St. Cybi’s Church

Holyhead

Holy Island, Anglesey, Wales

Saturday, August 7, 1948

A handful of journalists came to report on the funeral of a historical curiosity. Her moment of notoriety had been over 30 years in the past, but it was common knowledge that she had caused the downfall of a Prime Minister and the end of the Great War.

“What the hell did Venetia Stanley do after Squiffy snuffed it?” Hugh Richards, the reporter from Pathé News, sneered into his notebook. Apparently little: the eulogy for Miss Stanley at St. Cybi’s Church had been dull. Although the eulogizing priest had noted Miss Stanley’s high spirits in childhood as the youngest daughter of the fourth Lord Sheffield, there was no mention of her early adulthood, when she became infamous throughout Britain and the entire world as a real-life combination of the literary characters Zuleika Dobson and Lady Clara Vere de Vere. In the years after Miss Stanley had fled the limelight to live permanently at Lord Sheffield’s country estate of Penhrôs, she had apparently devoted herself to good works, speaking fluent Welsh (a rarity for aristocrats like Miss Stanley) to the servants at Penhrôs and the people in the town of Holyhead. She had never married, never had children. She had borne her fatal breast cancer with equanimity. Bor-ring! A hundred — nay, a thousand — other aristocratic old maids had done much the same and would keep on doing so till the crack of doom.

But what was Violet Bonham Carter, the Liberal MP and Shadow Foreign Secretary, doing at the funeral of the mistress of her long-dead father? Mrs. Bonham Carter, tall and ramrod straight with her wavy greying blonde hair scraped into a French twist under her wide-brimmed black straw hat, wore a couture black silk suit from Christian Dior. Richards shouted to Mrs. Bonham Carter as she left the church, “Why are you here at Venetia Stanley’s funeral?”

Mrs. Bonham Carter glared at Richards. “Miss Stanley was the dearest friend of my girlhood,” she said in a hesitant voice.

“But she caused your father’s —”

“She did not mean it,” Mrs. Bonham Carter said. “And she repented for it every day of the rest of her life.” After a long pause, Mrs. Bonham Carter sighed. “That is all I have to say on the matter. Thank you, gentlemen.”

Although the reporters shouted questions at Mrs. Bonham Carter, she did not look back at them. Her shoulders stiffened as she got into the back of a black Rolls-Royce, which drove her away.

“‘Dearest friend of my girlhood’?” Richards asked John Bellingham, the reporter on assignment from The Times. “There’s a story there, I’m sure of it.”

Lucerne, Switzerland

Monday, January 15, 1912

Violet and I were going to Sicily via Switzerland, Milan, and Rome. Mr. Asquith and Edwin Montagu, who was Mr. Asquith’s former Parliamentary Private Secretary and had become the Under-Secretary of State for India, would meet us in Palermo. I met Violet at the train station in Lucerne at around eleven in the morning. I had been stuck in Lucerne for 24 hours waiting for Violet and was dying of boredom.

“Violet, my own darling!” I exclaimed as she got off the first-class passenger car of the Interlaken train. I would have run towards her if my hobble skirt was not so narrow. Instead, I walked as quickly as I could without risking tearing the seams. “What took so long?” I hugged her tightly and kissed her cheek. Her Scottish maid, Miss Coates, struggled closely behind with Violet’s hand luggage.

“Oh, Venetia, you don’t want to know…”

“You know I do!” Then I laughed as if we were little girls again.

“Well, then. Cys and I had a roughish Channel crossing. After we got on the Paris train, I felt too tired to read…”

“That’s odd. You’re always reading! And writing! You should become an authoress!” I said as we proceeded down the platform, trying not to bump into the throng.

“Well, I would have a built-in audience, I suppose…”

“Of course you would. People would want to read anything by the Prime Minister’s daughter.”

“Trouble is, what would I write about? All I write are letters and my diary.”

“Then write a roman à clef. Make it scandalous. Make it salacious. I’m sure you could find some scandal to write about. I hear that Mr. Lloyd George has cast his roving eye on the tutor who taught his daughter last summer,” I told Violet. “He had Miss Megan enroll as a weekly boarder in the school where the tutor teaches — Allenswood, I believe. I think the tutor is a Miss Stevenson. She’s not discouraging Mr. Lloyd George’s attentions, is she? I think her head must be turned because he is Chancellor of the Exchequer and tipped to become PM someday. And of course your father —”

“You know I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Father,” Violet said seriously. The expression on her face was so solemn and foreboding that I decided to drop the subject.

I suppressed my sigh and continued in as light a tone as I could, “Then tell me more about your journey, darling,” I said as we got into a cab that would take us to an Italian restaurant. (Miss Coates and the luggage were going on to the Grand Hotel National, where Violet and I would spend the night together.)

“Oh, Venetia! I wish you had been with me!” Violet sprawled in her seat and assumed an exaggeratedly melodramatic pose. “Cys and I were in Paris just long enough to take the Interlaken train. It was so terribly damp and mild in Interlaken. The grass was sticking up blackly through the snow like an unshaved cheek. We went on to Lauterbrunnen. Mr. Lunn and Hugh Godley were there.”

“Mr. Lunn?” The name sounded vaguely familiar, but I could not place it.

“You know, darling. Of the Lunn travel agency. He contested Boston in Lincolnshire a couple of years ago, but couldn’t quite make it to become an MP. Quite Liberal. Quite pro-Father.” Violet almost beamed whenever she mentioned her father. “Anyway… poor Hugh reserved rooms for us at the wrong hotel in Mürren. We wanted to be where Mr. Lunn was staying. I did quite a bit of lubricant and emollient work buttering up the concierge of the hotel where Mr. Lunn was staying, and convincing the concierge of the other hotel that Hugh had made a mistake.”

I nodded. “Brava, Violet! You are so clever.”

“You flatter me!” Violet exclaimed. “I’m not half as smart as Raymond or Cys. Anyway, we spent a week in Mürren. Cys and I skied and ice-skated for the first few days till we both got a horrid little case of tonsillitis which made me spend two days in bed. I left Mürren yesterday morning. Divine Cys was so kind. Though he was still feeling poorly, Cys helped Coates with the hand luggage and saw us off. Pity that the railway over the Brünig Pass was overcast. The height scaled seemed terrific from what one could guess of it. At one moment, the clouds did melt a little and I saw the table-flat valleys deep down — miles below one and the summits of mountains up above. I felt almost in the sky, Venetia. I wish we could travel together on the Brünig Pass railway on a clear day. It would really be lovely.” She touched my hand for a moment, then gently squeezed it. “Maybe we will. Someday.”

I felt like kissing Violet on the lips right then and there, but refrained from doing so, not wanting to risk offending the driver of the cab in case he looked back towards the passenger seats.