That Churchill Woman

by Stephanie Barron

  “Professionals?” Something in Charles baulked. “But women aren’t admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. I may have seen a few female pictures in the annual Salon…but do admit, Jennie—true genius is male.”

  Jennie threw him a smoldering look. “Not another word, you philistine.”

  She bought three of Seurat’s studies and arranged to have them sent to her hotel. “I don’t intend to show them to Randolph,” she confided to Charles. “I mean to keep these in my studio, and learn from them.”

  Something in his face must have reached her. The glow in her eyes flickered and went out. “What is it, Charles? You don’t mean…Have you found him?”

  He inclined his head.

  “Of course,” she breathed. “That’s why you’re here. How stupid of me.”

  She waved in parting to Monsieur Seurat, who was busy with brown butcher’s paper and twine, and swept out of the studio. Charles followed her to the street. She allowed him to help her into the fiacre and waited until he was seated beside her before she spoke. “Well?”

  The horse pulled into the traffic of the Boulevard de Clichy. The noise of carriage wheels on stone was considerable; it was now nearly noon, Charles judged, and even Pigalle was awake. He leaned close to the black ostrich plumes to speak into her ear.

  “I found him in a house near the market.”

  “A brothel, you mean?”

  “Of sorts. Are you aware that your husband prefers men to women?”

  That first encounter at the Hôtel des Deux Mondes, nearly thirteen years ago. Her silk dress bunched beneath her. His hands lifting and turning her roughly onto her stomach, her breasts pinned to the floor. Her thighs, lean and muscled and boyish from hours of riding, gripped painfully in his hands. And then the thrusts, too soon, agonizing and endless, her teeth biting the crumpled silk, as he entered her from behind.

  Jennie’s nostrils flared; she glanced away. “Yes.”

  Charles waited for her to fill the silence.

  “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “On the contrary, I understand quite well,” he said. “I have lived in the world. It’s rarer for a lady to…recognize and accept.”

  She shrugged slightly, still avoiding his gaze. He realized suddenly that she was embarrassed not for Randolph but herself, as though it were her fault that her husband could not physically love her. As though she were not attractive enough. As though she had failed him as a woman.

  “My darling,” he said urgently. “I have known a number of similar stories. Both in Vienna and London. Here in Paris, even. Don’t blame yourself.”

  “How can I not?” she burst out. “He loved me enough to marry, once. We came together long enough to have a child….But after I discovered I was pregnant…”

  “I am sure that for Lord Randolph, men have always mattered most.” Charles did not want to prolong this conversation, have her voice all the doubts that had poisoned over a decade of marriage. “He’s very ill at the moment. I called in my own doctor to examine him. How long have you known?”

  “That Randolph prefers men?” She was frowning. “I just said—”

  “That Randolph has syphilis.”

  He watched the color drain from her cheeks.

  “That’s why he opposed the Contagious Diseases Act years ago, isn’t it?” he pressed. “Because one day, the Government might come to quarantine him?”

  She glanced at Charles, could not speak. Her eyes drowning.

  “Jennie—how long have you known?”

  It was as though he had thrust a knife into her. He set his heart in stone and refused to feel.

  “Since Winston’s birth,” she whispered. “Randolph believed himself cured when we married. He thought coupling with a virgin—it’s an old wives’ tale….”

  He grasped her shoulders, appalled. “He took your maidenhead knowing he had the disease?”

  “He hoped my virgin blood would cure his illness! But I failed him. His symptoms recurred while I was pregnant with Winston.”

  Almost thirteen years, Charles thought savagely. Well before she had invited him into a bedroom at Sandringham or their trysts in the attics of Connaught Place. Before he had fallen so hopelessly in love with a woman who refused to love him back. She had known her husband was infected with a fatal disease. That she might be as well. She had told him nothing.

  “Did he give you syphilis, Jennie?”

  She shook her head. “He never touched me after that first time. From the day we married, I seemed to physically repel him. I thought it was because pregnancy made me hideous, or that he feared damaging the child. But even after Winston’s birth he remained distant. I tried to act as though I didn’t care; as though he hadn’t hurt me to the core. Four years ago, Randy had…a relapse.”

  “Just before I met you at Sandringham.”

  “The year before,” she agreed. “Randolph broke out in hives—ran perilously high fevers—developed open sores on his body, and aches in all his joints. Robson Roose—Randolph’s doctor—sat me down and explained exactly how it was. The name of his disease.”

  “You should have left him then!”

  “How, in God’s name? With a public statement that the rising Conservative star was, in fact, a leper? No! I wanted him cured. Roose had a plan—the only possible one. Randolph would take the Mercury Cure: mercury rubbed in his sores, inhaled in steam baths, taken by mouth in pastilles. We rented a house in Wimbledon for six months. I had no choice but to retire with him while he underwent treatment. Our future depended on it.”

  “But he wasn’t cured.”

  She met his gaze bleakly. “The medicine was worse than the disease.”

  “It always is.” Mercury, Charles knew, poisoned the nervous system and brain. He laughed bitterly. “Would you honestly tell me, Jennie, if you carried syphilis? Or is your whole life a series of lies? Am I already doomed?”

  She stiffened and her eyes blazed. “I have been neither admirable nor respectable in our dealings together, God knows, but I would never expose you to mortal danger. I am not viciously careless with the people I love, Charles.”

  “You’ve been nothing else since the day we met!”

  She gasped and her pupils dilated. In them he finally read all her pain and regret, her yearning and her pride. “Since the day we met, you’ve ruined me for anyone else. I go through the motions of living, Charles, and can’t say why. I’m lost. Utterly lost. When will you find me again?”

  And now it was he who was drowning.

  * * *

  —

  He took her back to her hotel and made love to her in the great bed set out before the fire. A declaration of faith on a cold late-December afternoon, when all faith ought to be dead.

  * * *

  —

  “I’ve fought you for years.” He swept her into the curl of his body, beneath the eiderdown. “Tried to forget you, Jennie, with a hundred other lovely bodies. But it’s your soul I’m after. Your soul I can’t forget.”

  “No other bodies, Charles. No other soul. I tell you now what I never allowed myself to say out loud—I love you. Only you. Forever you.”

  At midnight, they heard bells all over Paris ring in the New Year. He had forgotten that it was le Réveillon—New Year’s Eve.

  “We should have champagne,” he said.

  “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” she whispered.

  “And I will pledge with mine.” Ben Jonson’s old song, still true. Charles’s words blurred as he kissed her mouth. Still drowning.

  * * *

  —

  “This French doctor of yours,” Jennie asked much later. “Can he be trusted?”

  “To keep your secret? Of course. He does not know Randolph’s name. Only that he is a friend of mine.”

  “Randolph is recognizabl
e the world over,” she said despairingly. “You understand that the word syphilis can never be spoken?”

  “Yes,” Charles said. “It would end his career.”

  “It would destroy our whole family. His mother—she believes him to suffer only from nerves.”

  “And there’s your place in Society,” Charles suggested.

  She turned her head on the pillow. “My boys. Ridiculed and whispered about. A child can be born with the infection and develop the disease later in life—the idea haunts me. People—cruel people, vicious people, like Minnie Paget—already talk about how Win is different. Because he had to leave St. George’s. That’s why Randy sets Win at such a distance. It’s nothing more nor less than guilt.”

  “The sins of the fathers.” Charles twined his fingers through hers and kissed her palm. “I know. I’ll pay the doctor whatever he asks to hold his tongue.”

  “What did he say? After he’d seen Randy?”

  He cupped her cheek in his hands and met her gaze squarely. “That your husband has reached an advanced stage. The disease has begun to infect his spine. His brain. He is having difficulty walking, darling. It is hard for him to speak. Hold a spoon. The present fit will pass with more mercury—but he will not improve.”

  “It will only get worse.” She said it flatly. “Until he dies.”

  “You must leave Randolph, my love. Before the disease is so obvious that all of London knows.”

  “I can’t.”

  His grip on her tightened. “You must. You’ll be cast out, otherwise. Suspect. Shunned.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve told you. Divorce is England’s only sin. Having married Randolph, I have a duty toward him. And in the morning, I intend to go to him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  After decades of solitary buccaneering, Leonard Jerome came back to England in the autumn of 1890 to die.

  When Papa landed at Southampton just before Christmas, Jennie was shocked to see how much he had changed. He was seventy-three years old now, and his hair was white. Gout had crippled one leg, and cigars had corroded his lungs. Galloping consumption, Robson Roose told her once he had examined Leonard at Connaught Place. There was another name for it: tuberculosis.

  Leonard joined his wife in her rented London home off Park Lane and spent his last days in the small spare bedroom, coughing blood into a handkerchief and dining on oysters and champagne. Leonie and Clarita, who had married Englishmen and lived in London, too, sat by his bedside and reminisced about their mad escape from Paris years ago. Jennie read aloud to Papa from Ruff’s Guide, the British racing form, and placed bets on horses he pegged as winners.

  And before he grew too weak to talk, she brought Fanny Ronalds to say goodbye.

  Jennie did not invade the meeting between the two old friends, Fanny seated by Leonard’s Bath chair, his gouty leg raised on a cushion. He was smoking a cigar and smiling, as though Fanny had come to him in a dream. She would always be matchless in his eyes, Jennie knew, no matter how many years fell between them.

  The soprano raised her wrist and turned it before Leonard’s gaze. A spattering of gemstones glinted in the sunlight, incongruous with her neat carriage dress of plum-colored wool. “The bracelet from Tiffany’s you gave me, on the night of the Union League charity concert,” she told him fondly. “Twenty-eight years ago, Leonard. Before Gettysburg. Can you believe?”

  “I’d have thought you sold it long ago, to keep yourself in furs,” Papa growled.

  “Sell a gift from you, darling? Never.”

  As Jennie closed the door gently on the pair of them, Fanny began to sing. “Sempre libera,” from La Traviata.

  * * *

  —

  In her last hours with Papa, Jennie tried and failed to ask him about love: why some men made a symphony of women, and others had no use for them. She had never found the words to explain her marriage to her father. But as always, he sensed when she was troubled.

  “What’s preying on your mind, dear heart?” he asked. “Is it young Winston?”

  She seized on the excuse. “He’s so aimless, Papa,” she managed. “Full of bravado and promises. His reports from Harrow are dreadful. Thank heaven he’s in the Army section—no more Latin.”

  Winston had been at Harrow nearly three years now. He had entered as the last-ranked boy in the lowest form. It hurt Jennie to see the Harrovians forced to march in and out of school according to their rank—and Win at the very end of the line. Complete strangers whispered about his stupidity within her hearing when she visited her son, unaware that Jennie was his mother. Look, they chattered. Dandy Randy’s boy comes last of all! He must be half-mad, like his father! Jennie longed to strike their blank and avid faces, their vicious mouths, glistening with the hunger to bully.

  It was obvious, Winston’s headmaster said, that he possessed high intelligence—even some brilliance. But to Jennie’s immense frustration, Win could not be made to do what he did not want to do. He failed at everything except writing, but was capable of stupendous feats of memorization. He had won a prize for reciting twelve hundred lines of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome flawlessly. Before his transfer to the Army form, Win had also been caught bartering his perfectly crafted English essays for another boy’s crack Latin exercises. He had nearly been sent down for that offense. It didn’t matter whether he was flogged, threatened with expulsion, or derided as an idiot by his form-mates. Winston blindly plowed his own obstinate furrow, in defiance of nearly a thousand years of English public school tradition.

  “He’ll turn all our hair white.” Jennie managed a smile for her father; she did not want him worried, in his last weeks.

  “He reminds me of myself at that age,” Leonard answered. “If you leave boys alone, Jennie, they find out what they’re good at.”

  “He seems to be good at nothing,” she retorted in exasperation. “Except boasts and exaggeration. He’s convinced he was born for greatness, on the basis of no excellence at all. And desperate for his father’s attention, of course. But he goes about winning it in precisely the wrong way. Randolph has long since decided Win’s hopeless. He’s washed his hands of him.”

  “Randolph has washed his hands of most things,” Leonard observed.

  It was true; despite still being a Member of Parliament for South Paddington, her husband had spent the winter far from England, in a houseboat on the Nile, with his friend Harry Tyrwhitt-Wilson. When he returned, he planned a year of gold-prospecting in South Africa. “Randolph is too impatient, too easily angered—”

  “And never at home,” Papa snorted. “So the hell with him, I say. Mind Winston spends more time with Count Kinsky. He’s worth ten of that husband of yours.”

  Perhaps, Jennie thought as she left him to sleep, Papa had answered the question she did not know how to ask. Perhaps love could not be explained. Only recognized. And cherished.

  * * *

  —

  She was thinking of her father now, as she rode out over the North Downs on a fresh June morning, in her light summer habit of pale blue twill, the sun coming up. Leonard Jerome, more than anyone alive, had shaped her passion for riding, her familiarity with racecourses, her exuberant wagers—her fearless attack of every sort of ground. Papa had been dead and buried three months already, but Jennie refused to wear black for him. Mourning was contrary to the pirate’s creed.

  Banstead Manor, the Churchills’ rented home near Newmarket, was a sprawling old redbrick manse on the Cheveley Park estate, inhabited since the fourteenth century. It was only a few miles as the horse ran from the heath where Randolph’s trainer exercised his string. It was Jennie’s secret gift to herself, hours before her sisters or the boys awakened, to rein in her mount on a hillside and watch the stable lads put the beautiful creatures through their paces. The air smelled of dew-wet grass, bruised by churning hooves; of trampled mud; of hay-making, s
omewhere in the distance; and of the deep tobacco musk of sweating horseflesh.

  A lark sang to the sunrise. A fragrant breeze kissed Jennie’s cheek. She shaded her eyes and gazed toward the gallops. Over a thousand horses were exercised on the Downs daily. But she could pick out the Abbess even from a distance: a compact and elegant black mare they had bought at Doncaster four years ago, for three hundred pounds.

  Jennie had named her for the main character in a French novel. As a three-year-old she had won the Oaks at Epsom; as a four-year-old, the Manchester Cup, beating out seventeen other contenders; and at Sandown last year, the Abbess had triumphed at the Princess of Wales’s Stakes. Jennie herself had accepted the cup from Princess Alix, curtseying prettily to her friend in a morning dress of jonquil silk and a chip-straw hat. This race season, however, was to be the Abbess’s last. She was five years old. At the end of the current season, she would turn brood mare—kicking up her heels in the fields that lapped Banstead Manor.

  “And you’d love to kick up your heels with her, wouldn’t you?” Jennie crooned as she patted the muscled neck of her mount—a roan gelding, six years old and fifteen hands high. Cyclops nickered yearningly. She’d named him for the noticeable cast in one eye. His ears were pointed toward the pack of racing horses and lads, and Jennie could feel his rib cage shudder with longing to take the bit between his teeth. But he stood obediently, lifting one foot and then the other, with Jennie curled around the pommel of her sidesaddle.

  Stocking a race stable had been the best choice Randolph had made after their return together from Paris that grim winter four years before. By the end of that January, he had recovered his speech enough to formally resign as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the Conservative Party.

  “I’ve thrown away my career in politics, of course,” he admitted to Jennie, “but the stress of office, on top of this bloody illness, would kill me.”