That Churchill Woman

by Stephanie Barron

  “You will write to me,” he said as they drew up near the Grand Cascade.

  “Every day, Papa. I shall have so much to tell you.”

  He touched her cheek. “You’ll be too busy being a madcap. I’ll never hear from you.”

  “You will be busy, too. You always are.” She met his gaze squarely, determined to be cheerful. But her voice quavered.

  “Shall you miss me?” he asked.

  “Of course.” Pain shafted through her, and a yawning desolation. Much later, she would have words for such a sensation. Grief. Loss. Betrayal. Right now, however, she knew only that she was both sad and furious at being forced to part from Papa. “Nothing exciting ever happens in a household full of women!”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “I shall miss you dreadfully, dear heart.”

  She fought the urge to clutch his arm. To keep him from leaving. To keep herself from falling. Was it Papa’s fault that Mamma had carried them all off to France? Was Fanny Ronalds to blame? Or…if Jennie had been less of a hoyden, would Mamma have let her stay in New York?

  Was she the cause of her own misery?

  If so, she must take responsibility for it.

  Jennie laid her hand gently on Papa’s sleeve. He placed his own palm over hers, strong and warm.

  When fear nips at the edge of your mind, knock it off its pins, Fanny’s voice echoed. Self-confidence is vital. It can look like balance, even when you have none.

  “You must visit us at Christmas, Papa,” Jennie said evenly. “Clarita and I will be home from school then.”

  “You can count on it. I’ve learned my lesson about missing holidays.”

  She dimpled. “I hope you will bring vast quantities of presents.”

  “For a change?” he joked, then grew suddenly serious. “Is there anything I can give you now, before I sail?”

  She hesitated, her cheeks flushing. “I should like to have a cigar, Papa.”

  “A cigar?”

  “To roll between my fingers. The scent will remind me of you. And our library on Madison Square.”

  He reached into his breast pocket and offered her a Havana.

  Jennie took it from him, her eyes suddenly dancing. “Now teach me to smoke, Papa,” she commanded.

  * * *

  —

  She hesitated now, two decades later, under the canvas awning in front of Mademoiselle Antoine’s. Rain still fell on Piccadilly and the paving stones streamed with water. A dark head swam in her mind, his hair falling vagrantly over the brow. The blue eyes that held her own—the strong hands that could sketch an image of herself simply by touching her. Jennie’s flesh thrilled with longing suddenly, as though he had traced his finger from the corner of her mouth to her clavicle. Charles.

  Posted to Paris?

  And what then?

  To Berlin, next?

  Ensnared in the politics of Mitteleuropa, the push and pull for primacy between Prussia and Austria, Bismarck and the Emperor?

  She unfurled her umbrella. She was done with running from love. Done with the fear of what she could not control.

  The patter of rain increased.

  “Shall I summon a cab, ma’am?” the porter asked.

  “No, thank you,” she said.

  Charles’s rooms were off Piccadilly.

  “I prefer to walk in such lovely weather.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The most exclusive group of bachelor digs in England began life in the eighteenth century as a private home for the Melbourne family. The Albany, as it was now known, was a three-story mansion, seven bays wide, converted by Henry Holland into sixty-nine sets of rooms for gentlemen of taste and means. Lord Byron had lived there, and Prime Minister Gladstone in his youth.

  Jennie entered by the main door off the central courtyard. A liveried steward inquired her name. Ladies had only been allowed onto the Albany premises in recent years, and the privacy of the male residents was still jealously guarded. The steward took her dripping umbrella, offered her a chair at a writing desk, and suggested she pen a note to be sent up to Charles’s digs. Jennie sank down on the seat and drew off her gloves. They were pale yellow doeskin and quite ruined by the rain. The toes of her boots were capped with wet.

  Charles’s set lay beyond this central part of the building. She had visited his rooms more than once in the past—by daylight, to take tea, and at night, heavily veiled, although the gentlemen lodgers of the Albany were not the sort to spy on their neighbors. They all had secrets to respect and keep.

  In converting Melbourne House, Holland had designed two perpendicular wings that ran the length of the back garden along Sackville Street. A covered and paved path the residents called the Rope Walk led down the center of the courtyard. The sets gave off a group entry, rather like rooms at Oxford or Cambridge; Charles lived off the “C” stair. The sets were notoriously small, but their ceilings were high, their windows bowed and filled with sunlight. One could be sure of being left in peace.

  Jennie wrote two lines.

  Dear Charles—I must see you. I’m waiting below.

  The steward took her note and went.

  Odds on he was out. He would be at the Austrian embassy. He would be at his club. It was a Thursday afternoon and he might even be riding through the woods at Sandringham, for all Jennie knew. But she had to find out for herself. It was possible Fanny Ronalds was wrong about everything, in her bohemian eyrie, and that Charles was fixed forever in London. Jennie had to tell him that she regretted nothing so much as sending him away.

  The courtyard door was thrust open; the steward returning, and behind him Charles’s valet, a ruddy-faced fellow in his fifties with close-clipped gray hair. He appeared to have thrust himself hurriedly into his black coat.

  “Lady Randolph.” He bowed.

  “Foster.” She had remembered the man’s name. English; it was a precept of Charles’s that one always hired servants native to one’s diplomatic post. They were, he claimed, vital to mastering the language and customs of a strange country.

  “I regret to inform you, ma’am, that my master is from home.”

  “Ah,” she sighed. “Then pray give him my missive when he returns.”

  Foster’s pale eyes skittered away from hers with what Jennie realized, to her horror, was sympathy. “I’m afraid that will be impossible, ma’am. I will no longer be in His Excellency’s employ in another hour, once the last of the packing cases are shifted.” The valet glanced down at the floor. “I did not fancy a removal to Paris at this time of life. I will be taking up a position with young Lord Clavering, the Earl of Markham’s heir.”

  “I see,” she said unsteadily. Clavering was one of Charles’s racing friends. They shared a club.

  She rose. “Thank you, Foster.”

  “My lady.” He bowed again.

  She nearly asked him for Charles’s address in Paris, but the steward would overhear her, and the thought was somehow shaming. The small flame that had carried her down Piccadilly flared and died.

  Charles had left London without saying goodbye.

  That was the way with people she cared about. Like Papa. They picked up their lives in other countries, leaving her to go on alone.

  What would she have said to him, in any case?

  Don’t leave me.

  Take me with you.

  Either was absurd. She and Charles had nothing to do with each other, now.

  “I wish you the very best with Lord Clavering, Foster,” Jennie said.

  “Thank you, ma’am. Please accept my best wishes for your ladyship’s health and happiness.”

  This time, she let the steward fetch her a cab.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  In September, Winston took the train back to Brighton. Little Jack went with him for his first term at the Thomson S
isters’ School. Jennie and Everest rode in the hansom with them to the station. The two boys held hands as they walked down the platform behind the porter. Winston’s trunk was shabby; Jack’s was brand-new.

  Everest buttoned the collars of their coats, although it was still quite hot and Jack insisted he was boiling. “If you or your brother has the least need, Master Winston, tell those school-ma’ams to wire for me,” she said.

  “I shall, Woom.”

  “And don’t be waiting until you’ve a temperature of a hundred and four.”

  “I shan’t.” He flung his arms around her comfortable bulk and hugged her tightly.

  Jack’s face was very white. He clutched his bear. Winston fingered a soldier in his pocket. Over Woom’s head he saw his mother’s face, carefully shielded with a veil against the steam and soot bursting in gasps from the train. She was gazing at something far down the platform. Her navy-blue twill dress had military-style epaulettes and beautiful brass buttons. He thought she looked splendid as a hussar.

  “Goodbye, Mummie.”

  Her brilliant eyes came back to his, and softened. “Goodbye, darling. Do write.”

  “I shall. And I’ll make Jack. But you must remember to answer!”

  “Of course,” she replied.

  Which meant, he knew, that they would each of them receive one letter for every six they wrote.

  “I shall be very busy, you know, with Papa back in Government,” she added.

  “Please say goodbye to Papa for me. And assure him of my very best wishes for his success at the Exchequer.”

  “Better him than you, eh, Win? Work on your maths this term.” She leaned down to kiss his cheek, fluid and fleeting. He caught her familiar scent: a mix of tuberose and saddle leather. “Look after your brother.”

  He nodded, his throat too tight to speak.

  “Now hurry along!” Everest scolded. “You’ll want good seats by the window, if Master Jack is not to be sick.”

  As they mounted the carriage steps, Jack uttered a faint and despairing sound. Rather, Winston thought, like a rabbit taken in a snare.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s out of the question that I should propose him for Eton,” Randolph said brutally. He had stopped into Jennie’s boudoir that afternoon as she changed out of her riding habit. She had invited Consuelo Mandeville and Fannie Ronalds to Connaught Place for tea. The two women rarely met but enjoyed each other.

  “I thought you put him down for a place when he was born,” she objected, as Gentry repinned her hair. Six generations of the House of Marlborough had attended Eton College.

  “That was before I knew Win was a dolt.”

  “Randolph!” Was this his idea of a joke? “His latest reports from Miss Charlotte are quite good. He’s taken a prize in recitation and one in French—”

  “The Thomson Sisters’ School hasn’t a patch on Eton.” Randolph smoothed his hair in the large gilt mirror that hung over her dressing table. In the weak autumn sunlight, his cheeks appeared sunken; his eyes protruded from their sockets, the whites glassy and reddened. His hand trembled in a way she doubted he could control. Being Leader and holding the Treasury portfolio were very bad for Randolph’s nerves. He’d stayed in bed the whole of Sunday, from his morning tea to his evening brandy, newspapers drifting among the rumpled sheets.

  You really must take more care of yourself, Arthur Balfour had told him worriedly. You’re looking devilish knocked-up.

  “The poor chap can’t manage Latin,” Randolph persisted. “He’d be at the bottom of his form at Eton, bullied and fagged to death, and sent down within weeks.”

  “Not if you put in a word with the headmaster. Asked for a kinder Head of House. Explained how sensitive Winston is.”

  Randolph threw her an incredulous look. “And embarrass the little sod beyond belief? Do you want Win hanged by his own form with a bedsheet? Good God, Jennie—if you think the boy’s as soft as all that, send him to Anglican seminary and be done!”

  “Too much Latin,” Jennie retorted in clipped tones. Then she sighed in frustration. “You’re not being fair, Randy. The boy isn’t soft—he’s a stoic. You didn’t see the weals on his back.”

  “A stoic would never have mentioned them.”

  The injustice of this lashed Jennie. “He didn’t! We’d never have known of his scourging if Everest hadn’t spilled the beans.”

  “Then he’ll think twice next time before he winges to his nanny,” Randolph said callously. “It’s not done for boys to blubber, Jennie. Especially at Eton. In any case, I thought we’d agreed on an Army career.”

  “And? Are all soldiers assumed to be uneducated?”

  “Well,” he temporized, “they go to Sandhurst instead of ’varsity, where they spend all their time drilling and taking apart guns.”

  Jennie threw up her hands in defeat. “So much the better. He’ll adore it. But Winston can’t stay with the Misses Thomson forever. Where do you intend him to go next? Winchester, with George’s boy?”

  “I wouldn’t give George the satisfaction.”

  Randolph was not speaking to his brother at the moment. George had sold off three hundred of Blenheim’s Old Masters.

  “Let’s have a crack at Harrow,” he suggested. “It’s only a dozen miles or so from London, it’s respectable, and the entrance exams can’t be nearly as hard as the ones I endured. They’ll take him in any case because he’s my son.”

  She frowned at him. But at least he was offering a solution. “Very well. Harrow it is.”

  Who did she know, Jennie asked herself, who had gone to the school? Of course—all Randolph’s cousins, the Spencers, and through them, the Hamiltons, the Duke of Abercorn’s family. Liberal Party members, and all Harrovians. She must talk to Charlotte Spencer. Charlotte was one of Princess Alix’s ladies-in-waiting.

  “Tell Win it’s for his chest,” Randolph suggested. “The air at Harrow is better than Eton.”

  “How can that possibly be true?” Both schools were within shouting distance of London.

  “Harrow’s on a hill,” Randolph said vaguely.

  A hill. She would have to find out when the entrance exam could be offered. What the fees and uniforms ran to. How many boys were under the care of each master, and which were the best houses. Jennie’s head was full of plans as Randolph turned for the door.

  “Mind you get Win a crammer over the hols,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  She saw little of her husband during the next few weeks. He cared passionately about his leadership in Commons, and sent detailed reports on the debates to Her Majesty the Queen, who answered with a personal letter of commendation from Balmoral. He loathed his Treasury portfolio, however. The ministry was populated with civil servants dedicated to producing the annual budget. Many of them viewed Randolph with suspicion. He was unknown to them and had never worked with budgets before. He was supposed to provide vision and policy, not actual sums, but he had begun to scribble endless rough figures in columns on sheets of paper. The process was perplexing to him—“I never could make out what those damned dots meant,” he said bitterly of decimals to his secretary—but Randolph was certain his ministry would not accept mere vision without hard math behind it. The British Crown and Government allowed no shortfalls or debt. Expenditure must strictly adhere to revenues.

  Randolph, who had lived on credit and in continuous debt for most of his life, was ambitious with the Government’s funds: He craved a budget surplus. As for his vision? “Cut taxes for the poor, simplify the death duties on the rich, and find savings in the Army and Navy budgets.”

  “But those are Gladstone’s ideas,” Arthur Balfour objected in horror.

  Randolph shrugged. “He wasn’t wrong about everything.”

  His fellow Cabinet members, including the PM, were n
ot amused that Churchill was borrowing from the Opposition.

  “It is frankly impossible,” Salisbury told him, “with the world in the state it is, to trim the Admiralty and War Office.”

  In direct conflict with the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Randolph gave a speech in Kent to twenty thousand people, supporting closer ties with Germany and Austria. He delighted the Queen—Victoria had relatives scattered all over the German parts of the world—but infuriated Salisbury.

  “He’s deliberately challenging me, Arthur,” the PM complained at their usual drinking hour. “He thinks his Tory Democrats will come out in the streets and lift him as high as Prime Minister.”

  Reporters tailed Randolph from his home to his club and everywhere in between, speculating on his loyalty to Government.

  Jennie’s initials appeared in the Spectator—the chief Liberal gossip sheet—with sly aspersions on her voracious pursuit of other people’s husbands. She shrugged it off and tried not to mind; it was common in politics to savage families.

  And then, one morning, Randolph simply disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  It was Alasdair Gordon who told Jennie he was gone.

  He appeared in the breakfast room with the sick look of a cat that has been left out all night in the rain.

  “What is it?” she asked, her brow furled.

  “I beg your pardon, my lady, but did Lord Randolph mention when he expected to return?”

  “From his club, you mean?” She rose to refill her coffee cup. “Have you breakfasted, by the way?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “That is—I have eaten, but I was not referring to the Carlton Club. Lord Randolph appears to have left town. Walden tells me he took only a single valise, and refused to accept his services for the journey.”