by Robin Paige
Fifteen minutes later, Consuelo was dressed in a blue velvet gown with a high cream-colored valencian lace collar embroidered with cut crystal and silver beads, and was seated at her dressing table, fastening her diamond bracelet while Rosalie silently arranged her hair.
Without much enthusiasm, Consuelo studied her reflection in the gilt-framed mirror. She knew that she was said to be a beauty, although of course, the newspapers had to print things like that, since she was a Vanderbilt by birth and a Marlborough by marriage, and such women were always supposed to be beautiful, no matter what they really looked like. She was tall-at five-foot-nine, she overtopped her husband by a full three inches-and willowy, with an elegant posture, the result of having worn a steel brace as a girl. Her deep-set brown eyes and arched brows were her best features, as well as her graceful neck and flawless white shoulders. But her jaw was decidedly firm, her capable hands were the size of a working man’s, and her nose Oh, that ridiculous retrousse nose, with its silly tip-tilt, which entirely spoilt her face! Consuelo made a self-deprecating grimace as she thought how her mother had blamed her nose when the Duke seemed disinclined to have her, in spite of her tempting Vanderbilt dowry.
“It’s your nose, I’m sure of it,” Alva Vanderbilt had wailed, after three weeks of wondering whether the Duke-Sunny, as he was incongruously called-had decided not to propose after all. “He must be afraid that your children will inherit it.”
But Marlborough had either discounted the importance of Consuelo’s nose or weighed it against her father’s fortune, for after three long weeks of ducal shilly-shallying, he had at last proposed, to the great delight of Mrs. Vanderbilt, who immediately set out to create the grandest wedding that had ever been seen in North America.
The offer of the Duke’s hand had brought Consuelo no happiness, however, for she loved someone else-dear, sweet Winty Rutherfurd, who had begged her to throw over everything else and elope with him. She had tried to tell her mother that she could never love Marlborough, who had not even had the grace to pretend that he loved her, but it was of no use. Mrs. Vanderbilt was absolutely dead set on the marriage: “An English duke! My dear child, what a coup! You should be eternally grateful to me for arranging it.” Consuelo had finally bowed to the inevitable.
The extravagant wedding was followed by the obligatory Mediterranean honeymoon, and in the course of time, Consuelo had obligingly presented her husband with an heir and then a spare, neither of whom were disfigured by their mother’s nose. This attention to duty had pleased the Duke’s grandmother, the old Duchess, who on their first meeting had told her that it was her responsibility to have a son, “because it would be intolerable to have that little upstart Winston become Duke.”
At the thought of Winston, Consuelo smiled, for he had become one of her closest friends, perhaps because his brash-ness was very American (after all, his mother Jennie was an American) and very unlike the stuffy Marlboroughs and their stiff friends. She wished she could talk to him about her present troubles, but they involved the Duke and she always hated to put Winston in a corner when it came to the family. But perhaps Her thoughts were interrupted by a light tap on the door, which burst open before she had a chance to call out. A young woman danced into the room.
“Oh, Connie, vous voila!” she cried, with a toss of her beautiful head. “I have been searching all over for you! I have something exciting to tell you!”
“Thank you, Rosalie,” Consuelo said, dismissing her maid. She turned from the mirror, smiling fondly. “Gladys, my dear. How pretty you look.”
No matter how angry she might be at Marlborough for the reckless way he was behaving with the girl, Consuelo found it hard to be angry at Gladys herself, who was as innocent as a child in such matters. Innocent and free, Consuelo thought with a sudden pang of envy-free to be lively and winsome and pursue her dreams as willfully as she pleased, privileges that she herself had never enjoyed.
Gladys threw herself on the bed with a theatrical flutter of white chiffon. “Oh, I am too, too weary, dear Connie, simply trop fatigued. The Duke insisted that we tramp around and around the garden, pausing to sit only a little.” She raised her arms above her head, showing off delicate white hands like little birds. “Did you know, ma cherie, that Marlborough has commissioned a Venus fountain? And it is to be in my likeness! Isn’t that a deliciously enchanting idea? Oh, that wonderful Duke of yours-he does all in his power to entertain!”
Consuelo’s lips tightened. She thought of the silent Sunny-what an irony there was in that family nickname! — who, when they had no guests, ate his dinner with neither a word nor a glance, let alone any thought of entertainment. But her husband’s churlishness toward her was scarcely Gladys’s fault, any more than it was Gladys’s fault that Marlborough was so obviously smitten-although Consuelo could wish that her young American friend might use just a little more discretion. Twenty-two was a bit old to play at being a flirtatious young girl, and Gladys’s giddiness might get her into trouble-as it very nearly had when the Crown Prince of Germany had fallen in love with her the year before, and insisted on exchanging his mother’s communion ring for Glady’s bracelet. The ring, of course, had been returned at the Kaiser’s command, but the indiscreet flirtation had nearly created an ugly international incident.
Consuelo glanced up to see her young friend watching her in the mirror, her luminous, wide-apart eyes the color of sapphires, a sphinxlike look on that beautiful face with its lovely straight, fine nose that Consuelo, despite her best intentions, could only envy. She had overheard a pair of housemaids whispering that the girl had persuaded a doctor at the Institut de Beaute to inject paraffin wax into the bridge of her nose, to form a classical line from forehead to tip. It was likely true, Consuelo thought, having herself noticed something of a difference in Glady’s profile, as well as a slight puffiness between the eyes. But it had been a ridiculous and dangerous thing to do-and quite unnecessary, for Gladys had been perfect just as she was.
To be fair, Consuelo could understand why her husband was infatuated with the girl, whose slender, boyish figure and enchantingly mercurial temperament gave her the air of a provocative young god. She herself had loved Gladys from the moment they met, although not, she supposed with her usual caustically self-deprecating humor, in quite the same way as did Marlborough.
Or Lord Northcote, for that matter-Botsy, everyone called him, who had turned up at Blenheim the previous week, in pursuit of Gladys. Botsy was simply mad for the girl, and had even told Consuelo that they were engaged. At first, Consuelo had welcomed the news with relief, thinking that Gladys’s marriage would put Marlborough off the chase. But when she had asked Gladys about it, the girl had only smiled her lovely, mysterious smile and refused to say whether it was true. Unfortunately, Botsy only seemed to add to the general tension, and Consuelo found herself wishing that the fellow-he was really rather silly, she thought, and not much of a match for Gladys-would go away again.
Consuelo picked up her engraved silver mirror, turned to inspect the arrangement of her hair at the back of her neck, and smiled at the girl. “I’m glad the Duke has amused you, my dear.” The gong sounded again, signalling teatime, echoing like a hollow, damning voice through the empty corridors of the immense house. She put down the mirror with a sigh. “Shall we go down to tea?”
As if they had any choice, she thought with dull resignation, following Gladys out of the room. For when the Blenheim gong sounded, everyone obeyed, like it or not.
CHAPTER SIX
My dear…
I hesitate how to begin. “Sunny” though melodious sounds childish: “Marlborough” is very formal; “Duke” impossible between relations; and I don’t suppose you answer to either
“Charles” or “Richard.” If I must reflect, let it be Sunny. But you must perceive in all this a strong case for the abolition of the
House of Lords and all titles…
Winston Churchill to his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough 1898
Hearing
the distant dressing gong, Winston put down his pen, took out his pocket watch, and glanced at it. Tea in half an hour-he had just time to change.
He leaned back in his chair and surveyed the pleasant room in which he was working, just off the arcade beneath the Long Library. The shelves contained his research material-books and documents he had carried down from the Muniments Room-as well as eight plaster busts, of no particular artistic merit, of the eight previous dukes of Marlborough. The table contained the stack of manuscript pages he had written so far in his Life of Lord Randolph Churchill.
The work was good, indubitably so, he thought with a comfortable pleasure. When it appeared in print, it would finally silence his father’s critics (of which there were still a surprising number, given that Lord Randolph had been dead for eight years). And it would please the Duke, his father’s nephew, which was not a trivial outcome. While Winston was confident that he had the grit and the muscle to fight his own fight, having the Duke of Marlborough in his corner was an asset that not many junior members of the House of Commons could claim.
As if summoned by Winston’s imagination, the door opened without a tap or an announcement, and His Grace slipped inside, moving with his customary stealth. Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill had been called Sunny as a child, not for his disposition but for his title as Earl of Sunderland. The undersized child had grown into a small man, with dark hair parted at one side and smoothed back from his forehead, a melancholy aristocratic face, a petulant mouth under a thin, turned-down moustache, and the prominent eyes of the Churchills-“bullfrog eyes,” Winston’s mother Jennie had called them. The Duke’s narrow shoulders seemed bowed under the burden of Blenheim’s past and future, which he had assumed when his father died a decade before.
It was a weighty burden, Winston knew, for the seven-acre house and twenty-five hundred-acre parkland easily swallowed a hundred thousand pounds a year in mere upkeep, never mind improvements (like bathrooms) or major repairs (like the roof). Winston himself was a romantic at heart and would never think of marrying for money, but he understood the dilemma his cousin had faced-that he would have faced, if things had gone a different way and Winston Spencer-Churchill had become the ninth Duke. Sunny was obligated to maintain Blenheim, and he’d had no choice but to go in search of a dollar duchess: an American heiress with her own money.
And Consuelo Vanderbilt had come with a magnificent purse: $2,500,000 in railroad stock and $100,000 in annual dividends for both Consuelo and the Duke, although of course everything came to the Duke. The annual payments had been enough to repair the roof, gild and refurbish the drab rooms of state, and replace the books, tapestries, and paintings auctioned off by Sunny’s father and grandfather. Winston, whose strong family pride had been wounded by Blenheim’s seedy appearance, could only applaud the uses to which the Duke had put the Duchess’s money.
“Ah, Winston,” Sunny said, in his almost inaudible drawl. “Hard at the writing still, are you?”
“Just stopping for tea,” Winston said. He paused, then added, in a guardedly neutral tone, “I trust that you enjoyed your walk with Miss Deacon?”
Winston disapproved strongly of his cousin’s relationship with the young American woman. Gladys Deacon might have the gamine winsomeness of an innocently mischievous child, but in Winston’s opinion, she was dangerous. She was duplicitous, deliberately provocative, and entirely out for Gladys. And what was worse, in Winston’s opinion, both Sunny and Consuelo seemed blind to her true nature-a fact which made Gladys even more dangerous.
Even so, Winston was ambivalent, for he could not deny that Gladys was dazzling-even more attractive than Pamela Plowden, whom he had hoped to marry someday. But his political ambitions had quite naturally occupied all his time and attention for the past several years, and the impatient Pamela had given up and flounced off to marry Bulwer-Lytton. And of course, no rational man who aimed at higher office (Winston himself had some exceedingly high aspirations) could afford to be involved with someone like Gladys. She was lovely, yes, indeed, but she was unwise and undisciplined and could never be trusted to avoid the pitfalls that frequently opened at the feet of political wives.
So it was with some smugness that Winston congratulated himself on having the wisdom and foresight not to fall in love with Miss Deacon. He also congratulated himself on being able to see through her, which was more than the Duke could do, or Botsy. Botsy-Lord Henry Northcote-was making a monkey of himself over the girl. Winston had even heard that Botsy had asked her some weeks ago to marry him, when they were both guests at a houseparty weekend. Of course, one couldn’t trust rumor, but it was also said that he’d given her a valuable diamond necklace that had belonged to his paternal grandmother. Winston doubted if the Duke knew this, and he did not mean to be the one to tell him.
Sunny shifted uncomfortably, but when he replied to Winston’s question, his voice as carefully neutral as his cousin’s. “Yes, thank you. Gladys and I had a most pleasant walk. The gardens are coming along nicely. Still a great deal of work to be done, of course.” His tone warmed. “I’ve commissioned Waldo Story to do a Venus fountain, which is to stand in the exact center of the Italian Garden. Miss Deacon has generously agreed to allow the sculptor to use her likeness.”
Winston regarded his cousin. Having refurbished the interior of the palace, the Duke had turned his attention to the vast Blenheim landscape. He lined the Great Avenue with elm trees, replaced the grass in the three-acre Great Court with stone pavings, and built a parapet, a stone wall, and iron gates along the north front to keep out the curious. Now he was working on the gardens outside the east wing, where he had laid out an intricate arabesque in dwarf box hedge, with orange trees in tubs and flowers in jars. Consuelo did not appreciate this fastidious formality, but it intimately revealed, Winston thought, the Duke’s turn of mind. The perfect palace was to be displayed within the perfect setting, and Marlborough, both the owner of this incredible jewel and its jeweler, could never stop polishing and perfecting it. And now this statue of Venus.
The idea of Gladys Deacon’s stone likeness planted in the center of the Duke’s garden brought Winston a deep disquiet. For Sunny, Blenheim was much more than a family obligation, it was an obsession-and, like his obsession with Gladys, dangerous, for in his passionate indulgence, he totally ignored his wife. Both Blenheim and Gladys, Winston very much feared, had the potential of destroying the Marlborough marriage.
And that would be a great pity. Consuelo had admirably performed the first duty of a duchess, having given the Duke not just one son, but two. She was a conscientious mother and a superb hostess as well, and Blenheim would not be the same without her. While Winston didn’t like to think of the matter in terms of money, one had to be realistic. If Consuelo left, she took with her nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year. The Duke did not seem to realize it, but losing his wife would be a terrible blow, both to the family pride and to the family purse.
Winston and his cousin had always enjoyed a cordial friendship, in part, perhaps, because they rarely spoke of personal feelings. Politics, the Royals, family history, the latest novels of Henry James, the plays of Ibsen and Stevens, Marconi’s triumphs, the reforms of the Webbs and the Fabians-the two men had a world of things to discuss, but personal relationships were never on the table. Gladys, however, was becoming too serious a threat to simply let the business slide. Winston felt he must say something.
He cleared his throat. “My dear Sunny,” he said awkwardly, “I wonder if we might have a confidential word-man to man, I mean.”
The Duke dropped his eyes and ducked his head as he always did when he felt uncomfortable. “About what?”
Winston moved a book a quarter of an inch to the right. “About Miss Deacon.”
There was a long silence. The phalanx of plaster dukes, like a Greek chorus, peered down, dumb and empty-eyed, at two very different descendents of John Churchill. Winston was a physical man, robustly, energetically self-assertive, while Sunny, pal
lid and polite, maintained an aloof disdain. Winston’s father had left him nothing but debts, and he had to depend on his pen and his wits to fill his pockets. Sunny’s father had left him an estate and a title; he had traded the title for his wife’s American fortune, and now his pockets were full. Winston lived a restless, hard-fought life in the world at large; nothing came easily to him, nothing seemed guaranteed, whether it was besting a political opponent or conquering a childhood stammer. Sunny, on the other hand, confined himself to Blenheim, where everything came easily to him, where everything was guaranteed-except happiness.
But while they might be very different, what bound these two Churchills together was their passionate love of Blenheim and their common determination to once again raise the Marlborough standard to its previous heights of respect and admiration. That was why Winston was smoothing over the rough places in his father’s life, and why the Duke was landscaping the palace. And that was why Sunny must be made to understand, Winston thought, that Gladys Deacon threatened all of them-not just Consuelo, or Sunny, but the entire family.
Sunny, however, was not to be confronted. He raised his hooded eyes and met Winston’s challenging look with the famous Marlborough blank stare.
“I believe I heard the gong for tea,” he said. “I think we had better change. We do not want to be late.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
A plague upon it when thieves cannot be true to one another.
King Henry IV, Part I, William Shakespeare
It was early Wednesday evening as Alfred hurried through the small gate beside the River Glyme where it flowed under the Park wall. In fact, the hour was so early that Bulls-eye might not yet have put in an appearance at the pub. But Alfred had no choice-it was now or not at all. And by this time, he was feeling desperate.