That Churchill Woman Page 16

  Jennie edged between the masses of Mrs. Belmont’s lilies and looked into the coffin; Camille was wearing her favorite white voile dress with the broad blue satin sash. Jennie was in black cotton that itched at her neck and felt far too hot for the July day. She reached a finger and smoothed Camille’s sleeve. Then, carefully, she slipped a rounded beach stone into her sister’s new bed. A favorite shell. The silver dollar Papa had left in the toe of Camille’s stocking last Christmas that she had never spent. Jennie’s was long since gone.

  “It should have been me,” she whispered. “Hanging around the stables. Not you, Camille. I’m so awfully sorry.”

  She was the only person who knew that Mr. Schermerhorn came.

  She found him kneeling on the prie-dieu before her little sister’s casket on the second day of mourning. He had changed from his usual shooting clothes to a dark suit, and his black top hat did not look at all out of place. Matilda waited patiently by his knee.

  Jennie hesitated in the doorway, thinking he might wish to be private with Camille, but like all recluses, he was sensitive to the sound of others breathing. He turned his head. After an instant she ran toward him. He did not get up or pray for Camille. Jennie waited for him to say something about carapaces or tests bleached of flesh, but instead he reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a shell. Jennie had never seen one like it before. It was the size of her hand, curled like a horn, cream striated with caramel. “Where did you find it?” she asked, entranced.

  “It was sent to me from the Andaman Sea. Nautilus pompilius. It swims only in tropic waters. I like to think your sister is there.”

  “So do I,” Jennie decided. “She is certainly not here anymore. I wish I knew exactly where she has gone. It would help when I talk to her.”

  He placed the shell inside the casket, being careful like Jennie to put it where only Camille would find it. Then he rose in his abrupt way and walked to the door.

  “I’m sorry,” he said without turning to look at her. “You will be lonely now.”

  * * *

  —

  Jennie was not allowed to go to Trinity Church with Camille; only Papa did that. Funerals were considered too distressing for women and children. Miss Hallam read the funeral service to Clarita and Jennie as they sat stiffly on their schoolroom chairs. Clarita had a black silk handkerchief to dab at her wet eyes. Little Leonie was napping and Mamma refused to leave her room.

  Papa did not come home from the funeral, or indeed all that night.

  Jennie watched for him through the stairs. She could not sleep in any case because she kept opening wardrobes and staring under the beds, looking for a shadow that might be Camille. Her sister’s bedding had been burned in a bonfire at the bottom of the garden, to banish the sickness, Dobbie explained, and one side of their room was stripped. Jennie stretched herself out on the bare mattress and reached her arms wide, like an angel.

  It rained that night. She thought of water trickling through the earth of Trinity churchyard.

  Early in the morning, before anyone was up, she harnessed Willie and Wooshie and drove to Fanny Ronalds’s house.

  She found Papa in the barn, sitting in the hay in one of Fanny’s stalls. He still wore the black clothes he had put on for Camille. He stared as Jennie pulled up.

  “You should be at home with your mother,” he said.

  “So should you. Fiddling while Rome burns.”

  She got down from the cart, holding the reins. Tears of anger spattered her face, the first she had cried for Camille. She was furious with Papa for deserting them all, and with Camille for leaving her behind.

  “Come here,” Leonard said gently.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Puppies. Fanny’s cairn had a litter last night.”

  She swiped at her eyes with a black cotton sleeve, then walked toward them and went down on her knees. Not touching. Just looking.

  So many blind things, fighting for life.

  “It’s my fault she’s dead,” Jennie whispered. “I made her sick. Hanging around the stables.”

  “No.”

  “It should have been me. Not Camille.”

  “I guess God plays favorites.” Papa reached down and lifted one of the sightless pups into Jennie’s outstretched hands. Its small body was smooth as a pigskin glove and the weight of its head like a stone in her palm.

  She remembered to touch its chest first.

  “If He had taken you, too, my Jennie, I could not have gone on,” Papa said.

  Her hands clenched and the pup gave a faint cry. She held it against her and it relaxed.

  “But if I’d been taken, Papa, I could have helped Camille. How will she go on, with no big sister? She couldn’t even drive yet.”

  “I know.” Papa touched Jennie’s head gently. “But she could ride her pony like the wind. Remember? How Camille threw her heart over, and took all her fences, though she was just seven years old? She needed nobody then.”

  “Yes,” Jennie said, relieved. “I will think of her on horseback. Perhaps she does not have to drive, in the Andaman Sea.”

  If her father found this reference puzzling, he asked no questions.

  “Listen.” He crouched down beside her and looked into her eyes. “The only way to fight death, Jennie, is to live. You’ve got to do it for two people now—yourself and Camille. Take every chance you get. Do everything she didn’t get to do. Live two lives in the space of one. I’ll back you to the hilt.”

  “I know you will, Papa. You always have.”

  The tiny fawn-colored thing peed wetly in her hands and she did not mind. This was what she’d been searching for under the beds last night. Some sign from Camille.

  “Isn’t he a dear?” she crooned. “Isn’t he cunning?” The puppy nuzzled her neck blindly.

  Papa smiled. For the first time in days, Jennie smiled back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  London, March 1886

  Jennie received a third bulletin from Robson Roose within a quarter hour of her return from galloping through Hyde Park.

  We are still fighting the battle for your boy….As long as I can keep the temp. under 105 I shall not feel anxious.

  Randolph had already left for Commons. Unable to eat, with dread gripping her throat, Jennie changed out of her riding dress hurriedly and summoned a hansom cab. Randy might scoff at her anxiety, but she was determined he must know that Winston was fighting for his life. She drummed her heel impatiently on the floor of the hansom as it made its way through the heavy afternoon traffic to Westminster, jumping down to press Roose’s message on a porter at the St. Stephen’s entrance. Deliver this immediately to Lord Randolph Churchill.

  Now what? Wait for an answer?

  There would be none soon. Randolph was on the floor of Commons. Shivering, Jennie glanced at the rooks wheeling in the leaden sky above the spires of Parliament. Their plaintive cries chilled her to the bone. She would not think of Charles, although the glimpse of his profile was seared on her brain. But she wanted comfort. And a friend.

  “Take me to Charles Street,” she ordered the cabman. Connie Mandeville would give her tea.

  * * *

  —

  The Viscountess welcomed Jennie in an ivory satin gown picked out with black ruffles, loose and becoming, with ivory lace at the plunging neck. Jennie had thrown on a carriage dress of purple velvet and brocade at random, too distracted to think of what she wore, but she wished now that she could kick off her half boots and curl up on the sofa with Connie as they had when they were girls in New York. She was aware of an immense weariness and the desire to be held on someone’s lap, like a dog. She was afraid if Connie was too kind to her she might burst into tears.

  “What news of your boy?” Connie asked once the maid had poured them each a cup of tea and left the tray on the ottoma
n before the fire. She had a son herself, three years younger than Win.

  “He’s worse,” Jennie said bluntly. Her throat tightened and she swallowed hard. “Both lungs are inflamed.”

  Connie offered her a macaroon. “Forgive me if I don’t embrace you, then, dearest. I have the girls to consider.” Connie’s twins were the same age as Jennie’s son Jack—just six—and still in the nursery.

  Jennie set down her untouched tea. “Randolph insists there’s nothing I can do for Win if I race down to Brighton. But I can’t stop thinking about that summer in Newport….”

  “When you lost your sister?” Connie murmured sympathetically. She had known Camille, of course. “Such a sprite. All gold and ivory. It was only a few weeks after Gettysburg, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Jennie said. “And the draft riots in New York.”

  “I don’t recall those.” Connie reached for a pot of Devonshire cream and spooned a little next to her biscuit. “All I remember is bathing with the other girls. And your donkeys pulling us up and down Bellevue Avenue.”

  “I thought I was to blame. For Camille’s death. That I’d picked up germs in the stables,” Jennie remembered. “But Mamma was sure my father brought infection with him from the city. All those conscripts, and the wounded evacuated to New York—I’m not sure she ever forgave him.”

  Connie lifted one dark brow. “Shall you forgive Randolph?”

  Jennie looked at her swiftly. “Or myself, you mean? If Win dies while I’m sitting here? What a comfort you are, Connie! You know it’s not the English way to hover over children.”

  “We’re not English,” Consuelo reminded her.

  * * *

  —

  Papa might have brought rheumatic fever to Newport, Jennie thought as she tossed endlessly in her bed that night, but he was with Camille to the end. She remembered how desperately she had wanted to send Papa a telegram when her sister was ill, but had not known how. Remembered her crashing joy at the sight of Clara Clarita, and the way she had whipped her donkeys straight down the hill to Fanny Ronalds’s house. She had known instinctively at the age of nine what Camille needed most: Papa’s hand on her cheek. How had she forgotten something so vital in the years since?

  Gentry’s tea tray appeared at eight A.M. We have had a very anxious night, Roose’s bulletin informed Jennie, but have managed to hold our own….On the other hand we have to realise that we may have another 24 hours of this critical condition, to be combatted with all our vigilant energy.

  Twenty-four hours. She could not endure it.

  She went in search of Randolph, but he was in neither the breakfast parlor nor the library. She discovered only Alasdair Gordon instead, writing letters of business at her husband’s desk. Jennie felt a wash of relief; Papa always insisted it was preferable to ask forgiveness than demand permission.

  “Alasdair, would you inform Lord Randolph that I have been called to Brighton? And cancel all my engagements for the next few days?”

  “All of them, my lady?”

  “Every one,” she said briskly. “I shall send word when I mean to return. Oh, and Alasdair—could you be a dear and summon a cab?”

  * * *

  —

  She saw Win immediately, immobile in his bed with the sheet drawn up to his chin. His eyes were closed and his thin face impossibly pallid. Jennie’s heart stopped as she halted in the doorway—was he even breathing?

  “My lady,” Everest whispered.

  The nanny rose from a chair behind a screen near Winston’s bed and moved soundlessly to join her. She had lost her starched white cap in the interval since Saturday, and her black dress, high in the neck and long in the sleeves, was unusually creased. “You’re just in time.”

  Jennie’s lips parted. For what? Good God—for what?

  “His fever’s broken at last,” Everest told her. “He’s sleeping for the first time in days.”

  Jennie pressed her hands to her mouth to stifle a choking sob. Everest reached out as though she were a little girl and gathered Jennie to her ample bosom. “Master Winnie took some broth before he went off, like the dear lamb he is. I daresay you’re chilled through, my lady. I’ll fetch a cup of tea, shall I? If you’ll watch with him?”

  Jennie nodded, unable to speak.

  She crossed swiftly to the foot of the sickbed and looked down at Winston.

  His lashes were ginger-colored. They fluttered in his dreams. The skin beneath his eyes was sunken and blotted with purplish shadows. His lips had cracked with fever. She had seen that look before. Was it possible he would survive? What had she done to deserve such a miracle?

  Tremulously, Jennie set down her pocketbook and unpinned her hat. She placed it on Everest’s chair with her gloves. Then, careful not to wake the sleeping boy, she lay down on the narrow cot beside him and wrapped him in her arms. He felt impossibly light, a gathering of twigs instead of limbs, but he was not burning with fever like Camille. He was not a blistered husk. With tears of relief rolling unheeded down her cheeks, she listened for the rhythm of his heart.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  His army numbered nearly fifteen hundred lead soldiers now, all the same size and British-made. Winston had arranged them on a vast table made of planks, laid across trestles, that nearly filled the entire room: an infantry division with a brigade of cavalry. They were assaulted by such projectiles as came to hand—marbles, pebbles, even dried peas—which he shot out of a catapult that Old Farnham, the chief carpenter at Blenheim, had whittled for him last Christmas. He had eighteen field guns and a handful of fortress pieces placed in mock castles. Flags flew from their turrets and from the hands of gallant standard-bearers. There were rough roads and even bridges, which were useful to blow up and bring down upon the heads of the Enemy.

  Jack, who was six, sometimes commanded the hostile army, but his troops were Colonials and weren’t allowed to use artillery. Jack never won these battles, of course, because of his inferior numbers (he had been collecting soldiers half as many years as Winston) and the fact that the British Army was invincible. Any Colonials who chose to challenge Victoria’s rule were damned rebels, and bound to die inglorious deaths. Jack understood in principle that he was a traitor to the British Empire, but was frequently known to bury his head in Woom’s lap when his losses were too great to bear.

  Jack was starting at the Thomson Sisters’ School in the autumn, but first Woomany was taking them both away for a fortnight to her sister’s house in Ventnor, on the south coast of the Isle of Wight. Woom’s brother-in-law was a prison warder who led them on bracing walks along the cliffs and told exciting stories about inmates who rose up and broke for freedom. He also read aloud to them at bedtime from Macaulay’s History of England, and it was the most thrilling thing Winston had ever heard, although lately he’d discovered Rider Haggard. Haggard’s books were brimming with adventures and near-death escapes and odious brigands who deserved to be Put Down. King Solomon’s Mines was Winston’s favorite. He read it in bed at night until Woom put out the light.

  He studied the trestle-table landscape now, assessing whether it might be possible to introduce the element of water, in a self-contained bed that might serve for perilous river crossings when the bridges were blown. It probably would not be possible to do such a thing without soaking the carpet beneath the table and being scolded for it. Old Farnham at Blenheim would know how it should work, but nobody at Connaught Place knew anything except how to cook and arrange flowers—except for Papa, who spoke in Parliament and held the key to everything worth having. Winston tried to cadge letters from him so he could sell Papa’s signature to other boys at his school and even to the porters, who would pay a shilling for Lord Randolph Churchill’s fist.

  As though he had conjured him, Winston’s father thrust open the nursery door and stuck his head around it. This was such an extraordinary occurrence that Winston cried
out, “Sir!”

  “Steady on,” Randolph said easily. “What are you playing at, Win?”

  “Soldiers.” He grasped a cavalry captain, fully horsed, in his right hand. His fair, freckled skin flushed painfully. He’d had only two glimpses of Papa since reaching London—or rather, of the crown of his top hat, from the nursery window. Winston was not allowed to enter the library or even knock on the door while Papa was working. The boys ate with Woom in the nursery. Sometimes they were allowed to watch Mamma dress. They were permitted to fetch her evening slippers—she kept countless pairs of them, brilliantly colored satin and velvet, scattered with flashing glass jewels or silk ribbons—on her boudoir shelves. The boys pretended the slippers were ships, careening in mock naval battles across the sea of her carpet. But even those visits had grown infrequent; Mamma said they were growing too big to be indulged.

  “How old are you now?” Papa demanded.

  “Eleven and a half, sir.”

  “I thought you had a tutor during this vac. You’re supposed to be swotting Latin. For the exams.”

  “He comes in the afternoons,” Winston explained, “as I’m still Delicate from my illness.” Mamma had engaged a topping crammer, just sent down from Cambridge, who was meant to get him ready for school, whichever school he was meant to try for next. The Thomson sisters would wash their hands of him once he turned twelve, in November. If he crammed well and passed his examinations, he might start spring term at the next school. That could be Winchester, where his cousin Sunny boarded—Sunny was Uncle George’s son and would be the Ninth Duke one day—or it might be another place. No one had told Winston yet and he did not like to ask. All schools were terrible. He wanted to be left alone in peace in his nursery with Woom until the Long Vac ended, and not think about it.