Hugo’s haste to have this issue determined while on honeymoon suggests he was in yet another financial scrape. From his sheepish tone, even he realized that his behaviour was grasping. Percy agreed that Mary should have only £350–400 a year as pin money, with the remainder going to the Elchos’ common expenses.12 From the occasional sly comment over the years it is clear that Percy knew full well why Hugo was so keen to reduce Mary’s pin money. Mary knew nothing of this until stumbling across this letter years later. ‘Typical’, she scrawled across it in irritation, that on their honeymoon Hugo should have written to her father ‘not on love but Money!’, adding, correctly, that Hugo’s master was ‘Mammon’.13
From Gober the Elchos travelled to Gosford, the Wemysses’ family seat just outside Edinburgh. For a century, the family had lived on another property on the estate. Now Lord Wemyss was adding two vast wings on to an Adams-built centre completed, but never lived in, a century before.14 During the course of the works, Mary persuaded the builders to let her go up in the crane used for the building. She drew a picture for her mother to illustrate it: a tiny figure swinging high over a bare landscape.15
Mary hated Gosford on sight. A chill east wind whipped around the property, which looked out to the glassy grey Firth of Forth. Seagulls wheeled overhead in a ‘complaining chorus’.16 In later life she described the rebuilt house as ‘like a large & gilded, dead & empty Cage’.17 Her daughter Cynthia echoed her: ‘a great block of stone that seems to me very still-born. It has no living atmosphere.’18 Lutyens likened it to a rendition of ‘God Save the King’ sung flat.19 As a newlywed, Mary dreaded the time when Hugo would succeed to the Wemyss title, requiring her to relocate to the north.
Gosford was enough to induce homesickness in anyone. Just days after they arrived, Hugo went rabbit shooting, leaving his new wife alone in the bosom of his family. He had accepted the invitation before his engagement, and claimed he could not in good conscience cancel. It was an early indication of his ability to costume selfishness as honour. In Hugo’s absence, Mary attended Aberlady Church with the family, went for long solitary walks and wrote endless letters to her husband. Evan Charteris, on finding her at her writing desk once again, marvelled teasingly that she had anything further to say. Annie Wemyss visited her in her bedroom before dinner and in her own stiff way ‘thimpashized’ with her doleful daughter-in-law. Nonetheless Mary felt marooned in a strange place and wondered what she was doing there. ‘You must come back soon … the very first instant you can … it is too horrid – & … dreary & dismal … everything is rainy & black & miserable & Mogs feels very sad,’ she told Hugo.20 Hugo’s sympathetic replies showed no sign that he intended to change his plans.
At dinner the Wemysses lectured Mary upon the dangers of separation in marriage. Annie Wemyss noted proudly that she and Lord Wemyss had barely spent a day apart. Already, the Elchos seemed to have exceeded their tally, and Mary’s solitude forced her into contemplation. ‘I think now that Hugo & I shall always love being together by ourselves better than anything else … [but] the habit of living together as one cannot be acquired in a minute any more than any other habit … the wedding day is but the beginning of the marriage not the “fait accompli”,’ she told her mother. She had taken as her mantra ‘I bide my time’. With that she could ‘remove Mountains!’21 But Mary’s brave words rang hollow. She was beginning to realize that moulding Hugo into the husband she wanted might be even more difficult than she had anticipated.
A few weeks later the Elchos returned to London. Hugo had taken a small house near his parents at 12 North Audley Street, off Grosvenor Square. The Elchos stayed at Belgrave Square while waiting for works on the rented house to be completed.22 Both their mothers warned Mary about the dangers of city life, full of distractions to drive an emotional wedge between a young husband and wife. Once installed in North Audley Street, the Elchos made a good fist at domesticity. Sometimes they dined alone. Over champagne, Hugo practised the speeches he intended to make the next day in the Commons, speeches they both hoped would gain the attention of the party leadership and raise him out of the backbenches in due course. On other evenings Hugo read poetry to Mary as they sat by the fire.
Yet far more frequently Mary’s diary recorded evenings spent in the company of others. In her journal the companions of her youth, cousins and Wiltshire neighbours, fall away. Instead she went with her sisters-in-law Evelyn de Vesci and Hilda Brodrick to watch the debates from the Ladies’ Gallery in the Commons, or spent evenings at the ‘New Club’ (the New University Club on St James’s Street) drinking champagne and ‘getting lively’ with Arthur Balfour, Hugo and Evan Charteris as they debated that day’s point of interest with dazzling lightness and speed. With Hugo, Laura Tennant and Alfred Lyttelton, Mary passed evenings at the bachelor lodgings of Godfrey Webb where the company reclined in armchairs, played the piano and indulged in ‘nice long talk’.23 Webb was somewhat older, and had originally been a friend of Percy and Madeline’s. A clerk in the House of Lords, and celebrated wit and raconteur, ‘Webber’ was described by some of the group as their court jester.24 That group, of which Arthur was the undisputed king, began to refer to itself as ‘the Gang’. In a few years its members would become ‘the Souls’.
Marriage had established the direction of Mary’s social circle. After a spat about flirtations in 1887, Hugo implied as much, telling Mary that ‘me almost wishes as a punishment – though not quite! That you were now playing the part of Lady Airlie [David Ogilvy had since become Earl of Airlie] – in some provincial garrison town – jealously guarded by Othello Ogles – no Migs – no Barkin [Arthur Balfour] – NO Tommie [Ribblesdale] – NO Stanywan [Stanway] – only Ernests [babies] – soldiers wives – & tea parties of 10th Hussar Sols – with Othello Ogles pouring out the tea.’25 Hugo’s conjecture was remarkably accurate in describing the life of Ogilvy’s actual wife Mabell Airlie at that time. Yet a comment by Mary in those early days suggests that the frenetic socializing for which she became notorious was partly the result of her husband’s response to married life rather than her own. Two years into their marriage, Mary counted to Hugo the number of occasions that the Elchos had been ‘quite alone’ in the countryside, without the array of hangers-on required to keep him amused. It was just twice: the time in Gober, ‘when you were stalking all day & one week at Whitsuntide at Stanway when I felt very ill – & yet you pretend to believe we are a domestic couple …’.26
In the spring of 1884, before the Elchos moved into North Audley Street, Mary had a miscarriage. She was put to bed at Belgrave Square and a doctor summoned. With fear of infections and haemorrhaging, miscarriage was considered more dangerous than childbirth, but Dr Cumberbatch said Mary’s condition gave him no cause for concern. ‘I suppose I have gone about it methodically in an easy going manner … I am as jolly as a sandgirl, or rather matron, or would be matron!’ Mary reassured her mother, who had stayed in London to be near Mary for as long as she could until the stream of telegrams from Percy, left with a houseful of guests at Wilbury, grew too irate to ignore. In a quiet room, cared for by a nurse, Mary rested on a chaise longue and knitted, whiling away the days until she was allowed back into the world. Hugo drifted in and out in between stints at the Commons. She was visited by friends – Lily Paulet and Emmie Bourke (a cousin of sorts whose husband Edward was the brother of Mary’s late uncle Lord Mayo) – and her sisters-in-law, who recounted their own experiences of childbearing and miscarriage. Eventually the shows of blood decreased. ‘Betsey … from [her] kind of light out of door attire is about to put on tippet and depart,’ Mary told her mother, and she was allowed to re-enter the world.
As Mary did so, she was unclear whether she was pregnant or not. Dr Cumberbatch, perplexed by the non-appearance of ‘a 3 months ovum’, confessed he could not tell what exactly had happened. Perhaps Mary had had a phantom pregnancy; perhaps she was still pregnant; perhaps the foetus would come away at Mary’s next monthly period. If her period did not appear, ‘I shan’t know whether I have picked up old threads or started afresh! It’s very funny,’ said Mary, resolutely bright-faced, affecting