That Churchill Woman

by Stephanie Barron

—

  Randolph was returned for South Paddington with 77 percent of the vote. The Conservative Party won in a landslide.

  Queen Victoria summoned Robert Cecil, the Marquess of Salisbury, to Buckingham Palace and asked him to form a Government.

  When the royal audience was over, Salisbury invited his nephew Arthur Balfour to join him for a cigar at the Carlton Club.

  “I now have four crosses to bear,” he said through a cloud of tobacco smoke. “The Prime Minister’s portfolio, the Foreign Office, the Queen—and Randolph Churchill. The burden increases in that order, Arthur.”

  Balfour examined the spirits in his glass. “Randy’s brought us in with a sweep, sir.”

  “And he wants my job,” Salisbury pointed out.

  “Only the Queen could give him that—and she declined. What are you going to do?”

  “Name Churchill Leader in Commons. And Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

  “Sir!” Arthur was startled. “I’m not sure that’s wise.”

  His uncle stared at him coldly. “The two posts generally go together.”

  “Because they’re portals to the prime ministership,” Balfour agreed. “But the Treasury portfolio is the most powerful position in Government, behind yours.”

  “And?”

  Balfour hesitated. He’d been a few forms ahead of Randolph at Eton. “Randy was never very good at sums.”

  Salisbury discarded his ash. “So much the better,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Jennie went looking for a dress on the last day of July, in a sudden shower of rain. She and Randolph were expected at Cowes for Regatta Week in August, and she absolutely had to be new-gowned for whatever entertainments the Waleses were sure to offer. With Randolph back in Cabinet it was essential that she represent him in as glittering a fashion as possible. Princess Alix spent Race Week in a variety of sailor dresses, navy blue and white, with closely fitted high necklines to disguise her scar, and neatly tailored bodices, masculine in style. Jennie was thinking of something lighter and altogether more suggestive of France. Bertie loved Paris and French women; a looser style would surely please him.

  She patronized a modiste with a salon in Piccadilly, a Mademoiselle Antoine who had probably never seen Paris but could buy the latest French fashion plates and had the cleverness to copy them. Even with the prospect of Randy’s Cabinet salary, Worth was much too expensive to consider this summer.

  But when she entered the salon, Jennie’s heart sank. Most of the mannequins circling the room seemed to be in thrall to Princess Alix, wearing necklines that hugged the throat—whether for sailing, casino, or walking. Worse, the half bustle at the rear of the gown had become a veritable shelf, while the fronts were elaborately draped over underskirts that clung to the legs. A warmer, more uncomfortable, and more constraining costume for August Jennie could not imagine.

  Two girls—in their early twenties, from the simple lines of their white dresses—sipped tea indolently on a settee. Jennie recognized the Miss Tennants, Margot and her elder sister, Laura, who were suddenly at the glamorous center of Society. The pair had formed a sort of club they called the Souls, a group of men and women who sometimes gathered (scandalously) in the girls’ night nursery on Grosvenor Square to discuss Art and Life’s Meaning. Laura was lately married to Arthur Lyttleton but Margot was still a debutante—George Curzon, Jennie understood, was deeply smitten with her. All the daring and expensive young people in London had collected around the sisters, but she had not been introduced to the Tennants herself. Perhaps at thirty-two she was too old for the Souls….

  “Lady Randolph! Where have you been hiding?”

  And there was Fanny Ronalds, elegantly composed in an upright chair, with a straw hat like a Turkish fez perched on the top of her head. The chestnut curls betrayed a few streaks of gray. Her liquid dark eyes were as vibrant as ever, and her figure never strayed from its rigid discipline—she must be a few years short of fifty, Jennie calculated, but she wore it well. Always exquisitely gowned, of course. Her men saw to that. Today she wore a white linen carriage dress with a broad windowpane check in peacock blue, trimmed with peacock-blue silk in a Greek key design eight inches deep along the hem. Perfect for high summer.

  Jennie kissed Fanny’s cheek, and felt a sudden rush of warmth that had everything to do with childhood and memory.

  “My dearest Fanny, how is it that in a circle as small as London, we never come to meet?”

  “You’re political and I’m bohemian,” Fanny replied. “The two rarely mix, I find. Particularly when that husband of yours is rocketing to his predestined heights. It wouldn’t do to be seen with music-hall riffraff; Dandy Randy might end up parodied in one of Arthur’s shows!”

  “He’d make a beautiful Pooh-Bah. ‘Lord High Everything Else,’ am I right?”

  W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s Mikado was all the rage that year; Jennie had seen the comic opera three times. As Arthur Sullivan’s acknowledged companion, naturally Fanny gloried in his success.

  “You look well, Jennie,” she said. “How are your dear father and mother?”

  “Mamma remains in Paris, and Papa in New York—where he is consumed with horse racing,” Jennie told her. “He and August Belmont have launched yet another track. In Sheepshead Bay, of all places.”

  “August Belmont,” Fanny repeated reminiscently. “It has been an age since I heard that name. Do you know that on one occasion, Belmont bankrolled the most elaborate party for me? And that your poor papa paid for it, too? He and dear August were bound to discover my sad confusion over expenses, but neither was so ungentlemanly as to tax me with it.”

  “A kinder age,” Jennie suggested, smiling. “No one may claim the title of gentleman anymore, Fanny—least of all those born to it. Self-made men are best.”

  “Now, now.” Fanny pressed her hand. “You must except your marvelous Charles Kinsky! The manners of an Austrian prince in the body of a dashing Englishman; I cannot think of a more elegant flirt. I was desolate to learn he’s been posted to Paris. How will you do without him?”

  “I’ve managed quite nicely to date.” Jennie’s heart began to thud painfully. Charles. Leaving England?

  Fanny’s brows rose. “I have put my foot in it! I thought you were the best of friends.”

  “We met once or twice, a few years since. But nothing more than that.”

  “Well, well. I ought to leave my bohemian set rather oftener. I am clearly behindhand with all the choicest bits of news. Tell me, my dear—what do you think of these hideous necklines for summer?”

  “I hate them,” Jennie said cordially.

  She chatted of fashion for as long as she could bear it, then fled Mademoiselle Antoine’s.

  * * *

  —

  How to think about Charles Kinsky?

  She had seen nothing of him since that bruising gallop through Rotten Row, but her mind had been filled incessantly with his voice. His hands. The elusive scent of him. She had expected Kinsky’s fascination to wane with time. She had expected to recover her self-possession, her sturdy bulwark against love and its tragedies, the longer they were apart. But love had crept up on Jennie unawares. Her yearning for Charles was as deep as her perpetual loneliness for Camille—as though Death had parted her from both of them.

  Why, she asked herself, had she fought him so much? Why was the deepest emotion she had ever felt in her life a force to be thwarted and feared?

  Fanny, she thought. Fanny and Papa. They had shown her long ago what the end of love looked like. And she had vowed never to be trapped in that kind of rubble.

  New York, January 1867

  “You must push off with enough speed to complete the figure,” Fanny Ronalds told Jennie as she skated beside her, “and raise your left ankle above your right.” Fanny was teaching her figure skating on the frozen pond a
t the Jerome country home in Bathgate, near Old Fordham.

  At twenty-eight, Fanny remained one of Mamma’s dearest friends, and was spending the week with them. There were three children in the Ronaldses’ nursery now, but except for a few lines at the corners of her eyes, Fanny looked as girlish as ever.

  Jennie was now thirteen. She studied the older woman’s example as she spun like a ballerina on the ice. “You’re dancing!” she exclaimed. “Even though it’s so slippery, and you should have tumbled long ago. How do you keep your balance, Mrs. Ronalds?”

  “I fight for it.” Fanny twirled slowly to a halt, her arms flung wide. “The key is to ignore your fear. Fear nips at the edge of the mind, Jeanette. You must knock it off its pins.”

  “I didn’t know you were afraid of falling.” Jennie was sharply afraid herself when her feet slid too fast to prevent disaster—and in the middle of the night, when she awoke from a dream of Camille, and remembered all over again that her sister was dead.

  “That’s because I refuse to show it.” Fanny skated over to Jennie. In her short-hooped skating costume, she might have been an enchantress from an Andersen fairy tale, Jennie thought—the Snow Queen perhaps. Her skirt of gray cashmere fell just below the knee, so that her shapely legs, clad in wool stockings and delicate boots with silver runners strapped to them, were partially, tantalizingly visible. The skirt had an over-draping of blue moiré silk that fluttered when Fanny sailed across the pond’s shimmering surface. A gray cashmere jacket trimmed in ermine and an ermine hat with a veil finished the costume. Her muff swung carelessly from one hand.

  “It’s never the ice that brings us down,” Fanny confided. “If you must tread a slippery path in life, Jeanette, self-confidence is vital. It can look like balance, even when you have none.”

  “And suggests you’d never dream of putting a foot wrong in the first place,” Jennie added, giggling.

  The Bathgate cottage they were sharing this January was barely a year old, and, unlike the Newport house, was designed for winter comfort. Papa had built it along with the rest of Jerome Park, his latest venture with August Belmont. The crown jewel of the sporting ground was Jerome Park Racetrack, where the two men’s passion for horse racing could be enjoyed in style. Papa’s racecourse had a grandstand that seated eight thousand, a clubhouse with a ballroom and bedchambers for overnight guests, and a dining room with its own chef.

  Jennie and Clarita had been allowed to attend the opening-day ceremonies the previous fall. Adelina Patti—the Italian soprano who was Papa’s latest flirt—had sung for the crowd. Jennie was allowed to watch the first horse race, which was called the Belmont Stakes because August Belmont had put up the prize money. When Papa’s thoroughbred, Kentucky, won, Papa ran with Jennie to the winner’s circle and hoisted her onto the horse’s back. She felt as giddy as though she’d won the race herself.

  “Have you heard anything from your father?” Fanny asked, a little abruptly.

  Which meant, Jennie knew, that Papa was no longer writing to her. The thought caused a dull ache, the way the frigid air coming off the ice pained Jennie’s bare hands.

  “He expects to dock in New York at the end of January,” she said in a rush. “Mamma received a letter last evening. I am sure she means to show it to you.”

  This was the first Christmas Jennie could remember without Papa—and the first time he had missed her birthday. He had left New York for Cowes in late November, following a transatlantic schooner race with his friends from the New York Yacht Club. The American boat had won, and Papa and his friends had remained in England to celebrate. Jennie wished with all her heart that he had come home.

  “You are more beautiful than Adelina Patti,” she said impulsively as Fannie spun in a final graceful figure. “I cannot think why Papa is smitten with her. Perhaps it is her voice, which we must acknowledge is very fine.”

  The look of careless freedom faded from Fanny’s eyes. “No one can equal her bel canto technique,” she replied. “Compared with Patti, I am an aging matron with no claim to talent or beauty.”

  She left the ice slowly, tearing off her gloves. After a moment, with a pang of regret for her thoughtless words, Jennie followed her. Fanny found a free spot on a bench and began to work at the laces of her runners. Jennie put her arms around her neck and rested her cheek against Fanny’s cool one.

  “I am sure Papa admires you,” she said. “So does Mr. Belmont.”

  “Never mind me.” Fanny’s eyes were fixed on her boots. “I do not want your pity, Jeanette, of all people’s. I know how much I have figured in your mind as a rival. Leonard loves you best of anyone in the world, because you are so much like him.”

  “You are not my rival!” Jennie protested, wounded. “Mamma’s, perhaps—”

  “Your mother should thank me.” Fanny met her gaze directly. “I have kept your papa amused and content and in no mood to find another family. We both know divorce is shameful—it bars one forever from Society. That’s why I’ve never sought one from Mr. Ronalds. But après moi, le déluge, Jeanette.”

  Coldness settled in the pit of Jennie’s stomach. “After me, the flood,” she said. “I understand what you said, but not what you mean.”

  “I mean that I have contained your father’s impulses for years. I shudder for all of you, now that he has done with me. God knows where he will look next.”

  She rose from the bench and smiled mirthlessly at Jennie. “I have been practicing my French, as you see. I am moving to Paris in September—did you know?”

  * * *

  —

  Mamma was mad for the Paris scheme once she learned of Fanny’s plans.

  “Clarita will be sixteen in April, and would benefit immensely from a little cultivation before she is brought out,” she mused over her magazine in the Bathgate parlor that evening. The fashion plates were French; Mamma studied them with new interest. “You know, Fanny, not even Mrs. Belmont invites us to her best parties. Certainly, the Schermerhorns and the Astors do not.”

  “The girls will find their prospects of marriage very limited in a few years’ time,” Fanny agreed, “if they are consigned to the second tier.”

  “No daughter of Papa’s is second-rate,” Jennie objected. She was reading The Mysterious Key and What It Opened, a dime novel by Miss Louisa Alcott, in a chair by the parlor fire. From Mamma’s sudden look of exasperation, she had forgotten Jennie was there.

  “Go up to bed, now, Jeanette,” she ordered.

  “But, Mamma—”

  “That is enough.”

  Jennie thrust herself out of her seat, but took her book with her. In the hallway, she lingered, her ears pricked.

  “Think of the advantages,” Fanny murmured. “The best music masters, the best art instructors, a thorough immersion in the French language…”

  “A tour of European capitals, to aid the girls’ general knowledge and sophistication,” Mamma breathed. “The most cultivated circles at the Emperor’s court…”

  “It will be the making of Clarita.”

  “And Jennie. I fear, Fanny, that she is becoming a hoyden.”

  “A lady can have no finer education than a period in Europe.”

  “And consider the gentlemen they will meet! From the nobility, perhaps! Fanny…a Vanderbilt or even an Astor will be as nothing to a French count!”

  Jennie shut her eyes tightly. Papa, Papa, Papa, she prayed. Hurry and come back. She did not want to leave him, or New York.

  She moved noiselessly to the stairs. Clarita was crouching in the shadows above. Listening to every word. Her older sister’s hands were clasped and her blue eyes were shining.

  “Jennie,” Clarita whispered when she reached the top step. “A Season in Europe! Isn’t it a dream?”

  * * *

  —

  By the time Papa disembarked in New York at the end of January,
the flood Fanny predicted had drowned them all. Mamma was tired of being second best, in every aspect of Leonard Jerome’s life. He had settled a fortune on her that even the Depression of 1867 could not touch. Mamma decided to leave Leonard. None of his promises could sway her.

  From the wreckage tossed up by the flood’s retreating waters, Jennie gleaned shards of her childhood. A simpler happiness, of fierce loyalties and convictions. A lost copy of The Children of the New Forest. A beloved pony she would never be small enough to ride. Soiled beauties and broken faiths.

  She would never sleep again in any of the houses she had loved, where Papa had sheltered her.

  * * *

  —

  Leonard Jerome made the crossing with his girls that September on the City of Paris, the first of the great screw-driven steamships. Jennie was allowed to take Nero, her cairn terrier. He had a basket in the stateroom she shared with Clarita and loved to brace himself against the wind when they strode the promenade deck. He was Jennie’s greatest friend.

  Fanny Ronalds crossed on the same ship. She had left her children behind. Her husband, though happy to fund her sojourn, clearly expected her back. Fanny never admitted she had no intention of returning to New York, but Jennie saw it in the carriage of her head and the way she smiled so broadly at the world. She was still teaching Jennie things. That it was possible to reinvent yourself—several times, if necessary. That you could find joy despite the death of your heart’s desire.

  Papa remained with them in Paris for a month, long enough to see his girls established in a hôtel particulier on the Rue Malesherbes. He engaged French tutors and music masters. He opened Clara’s bank accounts. He left letters of credit to be drawn on his funds in New York. He paid Dobbie’s salary in advance for a year; she had agreed to remain with Leonie, who was now eight, for at least that long.

  On his final afternoon in Paris, Papa took Jennie riding in Napoleon III’s new pleasure ground, the Bois de Boulogne. It was filled with fashionable carriages and gentlemen on horseback. Jennie was riding a four-year-old gelding Papa had just given her—sixteen hands, a black horse suited to her coloring. Her hair still hung down her back like a child’s but she rode better than any woman who passed them. The eyes of Frenchmen followed her as she and Papa cantered through the Bois.