That Churchill Woman

by Stephanie Barron

  “Randolph is dying, Charles.” She said it bluntly. “He may not survive the voyage. What kind of wife would I be if I abandoned him now?”

  She felt his hand tense on the small of her back.

  The waltz ended. They clapped and moved to the edge of the room. Charles placed her arm through his and led her toward the supper table. “The sort of wife who has done everything she possibly can, Jennie. No one would reproach you.”

  “Except myself.”

  He handed her a coupe of champagne. “Has Duchess Fanny bullied you into this?”

  “Duchess Fanny is utterly opposed to my going! She says I’m the cause of Randolph’s nervous complaint. The Duchess believes that if her son were only free of me, he’d recover. She wants Keith to manage Randolph alone.”

  Charles stared at her. “The woman has given you permission to stay behind? And you haven’t swooned in gratitude? If Randolph dies, Jennie, she’ll tell all of London that you drove him to his grave.”

  “I know.” She set down her glass and drew a deep breath. Surely, if Charles could be made to understand anything, it was the notion of honor. “But you see, my darling, I made a vow twenty years ago. In sickness or in health. Would you have me show no faith or loyalty, in the worst of all possible times?”

  “Yes,” he snarled. “I damn well would.”

  “Someone has to fiddle,” she told him, “while Rome burns.”

  * * *

  —

  He came to her three days later, on an afternoon of chill spring rain when the fires were lit throughout Duchess Fanny’s Grosvenor Square house. Jennie was writing letters alone in the library. She received him there, and when she had told the footman to bring brandy, and the door had closed on the two of them, she took Charles’s hand and drew him down to a sofa.

  “What is it, my dear?” she asked.

  He had a look on his face she’d only seen a few times before, as he schooled his horse over the jumps at Aintree—a reckless mix of joy, resolve, and dread. Her heart sank.

  “I’ve secured a transfer to Brussels,” he said.

  She felt the light die out of her. “When?”

  “The usual time. The end of June.”

  “After I’ve gone, then.” She managed a smile. “How long is the posting? Will you give up your London flat?”

  “Jennie.” He grasped her hands tightly. All the world in his grip. “Listen to me. I secured the post for both of us.”

  “Both of us?”

  “Come with me. Leave London when Randolph does—and take a place in Brussels. You’ll love the city, darling. The musical world is exactly what you’d wish, and there are painters. Even women painters. Professionals, of genius. It’s an easy distance to Paris if you wished to study—”

  She rose and walked to the fire, holding out her hands, which were suddenly cold. “What are you saying, Charles?”

  “Marry me, my love.”

  “I’m already married.”

  He shook his head. “Not in your heart.”

  “You’ve always commanded that,” she told him softly.

  “I won’t, when you’re on the other side of the world.”

  A shaft of fear went through her. Had he listened to gossip? Minnie Paget’s poison? That she took her pleasure at the slightest opportunity, regardless of vows?

  “Nonsense.” She glanced at him. “Is this some sort of test, Charles? Must I choose Brussels over duty, to prove my love for you?”

  “Duty!” He downed his brandy in a single draft and crossed deliberately toward her. “Do you know what Randolph’s friends say, Jennie, over cards in their private clubs? That he’s not just sick, but insane. Insane. You have no duty to live with a madman!”

  “So I should live as your mistress instead?” She faced him. “Until Randolph dies? A fine spectacle that would make!”

  “No.” He grasped her shoulders. “Sue for divorce. As soon as possible.”

  “On what grounds?” The usual cause was desertion—and she could hardly claim that. Since his year in South Africa, Randy had practically lived in her pocket.

  “Anything you like!” Charles cried. “Rape—sodomy! Lord Randolph cannot possibly refuse to release you. Think of the secrets you could tell.”

  “Never!” She stared at him in shock. “How can you even suggest it? The damage to my boys…”

  “Jennie, demand your freedom,” Charles pleaded. “The world will hold you blameless.”

  “And shun me regardless! Worse yet, the world would shun you, Charles. I will not be the reason your career ends in scandal.”

  “Let me worry about that,” he said impatiently. “I’ve thought it all through—I’ve thought of nothing else since you told me your plans.” He roughly pulled her close and spoke into the black mass of her hair. “Come away with me to Brussels, my darling. We’ll secure your freedom and be married quietly. After that, we can live anywhere in the world that Austria has an embassy. The United States, even.”

  For an instant, Jennie’s knees nearly gave way. His vision was bewitching. Life as Charles’s wife—not the indiscretion she’d been for the past ten years. No hurried meetings, broken off too soon. No pretense, or lies, or subterfuge. No persistent loneliness at the core of her being. Just love. With her soul mate and equal.

  She would become the Princess Karl.

  Impossible. She stiffened, and stepped back.

  “No.”

  His brows furled. His dark head dipped over her. “Jennie—you understand? I’m offering you all that I am. All that I have.”

  “Which is immense. And it’s too much,” she said.

  He was scowling now, anger gathering on his brow. “What do you mean?”

  “The cost.”

  “Your place in Society? You’d gain a higher one in mine. The cost to your sons? I’d be a far better father than they’ve ever had!”

  “Yes,” she admitted with difficulty. “Winston and Jack love you. But they would not be your sons. They would not be your father’s heirs. Marry me, Charles, and your parents will cut you off with tuppence.”

  “Bollocks,” he said brutally. “My mother admires you.”

  “Your mother barely speaks in your father’s presence.”

  “I will persuade him.”

  “You can’t,” she laughed. “He’s a creature of his class and his world! And he despises me. Under your Austrian laws, I am not your equal, Charles, in blood or birth or status! I am not of the High Nobility. You cannot marry me without dishonoring your house. Isn’t that true?”

  He drew a sudden breath, but said nothing.

  “Pauline de Metternich explained it all in a letter a few weeks ago. Ours would be—what do you call it? A left-handed marriage?”

  “A morganatic one,” he muttered.

  “Which means you could not pass on your title, your wealth, or your estates to any child we might have?”

  “Those laws are outmoded. They’ll change in our lifetime.”

  “You may be right,” Jennie conceded. “But you can’t give up your birthright on the chance.”

  “That’s my decision, not yours,” he flashed.

  “One you’d regret, and come to hate.”

  “Never.” Charles reached for her with a kind of desperation.

  “Eventually you’d hate me for what I’ve cost you,” Jennie persisted. “I couldn’t bear your hatred, Charles.”

  “Never,” he said again, and pulled her mouth to his.

  She felt the fury in his body, barely leashed; fury at the truth of all she’d said, at the perversity of it, the despair they both felt. Another instant and he would lay her down on the rug right in front of Duchess Fanny’s fire and plunge into her body, as though that could change things.

  She pushed away from him.

 
“Go, Charles,” she breathed. “Just go.”

  And to her dismay—with a goaded look—he went.

  * * *

  —

  Throughout May and much of June, Jennie planned the trip with Randolph and his doctor. They sold their share of the Abbess to their racing partner, Lord Dunraven, as well as some of Randolph’s African gold stocks, to pay for the year abroad. When she was not poring over maps or Baedekers, Jennie made sure to go out as often as possible—to the theater, or concerts, or the myriad parties that filled the London spring. She needed brief bouts of freedom. In a few months, there would be no escape.

  And she spent a good deal of her time, in public and on purpose, with Lord Frederic Wolverton.

  Whenever Charles Kinsky called in Grosvenor Square, Jennie was “not at home.” Whenever she encountered him in public, she was on Freddie Wolverton’s arm, and determined to look as though she hadn’t a care in the world. The gossip sheets began to hint slyly at her latest flirtation. She hoped that would incense Charles—humiliate him, even. Maybe then he’d give up her, instead of his future.

  The night before she left for Euston Station, Jennie received a letter by the last post.

  Come to me tonight, he’d written, or never come to me again.

  The exact words she had uttered on their first night together, long ago, at Sandringham.

  Charles knew, none better, how to twist a knife in her heart.

  She did not send a reply.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  In Bar Harbor, Maine, she danced the Boston—a slow, American version of the waltz—at the Kebo Valley Club, a broad-eaved, comfortable restaurant and theater built in the Shingle style. The summer people of Mount Desert Island played croquet there as well as tennis, the women in tidy white shirtwaists and cinched linen skirts they were forced to clutch in one hand while they held a racquet in the other. Jennie preferred to walk the island’s rough trails after breakfast, her memory stirred by the massive granite shelves jutting into the deep, deep waters of the bay. On more than one occasion, in secluded places, she allowed herself to spring from rock to rock as she had done so long ago in Newport—and hoped some shadow of Camille followed her.

  The fashionable world in Maine was both freer than, and yet as consciously formal as, the Newport one Jennie had once known—indeed, many of the principal New York families had homes in both places. There was the same round of pointless dressing for the business of paying calls and leaving cards, which Jennie engaged in like the others simply to avoid being isolated. If she skulked alone in her rooms with Randolph, people would talk.

  George Vanderbilt invited the Churchills to dine one evening in the house he called Pointe d’Acadie, set in the pines above the rocky shore. He was younger than Jennie—perhaps Charles Kinsky’s age—dark-haired and slender, with sensitive eyes and the ivory skin of a man who studied too much indoors. He was rumored to be cold and aloof; Jennie found him merely shy.

  “I understand you paint,” he remarked as he handed her a coupe of champagne. “What do you think of my pictures?”

  Instead of the usual seascapes and family portraits, Jennie saw, to her surprise, that the walls of the airy saloon were hung thickly with paintings in the Impressionist style. She stopped still, her glass forgotten in her hands. “Is that a Seurat?” she asked. It was all gold and lapis paint, the figure of a juggler or clown at the center. Nothing like the studies she had bought years ago, but recognizable as the painter’s all the same.

  “Got it in one,” George said softly. “Nobody gives it a second glance, usually. Too difficult for most people to comment upon.”

  Jennie smiled. “I once visited his studio in Pigalle. How often do you get to Paris?”

  “Once or twice a year. We’ve houses there, you know.”

  We being the Vanderbilts. George was the youngest child of the current generation; it was his much older brother William, whom Alva Erskine Smith had married. William and the eldest brother, Cornelius, had inherited the inconceivable sum of two hundred million dollars each. They had both built palaces in Newport on the strength of it. George had inherited far less, but Jennie thought he made the most of what he had.

  “Let me show you the gardens,” he suggested. “We’ve just time before dinner.”

  Thankfully, Randolph was having one of his better nights. Jennie glanced over her shoulder at Dr. Keith, who gave her a slight nod, his protective gaze on his patient. Randy was actually talking politics with another of George’s guests.

  She walked out onto the house’s terrace, where the hillside fell away to the rocky shore and the last light of summer shone brilliantly on the distant sea. Her silk chiffon gown—in a shade that echoed the Atlantic—swirled about her ankles. Once the sun went down, the nights were sharply cooler in Maine, and Jennie had tossed a fine wool wrap about her bare shoulders. “What a glorious prospect,” she said, breathing greedily. The clear air filled her lungs with the scent of roses, and salt, and the fresh smack of pine.

  George led her through a landscape deliberately shaped to look wild—“I adore Frederick Law Olmsted, don’t you?”—to a clearing where he stopped short, his hands in his pockets. “We all swim here on hot days,” he said.

  “Do you?” Jennie gazed at the rectangular pool, its waters as dark as the sea. There was a fountain at the far end, gushing whitely against the backdrop of Olmsted’s shrubs.

  “It’s the first of its kind in Bar Harbor,” George told her. “Seawater, piped up from below the cliff. Quite refreshing. Go on—try it.”

  He might have expected her to dip her hand in the fountain. But impulsively, Jennie slipped out of one silver sandal and, holding her skirt clear of the water, drew her toes across the pool’s surface. A trail of bubbles followed, like a ship’s wake. She saw George’s eyes widen as he stared at her foot and the line of her leg, draped in chiffon. Then his shy gaze flicked up to her face. He swallowed convulsively. Jennie remembered he was unmarried. She had unnerved him.

  She slipped her sandal back on. “And you all swim here? Men and women together? In bathing dress?”

  “Yes.”

  “How very daring.” She took a ruminative sip of champagne. “I had no idea that Americans were so…promiscuous.”

  * * *

  —

  Randolph was not always well enough to leave. There were hours at a time that Jennie sat with him in a shrouded room, the shades pulled down against the light that hurt his eyes. Dr. Keith made a point of relieving her after such periods, when his patient had taken a dose of laudanum and was profoundly asleep. Jennie usually sought out the company of other people then, from a desperate need for simple conversation. Sometimes she played duets with chance acquaintances, or wrote deliberately light letters to Freddie Wolverton, whose replies occasionally reached her as she sat in a straight-backed rocking chair on the hotel’s covered porch.

  She never heard from Charles.

  * * *

  —

  Jennie was reading a novel on the Kebo Valley Club’s shady lawn one afternoon when she met up with a lost Siren from her past: George Vanderbilt’s sister-in-law Alva.

  It was her voice Jennie noticed first—unmistakably imperious, yet softened by a Southern drawl.

  “Naturally,” Alva said to an invisible minion, “I shouldn’t wish to sit in such bright sunlight. I’m sure my delicate skin would suffer immeasurably from the insult. There must be some chairs in the shade, and if not, you may carry these two over and just shove ’em right in among the others. No one will mind. Much.”

  Alva had always known how to command her subjects. Jennie closed her book, leaving her finger between the pages as a marker, and fixed her eyes expectantly on the corner of the clubhouse. And in an instant, there was the procession: a quartet of male servants, shuffling under the weight of two lawn chairs; an expensively dressed woman with a face as broad
and red as the side of a barn; and behind her, under a frothy sunshade held aloft by a frail gloved hand, the most famous eighteen-year-old Beauty in all of America.

  “Alva Erskine Smith,” Jennie called, rising from her chair and smiling with true affection. “What in the name of heaven are you doing in Bar Harbor?”

  And that quickly, she was a girl of nine again, back in New York.

  Manhattan, February 1863

  There were several new girls in the Family Dancing Classes at Delmonico’s that winter, standing in corners and against the walls, stiff with apprehension and uncertain where to leave their wraps. Some had bored maids or nurses sitting behind them. One girl with a pugnacious expression and a head of red hair was chaperoned by an enormous black man in a powdered wig and eighteenth-century livery, who refused to take a seat. Jennie found his whole appearance astounding and smiled at him shyly in greeting. The man returned her gaze impassively, not a muscle of his face moving.

  “Who are they?” she’d whispered to Minnie Stevens (later Paget). Minnie’s father had built the most modern hotel in New York, the Fifth Avenue, which sat on the southwest corner of Madison Square, not far from Papa’s house. It had cost two million dollars, an unfathomable sum to spend on a single building, Mamma said. Every room had a private bathroom with indoor water closets, which some doctors said were dangerously unhygienic. Papa took Jennie and Clarita to the Fifth Avenue when it opened so that they could ride the “vertical screw railway,” the first elevator in New York. Within months, Mr. Stevens’s hotel was the political and social center of the city. The Stevenses had entered Society on the strength of it.

  “Southerners,” Minnie said succinctly. “I pinched them both. My father says Southerners are damned Rebels.”

  “Minnie!” Jennie was shocked and secretly envious. Papa never swore in her presence. She remembered suddenly that Mamma had said the Stevenses were not really “our sort.”