That Churchill Woman

by Stephanie Barron

  She would not be writing to Freddie again herself.

  * * *

  —

  They left Ottawa abruptly two days later, after Randolph tried to strangle their manservant, Job, when he offered his lordship the newspaper after breakfast. It was a Canadian journal, not a British one, and Randolph was outrageously offended. He put his hands around Job’s neck and throttled him, squealing all the while.

  The fit occurred in the library at Government House, and at least seven gentlemen witnessed it. Two of them intervened and pulled Randolph off his servant’s neck.

  “His lordship appears seriously unwell,” Lord Aberdeen warned Jennie that afternoon when they met privately in his study. “Have you considered that travel only worsens his condition? Cannot you return home?”

  “I appreciate your concern,” she told him, meeting his troubled gaze squarely. “But our plans are quite fixed. Job, naturally, will be sent back to the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough’s home in London—at Lord Randolph’s expense.”

  “You will wish, I am sure, to take dinner in your rooms,” Aberdeen said.

  It was a command, Jennie knew—not a request.

  * * *

  —

  September wore away while they visited Banff Springs, where the railway line was lit at night by the crimson glow of vast forest fires no one bothered to battle. They reached Vancouver, Victoria, then San Francisco—where they stayed some days, and Randolph was well enough to leave in Dr. Keith’s care for a few hours. Jennie might have done some shopping or found the salons of a few artists, but as she prepared to leave the hotel lobby one afternoon, drawing on her gloves, a slim, dark Eurasian boy darted forward and bowed.

  “If Madame would like to see Chinatown, I can promise to lead her through it in safety. You might buy jade. I assure the best prices.”

  Jennie stopped short, assessing him. He was neatly dressed and his speech little different from hers; they were countrymen, however divergent their circumstances. Chinatown was regarded as an infamous and vice-ridden place, dangerous for any white person to enter, much less a lady alone. The boy might hand her over to confederates, who would steal her purse. Or worse. Jennie glanced through the hotel’s double doors at the sharp sunlight on the paving; an innocuous day. And she was restless, fretful…to be brutally honest, lonely. If Charles were with her, they would plunge into the mysteries of this raw and exotic city without a backward glance. She had no Charles, but she had all the courage Papa had taught her. Her spirits surged. “What is your name?”

  “Edgar.”

  “And your price?”

  “One dollar.”

  It was steep enough, but Jennie was oddly reassured; Edgar valued himself highly. “Very well,” she decided, “but I can spare only two hours.”

  He grinned at her. His right front tooth was made of gold. “It will be enough,” he promised.

  * * *

  —

  She had expected the Chinese quarter to lie somewhere near the great shipping piers, and was surprised to discover it was in the beating heart of the city. Her immediate impression was of a throng of humanity, all utterly unlike herself, all dressed as they might have been in Shanghai or Peking. The narrow streets were crowded with men whose foreheads were shaved to their crowns, the rest of their hair gathered into trailing braids that reached the waist. The women wore heavy silk embroidered gowns that brushed the paving, and gripped children by the hand—tiny girls with elaborate gold headdresses shaped like pagodas, and boys with bald skulls and peaked caps of silk. Many of the men smoked long clay pipes. One, in pantaloons and a black vest, danced with a pair of swords, skittering backward along the street in front of Jennie and her guide.

  Vendors were everywhere. Jennie had never entered an Eastern bazaar, but she imagined this must be what one was like: odorous from meat turning on open braziers, and dark from awnings overhead; bins and sacks of rice; smoked fish hanging by their tails; chests of tea and dried roots and vegetables she could not name. Edgar led her to three jade shops and she bought a pair of bangles for her wrist and carved seals for Winston and Jack.

  He showed her glimpses of gambling houses where cross-legged men, young and old, clicked colorful ivory mahjong tiles, and opium dens where the dreaming and desiccated bodies of addicts lay fetuslike on bare wooden platforms. Part of her envied their escape—longed, even, for a similar peace and oblivion. She was spooked by the eyes of the den lords, which lingered on her insanely and covetously. When she backed away, Edgar’s hand was at her elbow and a few coins passed between proprietor and guide.

  Jennie drew in great gulps of fresh air once out on the street again and felt her dizziness pass, and then Edgar stopped short before an elaborate gate painted in red and black lacquer. “Joss house, madame.”

  This was a Chinese temple, she knew, named for the sticks of incense that the faithful burned in order to gain luck, or joss. The clouds of smoke when she passed through the gate were dense and overpowering; she pressed a handkerchief to her eyes.

  “Here, lady.” Edgar handed her a length of bamboo. “You are in need of joss, yes? I see it in your face. You must light the stick and ask for your heart’s desire.”

  “Do we go inside?” Jennie glanced about, blinking her streaming eyes; all around her, people were swaying and chanting, their faces turned to the temple’s walls.

  “No. The temple is for monks. You must light the stick and leave it here, lady. They will intercede for you.”

  Jennie did as she was told. The end of the bamboo flared like a firecracker, a pungent scent of sandalwood rising into her hair. What should she pray? Let him die soon. Surely to wish for another’s death must violate the ritual?

  She prayed for freedom instead.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning was the first of October. They set sail for Yokohama on the Empress of Japan.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Winston raised his pen from the fine sheet of linen notepaper, pilfered from the Dowager Duchess’s writing desk and emblazoned with her address. He had brought a stack of it back to Sandhurst, meaning to write to his parents, but now the bouyant phrases and his breathless excitement had begun to falter. That was due, he suspected, to the fact that he was writing to Papa, who had ordered him not to address him as Papa any longer, because Winston was too old for childish affection and must only call him Father. In his haste to convey his extraordinary success to the man on the other side of the world he had probably bungled and addressed Lord Randolph as Papa again. Winston glanced back at his salutation, swore under his breath, and tore the Duchess’s engraved sheet in two.

  He had been explaining about the riding competition. The entire class of cadets had been put through their paces on a set course, urging their mounts over jumps without using stirrups or reins, their hands clasped behind their backs. It was a test of balance and strength and communion with a powerful and sometimes wayward animal that Winston found both nerve-wracking and exhilarating. Only ten cadets from the class of one hundred and twenty-seven had advanced to the field chase. Only four of those survived for the final test.

  When it was done, Winston had earned one hundred and ninety-nine marks out of a possible two hundred, placing second. It was the greatest performance of his young life.

  But as he stared at the blank page of his letter, Winston knew that Papa would not care. Lord Randolph would never know what it meant to leave one hundred and twenty-five men to eat one’s dust. Lord Randolph despised the cavalry.

  Winston’s grades were good enough now at Sandhurst to be eligible for infantry, but he wanted desperately to join the Fourth Hussars, a light cavalry regiment commanded by an old friend of Lord Randolph’s, Colonel Brabazon. Brab had seen action in the Afghan Wars and around the Red Sea ten years before, and he’d invited Winston to dine with the regiment several times at their billet in Al
dershot. The officers wore blue and gold. The Fourth had campaigned for nearly two centuries. An air of discipline and affluence and superb power pervaded the mess. Winston lost his heart to the hussars. And his second-place performance in the exhibition—out of 127 cadets in his Sandhurst class—meant he could have his pick of regiments.

  His father insisted on the Duke of Cambridge’s Sixtieth Rifles.

  He took up his pen again. Better not to reopen the debate about his future when all possibility of answer was on the other side of the world.

  Was it too much to hope that Papa would be pleased?

  * * *

  —

  The only acceptable place to buy horses was Tattersall’s in Knightsbridge. On his bimonthly half day of leave, Winston took the train into town and made his way to the vast new auction ring presided over by the family’s fifth generation. The first Tattersall had founded the business long ago on Hyde Park Corner, when that was the rural edge of London. All manner of horses came under the gavel at Tatt’s: carriage horses, riding hacks, hunters, Thoroughbred racehorses, the entire contents of deceased noblemen’s stables. And on days like this one, polo ponies.

  Winston was passionate about polo. Sandhurst prohibited the sport on the grounds that it required cadets to buy a string of mounts in order to participate, and thus relegated the poorer subalterns to the sidelines, but Winston and his friends circumvented the rules by hiring hacks from a local livery stable and playing polo on Cobham Green, not far from the military academy. It was a sport he’d mastered with relatively little effort—he who had never been any good at cricket or the field races so vital to public-school boyhood. The bruising, high-speed game had something of the dash and thrust of fencing, the polo mallet taking the place of his foil and the pressure of his calves on the flanks of a horse controlling the speed of his advance and retreat.

  It did not occur to him that his mother was an effortless rider, and Leonard Jerome a polo player long before him. Winston discovered everything in life as though he were the first man to exit Eden.

  He would graduate from Sandhurst in less than two months, at the end of December. The Fourth Hussars were famous for their polo squad. He meant to join the regiment—and play for Colonel Brab.

  London was bustling this last week in October. The Tower Bridge was newly completed, and just along the Embankment from Westminster Bridge, New Scotland Yard was rising like a refugee from the Loire Valley, a Château-on-the-Thames. He eyed a few of the young women seated nearby on his omnibus—the bustle had quite gone out, he noticed, and most wore neat skirts and blouses rather than carriage gowns. That would be the influence of the bicycle craze; he’d heard girls wore bloomers now beneath their skirts instead of petticoats, but he had no way of knowing whether this was true. Their hair was piled effusively on the top of the head, rather than coiled neatly at the neck, and their hats perched precariously on the downslope toward their foreheads. He would have liked to have had a jolly girl on his arm, and taken her to see Mrs. Patrick Campbell at St. James’s Theatre, or perhaps Oscar Wilde’s Woman of No Importance at the Haymarket—but he could not risk missing the last train and being absent from morning reveille. Besides, he knew no jolly girls. He had come to town for one purpose: to buy, on his father’s credit, a pair of polo ponies. He meant to stable them at the livery near Sandhurst and school them throughout the winter once he had graduated.

  Tattersall’s sat on the southwest part of Knightsbridge Green, on the site of what had once been an old townhouse. There was a stone archway with iron gates, and side entrances for people on foot. These were flanked by a pair of functional, if unlovely, buildings in sulfurous brick that hid the rear of the premises from unprivileged eyes. The building on the left housed the off-site betting rooms run by the Jockey Club, with a gloriously tiled floor and a telegraph office to alert the cognoscenti of the results of races throughout the kingdom. The building on the right was reserved for Tattersall’s managers and partners. In between the two was a granite walkway that led to the auction yard—an enormous court housed within a plain two-story building, roofed with iron girders and soaring patent glass. Superb modern stabling, with gas and water laid on, surrounded this enclosed ring—enough loose boxes to house over a hundred horses.

  Winston accepted an auction billet and found a seat. One of Colonel Brabazon’s junior officers had told him about this sale. A member of the Fourth Hussars had broken his neck on the field, and his widow was selling his string.

  The ideal polo pony was of no particular breed, although many had Thoroughbred blood in them. Winston required an agile sprinter who could stop and turn quickly—but the sport demanded intelligence and heart as well. A young or untrained horse was difficult to assess from a walk round an auction ring. Bloodlines were helpful—a few breeders were beginning to produce horses specifically for polo—but Winston had no time to train a raw horse. He needed a mount previously owned and schooled by a crack polo player.

  The first few lots were for riding hacks. Then carriage horses—a beautiful set of match grays. Winston allowed himself to dream of what sort of neat little conveyance he might purchase one day, when he was able to set up his own stables—although God alone knew when that would be. And then his attention was drawn by a figure raising his arm to bid on the pair.

  There was something familiar about the set of the narrow shoulders and the elegant folds of the fellow’s cravat. One of his father’s friends—Mr. Trafford. Winston had dined with him a few years ago in Paris. It had been the week after Christmas, and Mummie had exiled him from home to bone up on French before his Sandhurst exams. Trafford had been very sporting and had taken Win to a cabaret.

  When the gavel came down on the grays, Winston moved through the stands to join the older man. Papa would wish him to be civil.

  “Sir—Mr. Trafford?” He extended his hand.

  Tommie glanced toward him and Winston felt his stomach suddenly drop. The man was dreadfully changed—looked quite ill, in fact. His face was gaunt, the skin marked by obvious sores. His pupils were dilated. Beneath his carefully trimmed mustache, his lips trembled and his tongue moved restlessly. He stared at Winston without recognition.

  “Who is it? What does he want?” he asked his companion querulously.

  The man—an upper servant of some kind, Winston guessed, in a plain dark suit and bowler—glanced at him. “Your name, sir?”

  “W-Winston Churchill,” he stammered.

  “Good Lord! Young Churchill! How are you, my boy?” The words emerged slightly slurred. Not as bad as Papa’s, Winston thought, but still…

  Tommie grasped his hand. “You’re a young man now.”

  “Yes, sir. I am about to leave Sandhurst.”

  “Years since we met in Paris.”

  “Indeed. Have you returned to London permanently?”

  “For as long as I have left,” Tommie muttered. His gaze slid away from Winston’s face. “Takes us all in the end. Your father, me, poor Harry…still, must have horses. Go about in style. What’s the next lot, Simms?”

  “Lord Fenton’s chestnuts, sir.”

  “We missed the grays?”

  “We did, sir.”

  “Don’t like chestnuts as well.”

  “No, sir.”

  The manservant’s eyes met Winston’s. He shook his head almost imperceptibly—in apology or warning, Winston could not say.

  “I shall tell my father we met,” he said to Trafford.

  “Yes, yes. Old man still kicking, what? Must call round and have a chat.”

  “My father is from home, sir. En route to Burma. My mother is with him.”

  “Took him out of the public eye, did she?” Trafford’s expression changed. “Poor bugger. Poor old Randy. Those whom the gods love, and all that. It’ll have us both in the end.”

  Winston sat through the bidding for the first polo pony as tho
ugh carved from stone, his arm and his paddle fixed at his side. He could not concentrate on the auctioneer or his calls. When the horse had been sold, he rose from his place and left Tattersall’s.

  He hailed a jarvey and took a hansom to Harley Street. Robson Roose had his London consulting rooms there. He was without an appointment, but that could not be allowed to matter. Roose had saved his life when Winston was a boy. He had known all the Churchills for years. He would not refuse to see him now.

  “I must speak to the doctor,” he told Roose’s nurse, “on a matter of the gravest importance.”

  * * *

  —

  Charles Kinsky slipped into his father’s library and quietly closed the massive door. The strains of orchestral music filling the Viennese palace faded behind him. He had seen Archduke Franz Ferdinand safely bestowed on a respectable young countess—a girl named Sophie Chotek, who could do him no harm—for the latest waltz, and felt he was entitled to take a few moments to himself. If he was lucky, no one—not even Lise—would miss him.

  The gas in the library’s chandelier was turned low, but a fire burned in the grate. Charles ignored it and all the books set out on the large leather-topped tables and crossed slowly to the glass cabinet positioned to the left of the hearth. A sconce set into the wall shed enough glow to illumine the objects laid out on ink-blue velvet.

  There was the gold chain and emblem of a sheep’s skin that signified the Order of the Golden Fleece. A sword that had belonged to the Kinsky who had served King Wenceslaus centuries ago. A tiara from a long-dead princess. And a gold-trimmed enamel box with three white fangs, displayed on a bed of silk.

  Charles opened the glass case and removed the wolf’s teeth.

  Impossible to know if they were truly twelfth-century, truly a relic of the house. But he carried them over to the firelight and crouched down. The flames flickered over his face and the elaborate dress uniform he wore; threw the shadow of his profile against the wall. He touched one of the fangs with his fingertip. What had he told Jennie all those years ago? Kinsky men defend their own. He would still tear the throat out of anyone who tried to hurt her, regardless of time or distance.