Free The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice De Janze and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll by Paul Spicer Page A

of his experiences, which he shared with the other farmers in the area, is the reason that a colony flourished in the highlands at all. Later, when the settlers needed to defend themselves against the restrictive regulations of colonial officialdom, it was D who led the charge.
    So much has been written about the Happy Valley crowd and their penchant for parties that it can come as something of a surprise to discover that most of its members were actually extremely diligent farmers, Joss and Idina included. At the time of Alice’s arrival in Africa, Joss was meeting regularly with leading ranchers and farmers, such as D and Sir Francis Scott, seeking to learn from their long experience. Scott, the second son of the duke of Buccleuch, was another Englishman who was instrumental in establishing effective farming techniques in the highlands. A former Coldstream Guards officer, he had arrived in Kenya with the wave of ex-servicemen settlers arriving after the war, building himself a magnificent home called Deloraine near Nanyuki. Together with D, he was only too delighted to help a fellow old Etonian such as Joss establish himself in the valley.
    Alice was getting to know the other farmers in the area. On her morning rides, she came upon a Tudor-style house, Satima Farm, named after one of the Aberdare peaks, just to the south of Slains. The house belonged to Geoffrey Buxton, who farmed the surrounding 2,500 acres. Geoffrey Charles Buxton had been born in Thorpe, Norwich, in 1879. He was a close friend of Denys Finch Hatton, the adventurer who was immortalized by Karen Blixen in Out of Africa (1937). Both Buxton and Finch Hatton had attended Eton, like so many of the settlers, Delamere and Joss included. Buxton had first arrived in Kenya in 1910, but when the Great War commenced, he returned to the UK and obtained a commission in the Coldstream Guards in 1916 and was awarded a territorial decoration after being mentioned in dispatches. On his return to Kenya, he devoted himself to farming. In fact, it was Buxton who had first lured Finch Hatton to the area, telling his friend that he had discovered “Shangri La on the equator.” Unlike at Idina's, where the hostess entertained in pajamas, socializing at Buxton’s was much more formal—a blacktie affair, in the style of an English country mansion. Although he later married, at the time of Alice’s arrival in Africa, Geoffrey was still a bachelor, albeit a rather serious one.
    Other immediate neighbors included the Honorable David Leslie-Melville, the second son of the earl of Leven and Melville, and his wife, Mary, the granddaughter of Lord Portman. The Leslie-Melvilles were married in 1919 and arrived in Kenya soon afterward, farming five thousand acres. Their house was a broad and rambling affair, decorated in the English fashion with antiques, silver, family portraits, and even a grand piano. Then there were Bill Delap and his wife, “Bubbles,” who owned Rayetta, a small pyrethrum farm. Pyrethrum was a valuable new crop and a natural pesticide grown by many of the farmers in the area, Idina included. Bill was a jealous and difficult man, and his first wife—according to Vi Case—“messed around with the troops.” After he married Bubbles, he built a drawbridge around his house and threatened to shoot unannounced visitors. The Delaps kept themselves to themselves, and the Happy Valley set were evidently perfectly in step with this arrangement.
    Thanks to Alice’s friendship with Lord Delamere, the de Janzés were also getting to know the crowd that gathered at the exclusive Muthaiga Club in Nairobi. The club had been founded by a group of settlers who had wanted somewhere to socialize away from the existing Nairobi Club, a place where they were likely to run into government officials, with whom they were often at war. The new club opened on New Year’s Eve, 1913, with D as its first president, and soon gained a loyal and elite membership. Well-bred settlers were