by Kerri Maher
He shook his head. “Much as I’d like to take responsibility, I can’t in this case.”
It must have been Joe, she thought, and her chest filled with relief and love for her oldest brother. She would try once more with her mother.
Kissing Billy on the cheek, she said, “See you at dinner? I have a letter to write.”
“Of course,” he said.
After saying a rosary in the quiet of her own room, which she hadn’t visited since her arrival, and lighting a candle to the Virgin, Kick sat down to write to Rose. She told her mother how much she hoped she had regained her health, and took pains to reassure her. “You did your duty as a Roman Catholic mother. You have not failed, there was nothing lacking in my religious education.” And she stated again, as she had many times before, that she herself was still a Catholic, and would continue to be one. Billy didn’t want it any other way. She would pray, and hoped her mother would pray, that the church would change its views of marriages like hers. I love him, Mother, and I know you love me. And I love you. Please let your love guide you to know how I feel, and why I’ve done what I’ve done.
She felt better for having written it, and sent it with the evening post, telling herself as the butler took it away that it was the best she could do and every word was true. God, she felt certain, would forgive her.
It was time to enjoy the rest of her honeymoon.
* * *
The following week found Kick and Billy in the little town of Alton southwest of London, where his regiment was once again stationed. They knew he’d be sent to the front soon, and so Kick tried to make sure every moment they shared as newlyweds would be like a page in a book Billy could turn to when he’d gone. It was no mean feat, since their suite of rooms at the Swan Hotel amounted to little more than the single bedroom they’d spent so much time in at Compton Place, and they were far enough away from London to make all their favorite social rituals impossible.
“Well,” she’d said when they first surveyed the tiny quarters, “good thing we’ve been practicing living small.” She wondered idly where the Greek vase from her mother had gone.
Billy laughed and pulled her to the bed. “We don’t need any other furniture, do we?”
When he wasn’t with the guards, they went on bike rides and ate picnics, napped in the long grasses of summer meadows. She shopped for his favorite lemon-cream biscuits and whiskey and even discovered a bottled local ale that met his standards, kept vases of fresh flowers in their rooms, and dreamed up new ways to please him in the evenings when he returned. They visited with Boofie and Fiona, and David and Sissy, and went to Crash-Bang one weekend and had a marvelous time with Joe and Pat.
“How’s it feel to be a marchioness?” Joe asked her.
“Like nothing,” Kick replied. “I haven’t assumed any duties yet.”
“You just wait,” Billy said threateningly. “Mum’s giving you an adjustment period, but she’ll be sending the lists soon.”
“Well, tell her I can’t wait,” Kick replied. Because she couldn’t. People like the Irish bellboy at the Swan treated her with an almost absurd level of respect, Marchioness this and Marchioness that, but it all felt very abstract. Half the time she didn’t even respond when they addressed her that way, since she was so used to responding to Miss Kennedy. She longed to do something—and initially, she hoped that something might start with a baby, but then her period arrived. Billy had said with a naughty grin, “We’ll just have to try harder.”
In a moment by themselves at Crash-Bang, Joe Jr. said to Kick, “I got a letter from Mother. She’s back to buying you clothes at Bergdorf’s, so you must be forgiven.”
So Kick’s earnest letter from Eastbourne must have had some effect. But still. “Marie Bruce told me she’d heard from Mother, too,” Kick said, “and that she was in good health. I just wish she’d write to me.”
“She will,” Joe reassured her. “Give her some time.”
Kick sighed. She’d begun to grow numb to it all. The happiness she was experiencing with Billy tempered every other feeling, made all that sadness and loss feel somehow irrelevant. The ocean between her and the rest of her family helped, she had to admit.
“What about you?” Kick changed the subject. “By the looks of things, you and Pat are closer than ever.”
Joe laughed in a chagrined way. “I can’t explain it,” he said. “After all the other girls, why should a married mother of three kids make my heart triple its former size?”
“Maybe it’s because of the children?” Kick mused. “The little ones adore you, and you like being adored.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said. They were both quiet for a few minutes, then Joe went on, “I hope I’ll finally get my opportunity to show everyone what I’m really worth on this second tour of duty.”
“You don’t have to prove anything to me, Joe. Nor to Pat. I hope you know that.”
“I do,” Joe said. “I have something to prove to myself, though.”
“Don’t go doing something stupid just to be a hero,” she said, her voice becoming wet and thick with emotion, “because I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She wanted to say the same thing to Billy, since he was so eager to get to France, but she didn’t dare. She knew he’d hear such a warning as sacrilegious, since his primary quarrel wasn’t with his brother, as was Joe’s—no, Billy’s fight was a sacred one for king and country.
“Don’t you want to be proud of both your big brothers?” Joe asked.
“I am proud of you both.”
Joe shook his head. “All right, I want you to be more proud of me. Is that so terrible?”
Kick laughed. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. “I already am.”
For just a second, Kick saw Joe’s eyes go watery. Then he coughed and used the back of his hand to rub his eye. “You don’t have to flatter me, little sister.”
“I’m serious. I don’t think I’ve properly thanked you for everything.” Everything hardly covered it. Joe Jr. had been there for her when no one else in the family had. And he’d been amazingly humble about it, too. She’d learned the other day, from Debo, that her brother had even stood up to Billy’s father before the wedding when he’d asked Joe to get Kick to sign some paper saying she’d raise the children Protestant. “You even told the Duke of bloody Devonshire where to put his pen,” she said to him now, slyly. “That took some guts, big brother, guts and backbone.”
“Well, Billy’s father needed to know you’re a woman of your word.”
“You’re a good man, Joe. Better than you give yourself credit for. There’s more than one way to be a hero.”
This time he cleared his throat and stood up. “Enough of this sissy talk,” he declared. “Time to find the monkeys and teach them some American football.”
CHAPTER 35
Billy was called up on June 13. He was to leave for France early on the fifteenth.
“I’ve been expecting it every day,” he said to her as they lay naked in their rumpled bed at the Swan. “But it always felt so distant, almost like it could never happen. How could anything disturb this? It’s like we’ve been living in a brilliant dream.”
Kick trailed her fingers slowly up and down his arm. Her ear was resting precisely over his heart, and she could hear how erratic its beat had become since he’d begun thinking about this again.
“I’ll miss you so much,” she said, not trusting the strangled tears in her throat, the heat squeezing her eyes. The last thing Billy needed was a weeping wife. Wife, she thought again, the word still giving her a zing of pleasure.
Putting his large, warm hands under her arms, he gently pulled her up so he could gaze at her face. He didn’t look so boyish anymore, though he ought to have looked even younger with his hair tousled and his pale chest and shoulders showing. The sadnesses of the past few years had given him the fine
st of lines around his eyes and lips. She kissed him so she wouldn’t have to look at him any longer. It was too painful.
“You make me so happy,” he murmured as they kissed more, arms and legs tangling in that way that was becoming more and more familiar, though every time they came together, it was a little different, and she always looked forward to finding out how it would be the next time. That night as they moved together, she sensed him getting a bit lost, his heart and body speeding up but never evening out. Closing her eyes and twisting her fingers into his hair, she allowed herself to go with him, wherever it was he was going, and found that she didn’t lag behind but caught up, and when they reached the end, it was together, and she forgot for one blissful second where it was they’d started. She opened her mouth to tell him how happy he made her, but he’d fallen asleep with his arms still around her and she didn’t have the heart to wake him.
* * *
The fifteenth found Kick at Marie Bruce’s apartment in London, collapsed in a puddle of tears.
“Poor darling,” Marie cooed, wrapping Kick in an afghan and handing her a cup of tea. “The war will be over soon, and he’ll be back, and you can start again. Think how wonderful it will be to be reunited.”
Kick cried and hicupped and tried to smile, then slept for three hours that afternoon. Later, Fiona practically forced her into the taxi to come to Ciro’s with her and Boofie, saying, “No use acting like someone’s dead. Carry on like the rest of us.”
“Even when someone is dead,” added Boofie a bit drunkenly. “It’s the English way.”
And so began what Kick came to think of as her third life in London. While she carried on doing many of the things she had always enjoyed—dining with friends, weekending at Crash-Bang, and renewing her charity work in the form of corresponding and meeting with the duchess about beginning her duties as marchioness—everything was done under threat of the German doodlebugs, which served as constant reminders of the dangers Billy was in overseas. Bug was a good name for them. Like jet-propelled wasps, they buzzed over London, and everyone who heard them girded themselves for their bite. They weren’t even piloted by humans, which added to their insect-like character.
Though the press denigrated the missiles as Göring’s last-gasp offensive after the embarrassment of June 6 at Normandy, the bugs “get under my skin,” Bertrand quipped at the 400 one night. The death toll was mounting, and important buildings like the Guards Chapel were completely gutted. Marie Bruce began chewing her nails. “I haven’t done this since the Blitz,” she said. Kick gave her a manicure with her best red Chanel varnish. “If this doesn’t keep you from biting, nothing will,” she told her friend, though Kick’s lips were ragged and bloody from her own nervous habit.
Billy wrote her, worrying over her safety, but she always assured him she was fine. Nothing, not even a doodlebug, was going to keep her from that reunion Marie Bruce had helped her envision, which was the only thing to prod her out of bed some mornings. He also wrote of the hearty, thankful greetings he and his men received as they marched north. The Allies were winning, and Kick began to put real faith in the image of herself and Billy on the lawn at Chatsworth—though not, she felt with a startling sense of grief at the onset of her second married period—with her belly rounded with joy. Soon, she told herself. We’ll just have to try harder, she thought with a smile, remembering Billy’s words.
Another hopeful sign was the beginning of correspondence directly from her mother, starting with one of her roundup letters consisting of news about all the family, addressed to Lady Hartington in Rose’s own hand. Though the letter contained no congratulations to Kick on her marriage, nor even a recognition of it beyond her changed name, Kick felt a deep sense of relief at this discreet opening of the door.
The day after she received the letter, she went to Brompton Oratory, her mother’s old favorite, and offered up two rosaries of thanks. She’d continued to attend mass as much as she had before marrying Billy, but she still could not get used to sitting in the pew while the other congregants rose to receive the body of Christ. She felt the lack of this Communion in her soul, as much as she felt Billy’s absence in her heart and body. Lying alone between cool cotton sheets, she wondered whether she was doomed to always feel something missing in her life, if that was the price she would have to pay for her independence.
* * *
Work proved the only salve, just as it had at St. Mary’s when she was a girl and at the Times-Herald when she was not much older. Throughout the summer, Kick and the duchess attended agricultural fairs and flower shows in Derbyshire and organized teas and luncheons to raise money for a variety of war-related causes. Inspired by Lord Halifax’s son Richard, who’d lost his legs in Syria and now got on remarkably well with wooden limbs, Kick asked if she could begin a charity for veteran amputees, and the duchess said that was precisely the sort of thing she hoped Kick would come up with. “And after the war,” the duchess added in a heavy tone, “if there ever is an after the war, we can think about arts and culture again, as we did before.”
“I remember those days well,” said Kick.
“As do I,” the older woman replied wistfully.
Even the duke took notice of Kick’s industriousness. After reading his morning post over breakfast at Eastbourne one morning, he turned to her and said, “I’ve just read a letter from the prosthetics surgeon at the hospital, and he says you have a good head on your shoulders.”
At the end of July, Kick sponsored her first carnival. In a neat print on the blue program, it read, “Red Cross & St. John Carnival, Under the Patronage of the Marchioness of Hartington,” which gave her a thrill. She sent her parents a copy and hoped that seeing her name so printed would remind them of how far they’d all come in the world. The day itself was considerably less posh than her name on the program. It had rained earlier in the week, so everyone had to wear wellies because of the mud, and the day was hot. She couldn’t even imagine dancing when the Derby Home Guard Band took the stage. But when the premier farmer in the region, a handsome, graying man of middle age, offered her his hand and said, “It’s a shame what happened to Billy in the election. But perhaps if he’d married you first, he’d’ve won,” she was happy to oblige.
In a rare telephone conversation with Billy, she relayed some of the summer events in a mad rush, and he’d laughed till he coughed. “So, you’re finding out that the life of a marchioness isn’t so grand after all. I wasn’t joking when I told the crowd I knew how to spread muck.”
“What, judging cows and pets isn’t grand? I relish my newfound power,” she said with a cackle.
“I miss you so much,” he groaned, reminding her of the low tones he used when they were in bed, and making her want him so much, she had to sit down.
“I’m not sure why this is occurring to me now,” she said, clutching the phone, “but I want to tell you how happy you make me. On our last night together you told me I make you happy, but you fell asleep before I could explain just how perfect and wonderful you are, and how perfectly happy I am to be your wife.”
Billy cleared his throat, and she could tell he was struggling to contain his emotions. “I hope to be home very soon, darling.”
“Hurry,” she whispered.
“I shall,” he replied. “I don’t think it will be long now.”
* * *
On a stifling morning in the second week of August, which was at least mercifully free of doodlebugs, Kick was breakfasting with the duke and duchess in a town house they’d hired in London so that the duke could attend to some business. They were companionably reading the papers and drinking tea, and Kick was looking forward to meeting Debo later in the day and then having dinner with Marie Bruce.
There was a firm rap at the front door, and soon after the butler showed a uniformed Royal Air Force officer into the room, announcing him as Officer James Woodman. He was older than Billy or Joe, and he
walked with a slight limp. His right hand and cheek were scarred from a burn. He stood stiffly in the dining room, though the duke quickly asked if he would like to sit and have a cup of tea.
“Thank you, sir,” the man replied with a respectful bow, before taking the seat the butler arranged for him.
Kick’s heart thudded in her ears. This could not be good. This stranger had come with news, and her whole body was afire with dread and longing to know what it was. The duchess also appeared stricken with fear, her posture rigid, her eyes wide.
Before his tea arrived, Officer James Woodman said, “I know you want me to get right to it.” He looked squarely at Kick now, and she felt sure her heart stopped for a moment. “Marchioness, your brother Joseph Kennedy died yesterday doing a great service to his country and ours. He will go down as one of the heroes of this war for his bravery and leadership. All his men loved him. He died trying to destroy one of the bases for those blasted doodlebugs.”
All eyes were now on Kick. She felt as though she might throw up. She stared at her fine porcelain teacup. Joe! Her pillar of strength and protector, whom she’d only just gotten to know. Dead.
“Darling Kick,” said the duchess, getting up to crouch beside Kick’s chair and take her hands in hers. “I’m so sorry. Words are . . . inadequate. Please, just tell us what you need.”
Kick turned to face Billy’s mother and felt the first tears come. She opened her mouth to ask Officer James Woodman if her parents also knew, but she could barely utter anything. “Do my . . .”
Amazingly, the duke knew what to ask. “Have her parents and family in America gotten the news?”
“They have,” the officer replied with a nod.
“Excuse me,” Kick whispered, standing up and muttering a hasty thanks to Officer Woodman before running from the room and up the stairs to the bedroom where she’d slept fitfully the night before, wishing for Billy. With the door closed, she curled up in the bed, held on to one of the pillows, and sobbed.