Free Empress of Fashion by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart Page B

did not have the power to hurt, unlike human beings. “My grandmother had a huge farm horse in the country outside of Katonah. . . . After lunch I’d run off, get on the horse. . . . I’d sit there all afternoon, perfectly happy. It would get hot, the flies would buzz. . . . That’s all I wanted—just to be with the steam and the smell of that divine horse. Horses smell much better than people—I can tell you that .”
    In 1920, when she was sixteen, Diana spent most of the summer with Weir before she died on September 8. There was another emotional upheaval when it emerged that Mary Weir had left Diana far more than all her other grandchildren, in the form of the Villa Diana, its contents, and twenty thousand dollars for its upkeep. Given the brutal value system of the day, Weir may have felt that Diana needed a dowry in a way that the beautiful Alexandra did not, and that by leaving her some money she was making up for a poor hand dealt by nature. It is also possible that over the years Diana had confided in her grandmother about her need to become “self-supporting” and that Weir thought it wrong of Emily to insist on this, since to her such a notion was both inappropriate and implausible. There was certainly an implied rebuke to Emily about her handling of Diana in Weir’s will; and Emily’s indignation at the slight to Alexandra can be felt in the wording of her own will, in which she left Diana almost nothing in an attempt to even things out.
    However, Mary Weir’s bequest meant that when the Villa Diana was sold two years later Diana had some money of her own. Emily also inherited a trust from her mother that finally gave her a substantial independent income. This was followed by another legacy to Emily from Diana’s godmother Anna Key Thompson in 1921, though the will was contested and the matter remained unsettled until 1923. In the late autumn of 1920, however, the Dalziel family finances were already less stretched. Soon after her grandmother died, seventeen-year-old Diana was dispatched to a liberal arts boarding school on Staten Island for a final year of education. Meanwhile Emily had enough money of her own to pursue what she most enjoyed on a much grander scale. In what would prove to be a fateful move, she departed a few weeks later on a hunting expedition to Africa with Sir Charles Henry Augustus Frederick Lockhart Ross, ninth Baronet of Balnagown, plunging her family into years of bewilderment about fact and fiction.
    U nlike Frederick Dalziel, Sir Charles Ross (1872–1942) was an authentic British aristocrat and a genuine British bounder. He was known as a “stinker” throughout his life by tenants, wives, and his own mother, whom he ejected from the family home, Balnagown Castle in Scotland, either by stopping up her bedroom chimney and smoking her out, or by setting fire to her hair, depending on which account one prefers. Even this behavior paled into insignificance beside the matter of the Ross rifle. Invented by Sir Charles, the Ross rifle was ideal for sport but had lethal shortcomings in battle. Nonetheless Sir Charles pressed it on the Canadian government before and during the First World War, making a fortune by causing the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Canadian soldiers before Field Marshal Douglas Haig personally intervened. None of this deterred Emily. She and Sir Charles Ross first met in New York in 1896, around the time of her debut. There is no sign of any further communication between them till 1919–20, when Ross, by now a very rich man, was living for many months of the year in the United States to be close to his business interests. He was a renowned sportsman, and given Emily’s enthusiasm for hunting and penchant for charismatic men it is not surprising that they struck up a friendship.
    Two versions of what happened next later emerged. In one version the relationship between Sir Charles Ross