Free The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse by Piu Marie Eatwell Page B

the same person. Swarms of agents combed through parish records, interviewing hundreds of Druces the length and breadth of the country, in an attempt to uncover one or other of these vital pieces of evidence. They searched in vain. †2
    *
    By the beginning of August 1898 the long vacation had arrived, *3 and the grey-haired lawyers of Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn and the Temple hurried to pack their bags and file in a great exodus to the elegant squares of Brighton, or the fashionable resorts of the Lake District. Bundles of documents and pleadings lay stranded on deserted desks; mounds of post accumulated dust in neglected pigeonholes; rats gambolled under the silent floorboards of the winding passageways of the Royal Courts of Justice. Grass sprouted between the chinks of the paving stones in Lincoln’s Inn, to be chewed thoughtfully by idle ticket porters, taking refuge from the sun in the shadow of empty porches. There was just one duty judge left in town for emergencies. Even he came only once a week to town to sit in chambers, clean-shaven and unrecognizable, having dispensed with full-bottomed wig, scarlet robes and white wand in favour of a summer suit and dapper white hat, a strip of plaster on his sun-blistered nose.
    And so, for the present, on a dusty desk of an empty court, the application to exhume T. C. Druce’s body stagnated. But the press sensation ran on throughout the whole summer of 1898. In fact, it seemed that neither the newspapers nor the public could get enough of the Druce affair. Enterprising individuals offered excursions to the Druce vault in Highgate, which was swift becoming the most-visited sepulchre in England. Four miles to the south, heads turned in unisonas horse-drawn omnibuses clattered past the entrance of the Baker Street Bazaar. The bazaar itself heaved with curious sightseers, hopeful of spotting the ghost of the unburied ducal tradesman stalking among the goods that had replaced the stock he left behind him, four-and-thirty years before. At a spiritualistic séance, a young woman fell into a trance and, when recovered, breathlessly related how she had ‘seen’ the Druce coffin, with nothing in it. ‘Mrs Druce’, announced the Daily Mail , ‘is now the most interesting woman in England. She occupies more space in the newspapers than is claimed by the Queen of England.’ In August the same newspaper announced a forthcoming ‘novelty for Daily Mail readers’ – no less than the imminent publication, day by day, of a serial story entitled The Double Duke , allegedly ‘founded on fact’ (although what facts was never stated). The serial was to be ‘quite the most interesting romance ever published in the Daily Mail .’ Where, wondered many a spectator of the media circus, did fact end and fiction begin?
    Anna Maria Druce herself revelled in the attention. With the gracious condescension of a dowager duchess-in-waiting, she granted interviews to the newspapermen clamouring at her door. Anna Maria’s official story about her origins was suitably genteel. ‘I myself was a Miss Butler,’ she informed the gathered pressmen with haughty conviction. ‘My father being agent for Lord Pembroke, the latter acted for a time as my guardian. It was through going to the same school as my husband’s sister that I first met him.’ She had given ‘land steward’ as her father’s profession on her marriage certificate in 1872. In truth, however, Anna Maria was the daughter of a humble Irish paperhanger, a workman who scraped a livinghanging rich wallpapers in the houses of the wealthy and fashionable. She had met her husband Walter – the third son of T. C. Druce – when employed as governess to the Druce household. A tendency towards socially aggrandizing fantasies about their origins was not uncommon in women of modest background, who had ascended the Victorian social ladder. Wilkie Collins’ ‘official’ mistress Caroline Graves, for example, used to describe herself as the