Jack and Eve E-Book

Wendy Moore

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 704

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Vera Holme, known as Jack, left a career as a jobbing actress to become Emmeline Pankhurst's chauffeur and mechanic. Evelina Haverfield was a classic beauty, the daughter of a baron and fourteen years older than Jack. They met in 1908, fell in love, lived together, and became public faces of the suffragette movement, enduring prison and doing everything they could for the cause. The First World War paused the suffragettes' campaign and Jack and Eve enrolled in the Scottish Women's Hospital Service and soon found themselves in Serbia. Eve set up and ran hospitals for allied soldiers in appalling conditions, while Jack became an ambulance driver, travelling along dirt tracks under bombardment to collect the wounded from the front lines. Together, they carved radical new paths, demonstrating that women could do anything men could do, whether driving ambulances, running military hospitals, becoming prisoners of war or bearing arms. They refused to compromise in their sexuality - they were lifelong partners even though Jack enjoyed relationships with other women. Determined to be themselves, 'forthright, flamboyant and proud', Wendy Moore uses their story as a lens through which to view the suffragette movement, the work of women in WWI and the development of lesbian identity throughout the twentieth century.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY WENDY MOORE

The Knife Man

Wedlock

How to Create the Perfect Wife

The Mesmerist

Endell Street

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2025 by Atlantic Books

Copyright © Wendy Moore, 2024

The moral right of Wendy Moore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 810 7

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

For Peter

Partner, chauffeur and fellow adventurer

Contents

 1:  Under the Stars

 2:  A Wild Hawk

 3:  Jacko

 4:  Twin Souls

 5:  Burning Hearts

 6:  United and Happy

 7:  The Very Centre of the Storm

 8:  Doing Time

 9:  Sights One Can Never Forget

10: The Long, Long Trail

11: No Man’s Land

12: Love’s Labour

13: A Hard Road

Author’s note

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Picture Credits

Notes

Index

CHAPTER 1

Under the Stars

Serbia, June 1915

AS THEY SAT outside their tent on the hillside they could see a vast panorama of valleys and mountains. Below them the little cottages of the village huddled together and in the distance the Kosmaj mountain formed a mauve blur in the west.

It was glorious stretching out on the grass under a cloudless blue sky in the blazing sunshine. It was glorious too being reunited after nearly two months apart, their longest separation since they had first met seven years ago. The green hills and distant mountains reminded them of carefree days together in Scotland, and especially one autumn morning not long after they had met when they had ridden out to Arthur’s Seat, the rocky outcrop overlooking Edinburgh. Then, as they looked down on the city sprawling below, they had declared themselves ‘twin souls’. Now, as they surveyed this foreign landscape under summer skies, they made a pledge. When peace came they would return to Serbia and tour the country in a horse-drawn caravan. But for now the war dominated everything. Their break over, it was time to get back to work. All around them the hillside was covered with hospital tents, their red crosses gleaming against white canvas backgrounds in the sun. Everywhere women were scurrying backwards and forwards, carrying blankets, cooking pots and bandages. Brushing down their uniforms, they hurried over to help.

Vera – or Jack as she liked to be known – had arrived in Serbia just a few days earlier. She had travelled from England in an army transport ship, its cabins crammed with British sailors and volunteer workers and its hold packed with explosives. The boat had sailed through the Mediterranean and into the Aegean Sea, dodging enemy submarines, then docked at the Greek port of Salonika (Thessaloniki) where Jack had boarded a train heading north into Serbia. She knew nobody when she set out and was responsible not only for getting herself safely to Serbia but also for bringing a motor ambulance and a seven-seater car. But Jack, being Jack, had soon made friends on the ship with others heading out to Serbia. She needed no second invitation to share her provisions and join in sing-songs with fellow volunteers she met along the way.

Evelina – Eve as Jack usually called her – had come out to Serbia two months earlier. She had journeyed more sedately, travelling first class by train from Victoria Station and then down through France and Italy before sailing the short hop across the Adriatic to Greece. Even so, the challenges of travelling through foreign territories in wartime, negotiating tickets and accommodation in trains and towns jammed with troops, were considerable. Eve’s fluency in various languages, including French, Italian and German, and her experience as a seasoned traveller had helped smooth the way with border officials and military red tape en route. But she had missed Jack from the moment she had set out and wired immediately on arrival urging her to follow. Now that they were reunited in Serbia, twin souls joined together again, they were brimming with excitement at the prospect of what lay ahead. After nearly a year of voluntary work on the home front in Britain, they were finally close to the real scene of action.

They had signed up as volunteers with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), a medical organization founded at the outbreak of war by a quiet yet formidable Scottish surgeon named Elsie Inglis. Within two weeks of Britain declaring war on Germany in August 1914, Inglis had approached British Army headquarters in Edinburgh and offered to set up and run a military hospital staffed entirely by women. The idea that women doctors could treat wounded men, let alone run a military hospital by themselves, was greeted with undisguised scorn. The official she met brushed her off with the words, ‘My good lady, go home and sit still.’ Far from sitting still, Inglis had launched the SWH and raised thousands of pounds for medical supplies and equipment from her friends in the suffrage movement within a matter of weeks. She then recruited women doctors, nurses and orderlies, not only from Scotland but from every corner of the British Isles, who were willing to offer their services to Britain’s Allies overseas and kitted them out in grey uniforms trimmed with tartan. The help that had been so brusquely rejected by Britain had been welcomed with open arms by the governments of France, Belgium and Serbia. By the end of 1914, the SWH had set up a typhoid hospital in Calais for Belgian troops and another hospital near the frontline for wounded French soldiers. A further unit had set out for Serbia. Jack and Eve could easily have volunteered to work in France, where they both knew the language and something of the country. But they had chosen to go to Serbia with its compelling combination of mystery and exoticism. In Serbia they were sure they would find the adventure they craved.

Before the war Jack and Eve had no more idea of what to expect in Serbia than they had of the surface of the moon. Like most people in Britain at the time they could barely have found Serbia on a map. If pressed, they could, perhaps, have roughly traced the course of the Danube, the mighty river which stretches like a long jagged scar across the belly of Europe from its source in the west in the Black Forest of Germany to its mouth in the east where it empties into the Black Sea in Romania. If they did, they might have noticed the river curling around the northern border of Serbia as it carved the nation’s boundary between Austria and Bulgaria. Beyond that, Serbia seemed like an unearthly place of mountains and myths. Occasionally Serbia had warranted mentions in the foreign news columns of British newspapers during the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. But these conflicts, which had finally freed the Serbs from the yoke of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, had seemed remote and insignificant to most British people. Even though Serbia had enlarged its borders as a result of the treaties which ended those two wars, it was still one of the smallest nations in Europe, with a population of just 4.5 million who lived mainly off the land.

Now, however, Serbia was on everybody’s minds. Two shots fired from a revolver in Sarajevo, the capital of Serbia’s neighbour Bosnia, on 28 June 1914 had catapulted Serbia onto the world stage and engulfed most of Europe in the deadliest conflict in history. On that day a nineteen-year-old Bosnian student, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie as part of a nationalist campaign to wrest Bosnia from Austrian control and unite it with Serbia. This random act of terrorism had been seized on by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a convenient excuse to invade Serbia a month later. At the same time Austria’s chief ally Germany had used the crisis as a long-awaited opportunity to invade its neighbour France and occupy Belgium en route. The tiny kingdom of Serbia was the tinderbox which had ignited the war and swiftly dragged Britain, France, Russia and other nations into the conflict.

To everybody’s surprise, Serbia’s largely peasant army had succeeded in repulsing the Austrian invaders and driving them back across the Danube by the end of 1914. This heroic stand had won fervent admiration from the Allies for ‘plucky little Serbia’. But Serbia’s triumph had soon turned to disaster as the thwarted invasion left in its wake thousands of dead and wounded soldiers and thousands more Austrian prisoners of war, which in turn unleashed an epidemic of typhus fever that engulfed the country like a forest fire. The women in the first SWH unit to arrive in Serbia at the beginning of 1915 had battled valiantly to treat the wounded and stem the spread of disease but they were powerless to prevent many thousands from dying, including three of their own staff. Desperately short of trained nurses and medical supplies, the SWH unit had wired its headquarters for more help. A second unit of doctors, nurses and other women had been hastily recruited and set sail for Serbia in April 1915. After the unit had left, and been waylaid in Malta to treat British troops there, Elsie Inglis herself set out for Serbia, determined to throw herself into the thick of it at the age of fifty. At the last minute, and partly against her better judgement, she had agreed to take Eve with her.

Eve and Inglis had arrived in Serbia in early May and headed straight for the northern town of Kragujevac, where the Serbian Army had set up its headquarters and main medical base. Although the typhus epidemic had begun to decline in the intervening months, the infection rate had risen again in a worrying second wave. By now the SWH women were running three hospitals in the town – one for surgery, one for typhus and a third for other fevers. While Inglis took command of the general fever hospital, she put Eve to work as an administrator.

Eve had no previous experience of running a hospital, indeed she had no experience in medical care whatsoever. But what she lacked in direct experience she more than made up for in determination and resourcefulness. In Britain since the onset of war she had already founded or co-founded three voluntary organizations dedicated to recruiting and training women to take over jobs previously done by men in order to release men for the front. Under Eve’s initiative, thousands of women had donned khaki uniforms and taken on jobs ranging from driving ambulances to digging trenches for home defence. With military-style discipline, Eve’s female army ran soup kitchens, delivered telegrams and even – to some consternation – shouldered rifles, transforming Britain’s streets in just a few months from a world run by men into a world run by women. Drilling her recruits, with Jack in tow, Eve was a born leader. She had taken up the reins of the hospital work in Kragujevac with characteristic enthusiasm.

Slim, athletic and naturally graceful, with finely chiselled features, golden hair and vivid blue eyes, Eve was the youngest daughter of an English baron and American mother who had made their home in Scotland. Now forty-seven, she had been married twice and had two grown-up sons. The elder was now fighting in the Middle East while the younger worked a ranch in Canada. Fiercely intelligent and fearlessly adventurous, Eve was utterly single-minded about anything she set her heart on. She had a capacity for extraordinary charm which put people immediately at their ease, but when she met opposition her temper could suddenly flare and her blue eyes blaze in fury.

Putting her powers of charm and persuasion to work in Serbia, Eve had secured supplies, organized transport and overseen finances for the hospitals in Kragujevac. This was no mean feat amid the chaos of wartime scarcities in a country ravaged by disease. She was described by one British aid worker as ‘extraordinarily capable and hard-working and energetic’. But when charm and persuasion failed she had no qualms about brow-beating army officers or local peasants into doing her bidding. Her fellow women workers were not always so easily subdued. Within six weeks of arriving in Kragujevac, Eve had clashed with one of the doctors and, in order to keep the peace, Inglis had separated the warring pair. She sent Eve further north, to set up and run an SWH field hospital near the village of Mladenovac, just twenty miles from the frontline. In the space of ten days Eve had organized a complete tented hospital, with an operating theatre, wards and staff accommodation all under canvas, on the grassy hill overlooking the village. It was there that Jack had joined her to work as a driver.

After her long journey to Serbia, Jack had been overjoyed to see Eve waiting for her when the train pulled into the platform at Kragujevac. ‘I am so glad to be with Eve again,’ she wrote to a friend back home. ‘[W]e are very happy to be together.’ To casual observers the two women might have seemed oddly matched, their looks and personalities were so entirely in contrast. For a start Jack, at thirty-three, was fourteen years younger than Eve. Eve was classically beautiful and elegantly poised, her manners polished, her hair and clothing impeccably styled even when in uniform, while Jack had a boyish figure which tended to plumpness, her hair was a mass of unruly dark curls and she was most comfortable wearing men’s suits and flat brogues. A former actress, who specialized in cross-dressing roles, Jack was an irrepressible entertainer who used her musical and singing talents to turn any genteel gathering into a raucous party. Although she could never be described as pretty, Jack’s grey eyes were almost invariably creased with laughter and her wide mouth was usually split in a grin. Brash and noisy, she possessed a daredevil spirit which made her popular wherever she went. One friend described her as a ‘naughty, bad, wicked, little monkey tiger’. Yet despite their differences in appearance, behaviour and personality, Jack and Eve were completely devoted to each other – even if, at times, Jack found herself distracted by a friendly female face.

Reunited in Kragujevac, Eve had treated Jack to a whirlwind tour of the town. This was no pleasure trip since the chief sights were hospitals, overflowing with sick and wounded men, in every available school, hotel and café. The stench of the patients’ bloodied bandages and gangrenous wounds was almost unbearable in the hot and fetid wards. Typhus fever still claimed dozens of victims every day, including two British workers who had died a week earlier. And the town had just been bombed for the first time by German and Austrian planes in a raid which killed five civilians and wounded many more. But at least the accommodation was comfortable since the SWH staff were being quartered in the residence of the Crown Prince who had fled the town, along with the country’s government, for safer quarters further south.

After three days in Kragujevac, Jack and Eve had journeyed by train to Mladenovac where Eve had proudly shown Jack around the camp hospital she had created. Two iron sheds served as the kitchen and an admission unit, where the sick and wounded soldiers were undressed, washed and their clothes disinfected or burnt, before they were dressed in clean pyjamas and sent to their beds. All the rest of the hospital – the wards, operating theatre, staff quarters, laundry and latrines – was housed in tents which dotted the hillside as far as the eye could see. In the centre stood a large marquee with a wooden floor where the women ate together and – when duties allowed – enjoyed music and dancing. In total the hospital had the capacity for 300 beds but in the current respite from fighting there were about seventy patients, most of them suffering from old wounds or infectious diseases or simply exhausted. The hospital was staffed by almost thirty women, including four doctors, eighteen nurses and a handful of orderlies who managed the cooking, laundry and other jobs; all had volunteered their services to the SWH. They were aided by Austrian prisoners of war who had been captured in the last campaign. Since many of the prisoners came from regions which had more sympathy with the Serbians than their Austrian rulers, they were glad to help with the hospital chores in return for food and shelter. One of the prisoners was a chef who had previously worked at the Trocadero Hotel in London’s West End.

In the comparative calm, with relatively few patients, the camp’s doctors had invited local women from Mladenovac and nearby villages to come for medical care. They arrived on foot and in carts, carrying their babies and children with them. Some of the women had injuries caused by shelling during the battles of 1914 but others had gynaecological and other complaints which had never previously been treated by a doctor in their rural communities remote from medical aid. Their children had suffered war injuries too, as well as typical infant maladies and birth defects which had likewise gone untreated until now. In return for their treatment, the local women brought gifts of eggs and fruit as tokens of gratitude.

Whenever they were not on duty, the SWH women spent as much time as possible outdoors, where they could escape the fumes of the formalin disinfectant which was sprayed daily inside the tents as a deterrent to typhus and enjoy the warmth of the sun on their arms and faces. But the Serbian summer weather could change in an instant. Dark clouds would suddenly appear in the blue sky and unleash thunderstorms which lashed the tents and turned the ground into a quagmire. Then the women would have to rush out and cling to the guy ropes to stop the tents being swept away in the gales.

Settling into the routine, Jack had got to work immediately. On most days she drove the ambulance or the Studebaker car, the vehicles she had brought with her from England, to transport patients or ferry SWH staff and other British aid workers between meetings and medical units. Jack was no novice driver. Before the war she had worked for several years as official chauffeur to Emmeline Pankhurst, the matriarchal leader of the suffragette movement, and won ringing plaudits in the press both for her driving skills and her mechanical acumen. A well-known figure in her smart uniform and peaked cap, Jack had driven Mrs Pankhurst on a two-month tour around Scotland, covering more than 1,000 miles, on her very first assignment. But even the steep, snaking roads of the Scottish Highlands were no preparation for driving in Serbia where the roads – really dirt tracks intended for farm carts rather than motors – were universally potholed, criss-crossed with deep ruts and strewn with boulders. The roads were scarcely navigable in dry weather; when it rained they were suddenly transformed into swamps which were virtually, or completely, impassable. Jack’s first motoring trip gave her a sharp foretaste of the trials ahead.

Within days of arriving in Serbia, Jack took the wheel of the Studebaker car to drive Eve and two other women on a forty-mile trip from Kragujevac to Mladenovac. Leaving Kragujevac, Jack skilfully navigated the perilously winding road as it twisted through a gorge. As well as slanting precariously towards the ravine, the road was ridged with gutters formed by the torrential rains which brought water gushing down the mountainside. After bumping slowly along for twenty miles, Jack was forced to come to a dead stop: the road had been completely washed away. Since it was impossible to go forward and too far to turn back, Jack steered the car onto a track through adjacent fields but almost immediately the wheels became stuck in the rough ground and then the engine died. Marooned in the middle of nowhere, the passengers had to get out and push the car in an attempt to restart the engine. Then disaster struck as the ignition key snapped in two and the four women had no alternative but to camp out in the field overnight. Fortunately two passing soldiers came to their aid and sent for help to repair the car. The women were rescued the following morning after eating breakfast as the sun came up behind the mountains. Typically making the best of things, Jack thought the experience ‘most awfully jolly in a beautiful spot’. Most of her journeys involved similar escapades. Over the ensuing weeks Jack became adept at navigating the treacherous mountain roads in all extremes of weather with frequent breakdowns and stoppages. Whenever one of the vehicles broke down or burst a tyre Jack had to leap out and fiddle with the engine or raise the vehicle to change a wheel.

The SWH ambulance was in high demand – and so was Jack as its driver. The vehicle was described by one of the Serbian Army’s officers as ‘the finest’ in Serbia. But in truth there was little or no competition. Even the British Army was entirely reliant on horse-drawn ambulances at the start of the war; it was only towards the end of 1914 that the first motorized ambulances had arrived on the Western Front in France. Very few of these ever reached Serbia so the Serbian Army usually transported its wounded in rickety farm carts pulled by bullocks or oxen. By comparison Jack’s ambulance was the height of luxury. The base was an ordinary car chassis which had been modified to take stretchers by the addition of a metal frame covered in canvas. Both sides were emblazoned with a red cross. Apart from a flimsy windscreen and a little canvas canopy, the driving compartment was completely open to the wind and rain. The low-slung chassis, which was designed for British and American roads, was at constant risk of being wrecked on the boulder-strewn Serbian tracks and the lack of adequate suspension meant that patients had to endure a bumpy and frequently painful ride.

Driving the Studebaker was hardly any easier. At one point, when the car became helplessly bogged down in mud, Jack had to find two oxen to pull it free. Occasionally she drove as far as Belgrade, the Serbian capital, which was fifty miles north of Mladenovac on the south bank of the Danube within clear sight of the enemy guns encamped on the opposite side. When she was not driving the ambulance or the car, Jack was occupied in making furniture – she was a talented carpenter – and helping with general orderly duties. Eve was equally busy, supervising the staff rota, marshalling supplies from the market in the village and overseeing the cooking, laundry and sanitary arrangements in order to ensure the hospital ran smoothly. But there was time for leisure too.

Eve had persuaded some of the Serbian officers, who were barracked in an adjacent camp on the hillside, to lend her some horses and she had already taught several of the nurses to ride. Whenever they could escape for some free time together, Eve and Jack rode out over the hills under the wide blue sky, just as they loved to do on their visits to Scotland and on the moors near their home in Devon. On one excursion, a few weeks after Jack arrived, they rode out with some Serbian cavalry officers who took them to a nearby hilltop where the men had held off the Austrian Army in a five-day battle the previous November. The little party laid down blankets and enjoyed a picnic in the middle of the battlefield, then Jack and Eve scoured the grass for spent cartridges to keep as souvenirs. It was ‘a most lovely picnic’, Jack wrote home, even though she had to admit that the pieces of bone and skull that they discovered from the ‘poor fellows’ who had died there were rather gruesome.

In the evenings they joined the other women in the big mess tent. After dinner the chairs and tables were pushed back so the women could dance together or stage concerts. Jack could always be relied upon to sing some of the popular songs she knew from her days on the stage or perform an excerpt from a well-known play in a makeshift costume. Sometimes the women invited the Serbian officers from the neighbouring camp to join them. Looking handsome in their grey uniforms and knee-high boots, the men sang mournful Serbian folksongs and their Austrian prisoners accompanied them on violins. Then throwing aside the usual rules of decorum, the women linked arms with the men to learn the Serbian national dance, the kolo, and together they stamped on the wooden floor and whirled in a circle in a dizzying grey blur. In this atmosphere of intimate camaraderie it was scarcely surprising that some of the Serbian officers fell for Eve’s striking good looks and confident manner. The colonel in command of the Serbian cavalry unit, a giant of a man with a broad chest who could tear a pack of cards in two with his bare hands, was one of her greatest admirers. Jack, however, was more interested in one of the nurses who, she was saddened to discover, was heading home soon.

After the music died away and the men retired to their own camp, Jack and Eve stumbled their way tiredly between the guy ropes to find their own tent in the dark. On clear nights they slept on the grass in the open with only a shared mosquito net for cover. ‘It is lovely sleeping out under the stars every night,’ Jack wrote home. When it rained they took refuge inside their tent. Only then, in the privacy of their tent beneath the Serbian night sky, could they truly be themselves. Only then were they at liberty to link hands and hold each other close. They would never describe their lovemaking in letters. But Jack, at least, confided her feelings in passionate poems that she wrote for Eve. In her poems she celebrated Eve’s ‘strong embrace’ and ‘kisses on my face’. But they both knew their idyllic summer could not last.

It was the lull before the storm. Every day as they worked in their tented hospital, Jack and Eve could see the streams of Serbian soldiers marching to the station for trains which took them to the front. When the wind was in the right direction they could even hear the rumble of enemy guns on the other side of the Danube as they sporadically shelled Belgrade. After the Serbs’ victory over their invaders the previous year, the Austro-Hungarian Army had been reinforced by German troops and these were now massing on the far bank of the Danube for another attempted invasion. Rumours which reached the women’s camp reported that the Bulgarians, Serbia’s neighbours to the east, were plotting a simultaneous invasion across the eastern border. Well aware of the approaching danger, in July Dr Inglis met with the organizers of other British medical units in Serbia at an emergency conference to discuss whether they should pack up and head home to safety – or stay. The aid workers were unanimous. They vowed to remain and support the Serbians through whatever the war might unleash.

For the moment Jack and Eve made the most of the summer sunshine by day and the sparkling skies by night as they wondered what the future would bring and shared memories from their varied pasts. They had come from completely different worlds. Jack, the perpetual clown, the incorrigible joker, had learned the hard way how to survive. Eve, the adventurer, the loner, had rarely suffered a moment’s worry about her survival. She had always soared above trouble just like, as one family member put it, a ‘wild hawk’.

CHAPTER 2

A Wild Hawk

Scotland, 1870s

FROM THE WINDOWS of her childhood home Eve could see the peak of Ben Nevis, Britain’s tallest mountain, rising into the clouds. When she raced with her sisters through the bracken beyond the house, she could run for miles in any direction, through forests where deer tiptoed, over moorland where golden eagles swooped, to rivers where salmon leapt. And when she climbed to the top of Ben Nevis, as she often did, on a clear day she could see islands glittering in the distant Atlantic Ocean.

Eve had always lived life on a grand scale. Born in 1867, the Honourable Evelina Scarlett, as she was formally titled, was the third and youngest daughter of the 3rd Baron Abinger, William Scarlett, and his American wife Helen. As she grew up, the family divided their time between their London townhouse in fashionable Kensington and their vast Scottish estate which encompassed half of Ben Nevis along with several smaller mountains. Eve’s family home, Inverlochy Castle, was an imposing granite mansion with battlements and turrets surrounded by neat pleasure gardens. Queen Victoria, who stayed there for a week in 1873, when Evelina was six, declared, ‘I never saw a lovelier or more romantic spot.’ Yet although the castle looked and sounded as if it must have played a prominent role in Scottish history for several centuries past, it had actually been built by Evelina’s father – who gave it its ostentatious name – and was completed the year before she was born. The original Inverlochy Castle, elsewhere on the estate, was just a ruin. And for all the family’s fondness for the Scottish Highlands, the Scarletts owed at least part of their wealth and status to a far more tropical location and decidedly more dubious source.

Eve’s ancestors had made their fortune in the West Indies from sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans. The Scarletts had originally arrived in Britain with the Norman Conquest when they were given land in southern England and elsewhere. Almost six centuries later, in 1655, Francis Scarlett joined a British military expedition to the West Indies which captured Jamaica from the Spanish. He was granted a large estate on the island in return for his role in its seizure. From that point on the Scarletts, and the local British families into which they married, grew rich on the proceeds of their sugar plantations, which were entirely dependent on slave labour. In common with other West Indian planters, the Scarletts regarded the enslaved people they kept captive as their rightful property for whatever purpose they desired. Eve’s great-great-great-grandfather had four mixed-race daughters whom he provided for in his will in 1777; her great-great-grandmother left five enslaved people to her heirs when she died in 1828.

Eve’s great-grandfather, James Scarlett, who became the 1st Baron Abinger, was born on the family’s sugar plantation near Montego Bay in north-west Jamaica and grew up surrounded by Black servants and enslaved labourers. At fifteen James sailed for Britain to study law and never returned to the West Indies – although he did claim compensation after slavery was abolished in 1834 for several enslaved people he had inherited. He met his wife, Louise Campbell, in England although she too had been born in Jamaica where her Scottish family owned several plantations. A clever and ambitious lawyer, James rose to the position of Attorney General and was created Baron Abinger in 1835, taking his title from his country seat of Abinger Hall in Surrey. He sent his son Robert, the 2nd Baron, to buy the Inverlochy estate in 1841 as a summer retreat where the family and their guests could shoot grouse, hunt deer and fish for salmon, in keeping with the passion for Highland sports which had gripped the Victorian aristocracy. But it was Eve’s father, William, the 3rd Baron from 1861, who developed a lifelong love of Scotland and all things Scottish. He sold Abinger Hall, made Inverlochy the principal family home and devoted all his spare hours to sporting pleasures on his sprawling estate.

From her father, who joined the British Army at twenty and fought in the Crimean War, Eve inherited a keen sense of daring, strong self-discipline and fearlessness in the face of danger. She grew up hearing stories of her ancestors’ military valour since not only had her father distinguished himself in several significant Crimean battles but her great-uncle, James Yorke Scarlett, had led the Charge of the Heavy Brigade – a major military success in contrast to the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade – at the Battle of Balaclava. Yet for all his iron nerve, Willie, as he was known, had married for love. Posted with his regiment to Montreal during the American Civil War, he fell for Helen Magruder, a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty whose family were taking refuge from the conflict in Canada. Helen’s uncle and brother were both fighting on the side of the Confederates – and Willie himself was a sympathizer with the South – but her father, a former US Navy officer, chose neutrality rather than join his Southern compatriots in taking arms against the Union to which he had pledged his loyalty.

Described as ‘the flower of Montreal society’, Eve’s mother Helen was an accomplished artist who had toured the cultural highlights of Europe and mastered several languages. The couple met at a polo match where Willie was thrown onto a fence and knocked unconscious after his horse was stung by a fly. He opened his eyes to see Helen, ‘a vision in white muslin’, bending over him to render first aid. They married in Montreal a few months later. While Willie was plainly smitten by his Southern Belle, family members back home were horrified at the prospect of the Scarlett bloodline becoming tainted by an American interloper – especially one with so little money to her name. Later in the nineteenth century dozens of British aristocratic families would overcome their snobbery to bag an American heiress to an industrial fortune who could help refill their depleted coffers. Helen Magruder was ahead of her time in breaching the battlements of Britain’s peerage but she could do relatively little to help bolster the Abinger finances. Willie’s mother was aghast at the fact that Helen was bringing only £20,000 (about £2 million today) to the marriage and complained, ‘I own the transatlantic connexion makes me sick.’

British high society was no keener on welcoming the new Lady Abinger when Willie brought Helen home in 1864. She was snubbed by the leading hostesses of the day who despised her manners as common and her American accent as vulgar. That changed overnight when Queen Victoria invited the newly-weds to stay at Windsor Castle and the invitations suddenly poured in. Helen threw the majority in the wastepaper basket and never forgave the earlier slights. Determined to make an impression, however, she always looked immaculately groomed at the social events she deigned to grace. Her gowns were designed by Charles Frederick Worth, the founder of haute couture, who travelled from Paris to bring her his latest creations and arrange them to his satisfaction. Disdaining city life, Willie and Helen spent most of their year in Scotland. They repaired to London during the depths of winter but from the first signs of spring to the dying days of autumn they gloried in their Highland home. They made sure their children enjoyed it too. Three daughters, Ella, Helen and Evelina, were born within four years of the wedding; Evelina, known as Eve or Evie in the family, was the first of the children to be born at Inverlochy. Another daughter died in infancy before the only son and heir, James Yorke MacGregor, arrived in 1871.

Thanks to their enlightened mother and fond father, Eve and her sisters enjoyed a liberal education and personal freedom which were highly unusual for girls of their social circle at the time. Taught at home by governesses and tutors, they grew up with a craving for learning and ambitions to make their mark on the world. When lessons were over the three sisters were free to explore the 42,000-acre estate with their younger brother, the little Master of Inverlochy, trailing behind. The girls were brought up to be hardy and athletic, a match for any of their male contemporaries at riding, hunting and fishing. Under their father’s guidance they learned to shoot deer, grouse and rabbits, to handle a boat on the lochs and at sea, to land a fish from the two rivers which bordered the estate and to hike long distances in all weathers. Eve, in particular, loved to walk or ride to the far reaches of the estate with her Papa, a tall burly man with a vigorous handlebar moustache, to visit their tenant farmers or watch the sheep being sheared. Eve enjoyed even more free time with Papa after he retired from the army when she was ten. Although she was slightly built with a fashionably nipped-in waist, by virtue of the constricting undergarments which were obligatory for women at the time, she shared her father’s fervour for outdoor sports and became a skilled horsewoman who revelled in pushing herself to the limits.

The children needed to be equally hardy when they returned home at the end of their day’s explorations. Although the house was spacious with more than thirty rooms on three floors, its corridors were dark and draughty, the bedrooms cold and the bathrooms colder. Water for baths had to be heated on the kitchen range and carried up several flights of stairs. The whistling Highland winds rattled the windows and made the gas lamps flicker. In the gloom, the portraits of ancestors and the heads of stags shot by the baron which covered the walls of the grand entrance hall took on a ghostly air.

While the girls worked hard at their lessons in the schoolroom, their little brother, known as Jim, was sent to Eton just as his father had been. A tearaway who would become the black sheep of the family, Jim ran amok when he returned for the holidays. He was ‘the worst unlocked cub I ever saw’, Eve told a cousin on one occasion. Eve, however, had her own wild and rebellious streak. Unlike her siblings, she had inherited the fair hair, pale complexion and bright blue eyes of her great-grandfather, the 1st Baron, rather than her mother’s sleek dark looks, but she had nevertheless imbibed her mother’s independence and fiery spirit. At twelve, she reminded her aunt Fanny, Papa’s sister, of a brother who had died in his teens so that ‘the young brother so long dead seemed to be alive again in her, and I loved her at once. I soon found she had also his generous nature and hot temper.’

A year later, whether in an effort to curb that temper or to enlarge her world, Eve was sent to school for a year or two in Düsseldorf, where she lived with a German family. She became fluent not only in German but also French and, like her mother, developed a passion for foreign languages and cultures. The urge to travel sometimes led to precarious situations. On a trip to Egypt with her mother and some friends when Eve was eighteen, their party was attacked by angry villagers. Having travelled up the Nile in a traditional sailing boat, the sightseers had stopped to hire some donkeys to visit some ancient sites. On their return an argument ensued – most probably over the fees for the donkeys – and the villagers began pelting them with stones. When some of the stones hit Eve, a young army officer in the group rushed forward to tackle the assailants but slipped and was set upon by the crowd. At that point Eve dashed over and laid about the attackers with her riding whip until they fled in terror. Her impulse to defend others without fear for herself, coupled with that fierce sense of aristocratic entitlement, would guide Eve through many more predicaments.

At eighteen life for Eve seemed almost perfect. When she was not touring the wonders of the world with her parents, she spent her leisure time mingling with the rich and famous at country house weekends, dancing at chaperoned balls with titled young suitors, and hunting and riding with Papa at Inverlochy. Wherever she went she was waited on by servants, indulged with fine foods and cosseted in comfort. She was clever, confident and attractive; she had wealth, privilege and connections. But Helen, her favourite sister, had got married a year earlier and Ella, the eldest, a talented pianist, had gone to study music in Vienna. At home, with just her parents for company, Eve was lonely and bored. To fill her idle hours Eve set up a Sunday School for crofters’ children on the Inverlochy estate. She consulted her first cousin, Sidney, who had become a curate in Herefordshire, for advice on the lessons and implored him to visit for a summer break. It was a ‘divine day for climbing up Ben Nevis’, she told ‘Siddy’, who was six years her senior, and the evenings were ‘so beautiful here, such sunsets’. For all the splendour of the Inverlochy surroundings, however, she was restless for change, chafing to escape. Escape presented itself that summer not with the arrival of Cousin Siddy but in the form of an army major who was more than twice her age.

MAJOR HENRY WYKEHAM Brook Tunstall Haverfield was a forty-year-old career soldier who had joined the Royal Artillery at the age of twenty-one – before Eve was even born – and risen steadily through the ranks. Despite his impressive string of names, the major came from a modest middle-class family who lived in Bath. Cast in the mould of Eve’s father, he was tall with springy hair that receded from his high forehead and a wispy handlebar moustache. Just like Eve’s military forebears, the major’s father and grandfather had served in the British Army before him. Henry arrived at Inverlochy Castle for a summer party – probably involving some grouse shooting since the season began on 12 August – and Eve was entranced. Being courted by a handsome, charming, older man, who was a skilled equestrian and a crack shot, was exciting. When the major proposed within weeks of their first meeting, Eve – who had just turned nineteen – was thrilled. The prospect of becoming an army wife promised the travel and adventure that she craved. The couple were engaged by Christmas and the wedding quickly arranged.

The wedding, at St Stephen’s Church in Kensington in February 1887, was a lavish society event. Eve walked down the aisle in a cream satin dress with a long train, both embroidered with pearls, and a long tulle veil which glistened with diamonds. She wore an amethyst necklace and bracelet which had been a wedding present from the tenants at Inverlochy, and sprigs of orange blossom in her hair. After the ceremony, the wedding party adjourned to the Abingers’ townhouse where Eve changed into a grey travelling suit edged with fur. That afternoon the couple set off for the Continent on their honeymoon tour. While the newly-weds were heading for the coast, the celebrations were just beginning at Inverlochy. After a salute fired from the castle terrace, bonfires were lit at high points on the estate and when darkness fell a huge fire was set alight on the summit of Ben Nevis. As the flames lit the night sky the farmers, tenants and staff toasted the absent couple and then danced to the accompaniment of bagpipes into the early hours.

For all their difference in years, Eve was happy with her major whom she jokingly called ‘Boy’ or more often ‘Jack’. At first they settled in Exeter, where the major was stationed, and where Eve gave birth to two boys, baptised John Campbell and Brook Tunstall, within two years. Then in 1890 the little family moved into a pretty Elizabethan manor house, West Hall, near Sherborne in Dorset. The large house with its stables, gardens and extensive grounds provided plenty of room for the boys to run around as well as ample space for Eve’s horses. Although Eve was proud of her sons, motherhood was rarely taxing since there were six staff, including a nurse, to help look after the boys. Eve joined the local hunt – she was one of the first women to hunt astride instead of side-saddle – and started a hunting diary which she would keep for the next twenty-five years. With plenty of time for leisure, the Haverfields enjoyed theatre trips to London, fishing on the River Wye in Herefordshire and Christmases at Inverlochy. But happy family life did not last long.

Just four years after their wedding, Major Haverfield was forced to retire from the army through ill-health at the age of forty-five. The major’s symptoms seemed strange, and must have been mystifying to Eve, but they were common enough among middle-aged men in Victorian society at the time. At first Henry would have suffered from muscular weakness, problems with his balance and general lack of co-ordination but before long his condition had deteriorated and he was beset by sudden convulsions when his body shook uncontrollably and he sometimes lost consciousness. The diagnosis was ‘general paralysis’, a vague catch-all term employed by doctors at the time. It usually denoted tertiary syphilis.

Having first arrived in Europe in the sixteenth century, syphilis had reached epidemic proportions by the 1800s. The disease afflicted an estimated one in ten people in Britain and was especially prevalent among men in the army and navy. In the majority of cases, the symptoms – beginning with open sores on the genitals and developing into a generalized rash and fever – disappeared after a few weeks. But roughly one in three sufferers went on to develop devastating and incurable symptoms years or even decades later when the disease attacked the heart and brain. As well as experiencing physical weakness and convulsions, sufferers could develop mental problems including delusions, hallucinations and dementia. The condition, in this final stage, was denoted ‘General Paralysis of the Insane’ or just ‘General Paralysis’.

Although a few doctors had identified syphilis as the cause of the condition by the mid-1800s, most of the British medical profession were still in ignorance of the link. So it is highly probable that Eve, Henry and even his doctor had no idea of the reason for his sudden degeneration. Luckily for Eve, it is unlikely she was infected herself since the condition was only contagious in its early stages. Some Victorian men who contracted the disease in their youth never married for fear of passing syphilis on to their wives – and quite possibly their children – but others blithely conveyed the disease to their brides on their wedding nights. As Henry’s health declined, Eve was powerless to help. The couple travelled to North Africa in the hope the warmer climate would benefit the major but the outlook was gloomy. As her husband’s illness worsened there was more bad news for Eve.

In January 1892, while Eve and Henry were in Morocco, her father died suddenly. He had travelled from London to Inverlochy a week earlier and caught a chill which developed into pneumonia. By the time the news reached Eve her father had already been buried. Her brother, twenty-year-old Jim, immediately succeeded as the 4th Lord Abinger. At a stroke Eve had lost not only her beloved father but also her childhood home, since Jim, of course, took possession of Inverlochy. The little brother who had been outrun and outdone by his three older sisters in his youth was now in charge of the family home and fortune. Having followed in his father’s footsteps into the army, Jim would proceed to bring the Abinger name into disrepute and the Inverlochy estate close to ruin. A year after taking the title, Jim became embroiled in scandal after a young woman drowned in a lake on the estate. His role in the incident went unexplained but was sufficiently serious that he was advised to take a trip to America until the situation had cooled. Jim’s American sojourn did nothing to dampen his temperament. Using the Inverlochy estate as collateral, over the next ten years he would rack up enormous debts, most probably from gambling.

While Jim lived life to the full, the future for Eve and Henry looked bleak. Returning to Dorset, they moved again, to Bishop’s Caundle, a few miles from their previous home, but Henry’s condition did not improve. In January 1895 he lapsed into a coma and a few weeks later he died. At twenty-seven, Eve was widowed with two sons aged seven and five. She was distraught at the loss of her ‘dear Jack’ and commissioned a stained glass window in his memory in the local church. But rather than wallow in grief Eve resolved to set out on an adventure in an effort to forget her sorrows. On 25 January, the day after the major’s funeral, she left her boys with an aunt and booked a passage across the Atlantic. She had decided to visit her late husband’s cousin, Lionel Carden, who was the British Consul in Mexico. ‘I made up my mind to have a complete change,’ she wrote in the diary that she kept throughout her trip.

Eve sailed from Liverpool in February 1895 on the cargo steamer SS William Cliff in the teeth of a biting wind for the month-long voyage to Mexico. She took with her just a travelling bag which her mother had given her on her wedding day and a portmanteau which had belonged to the major. Despite the fact that she was travelling alone and in mourning, she threw herself into the experience, socializing with her five fellow passengers and the ship’s crew, and taking every opportunity for sightseeing wherever the boat docked. As a charming, educated and wealthy young widow Eve inevitably attracted interest throughout the voyage. She made friends with the ship’s officers – one of them promised to transport a parrot for her to a friend back home on the return voyage – and especially with the ship’s captain, Captain Fost, who went out of his way to tend to her needs. When Eve felt out of sorts for the first few days, the captain was kind and attentive. She blamed her malaise on ‘sheer weakness’ rather than seasickness, though the shock of her bereavement could not have helped. She soon rallied, however, and accompanied Fost – ‘a most pleasant man to go about with’ – on various excursions ashore.

The ship docked at Colón, on the Atlantic coast of Panama, in early March. During the three-day stay Eve and the captain travelled the new railroad across the narrow isthmus to Panama City on the opposite coast. In Panama City they lunched with the British Vice-Consul and his wife, who were friends of Fost, in their house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. After returning to the ship, they next docked at Kingston, Jamaica, where Eve and the captain toured the island that had once been home to her ancestors. They visited Spanish Town, the old capital, where Eve discovered some distant relatives, though she made no attempt to find the remnants of the Scarletts’ old plantations in Montego Bay.

A few days later the ship arrived in Tampico, on the Mexican coast. There, while she waited for the ship to unload its cargo, Eve bathed in the Atlantic breakers which crashed onto the sandbar at the river mouth, despite the fact she could not swim and heedless of the warnings of sharks. Then she dried her hair in the sun, looking ‘a most untidy object’. After steaming down the Mexican coast the ship docked at Veracruz, a swampy port rife with tropical diseases, where Eve said goodbye to her captain and his crew. She imagined herself making many more long sea voyages in the future but was certain, ‘I shall never find myself on a vessel with kinder folk from the cabin boy to the Captain.’ At Veracruz she was met by Carden and they set off early the next day for Mexico City.

An astute diplomat, Carden was a tall, dignified-looking man in his forties. Having previously been posted to Havana, Carden had arrived in Mexico City ten years earlier and was fluent in Spanish. He had originally been sent on a mission to promote British interests in Mexico under its new president Porfirio Díaz whose seizure of power ushered in a long era of peace and prosperity imposed with an iron fist. Eve liked Carden’s American wife Anne at first sight but she took an immediate and lasting dislike to Carden himself. The feeling was mutual. Eve thought Carden lazy, pompous and, worst of all to her mind, boring. Carden, for his part, was exasperated by Eve’s insistence on doing whatever she pleased regardless of the risks or rules of decorum. Eve stayed with the Cardens in Mexico for six months. But it was not long before she tired of their sedate lifestyle and Carden’s attempts to restrain her intrepid spirit. To Carden’s consternation, Eve insisted on hiring horses to ride out alone or – probably worse in Carden’s eyes – unchaperoned with male friends she met. Carden alternately remonstrated with her or sulked but Eve refused to be cowed. After three years of tending her ailing husband and the shock of bereavement, she was intent on experiencing Mexico in all its vibrancy.

In Mexico City Eve filled her days with visits to the gardens and boulevards, tours of the public buildings and trips to the wealthy suburbs. Through the Cardens’ connections, she mingled with the city’s international community at the theatre, the races and the Jockey Club, which was a favourite haunt of the rich. When the Cardens were too busy to escort her, she went sightseeing with a Mexican friend of theirs, noting that if ‘not for him I should not see much’. On other days she rode out with an English engineer who took her to see the drainage works for a much-needed sewerage system he was building for the city. Walking out one Sunday afternoon, when well-dressed Mexicans drove along the Paseo, the tree-lined boulevard which ran through the heart of the city, in every manner of carriage, she saw her first ever motor car but thought its driver looked ‘very foolish’. She was adamant that riding horseback was ‘the only way to see this country where the roads are quite impossible for driving’ whether by horse-drawn buggy or horseless carriage. For all the wealth on show, however, she was equally entranced by the sights and sounds of ordinary Mexicans dressed in their colourful costumes and playing in their noisy bands as she strolled alone through the streets and markets.

Since Anne Carden disliked the capital in the rainy summer months, Eve accompanied the couple to their country house on Lake Chapala in the mountains. There she learned to swim and to fire a Winchester rifle. Armed with her gun she set out at 5 a.m. one day on a long hike with ‘an old Indian’ guide to shoot duck. After a few weeks she was proficient at swimming and by the time they returned to the city at the end of May she was almost fluent in Spanish. The tensions with Lionel continued, however. He was dull company, she wrote in her diary, since he was always either ‘in the sulks’ or berating her over her perceived waywardness. As a change of scene, Eve went to stay with assorted friends of the Cardens in other parts of the country. Staying with a British family who ran a silver mine in western Mexico, she joined a two-day trip on horseback to fetch money from the bank just as a hunt was afoot to find the murderer of two men who had gone on the run. The party returned with an escort of soldiers to guard their $6,000 cash but, to Eve’s disappointment, the murderer had already been caught.

After six months in Mexico, Eve crossed the border into Texas with Lionel (Anne had gone to visit her family in New York) and then, sometimes with Carden but more often travelling alone, she toured the United States and Canada. Travelling in North America had become big business since the expansion of the railways had opened up the continent to sightseers in the mid-1800s. Tourists flocked to visit the burgeoning cities and natural wonders which were popularized by novelists, journalists and artists. Yet it was still relatively rare for women to travel the railroads and tramp the streets alone. Eve, typically, was undaunted.

Having said a thankful goodbye to Carden in Los Angeles, Eve bought a ticket for a stagecoach excursion to the Yosemite Valley. Taking just a few essentials in her travelling bag, she journeyed overnight by train to Raymond, the little station where passengers transferred to the stagecoaches. The next morning, with four other passengers, she boarded a stagecoach pulled by four horses for the bumpy and dusty forty-four-mile journey to the Wawona Hotel, the gateway to the narrow gorge. The following day, despite a headache from the previous day’s joltings, Eve and a fellow passenger continued on the six-hour trip to the valley itself.

Yosemite Valley had become a major tourist destination since it had first been explored by white Americans in the 1850s. The six-mile gorge with its perpendicular cliffs and spectacular waterfalls had been created a state park in 1864. By the 1890s, as many as eleven coaches a day transported visitors on the ten-hour trip from Raymond to the Wawona Hotel, where they rested overnight before continuing onward for the twenty-mile journey to the valley itself. Although there were surprisingly few accidents along the rocky route, the journeys were not uneventful: at least six coaches were held up by robbers between 1883 and 1906. The stagecoach driver on Eve’s trip was taking no chances. Since her fellow passenger was returning to Wawona, the driver insisted on accompanying her on a five-hour hike to see two of the biggest waterfalls because the paths ‘were not safe for a lone woman’. Despite the warnings, the next day Eve set out alone to climb the 4,000-foot peak Glacier Point. She drank a quart of milk at a hotel on the summit as she enjoyed the dramatic view of the valley below before beginning the descent – a punishing six-hour hike in all.