Free Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey by The Countess of Carnarvon Page A

the secular trimmings were there to be enjoyed. It was a predictably jolly occasion, with Carnarvon’s great friend Prince Victor Duleep Singh a fellow guest as well; a thoroughly multicultural andeclectic gathering of people, all bent on celebrating their own good fortune as much as anything more pious.
    The Carnarvons were regular visitors to Halton House throughout the early years of their married life. There was a permanent whirl of moving between Highclere, London, Bretby in Derbyshire and Pixton in Somerset, as well as foreign travel. Given Almina’s lifelong devotion to the city of her childhood, they went often to Paris, usually staying in the Ritz hotel, and popped out to the Bois de Boulogne for racing at Longchamps on a fine weekend.
    For Lord Carnarvon it was a relatively sedate existence, compared to his long sailing missions to the other side of the globe. For Almina, though, the world was expanding faster and further than ever before. Young ladies simply did not travel as men did. They were kept indoors or close to home and groomed for the transition from their father’s home to their husband’s. Only now that she was Countess of Carnarvon could she diffuse some of her formidable energy in seeing a bit of the world. In the first ten years of her married life, Almina accompanied her husband to France, Italy, Germany, Egypt many times, America and the Far East.
    When they were at Highclere or at their house in London, the Carnarvons were always entertaining. It was a curiously public existence compared to domestic life for most married couples today. They were hardly ever alone, and their house was always full of staff and guests. In the summer there were racing parties and tennis weekends; in the autumn there were shoots. All year long there were local fetes and garden parties and, to all of these functions, they invited the latest stars of the social scene, the newly married, the intriguing and the glamorous.
    In May 1896, almost a year after their own marriage, they invited the newly wed Duke and Duchess of Marlborough to stay. Consuelo Vanderbilt was an American heiress of spectacular wealth, whom the 9th Duke had quite plainly married only for her money. She was a beautiful and charming woman, but the fact was that the couple loathed each other. They had both given up the people they really loved in order to marry each other, and Consuelo, who was only seventeen at the time, had been coerced into the marriage by her domineering mother. She later reported having cried behind her veil as she said her vows.
    Consuelo spoke in almost hushed tones of her first London season, that summer of 1896. ‘Those who knew the London of 1896 and 1897 will recall with something of a heartache the brilliant succession of festivities.’ Part of those festivities, of course, were the inevitable weekend house parties, such as the one she attended at Highclere.
    She and Almina were in oddly analogous positions. They were both beautiful young heiresses who had married into the aristocracy because of their family’s fortune and despite its roots in trade. They were both outsiders. Almina had been sidelined by her illegitimate status, Consuelo was constantly sneered at for being American and therefore hardly worthy to be a Duchess. But there the similarity ended. Consuelo was miserable before and throughout her marriage, and separated from the Duke of Marlborough in 1906. Almina was giddily in love on her wedding day and the Carnarvons had a happy and companionable marriage for many years.
    Did the girls recognise something in each other that weekend? Did they talk about the mishaps they’d had inthe course of their apprenticeship in ‘Being a Chatelaine’? Consuelo always recalled that she was totally unprepared for the rigid observance of precedence in her new world. A Duchess was higher ranking than a marchioness, who came higher up than a Countess, but there were endless distinctions between Duchesses, marchionesses and