Arrangements proceeded as normal: the wedding presents arrived at Belgrave Square and, as customary, were displayed for inspection by family, friends and household (although some, such as Stanway, the Gloucestershire manor house given by Lord Wemyss to the newlyweds, were not capable of display). Mary began work on hundreds of thank-you letters: ‘I have thanked eight presents (long elaborate letters) & August is two hours old!’ she complained to Hugo.68 Last-minute adjustments were made to Mananai’s and Pamela’s bridesmaid dresses and Mary’s trousseau was packed in tissue paper in preparation for her honeymoon. Early on the morning of their wedding day, 10 August 1883, ‘the dawn of the day which I hope through all our lives we shall look upon as a blessed anniversary’, Hugo wrote to Mary anticipating their meeting in St Peter’s Church in Eaton Square later that day: ‘Darling God give you strength to go through it all – & make me a good Hogs worthy of the little angel Mogs … Goodbye my darling soon to be mine only and really.’ He sketched for Mary a cartoon: a small round Mary (not entirely representative, it must be said, since Mary was tall and slender) with a tall thin bridegroom by her side shouting ‘hurrah!’69 Several hours later, as reported by The Times, Mary, dressed in white and decked with orange blossom, walked down the aisle of St Peter’s, past relations, friends and royalty in the form of Princess Christian, towards ‘Lord Elcho M.P.’, and became his wife.70
As the assembled masses waited in the cool church for Mary to make her entrance on Percy’s arm, it was Madeline Wyndham’s nerves that were most frayed. ‘It was an awful bit that in the Church before you came – it felt so long,’ Madeline told Mary later, heady with relief that all had gone as planned. ‘The organ played such a tune … I could have screamed to the man, to stop his twiddles … & then, like hot & cold or magic music, as you drew near he played louder & louder!’71 Normally such a thing would have given Mary and her mother the giggles: this time it only gave Madeline a feeling of ‘teeth on edge’.
The service was followed by a short reception at Belgrave Square. At a quarter past four, the bride and groom departed: first for Easton Lodge in Essex, lent to them by Lord and Lady Brooke, and then to Gober, in the Scottish Highlands, where Hugo was to go stalking. The Wyndhams settled in for a quiet evening at Belgrave Square. Madeline and her sisters, Julia and Lucy Campbell, alternately laughed and cried over the events of the day. Then George and Guy Wyndham went to a play. The rest of the family dined with Fräulein. After dinner, as Mananai sat and pulled apart Mary’s bouquet in order to make nosegays for Mary’s friends as keepsakes, her mother was reminded of her eldest daughter: ‘sitting there with a melancholy face picking and pulling at all the lovely flowers!’72 The comparison did not bode well given that all Mary’s bouquets and buttonholes had been to do with Hugo.
Three years later, when the sheen of marriage had long started to fade, Mary reproved Hugo for spending their honeymoon stalking. At the time, she had seemed happy enough to yomp across the moors after Hugo, and she revelled in a sense of recklessness as the Elchos drank champagne and played piquet by night. The Wyndham family was by now summering in Hyères, and Madeline Wyndham was missing her eldest daughter desperately (‘I cannot get reconciled to being without you,’ she told Mary some two years after her marriage),1 but Mary’s letters to her family glowed with delight in her marital state. One evening, she told Guy conspiratorially, the Elchos had got so ‘drunk’ on champagne ‘to cheer our spirits’ after Hugo failed to bag a stag that Hugo fell over.2 At this liminal honeymoon stage Mary had been freed from childhood’s bonds without yet assuming matronly cares.
The little cartoons the Elchos sent one another in their marriage’s early years, and coy references to ‘lonely little cots’ when they were apart, suggest that sexually the union was a success. Not for the Elchos the horror stories of the Ruskins, whose marriage was never consummated, or of the young scientist Marie Stopes, who only realized her abusive husband was impotent after six months of study in the British Library.3 Madeline and her daughters were extremely frank with each other about all health matters, microscopically recounting any oddities in relation to ‘Lady Betsey’, their term for their menstrual cycle. Mary was enthusiastically descriptive about gynaecological matters. It seems likely that Madeline gave all her daughters some kind of warning about what a wedding night entailed. What Mary told her mother after the event must remain a mystery. Madeline Wyndham kept ‘letter books’ containing her children’s correspondence over the course of their lives. On pasting in Mary’s first letter to her following her wedding, Madeline redacted it, so that it tells us only that Mary had ‘a headache’, before the next three lines are scrubbed out vigorously with black pen.4
Romance was in the air at Gober. As Mary and Hugo ate their dinner by firelight, backstage in the little hut Hugo’s valet Williams seduced Mary’s maid Faivre. Prophylactics, not uncommon in the city, were hardly readily available in the Highland wilds; perhaps Faivre was also one of many unversed women who did not know how babies were made. Faivre consequently found herself unmarried and pregnant – ‘ruined’, as Mary put it.5 It was a highly unfortunate position for any young woman, an untenable one for a lady’s maid.
In most cases, Faivre would have found herself immediately dismissed without a reference. When the Elchos’ friend George Curzon found out that a housemaid in his employ had been seduced by a footman, he ‘put the little slut out into the street’ without a qualm. His contemporaries considered his attitude unremarkable.6 Mary responded quite differently. With the help of Madeline and Percy she helped Faivre find lodging with a tolerant North London landlady; assisted her financially from her own pin money (Hugo’s valet had long since scarpered); and visited Faivre once the child, a little boy, was born in the spring of 1884.7 Most of Mary’s friends thought her admirably liberal attitude towards staff overly indulgent. Servant troubles became a constant footnote to her daily life. Her anxiety never to hurt anyone’s feelings did not serve her well as an employer.
On 14 August 1883, a few days after the Elchos had arrived at Gober, Hugo wrote a private letter to Percy. The subject was Mary’s dowry. Hugo told Percy that he had proposed ‘with no idea what Mary was to have or whether she was to have any[thing] at all’, as unconvincing a statement as the rest of his letter was disingenuous.8 Mary’s marriage settlement had been negotiated in the weeks between the engagement and the marriage by Percy on the one hand and Hugo’s solicitor, Mr Jamieson, on the other, as was the convention.9 Mary received £15,000 (roughly £1.25 million today), the interest on which would produce an annual income of £500.10 Hugo had thought that £100 or more of this £500 would be given to him for his own use. Now conversations with Mr Jamieson had made it clear that Percy intended the whole for Mary’s use as pin money.
Hugo’s frantic letter to Percy argued that Mary should not have an allowance disproportionate to the Elchos’ income, lest she learn bad spending habits. His reasoning, while in line with contemporary attitudes, was both patronizing and misleading. His concern was not that Mary’s spending habits should be curbed but that his own should be supported. Mary was innately frugal, and remained so all her life. She spent almost no money on clothes (far too little, her friends complained). Her eldest daughter never remembered her buying even a trinket or a bottle of scent for herself. She invariably travelled