The Million Dollar Duchesses by Julie Ferry

Author:Julie Ferry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2018-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

14

Lily of Troy

April 1895, London

‘Mrs Louis Hamersley is one of the handsomest women in New York.… Add to this great beauty the fact that she owns some five or six millions, and the natural result is that her opera box is constantly filled with the most attractive men in the town.’ – THE BROOKLYN EAGLE

Lily Beresford would have cast her eye around the large reception room at Number 3 Carlton House Terrace. The room looked perfect, just as she had imagined it. For once she had got the wedding breakfast of her dreams, and she couldn’t have been happier. This time she would have been determined to leave nothing to chance. A young Winston Churchill wrote to his mother, Jennie, that it was ‘a most excellent breakfast which must have cost a great deal’1. It had, but as a woman of means, she could now afford to do things properly, and properly she would, without the interference of her mean and eccentric first husband or her second husband, an impoverished duke keen to make as little fuss as possible. This time, her third as a bride, she would put on the occasion that everybody expected and she had longed for. Her marriage to Lord William Beresford would be different, of that there was no doubt.

The wedding had been set for ten o’clock on 30 April 1895 at the fashionable St George’s Church on Hanover Square. The morning was clear and bright as the guests filed through the six vast stone Corinthian columns at the church’s impressive entrance to take their seats. Awaiting them lay an interior festooned with Lily’s trademark white orchids, a tradition she had established many years before when she became notorious for decorating her opera box with them. Today, they acknowledged her past life, as it would never be far away from her thoughts. She was conscious of the turbulent journey she had taken to arrive at St George’s and she wouldn’t be forgetting what she had learned along the way.

The wedding guests, including the Duke of Cambridge, the United States Ambassador and Winston Churchill, turned to look at the thirty-nine-year-old bride as she was slowly revealed at the rear of a procession headed by the choir and the Queen’s chaplain, Reverend Edgar Shephard. She took slow, deliberate steps, arm-in-arm with her stepson, Sunny, the 9th Duke of Marlborough. Today, she would cease to be the Dowager Duchess, as she had been since 1892 on the death of Sunny’s father, the 8th Duke. She wore a dress of satin brocade trimmed with point lace and finished with beautiful diamond buttons, and a small grey velvet bonnet trimmed with pearls, ostrich plumes and a flamboyant white aigrette. Ahead of her at the bottom of the chancel steps stood William with his best man and younger brother, Marcus. William represented everything her two former husbands had lacked: a future bright with possibility. He was popular, beloved by all those who met him, and Lily was hopelessly in love. His

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