That Churchill Woman

by Stephanie Barron

  “More than just the Irish feel that way.”

  “And they’ll throw bombs?”

  “I hope not.” Gently, Papa released her. “Don’t you worry about me, Jennie. I can take care of myself. You hold the fort here, understand?”

  She felt his kiss on the top of her head. She stepped back as he climbed into the carriage. Papa rolled an unsmoked cigar between his long fingers, shredding the tobacco, as the horses pulled away. Jennie realized with a small jolt of pride that he meant to save New York. And if Papa couldn’t, no one could.

  * * *

  —

  Days passed without a word from him, however, or none that Mamma shared. Jennie fretted at the silence. She longed to know what was happening in the world. The New York Times never came to the house unless Papa was there.

  “Do you know where I can buy a newspaper?” she asked Dobbie one morning, when she could no longer abide her ignorance.

  “Now, Miss Jeanette, what would you be wanting with one of those?”

  Dobbie was ironing a pile of white muslin shifts. She was responsible for the care of the younger girls’ clothes, and the scents of iron and linen and lavender water, which she used to dampen the shifts before she pressed them, filled the upstairs room. Jennie was sprawled on a window seat overlooking the trees that surrounded the house. The rustle of leaves made her feel like a bird in a secret nest. She imagined climbing out onto the nearest limb and swinging from one branch to another.

  “When he left here, Papa said he was fiddling while Rome burned. I should like to know what he meant.”

  Dobbie snorted. “I suspect your Papa fiddles most days. Can’t be the King of Wall Street without leading a whole band.”

  “Is New York burning?” Jennie demanded fiercely. “I must know.”

  Dobbie folded a square of linen deliberately and set it on a pile. Her dark eyes flicked across Jennie’s face; she was deciding, Jennie knew, how much to say. “There’s mobs in the city, from what I hear tell.”

  “Are they near Papa, Dobbie?”

  A pause, while the hot iron passed to and fro. Jennie stared implacably at the nursemaid; at last Dobbie relented. “Two nights ago, they attacked his newspaper office.”

  Jennie’s stomach somersaulted, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. “Why?”

  “The Times backs Mr. Lincoln. Some folks don’t like that.”

  “Is Papa all right?”

  “I guess we’d have heard if he wasn’t.”

  She thought of her piano. Her library. “What about our house?”

  “The trouble’s all below Union Square,” Dobbie said.

  Jennie’s sense of the city was limited, but she thought Dobbie meant to reassure her.

  She ran to find Camille. They must write to Papa. They must tell him to come back to Newport as soon as he could.

  Her little sister was curled up on her white sleigh bed in the Dutch-blue bedroom, fully dressed. Her eyes were half-closed and her whole body shuddered. At first Jennie thought Camille was crying, but then she saw that the wetness on her face was sweat. She touched Camille’s forehead. Her little sister was burning with fever.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  London, March 1886

  Jennie sat at her writing desk, attempting to answer the flood of congratulatory notes that had arrived in response to her dinner. It was gratifying, of course, that the Deadly Enemies had thoroughly enjoyed themselves—or their proximity to the Prince and Princess of Wales—but her replies were perfunctory. As her hand moved across the thick linen notepaper, Jennie’s stuttering mind was on Winston. She was aware of her breast rising and falling with each breath. Any second, this simple power might be denied her son. Any second, the footman might appear with another note from Robson Roose, announcing that Winston had ceased to breathe. Fear made Jennie frantic. Her hand trembled and she blotted her words.

  Of course, Roose was the properest person to care for Win. Randolph was right—the doctor did not need an anxious mother hovering at his elbow. But as Jennie addressed her polite nothings to a score of friends and left them in an unruly pile for Randolph to frank—postage was free to Members of Parliament—panic rose like floodwater in her throat. Her husband was useless to her now. He had no comfort to give. He made the slightest request for support or concern seem like an outrageous imposition on his attention. Jennie was desperate for someone who cared. About her anxiety, her guilt, her animal need for reassurance.

  She set down her pen and sank back against her chair. Damnit. She wanted Charles Kinsky.

  How to think about the Count?

  Jennie had tried to avoid him since their private rupture. Over the past three years, she’d thrown herself into Randolph’s work. Her husband’s political career was important to her sons; it was all the foothold in British Society they had. But it was impossible to cut Charles Kinsky entirely—he was a fixture in London’s best drawing rooms. There were moments when Jennie glimpsed him across a crowded salon, felt his cool eyes upon her like a finger drawn suddenly down her back. Then she curtseyed in his direction, talked lightly of him to strangers, pretended there was nothing more between them than a love of horses and mutual friends. He was always surrounded by his entourage. He escorted a series of beautiful women, some married, some not. He never met her alone after that reckless climb to her bedroom window. She had burned her bridges when she told Charles it was impossible for her to love only him.

  Jennie had tried to take other men into her bed, out of a need for affection and human warmth. Edgar Vincent, Viscount D’Abernon, a Cambridge-educated soldier who adored art; Henri, Marquis de Breteuil, with his dreamlike chateau southwest of Paris. She had even briefly enjoyed a flirtation with young Harry Cust, whose way with words had charmed her as much as his roguish smile. All useless. Jennie had driven away the one man she loved. And, Lord help her, how she wanted him now—

  She drew forward a sheet of blank notepaper embossed with her monogram, and hesitated over it, her pen suspended.

  Dearest Charles, Winston is gravely ill at school—indeed, as I write this, he may already be…

  Jennie crumpled the sheet and tossed it to the floor.

  My Dear Count Kinsky—Although it has been some years since communication of a personal nature has passed between us, I feel compelled to let you know that I am in great trouble at present. My son, Winston, is gravely ill at school in Brighton, and…

  She tore the sheet in two.

  Absurd, to ask anything of a man she’d sent away with such ruthless precision. He would toss her letter on the fire without even breaking the seal.

  Jennie rose from her desk and stared at the spring rain coursing down the windowpanes. Her pulse throbbed relentlessly in her temples. Nobody would be riding in Hyde Park today. A full-blown gallop would calm her nerves, and to hell with the wet. At least she’d be far from the threat of Roose’s next bulletin. She hurried upstairs to change into her oldest boots and riding habit.

  * * *

  —

  From Connaught Place, the park was due south. As always, Jennie was obliged to guide her gelding, a showy chestnut she’d named Uncle Sam, through the traffic of Edgeware Road to the Cumberland Gate. From there, she had a choice of paths down to Rotten Row, which ran along the park’s southern edge from Hyde Park Corner to the Serpentine Road. She met few riders as she trotted briskly beneath the dripping trees, which were flushed with the first acid green, but as she turned Sam’s head into the sanded expanse of Rotten Row and collected herself to gallop, she glimpsed a scattering of horses ahead. No matter. She was adept enough in the saddle to weave her racing mount through a handful of plodders. She had done it often enough in the hunting field. She urged Sam forward.

  A half mile in, her breath tearing in her chest and the gelding at full stretch, she blew past a pair of beautifully mounted riders. Jennie barely spared
them a glance—they were moving at a walk, well to her right, the gentleman shielding the lady, whose horse was close to the inner rail. But the man’s dark head turned swiftly as she bowled by him, and Jennie caught the straight blade of the nose, the unmistakable blue eyes, the strong line of his chin. Charles.

  And beside him, her mouth a perfect O, the blond Miss Fairfield, heiress to a prodigious factory fortune.

  Did Charles urge his horse forward, before his mind checked the impulse and reined in pursuit? Jennie felt it was just possible. She felt his surge in the saddle, his eyes boring into her back. But she did not glance behind in her flight. She would not stop, to be patronized by a Miss Fairfield. She kicked Uncle Sam harder, tears whipping down her cheeks.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Newport, July 1863

  When Camille had been sick for three days, Clara Jerome at last sent Jennie in her dogcart into town with a letter for Papa. Clara thought he ought to know that a fever of this kind, in summer, was out of the ordinary. Dr. Winslow, she wrote, was not entirely encouraging. She did not tell him that Camille tossed in sweat-soaked sheets or that her breathing was labored. One of the women from the kitchen sat by her bed and fed chips of ice between her cracked lips.

  Jennie was no longer allowed to sleep in the same room. She hovered on the threshold constantly, checking to see if Camille was better. Her little sister’s cheeks were mottled and her pale peach eyelids were translucent as shells. She whiffled when she breathed, like a dreaming dog.

  Jennie brought her bouquets of Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susan she gathered along the roadsides and tied with her hair ribbons. She played the piano for hours each day, in the hope that Mozart and Bach would sooth Camille. She wrote stories in her scrawling hand about the donkeys and Alva Smith and Consuelo Yznaga, who had fallen over when a big wave hit them at Bailey’s Beach and gotten drenched to her ears. She pressed these jokes on Dobbie, who read them to Camille and swore her sister always smiled when she heard them.

  After Jennie turned in Mamma’s letter at the post office that third day, she lashed Willie and Wooshie until they galloped along Bellevue Avenue. There was too much traffic now at the height of the Season for such behavior to be safe. She careened past carriages frothy with women’s parasols. It would take at least a day for Mamma’s letter to reach Madison Square, and another for Papa to answer it. Jennie wished Mamma had sent a telegram instead. She was sure Camille would get better once Papa was there to smooth her hair.

  She pulled up the donkeys on a small bluff above the streets of town, under the shade of a tree. From here she could see the sweep of ocean, the wharves stretching out into Narragansett Bay. The sun flashed brilliantly on the deep blue-green of the sea, riffled with whitecaps. Schooners dipped and turned under their widest sail. Jennie felt her heart surge and something of her joy must have communicated itself through the reins to the donkeys; Wooshie flicked an ear back at her and tossed his head. In a world so fresh and beautiful, surely nothing could be wrong for long. Not even Camille.

  Jennie’s eyes roamed appreciatively over the wharves, then stopped dead. For an instant, she thought she had imagined Clara Clarita, lying sleek as a cat at her usual mooring. She craned forward to study the slip. But it was no mirage. There was the steamer, dark-hulled and merry with its striped awnings. Papa was already in Newport. It would be days, now, before he received Mamma’s letter.

  * * *

  —

  “I was ready for them,” Leonard Jerome said.

  He wore a smoking jacket and his collar was undone. Fanny was in one of the loose day gowns that Jennie would later order herself from Charles Worth in Paris, called a déshabillé, and her chestnut hair was unpinned down her back. Leonard was stretched out on a chaise longue in her boudoir, and Fanny was curled on the rug at his feet. Somewhere in the house a child wailed. All the windows were open to admit the sea air, because the late July weather was close this year. An insect bumped repeatedly against the picture moldings. Leonard’s hand stroked her head as though she were a prized retriever. Fanny felt a trickle of sweat between her breasts. She leaned into his hand.

  “The first thing I did when I got back to New York was hunt down two of the new Gatling machine guns that the War Department has been fashioning. They’re not for civilian use but I’ll say I made my case. The Times has backed Lincoln. It’s fitting that he should back the Times.”

  “Leonard,” Fanny murmured.

  “I had them mounted right at the newspaper’s main doors. Drawing a bead on the whole of Times Square. When that vicious crowd came for us, meaning to lynch the editors from the trees, I manned one of the guns myself. Raymond”—Henry Jarvis Raymond was the Times founder—“manned the other. They left us alone after a while.”

  He stroked her head methodically. Cigar smoke curled to the ceiling and stunned the insect meandering there.

  “Six days,” he went on. “Six days of looting and fighting, Fan. Negro neighborhoods burned. Some dozen Negro men dragged from their homes and murdered. Bodies dragged behind carriages. Cobbles torn from the streets and hurled through windows. They haven’t begun to count the dead or the cost of the destruction.”

  “Leonard,” Fanny said again. Her voice was soothing, soporific.

  “They torched the Negro orphanage, did you know that? And the little children running in their nightdresses through the dark, screaming. I hope never to see another week like it. I am so grateful to God my own girls are safe.”

  “Stay here now,” she urged. “You’ve done your part.”

  “I can’t. The city’s a smoking ruin.”

  Fanny stiffened under his hand, suddenly alert. Her ears had detected an uproar at her door, a persistent demand for admission. Perhaps August Belmont…She half rose, Leonard’s fingers slipping to her shoulder.

  “Papa,” Jennie burst out as she thrust open the door of Fanny’s boudoir, “I am sorry to disturb you and Mrs. Ronalds, as I know it is not the done thing. But poor Camille is terribly sick and she needs you! Will you come now in the dogcart, please?”

  * * *

  —

  She never knew what her father told Mamma. Some variation on the theme of a desire to join his family, without ever having received Clara’s letter. This argument would place him in the most charitable light, and leave Fanny entirely out of it.

  Jennie never knew what he said because she fell ill herself that evening.

  The talk of the grown-ups became echoes and murmurs, distorted by fever. Dobbie going on about orphan children lynching policemen in their nightshirts. Dobbie talking about ice, and crooning that she should mouth it. A cool cloth grazed her forehead and swiftly turned warm and sodden. Miss Hallam and Clarita stood on the fringe of sight, faces distressed and swimming through waves of heat. Miss Hallam refused to enter the sickroom. It was not her place, she informed Clara Jerome; besides, her fiancé forbade her to endanger herself.

  Clara set Miss Hallam to amusing Clarita and little Leonie with elocution and exercise along the Cliff Walk. Neither sister was allowed to enter the Middles’ room. They were told only good news. Clarita tried to mother four-year-old Leonie but she was frightened and made a poor job of it. Jennie’s throat was swollen and most terribly painful; a rash spread across her stomach. She woke desperate for water and groaning from the pain in her joints.

  Rheumatic fever, the kitchen maid Hannah mumbled as she bathed Jennie’s forehead. Got it hanging around the stables, and passed it to that angel there. No one would ever call Jennie an angel. Mamma called her “young lady” and Papa called her “a sad romp,” but it was Camille who was angelic, Camille for whom they had no words.

  Jennie lay spellbound and dreamed of burning. Of Papa with a fiddle in his hands. Camille cried tunelessly in her torment, and the sound wove through Jennie’s mind like a dirge. Some dozen hanged from trees. As good a Nero as any.

 
Her fever broke the fifth night. The next day she was moved to a separate room, a disinterested bed with cooler sheets.

  Camille’s fever did not break. Her heart and lungs grew weaker. The doctor told Mamma that the fever was afflicting her brain. Clara Jerome took Dobbie’s chair and fed her baby ice, refusing to leave the room. Papa, as Jennie expected, smoothed Camille’s hair, but she had traveled far out on the Narragansett waters and the tide did not appear to be bringing her back.

  Jennie disobeyed orders that night. She climbed into her sister’s bed and curled protectively around her. Camille’s frail body was a furnace. She did not open her eyes but her stiff frame relaxed at Jennie’s touch. Jennie laid her cheek against her sister’s neck, listening fiercely to her heart.

  She was still holding Camille when it stopped.

  * * *

  —

  Camille’s coffin seemed so terribly small. They placed it in the morning room and set flowers all around it. Mrs. August Belmont sent white lilies from her gardens. Camille looked like a doll nobody played with anymore, and her skin when Jennie touched it had the senseless quality of bisque. For three days, the ladies of Newport came to pay their respects while Clara Jerome received in the drawing room. Mamma wore a black so dense it seemed to absorb light and sound.

  Fanny Ronalds held Clara’s hand in silence. Papa kept his distance from them both.

  Nobody visited Camille except Jennie. She stole down the back staircase while the grown-ups were all busy trading sacred nothings in the front parlor, and crept into the morning room at the rear of the house. Camille lay silent and still, her head toward the fireplace and her feet toward the bow windows that overlooked the garden. They had been draped in black crepe, like the mirror over the mantel, so that Camille’s soul would not be trapped in the shiny glass. Dobbie had explained this carefully to Jennie when she draped the mirror in the girls’ bedroom. All over the house, every inch of glass was covered.