For fifteen years the man who loved her sat three places down the table and was not permitted to look at her.
He was the second Baron Montagu of Beaulieu. Motoring pioneer, member of parliament, married into one of the great houses of England. She was a telegraph engineer’s daughter from Stockwell who had built herself, name and all, out of nothing.
“I fell in love with her at first sight,” he wrote. “But as I couldn’t marry her I felt I must keep away from her as much as I could.”
He could not. There was a daughter. The baby was given away at birth to be raised by an estate employee who could give her a surname society would accept, and she grew up calling her own father Uncle John. He visited. He asked how she did at her letters. He took her to the Ritz for oysters and made it their private ritual, in the most public dining room in England.
He never told her. She found out from a letter he had sealed, with instructions that it was not to be opened until after he was dead.
Source: Lord Montagu’s own words, and the family facts as used in the novel’s publisher A+ record. The image is an illustration, not a period photograph.