That Churchill Woman

by Stephanie Barron

  There was nothing so valuable, she reflected as she slipped her arm through Minnie’s, as the support of old friends.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Charles Kinsky settled his black derby on his head and swung through the broad front doors of the Austrian embassy. A pair of uniformed officers stood at attention as he passed; Hungarian boys, they stared unwaveringly from beneath their visors at the cobbled courtyard, framed by two broad wings of the building that reached toward the narrow Rue Las Cases.

  The hôtel particulier had been built for a relative of the Sun King around 1700; his heirs had met their deaths on the guillotine, and after the Revolution the serene and classical city palace with its columns and Palladian windows had passed into strangers’ hands. A century later, most of the great homes in the seventh arrondissement—one of the oldest and most exclusive quarters of the Left Bank—had been converted to embassies or French government ministries. The Bourbon Palace, where the National Assembly met, was within walking distance. The great dome of Les Invalides hovered at the edge of sight. Charles associated the faubourg, as it was commonly called, with work and governance and entrenched medieval sensibilities. He preferred to spend his free hours across the Seine, on the Avenue de l’Opera, in the midst of all the light and whirl of the Right Bank.

  He passed through the massive courtyard gate. The porter saluted him. Outside, on the Rue Las Cases, the buildings encroached on one another. The stone street was empty. It was two days before New Year’s, dusk was falling and with it a flurry of snow. Charles paused, rubbing his gloved hands. The cold air was scented with roasting chestnuts and burning wood. It irresistibly recalled other towns and other times: winter in Vienna and Prague, candles in leaded windows and fires burning in the midst of the market. A soprano’s voice filling Wenceslaus Cathedral, his father carving a suckling pig while a private orchestra played Mozart. His younger sisters in gowns of crimson and emerald velvet. Waltzes and czardas in the baroque confection of a ballroom, angels peering down from their plaster lozenges in the vaulted ceiling. The scent of bruised hothouse flowers, and mulled wine with cloves. His mother’s jewels glittering in her hair.

  He ought to have requested leave. He ought to have gone home for Christmas. He was struggling with an emotion he had never suffered so much in all his life: loneliness.

  The snow kissed his cheek, settled on his eyelashes and mustache. He could walk, of course. Take the streets running toward the Seine until he ended at the Pont de Solférino, and cross the river to the huge blasted ground that had once been the Tuileries. He might stop for a fine—a cognac—at one of the cafés on the Rue St. Honoré. But the snow was increasing. He would be chilled to the bone as dusk turned to night.

  He glanced toward the Rue de Bellechasse. A fiacre—one of the Parisian cabs drawn by a single horse—was pulled up at the corner. The horse was a worn-out gray and its nose was shrouded in its feedbag. There was no established cab stand in the Rue Las Cases—it was far too narrow—but the fiacre driver was pacing the paving at the horse’s head with his hands thrust into his greatcoat pockets as though he owned the ground, shoulders hunched against the cold.

  Charles walked toward him.

  As he came abreast of the man, the cab’s door opened from within.

  Charles stopped short. He stared into the fiacre’s depths.

  Her hand, white against the surrounding darkness, reached toward him.

  “Charles,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Jennie had gone to the wrong address that late December day in her hunt for Count Kinsky. The Austrian embassy she remembered from her girlhood in France fifteen years before had been on the Rue de Grenelle, a few blocks away.

  “It had a wonderful garden—acres and acres of trees and formal beds,” she explained as Charles stared at her, unspeaking, inside the fiacre. The cab had not moved; the driver awaited instructions. “Pauline de Metternich used to hold receptions there when I was a girl.”

  “Prince Metternich left Paris when the Prussians invaded,” he told her. “So did you, as I remember. But you didn’t come here to talk history or houses. What are you doing here, Lady Randolph? Ordering a few more gowns from Worth?”

  Lady Randolph. He did not intend to make it easy for her.

  “I…needed to get away. From London.”

  “At Christmas? Why aren’t you at Blenheim with your boys? Or doesn’t the Duke of Marlborough gather his family for the high holidays anymore?”

  “George is from home these several weeks. So, as it happens, is my husband.”

  “So, as it happens, are you. And from the fact that you were searching for me at a defunct address—then lurking here by the curb in the hope of catching me unawares—”

  “Why did you leave London without calling in Connaught Place?” she demanded abruptly.

  “I thought I had. That night in your bedroom, after the tziganes party at the New Café.”

  “You left the country without a word of farewell.”

  Charles leaned toward her. “Because I couldn’t bear to live there any longer. In constant sight of you. Unable to touch your skin or speak to you. Don’t you know what hell it was?”

  “Naturally I know,” she whispered. “Do you think I’m made of stone?”

  “I had waited. Hoping for some change on your part—some sign—and when it never came I was afraid of what I might do.” He glanced away from her, through the tiny fiacre window at the curtain of snow. “I had to get out of Britain. Having made that decision—knowing that you had made yours—I thought a clean break best.”

  “It felt like a slap to the face. When I understood you were gone…”

  “You had it in your power to call me back in an instant.” His unyielding gaze swept her face, the kiss of her chinchilla collar where it met her chin, the piquant hat perched over her temple. He touched her cheek lightly. His fingers were cold with the winter and Paris. “You knew the terms. So I ask you again, Lady Randolph: Why have you come to France?”

  She drew an uneven breath, fighting her panic and the desire to feel his arms around her. “Charles—I need your help.”

  His expression changed; instantly he dropped his hand. “In what way?”

  “There’s no one else I can ask….No one I really trust.”

  He laughed sharply.

  “Don’t,” she said in a stifled voice. “I have allowed no one alive so deep into my heart as you.”

  He was silent, assessing. Then he nodded. “Where are you staying?”

  “The Hôtel des Deux Mondes, on the Avenue de l’Opera.”

  “That’s on my way home.” He frowned. “I thought titled Englishwomen always stayed at the Grand—or the Meurice?”

  “I’m not really titled. Not really English. I can’t bear to overlook the Tuileries…that vast empty scar where Eugénie’s palace used to be….Besides, one meets too many people one knows, in such places.”

  “And you want to be…unmet?”

  “So far as is possible. Yes.”

  He smiled at her faintly, his eyes still watchful. “And yet your face, once seen, can never be forgotten. If we are to talk, we need someplace private. Will you dine with me before I return you to your hotel?”

  She glanced down at her carriage gown and fur cloak. “I’m not dressed to dine.”

  “Neither am I. But this is Paris. No one will ask impertinent questions.” He thrust open the fiacre door and said to the driver, “Allons. Quai des Grands Augustins, s’il vous plaît.”

  * * *

  —

  Charles took her to Lapérouse, on the very edge of the Seine’s Left Bank, where generations of lovers had found refuge in discreet salons privés, small private dining cabinets lined with etched mirrors and red damask and mural-painted panels. He was not so unwise as to ask for one of these—it would ruin Jennie
if she were seen entering one of them. Instead he secured a table upstairs with a view of the Seine. The Île de la Cité filled the river beyond the windows: the buildings of the Conciergerie where Marie Antoinette had waited for death, and farther downstream, the cathedral of Notre-Dame, gently lit in the greenish glow of gaslight.

  “None of your friends will find you here,” Charles promised her. “The English only dine in their hotels. French restaurants are too risky for them.”

  Jennie knew he was right. She was free tonight of English fears. Exhilaration filled her the way a fresh gust of wind unexpectedly fills a sail. She looked around at tables given over to chic Frenchmen and their women, exquisitely dressed and coiffed. This was the Paris she remembered from childhood. It had been ruthlessly overlaid in her mind with images of destruction and violence. But that darkness was gone. She smiled without being entirely aware of it.

  Charles said, “Praise God.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you’d never smile again. Tell me what’s happened.”

  She reached impulsively for his hand. “Not yet. Pour me champagne, Charles.”

  They shared perfect foie gras and langoustines; sole meunière and roasted lamb; salad with shaved black truffles. With the sole they had a respectable Sancerre and with the lamb a premier cru Bordeaux. They talked of Paris, as only two people who love that immortal city can talk: about riding through the Bois in the cold hour just after dawn. Walking the narrower streets of the Latin Quarter while a cello’s strains drifted through an open window. They talked about nights at the Opéra and stag hunting at Fontainebleau, which had become a French artillery school now that it was no longer a royal château. Jennie told Charles how as a girl of sixteen she had ridden through the Compiègne woods in the company of Napoleon III, dressed in the Emperor’s required green-and-gold livery. In ten days, she would be thirty-three.

  They talked of chestnut trees, which were slowly returning to the siege-ravaged boulevards, and of the art within the Louvre’s walls. Jennie mentioned her progress in painting and how Winston had asked for his own paint box. She did not tell Charles that she had turned his portrait to the attic wall at Connaught Place—the portrait she loved, with his collar undone and his eyes caressing her.

  He told stories about his horses, and the hopes he had of a certain three-year-old filly he thought might go the distance at Longchamp that spring.

  He did not mention the past, or the current state of his heart.

  Neither of them discussed politics.

  Finally, as the demitasse was served and she declined a sweet, Charles asked her again.

  “What has happened, Jennie?”

  Her pulse quickened at the use of her first name.

  “A good deal. You told me once that you followed my husband’s career—and reported to your superiors.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that still true?”

  He cracked open the walnut he’d been turning between his fingers. “What do you think?”

  She drew a sharp breath. “Then you know. That Randolph resigned last week from Government. He gave up both his posts—the leadership of the House and the Treasury portfolio. Without warning. Without explanation.”

  Charles studied the walnut’s shell, its brainlike folds. “Three days before Christmas. Yes. It was in all the newspapers.”

  His voice was casual, as though he weren’t talking about the end of Jennie’s world. The crushing loss of all she’d worked for, at Sandringham and in the glittering salons of London, on the hustings during campaigns and through countless hours in the Speaker’s Gallery. When she continued to stare at him, stricken to silence by all that was still unsaid, his eyes flicked over her curiously.

  “You had no warning?”

  “None.” Her voice wobbled, nearly broke. “I learned about Randolph’s resignation from the Times. Do you know how infuriating that was?”

  He set down the walnut and dusted off his fingers. “It was certainly unthinking of him.”

  “He’d been to visit the Queen at Windsor, that last Friday. He dined with her, talked with her, bade Her Majesty good night—and never even hinted he meant to resign. But he wrote his letter to Salisbury before bed, on Windsor Castle paper. Infernal cheek, the newspapers called it.”

  “Well, your husband has always been reckless. And he just returned to London the next morning? As though he hadn’t tossed a match in a hayloft?”

  She bit her lip. “He made himself scarce that Saturday—traveled directly from Windsor to the Carlton Club. We met at a production of School for Scandal that night, but Randy said very little about his Windsor visit—only natural, I thought, in a public place. He left after the first act. I know now that he went to the offices of the Times and handed the editor a copy of his resignation.” She drew a shaky breath. “It was printed in the morning edition.”

  “And be damned to Lord Salisbury,” Charles observed.

  “The PM never had time to answer Randolph’s letter.” Jennie took a sip of coffee; it was hot and rich, utterly unlike the swill she got in London. “Charles, he dashed himself down from a great height! It was an act of sheer madness. He says the Government forced his hand, by rejecting his budget. But damn his insane impulsiveness! Surely he might have found a compromise?”

  “Compromise? That is not a word I associate with Lord Randolph,” Charles said dismissively. “In point of fact, he committed political suicide. But that was always going to happen. Wasn’t it?”

  “You think so?” Jennie asked, startled.

  “I’m certain of it. Randolph has always had a death wish. Why else would he have married you?”

  The depth of his bitterness was like a slap in the face. But Jennie knew she deserved it. She had forced open a wound he’d struggled for years to heal. Her sudden appearance in Paris was brutally selfish. Unforgivable.

  But as she stared at Charles, desire in every cell of her body, she regretted absolutely nothing.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  She was acutely conscious of his body next to hers in the closeness of the cab as they rolled toward the Hôtel des Deux Mondes. Aware of the silent rise and fall of his chest, of the tautness of his thigh as it deliberately did not touch hers. The tenseness of his gloved hands, which rested on his knees. The interior of the fiacre was turbulent with thwarted emotion.

  But when Charles spoke, his dispassionate tone chilled her.

  “Your husband burned his bridges. After barely five months in Government. He must have been very sure he was finished with politics. Must have hated them, in fact.”

  “Quite the reverse,” Jennie retorted, her gaze fixed on the lights of the quay beyond the carriage window. “All Randy’s ever dreamed of is being Prime Minister of Great Britain. He expected Commons to rise up when he resigned, and demand that he replace Salisbury.”

  She felt Charles smile in the darkness. “But instead?”

  “The PM merely named another man to replace Randolph,” Jennie faltered.

  A snort of derision. Charles had grown cynical in the years since they had last met, she realized. No matter. They lived in cynical times.

  “You asked for my help, Lady Randolph?”

  Distant, again. He must be put off by her obvious distress at her husband’s difficulties. Charles could have no idea how desperately she longed for him—the unswerving presence in her life that had once made her feel joyous…and loved…

  “He’s gone missing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Randolph has simply vanished. Again.” She tore her eyes from the passing streets and looked at his profile, just visible in the darkness. The straight line of his nose. The jut of his brow, and the fall of curls over it. Impossible not to yearn to touch them. “He hared off to Vienna a few months ago, with Tommie Trafford. But this time, it was Tommie who told me Rand
y was gone. I thought he was still lying on his library couch, receiving condolences from his mourners….”

  “I’m afraid I don’t see—”

  “Why I want your help?” she interrupted. “Of course you don’t! You don’t know my husband. Randy only comes to Paris when he wants to die. It’s his version of Hell, Charles. He throws himself into the lowest circles and tries to immolate himself. And I don’t know where to begin to look for him—”

  “Why bother?” Charles demanded. The killing coldness still in his voice. But he was looking at her now. “He’s treated you shamefully.”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “But that’s been true for years. I’ve been fighting for my family’s survival any way I can—and Randy’s just smashed years of work to pieces. I could strangle him, I’m so angry.”

  “And hurt, I daresay.” Charles edged closer, his shoulder brushing hers. A pulse of current, instantly, where they touched. “Jennie. When will you stop trying to save the bastard?”

  “I have two sons. Two lovely boys who’ve done nothing to deserve this abandonment. I refuse to let their lives be ruined by a suicidal father.”

  The gleam of his eyes in the darkness. “You’re that worried?”

  “I am.” Panic rose in her chest. She forced it down.

  Charles sank back against the hard leather seat. “Very well. You must tell me the truth. If I’m to help you.”

  “Do you honestly think I’ve ever told you anything else?”

  “There’s all you haven’t said,” he pointed out. “These circles of Hell—what do you imagine they hold?”

  “Whores,” she answered succinctly. “It’s impossible for me to enter such a place. I would never get past the door.”