That Churchill Woman

by Stephanie Barron

  Behind him, the door opened with a slight sigh on its hinges. He glanced round and saw his mother. She was regal this evening in a ball gown of bronze silk with the new leg-of-mutton sleeves.

  “Karl. I saw you leave the ballroom. Are you unwell?”

  “Not at all.” He replaced the teeth and set the enamel box back in its spot in the case. “I must congratulate you on an exceptional entertainment, Mamma—you have outdone yourself. So many beautiful young ladies! The Emperor can hardly reproach you if his heir fails to marry this Season, at least.”

  “Franz is in love with that little Countess,” the princess said impatiently, “and she is entirely unacceptable.”

  “Countess Sophie?” Charles asked, surprised. “They make a charming couple.”

  His mother crossed the carpet to his side and cupped his cheek in her hand. “Poor darling. Charm is not the point. The Chotek is not a princess! Worse for Franz if he contracts a mésalliance than if he never marries at all.”

  “I see.” Charles grasped her small hand in his and kissed the palm. “Let me escort you back to the ballroom, Mamma.”

  “You were looking at the wolf’s teeth,” she said, frowning.

  “Yes.”

  “Does it hurt you so much?”

  “Duty often does.”

  “Duty has its compensations,” she suggested.

  “So I’m told.”

  “Karl,” she said impulsively, “please try to be happy. I cannot bear you to live in regret.”

  He smiled down at her. “But isn’t that the human condition? Why should I be any different from the rest of the world? Come along, Mamma. We must dance together before I return to Brussels.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  She stood on the steamship’s promenade deck not far from the stern, where she could watch the bearers. There were six of them, native Gurkhas. They seemed too slight for the thing they carried. The quay’s surface was uneven and slick and the bearers wore no shoes. She waited for one of them to stumble, for the oblong casket to cartwheel obscenely to the ground. But the men came safely to a halt near the cargo hold.

  Which meant that their burden was hers now.

  Jennie turned and stared out over the ocean. Burma was at her back, the setting sun invisible behind a bank of cloud. She was moored in the midst of the Andaman Sea.

  The Andaman Sea.

  Oh, where, she thought, are you floating, Camille?

  No answer came back from the waves.

  Did Mr. Schermerhorn still live behind his drawn shades at Chepstow House, turning over the shells of creatures he would never see? Had he ever thought of her or Camille again, as he walked in the winter months along the granite-strewn shore? Matilda must have died long ago.

  I have tried to live for us both, she told her little sister. I tried to carry you forward, Camille.

  It was early November. Spring or fall? Naming the season this close to the equator was pointless, like so many of the habits she’d abandoned over the past four months. Simpler to say that the air was both hot and moist, the harbor a basin of steam. That it might be any day of the week. That she hated the way her silk dress, soiled from too much wear and impossible to really clean, stuck to her back like flypaper. She had been sitting below in the cabin with Randolph for hours, and when he fell asleep, she had ducked up the gangway for air. Only there was no air. Just mist as warm as a kiss on the nape of her neck.

  Keep him below if you possibly can, Keith had warned. The bearers might unsettle him.

  She should have followed her instincts and ignored the doctor’s advice. Nothing infuriated Randolph more than being idle. She should have hired a native guide and a pair of mules and set out with him up into the tea plantations, where they could have clawed their way above the clouds and felt the cool sunlight. There might have been a breeze. He would have boarded the boat this evening tired and content. He might even have slept. Whereas…

  Whereas provided so innocently with a knife by the steward who served them lunch, he had seized her arm as soon as the man disappeared through the cabin door.

  Snake, he said, though he wasn’t looking at the tattoo of a serpent coiled on her pale wrist. He could choke out words of one syllable quite clearly; more complicated thoughts died in his throat. She forced herself to hold his gaze, to meet the fury in his eyes and not look down. If she showed fear, if she tried to wrench her arm free, he would slice the blade across the tattoo and open her veins. She smiled at him instead and agreed.

  Snake.

  The knife trembled a little in his fingers; he could not control them anymore. Bitch.

  Bitch, she agreed warmly.

  Cunt.

  Slut.

  Thief.

  Whore.

  So much abuse in words of one syllable. A lullaby they crooned together. The rage gradually ebbed from his eyes. The steward returned with a pitcher of cold water and Randolph drank greedily, liquid dribbling through his beard. The rage was replaced with a look of sad confusion, and the knife slipped from his fingers to the floor. She stretched out her boot and caught it beneath her heel, her upper body deceptively still.

  Just so had she flirted with Charles beneath a score of dining room tables. Her slippered toes skimming wickedly along his calf.

  She must not think of Charles. Although he had haunted her, his voice curling between her thoughts, his face rising like a mirage on portholes and train windows. Charles prowled at her elbow, his touch ghostlike on her skin.

  Should she have sued for divorce? Gone with him to Brussels? Alva Vanderbilt would not have hesitated.

  We can live anywhere in the world that Austria has an embassy. The United States, even.

  A few weeks before, just outside of Yokohama, Randolph had found a pistol and pressed the shaking barrel against her skull. She waited for the click of the trigger, and when it came, was astonished to find that the gun was unloaded. Randolph’s right arm refused to function after that. Paralysis? Or mental reaction to a murderous impulse? Dr. Keith couldn’t say.

  Japan was at war with China and the harbor at Canton was mined. Jennie had insisted upon going ashore anyway, under cover of darkness and in sampans whose shallow draft would never trigger explosives. Randolph liked the night passage, the moon hanging low over the water. He was easy to manage at first. But when the beacon from a nearby fort sliced across the harbor, he catapulted from his seat and screamed. Shaking his fists at the enemy. She clutched his legs while the sampan rocked and the Chinese guides scolded and swore. She could not forget his silhouette; on bad nights, it came to her in dreams. Randolph falling overboard. A mine whistling. All of them going up in flames.

  At least in Canton their scenes had been private. In Hong Kong they had an audience—every English expatriate who wandered through Government House. The Churchills left for Singapore after two days. Jennie trapped in a ship cabin and staterooms again, watching George Keith take notes as her husband’s brain rotted.

  You cannot imagine anything more distracting and desperate, she wrote to her sister Clarita, than to see him as he is and to think of him as he was.

  Singapore was memorable for the snake tattoo. Keith was absorbed in his work and Randolph was quiet, so she had almost run down the gangway to stretch her legs alone on dry land. She had found the Malay with his ivory and steel knives, his ink intended to brand the skin, set up under an awning near the entrance to the docks, bent over the arm of a British sailor.

  Bertie, the Prince of Wales, had a tattoo of five crosses on his forearm. So did his son George. Tattoos were talismans of courage and daring among the Marlborough House Set: a mark of unconventional thinking. Jennie watched the native artist, fascinated, her eyes flicking to the stoic face of the sailor. The man was whistling as his flesh was punctured. Could she bear it?

  She took a walk around the town’s principa
l streets, where there was great excitement—the Tenth Lincolnshire Regiment were engaged in some sort of football match and the whole English population was gathered near the pitch—but when she returned to the docks later, refreshed and clearheaded, the tattoo artist was free. He met her gaze unsmilingly as she walked by his tent. She stopped short. Was it an affront to such a man, for a woman to ask for his art?

  Impulsively, she held out her left forearm. Ours would be a left-handed marriage. “How much?”

  He shook his head. “The lady will swoon.”

  “I have borne two children. I will not swoon.”

  He hesitated, glanced beyond her as though searching for the man who must have her in his keeping. There was no one behind Jennie. The artist lifted his shoulders slightly.

  “These do not wash off. You understand?”

  “I understand.” She seated herself on his leather stool. “I am embarked on a very long journey. Of the soul, as much as the body. There has been too much pain—inside of me, if you understand.”

  She pressed her fist against her heart; the man nodded his head.

  “You wish to feel the pain now in your skin, and free your soul.”

  “Yes,” Jennie replied, with a note of surprise. “A small and delicate drawing, perhaps—on the inside of my wrist.” She exposed the pale flesh to his dark eyes. She might cover it, she thought, with a bracelet in moments when the symbol felt too revealing.

  She rejected crosses and hearts, flowers and wings. He showed her drawings of snakes, in rings and figure eights, the serpents’ mouths devouring their tails. She was both fascinated and repelled. Snakes signified sin, the seduction of the Temptress. The expulsion from the Garden. Did he see Eve in her face?

  “Why these?” she asked.

  “Ouroboros,” he said. “Rebirth, lady.”

  The idea startled her. A second life? A new journey. A future beyond Randolph’s ending. Jennie thought suddenly of Camille, denied all futures. She would allow this man to cut the serpent into her skin. He would scar her with hope. Surely that was worth any price he might name.

  She gave him her wrist, and a British pound sterling.

  She suffered an alarming few days of infection, her arm red and swollen. The tools could never have been clean; Dr. Keith scolded her recklessness, and painted her skin with iodine and carbolic acid twice each day. But the snake subsided into peace near her palm, repellant and inviting. Her pact with the future.

  * * *

  —

  Jennie looked at Randolph across the lunch table in the midst of the Andaman Sea that afternoon, his knife beneath her heel, and kept up a stream of soothing words. She talked of crocodiles. Rare Asian herons. Strange plants she had seen in her grueling walks through the hills above Hong Kong, and the bonsai trees she had bought in Yokohama. He never answered her but the sound of her voice was important. It beguiled him.

  He grew absorbed in his treacle tart, small grunting noises rumbling in his throat. She felt in her dress pocket for her vial of morphine and slipped a dose into his coffee.

  When he’d been snoring for at least ten minutes, she bent down and retrieved the knife pinned beneath her shoe. For an instant she studied his ravaged face, her fingertips trembling against the blade. It would take so little to end it all. She could say he had tried to kill her. And that in self-defense…

  She almost ran through the cabin door.

  And from the deck, she saw the bearers. Toiling barefoot with the lead-lined coffin on their backs, intended for her husband’s body.

  With all her strength, she flung the knife into the oily waters.

  * * *

  —

  “Lady Randolph.”

  “Dr. Keith.”

  She turned from her position at the rail. The sun had nearly slipped below the horizon. It must be time to change for dinner. She had no appetite but it was always a relief to see the faces of the other passengers, to move freely among them with Keith at her side. He was at least ten years older than she and not one of her admirers, whatever the London gossips might whisper.

  “How was he today?”

  “Much the same. Listless. Then violent.”

  “Asleep, when I looked in,” Keith said.

  “The bearers came,” she offered.

  “I know. The purser gave me a receipt.”

  “Ought we to go home?” They had accomplished their object; they had seen Burma. Randolph had been in no condition to understand or appreciate the antiquities of Rangoon or the nature of the people he had forced into Her Majesty’s Empire, but he had set foot in the country, at least.

  “You miss your boys.”

  She nodded slightly. Her boys. All of them. Charles—

  Keith drew a pair of envelopes from his breast pocket. “Then these should make you happy indeed. Our last mail, I’m afraid, until we reach Madras.”

  One letter was slim—nothing but a telegram. The other was thick and bore her son’s hand. She would read it first.

  Keith left her alone in the first cool breeze of evening. She tore the gummed flap with her fingernail and began to scan the regular lines. Win’s careful handwriting, exuberant with all the small details of his life. A visit to Tattersall’s. Polo ponies! A glimpse of Tommie Trafford…who had looked alarmingly unwell…

  Jennie’s breath caught raggedly in her throat. Dear God. No! She raised her eyes from the sheet of paper, which was trembling now in her hand, and stared wildly at the docks. They wavered before her like a scene glimpsed through a wet train window, half-perceived, unrecognizable. Winston had gone to Robson Roose. Randolph’s doctor. He had demanded to know exactly what nervous complaint his father suffered from…

  And Roose had told him everything.

  Damn the man!

  Pain slashed through Jennie’s chest. She tasted bile in her throat. Winston had written this—the twenty-year-old boy with the pugnacious mouth, hunched over his desk at Sandhurst. He knew that syphilis could be inherited. And that would terrify him. The sheer precision of his script told Jennie how much fear he was suppressing.

  She had kept Randolph’s secrets for twenty years. She had never wanted anyone—certainly not his sons—to know the truth. And now Roose—

  “The bloody, vicious fool,” she muttered.

  Her left hand was clenched tightly on the second letter Keith had given her—the telegram. She drew a shaky breath, her vision clearing slightly, and steadied herself. It must be from Roose. Begging her forgiveness for the appalling thing he had done.

  But the telegram was from her sister Leonie.

  CHARLES KINSKY ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED STOP COME HOME MY DEAREST STOP HE CANNOT DO WITHOUT YOU…

  Jennie closed her eyes. They were hot and wet, suddenly—something to do with the Malaysian weather and the knife that might as well have been plunged in her gut.

  He had given up on her. At the worst possible moment—

  Hadn’t she always known he would?

  He did only what you asked, a voice protested in her mind. Exactly as you ordered. You have no one else to blame.

  She crumpled the telegram and dropped it overboard, into the sea.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  More letters awaited Jennie in Madras.

  The girl is twenty to Charles’s thirty-six, Leonie wrote, and a countess. Her name is Elisabeth Wolff-Metternich zur Gracht, a cousin of the Empress Sisi. Charles told me all about it himself, while briefly in London a few days ago—I think he did not like us to learn the news from strangers. Naturally, she has never been introduced to London Society, and nobody seems to know much about her—but he showed me her miniature. She is blond, with severe features and rather sad eyes, I think. They are to be married in Westphalia, at the schloss belonging to her mother’s family, the von Fürstenbergs, just after the New Year.

  I ca
nnot tell what Charles feels. He guards himself. Even from us.

  Jennie knew Charles in that mood: distant, unreachable, and apparently emotionless. As he had been that first night in Paris, when she had come looking for Randolph and pleaded for his help. And yet, he had helped her freely. Laid down his iron mask. Told her that his love was inviolable.

  She tamped down on her anguish and, her fingers shaking, opened another letter.

  Fourteen-year-old Jack, writing to Randolph from Harrow with words that his father could no longer read or understand.

  I suppose you have heard that Winston came second in the cavalry contest at Sandhurst. That seems to be important. I have not been happy for nearly six months, ever since you and Mummie left England.

  The next letter was for her. From Winston again, a more cheerful note than his last urging her to keep her spirits up and enjoy life. Jennie laughed out loud. How did he think she had gotten through twenty years of life with his father?

  There was nothing from Charles. There would never again be anything from Charles.

  She set aside her mail and drew a soft breath. Three-quarters of her soul wanted to cry out. The other quarter looked first for Randolph—and found him lying on his berth, staring insensibly at the cabin wall. Saliva trickled from the corner of his mouth.

  Since Rangoon, all fight had gone out of him. He was listless, apathetic, unable now to utter even guttural syllables. He soiled his linen and, like an infant, had to be changed. He could not walk without a strong arm to support him; thank God for George Keith.

  Sinking, Keith said when he looked at Randolph now, as though not just his patient but the entire ship and all its passengers were about to founder. Keith had sent a telegram to Robson Roose this morning with the latest health report from Madras. Jennie wondered what it said.