The Husband Hunters

by Anne de Courcy

  It was true. That year, a small book entitled Mrs Jonathan Abroad had emerged in America. It gave more or less harmless descriptions of a number of American women who had succeeded in British society, each of a paragraph or two – but with thirty pages devoted to the Bonynges and their allegedly unsavoury and deceitful background. Mrs Bonynge, for instance, was described as an adulterous bigamist with a husband in San Quentin prison.

  ‘The Mackay-Bonynge feud is bubbling at a lively rate once more,’ said the New York Times of 18 May 1891, on learning that Bonynge had brought a case against Mackay to recover heavy damages, charging him with libel. Town Topics drew the attention of its readers to ‘the systematic persecution of the Bonynges, who for years have made their home in England,’ with The Saunterer describing the regular receipt of anonymous typewritten documents on the subject.

  By now the feud, in full swing, had become known to the wider public. Quite apart from the rights and wrongs of the case, the Greville family became less and less happy about the future heir being caught up with a family involved in such an ugly business. Then, according to the San Francisco Call, which relished every detail of the battle between two of the town’s former leading inhabitants: ‘One fine morning the London mail carriers delivered to everybody in London society a marked copy of New York Town Topics. The article marked dealt with the history of the Bonynges, and alleged that Miss Bonynge was the child of a convict, during whose imprisonment Miss Bonynge’s mother had married her present husband, etc.’

  Ronnie, who had of course heard the rumours and now received a copy of Town Topics, confronted the Bonynges. Both Bonynges, and Virginia, agreed that they should disclose the true facts of her parentage. These were that when Daniel eventually emerged from prison he went straight to look for his wife and daughter, who had disappeared, although there were still men around who could tell him what had happened – that his wife had divorced him and married Bonynge. It was the first time he heard that he had conclusively lost them both and after his years in jail, living on what turned out to be false hope, he was shattered. He took to drink and crime and wandered off into the mountains, where his body was eventually found.

  Hearing the story, or at least the basic facts of Virginia’s parentage, Ronnie Greville broke off the engagement without an instant’s hesitation and without even a word to his fiancée.7 There had never, he said, been the slightest blemish on his lineage and his pride in his name meant that it was impossible to sully it with even such a remote slur. Virginia, devastated with both grief and humiliation, took to her bed and then developed brain fever. Thus stood matters just before the climax to the battle between these two warring tycoons.

  In January 1891, Bonynge, who had returned to San Francisco on business matters, and driven perhaps by the misery and suffering of his daughter – for so he thought of Virginia – gave an interview to Truth magazine saying that when he and his wife had been up the Nile the previous winter, they had been followed by a dispatch from the San Francisco Call, stating that they had been driven from London.

  In the interview he discussed at length the attempts of a ‘prominent American’ to libel him. He said that various scurrilous rumours had been printed for several years, with around 500 copies of the newspapers in which they had appeared being sent to London and distributed at various clubs. ‘So anxious was this party [to discredit me] that three papers of the same issue would be sent, one to the lady of the house, one to the gentleman and one to his club.

  ‘Nothing gives so much mortification and annoyance to this individual as the contemplation that Mrs Bonynge is a lady by birth and education, the daughter of one of the slave-owning aristocracy of the South.’ He then described how one of the lawyers of (presumably) Mackay had gone to her birthplace and had every one of her father’s former slaves interviewed to try and rake up something against her.

  Mackay was predictably outraged by the article. The day after it appeared, he happened to go to see the president of the Nevada Bank in San Francisco, of which he had been one of the founders in 1875. Walking into the president’s office, he saw Bonynge there, talking to the president with his back turned to the door.

  In strode Mackay and, without pause for thought, strode up to Bonynge and punched him in the face with a right and left, knocking him to the floor. Bonynge scrambled to his feet and both these sixty-year-old men, hardened by their early days in the mines, fought like tigers, knocking over chairs and desks and sending inkpots flying so that ink streaked the walls.

  ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen! This will never do!’ cried the horrified president, but neither listened. Finally, they were separated by half a dozen of the bank staff.

  ‘It was a regular possum and wildcat fight,’ reported the Lewiston Daily Sun the next day. ‘Their clothes were so torn and their faces so bloodied afterwards that they had to slip away unseen through a side door in a couple of cabs.’

  Everyone attributed the cause of the fight to the social rivalry that had spread over the drawing rooms of two continents and several cities, though a contributory cause might have been that Bonynge had recently been talking of introducing an opposition cable line stretching across the Atlantic, which would have been a rival to Mackay’s.

  Many years later, it was said by Bonynge’s granddaughter that there might have been a romance between Bonynge and Louise Mackay before she married Mackay in 1868, ‘and nothing is as bitter as a lovers’ quarrel’.

  At this point both Mrs Mackay and Bonynge decided that enough was enough. The feud was called off. Mackay realised that his wife was securely established in London, and in 1892 leased an even grander house for her, No. 6 Carlton House Terrace. It had an art gallery, a marble staircase, a tapestry worth $250,000 on the wall, a ballroom that opened onto a terrace overlooking St James’s Park and was decorated in sumptuous deep blues, silver, gold and red velvet.

  For, finally, Louise Mackay had achieved the ambition that had caused all the problems in the first place: to become a social leader. Thanks to the feud, she now was famous, with everything she said, did or wore faithfully reported. ‘Her fame as a social leader has been internationally established,’ said the New York Herald.

  * * *

  Virginia, too, was on the verge of a happy ending. George William Coventry, the 13th Viscount Deerhurst, a fair-haired, blue-eyed young man of medium height, was the eldest son and heir to the 9th Earl of Coventry. He was imaginative and chivalrous and, so the story goes, hearing of Virginia’s jilting and the reason behind it at his club, he was instantly struck by the pathos of the beautiful young woman lying ill with grief in the seclusion of her London home.

  There could also have been another reason. Deerhurst was a gambler and had been in debt for a number of years (there is a thick file of letters between him, his bank, Coutts, and his solicitors discussing how to placate or pay off his creditors). ‘What the creditors want is the payment of the remaining 10/- within a period of four years, and a charge on the unsettled real estate,’ they tell him. Earlier, when his father had finally refused to pay his debts, he had been sent off to Australia for a while.

  By February 1890 he had become desperate. ‘Truly my state of affairs is awful,’ he writes to his solicitor. ‘I don’t know what to do. I am miserable about the whole thing. It wants very little more money than there is in hand. If you offer my creditors 10/- in the £ and if such were done I expect that they would take it. If I could only get my father to do so it would save me and the family generally from this awful disgrace. I have lately been trying so hard not to run up fresh debts and have succeeded. If these proceedings are continued with I am sure sooner or later to do something which I ought not to and get into the most terrible mess.’ Eight months later, he is writing desperately to his father asking him to insure his life ‘or I will be made a bankrupt tomorrow’.

  Although the story was put about that his chivalrous interest had been sparked towards the beauty who had been treated so badly by one of his own kind, it is also diffic
ult to avoid the conclusion that now that a rival was out of the way he saw the chance of snapping up an heiress and sorting out his financial affairs. At the same time, his letters show him to be a man with many of the qualities likely to appeal to a woman – the ability to express his feelings and not be ashamed or embarrassed to do so, coupled with warmth, spontaneity and enjoyment of life.

  He managed to achieve an introduction to the ‘American Monte Cristo’, as Bonynge was nicknamed; thereafter, the correct formalities having been observed by meeting Bonynge, he was able to call constantly at the Bonynges’ house to enquire after the invalid, or to send presents of fruit or flowers. One day Mrs Bonynge, who happened to be there on one of his visits, invited him to tea, when she thanked him profusely for his presents. ‘I promise you,’ she told him, ‘that when my girl is well enough to see a stranger, you shall be the very first to be introduced and she must thank you with her own lips for all your kindnesses.’ They met, Virginia proved to be every bit the romantic heroine a young man could want, and it was not long before they were engaged.

  Yet so broke was he that only a month before the wedding he was writing anxiously to his father about not being able to afford his side of the lawyers’ fees for Bonynge’s generous settlement on his daughter. ‘I was amazed that they amount to nearly 350 [pounds]. Of course, as you know, I have not the ready money to pay this so I must make some sort of arrangement. Would you help me to borrow this money repaying it by stated instalments? It would be most good of you if you would, as to go to Mr Bonynge after his already great kindness to me would seem too much…’

  For Deerhurst, the marriage took place in the nick of time. A fortnight later he was declared bankrupt, with liabilities of £25,000 and assets of only £500. He was able to offer his creditors ten shillings in the pound, ‘with present security for the remainder of his liabilities’. It must have been a shock for Virginia, but both of them seem able to have brushed it aside. Later, Princess Christian stood sponsor to their elder daughter and the King was godfather to their son. Apart from the fact that Virginia disliked going into London society after her earlier experiences, the marriage was believed by all who saw them to be ‘ideally happy’.8 Perhaps the only person for whom events did not turn out too well was Mackay, wifeless and alone on the far side of the Atlantic.

  CHAPTER 12

  Maud

  Far from shrinking from society like Virginia Bonynge, Maud Burke could hardly get enough of it. No other American girl had such influence on the English cultural scene as the woman who became known as Emerald Cunard. Reinventing herself from unexceptional beginnings, this American heiress managed her love affairs discreetly, became one of England’s most famous hostesses and brought English opera into the mainstream of life, financing many of the ventures of the great conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, her lover. Yet it all began because she was a girl for whom the acquisition of a titled English husband was not only a stepping stone but a way of showing how little she cared about a public jilting.

  * * *

  Born Maud Alice Burke in San Francisco on 3 August 1872, to parents who were well-off but not considered well-born, there is little known about the soi-disant Emerald’s early life, as she never spoke of it and, conveniently, all documentation was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

  It was in any case questionable. She may not even have been the daughter of her mother’s husband James Burke, as Mrs Burke, pretty, flirtatious and half-French, had many admirers. One of them, William O’Brien, a handsome, fair-haired, blue-eyed Irishman, one of the four partners who shared in the great Nevada Comstock Lode silver mine, was reputed to be Maud’s father and she did indeed have the same colouring – she grew up to be a blue-eyed blonde and she certainly had the enterprise and vigour that had served O’Brien so well. From early on in her life, when she was brought up largely by Chinese servants, Maud regarded her mother as an adored friend rather than someone whose word was law and who would guide her into the future.

  Her legal father, James Burke, died when she was in her early teens; after which her mother had a succession of influential admirers and protectors, some of whom were financiers and made profitable investments for her – something that would not have been lost on the adolescent Maud. One of these wealthy admirers was Horace Carpentier, a bibliophile and a cultured man who also had a habit of adopting very young women as honorary ‘nieces’ (as with his books, ‘he liked them in mint condition’, said a friend). The clever, pretty and lively Maud quickly became one.

  Carpentier had had, to say the least, a chequered history, although he was also responsible for some philanthropic acts. He was highly intelligent, graduating from Columbia University in 1848 with a degree in law. Soon afterwards he left New York, drawn by the Californian Gold Rush, sailing with 200 other passengers in the ship Panama, a dreadful journey round the Horn, arriving in California in August 1849.

  Once there, he decided against the goldfields, instead going into local politics and property. After a year or so in San Francisco, he settled on the other side of the Bay – the contra costa – and, with some cronies, proceeded to found the town of Oakland, becoming its first mayor and managing through various dubious manoeuvres to secure its lucrative waterfront for himself (he was ousted from the mayoralty by angry citizens when it was discovered he had finagled complete control of the waterfront for his own profit). Here he rose to become president of the California State Telegraph Company and the Overland Telegraph Company and was the man who sent the first transcontinental telegraph message – addressed to President Abraham Lincoln.

  Maud soon became Carpentier’s favourite ‘niece’. He enjoyed directing her reading, and introduced her to the works of Balzac, the Greek and Latin poets and the plays of Shakespeare. Book-lover though she quickly became, she was even more enthralled by music. She heard her first opera, The Ring, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York when she was only twelve years old. The impact was instantaneous, and lasting.

  ‘It was as if a new world had opened out,’ she wrote later,1 ‘revealing a race of men and women, very Titans of humanity endowed with superb gifts, and the musical setting within which they were enshrouded made an impression on me which was to last as long as life itself.’ Carpentier loved to listen to his little ‘niece’ singing, playing the piano and, above all, watching her as she flitted in and out of his house.

  As Maud grew older her mother, like so many other well-off Americans, began to take her daughter to Europe, where Maud fell under the spell of old-world civilisation, in particular French literature. When Maud was eighteen, her mother remarried. Mrs Burke’s new husband was a stockbroker named Charles Tichenor, and at this point Maud began to make her home with Carpentier, to whom she now began to refer as ‘my guardian’.

  The remarriage also meant that, despite their love for each other, Maud’s dependency on her mother – and her mother’s influence over her – was far less than that of most girls of her age. She was, in a word, growing more independent and less likely to be guided by others. Finding a suitable husband, it soon became obvious, would be done by Maud rather than the new Mrs Tichenor.

  Carpentier had returned to New York in 1883, buying a smart house on 37th Street. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, New York had expanded northwards, the former farms and estates on the island of Manhattan giving way to houses, stores and churches, laid out in a grid pattern by the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan. One of these estates, belonging to Robert and Mary Murray, held out until 1847, when their descendants created the Murray Hill Restrictive Agreement, ensuring that future development consisted only of upmarket brick or stone houses, churches and private stables. Carpentier’s house was in the midst of this exclusive area.

  * * *

  One day, when the twenty-two-year-old Maud and her mother were in London on a visit, Maud discovered that the writer George Moore was to be a fellow guest at a big luncheon party at the Savoy to which they had been invited. One of her favourite autho
rs was Émile Zola, whom she regarded as trying to free the novel from the prudery and genteel obfuscations that then abounded, and she felt that Moore had the same crusading spirit. She also knew that he, like her, was an admirer of Zola.

  Moore, the son of a former MP and horse breeder, was an Irishman whose family had lived in the same house, Moore Park, in County Mayo, for over a century. He was a popular writer and particularly renowned for novels that, tackling ‘forbidden’ issues like prostitution, extramarital sex and lesbianism, were frequently banned by circulating libraries.

  Maud was so thrilled at discovering they would be at the same luncheon party, and so determined to meet him, that she slipped into the restaurant beforehand and changed the place cards so that she was now sitting next to him.

  The luncheon was all she had hoped. George Moore held forth, talking passionately of his ambition to win freedom for the English novel, and praising what Zola had done for the French. Maud, wearing a becoming pink and grey shot silk dress, listened entranced and, during a pause, laid her pretty little hand on his arm, gazed at him enraptured and said: ‘George Moore, you have a soul of fire!’

  For any man, to hear these words uttered with adoring admiration by a beautiful young woman would be a near-erotic experience. For the forty-two-year-old Moore, newly emerged from a difficult liaison with a fellow writer, it was overwhelming. By the end of the luncheon he was in love.

  They spent much of the next few weeks together, Maud managing to evade her mother’s chaperonage – or, more likely, her mother tactfully ignoring their closeness. The enraptured Moore wrote of the afternoons he spent with the golden-haired Maud. ‘While walking in the woods with one, she would say, “Let us sit here,”’ Moore recorded, ‘and after looking steadily at one for a few seconds, her pale marmoreal eyes glowing, she would say, “You can make love to me now, if you like.”’

  The idyll was not to last: at the beginning of summer Maud’s mother took her back to America. ‘Thinking of her my senses grow dizzy, a sort of madness creeps up behind the eyes – what an exquisite despair is this,’ wrote the miserable George Moore; ‘… that one shall never possess that beautiful personality again, sweet-scented as the May-time, that I shall never hold that oval face in my hands again, shall look into those beautiful eyes no more, that all the beautiful intimacy of her person is now but a memory to be renewed by actual presence…’