Okay, imagine a world with unlimited access to whatever you want. It's the Gilded Age, and your legal father is a retired British Army officer and successful banker. Your mother is a French beauty, and it turns out you are allegedly the illegitimate but much adored child of one of the richest men in the world.

Sounds like a life of ease and very little drama, right? However, the life of Almena Rothschild Herbert

was anything but lacking in drama. I'm Patty Steele, from limitless money to life as a countess at High Clear Castle to the

curse of King Tuth. That's next on the backstory.

This is an I-Heart podcast.

The backstory is back. The final saga of the Downton Abbey franchise has just arrived in theaters and is a huge success with like a 92 on Rotten Tomatoes.

But the drama in the film has nothing on the real-life drama of Almena Rothschild.

In 1895, at the age of 19, she married George Edward Stanhope,

Mullinue Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvan, whose family estate was and is High Clear Castle

of Downton Abbey fame. High Clear is a 5,000-acre estate built in 1679. It's been the family seat of the Earl of Carnarvon for almost

350 years. So how did Al-Mina and High Clear get tied up in the curse of King Tut's tomb?

Well, let's go back a little bit. Despite her questionable paternity, Almena's birth father, Alfred Rothschild,

lavished her with love and money, though he never married her mother even when she was a widow,

and he was always a bachelor. He never married to anybody. He enjoyed the bachelor life. But for

Almena's fifth birthday, Rothschild gave her a pony and a private fireworks show.

The gifting and money for her lavish lifestyle went on throughout her childhood.

When she turned 18, she was presented to Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, wearing spectacular

diamonds. There was talk in the palace of the possibility of her huge dowry,

which is no doubt how the Earl of Carnarvon got interested.

As was often the case in those days, marriage was a business transaction.

In this case, the Earl needed a male heir to inherit the title,

and as importantly, he needed vast amounts of money

...