That Churchill Woman

by Stephanie Barron

  “Pas de tout,” she said, and snapped her fingers.

  The Nubian peered around the edge of the silk velvet portiere. “Oui, madame?”

  “Bring me cognac. Monsieur is smoking tonight.”

  No Frenchwoman would desecrate Haut-Brion with tobacco, Charles reflected; it had been his subtle test. A measure of whether Alexandrine Jouannet could be trusted.

  “How may I serve you?” she asked him, as the girl with the oiled skin and the kohled eyes poured her three fingers of brandy.

  “I’m in search of a dear friend,” Charles replied. “Urgently. I simply wish to know whether you’ve seen him.”

  Alexandrine took a sip of amber liquid. Charles watched as she rolled it about her tongue. She was inviting him to kiss her, he knew; but he restrained himself. Seduction was second nature to her, every encounter a subtle contest for power.

  She set down her glass and reached for Charles’s cigar. This, too, a form of seduction; the Havana as phallic substitute. Her lips caressed it. She drew deeply and swallowed the smoke.

  When he did not respond, she said abruptly, “You understand that the sort of discretion I give to you, I give to all my clients?”

  “Yes. That is why Le Chabanais is unrivaled.”

  “How, then, can you ask me to betray your friend?”

  “With an appeal to your compassion. I believe him to be in personal danger. It is vital that I find him.”

  Alexandrine waited. She continued to smoke Charles’s cigar.

  “I shall, of course, make it worth your while.”

  “Monsieur understands the conventions.”

  “What price do you put on your discretion?”

  Her eyes narrowed. She studied him. “I could ask for money.”

  “Of course. And up to a certain limit, I would agree.”

  “Or…”

  There was a pause. Alexandrine sipped her cognac.

  “Or?” Charles said.

  “An introduction to certain figures in Vienna. Who might be interested in investing in a lucrative business, managed with the utmost professionalism.”

  “You’re seeking to expand?”

  “Diversify, let us say.” She set down her glass. “To expand, I need merely buy the neighboring property. Whereas to attract an entirely new clientele—one drawn from St. Petersburg rather than London—I must have an entirely new foundation.”

  “I see.”

  Charles had no interest in serving as Madame Kelly’s noble pimp in the land of his forefathers. But time was passing and he had not even asked his questions yet. Somewhere, Jennie was sliding between lavender-scented sheets and turning out her light….

  He drained his brandy. “I am happy to consider it—and explore the notion further—in deference to my friend’s considerable danger. Now, Madame Kelly, will you tell me if you have lately seen Lord Randolph Churchill?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The vast structure of glass and iron that housed the central Paris market of Les Halles came to life in darkness, three hours before dawn. Fires flared in coal braziers and stall keepers brewed coffee. Burly carters and stout ponies drew heavy drays from the countryside into Paris, where butchers’ apprentices and market porters unloaded crates from the backs of wagons. They kicked their way through straw and horse dung to the brightly lit pavilions, where they set up pyramids of root vegetables and hung trussed rabbits from their paws. Poulterers unloaded wire mesh crates of squawking fowl that would be plucked and boiled within hours. Set out on trestle tables were sacks of lentils and dried peas and rice and tea; roasted coffee beans; saffron and cardamom seeds and milled corn and olives. A thousand scents mingled and perfumed the frigid night air—animal, vegetable, mineral. The din was ferocious.

  A Renaissance church, Église Saint-Eustache, rose at the market’s edge, and in the streets surrounding it young wrestlers grappled in the light of open fires for anyone willing to place bets on their bodies. Cafés served stews and fried potatoes and bottles of wine all night long, and at the buvettes—makeshift market bars set up inside Les Halles—the porters and sellers snatched quick glasses of cognac. Prostitutes, both male and female, worked the shadows. So did pickpockets and hungry children.

  To Randolph Churchill, the quarter’s noise was almost unbearable. He baffled his ears with a goose-down pillow and slept poorly, regardless; during his few days in Paris he had been crippled by constant pain in his joints and muscles. His legs refused to obey him. His hands shook with palsy. His sheets were damp with sweat, although the bed itself was luxurious enough—a four-posted affair at the rear of a house on the Rue Rambuteau, at the northern end of Les Halles. He had come to it immediately upon his arrival in France two days before Christmas, but he had lost track of how long he had been lying here in the semidarkness. He refused to allow the shades to be raised. Night followed night as he burned with fever.

  Occasionally a boy of about thirteen peered around the door and stared at him, or an older one in his twenties, hair carefully pomaded and skin freshly scented with musk, sidled into the room with a tray. Randolph declined everything except premier cru Bordeaux. He thought the alcohol might kill whatever was killing him.

  * * *

  —

  Charles Kinsky halted outside the house on the Rue Rambuteau a little after three o’clock that morning. The numbers of the address set in faience over the doorway were different from the blue and white ones that graced most houses in the French capital. They were exaggeratedly large, colored green and red, and bordered with yellow rosettes. Places of prostitution in Paris were discreet out of respect for their neighbors, but all of them signaled their existence with gaudy address tiles.

  It was the third house Charles had visited that night. Alexandrine had sent him about his business as soon as he uttered Churchill’s name.

  “Lord Randolph?” She’d smiled at him with her ugly mouth and startling eyes. She shook her head. “That one finds nothing to amuse at Le Chabanais.”

  Alexandrine suggested he drop into Miss Betty’s first if he wanted word of the Duke’s son. Miss Betty was English herself and her maison close sat directly across from the side entrance to the Église Saint-Sulpice, on the Left Bank. It counted numerous priests among its clientele, their clerical garments flapping like crows’ wings as they hurried across the street. Betty understood their tortured relationship with pleasure and sin, guilt and temptation. She offered rooms especially designed for Catholic tastes. She specialized in mock crucifixion.

  Charles gained admittance and made his way swiftly through the parlors, with their mournful subjects, and lingered in the doorway of a firelit chamber. A nude young woman lashed a whip over the back of a prelate violently enough to draw blood. He thought that might appeal to a man like Randolph, schooled at Eton.

  But when Charles conferred with Betty, who comported herself as a nun and ceaselessly fingered the beads of a rosary, she, too, shook her head. “I ’aven’t seen Churchill.” The accent was pure East End. “You might try the Satyr for that one. Near the market, it is.”

  * * *

  —

  He had not expected children in this place, although later—when he was alone and able to consider all he had done, not just now on Jennie’s behalf but in the course of his male life—he admitted this was foolish. Girls were everywhere in whorehouses. They were apprenticed. They served as acolytes at a young age, and sometimes—for a special price—they were sacrificed to the whims or needs of men before they were fully grown. Why should it be any different with boys?

  But he had not expected it. Choirboys with angelic faces, slim arms, wide eyes. Boys of eight and ten. Some were dusky-skinned in a way that might tempt colonial overlords. Two led him from the Satyr’s entrance down a brief hall to a firelit salon at the far end, where the maison close’s proprietor received: a former British officer of the Ri
fle Brigade named Hobhouse-Jones.

  He was tall, correct, mustachioed in a way that might inspire confidence at the card tables of a dozen St. James clubs. He was also equipped with a sword at his belt and a pistol in a holster. Charles wondered how often the Satyr had been attacked. He offered the man his card. Not the diplomatic one but the card with only his title and crest.

  “Count Kinsky,” Hobhouse-Jones mused as he fingered it. “It has never been my pleasure to serve anyone of your house. What may I do for you?”

  “The matter is delicate.”

  “I see. Please, will you take a chair?”

  Charles remained standing. “I am in search of a dear friend on a family matter of some personal urgency. It is vital that I find him and communicate news of extreme import. I have reason to believe he may enjoy your hospitality at present. A Mr. Spencer? From London?”

  “Mr. Spencer,” Hobhouse-Jones repeated slowly. “That is not a name commonly used.”

  “By a duke’s son, no. Only when his lordship is anxious to deflect notice.”

  “Indeed.” The man’s eyes shifted from Charles’s card to his face. “And why do you search for Mr. Spencer? In place of, let us say, a member of his noble family?”

  “Let us say that I have been seconded to the duty by one who commands my soul and allegiance, at the highest possible level.”

  Charles was royalty himself, after all. Let Hobhouse-Jones think it was Queen Victoria, not Jennie, who had sent him searching for Randolph.

  The words transfixed the brothel keeper. He did not speak for a moment, but twisted Charles’s card in his long, nervous fingers. “Of course. I beg your pardon—Mr. Spencer’s intimacy with Government…”

  “Take me to him now,” Charles said.

  * * *

  —

  He had glimpsed Randolph Churchill in the early hours of the morning on other occasions, of course: at the Carlton Club or White’s, as he gambled at cards. But nothing could have prepared either of them for this particular encounter.

  It was the pomaded twenty-year-old who led Charles along a crimson-carpeted corridor with flaring gas jets to the rear bedroom on the second floor. He scratched delicately at the door. There was no answer and the youth had no intention of waiting for one; he turned the knob and ushered Charles inside.

  He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim interior. Two windows were cracked open and a draft of icy air wafted in a current through the room. The remains of a coal fire burned low. A figure in the bed pushed itself upright and growled a few words.

  They were unintelligible.

  “He cannot speak clearly,” the youth informed Charles sotto voce in French. “A convulsion of some kind. We have done our best, monsieur.”

  “Leave us,” Charles ordered, and handed his guide a few centimes.

  The door closed behind him.

  The man on the bed struggled to free himself from the sheets, still growling in hoarse syllables. Charles could see, now, that he was bare above the waist. A slight figure, with a hollow chest and rickety shoulders.

  Charles reached for a lamp on a nearby table and turned up the flame. And found himself facing the muzzle of a gun.

  The sick man had found a pistol somewhere in the sheets and was leveling it at him, still barking nonsense. The gun shook uncontrollably in his hand. Charles felt a sudden spasm of fear: at least when he’d faced down Jennie in similar circumstances, he’d suspected she was an accurate shot.

  He lunged at Randolph and wrenched the pistol from his hand.

  “Kinsky!”

  The first articulate word the man had managed. But distinguishable only to Charles, who had heard his surname uttered in a dozen different dialects.

  He tucked the pistol safely into his coat. “Kinsky indeed. I’ve come to fetch you a doctor, Randolph.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  When he called at the Hôtel des Deux Mondes the following morning, Charles found that Jennie had already gone out. He asked to speak to her maid, and was met in the lobby by a tearful Gentry. They were old acquaintances.

  “Oh, my lord,” she said as she curtseyed, “can’t you persuade my lady to stop gallivanting alone around this wretched city? A quiet spot of dressmaking was what I thought we’d come for, although why such business had to be done at Christmastide I couldn’t say, when most decent folk are happy enough to be close to their own hearths and in the hands of their dearest kin—but if she meant to have her measurements taken, then she did ought to have carried me along with her to Mr. Worth, for I’m sure I’m a better judge of fit and quality than he is.”

  “Do you know where her ladyship has gone?”

  “To them painters,” Gentry said darkly. “Wild she was to see them, and nothing would do but she must set out immediately after breakfast, on account of the light. Or so she said. Insisted it would be better in the morning, and quite gone if she waited until a decent hour. Although the way such people carry on, I don’t suppose they know what decent is.”

  “Which painters?”

  Gentry shrugged. “I can’t make out foreign names. But I wrote down the direction, in case Lady Randolph was kidnapped, and the gendarmes did have to be sent for.”

  The scrap of paper she handed Charles was printed in block capitals, 128 b, Bull Clishy, which he rightly interpreted as standing for 128 bis, Boulevard de Clichy. An address in Montmartre. He pressed a few coins into Gentry’s hand, but she shook her head.

  “Thank you, sir, but I’ve no use for foreign money. It’s good enough for me that you mean to go after her.”

  “Buy yourself some chocolate,” he ordered, and left.

  * * *

  —

  There were any number of artists’ studios in the quarter known as Pigalle, but women of Jennie’s social class were rare. This was a district that slept by day and came alive at night, full of caf’concs, as they were called: song-and-dance cabarets that served a raw clientele. Charles’s fiacre driver carried him north from the Place Pigalle to the very end of the Boulevard de Clichy, hard by the quiet Montmartre Cemetery. On the hillside above, the vanes of numerous windmills turned in the stiff breeze, grinding grain and pressing grapes. The quarter remained working class.

  Number 128 bis—the word indicated a secondary entrance to a street address—led to a narrow stair rising straight up, six stories. The hall smelled of fish. Somewhere, a baby wailed. No carriage stood at the curb for Jennie and there was no sign of her on the paving. There was a street brazier of burning coals, however, and a man turning sausages over the fire.

  “Do you know whether any painters live there?” Charles asked him.

  The sausage turner grunted. “Are there rats in a sewer, monsieur? This is Montmartre.”

  “Did a lady enter in the past hour?”

  The black eyes flicked up to meet his. Took in his impeccable top hat, the well-cut coat he wore to the embassy, his dove-gray gloves and ebony stick. Took in, as well, his flawless French and something not quite French about him. “I couldn’t say. Would you like a sausage?”

  “No.” Charles handed the man a few centimes. “Where did the lady go?”

  He pocketed the money. “Fifth floor.”

  Charles told the fiacre to wait. He entered the smelly hall and began to climb, conscious of the street cook’s stare as he mounted the steps. He was tired of chasing after Jennie and the men she could not control. And impatient, after only a few hours, to be with her again.

  When he glimpsed her through the studio’s open door, her face seemed lit from within. She was gazing at something beyond Charles’s range of vision, her lips parted and a slight furrow between her darting brows. Her cheeks were faintly flushed. A ravishing face, framed in black-dyed ostrich feathers. In her eyes was an expression that recalled his time before her own easel: she was weighing shadow and light.
/>   He stepped into the room.

  It was high-ceilinged and stood far enough above its neighbors to capture the sun. On a winter day like this, the atmosphere was gray, aqueous, sterile but for the vivid color dotting the large canvases set against the walls. Jennie stood well back from them, as though she needed distance. She was marooned in an island of bare floorboards.

  Her head turned at the sound of his step. Her expression changed. The rapidity of it jolted him. She had been trancelike; now she was alive.

  “Charles!”

  She held out her hands, gloved in black suede. He bowed low, aware that they were not alone.

  “Do you know Monsieur Seurat?”

  “I have not had the pleasure,” he said.

  “Monsieur—allow me to introduce you to le comte Kinsky, of the Austrian embassy,” she said, in her rapid French. She led Charles to the bearded man leaning against the far wall, a narrow-shouldered, composed figure roughly his own age. “He’s a neo-Impressionist,” she murmured, in English this time. “A founder of the Society of Independents, along with Redon and Signac. I’ve been dying to see their work—Monsieur Seurat calls it pointillisme.”

  The names meant little to Charles. Had she asked about music, he could have given her a tour of Paris few Englishwomen were allowed, but art was another country. He watched Jennie enthuse over the large canvases. She placed smaller studies in his hands, all of them compositions of jabs and dots in myriad colors that blurred too close to the eye and resolved themselves only when viewed at a distance. A line of cliffs by the sea; a figure upright in a boat. The compositions were painstakingly detailed, complex, rigorous. Under examination, the mass of dots bewildered; everything solidified when he stepped back.

  “Like dreams,” Jennie mused. “Real as houses while you move through them—lost once you wake. Did you know, Charles? Monsieur Seurat tells me there are any number of women’s studios here in Paris—where women take instruction, and paint together, as professionals. I should dearly love to visit such a place.”