Constance “Toots” Marten, 38 — Leeds graduate, Tatler It-girl and, for several weeks in 2023, missing mother — stopped posting on her Instagram page in June 2016, the same year she is believed to have met her partner Mark Gordon, 50. It is also when she became estranged from her family, one of England’s most prominent aristocratic households, which has links to the royals and formerly owned Crichel House in Dorset, a grand, 5,000-acre estate where Gwyneth Paltrow’s 1996 Emma adaptation was filmed.
The Marten family have long been the subject of intrigue and fascination. Her father’s extraordinary midlife ‘awakening’ was documented in national newspapers in 2013; her grandmother, Mary Anna Marten OBE, was a goddaughter of the late Queen Mother; and their sprawling estate has been called “one of Dorset’s grandest Georgian houses” and “an unusual and fascinatingly complex house” by the likes of Country Life.
