[Mitford Murders 03] - The Mitford Scandal

by Jessica Fellowes

  ‘Do you mean to say you knew what she had done?’

  ‘I didn’t know about the devils-on-horseback for Bryan, and certainly not that the maid had eaten them by mistake. But I did wonder about those chocolates. When it was realized that someone had to have given Clara the opium I did strongly suspect, because I had noticed Aunt go missing when we were all in the church. She must have followed Clara out and been the one who took her bag. Only, when Kate was dead, it seemed to fit that perhaps Kate had done it after all. She stole Kate’s diary, too. But I’m afraid when I saw it I was too overcome by nosiness and the thought that I might be able to sell a story or two from it.’ He looked shamefaced and Louisa didn’t have the heart to remonstrate with him over this; his own guilt and the knowledge of who his aunt really was, was punishment enough.

  ‘Do you think she made you sick?’

  ‘There could be no explanation for it other than she was slowly poisoning me.’

  ‘She told me she saw a letter from the police. It must have been the one dropping the charges.’

  ‘Yes, she steamed it open and read it before she gave it to me. I thought I’d kept it from her but I was a fool to think that. She wanted to control every element of my life. It had always been like that but it got worse in recent months. But you see, I couldn’t think what I’d do without her and, I know it will sound ridiculous to you, no one else had ever cared for me. Aunt, in her twisted way, seemed to mind what happened to me.’

  Louisa took Luke’s hand in hers. ‘Anyone would find that hard, you mustn’t blame yourself.’

  ‘Only I was completely wrong about her, wasn’t I?’

  ‘But not about us,’ said Louisa. ‘Nor Guy, or Mary. We all came, as quickly as we could.’

  Luke smiled at that. ‘So do you think there’s a chance for me?’

  ‘Everyone deserves a chance,’ said Louisa. ‘Even us.’

  A few hours later, Guy came to the hospital with a brown paper bag of grapes, an exotic delight. He looked exhausted but it was tinged with exhilaration at the work he had done that day. ‘She confessed everything,’ he said. ‘It was a moral crusade. She believed Bryan Guinness was caught up in evil practice against God’s works because the family money was made from alcohol.’

  ‘And he was in the way of Luke, who might otherwise marry Diana,’ interjected Louisa.

  ‘I think Luke had the lucky escape there,’ said Guy. ‘She said she had been sorry about the maid’s death, though she hadn’t known it was because they’d eaten the devils-on-horseback. The chocolates had been intended for Bryan and Diana, but when Shaun was killed instead she had reasoned that God had changed the target and that He had his reasons. Discovering that Shaun had committed adultery had only confirmed that belief.’

  Louisa could only shake her head in wonder.

  ‘Clara she saw as helping her move more swiftly to an end that was already coming, and that she deserved to go straight to hell as a drug addict. She had seen her leave the church and take the opium. Back at the hotel, she intercepted the maid who was taking Clara the tea you’d asked for, and put the opium in it.’

  ‘Which must have been why the maid didn’t want to talk to the police,’ interrupted Louisa. ‘What about Kate Mulloney?’

  ‘Lady Boyd knew that the police were investigating Clara’s death, so she had to throw them off the scent. She was especially concerned when Luke was called in that he would be arrested. She poisoned Kate first, then used Kate’s own gun to make it look like suicide. She was the “R” in Kate’s appointment book. They had met for luncheon that day, and then arranged that Lady Boyd would go to her house later. It had been easy for Lady Boyd to contact Mrs Mulloney and offer her Christian help and sympathy, given that they had briefly met in Venice. That was also where Lady Boyd stole the diary, after Mrs Mulloney left it on a desk where she had been writing letters. That connection between Clara and Shaun made her an easy victim.’

  ‘And then Luke,’ said Louisa. ‘She was poisoning him, too. Bit by bit, but still.’

  ‘That seems to have been the hardest one for her, which perhaps explains why she didn’t give him one fatal dose. I think even in her own deranged way, she did love him but she loves God more. She tried to see it as the ultimate sacrifice, like Abraham and his son.’

  ‘What will happen to her, do you think?’

  ‘Hard to say but I think she’ll be committed to Broadmoor. It’s unlikely she’ll ever see the outside world again.’

  Louisa was quiet at this. ‘We must help Luke to get on his feet.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be fine. He has a future ahead of him now. His aunt was never going to give him that. He can live as he truly is, with no fear.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true.’

  Guy looked at Louisa then, and she felt a pleasant sensation in the lower part of her stomach that was quite separate from any of the earlier pain.

  ‘Perhaps we, too, have a future ahead of us now?’ he said gently.

  ‘Yes,’ said Louisa, turning her face towards his. ‘We do.’

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  After Louisa had been discharged from hospital, she returned to work, with the agreement that she would attend to Diana when she was in London but would no longer travel down to Biddesden. The excuse given was Louisa’s need to recover but the truth was they both knew that Louisa would not work for her for much longer. This seemed a gentler way to end things while Louisa tried to work out what she would do next. (And there was an increasing realisation that Diana was also thinking about what she would do next.) Louisa still wanted to work, and Guy supported this, the difficulty being that while she did not want to be a servant or shop girl, she had no school qualifications to speak of. As it was, jobs of any kind were hard to come by but it looked as if the worst of the depression in America and its consequent effects in Europe, might be coming to an end; there was hope that opportunities would improve soon. In this respect, of course, they were wrong.

  Louisa, still basking in her romance with Guy, was increasingly disturbed by Diana’s involvement with Mosley. She had come to recognize the daily letter that arrived from him, eagerly opened by Diana when she received her breakfast tray and which was replied to by the second post. Newspapers were scoured daily front to back – ‘I must understand everything that is going on’ – and Louisa overheard Diana tell several friends that the Leader was a prime minister-in-waiting: ‘They all say it in the House.’ Bryan, who preferred to discuss the novel he was reading or a play he had seen the night before, was sidelined by his wife’s political discussions on how the National Government was failing the country. They both shared a love of their children but if Diana was at home, her mind was constantly restless unless she knew when she would next see Mosley. It did not make for a very relaxing atmosphere for anyone. Yet, Diana’s social whirlwind did not ease up – she became more ravishingly beautiful by the day, it seemed, and had been painted by several leading portrait artists. She was even rather unexpectedly asked to play the part of Perdita in a production of The Winter’s Tale but turned it down.

  In this feverish state of romantic angst and social dervish, it was predictable that Diana should decide that she and Bryan would hold a huge party at Cheyne Walk for her twenty-second birthday in June. Louisa’s instinct for the disruption that felt imminent was heightened when she saw that Mosley and his wife were on the three-hundred-strong guest list. Louisa was not invited to the party but Diana had asked if she might attend in the capacity of chaperone to Decca, now fourteen years old. ‘Strictly speaking she can’t officially be there but it would be such a shame for her to miss out,’ said Diana. ‘I thought perhaps if you were with her, you could take her off to bed at a reasonable hour and then she will be perfectly happy, and so will Muv.’

  Louisa agreed, and so on the night she was there as the sisters and Tom gathered at the start of the party to wish Diana a happy birthday before the evening officially began. Lined up together they were an exceptional collection of beaut
y and personality. Nancy with her dark hair and green eyes, confident now with her growing reputation as a witty writer, if troubled that Hamish and she had still yet to marry; Pamela, with healthy colour in her cheeks and happy with her farm life; Unity, now in her own debutante season, with large hooded eyes and red lips; Tom, tall and attractive; Decca, who looked most like Nancy with high forehead and short chin, but a kinder, more inquisitive soul. And the birthday girl herself, who drew gasps of delight from even her own siblings.

  ‘I’m wearing as many diamonds as I could get my hands on,’ she had teased, dressed in pale grey chiffon and tulle that fell to the floor as softly as whipped egg whites.

  ‘It’s not just that,’ said Nancy suspiciously. ‘You look as if you’ve eaten lightbulbs. You’re radiating happiness. It’s positively sick-making. What’s going on?’

  Diana had waved this off. ‘Absolutely nothing. I’m happy to see you all here. We’re going to have a wonderful night.’

  Decca, feeling shy, had sat with Louisa in the long garden, scented by the full bloom of the roses and with a Russian orchestra playing outside for those who preferred to dance in the open air, rather than the panelled drawing room inside. They watched as the waves of beautiful people arrived, each one more expensively, divinely dressed than the one before – Louisa knew some of them and Decca pointed others out: Winston Churchill, Augustus John, Robert Byron, Evelyn Waugh. The maids were dressed in green and white flowered dresses instead of a uniform, and there seemed to be enough champagne to fill the Thames over again. It was an intoxicating sensation, teasing all her senses, but it felt somehow unreal. As if it were a perfect painting of how life should be but could not be, a screen that hid the grotesque figures and darkening skies behind.

  At eleven o’clock, Louisa took Decca inside and saw she went to bed. They could still hear the strains of music coming through the upstairs window. Decca was not in the least bit tired and asked a thousand questions about who the people were and what did they do, and why were there poor people in the world and could they not share some of the food that was left uneaten at the end of the party, none of which Louisa felt she could answer. They were both unsettled by it all, so when Decca asked Louisa if she could find Unity, just to come up and say good night to her, she agreed.

  Through the house Louisa wandered, trying to find Unity but there was no sign of her. She saw Nancy, attempting to pull Hamish into the dancing, him resisting but not crossly. Tom was endlessly, smoothly moving in circles with various beauties in blue feathered boas and silver lamé dresses. Pamela was sitting on a bench talking intently to a man who looked swarthy and serious. The air inside was heavy with cigarette smoke, cigar smoke and scent; Louisa went into the garden, to look for Unity there but saw Luke instead. He had recovered from the poisoning – confirmed to have been arsenic – and looked his handsome, curly-haired self again.

  ‘Hello, you,’ he said. He had been holding court in a group of three or four people but broke away to greet his friend.

  Louisa smiled at him. ‘I’m trying to find Unity. Decca wants her to go and say good night.’

  Luke grimaced. ‘I saw her, talking to Diana and that awful man. I thought Diana admired him the most but Unity knocks her into a cocked hat. She was practically gaping.’

  ‘You can never resist a gossipy remark, can you?’ But she was only gently teasing. Luke had recently been appointed London correspondent for a newspaper in Berlin. ‘Where were they?’

  ‘At the bottom of the garden, I think. Hiding in the trees.’

  Louisa padded softly on the grass, in between the people talking and drinking. No one noticed her. There was no sign of Unity, so she kept on until she had almost reached the tree that marked the end and there was no further to go. Underneath it stood two figures, close together. Without meaning to and yet without stopping herself, Louisa slipped behind a rose bush in the dark, and listened to what they were saying. She knew no good ever came of eavesdropping but she felt as if so much hung in the balance of what was said on this evening with its charged atmosphere that she could not afford to miss it.

  Diana and the Leader were declaring their love for each other.

  ‘Darling, you know I shall leave Bryan. I can no longer be married to him, not now I feel this way and you do, too.’

  Mosley kissed her. ‘I think you should. So long as you understand that I cannot ever leave Cimmie.’

  ‘I do understand,’ Diana said softly. ‘But somehow, the idea of being quite alone for the rest of my life does not frighten me. Not if I know you love me. I will put you first in everything I do.’

  ‘Everything, my darling?’

  Diana nodded and Louisa turned away, unable to bear it any longer. She walked up the garden, through the house and out of the front gate, on to the street where men and women impatiently pushed past to wherever they were headed. In amongst all those thousands in London, Louisa only needed one person. She was going to find him and this time she wasn’t going to let go.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  This novel is based on a number of real people and events but it should be noted that the murder plots and all conversations – bar a few lines when Bryan proposes to Diana and when Diana and Tom talk in Venice about the Nazis (with the kind permission of Anne de Courcy) – are entirely imagined by me, the author.

  The death of Dorothy Martin at the Guinness dance at 10 Grosvenor Place in June 1928 was a real, tragic event. Dorothy and her friend Elizabeth Tipping were housemaids, sent to bed at midnight by the housekeeper. On the servants’ landing, they had tried to view the party by going on to the glass skylight, which broke. Dorothy fell thirty feet and died almost instantly, Elizabeth was badly injured. The inquest recorded an accidental death.

  Dora Carrington was an artist who was known to be in love with the writer Lytton Strachey; she was married to Ralph Partridge, who had also had an affair with Lytton. The three of them lived at Ham Spray House, close to Biddesden. After Lytton’s death, Dora asked Bryan for the loan of a gun to shoot the rabbits but instead turned the gun on herself. He was much distressed at what he felt had been his own hand in the incident. It had also happened that Diana had been very sick the first weekend she went to stay at Ham Spray House, and rumours had begun that Dora had poisoned her food out of jealous spite (Lytton liked Diana very much) but Diana never agreed that this had been the case.

  Evelyn Waugh, initially a good friend of Nancy’s, had become very close to Diana in the wake of his divorce. He dedicated his novel Vile Bodies to her and Bryan. Sadly, after her son Jonathan was born, she and Evelyn seemed to fall out and were never friends again in quite the same way.

  The incident of Luke’s arrest was based on events surrounding PC Reginald Handford, a plain-clothes policeman suspected of manipulative practices in arresting homosexuals in public urinals in 1927. After a court trial, he was ultimately found not at fault but there was ‘tacit condemnation’ of police operations in urinals and the agent provocateur method. Before the trial, Handford made fifteen arrests in eighteen months; in the following five months he made none, claiming that he was concentrating his efforts on suspected persons and pickpockets instead (from Queer London).

  The story of Rose Morgan planning to run away with the little girl Muriel was based on Rose O’Grady and eleven-year-old Muriel Dunsmuir, who went missing in 1929 from Lytton Hall in Putney. Muriel’s father had died three weeks previously and she and the maid planned to run away to start a dance act. Muriel’s aunt had been married to the couturier Molyneux, though the two were found after three days in Ireland.

  The character of Lady Boyd emerged from an understanding of the divide between the generations in the aftermath of the First World War. Those who had been brought up in the Victorian and Edwardian eras were bewildered if not angry at what they saw as the fast-paced, loose morals of the men and women who embraced the changes that the 1920s brought. The clashes – whether expressed theoretically or violently – between the class, gender and political
divides were not easily resolved against a background of increasing global economic pressure. Quick developments in technology, culture and fashion all had an impact on each other as well as on politics, which became increasingly extreme at each end of the spectrum. We all know how that ended …

  In June 1932, Diana and Mosley declared their love for each other at Diana’s birthday party, though Mosley told her he would never leave his wife. In October 1932, Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, with himself as leader. The following month, Diana told Bryan she would be leaving him, and in January 1933 she moved into a flat with her boys. Mosley remained married to his wife Cimmie until she died in May 1933, shortly before Diana’s divorce came through. Mosley and Diana married in Goering’s drawing room with Hitler present, in October 1936.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  I read a lot of books in the course of researching this novel but am especially grateful to:

  Diana Mosley, Anne de Courcy (Vintage, 2004)

  Queer London, Matt Houlbrook (University of Chicago Press, 2005)

  To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914–1949, Ian Kershaw (Penguin, 2015)

  Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford (Phoenix, 2007)

  A Life of Contrasts, Diana Mosley (Gibson Square Books, 2002)

  The Mitfords: Letters Between the Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley (Fourth Estate, 2007)

  We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars, Martin Pugh (The Bodley Head, 2008)

  Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History, Tori Telfer (John Blake, 2017)

  Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford, the Biography, Laura Thompson (Review, 2003)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My deepest gratitude to Anne de Courcy and her biography Diana Mosley, which was written only after she had conducted long interviews with Lady Mosley and been given unprecedented access to her diaries. There are details and a sense of Diana’s personality from de Courcy’s book that she has very generously allowed me to use here. For those who are interested in reading further on Lady Mosley, I wholeheartedly recommend this biography.