That Churchill Woman

by Stephanie Barron

  From the age of nine, when Jennie first saw Papa’s fingers caress Fanny Ronalds’s throat in the private opera house on Madison Square, she had known that love was a terrible thing. Love destroyed families and happiness.

  Love was the reason Mamma had sailed away from New York with her daughters forever.

  Love was violent and destructive. Good only for Austrians—and fools.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  On the fifth of July, without warning, John Winston Spencer-Churchill, the Seventh Duke of Marlborough, suffered an attack of angina and died. He was sixty-one years old.

  He lay in state for three days in the private chapel at Blenheim, with its hideous marble walls the color of raw liver, then was interred in the crypt with his ancestors on a humid and lowering summer afternoon. The air was thick with thunder and Duchess Fanny’s misery. The Spencer-Churchill family marked its grief by donning black clothes and refusing all public engagements for the remainder of the year.

  Jennie and Randolph left England at the end of July with their boys and Mrs. Everest, their nanny, for cool relief in the mountains of Switzerland.

  Blenheim Palace was entailed upon Randolph’s brother George, but the dead Duke gave one final nod of dislike toward his ramshackle heir—he left the bulk of his remaining funds to his widow, Fanny, and his younger son, Randolph. George was now the Eighth Duke but had no means to support his rank. More of Blenheim’s treasures would have to be sold.

  Duchess Fanny retired to the rented house on Berkeley Square. Sarah gave up her debut for another year and spent her time bicycling in Hyde Park. At the end of the summer, Randolph and Jennie returned from walking in the Alps and sent Winston off to a new school in Brighton—Jennie’s answer to the sadist at St. George’s. To her surprise, Blandford invited the Churchills to shut up their London house and spend the rest of the mourning period at Blenheim.

  Blenheim. Jennie’s heart sank as she stared at Randolph’s brother, impeccably turned out and holding state over the teacups in her drawing room. His vast palace was damp and echoing and cheerless at the best of times—but particularly desolate in winter.

  “I need a damned hostess,” he explained irritably as he sipped his Darjeeling. “You know Goosie’s obtained her divorce at long last. Just missed the chance to call herself a duchess.”

  “And your mother?”

  “The Dowager, as she insists on being addressed, is determined to remain in London. I don’t want her living in my pocket in any case; we’ve never seen eye to eye.”

  Blandford—Jennie could not yet think of him as His Grace—had cannily delivered his invitation while Randolph was in Commons. Desperate to avoid offending him, she settled for a faint smile. “How kind of you to think of us. But I must refuse to answer until I may consult Randolph. It is his work in Parliament that dictates our lives, George.”

  “You can talk him round,” he urged. “Randy will give you anything you ask.”

  “Will he?” Jennie mocked, with raised brows.

  “By God, if you were my wife, you could have the earth on a platter.” George had always treated Jennie less like a sister-in-law than a woman to be seduced. He leaned in to kiss her cheek, but she rose hastily and left him reaching for air.

  “I’m sorry to let you go, George,” she attempted, “but I must change for an engagement.”

  He set down his cup and rose to his feet. “Does my brother make you happy?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “After all these years?” He stepped toward her. “You don’t find that familiarity…breeds contempt?”

  Only in your case, she thought wearily. “I daresay Randy is more compelling than your Goosie.”

  George barked out a laugh. “He has only to utter a complete sentence to manage that! Do you know what she did to me? When I tangled myself with Edith Aylesford? Left a china baby doll in a chafing dish on the breakfast sideboard! Gave me the queerest start when I lifted the lid in search of kippers. She thought it was a joke.”

  “Goosie always had an unsettling sense of humor.”

  “The woman’s demented. And worse luck, she’s reared my heir.” George studied Jennie with narrowed eyes. “Hear you’ve been spending a good deal of time with that Kinsky fellow. Handsome devil. Too young for you, of course. Woman like you needs a man of experience.”

  “Your gossips have failed you, George,” Jennie said indifferently. “The Count merely escorted me once or twice in Hyde Park. As have a hundred others.”

  “Mind you confine him to the park, Jennie.”

  “As you confined Edith to Paris?” Her eyes blazed.

  “City was wasted on her.” He reached for his homburg and settled it on his brow. “Nothing would be wasted on you. Not even a dukedom.”

  “I’d say you were flattering me, George.” Jennie handed him his cane. “But then, I actually know how little your dukedom is worth.”

  “Got the price of everything, Jennie?” he rasped, stung. “And the value of nothing? But I was forgetting. You are American, after all.”

  “Just a woman, George, like any other,” Jennie replied sweetly. “Naturally we price the goods we’re offered. We’re forced to pay so much more heavily for our sins than men.”

  * * *

  —

  “I don’t know why your brother even wants a hostess!” she raged at Randolph as Gentry brushed her hair that night. “He’s in mourning! He may hunt and shoot this whole wretched winter, but he’s not likely to throw a ball for the entire county!”

  “I daresay he wants help with his grocer’s accounts.” Randolph was leaning in her dressing room doorway, one hand stuffed into the pocket of a quilted smoking jacket. “George is no fool. As Father left me all the blunt, he thinks I ought to pay for his butcher and wine merchant. There’s a certain symmetry to the arrangement.”

  Jennie glared at his reflection in her mirror. “You have no intention of accepting his offer, I hope?”

  Randolph shrugged and blew a cloud of cigar smoke, obscuring his image in the glass. “We could do with some cost-saving ourselves. Father’s funds aside, I’ve no idea how we shall make ends meet. And with Winston’s school fees…”

  “The new place is cheaper than St. George’s. If the Government were to fall…” Members of Parliament, such as Randolph, were paid nothing. But Cabinet secretaries received five thousand pounds per annum. Surely Randy would be offered a Government post if the Conservatives came in?

  “If, if,” Randolph sighed. “Gladstone is likely to bugger on well into the next century, out of sheer obstinance.”

  Jennie threw him a despairing look. “What would we possibly do in Oxfordshire all winter?”

  Gentry reached for the hair receiver on the dressing table, her lips pursed. The maid was a native Cockney and hated Blenheim almost as much as Jennie did. She combed out the brush with stifled violence.

  “You could hunt with George,” Randolph suggested mildly. “You haven’t had a topping season in the field since Ireland. The Blenheim pack is first-rate.”

  “Are you entirely comfortable, Randolph, consigning your wife to the care of a rake?”

  “Old George is harmless.” He frowned at his cigar. “I shan’t abandon you, Jennie—I’ll be poking around the dreaded barracks at your side.”

  “But—darling, your work…”

  “That’s what the British railways are for. Last I checked, there was a branch line from Woodstock. Paid for by my father.” He thrust himself out of the doorway, intent on his own room and bed. “Mind you speak with an estate agent tomorrow, Jennie. There must be any number of families who’d jump at the chance to rent this house for the Season. We have so many bathrooms! And electricity.”

  * * *

  —

  Within weeks, Jennie went into a new kind of exile. The house on Connaught Place fell silent under Hollan
d covers, and the trunks were sent down with the servants to Woodstock. On her first morning at Blenheim she galloped alone through the estate’s vast park, wishing with a stab of anguish that a familiar dark figure would appear on horseback, pull up under a great cedar, and call to her.

  But it would be years before she saw Charles Kinsky again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Temperature 104.3, and the right lung is generally involved, Robson Roose noted. He was sitting outside the boy’s dimly lit room, writing hastily on a sheet of paper. There was no desk in the infirmary, which like everything in the Thomson Sisters’ School at Brighton was not very large. Roose had propped a book on his lap to support the page and had set the inkwell on the floor. He bent down periodically to rewet his pen.

  He wrote down the date—Sunday, 14 March, 1886—and the hour. Seven forty-three in the evening.

  This report may appear grave, yet it merely indicates the approach of the crisis which, please God, will result in an improved condition should the left lung remain free.

  He hesitated, his brow furrowing above his neat gold spectacles. This was the third bulletin he had sent off to Connaught Place in the past twenty-four hours. He had served as the Churchills’ family doctor for years and had known Winston from birth. The eleven-year-old boy’s parents had descended on the school the previous day when it was clear he had contracted pneumonia. They arrived separately—Lord Randolph from Blenheim and Lady Randolph from London, with her nanny, Mrs. Everest, who would help with the nursing.

  “Woom,” Winston had rasped as he clung to the nanny’s hand. “My Woomany. You won’t leave me?”

  He was flung out on his side on the narrow iron cot, a sheet kicked off and in a tangle around his feet. A spot of vivid color burned in each pallid cheek. His china-blue eyes were brilliant with fever.

  “Not on your life, Master Winston,” Everest replied as she smoothed the linen and drew it up under the boy’s chin. “It’s your mamma as must return to London tonight, on account of her party for the Prince of Wales. Think of that! His Royal Highness in your drawing room tomorrow evening!”

  “Will Gladstone be there?” the boy demanded. “And Chamberlain? Uncle Arthur Balfour?”

  “No doubt,” Everest soothed. “If you’re a good boy and do your best to get well, you might just catch a glimpse of all those toffs. But you must drink some broth for Woom now.”

  Lord Randolph had sent a note of encouragement into the sickroom, but Roose forbade him to enter—as his lordship’s doctor, he could not advise Randolph to risk his delicate health. And there was the younger boy, Jack, at home to think of—his lordship could not be carrying contagion back to London. Lord Randolph waited long enough to hear Roose’s assessment of Winston’s lungs before driving to the Brighton station.

  “You can have no such fears for me,” Lady Randolph had insisted firmly, and stepped past Roose to take up a chair by her son’s bedside. And indeed, he had to admit that her ladyship was in her usual roaring health—although her expression was more strained than he had ever seen it. She managed a smile as she smoothed Winston’s hair, and sang him some Brahms in her throaty alto. Lullaby and good night, with roses bedight…

  “Will you do something for me, Mummie?” the boy demanded as she paused for breath.

  “Anything, my darling.”

  “Beg for the Prince’s signature,” he implored, “and Mr. Gladstone’s, if you can. If you will only send them to me, all the other boys will be green.”

  Lady Randolph’s lips quirked, but she told her son to Hush, darling, and not to worry about such things now.

  She had no idea, the doctor suspected, that there was a raging market among the Brighton schoolboys for the best autographs—Winston even sold his mother’s. Lady Randy was one of the PBs, or Professional Beauties: Society women whose pictures were flogged on postcards at news kiosks without their knowledge or consent. Roose rather thought Lady Randy was the one the hawkers called the Black Pearl.

  But the brief plea had worn Winston out; in his pain and difficulty the boy began to cry weakly, his breathing clotted with the fluid in his lungs. Everest moved firmly between him and his mother and said, “Rest is what Master Win wants. Rest and quiet.”

  Lady Randolph dropped a kiss in her son’s palm. “Keep this for me until I return, darling.”

  Winston’s fingers curled where her lips had been. The rasp of his labored breathing filled the room. His eyelids fluttered closed. But with a parting wistful look, Lady Randy left them in a swirl of scarlet embroidered mantle and chic doeskin gloves—her head full, Roose supposed, with plans for that party.

  “Thank God for the unstinting love of nannies,” he muttered as he took Winston’s temperature.

  By the time Saturday’s dinner hour had passed, Winston had fallen into delirium. His fever mounted through the night. The words he uttered were mangled and uncertain. The delirium continued Sunday. Roose glanced toward the dimly lit alcove, screened from direct light, where Everest sat with the boy, smoothing his hot forehead with folded cloths soaked in ice water. The nanny’s eyes were bright with unshed tears. Winston no longer knew that his Woomany was there.

  Roose felt a stab of frustration. The Churchills thought he had all the answers. That he was someone they could trust. But there was not much he could do in cases of pneumonia—plunge the boy into an ice bath if fever threatened his brain. Give him digitalis by the mouth and rectum, to keep his heart beating. But the disease would work its course, regardless. Winston would die. Or he would live.

  Roose drew his pocket watch from his waistcoat and looked wearily at the hour. He was an expert in both gout and nervous complaints; the most celebrated of Society’s lions, including Lord Randolph, consulted him in his rooms in Harley Street. He would have to spend the night here in the infirmary, however, and put off his London work, until the redheaded boy muttering and choking in the bed behind him rallied—or sank.

  He hoped Winston rallied. The cost to Roose’s reputation, if Lord Randolph Churchill’s son died, was too great to bear.

  * * *

  —

  Jennie had invited twenty-four people to dine that Sunday, including—for the first time at Connaught Place—the Prince and Princess of Wales. She was imitating Fanny Ronalds by summoning the Great on the Sabbath; it was supposed to be a day of pious observance, but most people were bored silly by dinnertime and desperate for diversion. She had, of course, hurried down to Brighton with Everest the previous day, but there was no question of remaining there with Winston—a thousand details required her attention in London.

  “The invitations went out weeks ago,” she told Randolph. “Sick child or no, the dinner must go forward.”

  “Your guest list,” Randolph mused, “is absurd in its optimism. Do you really expect me to trade polite nothings with Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain—that working-class bounder from the Midlands—while Bertie tut-tuts and looks on?”

  “Yes,” Jennie retorted. “I’m attempting a bit of political witchcraft, Randy, and you should be down on your knees in thanks! Bertie’s finally agreed to grace us with his presence. Ten years since your silly spat—and he only now consents to dine in Connaught Place?”

  They were chatting as they often did, between the doorways of their adjoining rooms, as their personal servants dressed them for dinner. Jennie was in emerald-green velvet embroidered with ivory thread, the front of the gown draped back to reveal a tightly fitted ivory silk underskirt; it had the new round neckline and slight cap sleeves that displayed her collarbones to perfection. Gentry had wound emerald silk through her black hair, which was elaborately looped at the back of her head. Jennie thought with satisfaction that she looked like a mermaid or Siren, even if she was a terrifying two-and-thirty. If only she had a few emeralds to clasp at her neck! But no, simply the seven-pointed diamond star…

  “The Irish Questi
on is about to blow up in our faces, and you summon all my foes for soup and mutton! If there’s not blood spilled by the cheese course, Jennie, I’ll award you a knighthood.”

  “It’s certainly a dinner of deadly enemies,” she agreed, her eyes sparkling at him, “but where’s the fun, otherwise? You know what Arthur Balfour and even Hartington think about Irish Home Rule—why not hear the Working-Class Bounder’s views? Chamberlain could be Prime Minister one day!”

  “Not while I have breath in my body,” Randolph vowed. “The man’s a flaming Radical.” But he bared his teeth in what passed for a smile. Politics was the only passion he and Jennie still shared. How had he described it, so many years ago? The greatest of all blood sports?

  “You’ve been called the same in your time,” Jennie observed. “Perhaps Mr. Chamberlain is just another victim of the press.”

  “Dear God! Is it possible my own wife mistakes the enlightened debate of an educated man for a cur’s rabid snarl? Chamberlain never darkened the door of university. He earned a fortune in trade on the backs of factory brats. And he’s liable to lead them all to the barricades if we’re not careful.”

  Jennie glared at him. “Insult the fellow as you choose in Commons, Randy, but as a gentleman, you will be cordial at my dinner table!”

  “I’d sooner kiss a stoat!”

  “If Bertie can meet Chamberlain, so can you.”

  “Definitely a dinner of deadly enemies.” Randolph scowled as his valet eased his coat of dark gray superfine over his narrow shoulders.

  “I just might prove the salvation of the kingdom,” Jennie retorted.

  * * *

  —

  “What news from Brighton, my dear?” Arthur Balfour asked as soon as he appeared in Jennie’s drawing room, his voice pitched low amidst the throng of guests. “Is the young chap any better?”