On a February morning in 1960, in a bungalow on the far edge of a vanishing empire, Edwina Mountbatten was found dead in her bed.
Scattered across the covers lay a pile of letters from the prime minister of India.
For 30 years, she had been the most talked-about wife in England. She was the mistress of a fortune worth close to £400 million in today's money, married to a cousin of the king.
Half of fashionable London had passed through her rooms, and her husband had long since stopped pretending to mind. Yet the letters beside her bed belonged to none of the lovers the gossip columns had spent decades counting.
They had come from the one man she was never permitted to keep, whose name no British paper had ever been allowed to set beside hers.
Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley was born in London on November 28, 1901, into a world where two great powers of the age met inside a single child.
On her father's side stood the old aristocracy of England. Wilfrid Ashley was a Conservative member of Parliament descended from the reforming Earls of Shaftesbury, master of Broadlands, a handsome country seat in Hampshire that had come down through the family for generations.
On her mother's side stood the newest money in Europe, the Cassel millions made in international high finance. Her mother, Maud, was Cassel's only surviving child, and she carried her father's fortune and something of his intensity.
When Maud died in 1911, worn out and only 31 years old, Edwina was nine. The warm center of her childhood simply fell away.
What followed was the peculiar loneliness that only great wealth can arrange. Her father remarried, and the new marriage brought no comfort to the difficult, grieving girl. The stepmother was cold, the house ran to its own rhythms and its own favorites, and the clever child who had lost her mother was left to governesses and to the vast silences of very large rooms.
She was intelligent far beyond what anyone around her chose to notice or cultivate. She was physically fearless, a hard rider and a reckless one. She wanted things with an appetite that frightened the adults around her, and she found almost from the beginning that nothing she was given held her interest for long.
A friend would say of her years afterwards that for Edwina there was always something missing. It was the truest thing anyone ever said about her, and it was already true when she was a child in a house full of servants and empty of affection.
The one person who saw her whole was her grandfather. Sir Ernest Cassel had lost his own wife and then his beloved daughter, Maud, and the double loss had turned him inward and hard. But the granddaughter reached something in him that no deal ever had.
He took her up. He gave her the run of his houses. He carried her with him when he traveled into a world of yachts and spas and the private trains of the very rich.
In the last years of his life, he installed her, still a teenager, almost as the mistress of Brook House, the enormous mansion he kept on Park Lane, a pile of marble and gilt so grand that the gossip of the day called it the giant's house.
She learned to pour his tea for the financiers and statesmen who came to see him. She learned without a single lesson exactly what money could command in the world, and exactly how little of it ever needed to be earned by the person who spent it.
Cassel had been the close intimate of King Edward VII, a fixture of the pleasure-loving set that gathered around that easygoing monarch, a man whose loans quietly steadied whole governments and whose houses received the crown and the titled of half of Europe.
He had come to England out of Cologne as a very young man with almost nothing to his name, a clerk with a good head for figures and no connections at all, and he had made himself by sheer relentless ability into one of the two or three richest men in the entire country.
He was a Jewish outsider in a society that never quite let him forget it, and he answered the coldness of that society by making himself so completely useful to it that it found in the end it could not do without him.
From that grandfather, Edwina absorbed two lessons that would run through the whole of the rest of her life. The first was that money in a sufficient quantity will buy a person clean past almost every barrier the world can raise against them.
The second, learned from watching at close hand a man who possessed everything and trusted almost no one, was that having everything is no guarantee whatever against being profoundly alone.
In September 1921, Cassel died, and the shy girl who could not sit still became in an afternoon one of the wealthiest unmarried women in the country.
Under her grandfather's will, Edwina received a life interest in a trust fund valued at roughly £7,300,000, a sum that in the money of today would run to something close to £400 million. A further £1,600,000 was settled in trust for her benefit alone.
She was left Brook House and everything in it. And she stood in time to inherit Broadlands from her father, so that the great house of the newest money and the great house of the oldest blood would one day both be hers.
At 19, an age at which the daughters of dukes still asked permission to leave the dinner table, Edwina Ashley answered to no living soul for a single penny.
It is tempting to imagine that so vast a fortune would settle a restless nature. It did the opposite. Money removed from Edwina every obstacle that gives an ordinary life its shape, every reason to wait, to save, to plan, to earn, to want a thing she could not simply reach out and take.
She had no career open to a woman of her rank. No fortune left to build, because the fortune was already built and would renew itself faster than she could spend it. What she had was time and beauty and an income larger than that of most government ministers, and a hollow at the center of herself that none of it touched.
On a July morning in 1922, 8,000 people pressed against the barriers outside St. Margaret's, Westminster, to watch a sailor with no money marry the richest girl in England.
The crowds had begun gathering before dawn, filling the pavements around the little church that stands in the shadow of the abbey, straining for a glimpse of the couple the newspapers had been writing about for months.
Inside waited a congregation that read like a census of the age. Queen Mary was there and Queen Alexandra and a great parade of the titled and the famous. And standing at the groom's shoulder as best man was the Prince of Wales himself, the future King Edward VIII.
The papers reached for the only phrase large enough to hold the occasion and called it simply the wedding of the year.
The groom was Lord Louis Mountbatten, known to everyone who loved him and a good many who did not as Dickie. He was tall and handsome and ferociously ambitious, and he was royal to the marrow, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, cousin to the crowned heads of half of Europe.
He had gone to sea as a boy cadet and meant to climb to the very summit of the Royal Navy. But in 1922, he was still a junior officer with a magnificent name and comparatively little money of his own, and Edwina Ashley possessed a fortune that could have floated a battle fleet.
Those who watched the marriage with cool eyes understood the bargain inside the romance at once. She was buying blood, rank, and a place at the very center of the royal circle. He was marrying security, style, and the means to live as grandly as his ambitions demanded.
Underneath the arithmetic, at the beginning at least, there was also something that looked a great deal like love. They had met not long before, and the courtship had been swift and headlong in a way that suited them both.
Edwina, who was bored by very nearly everything, was not bored by Dickie. He was quick and vain and full of schemes, and he took her seriously in a way that few men managed with an heiress, treating her as a mind to be engaged rather than a prize to be won.
On July 18, 1922, they were married, and the whole machinery of the British establishment turned out in state to bless the joining of the oldest blood in the land to the newest money in Europe.
Then they left, and the honeymoon announced to the world exactly what kind of couple they intended to be.
Most newly married pairs of their class retreated to a country house or slipped quietly to the south of France. The Mountbattens went to America for six months, and they went as royalty in all but name.
They crossed the Atlantic in the grandest style the liners could offer. They were received by President Warren Harding and toured the United States as celebrities in their own right, cheered and photographed at every stop.
In Hollywood, they were taken up by the biggest stars alive. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, the reigning king and queen of the silent screen, entertained them at their famous house. And Charlie Chaplin, at the absolute height of his fame, was so delighted by the glamorous young English couple that he wrote and shot a short comic film with them purely for fun.
To read the honeymoon now is to see the whole marriage in miniature. It was a partnership of ambition, glamour, and mutual advantage, conducted at a scale that ordinary people could barely imagine.
For a few years it held in the conventional shape. There were two daughters. Patricia was born in February 1924 and Pamela in April 1929.
There was the setting up of grand houses, the engaging of armies of servants, the endless round of entertaining that a couple at the center of society was expected to sustain.
Dickie went back to his ships and his signal courses and his relentless program of self-improvement, forever away at Malta or on maneuvers. Edwina played the young society wife, richer and more sought after than any of the friends around her.
On the surface, it was everything the 8,000 who had waited at the barriers might have wished to see. Underneath the fairy tale, though, the machinery of the marriage was already visible to anyone who cared to look closely.
Dickie Mountbatten was a man in a very great hurry, driven by a hunger for advancement quite as fierce in its own way as Edwina's hunger for meaning. He wanted the Navy and beyond the Navy the great affairs of state, and he pursued both with a single-mindedness that left little room for the ordinary business of being a husband.
Edwina's money paid for the style of life that a rising man of his ambitions was expected to keep. The entertaining, the houses, the appearances, and she gave it without stint, because advancing Dickie was in the early years one of the few genuine occupations open to her.
Each of them had received exactly what the bargain promised. Neither of them had received the thing that a marriage is supposed to be for.
They had a penthouse on Park Lane, a country house in Sussex, a combined income that would take a laborer three lifetimes to earn in a single year, and nothing whatever to do with any of it that mattered.
Through the 1930s, the couple enjoyed a combined income before tax of about £113,000 a year and something near £60,000 a year even after the taxman had taken his share.
Set those figures against the wages of the people who served them. A housemaid in one of their houses might earn perhaps £30 in a year and count herself well placed. A farm laborer took home a pound or two a week. A member of Parliament, one of the men who governed the empire, was paid £400 a year.
The Mountbattens spent more on flowers and motorcars in a single season than most of their countrymen would see in a lifetime of work, and the fortune behind the spending renewed itself so fast that the spending barely dented it.
Brook House, the old giant's house on Park Lane, was pulled down and rebuilt, and the Mountbattens took for themselves a vast penthouse apartment of such size and modernity that it stood among the grandest private homes in London.
There was a leased country house at Adsdean in Sussex, filled with guests and dogs and horses, the center of a sporting and social life that ran without pause. There were yachts and motorcars and a household run at the very peak of what modern luxury could provide.
Now set against all that splendor the emptiness at the middle of it, because that is the part the photographs never showed.
Edwina had no occupation that the world would recognize as one. She could not stand for Parliament. She could not go into business or the professions. She could not, being exactly who she was, do very much of anything at all except be Lady Louis Mountbatten, hostess, ornament, and she was far too intelligent not to feel the insult buried in the role.
So she filled the hours as best she could. She read voraciously, far more widely than her set thought seemly. She traveled compulsively and often alone or with companions of her own choosing, striking off to the far corners of the earth on a whim.
She drove fast cars fast. She danced until dawn. She gathered around her the loudest and most modern society London could produce, the bright young things grown a little older and a great deal richer, and she moved through the whole glittering carnival like a woman searching a crowded house for a door that was not there.
The restlessness was not a pose, and it was not a hobby. It was the engine of her, running always, and in the long peace between the wars it had nothing worthy to drive.
And so it drove her from place to place and in time from man to man in search of an intensity that the safe, upholstered life she had been born into could never once supply.
By the later 1920s, the marriage of the oldest blood and the newest money had settled into a pattern that looked from the pavement like the most enviable life in all of England, and felt from the inside like a gilded cage with its door standing wide open.
Edwina had already begun to walk through that open door, quietly at first, and then not quietly at all.
A friend said of her that for Edwina there was always something missing, and by her late 20s she had begun looking for it in other men's beds.
Edwina Mountbatten did not take lovers because she was wicked, and she did not take them because she was a helpless victim of a cold husband. She took them because she was a woman of enormous appetite and no permitted outlet, and because the one thing all her money could not buy her was a reason to be faithful.
Here was a person who had been handed from birth every single thing that other people spend their whole lives chasing, and who had learned from birth the bitter lesson that having a thing is not remotely the same as being satisfied by it.
The mother gone at nine, the adored grandfather who saw her whole, and then the grandfather gone as well. A husband chosen half for love and half for rank who turned out to be married at the deepest level to his own advancement. A society that offered her the single role of decorative wife and slammed every other door in her face.
Into that shaped emptiness came the affairs, and the affairs did for Edwina what nothing else in her gilded life could manage. They made her feel wanted urgently and specifically and for herself by men who could not simply have her for the asking.
In a life where everything was permitted and nothing was required, the one experience that still carried a genuine charge was the experience that was forbidden.
She was, by the account of everyone who met her, magnetic in a way the photographs only hint at. It was not conventional prettiness so much as force, a quick, dangerous, restless vitality that pulled people towards her and unsettled a good many of them.
Men fell for her hard and fast. She was clever enough to hold them, and cool enough to drop them when the charge went out, and she conducted the whole business with a boldness that took even her worldly circles' breath away.
She could be dazzlingly generous, pressing gifts of real value on the people who amused her, arranging lavish treats, paying debts that were not hers to pay, opening her houses and her purse without a second thought.
And she could be glacial, dropping a friend or a lover without warning or explanation the moment they began to bore her, which most of them eventually did. She was capable of great kindness and of casual cruelty inside the same afternoon.
The men who loved her found her intoxicating and then found her gone. The women who befriended her found her the most exciting company in London, and then found themselves, without any quarrel they could point to, quietly dropped from the list.
It was not calculation. It was appetite. The same appetite that carried her across oceans and through drawing rooms, forever reaching for the next thing, because the last thing, however fine, had failed once again to fill her.
All the while the daughters were growing up inside this. Patricia and Pamela were children of the nursery and the governess, raised at the edges of their parents' enormous life, and they saw with the clear, unsentimental eyes of children exactly what that life was.
It is from Pamela, grown up and looking back, that much of the truest account of the marriage finally came, delivered without bitterness and without any attempt to prettify it, the calm testimony of a woman who had watched the whole strange arrangement from the inside.
Where other unfaithful wives of her class crept and covered their tracks and lived in terror of discovery, Edwina moved through her affairs at speed, and very nearly in the open, protected by the great double wall that guarded women exactly like her.
In the Britain of the 1920s and 1930s, the private lives of the very grand were in effect unprintable. Libel law was fierce and its damages were ruinous, and no editor in his senses would risk naming a countess as an adulteress without proof that would hold up under cross-examination in open court.
Above the libel law sat something even more powerful, the deference of an establishment that policed its own and protected its own, a whole apparatus of palace and press and law that understood without a word ever being spoken aloud that certain things about certain people were simply not discussed.
And so Edwina lived a life of open secrets. Her friends knew everything. Her maids and footmen who dressed her and made her bed and carried her notes knew more than her friends. The whole of fashionable London passed her name from dinner table to dinner table.
And the whole of ordinary Britain, turning the pages of its newspapers over breakfast, knew nothing whatever, because there was nothing whatever there to read.
Dickie for a good while was among those who did not know, or who did not permit himself to know. He was away so often and so utterly absorbed in the project of himself that the full extent of his wife's private life took years to reach him with its true force.
When it finally did, it very nearly ended the marriage in the divorce court.
No paper named the list. When a biographer finally assembled it 70 years later, it ran to at least 18 names, and the newspapers of her own day were permitted to print not one of them.
The number belongs to Andrew Lownie, whose study of the marriage gathered up the surviving letters and the memoirs and the family recollections and set them down together for the first time. It should be held as a considered estimate rather than a ledger, because the whole nature of the thing meant that no one was keeping a ledger.
The earliest of the men whose names survive was an American. Laddie Sanford was a wealthy sportsman and polo player, one of that gilded transatlantic set who moved between America and the great English houses in pursuit of horses and pleasure.
After him, and overlapping with the whole restless decade, came Mike Ward, a figure from the newspaper world, a man connected to the Beaverbrook press, which lent the affair a private irony so sharp it might have been invented for the very industry that employed her lover was the industry forbidden by law and custom from printing a single syllable about her.
There were others whose names the record keeps in passing. There was Bobby Sweeney, the American amateur golf champion and society figure. There was talk, reliable enough to be set down, that her attachments ran to women as well as men, the American singer Sophie Tucker among the names that surface.
Some of the names have blurred, and a great many of the evenings are lost entirely. But the pattern held. She chose men who amused her, took them up with startling speed, and moved on the moment the charge went out of it.
What made all of it possible was not daring alone. It was the architecture of silence that surrounded women of her rank.
A countess in 1928 lived her private life behind three walls. The first wall was money, which meant she needed no man's income and feared no man's leaving, and could therefore choose and discard lovers with a freedom that a poorer woman could never have risked.
The second wall was libel law, savage and expensive, under which any editor who named her would face a courtroom and in all likelihood lose everything he had.
The third and highest wall was deference, the unwritten treaty of an entire establishment that the private conduct of its own people was simply not a subject for public discussion.
Behind those three walls, Edwina moved almost exactly as she pleased. Her friends knew everything. Her servants knew more. The gossip of the great houses carried her name from dinner to dinner and back again, and the ordinary reader of an ordinary paper knew nothing whatever.
The mechanics of the silence are worth dwelling on, because to a modern eye they seem almost impossible. A great house of that era ran on the discretion of its staff, and the staff of a woman like Edwina saw everything.
The lady's maid who dressed her knew which gowns had been worn and which beds had been slept in. The footman carried the notes. The chauffeur drove to the addresses. The whole intricate machine of a rich household turned on the understanding that what its servants saw its servants did not say.
Above the servants sat the friends, and the friends operated by an identical code. They passed the news from dinner table to dinner table. They knew precisely who was with whom and for how long, and they would no more have carried the gossip to a newspaper than they would have picked a guest's pocket.
And above the friends sat the newspapers themselves, held back by a libel law that made naming a countess a financial act of near suicide, and by a deference so total that the idea of exposing one of their own barely occurred to the men who ran the press.
Between the three of them, the servants, the friends, and the editors, they built around Edwina a wall of silence so complete that she could conduct the most talked-about private life in London and remain, to the ordinary reading public of Britain, a model of aristocratic respectability.
And yet weightlessness is its own particular kind of hunger, and this is the thing the leering accounts always miss. The affairs of those years were, for the most part, sensation rather than love, pursued by a woman who could find sensation nowhere else in a life that asked nothing of her.
Her husband was still largely absent, still largely ignorant, still climbing his own ladder with his eyes fixed firmly upward and away from home. But the day was coming when Dickie Mountbatten would be made to understand in full exactly what his marriage had quietly become.
When the sailor finally understood how far his wife had strayed, the couple came within sight of divorce and then did something stranger than either loyalty or ruin.
The moment of understanding seems to have arrived in the later 1920s, and by one account it reached Dickie through the worst messenger imaginable, the gossip of his own social circle, which carried to him at last what most of London had known for years.
For a proud, self-conscious man who cared enormously about how things appeared, the humiliation of being the last to learn the truth was almost as sharp as the betrayal underneath it. There were terrible scenes. The marriage that 8,000 people had cheered outside St. Margaret's stood for a time on the very edge of the cliff.
Dickie Mountbatten left many years later the single most honest summary of what his marriage had become, and it is worth giving in his own words because no biographer has ever bettered it. Edwina and he, he said, had spent all their married lives getting into other people's beds.
It is a remarkable thing for a man of his position and his vanity to have set down about himself and his wife, and it is remarkable above all for the flat, unashamed accuracy of it.
The biographer Andrew Lownie, gathering up the evidence of exactly how the couple survived the crisis of the late 1920s, put it plainly. They agreed, he wrote, to have an open marriage, and Edwina would continue to support her husband's professional endeavors.
There, in a single sentence, is the whole treaty. Freedom for both of them in private, an unbroken united front in public, and her fortune and her energy placed throughout at the service of his career.
The most human wrinkle in the whole arrangement, and the one that keeps it from being merely cold, was the matter of Yola. Dickie's attachment to Yola Latellier was no passing thing. It began around 1931, and it lasted in one form or another for the better part of his life, a settled and central relationship running quietly alongside his marriage.
And the effect of it on Edwina was the last thing anyone would have predicted from a woman with her own long history of lovers. She was jealous, sharply and unmistakably jealous, of the very freedom she herself had insisted upon.
The woman who had strayed first and strayed most could not bear that her husband had at last strayed too, and she made her feelings plain. It is a contradiction that no logic can quite dissolve, and it is precisely the kind of contradiction that real people are made of.
And then she did the thing that turned the whole triangle from a grievance into something almost warm, the thing that says more about her than any list of lovers ever could. She befriended Yola.
Rather than freeze the younger woman out, she took her up, spent time in her company, and came away liking her, and she said as much to her husband, writing approvingly of the younger woman and telling him that the two of them had got on well together.
It was an act of a peculiar generosity, the wronged wife making a friend of her rival, and it set the pattern for the far stranger three-way friendship that would come at the very end of her life in India with a prime minister.
What saved the marriage was not a change of heart, but a change of terms. Rather than divorce, with all the scandal it would unleash and the loss of the fortune's steadying hand it would bring, the Mountbattens negotiated a private peace.
An arrangement their younger daughter Pamela would one day describe, choosing her words with great care, as a modus vivendi, a way of living together. In plain language, they agreed to an open marriage.
Both of them would be free. Both would take lovers as they wished, and both would preserve absolutely and without a single public exception the outward form of a devoted and respectable union, because the outward form was the very thing that protected the careers, the children, the rank, and the money that neither of them was willing to lose.
Pamela Hicks, looking back across a very long life at her parents' marriage, gave the whole arrangement the most generous and probably the truest reading anyone has offered. Her parents, she said, managed to negotiate their way through the crisis and found a modus vivendi. And what made it hold in the end was her father's total desire for her mother's happiness.
It is a startling thing for a daughter to say, and startling above all for what it quietly admits, that both her parents took lovers, a fact she confirmed without flinching or apology, and that the marriage survived not through fidelity, but through a strange, hard-won generosity of spirit.
So the marriage did not break. It reformed itself instead into something the couple's own century possessed no comfortable word for, a partnership of tolerated infidelity held together by ambition, real affection, a great deal of money, and an absolute united front presented to the outside world.
Of all the men, one broke her heart, and one nearly broke the monarchy, and neither was the man the whole country would soon believe she had ruined herself over.
The first was a soldier. Harold Phillips, known to everyone who moved in their world as Bunny, was an officer in the Coldstream Guards, and by the considered judgment of the biographers who have weighed the surviving evidence, he was the great love of Edwina Mountbatten's life.
With Bunny, it was not sport. The affair had a depth and a duration that set it clean apart from the long parade of amusements, and it exposed beneath the careless heiress the columns whispered about a woman entirely capable of the oldest and most ordinary human catastrophe of all, the catastrophe of loving someone who would not in the end be hers.
When Bunny Phillips at last married another woman, Edwina was, in the plain word the record uses, without softening it, devastated.
The mistress of 18 affairs, the woman who dropped her lovers the instant the charge went out of them, found herself, for once, on the wrong side of exactly that equation, and she found it unbearable.
It is the single detail that rescues her most completely from caricature. Whatever else the affairs were, they were not the conduct of a woman incapable of feeling. She could love and be hurt and grieve a love that was not returned to her in kind.
The second name is of an entirely different order, and it must be handled with great care, because the story that would soon grow up around it was one the courts themselves would formally declare to be false.
Leslie Hutchinson, known across fashionable London simply as Hutch, was a cabaret pianist and singer from the island of Grenada, one of the most glamorous performers in all of Britain.
A man of extraordinary charm and talent who filled the smartest nightclubs in the West End and moved as an entertainer through the drawing rooms of the very people who would never have dreamed of receiving him as a social equal.
That a black colonial entertainer and a white countess should be linked together in the London of the early 1930s was to strike at once at the two most sensitive nerves the British establishment possessed, the nerve of class and the nerve of race.
And it is Hutch, and not the far more famous man the newspapers would soon hint at, whom most historians now believe was the real object of the affair that came so close to destroying her.
The evidence for it is gossip rather than proof, and it must be flagged plainly as such. But it is persistent and well-sourced gossip, and it arrives wrapped in a detail so specific that it carries the unmistakable ring of truth.
Edwina, it is said, showered Hutch with gifts of a kind that leave a permanent trail behind them, a jeweled gold cigarette case, a gold ring engraved on the inside with her own family coat of arms, and a gold and diamond watch.
The crested ring in particular is exactly the sort of object that turns an affair from rumor into something close to documentary evidence. A countess's own arms worn in secret by a nightclub pianist. The class system and the color bar and the marriage vow all broken together inside a single small circle of gold.
None of it was ever proved in any courtroom, and this account does not assert it as fact. But it is the widely believed truth that sat behind the scandal about to break over her, unspoken and unprovable underneath everything that was about to happen.
The final irony, and the thing that makes the whole episode so strange, is that when the scandal finally broke into print, it attached itself to entirely the wrong man.
The newspaper that lit the fuse would name no one at all. And the rumor that rushed in to fill the silence would fasten not on Hutch, the pianist most historians now believe was the real figure, but on Paul Robeson, a far more famous performer whom Edwina had, in all likelihood, never so much as met.
The truth was protected in the end by the very machinery of the lie. The public would be handed a false name. Edwina would be able to deny that false name with perfect honesty. And the real story would slip back down behind the three walls and stay there exactly where it had always been.
Seven weeks before the trial, a Sunday paper printed a story about a titled woman and a colored man that everyone in London read as a single name, and the king ordered her home to fight it.
The paper was The People, and the item appeared in May 1932, wrapped in the coy, deniable language that gossip always used when it could not risk printing a name outright.
It spoke of a scandal that had shaken society to its very depths. It described a titled woman whose association with a colored man had become so marked that the two of them were now the talk of the West End, a couple, it claimed, who had been caught in compromising circumstances.
No name was printed anywhere in it. None was needed. Everyone who mattered in London read it instantly as Edwina Mountbatten, and the man the rumor mill obligingly supplied was not the pianist most historians now suspect, but the American singer and actor Paul Robeson.
And as it happened, a man Edwina had in all probability never so much as met. His own wife, when the rumor reached her, retorted with some asperity that Edwina was just about the one person in England they did not know.
The response came from the very top, and it reveals with perfect clarity how the machinery of the establishment worked when its own were threatened.
King George V, a monarch obsessed with the dignity of the crown and terrified of anything that might drag his family's circle down into the gutter of scandal, took a direct and personal hand in the affair.
The Mountbattens were abroad, and word went out that they were to come home at once and sue publicly, ferociously, and above all successfully, because a libel left unfought was a libel half-believed, and the palace could not for a moment afford to let the country begin to believe this particular one.
It was not tender concern for Edwina herself that moved the king. It was the image of the monarchy to which the Mountbattens were bound by blood, and the sheer horror of a color bar being seen to be broken in open court by a woman so near the throne.
The case came on in July 1932 before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, and the court sat at the unusual early hour of nine in the morning, the better to dispose of so delicate and dangerous a matter with the greatest possible speed.
The advocacy engaged on the Mountbatten side was of the very first rank the English bar could offer, the kind of overwhelming legal firepower that only the very grand and the very rich could command, and the language from the opening moment was absolute and unsparing.
The libel was denounced from the outset as the most monstrous and most atrocious of which counsel had ever in his career heard. And then Edwina did the thing that no woman of her rank was ever supposed to do.
She went into the witness box herself. She stood up in open court under her own name and swore upon oath that the story was false from its first word to its last, that she had never met the man, that there had been no affair of any kind, that the whole thing was a poisonous invention.
For a countess to give evidence in person to deny an adultery rumor was almost without precedent in the annals of English scandal, and it worked exactly as it was designed to.
The newspaper crumpled completely. The People had no evidence to offer, because for this specific story there was quite simply no evidence to be had. It withdrew the allegation without reservation, apologized in the most abject and groveling terms the court had heard, and accepted a total and crushing defeat.
Edwina won on every point. She took her costs in full, and then, in a gesture of pure aristocratic disdain, declined to accept any damages at all, as though the money itself were beneath her notice and the vindication alone were the thing she had come for.
The verdict was absolute, and the establishment closed around the victory with a speed that tells the whole story of what it had really been for. That very evening the Mountbattens were seen out in society and celebrating. And the following day they lunched at Buckingham Palace with the king and queen.
The speed of that gathering back into the fold is the tell. A woman genuinely suspected of disgrace would not have been lunching with her sovereign the day after her ordeal. The palace lunch was a public act, staged and understood as such, a way of showing the whole of society that the countess had been vindicated and was once more entirely one of them.
What had frightened the king was never Edwina's conduct in itself, which he can hardly have failed to know a good deal about. What had frightened him was the prospect of that conduct becoming public property, of the private life of a woman so close to the throne being dragged through the courts and the gutter press in a way that might splash the monarchy itself.
Here lies the deepest truth of the whole affair. Edwina's victory was entirely real, and it was at the very same time a magnificent act of concealment.
The specific charge was false. She had in all probability genuinely never met Paul Robeson, and the particular affair that The People had described had never happened at all.
But the general truth the paper had blundered towards, that Edwina Mountbatten was a woman of many lovers, living inside a marriage that had long since stopped even pretending to be faithful, was accurate to the last detail.
The court had been used to defend a false accusation in order to bury a true one. The entire apparatus of the law, the palace, the finest advocates in England, and the personal will of the king himself had all been mobilized at enormous expense, and what the whole vast machinery had protected in the end was not a wronged innocent but an open secret that everyone in that world understood and no newspaper was ever allowed to describe.
When the bombs began to fall on London, the woman the gossip columns had mocked for a decade found the one thing they could never take from her.
It arrived in the autumn of 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War, and it changed Edwina Mountbatten more completely and more permanently than any lover ever had.
For 20 years, she had been a woman in search of a use, throwing her restless energy against the walls of a life that offered her nothing worth the doing. The war took that same energy, the same physical fearlessness, the same lifelong refusal to sit still, and pointed all of it at a task large enough to swallow her whole.
She threw herself into the work of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, a body devoted to first aid and civil medical relief, and she rose through it at a speed that owed a little to her famous name and a very great deal more to her sheer, tireless capacity for work.
In November 1939, she became county president for London. By 1942, she had risen to superintendent-in-chief, the most senior woman in the entire organization, a post she would go on to hold for 18 years, right up until the day she died.
And this was no ornamental colonelcy of the sort grand women were handed to keep them occupied and out of the way. Edwina worked, and worked hard.
She built shelter schemes and first aid schemes across a capital city being pounded night after night from the air. She went down into the underground stations where Londoners huddled from the raids. She toured the bombed streets and the casualty posts while the fires still burned.
She drove herself to the edge of exhaustion and then, being Edwina, drove herself well past it.
The transformation was not lost on the people who had spent a decade sniggering at her behind their hands. The columns that had once traded encoded hints about the fast-set countess now had a countess who spent her nights in the smoking wreckage of the East End, and they did not quite know what to do with the contradiction.
The war, in a way the long peace never had, gave Edwina a stage on which her real qualities could finally show themselves. The recklessness that had made her a scandal in a nightclub made her, in a bombed city, simply brave.
The hunger for intensity that had driven her from lover to lover now drove her straight into the worst nights the capital had ever endured. The organizing will that had once arranged a thousand parties now arranged relief for the homeless and the injured and the dying.
She was rewarded in 1943 with appointment as a commander of the Order of the British Empire, the first of the honors that would eventually crowd her breast. Each of them was given for service, and each of them sat on a woman who had gone looking for the worst of the war rather than the safest corner of it.
In 1941, she crossed the Atlantic and toured 28 of the American states with her husband, part of the great effort to bind the still-neutral United States closer to a Britain fighting alone for its life.
And she was, by every account, natural at the work, tireless and persuasive, and quite impossible to overlook. The girl who had honeymooned among the film stars came back to America nearly 20 years later as something a good deal more useful than a celebrity, a working symbol of a nation under siege.
Through all of it, she was quietly learning the trade that would come to define the whole of the last 20 years of her life. The vast, grinding, unglamorous business of relief, of moving supplies and bodies and hope across distances that defeated other people, of standing directly in front of human suffering and organizing it patiently and relentlessly into something a little more bearable.
In the wreckage of the Japanese surrender, she flew 33,000 miles to reach the men everyone else had written off as already dead.
The year was 1945, turning into 1946, and the war in the Far East had ended with a suddenness that left a vast catastrophe behind it.
Across the whole of Southeast Asia, scattered through the jungles and the ruined ports of a shattered empire, sat the prisoner-of-war camps. And in them the survivors of years of starvation, forced labor, and casual brutality, Allied soldiers and civilians alike, who had vanished entirely from the world's attention for the duration of the fighting.
Edwina Mountbatten, by now a decorated and senior figure in the relief world and married to the supreme allied commander in the region, took on the coordination of that enormous rescue, and it became the crowning work of her entire life.
Working through the organizations she led, Edwina helped to oversee the recovery of something in the order of 90,000 prisoners. They were scattered across roughly 230 separate camps.
Those camps were spread over some 3,000 miles of ruined and broken territory, across seas and jungles and shattered roads, in a region where the ordinary machinery of government had simply ceased to exist.
And in order to reach them, to see the conditions inside the wire for herself, and to force the pace of the relief with her own presence, Edwina personally flew something close to 33,000 miles into airstrips hacked out of nothing, down to camps where men who had not laid eyes on a friendly official in years watched an English countess climb down from an airplane and begin at once to get them out.
She did not observe any of it from a comfortable distance. That was never once her way, in war or in peace. She went into the camps themselves. She walked among the skeletal survivors, inspected the conditions with her own eyes, listened to the men, wrote down what she saw, and then made the demands that turned inspection into action.
Where she found neglect, she was merciless with the officials responsible for it, using the full weight of her rank and her name to shame and to bully the slow into moving. Where she found suffering, she moved to end it with exactly the same headlong energy she had once poured into pleasure.
To thousands of prisoners, the very first sign that the outside world had remembered they were alive was the arrival of Lady Louis Mountbatten, notebook in hand, refusing to be hurried and refusing absolutely to be lied to.
In 1946 came appointment as a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and as a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of St. John. And in 1948, the Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire.
The girl whose only real distinction had once been the size of her bank balance now carried decorations given for hard and dangerous service.
In the spring of 1947, she walked into a palace of 340 rooms to preside over the death of the largest empire the world had ever known.
Her husband had been sent out to India as its last viceroy, charged by a British government that had run clean out of money, of will, and of time with the single overwhelming task of bringing the greatest possession of the empire to its independence, and of doing it fast.
Dickie Mountbatten arrived in Delhi in March 1947 carrying a mandate to transfer power in a matter of mere months, and Edwina arrived at his side as vicereine, mistress of a court at the exact historical moment that the court itself was to be dismantled forever.
She took up residence in Viceroy's House, the vast palace designed by Lutyens, a building of some 340 rooms that stood and stands to this day as the single grandest statement the British ever built in stone of their power over India.
And she moved into it knowing with complete certainty that she would be the very last English woman ever to reign inside its walls.
The role she had been handed could very easily have been a purely ceremonial one, a matter of receiving lines and garden parties and the handing out of prizes, while the men in the next room decided the fate of a fifth of the human race.
Edwina made it into something else entirely. She arrived with 20 solid years of relief experience behind her and a whole subcontinent sliding visibly towards catastrophe in front of her, and she went straight to work.
She toured the hospitals and the welfare centers. She threw the enormous resources and the still greater prestige of her position behind the medical and refugee services that a partitioning India was very shortly going to need as no country in history had ever needed them.
British India was to be divided along hurried and bitterly contested lines into two new nations, one of them mainly Hindu and the other mainly Muslim. And the division was about to set in motion one of the largest and bloodiest movements of human beings the world had ever seen.
Ancient communities were about to find themselves stranded on the wrong side of a brand-new border, drawn in haste along contested lines. Trains were about to arrive at their stations carrying nothing but the murdered. Great cities were about to burn from end to end.
Into that gathering horror walked Edwina Mountbatten in her middle 40s and at the very height of her powers, armed with nothing but her energy, her rank, and her 20 years of learning how to organize relief out of chaos.
It was in this atmosphere of mounting dread and ceaseless work that she came to know the Indian leader whose name the story keeps circling. He was a widower, his wife long dead, and he carried the particular loneliness of a man at the summit of an enormous cause with no one at his side to share the weight of it.
He was cultured, well read, idealistic, and magnetic. And when he and Edwina fell into each other's company in the whirl of those final imperial months, each of them recognized in the other something they had not expected to find so late, and had almost given up hope of finding at all.
Independence came in August 1947, and with independence came the partition of the land, and with the partition came the catastrophe that everyone had feared and no one had found any way to prevent.
Along the new frontiers, Hindus and Sikhs fled one way and Muslims fled the other, in columns of the dispossessed that stretched from one horizon clean to the other. And as they fled, they were set upon and slaughtered.
The estimates of the dead range from several hundred thousand souls at the lowest to a million and more at the highest. The estimates of the displaced run as high as 15 million human beings uprooted, robbed, raped, murdered, and starved in a matter of a few short weeks.
It was directly into the heart of all this that Edwina Mountbatten threw the last full measure of her strength.
She took charge of the great coordinating body for the voluntary relief organizations, the United Council for Relief and Welfare, and she used it as a lever to fling absolutely everything she had at the disaster.
She organized the vast refugee camps that sprang up around the great cities, some of them holding populations the size of towns, hundreds of thousands of the dispossessed crammed together with nothing.
She drove the campaigns of vaccination against the cholera that swept through those camps like fire, the sanitation schemes that were all that stood between the refugees and total epidemic, the distribution of food and clean water and medicine to people who had lost everything they had ever owned except their lives.
And she did all of it in her own particular way, which was to go and see the worst of it with her own eyes, to walk directly into the camps and the overflowing hospitals, to stand in the very middle of the suffering and organize it into some kind of order, refusing absolutely to be spared the sight of the thing she was working herself to death to relieve.
Indian statesmen who had every reason in the world to resent the departing British made a single and remarkable exception for the vicereine, because they had seen her with their own eyes in the camps and they knew that whatever else the British Empire had been to their country, this one particular English woman had spent herself without any reserve at all on the suffering of their people.
Among those who watched her most closely of all in those months was the new prime minister. He saw Edwina not across the polished floor of a ballroom, but across the churned mud of a refugee camp. He saw her at the work that was the truest and deepest expression of everything she had at last become.
She had spent 20 years treating love as a game she always won. And then at the end of the world, she met a man she could not play.
His name was Jawaharlal Nehru, and he was, by the time Edwina came to know him truly, the most important man in the whole of the new India, its first prime minister.
He was a widower. He was cultured and lonely and idealistic, a man who had read very deeply in British prisons and thought very deeply about power, and who had emerged from the whole long ordeal with a mind that Edwina, who had spent an entire lifetime being quietly bored by the men around her, found to her astonishment that she could not exhaust.
With Nehru, there was no question at all of the quick conquest and the still quicker discarding that had defined every one of her affairs. Here at last, and far too late, was an equal, and an equal is the one thing that cannot be collected.
The Mountbattens had first encountered Nehru in Singapore in 1946, before ever the viceroyalty was thought of. Edwina, by her husband's own account, was knocked over in the crush of a crowd at a rally, and Nehru and Mountbatten linked arms to help her back to her feet, and the three of them fell to talking, as Mountbatten put it, about everything under the sun.
When the couple arrived in Delhi to take up the viceroyalty in March 1947, the acquaintance deepened fast into something more. A garden party photograph taken at the end of that month shows Nehru seated on the ground beside Edwina where she sat on a sofa, the two of them turned towards each other, absorbed.
From there, through the 15 months of the transfer of power and the catastrophe of partition, they were rarely apart.
What drew them was not the thing that had drawn her to any of the others. With Nehru, there was a genuine meeting of two serious minds, a shared seriousness about the enormous work they were doing, and a shared exhaustion in the doing of it.
He was, in the phrase she used of him, a man who respected her mind, and for a woman who had spent a lifetime being admired for her money and her beauty and her daring, and almost never for her intelligence, that respect was a kind of oxygen.
She had been the cleverest person in most rooms she had ever entered, and had been permitted to do nothing with it. Here was a man of the first rank who took her seriously as a thinker and a worker and a partner in a great endeavor.
It was, she said, a strange relationship, most of it spiritual, and whatever else it was, it was the deepest attachment of a life that had never before let anything reach the bottom of it.
Some have argued that the warmth between Edwina and Nehru, and the genuine affection Nehru came to feel for the Mountbattens, helped to smooth the transfer at a point where it might easily have collapsed into total breakdown. Others have thought the claim overdrawn, a romantic gloss on what was at bottom hard political calculation on all sides.
The truth is probably somewhere between, and it can never be fixed with any certainty. But it is at least possible that the private attachment of one restless English woman and one lonely Indian statesman had consequences that reached far beyond the two of them into the settlement of a subcontinent.
That the two of them loved each other in some genuine form is beyond any serious doubt. When the Mountbattens finally left India in 1948, the bond did not end but merely changed its shape, sustained now across whole continents by a correspondence that ran to hundreds upon hundreds of letters.
Whether it was ever also a physical love is the question the world will not stop asking. And the surviving record offers four separate answers and no final verdict between them.
Her own authorized biographer, Janet Morgan, judged the relationship to have been purer than a merely physical one, holding that Nehru respected the husband far too deeply to have ever betrayed his trust in that particular way.
Her own daughter, Pamela Hicks, who was actually there in the house and saw it with her own eyes, insisted flatly that it was never physical at all, describing the three of them together, her mother and Nehru and her father, as a happy threesome.
Standing against the two of them is the biographer Andrew Lownie, who inclines instead to the view that it was indeed a physical affair, and who cites an earlier writer's striking claim that Mountbatten himself knew perfectly well that they were lovers, and was, most extraordinarily of all, actually proud of the fact.
And sitting somewhere between the two firm camps is the honest uncertainty of Edwina's own friend, the writer Marie Seton, who said simply that she really did not know about the physical side of the affair, but that she would think on the whole probably yes.
At the dead center of all four of them is a silence that simply cannot be broken, because the most intimate of the letters between them remains sealed to this day, held privately away in India.
The strangest part of the whole thing is what her husband chose to do when he found out about it. Because Dickie Mountbatten did not rage, and he did not sue for divorce, and he did not force her to choose between them.
The moment came in 1952. Edwina, badly frightened by an episode of illness and perhaps moved to a new honesty by the fright of it, showed Dickie the letters that Nehru had written to her, laying the deepest attachment of her whole life open before the husband she had married 30 years earlier.
What he wrote back to her in reply is the single most remarkable document in the entire story.
He told her that he knew and that he had always understood the very special relationship that existed between Jawaharlal and herself. And then he went on to explain to her exactly why it did not wound him, saying that by the remarkably lucky fact that among his many defects God had not seen fit to add jealousy, he had been spared the ordinary agony of the ordinary husband.
And then he went further still. He told her that this very absence of jealousy in him was the precise reason he had always made their visits to each other easy, why he had smoothed the path between his own wife and the Indian prime minister rather than ever once moving to block it.
He was not merely tolerating the bond between them. He was actively helping it along.
To a world that understood marriage as a form of possession, the letter was simply incomprehensible. To anyone who had followed the long and winding road of the Mountbatten marriage all the way from its beginning, it was the perfectly logical last station on the line.
This was the very same arrangement, grown now to its fullest and its most generous possible form, that the couple had first hammered out in painful secret during the crisis of the late 1920s.
Twenty-five years earlier, that pact had been a wounded and grudging compromise between two people who had simply run out of the strength required to go on pretending. Now, in Dickie's letter about Nehru, it had somehow become something that came very close to grace.
Pamela Hicks described the three of them, her mother and Nehru and her father, as a happy threesome. And the word she chose is worth pausing on, because it is not the word of a wounded child papering over a wound. She meant it.
The correspondence between Edwina and Nehru ran on for the whole of the rest of her life, London to Delhi and Delhi back to London. Nehru came to visit England. Edwina returned again and again and again to India, drawn back each time both by the relief work and by the man himself.
And Dickie, rising all the while towards the very summit of his own long naval and political career, made it easy for them both, exactly as he had promised her that he would.
The 1950s used her very hard. The angina came upon her in 1956, the first clear warning that her heart was wearing out under the relentless punishment she insisted on giving it. A small stroke followed two years later, in 1958. She caught a savage case of chickenpox from one of her own grandchildren and would not rest even through that.
Her body was sending her every distress signal that it possessed, and she calmly ignored the whole lot of them, because the relief work that had become the entire meaning of her life would not wait for her to recover, and she had never once in all her 50-odd years been any good whatever at stopping.
Those who loved her begged her to slow down, and she paid them no attention at all. There was always another tour to make, another distant branch of the organization to inspect, another journey that took her, not by accident, in the general direction of the country and the man she could not stay away from.
So she kept moving, and the moving carried her in February 1960 to the very last place on the map.
Jesselton was about as far from Park Lane as it was possible for a British subject to travel and still be within the shrinking bounds of the empire. A town on the northern coast of Borneo, humid and remote, a world away from the giant's house where the whole story had begun.
She had come there to inspect the local work of the brigade she had led for 18 years. A woman of 58 with a worn-out heart, still doing on the far rim of the world the work that had given her life its only lasting meaning.
She spent her last day at it, and then she went to bed in the warm dark with the letters of the prime minister of India near at hand, as they always were. And in the night her heart, which had carried her through the Blitz and the camps and the cholera and the whole long restless flight of her life, finally stopped.
The end came on February 21, 1960. She was 58 years old, and when they came and found her in the morning, there was the single detail that has come more than any other in the whole of her crowded life to stand for the whole contradiction of her.
The scattered pile of Nehru's letters lying across the bed. The private life spilling right out of the public one to the very last breath.
Edwina had asked to be buried at sea. And on February 25, 1960, her wish was carried out from the deck of the frigate Wakeful off Portsmouth, with the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, Geoffrey Fisher, officiating over the gray water and the waves.
Her body was committed to the sea she had crossed so very many times in her restless life, in the presence of her family and of the Royal Navy that had been the whole of her husband's world.
It should by every expectation have been an entirely English ending, and an English ending only. And it was not, because of the man waiting in Delhi.
Nehru, the prime minister of a nation of hundreds of millions of souls, on learning that the woman he had loved was to be given to the sea, ordered a warship of the Indian Navy, the frigate Trishul, to sail all the way to Portsmouth and to take its part in the burial.
And so as the English frigate committed Edwina's body to the deep off the English coast, the Indian frigate stood by on the water beside it, and a wreath of marigolds, the flowers of Indian mourning, was cast upon the waves in her memory, sent by the head of a foreign government to the sea grave of a British society woman.
It was the very plainest public statement that Nehru could possibly make of everything she had meant to him. A warship and a wreath of marigold flowers on the cold gray water of Portsmouth.
No newspaper in Britain had ever once been allowed to describe the thing that lay between the two of them. An Indian frigate on the English sea said the whole of it at the last without a single word.
The Queen Mother, on hearing of the burial at sea and of the extraordinary manner of it, produced the line that Edwina's own family have treasured ever since, dry and affectionate and exactly perfectly right. Dear Edwina, she said, she always did like to make a splash.
When the accounts of her long life were finally settled, the great Cassel fortune had shrunk to a shadow of the thing it had once been. Her personal estate came to a gross figure of some £589,000, and after the state had taken its full share of it in death duties, more than £333,000 of the whole, well over half of everything she had, was simply gone.
Broadlands still stands today in its Hampshire parkland, the great family seat that passed down through Edwina to her descendants, grand enough that a full generation after her death it would shelter the honeymoon of a Prince of Wales and his new young bride.
Her truest monument, though, is the one that not a single gossip columnist of the 1920s could ever in their wildest imagining have predicted for the fast-set countess they mocked. It is the living, breathing work of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, the relief institutions that she built and led for 18 years, and the memory in the places she actually reached of the 90,000 prisoners brought safely home and the refugee camps organized in the worst summer that India ever knew.
The idle woman became at the very end one of the great relief workers of her whole century. And that is the one part of her that the historical record honors without a single word of reservation.
There is one last thing to be said about the letters, because in a sense they are the truest monument she left. They outlasted her. They outlasted Nehru, who died four years after her in 1964. And the most intimate of them outlasted the whole world that had bound them both, sealed away in India, unread.
Every other secret of her life has been dug up and turned over by the biographers, the lovers named, the arrangement laid bare, the trial re-examined, the household witnesses called. Only this one has held.
And so the woman who lived her entire life behind walls of silence keeps in death the last and deepest of those walls intact, and hands the question of what she truly was in the end straight to whoever cares to ask it.
It is worth holding the two Edwinas side by side one final time, because both of them were entirely real.
There was the woman of the gossip and the 18 names, the bored heiress who chased sensation through the nightclubs and across the oceans, who kept a nightclub pianist in secret and stood in a witness box to swear away a scandal, who treated love as a game and men as amusements and cared for 20 years about very little beyond her own restless appetite.
And there was the woman of the camps, who flew 33,000 miles to bring 90,000 prisoners home, who walked into the cholera wards of a partitioning subcontinent and would not be spared the sight of the suffering she fought, who was mourned at the last by an Indian warship and a scattering of marigolds on the sea.
Both were the same person. The idle woman and the heroine shared a body, a temperament, a hunger, and the whole meaning of her life lies in the fact that the second grew directly out of the first.
Edwina Mountbatten was, by any measure the age could offer, the freest woman in England, richer than dukes, married into the very heart of the royal family, answerable to no living person on earth for a single penny of her own.
And she spent 30 long years of that freedom slowly discovering the hardest truth of her life, that a freedom bought with a fortune is not at all the same thing as a purpose worth the having.
The lovers and the jewels and the yachts and the midnight parties had all been merely the noise of a brilliant woman with nothing whatever to do. And the open marriage had been two clever people finally refusing to lie to each other, even as they went on lying perfectly to the whole of the rest of the world.
She had chased sensation for 20 years and found it hollow to the core. She had been mocked without mercy, and then later decorated with honor.
And at the very last, on a narrow bed in a bungalow in Borneo, at the far edge of the very empire that her own marriage had helped to bury, the Countess Mountbatten was found lying dead, with the letters of the prime minister of India scattered across her bed, the letters of the one man she was never in all her life permitted to keep, and the whole truth of what had passed between them sealed away for good, exactly where no newspaper in Britain would ever once be allowed to reach it.