That Churchill Woman

by Stephanie Barron

  “But bombs, Dobbie?” Jennie plunked herself down on one of the nursery tuffets, fascinated.

  “Most likely bottles filled with rags and kerosene, Miss Jeanette. But they work just fine—I hear most of the lower end of the city is on fire. That’s why your pa wants us all out of Manhattan.”

  “In case the fire spreads?” If Papa’s library burned—and the stable where her pony lived…the theater where she played her piano…

  “They won’t hurt you, will they?” Camille quavered. She wrapped her arms tightly around Dobbie’s waist.

  “Dobbie’s not a slave,” Jennie declared, recovering. “She’s as free as you and I are. And you know we’ll be safe in Newport, Camille. There’s bound to be a forest we can hide in there.”

  The next morning, three carriages of servants, household goods, Jeromes, and baggage rolled out of Madison Square toward Papa’s berth on the East River.

  * * *

  —

  Papa had owned boats before, but Clara Clarita was special. She was a new schooner-rigged steam yacht, graceful and swift; even the iron funnel protruding amidships failed to mar her fluid beauty. She was 130 feet long, with guns mounted on her stern and a saloon lined in pale blue satin.

  “Leonard,” Mamma had sighed the first time she saw the rich upholstery, “what were you thinking? This will fade in sun, and stain with salt water!”

  “But the color pairs so well with your complexion, my dear,” Papa replied, which was unanswerable.

  Mamma shooed the girls into the saloon to escape the soft drizzle, but Jennie ignored her and remained on deck with her hand in Papa’s. She could feel the steady thump of Clarita’s engine beneath the deck. The East River was roiling and wine-dark as they headed north toward Long Island Sound. The patches of sheen on its surface dazzled like rainbows.

  “Oil,” Papa said disappointingly, when Jennie pointed out the sparkling colors with her muff.

  Boat traffic was heavy, the racket of commerce loud and bewildering; whistles blared. Jennie gripped Papa’s hand.

  “Are you cold?” he asked.

  “No, Papa.” Dobbie had stuck a round felt hat on her black curls with a jaunty aigrette in the shape of a feather. Her cherry-red merino coat was trimmed in sable. The fur tickled her chin and cut the wind off the river. Her muff was sable, too, and she kept her left hand firmly inside it, clutching the book she’d tucked there. It was not that she was hiding The Children of the New Forest from Papa, but rather the fact that she had taken a volume from his library without asking. If he discovered this, Jennie would tell the truth. I had to know how the story ends.

  “How long until we reach Newport?” Her eyes smarted and teared with coal smoke and wind. She did not want her father to think she was crying at leaving New York. She blinked rapidly.

  “It’s a hundred and thirty-nine miles,” he explained. “The Clarita averages about thirteen knots. I make this trip each year with the Yacht Club regatta, you know. It’s a tradition. We’ll be there in nine hours or so.”

  Jennie was used to traveling by train to Rhode Island each summer, and the railway took half as long. But Papa looked so pleased to be sailing luxuriously from one port to another that she merely said, “As fast as that!” He was proud of Clara Clarita.

  “Shall you be bored?” He smiled down at her.

  She shook her head. “Did you know, Papa, that there are civil wars in England?”

  “Men will find a reason to kill each other anywhere, Jennie. Would you like to visit Captain Thayer on his bridge?”

  * * *

  —

  It was dark and cold by the time they reached Rhode Island. Mamma and Clarita had both been sick over the side and retired to shrouded cabins. In the seventh hour at sea, little Leonie began to wail and Dobbie bore her away to sleep below deck.

  “You should name your next yacht Jeanette or Camille, Papa,” Jennie said helpfully, “after better sailors.”

  Few lights illuminated the summer cottages on the cliffs as they moored at one of the private slips in Newport, but the shops and streets around the wharves were bustling. Papa sent the servants ahead in hired carriages to the Jerome cottage, which was intended purely for summer and had no central heating, so that fires could be hurriedly lit and beds made up. Dobbie and Leonie went with them.

  “We’ll have a little supper, girls,” Papa suggested. “Get something warm in your stomachs, or you’ll never sleep.”

  He ushered Mamma and his three older daughters, tired and red-cheeked from the March cold, into a public restaurant on Thames Street, not far from the wharves. Jennie was conscious of eyes upon them. It was an hour when most little girls were long since tucked up in bed, and the room was cheerful with oil lamps and the warm fug of tobacco smoke. A fire roared on the hearth and the Jeromes had a table near its warmth.

  It was the first time Jennie had ever been allowed in a restaurant, and she struggled to contain a bubble of excitement over everything to do with the meal—the strangeness of a waiter unfurling a napkin in her lap, the swell of male voices from the tables around them, the menu that seemed so immense in her hands. Clarita, she noticed, was doing her best to look bored, as though she were used to dining out with grown-ups. She sat very straight, practicing deportment, and kept her hands demurely in her lap. Jennie stuck her tongue out at Clarita when Mamma was not looking, and caught a twinkle in her father’s eyes from across the table. His thumbs were tucked in his waistcoat pockets, and his long legs thrust out on the wood floor.

  “Happy, Jennie?”

  She nodded vigorously. “May I have fried oysters, Papa?” It was the most exotic item on the menu. She thought the occasion called for nothing ordinary.

  “You may.”

  “Leonard!” Mamma protested. “She’ll be sick!”

  “If she didn’t cast up her accounts on the Clarita,” he said, “she’ll do fine. Oysters are one of the first refinements of Society, Clara.”

  * * *

  —

  It was extraordinary, Jennie decided, how black the night sky over Newport seemed after the lights of New York, and how thickly crowded with stars. She stood stock-still in the middle of the carriage drive, her head craned back, just staring.

  The Jerome cottage was on Coggeshall Avenue, not far from Almy’s Pond. They had passed the homes of any number of people Mamma and Papa knew, but most of the houses were empty and dark.

  “The Gerrys are not yet at Seaverge,” Mamma observed as they traveled down Bellevue Avenue, “nor the Wolfes at The Reefs. And you heard, Leonard, that old William Wetmore died, and left Chateau-sur-Mer to George? I’m told he plans extensive renovations, and has taken his bride to Europe. You’ve marooned me here, with four children, thirty trunks, and not a respectable soul to cheer me! It’s very tiresome.”

  “There are lights at Chepstow,” Papa observed, as their carriage turned into Narragansett Avenue.

  Jennie peeked out the side window. White stucco and black shutters, a wide lawn and circular drive. One light burned behind bow windows, another high on the upper floor.

  “Chepstow!” Mamma repeated. “You must be dreaming, Leonard, if you expect me to invite the Recluse to dine!”

  “You could do worse.” Papa quirked his bushy eyebrows. “Schermerhorn is Lina Astor’s cousin.”

  Even Jennie knew that Caroline Astor was the most fashionable lady in New York—and that she did not wish to know Mamma. Mrs. Astor’s daughter Emily refused to say hello to Jennie in the dance classes they shared at Delmonico’s. The Jeromes’ money, Papa had once explained to her, was not old enough. He had made his own fortune, not inherited it.

  “Her eccentric cousin,” Mamma retorted, “who refuses to marry because of a Disappointment in Youth, travels with the side shades of his carriage drawn down, and speaks only to his servants! Edmund Schermerhorn would be poor com
fort at any time, Leonard—but none at all in March!”

  “Suit yourself.” Papa shrugged as the carriage turned into their own sweep. “For my part, I find eccentrics interesting.”

  Now Jennie felt her father’s hand on her shoulder as she stood alone, her face lifted to the stars. “When it’s a bit warmer,” he suggested, “we’ll study the constellations. Would you like that?”

  “Very much, Papa. But we will have to stay up fearfully late.”

  “I’ll settle the matter with Dobbie,” he promised. “Now come along inside, before you catch your death.”

  There were hot bricks wrapped in flannel in the beds that night.

  The next morning, Papa sailed back to New York alone.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “I love Newport, even if it is cold,” Jennie told Camille. “Nobody cares that we’re all by ourselves. We’re never allowed outside alone in Madison Square.”

  She had banged out of the cottage’s back door in her cherry-colored coat that morning, immediately after breakfast, while Dobbie was busy with Leonie and Mamma was still unpacking her trunks, to roam the tumbled granite slabs that bit into Narragansett Sound. Camille followed carefully behind, picking her way uncertainly among the rocks. At seven, she was much slighter than Jennie but she would rather die than fail to keep up. The girls had raced from Coggeshall Avenue down to Sheep Point. There was a narrow curve of sandy beach here, but Jennie was intent upon the rocks, where she could test her balance and skill.

  There was only one other person on the sand when the two girls reached it: a man in a dark shooting coat and gaiters with a Scottish terrier at his feet. He wore a beaver top hat, which Jennie knew was quite wrong with a shooting jacket, and he stood with his back to civilization. His gaze was fixed on the waves curling relentlessly into the quarter-moon of cove, and he was utterly still. His terrier bitch gazed seaward like her master. Jennie disregarded both of them and mounted her first granite slab.

  It was precariously pitched and led to a larger boulder where the waves lapped hungrily, but beyond this was a third and larger rock that was broad and inviting, a king of a rock that led farther out into the sea, where she might feel the wind and the power of the tides.

  She leapt once, teetered, steadied herself with her arms outflung like a ballerina, then leapt again.

  “Jennie,” Camille called.

  Her sister was crouched on the beach, her long blond curls shielding her face and her delicate hands poking at something. Her flared coat and skirt and petticoats were rucked up over her black-stockinged legs.

  “Come see!” she insisted.

  Jennie hesitated; the wildness called to her. But Camille looked so absorbed. Jennie turned back.

  “It’s like a town,” Camille told her. “A little town with shells for houses.”

  It was true, Jennie decided as she hunkered down near her sister. The tide pool was a separate world ringed with stone. There were barnacles and mussels clinging to the rocks, laced with seaweed, but below them in the shallow stillness of sand and water, crabs scuttled sideways, absurd claws waving. She could put names to some of the things Camille’s fingers hovered over—

  “Those are winkles.” She pointed to the whorled and striated shells of the snails. “French people eat them, Papa says.”

  Camille wrinkled her nose.

  “And that’s a sea urchin.” Jennie peered under the nearest granite ledge. The urchin liked to hide. It was reddish orange, all spikes that waved like a tree in a strong wind, and she had no intention of touching it. But beside it—

  “That’s a sea star!” Jennie pulled the horny thing toward her, curling and writhing against itself. Camille was round-eyed in fascination; the creature was so alive, yet it felt like coral when touched. “Papa says that if you tear off its leg, it will grow another. Shall we see, Camille?”

  “Don’t,” the man said.

  Jennie looked up in astonishment.

  The man in the gaiters and shooting jacket was standing over them, his Scottie at his side. The little black dog looked mildly interested in Jennie and Camille but seemed to reserve judgment.

  “Sea stars are so defenseless,” the stranger added apologetically. “It’s like maiming a lamb. Would you tear the leg off a lamb, Miss…?”

  Jennie hesitated. Neither Dobbie nor Mamma allowed her to talk to strangers. But this one was about Papa’s age, and from his voice, was clearly Their Sort of People.

  “Jerome,” she supplied.

  “Charmed.” The man lifted his top hat from his head and bowed.

  “What is your dog’s name?” Jennie asked.

  “Matilda.”

  “Matilda,” Jennie repeated. She reached a tentative hand to the dog’s head, but the terrier ducked and avoided her.

  “Always greet a dog with a hand to its chest,” the man advised. “That way you touch its heart. Pat its head, and it resents you. You might as well be driving it into the earth.”

  Jennie said nothing, but reached for the dog’s chest. Matilda leaned into her hand and made a low moaning sound in her throat that suggested pleasure.

  The man crouched down beside them. “Look at the rock crabs,” he told the two children. “Cancer irroratus. Kingdom, Animalia. Phylum, Arthropoda. Subphylum, Crustacea. Class, Malacostraca. Order, Decapoda. Infraorder, Brachyura. Family, Cancridae. Genus, Cancer.”

  Matilda thrust her nose into the crease of Jennie’s elbow.

  “There are so many,” Camille faltered. It was true: crabs large and small scuttled in swarms over the sand, in the shallows, darting under rocks where they felt safest. Jennie sensed that her sister was frightened. The crabs were like spiders. They shared the same multi-limbed, unpredictable motion, the possibility of nightmare. She took Camille’s hand and squeezed it.

  The man lifted a crab in his fingers, claws waving. “They have a hard exoskeleton and a fan-shaped carapace, and antennae for taste and smell. Note the eyestalks at the front of the shell: they are movable.”

  Jennie offered her palm and the man placed the crab in it. The eyestalks waved at her, and one claw lifted in challenge. She counted to five before she set it carefully back in the pool; there was victory enough in this.

  “During the mating season,” the man observed, “the male crab encircles the female with his claws, to protect her as she molts. He can only mate, you see, during molting, when the female is soft-shelled and defenseless.”

  Camille looked helplessly at Jennie, horror in her eyes.

  “But the female wants to mate, too,” Jennie said sturdily. “So that makes it all right.”

  “Of course. God’s plan,” the man agreed, as though this were obvious. “Once her shell hardens, in another two or three days, the male lets her go.”

  There was a deeper lesson in this, Jennie knew, but her mind sheered away from considering it.

  The man rose and snapped his fingers at Matilda. The black dog and her master turned their backs on the girls and made their way up the stony beach.

  “Sir!” Jennie called after him. “I should like to know your name.”

  The man stopped short. He seemed to consider her words, his gaze firmly fixed on the sea.

  “I am Schermerhorn,” he said at last, “the Recluse.” And walked on.

  * * *

  —

  When Dobbie found smears of seaweed and sand on the hems of their dresses, she made Jennie stand in the corner without her dinner. “Catapulting over the rocks again,” Dobbie scolded. “It’ll be on your head, Miss Jeanette, if your sister drowns in the waves.”

  Camille pushed back her chair from the nursery dining table and ran to stand at Jennie’s side. Jennie ignored her so that Dobbie wouldn’t be angry—Dobbie loved Camille best of all four Jerome girls. Camille took Jennie’s hand anyway. They stood like that until Dobbie lost patience and
sent them both to bed. They shared a room with Dutch-blue walls high up under the sloping eaves of the house, their white wooden beds shaped like sleighs.

  “It was worth missing dinner,” Jennie whispered after the lamps were dimmed, “just to meet the Recluse.”

  That night she dreamed that Papa sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor, racing crabs across the carpet.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In April, Papa brought his glamorous friend Fanny Ronalds and her two young sons and their nursemaid to Newport on his steam yacht, the Clara Clarita. Although he’d assured Jennie that the dockyards and working-class neighborhoods were quieter now after the explosive March draft protests, Papa had urged Mrs. Ronalds to get out of New York, too. He escorted her to the Ronaldses’ cottage a quarter mile from his own, and his crew saw her luggage safely transferred from the yacht. This was Friday. On Sunday afternoon, the rest of her things having arrived from Manhattan (the word things encompassing servants and carriages and horses), Fanny appeared at the foot of the Jerome drive in a dogcart pulled by a pair of donkeys.

  Jennie was already dressed and running among the bare canes of the rose garden, which were beginning to swell with pale leaves the color of fresh tea, but the instant she glimpsed the upright figure in a spring bonnet, its arched brim lined with silk peonies and tied with a deep pink taffeta bow, a bubble of pleasure rose in her chest. Fanny was like a memory of home. The streamers of her bow were six inches wide and two feet long, and they bobbed splendidly at Fanny’s breast as the donkeys jogged. She held a pearl-handled whip along with the reins; her hands were gloved in pale rose kid. Jennie noticed that Fanny’s carriage dress had the new sleeves: narrow at the shoulder but as full as bells where they gathered at her wrist. So becoming for a lady who drives, Mamma had said as she leafed through Godey’s Lady’s Book.