American Duchess

by Karen Harper

  “I wish Winston was not off soldering in Italy,” I told him.

  “That is what one gets for attending the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. But he feels it is his best preparation for public service to the nation. He has always wanted to be a hero, and I can only hope he does not die for that cause. As different as the two of us are, well, we have been close. He has held me up through some difficult times, and I him.”

  “I was just thinking he would keep the prince entertained at dinner. You said he does not favor bluestockings, and here I have all this background of history and literature to discuss from my years of education.”

  Sunny laughed again, as he had at my frustrations and fears these last months of planning. “Granted,” he told me, “the sort of bluestockings he would favor are those on a lady’s legs.”

  He snickered like a horse as he helped me up into the carriage. This time, however, Sunny’s favorite four matched grays would pull us back, not our estate workers. I carefully arranged my skirts so the rich brocade would not wrinkle, for I had needed to buy and be fitted for sixteen new ensembles, from tweeds to satins, for these few days.

  “So tell me more about this Lord Arthur Balfour the prince has suddenly decided to bring along,” I changed the subject as I settled my skirts. “The note said he would not join the guns but would bring his typewriter. He rather sounds like some sort of secretary.”

  “Not Lord Balfour. You must remember the word secretary here does not mean some lowly position. Balfour is about fifty, smooth of speech and manners, First Lord of the Treasury and Tory leader in the House of Commons.”

  “I do recall him from sitting in the strangers balcony in Parliament. A magnetic personality.”

  “But as for being sad that Winston’s away, I say it is a blessing. He would never let up on Balfour with his own dreams of grandeur. Winston is going to stand for office sooner or later, and I shall, too, locally here, of course, my ducal duty.”

  At the railway station, our greeting of the royal family and so many guests seemed to go on and on. I curtsied to the prince and princess, and she took my hands. “I cannot wait to see your collection of ornaments and bibelots,” she whispered.

  “Nothing like yours,” I told her, “but Blenheim has some fine historical pieces—ah, crucifixes, battle flags, and such.” I did not mention that Sunny’s father and grandfather had sold off art and rare collections to pay Blenheim’s debts.

  I thought I had planned for every contingency of their stay with us, but I had not thought of that. And Sunny had warned that the princess had “an acquisitive nature” when it came to things she liked that others owned.

  Oh dear, I thought, as the prince’s laugh boomed out and we climbed into the carriage to be followed by others on the way back. I was already exhausted. However would I survive this “little” royal visit?

  THERE WAS NEVER a dull or even restful moment over the next few days. Hundreds of Blenheim birds were “bagged” each day, and the crack, crack of the hunters’ guns permeated the air for hours. During the day, I entertained the ladies and Arthur Balfour and ended up admiring him immensely for his intellect and charm. He showed me how to use his typewriter, though I was slow since I had no time to learn the pattern of the alphabet laid out on it.

  “One of the waves of the future, the keyboard to make print!” he told me. “Men will fly someday soon, too, mark my words.”

  “You mean in hot-air balloons?”

  “Of course, but that is old hat. With wings, gliders like birds of the air. Hate to say this, but the Frenchies are far ahead of us with that.”

  I nodded, but had no time to ponder the “flying Frenchie” I had met once. Here came Princess Alexandra with the single lady-in-waiting she had brought and here came the guns back from another day of shooting.

  “BLENHEIM IS A lovely place with a lovely mistress,” Prince Edward told me at dinner the last evening they were with us.

  “We are so honored you and the princess could visit.”

  “She is quite fond of you, does not take to many Americans or even some English, truth be told.”

  “She has been most kind to me,” I said, starting to lift my champagne glass to my lips.

  “And I hope I also,” he said and clinked the lip of his goblet to mine.

  “That goes without saying, sir. We have been glad to be able to return not only a bit of your hospitality to us but our gratitude for your past and future support of the Marlboroughs and the entire nation.”

  “Then to the queen,” he said and his stentorian voice carried up and down the table.

  Other conversation ceased, though I had noticed when he spoke to me, others tried to listen.

  Alexandra, sitting to Sunny’s right, smiled and nodded. Well, I thought, returning her smile, there was one who was not listening. She had told me she had such trouble with the buzz of voices in a crowd and missed things like the songs of birds and even human voices singing. And she had privately told me that to conceive a child, I should not ride horses or take hot baths—another person aware I must bear a son.

  “To the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough!” the prince’s voice rang out. “To their palace—the only one that is not Her Majesty’s, of course—I lift a toast to their futures and contributions to the Empire.”

  Sunny rose, and the men all stood. I did not care if it was English precedence or not, I stood too, so the women got to their feet. It was a shining moment for both me and Sunny, who was beaming like the sun itself for once.

  SUNNY KNOCKED ON my bedroom door after dinner one January evening since I had sent word down I did not feel well enough to eat. Truth was, I’d felt faintly nauseous all day.

  “Shall we send for the doctor?” he asked, closing the door behind him. He seemed sincerely distressed.

  “Not . . . not until later so he can agree with what I already know.”

  “Where does it hurt?”

  I almost said, in my heart, but it was not hurt, though I had been a bit depressed of late. I actually felt contentment, mixed with a bit of anxiety. “I don’t really hurt,” I told him. “I think I am filled with joy—and relief.”

  His intense gaze dropped to my midriff, which I had covered with a warm woolen robe. The fire crackled in the grate behind the firedogs, but I felt warm all over. Triumphant. I smiled.

  “Consuelo, if you think you are with child, tell me right out. If not, I will have the doctor here tomorr—”

  “Yes. Yes! Though, of course, I am rather new at this, I believe I am with child.”

  He knelt before my chair and took my hands in his. “My dear wife!”

  “Am I? And not just for this reason—and the other?”

  “No . . . I . . . you have been a help to me in many ways. And now . . .”

  “And now, other than improving Blenheim, you shall have another wish come true.”

  He lifted both my hands and kissed them solemnly. Tears gilded his eyes in the firelight and dropped onto my fingers. It was then, I swear, I saw a woman in a long, silk robe move in the darkness behind him and absolutely disappear through the door.

  Goose bumps skimmed my arms. Had my maid come back in? Nonsense. Just exhaustion. A hallucination. Or just a surprise that Sunny, the 9th Duke of Marlborough, knelt at my feet as if he were at last being presented to me. Perhaps there was hope for us and for our future child.

  I THOUGHT BEING pregnant would make me happy, but it only made me relieved. In truth, I felt lonely, however joyful I was supposed to be—especially when lacing tight was a complete farce and I needed to stay in more. I was so slender that I sometimes felt I had a, well, a child-sized hot-air balloon in my belly.

  Sunny, after our triumph with the royals, spent much time away in London, but one day here I heard my doctor tell him in the hall, “She has narrow hips, Your Grace, and a first birth—with a big child. We shall pray no difficulties ensue. Though I can come here when her time is near, you might want to take her to London for the birth.”
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  “Actually, I intend to. Since our own townhouse is not complete, I want the child to be born there in Spencer House, one tied to our family history. It will be good for her to attend a few events of the London season. The duchess’s mother is coming from the States for the birth, and I shall endeavor to see she does not get in your way. Mrs. Vanderbilt—now Mrs. Belmont—has a tendency to take things over.”

  “So I gathered from what Her Grace said. I shall be back next week.”

  Meanwhile, I read German philosophers Mother had forbidden me, though I should have picked something cheerier. I spent a lot of time staring out my window at the pond where a butler, before I came, had drowned himself, or so Lilian, with her tendency to talk of ghosts, told me.

  But I was immensely cheered when Winston came back from his military assignment in Italy and dropped in to see me before we removed to London. His energy and buoyant personality lifted me. He had been pumping me for any shred of conversation Lord Balfour had muttered when he was here for the royal visit.

  “Let us walk to the monument and back,” he suggested after lunch. “It is a lovely September day. We shall take it slow.”

  “You know ladies in the family way are not to exercise too much and I am big as . . . as a barn.”

  “Nonsense, you look beautiful as ever and can use the walk.”

  “Speaking of ladies, have you found a particular one you favor?” I asked him as I tied a scarf over my hat to face that windy day.

  “Only one, but she is taken,” he said with a grin and a wink at me. “But I am looking, looking. I must make my way, of course, first. It will not do to just be a war correspondent or soldier, even an officer. Consuelo, if I do stand for local office, will you attend my talks? Lend me your good graces?”

  “Of course, and Sunny will, too. I envy your long friendship with him.”

  “Because we are so different. That is what people say. I am brash and hell-bent—excuse my language—and Sunny, circumspect and, well, inward.”

  “But blood is thicker than water. You are a formidable pair of cousins. Winston,” I said and took his arm as we walked outside into the brisk breeze, “you do not seem to hold any resentment against this—our coming child, though if it is a son, it really sets you back from inheriting the dukedom if something should happen to Sunny.”

  “My dear, think of it this way. It would slow me down to have to tend to everything here if I were duke. Blenheim, an honor but a burden. It’s like that tall pillar there, with the first duke atop it,” he said, pointing dramatically at the monument in the distance. “How marvelous to be that lofty soul, but all alone, set in stone, way up there, instead of down here—with people who need help in war but in peace, too.”

  “Oh,” I said, sounding quite inadequate after all that. I just stood there for a moment with the wind buffeting my skirts. The man did have a way with words. “I do see what you mean, though,” I told him.

  “I knew you would. If you bear Blenheim a son, that will be all for the best with me and for me, my friend Consuelo. And I hear your mother is coming soon.”

  “She is and batten down the hatches.”

  “I adored my mother,” he said with a sigh. “Still do. But she was not around much. Quite the determined whirlwind, too. Truly, my dear nanny was my emotional mother, so be sure to get a good one for your brood.”

  “My brood?” I asked and stopped our walk across the grass. I had to laugh. “If I birth this one, that will be enough of a brood for now. And perhaps I shall have a daughter, as I was firstborn.”

  “But Sunny said your mother bore two boys after that.”

  “And I miss them both, my father too,” I said with a sigh. I squinted upward at the rather too tall memorial with the first duke standing atop the Column of Victory in a Roman toga with his arm raised as if in blessing. I sighed, and the wind seemed to snatch my breath away. “I know I will not be able to do much in London, but it will keep me busier than here, make the time pass faster. Yet, I must admit, I am starting to think of beautiful Blenheim as home.”

  “Beautiful Blenheim for its beautiful duchess,” he said quite solemnly. “Consuelo, I wish you well as you gift England with its next noble generation of us Spencer-Churchill-Marlboroughs. Now, here is one way I buck myself up in tough times,” he said, lifting his right hand and spreading two fingers in a V. “It makes me look upward,” he said with a glance up at the statue.

  I lifted my right hand and made the same sign. We gently bumped our fingertips together. “Always onward and upward!” I told him, as we turned about into the wind to head back to the palace.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sunny seemed to care about me more during the days of my pregnancy, at least the times we were together. When he was planning the laying out of the water terraces he hoped to build, he would send for me to come out, be sure I had a chair, and explain his ideas. I agreed the sculpted, terraced beauty would soften and enhance the honey-hued building itself. More than once he promised that as soon as our child was born, I should invite my papa and some friends to see the setting for the future terraces my dowry would provide for the palace.

  I spent some time overseeing the purchasing of a layette for our child, boy or girl. I spent so much time with the Bladon and Woodstock poor and elderly—and of course the schoolchildren—that Sunny insisted we head to London early. I will never forget my farewell to Mrs. Prattley as I held her delicate hands in mine. Her voice was like crinkly paper.

  “I wish a blessing for yourself and the babe,” she told me, lifting her sightless eyes toward my face as I sat beside her. “All will be well for Your Grace, our Angel of Woodstock.”

  “That means so much to me, my friend. It is like a mother’s blessing.”

  “But she will be there, you say. Just remember that ‘This too shall pass.’ The difficult parts, the pain.”

  “I will bring the child, him or her, here to meet you someday.”

  “I do not know, Your Grace. Time weighs heavy on me.”

  And on me, I thought in the days after. This endless waiting. The avid expectations of my husband and his family. And my mother coming soon when I had not seen her for months after being under her thumb for so long. I was my own woman now, about to become a mother myself. Would she have changed? Dare she still try to dominate me, a married woman and a duchess?

  The month before my actual lying in approached, Sunny leased Spencer House, a gray-stone, many-windowed home in St. James’s, London. He took me on carriage rides and, at the doctor’s request, escorted me on walks, mostly on the grounds or in nearby Green Park, which the three-storied house overlooked.

  A week before Mother was to arrive, the most ornate, gilded, and crafted cradle I had ever seen arrived from her. It had been made in Italy, sculpted with twisted sea creatures on its base. A canopy of Belgian lace was draped over it. It belonged in some Baroque palazzio in Venice, but here it was in the room next to mine, close to our new nanny’s bed, waiting, just waiting as were we all.

  Since 1897 was the celebration year for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee of sixty years on the throne, there were many London celebrations. Despite my girth, Sunny relented to let me attend the Devonshire House ball at the end of the season. I did not dance but sat with the dowagers off to the side and enjoyed the music and food. After dark, with a guard and two tall Marlborough footmen following us, we walked home through Green Park to lighted Spencer House nearby.

  Our men held lanterns, the light of which snagged an occasional family group or old man as we passed. I gasped when I saw a young woman sitting right on the grass with her torn shawl wrapped partly around a baby who was wailing. It seemed as if these poor ragamuffins had emerged full blown from the grass.

  “Perhaps I should have brought more men,” Sunny muttered.

  “Are they ill?” I asked him. “Not homeless, I hope. Even the poorest in Oxfordshire have a place to lay their heads. Can we give them coins?”

  “I am pleased to hear you
say that those near Blenheim are tended to. Sometimes,” he said, pressing my arm closer to his ribs, “I worry that you think you must do more for our local poor when that is just the way of things—here too.”

  “I do want to do more. If we have to send cold, castoff food to them, if there are orphans or beaten or lonely women anywhere near the estate, if—”

  “Consuelo, not now!”

  “Why not now? Here we are in the heart of the city, the one you call the grandest on earth, head and heart of the British Empire, in this Jubilee year, and there are some of the queen’s people—in mid-September when the wind will soon turn cold—who—”

  “Sush! Do not turn back! See, you stumbled. Are you all right?”

  “I just caught my toe. And we all stumble when you and I have just come from a feast and warm, lighted rooms and laughing people, and this is but a stone’s throw away!” I swept my other hand in an arc to encompass the people huddled on the damp grass. How I wanted to go back to that woman with the baby.

  He said naught else when I am sure he would have lectured me further had I not been heavy with child. It felt strange to have that power over him, to merely frown and have him inquire if I felt well, to hint I had not slept well and have him fuss.

  Whether or not I soon bore an heir for the family and Blenheim or “just a girl,” I vowed to love this child. And to someday, someway, speak out for the poor.

  MY MOTHER HAD a knack for pretending nothing had ever gone amiss between us, but I guess I was glad for that.

  “I am pleased you like the cradle,” she said the day she arrived. I had told her twice that the gift was most kind and generous of her. “A little piece of Renaissance Italy,” she added.

  “A big piece of it, I would say. A work of art.”

  “I knew you would approve now that you are here with all this, including a doting husband and heir on the way.”