Mary was soon bored by lying in, and frustrated by her difficulty in breast-feeding Ego, a fractious infant. As quickly as she could, she threw herself back into the social whirl. Madeline Wyndham chided her daughter for ‘racketing around’ at the expense of her health and her child. ‘The rule is that one cannot possibly live in the same way for 2 or even 3 months after “The Crisis” as one did before.’ But Mary did not listen, and before long her health gave out. In February 1885, Madeline Wyndham and Annie Wemyss joined forces, compelling a ‘pale and wasting’ Mary to Gosford for ‘a nice quiet bit by the sea’ with nothing to amuse her except long walks and her child – ‘who is a most important personage’, Madeline reminded her.9
Mary never really liked being by herself: ‘when I’m alone my spirits go down! Down!’ she said,10 and she found Gosford as depressing as always. ‘I am very low but that’s not strange!’ she told her mother.11 In fact she was miserable, bursting into tears every time she heard Ego cry. On the advice of her maternity nurse, Mrs Sayers, she began bottle-feeding him, such feeding newly in vogue, as legislation curbing the adulteration of foodstuffs made cow’s milk safer than before. Madeline Wyndham, fiercely opposed to the novel practice, immediately besieged her daughter with prophecies of doom: too much milk, she said, might ‘fly to ones head & make one vy odd for a time! Go to one’s leg & lay one up with what is called a milk leg.’12 In her anxiety Madeline became vitriolic, and, though her anger was mostly reserved for the ‘wicked’ Mrs Sayers for proposing this course, Mary feared she was a bad mother and that her son was not developing as he should. Hugo had remained in London. What news he did deliver was dismal: Stanway’s housekeeper had dropped dead from diabetes. Mary’s initial shock and sympathy were swiftly replaced by exhaustion and alarm as she wondered how she would possibly find a suitable replacement.
The news in the wider world was just as poor. The relief troops arrived at Khartoum in January 1885 four days too late. The city had fallen. Gordon’s head was impaled upon a stick under a sky as blazing as his own eyes. The news was telegraphed back to London. In the press, the GOM of the Midlothian Campaign became the MOG: ‘Murderer of Gordon’. In February it was announced that a further dispatch of troops would effect the original evacuation plan. Among these troops were Hugo’s jubilant brother Alan and George Wyndham, ‘in the 7th Heaven of delight’ at the prospect of a good old rout. ‘It’s like a death in ones [sic] heart,’ said Madeline as she broke the news to Mary.13 All her forebodings, poured out to Mary in letter after anguished letter, charged towards one impossible truth: George was departing to his death. Percy, who thought this intervention as wrong as all Britain’s actions in Egypt thus far, was scarcely more optimistic. In a letter written on the eve of George’s departure he assured him that he did not think ‘for a moment your most precious life is thrown away’ if his son should die in combat.14 At Gosford, Mary suffered a violent bilious attack. Madeline thought it was a direct response to her ‘grief’ at the news.15
As the troops prepared to leave, the Wemysses travelled south, and the Wyndhams congregated first at Wilbury and then in London. Only Mary was absent, forbidden by both families from making the long journey while she was still frail. She remained with Mrs Sayers and Ego, reliant upon her family’s letters for updates. They were not encouraging. ‘Tonight is the awful night when we say goodbye I never felt such a horrible feeling as it is – Poor darling Rat [Madeline Wyndham] looks so unhappy but she bares [sic] it wonderfully,’ Mananai told Mary on the eve of George’s departure after a day spent watching the inspection of the troops at Wellington Barracks.16 The next day they were at the Barracks again, among the cheering crowds waving off the troops in the glittering sunshine of an early-spring day, determined – said Madeline – to show George ‘no signs … of our sorrow but rejoice in his joy’.17
Madeline left London for Gosford. The visit was intended to raise her own spirits as much as her daughter’s, but seems rather to have made them confidantes in each other’s misery. She then returned to Wilbury ‘with a distracted mind & a sad heart & eyes that have gone blind with much crying these last weeks’.18 The house was in a state of upheaval. Final preparations were being made for the move to Clouds, which was to take place while the Wyndhams were in London for the Season. ‘The packing that is going on here is terrific. 3 immense waggons came here the other day and were loaded I don’t know how high & then trudged off at six o’clock in the morning,’ Pamela reported to Mary.19 On finding that her pet white sparrows had been left unfed and allowed to die in the chaos, Madeline saw another augury of George’s fate.20 It was not long before her mind would find another avenue along which to race.
In April 1885 the Gang rejoiced at the engagement of Alfred Lyttelton to Laura Tennant, two of the most beloved of their group. All who knew Laura praised her to the point of hyperbole. She was possessed of ‘an extra dose of life, which caused a kind of electricity to flash about her … lighting up all with whom she came into contact’, said Adolphus (‘Doll’) Liddell, one of the many men in love with her.21 Laura was intensely spiritual, very flirtatious and extremely frank. Mary considered her to be her closest friend. The two concocted grand plans for a literary salon. Shortly after the engagement the Elchos jaunted to Paris with Arthur Balfour, Godfrey Webb and Alfred Lyttelton to visit Laura, who was with Margot and Lady Tennant shopping for her trousseau. ‘We form a fine representative party of Englishmen a married couple, an engaged couple, “doux garcons” as Webber wd call it in his fine English accent … & Margot does well for a sporting “mees”,’ Mary told Percy.22
In old age Mary recalled the irrepressible Tennant sisters’ debut in London as causing ‘a stir indeed – one may almost call it a Revolution … theirs was a plunge, a splash as of a bright pebble being thrown from an immense height into a quiet pool … Many were startled and most were delighted.’23 The Tennant girls, unchaperoned by their mother, were ‘of totally unconventional manners with no code of behaviour except their own good hearts’, as the wife of Arthur’s brother Eustace, Lady Frances Balfour, put it.24 At Glen House, the family home in the Scottish Borders, they entertained male guests in their nightgowns in their bedroom, arguing late into the night over philosophy, spirituality, politics and psychology. The room was known as the ‘Doo-Cot’ (Dovecot) in ironic reference to their heated debates. In London – and in qualification of Mary’s recollection – it took them some time to achieve entrée. Laura met Lady Wemyss – who lived not thirty miles from Glen at Gosford – only when she married Alfred.25 Alfred’s brother Spencer described the Tennants to his cousin Mary Gladstone as a family of ‘brilliant young ladies and vulgar parents’.26 Mary Elcho, of somewhat unconventional behaviour herself, was captivated from the first.
Mary recounted this week in Paris to her parents in exhaustive, delighted detail. She told them about afternoons dozing on the sofa while Laura played the piano in their little shared sitting room; about their proficiency at lawn tennis that had roused the natives to applause; about their conversation, ‘as animated as the most spirited of Frogs’. Mary complained to Percy about the stolid Lady Tennant: ‘someone always has to lag & try to talk to her & she talks not at all! Except in the most commonplace manner.’ She told them about drives in the Bois de Boulogne, delicious déjeuners and dinners at the Lion d’Or. They went to the Théâtre du Palais-Royal and then, Mary added in strangely bathetic phrase, they ‘walked home afterwards’.27 She did not tell her parents that the person with whom she had walked arm in arm, deep in conversation, on the winding route home was not Hugo but Arthur.28 On their return to London Arthur dined with the Elchos. Mary was wearing a low-cut gown which startled her guest into an unexpected compliment. ‘You have a jolly throat,’ he told her, such an effusive comment for the reserved Arthur that Mary openly blushed.29
One of the Gang’s defining characteristics, stemming directly from the nightgowned Tennant girls entertaining in the Doo-Cot,