to skate on her lake in her habitual absence in winter but, that year, I found she was living in the house and I called to apologise for unintentional trespassing …

  I was received by a very tiny, very slight little old lady, with large eyes and the saddest face I ever saw. She was very amiable and very friendly, but received my apologies with tears – as the fact of her spending the winter at Roehampton was owing to General Claremont’s death. He liked the shooting at Lynford, but now that he was gone there was no one to enjoy it.

  Her broken English and her French were hard to understand, but we got on well together, and parted affectionately. I saw her several times more, and on the cold winter days when I went to see the children skate, her sad little form in deep black was constantly to be seen, taking slow solitary walks in the garden.6

  Harry was still in Davos when the 1891 census was taken during the evening of 5 April. In the entry for Grove House, Yolande is listed as head of a household of fourteen servants: a butler, housekeeper, cook, French lady’s maid, three laundry maids, three housemaids, a still-room maid, a dairymaid, and two footmen. Living in cottages on the estate were a coachman, two grooms, four gardeners, and a lodge-keeper/carpenter.

  That same evening, in Gloucester Street, Fanny Claremont listed the names of the people who would be sleeping under her roof that night. In addition to the servants, she included her eldest son, George, who was staying for a few days in London.

  A lieutenant-colonel in the Worcestershire regiment based in Malvern, George had married Marianne (Daisy) Hamilton, the widow of one of his fellow officers, in 1887. Having begun to suffer from epileptic fits, he retired from the army two years later and moved to Daisy’s home town of Larkhall near Glasgow. Unknown to George, Daisy had incurred debts in Larkhall which she now asked him to repay.

  Yolande had refused to give George a marriage settlement, or any other financial help, so he mortgaged his house and furniture in Malvern. On 18 May 1890, when there was no money left, he wrote to his father in Paris asking Yolande to lend him £450:

  Daisy has been in bad health all the winter. She has been quite prostrate. She has hardly eaten a thing or slept a wink for a week. I feel all this very much as I am so utterly helpless in the matter. I have neither securities nor capital to offer, so please ask Mrs Lyne Stephens to advance the money. She shall be paid back and I will put by a portion of my retired pay to pay the interest on the loan. Remind her with my love of her kindness to me when we spoke of my marriage in the morning room at Lynford and she said that, though she could not make a settlement on me then, I should never be any the worse of it hereafter.

  Edward had less than two months to live when he received this letter. He decided not to show it to Yolande; instead he wrote his own cheque for £450 (£53,000). Despite this generosity, George’s marriage became increasingly unhappy and, when he was staying with his mother in April 1891, he told her ‘what a comfort four days of peace in London had been to him and how he disliked having to go back to Larkhall on the Monday’.

  Fanny was worried when she answered the enumerator’s questions
during the early evening of 5 April. George had been restless during the morning; he told her that he was going out for a walk but had never returned. He was found later that night in his London club, slumped in one of the lavatories. He had suffered an epileptic fit, fallen forwards and hit his head on the floor. The duty attendant was taken ill that day and had not been replaced, so George remained in the closet, his head on the floor, for five hours.

  Next day, Yolande took the news ‘most complacently’. When the family suggested that George should be buried close to his father in the consecrated ground outside the mausoleum, she refused to allow it. To one member of the family, she explained that she would not like Daisy to have access to the mausoleum; to another, she said firmly that ‘no one is to be there except the General and his wife’.

  George’s body was taken to Malvern where he had lived before his retirement. He was buried there on 11 April, with Daisy, Teddy and his three sisters as mourners. Fanny stayed in London and suffered a visit from Yolande. ‘Mother keeps well,’ Teddy wrote to Harry on the 12th. ‘Mrs Lyne Stephens went to see her yesterday and rather upset her.’

  The arrival of warmer weather in May did little to lift Yolande’s spirits. Five weeks after George’s death, she wrote another letter to Arthur Riddell:

  I am still here and in the same state of mind. I have been all the time not wishing to do anything or go anywhere. The weather was for many months the principal cause of it, then so much business to attend to and so little knowledge and energy to do it all. It is not easy for one who had never done any serious work of that sort to take to it or understand it at once … However, the spring cheering me a little, I hope some day I may get more what I was before all my troubles which have been all along very great.7

  21

  THAT TEARLESS CRY

  I come in for a lot of ill-humour. Nothing gives

  pleasure or satisfaction.

  Canon Michael Dwane, 16 February 1892

  Harry’s eldest daughter, Sybil, would remember Yolande as a ‘très grande dame’, a small, dainty old lady with a strong French accent. Her grey hair was parted in the middle and she was always dressed in black. When the children stayed with her in Grove House, she would give them a wrapped sweet before they went to bed and insisted that they curtsey to her before leaving the room. Sybil also remembered ‘a wonderful French chef who was very good with rabbit’.

  Yolande tried to hide her grief when Harry and his family were visiting. In private, she was hysterical, howling in anguish in what Michael Dwane referred to as ‘that tearless cry which is so painful to witness’. She was unable to cope without Edward’s emotional and administrative support. Harry did his best to take over his father’s duties, but he was away in Switzerland during the winter months and was becoming increasingly unwell. ‘Très cher ami,’ she wrote in an undated letter when she had not heard from him for several weeks:

  All the days I have passed for ten days now have been most anxious ones. I have been wishing to have a few words from you, but nothing has come. How is it, if you could not come, a line would have calmed my anxiety. I have counted the hours but all is a blank. What shall I do, waiting, waiting all the time is cruel! I cannot give you an idea of my wish to know something about you. I am most anxious.

  In July, she returned to Paris, arriving shortly after the first anniversary of Edward’s death. Harry joined her there in August. With the agreement of Sir John Lubbock, he had succeeded his father as trustee of the Lyne Stephens fortune and, after a few weeks in Paris, he travelled to Norfolk to learn about the administration of the Lynford estate. Yolande wrote to him from Paris on 28 September:

  Your letter from Lynford has made me nearly happy, though I would be more completely so if you had said you were stronger. Only I am dreadfully afraid all that knowledge of every department could not be acquired without much fatigue. Do take care, do not be anxious. It would have been better for you to rest after the Lynford work, but one cannot do anything without exertion.

  Now for what you ask about me. I got better of the attack of diarrhoea and I thought it would be soon alright, but the exertion made me very unwell. They were obliged to give me pills which yesterday morning had too strong an effect and made me feel very seedy. Pills are terrible and what is to be done. I cannot remain as I am. If I could get things as it ought to be, I could at once begin putting all my things in the packing boxes and try to find my way to Roehampton … All in this life is disappointment.

  She returned to Grove House in early October. Shortly after her return, Harry left again for Switzerland and, on 29 October, Yolande signed a codicil to her will which raised the possibility that he might die before her. On 8 November, she wrote him a rather garbled letter:

  I am pretty ashamed of myself to be still in your debt of letters to such an extent. I can hardly tell you how it has happen, but this is a plain fact and nothing of what I can say will make it less bad. I am in great fault. However, you know all my faults and you know that I could do my best to avoiding displeasing you if I could help it.

  You are quite right saying that a few lines would be sufficient occasionally. That is true but when I begin I try to make up for the loss of time, but I plunge in more and more in difficulty and I cannot get out after. Since I am here I have taken again to the way I left this last year, though I made a promise to avoid it. It is not so easy to give up bad habits. I ought to exert myself in getting as I should like myself to be, but I cannot do it …

  People who have not seen me for some time say I look well. I think it may be to please me a bit but why would they say that if it was out of humbug only? Of course I am happy to hear it … À vous, toutes les forces de mon coeur.

  She wrote again on the 27th, having encountered a problem with gifts of game, an annual ritual which Edward had handled in the past:

  I find myself in an awful difficulty. I have to send, as in preceding years, game to people, schools, etc., and I have not the book we used to refer to, to whom and to know also the quantity. If you have seen anything referring to what was done, tell me, as they ask and I have not the least idea of what was done, and if you have seen, in books, anything of the sort, answer me at once as I cannot get on.

  Yolande stayed in Roehampton for a second winter, a decision attributed by Michael Dwane to ‘the proximity of her solicitor’. Pym came regularly to see her and Dwane also kept her company, returning by train to Norfolk at weekends to say Mass in the chapel at Lynford.

  In November, Christopher Scott came from Cambridge to spend a week in Grove House. His visit calmed her. ‘For some time before Christmas,’ Dwane wrote to Harry on 18 January 1892, ‘our times have been more peaceable. Of course you will understand that spasmodic outbursts have taken place.’ Yolande wrote ten days later:

  It is very true that I should write oftener and little at a time to you, so that you should know what I am about. My saying that I have no time to write much is perfectly true but if it is merely to let you hear what, besides business, I am able to do, well and good. I can do so to a certain extent. My mornings generally are spent in a little letter writing, mixed with doing little jobs about my rooms. The short days in winter make the day work very indifferent for utility. Still, one can always have plenty of little talks and the time passes … Je vous embrasse tendrement.

  According to Constance Smith, Yolande complained of being ‘very much neglected by her servants, so neglected that her doctor threatened to expose their conduct if they did not behave better to her’. If this was true, the servants had cause for their behaviour for Yolande was now a bitter, self-absorbed and bad-tempered old woman who had become miserly with small amounts of money.

  Her butler resigned in the summer of 1891, after which her main victims were Michael Dwane and her lady’s maid, Marie Marque. She treated Dwane as a servant, rather than a man of the church. ‘How kind you were to have dear Dwane with you,’ she wrote to Harry when he was in Lynford in September 1891, ‘and to give him a meal of potatoes
and bread and butter.’

  Dwane expressed his anger in long letters to Harry. ‘I might make many a letter out of my own too-wounded feelings,’ he wrote on 6 February 1892:

  but this would not be news to you. Perhaps the hardest thing to bear is the oft-levelled charge that I am useless, wasting my time, unable to do anything, while all the time I am not allowed to do the least thing. I’m told I’m no good, I do nothing for her, etc. When this is said with feeling, as you know it can be, it is hard to bear in the face of a fixed determination that I shall not be trusted to do anything. I exercise a great deal of self-control. I am often astonished at my self-restraint. It is best to treat what is said in anger and violence as if it had been said in coolness and deliberation. That style on my part leads to coldness on her part, and I have a most trying time of it.

  Two days later, he wrote again:

  I come in for a lot of ill-humour. Nothing gives pleasure or satisfaction. I have been called useless, that I do no good, that my time is spent without an object, etc. Though I was boiling over, I took a seat, looked into the lady’s face, and in the mildest of tones, asked if she really wished me to be near her or not, that I was there as her companion, and as she well knew, had nothing else to do (she takes care of that), but if she was unhappy on that account and would prefer me to be in Lynford, she had but to say the word … Dr Marshall comes once a day and Marie says he will be favourite until he has to send in his account.

  Yolande queried Dwane’s expenses on his third-class railway journeys to Norfolk at weekends, ‘which she said were cooked – she vowed that the third-class fare was nothing near so much as I had charged, 7/3’. The station in Brandon was five miles from Lynford and the early months of 1892 were particularly cold. ‘On Monday,’ he wrote on 2 March: