The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (29 page)

Mad women, in fact, seemed to be something of a feature of the Druce case, in Dew’s estimation. There had been, to start with, the crazed Anna Maria Druce, who had unleashed the whole affair in the first place. How, or where, the idea that the 5th Duke of Portland was the same man as T. C. Druce had originated, other than in her diseased brain, he had no idea. Then there had been the two crazy female witnesses, Mary Ann Robinson and Mrs Hamilton, who had concocted the fabulous stories about their experiences with Druce as the duke. And in only a month’s time, the name of yet another woman was to be dragged into the affair; only this woman was of an importance on a scale entirely removed from the others. She was, in fact, a member of one of the most powerful and ancient aristocratic families in England. She it was who had been the mysterious member of the Cavendish-Bentinck family whom George Hollamby and Coburn had darkly hinted at, as someone who supported their case and who would come forward ‘when the time came’. Brilliantly witty and a serial seductress, she had already scandalized society in one of the most famous trials of late Victorian England. Her family were desperate that she should not do so again.

*

It was Amanda Gibson – the secretary who had worked for the Druce company – who dropped the bombshell when Inspector Dew interviewed her in July 1908. Although the official police investigation was closed in June, Dew continued for a few months to carry out inquiries privately on behalf of the 6th Duke’s representatives, with a view to establishing whether a private prosecution for perjury against the major culprits was worth pursuing.
*2
‘Lady Sykes’, Amanda told Dew, ‘was providing information at this time to the journalist Kenneth Henderson about the Portland family, and Henderson paid
her.’ As we have seen, Henderson was then general manager of
The Idler
, which had published a series of pamphlets produced by the Druce camp to set out and advertise their case. The information that Lady Sykes gave Henderson, Amanda told Dew, related to the Duke of Portland’s family, and the articles were signed under a
nom de plume
as ‘one who knows’. Dew probably knew little about Lady Sykes, other than that she had been involved in a spectacular court dispute with her husband, Sir Tatton Sykes, in the 1870s. He was unlikely to have known that she was connected with the Cavendish-Bentincks, having scant contact with high society outside his immediate professional duties. He needed to find out more.

Dew’s subsequent researches would have revealed a tangled web of dashed hopes, wasted talent, greed, decadence and despair. Lady Christina Anne Jessica Cavendish-Bentinck – ‘Jessie’ to those who knew her – was the daughter of George ‘Little Ben’ Cavendish-Bentinck, MP for Whitehaven, and a granddaughter of the 4th Duke of Portland. A spirited young woman, Jessie was handsome rather than beautiful: she was striking with her square jaw, sparkling dark eyes and mass of curly black hair. A victim of her ambitious mother’s social scheming, she was married off in 1874, at just eighteen years old, to Sir Tatton Sykes, heir to the fabulously wealthy Sykes family that had for centuries dominated the landed gentry of Yorkshire. The Sykes lorded over their environs from the gloomily palatial splendour of the family seat, Sledmere House, in the chilly wolds of the East Riding.

The Sykes marriage was not a happy one. Thirty years Jessie’s senior, Sir Tatton had established a reputation for eccentricity that rivalled even that of the 5th Duke of Portland.
A disappointment to his father and ignored by his mother, he had developed a reclusive, hypochondriac disposition, with a marked distaste for the female sex. Among his many odd traits was a hatred of flowers: he deplored them as ‘nasty, untidy things’, and would not rest until he had raked over the beautiful gardens he inherited at Sledmere, right up to where they met the house. Sir Tatton absolutely forbade the cultivation of flowers in the gardens of the cottages on the Sledmere estate, with the exhortation, ‘If you wish to grow flowers, grow cauliflowers!’ He was even known to have taken a cudgel to offending blooms, if any of his tenants dared to disobey his command. Another peculiarity of Sir Tatton’s was an aversion to workers’ cottages on his estate having a front door. (It was speculated that he hated the sight of women gossiping in the porch.) Cottages on the Sledmere estate, therefore, were only permitted false front doors, with their real entrances at the side or the back. A further oddity, which uncannily echoed one of the 5th Duke of Portland’s own, was Sir Tatton’s firm belief that the body should always be maintained at an even temperature, with the result that he possessed a series of coats designed to be worn on top of each other. A vicar of Sledmere explained Sir Tatton’s singular practice thus:

On two chairs outside his special den were arranged different coats. On one there were heavy overcoats, on the other four covert coats, all of different colours and each was a perfect fit, made to go one over the other, and allowing for size. He sometimes wore six coats. I have seen him in church gradually strip off four covert coats and Ulster, and he still had a coat on.

A vivacious and intelligent eighteen-year-old girl and a cantankerous old man whose behaviour became increasingly peculiar as time went on were unlikely to form a marriage made in heaven. By his latter years, Sir Tatton lived mainly on a diet of milk puddings and chewed-up meat (he would chew the meat, swallow the juices and regurgitate the rest). Eventually, Lady Tatton Sykes installed herself in London, while her husband remained at Sledmere. She began to entertain a series of lovers at lavish parties, earning herself the rather unkind moniker of ‘Lady Satin Tights’. Owing to her extravagant lifestyle, Jessie ran up a series of enormous debts, which the tight-fisted Sir Tatton wished to avoid having to pay off. It was then that he hit upon the novel idea of using the Married Women’s Property Act 1882 to that end. The primary purpose of the Act was to improve the lot of married women, and it certainly went some way to assisting abandoned wives like the unfortunate Elizabeth Crickmer. However, the Act also contained the stipulation that a husband would no longer be liable to pay his wife’s debts, if he publicly advertised the fact. Sir Tatton therefore made legal history – and broke a gentleman’s code of honour – by being the first man to do just that. The advertisement read as follows:

I, SIR TATTON SYKES, Baronet, of Sledmere, in the County of York, and No. 46 Grosvenor Street, in the County of London, hereby give notice that I will NOT be RESPONSIBLE for any DEBTS or ENGAGEMENTS which my wife LADY JESSICA CHRISTINA SYKES, may contract, whether purporting to be on my behalf or by my authority or otherwise.

Of course, this simply brought all Jessie’s creditors crawling out of the woodwork, desperate to prove their debts. The result was one of the most notorious trials of the 1890s, when a major moneylender attempted to sue Sir Tatton for his wife’s debts. Sir Tatton’s defence was that the signature on the promissory notes was not his own, but forged. This argument was accepted by the jury, who found Sir Tatton not liable for the debt. The obvious question implied by the verdict, but left unresolved and hanging in the air, was: who had forged the signatures? To which, equally obviously, there could be only one answer. Fingers were pointed, accusingly, at Lady Sykes. She became a marked woman – disowned by her relatives, shunned by respectable society, drowning in a cycle of increasing drunkenness, gambling and debt. It was even said that her alcohol dependence reached the point where her old and faithful maid began hiding bottles of perfume from her inebriated mistress, for fear that she would drink them.

Following Jessie’s pathetic career after the trial, Dew could see how she was tempted into helping the Druce party by writing articles for
The Idler
in return for money. Various attempts had been made to come to a settlement with Sir Tatton for the payment of alimony, brokered by Jessie’s long-suffering son Mark, but all collapsed; by the early 1900s she was left struggling to maintain her own drinking, gambling and extravagant lifestyle by attempts at writing books and forays into journalism. None of this was, in itself, particularly shocking to Dew’s mind, nor indeed any worse than what had already been said about the unruly lady. In fact, Horseman Bailey had informed him that Lady Sykes had admitted to them that she had written articles for
The Idler
, and that
the 6th Duke had reprimanded her with the wish that she had ‘left the matter alone’. However, there was something else – a statement made to Inspector Dew by Mary Ann Robinson in Holloway – which was a different matter altogether. Something that made even the laconic chief inspector take a sudden intake of breath. Something that, if it got out, would cause the devil of a scandal, making the Sykes trial of the 1870s appear as tame as a boundary dispute between neighbours.

‘Soon after I came here, Mr Henderson told me to go and see Lady Sykes,’ Mary Ann had told Dew. According to Mary Ann, the purpose of the visit to Lady Sykes was for Mary Ann to tell her that she ‘knew the duke’s two wives, and she [i.e. Lady Sykes] would try to get a settlement for G. H. Druce out of the Duke of Portland’. When Mary Ann protested that she knew nothing of the duke’s two wives, Henderson said, ‘Well, it is useless to have brought you over if you won’t do as we tell you, and if you don’t mind you won’t get your £4000.’ Mary Ann therefore had little choice but to accompany Henderson to see Lady Sykes, a journey that took place in an unmarked cab. ‘I went to see a lady,’ she told Dew, ‘and she asked me if I knew the duke’s two wives. I said no, and she said “She is no use.” I described the duke to her, and she said I was all right.’

Inspector Dew could barely believe his ears. Was Lady Sykes actually getting mixed up in trying to extort a settlement from the 6th Duke of Portland, on behalf of the Druce party? He had asked Robinson to describe the lady she had met. ‘She was a thickset lady with a heavy jaw, about fifty years old,’ came the reply. Lady Sykes would then have been fifty-two years old and her square jaw had always been a distinguishing feature. Dew sighed. Things did not look good
for Jessie. And, it had to be conceded, they did not look good for the honour or the privacy of the Sykes family. Disgusted at the humiliating publicity of the debt trial, Sir Tatton had been keeping an even lower profile than usual in recent years, escaping abroad on tours of the Middle East and concentrating on his pet hobby of demolishing and rebuilding churches in the East Riding. The last thing the Sykes family needed was another sensational trial involving Sir Tatton’s wife. Nor would the 6th Duke of Portland, eager as he was to have the real culprits brought to book, have relished the prospect of the Cavendish-Bentinck name being dragged through another media circus. And Jessie, whatever her many faults, was, after all, a Cavendish-Bentinck. Yet another reason, Dew thought, why the Druce affair was very likely to be buried. Quickly, discreetly, and with as little sensation as possible.

*

And that, in fact, is precisely what happened. Shortly after his interview with Amanda Gibson, Dew’s instructions to investigate the Druce matter on a private footing appear to have been withdrawn. Over the summer of 1908, the Druce affair began slowly but surely to drop out of the newspaper headlines of which it had been such a dominant feature throughout the previous decade. The eye of the fickle newspaper-reading public was turning elsewhere: to the increasing excitement of the 1908 London Olympics; to the race that summer between the Wright brothers and the French to be the first to achieve powered flight; and then, in the autumn, to the gathering clouds looming over the Balkans with the first annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the
initial warning shot of a conflict that was soon to change the old hierarchies for ever.

To be sure, the odd event in the aftermath of the Druce affair was reported in the ensuing years, as a footnote to what was becoming increasingly regarded as a bizarre curiosity in the annals of British legal history. Thus, on 13 January 1911, the
New York Times
reported that Robert Caldwell, ‘notorious as a maker of false affidavits’, had passed away in the insane asylum on Ward’s Island where he had been incarcerated ever since slipping back to America after the trial in London. According to the newspaper, he had been ‘suffering from a twist of the brain’. Edmund Kimber continued to practise as a solicitor in southeast London, dying in Lewisham in 1934 at the ripe age of ninety. Coburn, who fled back to Australia immediately after the collapse of the case, returned to England for his retirement many years later, when all the fuss had died down, and the case was forgotten. He died in Kerrier, Cornwall, in 1952 at the age of eighty-seven. George Hollamby emigrated to Oakland, California, where in 1913 he told a journalist from the
Oakland Tribune
that there was a tunnel between the duke’s London mansion, Harcourt House, and the Baker Street Bazaar, and that the coffin in the Druce vault contained only a dummy. He claimed that he had been offered ‘ample funds’ by wealthy women to continue to fight the case in return for his hand in marriage, and that he would be returning to England to revive his claim. However, he remained in Oakland, working as a carpenter and janitor. By 1937 he was living in a rooming house on 723 Sixth Street, blind and on a pension. He died in 1942.

Around the same time as the reports of Caldwell’s death in
January 1911, two curious articles appeared in the press relating to Anna Maria Druce, the woman who had started off the whole affair, and who had so mysteriously disappeared after the collapse of her case in 1901. The first article, published in the
Daily Express
on 3 January 1911, announced Mrs Druce’s apparent death in London. A brief summary of the Druce affair was given, but no details of Anna Maria’s funeral or burial. On the very next day, however, an article appeared in the
Daily Telegraph
, quoting Anna Maria’s daughter Marguerite, who claimed that her mother was perfectly alive and in her usual state of health. Had Anna Maria had one last grim laugh at everybody’s expense, by staging her own death before retreating into the shadows? The truth was not to be established until many years later.