The Viceroy's Daughters

by Anne de Courcy

  It was a polished and appreciated entertainment; as he told Nancy afterward: “People were very good about [it] and I think it repaid all the trouble.” Irene, dark and graceful, “with a great look of the mother she lost,” reported one society paper, wore the obligatory white with a single string of the magnificent pearls that had belonged to Mary. Unfortunately, as she knew no young men owing to her father’s Victorian belief that these dangerous creatures should be kept away from girls until they came out, her only dancing partners were elderly uncles.

  When war was declared on August 4, 1914, Curzon offered his services to Asquith immediately but was rejected. “Pitiful that at 39 one was thought fit to rule 300 millions of people, and at 55 is not wanted to do anything in an emergency in which our whole national existence is at stake,” he reflected bitterly. His children were loyally indignant for him. Baba drew a pen-and-ink sketch of the head of her father’s nemesis, Lord Kitchener (now at the peak of his fame as secretary for war), marking it phrenologically, its different sections labeled with various qualities such as “misjudgment,” “short-sightedness,” “ambition,” and “egotism.”

  To Elinor, who had returned from France, he lent his holiday villa Naldera at Broadstairs. Here her daughter Margot would listen to the guns booming on the other side of the Channel. He also invited the Belgian royal family, whom he had met with Mary in the South of France, to stay at Hackwood for as long as they wished. Though the king of the Belgians returned to the unoccupied part of Belgium, his three children—Charles, Albert and Marie-José—remained at Hackwood throughout the war.

  Baba was the one who saw most of them; she and Marie-José played piano duets together, were exactly the same age and remained friends all their lives. Baba disliked Albert, largely because of his unkindness to her beloved dog Bobby, into whom, to annoy her, he would attempt to stick pins.

  Curzon was solicitous about the welfare of his Belgian guests. He supervised the princes’ education and, one weekend in 1915, invited a famous Belgian cellist who had taught Queen Elizabeth of the Belgians to play the violin to stay at Hackwood for the weekend and make music to entertain her three children.

  With him came the young Arthur Rubinstein, later to achieve worldwide fame as a pianist, and two other members of the quartet. They arrived on Saturday, to be greeted by Irene with the news that her father was still in London but would arrive in time for dinner and that the two Belgian princes were away. “That leaves us only with little Princess Marie-José,” said Irene, “but she is the one who really loves music.”

  Curzon greeted his guests in the drawing room before dinner. The impression he made on Rubinstein was indelible. “Lord Curzon entered like a supreme judge ready to pronounce a death sentence. His bald head, cold steel-gray eyes and thin, tight mouth made his face bland and expressionless, and he walked with pompous dignity.” (Rubinstein was unaware of Curzon’s steel spinal corset, though this sometimes creaked when he walked.) It was too late for music that night, Curzon told them, and Rubinstein spent the following morning in the company of the Curzon daughters and little Princess Marie-José. At teatime Curzon said: “Gentlemen, if you are not tired, it would be delightful to hear some music.”

  They played a quartet by Dvoˇrák, listened to attentively by the girls while Curzon sat in a comfortable armchair in a corner of the room. “At the end of the first movement we saw him peacefully asleep,” recorded Rubinstein. “He woke up brusquely when we had finished. ‘That was quite, quite delightful. Thank you very much, gentlemen.’ We took a train before dinner and arrived in London a little tired but in good humor. ‘It was quite, quite delightful, gentlemen,’ we repeated many times to each other.”

  For Rubinstein it was even more delightful than for the others. He had made a mental note of the young Irene’s charms in the hope that they would encounter each other on more neutral ground in the future. He was not the only man to admire Irene at that time. Comte Willy de Grunne, in charge of the king of the Belgians’ household, fell deeply in love with her and longed to marry her. “Ah! Irene! I loved her so much,” he told her nieces years later. “She was such a wonderful dancer—how we waltzed together!” But though Irene enjoyed dancing with him, she scarcely noticed him otherwise and quickly forgot him.

  Elinor, away from London, was unaware of a development that was to devastate her emotionally. The Souls had not given up their efforts to prize their “dear George” away from the hated Mrs. Glyn, and one of them, his friend Violet, the duchess of Rutland, gave a luncheon party in June 1915 for him to meet someone who might effect this. Curzon had already noticed Grace Duggan, wearing a pink dress and leaning against a pillar, at a ball given by Lady Londesborough. She was married to a wealthy Argentinian of suspect health who was an honorary attaché at the Argentinian embassy, a post that gave his beautiful wife plenty of scope for the fashionable, frivolous, amorous life she enjoyed.

  When the duchess’s letter told him she was inviting “that pretty Mrs. Duggan,” Curzon accepted at once and at the luncheon asked Grace Duggan if he might call on her a few days later at her house at 32 Grosvenor Square, where she ran a convalescent home for Belgian officers.

  Within a month of dining at the ultra-respectable RAC, they had plunged into a passionate love affair. “My heart is just calling to you all day,” wrote Grace on August 26, 1915, on her silver-and-black monogrammed paper. “Believe me my darling great big man, I think I must have been waiting for you always as I can’t describe how complete I feel. You call me a flower, dear heart; I do feel a wide open full-blown rose with every petal open to you, my sun. George darling, my love for you is so big that it frightens me. Help me and keep me. Your Grace.”

  War did not halt another of Curzon’s passions: houses and castles. In 1911 he had bought the fifteenth-century Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire and was restoring it, but he believed the most “truly British style” ran from the second half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign to the end of James I’s. For him, the most perfect of the smaller stately homes of that period was Montacute House, in Somerset, with its tall chimneys, armored figures in niches below the balustrading, stone staircases and paneled baronial hall. He itched to restore it and when its lease became available he consulted Irene and Cimmie about its purchase—it was, after all, their money that would buy it and it would, ostensibly, be their home as well.

  His daughters’ share of the Leiter Trust, the fortune left by their maternal grandfather, brought in an annual income of more than ten thousand pounds each,* of which Curzon had the handling until they came of age (his own income from Mary’s marriage settlement was four thousand pounds a year). Because the three girls were such substantial heiresses, the trustees had insisted that they be made wards of court, with their father as their official guardian; every year, he had to appear before a judge for the necessary permission to use their incomes for housing, upkeep, education and general maintenance of the Curzonian style of living.

  Curzon’s view was that the purchase of the Montacute lease meant a substantial house for each daughter but, viewing Hackwood as home, they showed little enthusiasm for this new interest. He went ahead anyway and acquired the lease in 1914. Montacute fulfilled all his ideals of architectural beauty. He badgered the long-suffering owner with questions: Did any of the oak chests have any particular significance? Was the hall ever used as a living room? When was the asphalt tennis court laid? How old was the kitchen garden? Who planted the broad avenue leading to the east entrance?

  He put in a first-floor bathroom, restored the original stonework and filled the house with Elizabethan furniture bought locally so that, as he put it, “without being fine, it is contemporary and harmonious.” Then he asked Elinor to decorate it.

  She was thrilled. Convincing proof of his adoration, she felt, could go no further. To seek her help in creating a home must surely mean that he intended to share it with her if her circumstances altered—and Clayton’s health was deteriorating fast. Elinor felt convinced that if, as se
emed likely, she was widowed, Curzon would ask her to marry him.

  She stuck to Milor’s imperial theme for his own bedroom, with a crimson carpet and hangings, silver Louis XIV mirror and Spanish candlesticks and, in the intervals between decorating, wrote a tribute to the man with whom she hoped to spend the rest of her life—a Pen Portrait of a Great Man, by One who knows the Greatness of his Soul, bound in green leather with a gilt C and coronet in one corner.

  She put as much effort into designing the interiors of his daughters’ bedrooms, with a pink carpet and chintzes in Irene’s and parrots on the walls of Baba’s. Elsewhere she gave free rein to her own romantic tastes, a mélange of rich color and luxurious fabrics that evoked an almost oriental sensuality. Her signature purples and mauves were everywhere—even the governess’s room had a mauve carpet. In the Great Chamber there were silk hangings on the walls, a sofa, chairs and curtains of purple and orange velvet, green silk velvet cushions and four smaller chairs in purple velvet. Here, too, she replaced in their original niches the female nude statues removed for their supposed indelicacy in the mid-Victorian era and persuaded Curzon to strew three of his tiger skins on the purple carpet. It was a temple to the erotic love she hoped to share with him for the rest of her life.

  When Clayton died in November 1915 this hope must have been reaffirmed every time Curzon visited her at Montacute during the customary year’s mourning that followed. His visits were often unannounced; in order to preserve the character of Montacute he had refused to have a telephone installed.

  What Elinor did not know was that a fortnight before Clayton’s death Grace Duggan’s husband had also died. In 1916, the widowed Grace left their house in Grosvenor Square and leased Trent Park, in Middlesex, with its exquisite gardens, pink pillars and flamingos, from the rich and social Sir Philip Sassoon. She kept up the house in lavish pre-war style—“four footmen in the hall and dinner beginning with caviar,” reported one visitor, Edward Marsh—and Curzon would come and see her there.

  Curzon, with the choice of two adoring red-haired beauties, had no hesitation in proposing to the younger, richer and more frivolous of the two. One day he invited Grace to accompany him to the ruined Bodiam Castle in Sussex, which he had just bought from Lord Ashcombe and intended to restore. They ate their luncheon, which they had brought with them, in a private room at the Castle Inn opposite and looked over at the castle ruins. Curzon then drove Grace to Winchelsea where, in one of its beautiful churches, he asked her to marry him. Afterward he wrote: “May I be worthy of the love of my girl and make her truly happy.”

  On December 17, 1916, Elinor was standing on a stepladder straightening some of the newly hung curtains she had chosen when a servant brought her a six-day-old copy of The Times. Opening it, she began to read. On the Court page it held the news of Curzon’s engagement to Mrs. Duggan.

  Elinor climbed down from the ladder, burned Curzon’s letters, packed her belongings and left Montacute—and his life.

  6

  Growing Up

  Grace Duggan was rich, kind, beautiful and, although comparatively brainless, approved of by the Souls. Unlike Elinor, she was still young enough to have the son Curzon longed for. He desperately wanted an heir not only to inherit his hard-won earldom but to forge a similarly brilliant career—daughters did not count, as it was inconceivable to him that a woman could attain distinction in public life. His liaison with Grace had already assured him of their sexual compatibility and she was exactly the physical type that he admired: a voluptuous redhead with an ample bosom.

  In addition, she had an exquisite complexion, huge dark eyes and the small hands and feet (size three and a half) considered such a mark of delicate femininity. He still hoped to reattain high office, and—again unlike Elinor—Grace was untainted by notoriety. Though money was a subject they did not discuss, her wealth would allow him to maintain the grandeur of his way of life. He must, too, have been encouraged by the fact that she had already borne two sons, Alfred and Hubert, as well as a daughter, Marcella.

  The separations that were so to plague him started almost at once. The first was one that both agreed was essential: Grace had to return to Argentina to settle her affairs there, despite the delay it would cause to their wedding plans. “I long for the day ever drawing nearer when my girl will come home to be with me as long as life shall last,” wrote Curzon in the first of many loving letters, “and we will do our best to give peace and happiness to each other and perhaps to do something worthy in so much of life as may be left to me. It is an age since her dear kisses trembled on my mouth.”

  On March 23, 1916, while Grace was away, Lord Scarsdale died. Curzon, as his heir, inherited the ancestral home of Kedleston. It was the fulfillment of a long-held dream: Curzon had always felt passionately about Kedleston, but while his father was alive all his suggestions for the refurbishment and upkeep of this Palladian palace had been firmly rebuffed.

  Kedleston, almost more than any other of Curzon’s houses, exactly suited his taste. Commissioned by Sir Nathaniel Curzon from Robert Adam in 1759, it appealed to what Elinor Glyn had called the Roman in him. The saloon, with its huge domed rotunda rising to sixty-two feet, was full of statues, pediments, friezes, columns, urns and garlands. The marble hall had twenty Corinthian columns; as Curzon would tell visitors, in a phrase emphasizing his flat Derbyshire a’s, “While the pillars of Government House, Calcutta [modeled on Kedleston], were lath and plaster, those of Kedleston were purest alabaster.” There were huge chandeliers of Waterford crystal and wonderful views over the parkland and lake to the Derbyshire dales from the tall windows. Despite Robert Adam’s heating system, disguised in cast-iron altars, it was icy cold and none of Curzon’s family, let alone Grace, felt about it as he did. In any case, it was far too far from London, where his presence was required in the war cabinet (of which he had become a member when Lloyd George succeeded Asquith as prime minister on December 6, 1916), for him to live there for more than a few weeks of the year.

  Soon after her father’s engagement to Grace, Irene received her first proposal, from the entirely suitable Guy Benson. He went down on one knee and asked her to marry him. “Yes!” she replied, whereupon he rose to his feet, kissed her chastely on the forehead and exclaimed, “You are a brick, old thing!” This was so much at variance with Irene’s ideal of romance that she broke it off at once. Curzon thought this displayed a greatness of soul. “Such a woman deserves the best and some day she may attain it,” he wrote to Nancy Astor.

  Curzon and Grace were married at Lambeth Palace on February 2, 1917, by Curzon’s old Balliol friend Cosmo Lang, the archbishop of York (the archbishop of Canterbury had the flu), Grace in a cream chiffon dress by Worth trimmed with Russian sable and a long sable cape. Curzon was so moved by the occasion that Grace arrived at the altar to find tears pouring down the normally impassive face of her bridegroom.

  After the wedding, they motored straight to Trent Park, together with their respective children. Irene brought her horses and accompanied the Duggan boys out hunting, often giving them leads over difficult fences. Nancy Astor kept closely in touch, frequently asking Irene and Cimmie over to Cliveden for the weekend or for parties (“we will have a dance and every sort of lark”).

  The Curzons’ first party at Trent was Irene’s coming-of-age dance, in January 1917. Irene, in the white that set off her dark looks so well, wore a wreath of green leaves in her hair, waltzing with closed eyes the better to enjoy the music. The war, with its terrible slaughter, had been dragging on for several years, so the party, a comparatively quiet affair for 150, had none of the lavishness of her coming-out ball. Even so, when the Curzons motored to London the following day they were deeply upset to see a newspaper placard with the words: “Curzons dance while Europe burns.” After this, they confined themselves to small dinner parties, chiefly for Curzon’s Soul friends like Harry Cust, Arthur Balfour, Evan Charteris and Lady Desborough.

  Because of the war Cimmie, eighteen that year, did not h
ave the usual coming-out season and ball. Instead, after leaving her Eastbourne school, she began work at the War Office when the Curzons returned to Carlton House Terrace.

  Grace was good at making men comfortable and she quickly learned Curzon’s idiosyncrasies. He could not sleep unless every chink of light was shut out of the room, he liked simple nursery food—seedcake, homemade jam, queen of puddings with meringue on top and jam inside—but was extremely fussy. “Look, Gracie,” he would say, appearing in her bedroom at breakfast while she was drinking her coffee, reading letters, talking to her maid or having her nails done, and holding out his plate: “This egg’s far too hard.”

  She ordered the boxes of chocolates from Rumpelmayer’s, the fashionable tea shop in St. James’s, through which he would munch when he sat up late at night dealing with papers. And she quickly realized that her arrival could do nothing to stop him from taking his meticulous and detailed interest in the running of their houses. “George works so hard and sits up so late,” she told Lady Cynthia Asquith. “He often doesn’t come to bed till 2:30 but stays down writing out the menus for the servants in his different country houses.”

  She was also well aware of Curzon’s longing for a male child and, whatever her other faults in the marriage, never shirked her duty in this respect. Even during their engagement she had written: “My beloved boy’s child! Darling, this thought is already my biggest wish and my most earnest prayer. I am taking great care of myself—if ever we are blessed, he must be strong and all that your son should be.”

  But there was no sign of an heir. With typical thoroughness, Curzon set about finding out why, and was soon assuring Grace—or, as he always now called her, Gracie—that a small operation would soon put things right. On June 25, 1917, he was telling her that this should be performed at Carlton House Terrace. “The doctor only wants the carpets up in the bathroom.” It would, he assured her, be a mere nothing: