That Churchill Woman Page 23

  “Even if you knew where the best houses were. In Paris.”

  “Or the worst. I think those are the kind Randolph likes.”

  Charles laughed sourly. “You’re certain you want to find him?”

  It would be so much easier to do nothing. To wait at home for the prodigal to return. Or be found dead in a Paris gutter, God help him. But Jennie had weighed and rejected those options days ago.

  “I have to, Charles. His life is at stake.” She grasped her gloved hands together to keep from reaching for him. “Even if he’s in no physical danger, Randolph’s not thinking clearly. He risks utter social ruin if the wrong person discovers him in such despicable circumstances. You know how recognizable he is. And how the press follows him…”

  “You want me to run him down in a whorehouse and say that his wife sent me?”

  The fiacre drew up to the curb. She did not reply.

  “You don’t ask much, do you?” Charles said.

  * * *

  —

  Gentry had turned down her bed and built up the fire. The maid had been given a cot in the dressing room that formed a part of Jennie’s suite, and when her mistress entered the room she instantly appeared, a piece of mending in her hands and a pair of spectacles perched on her nose.

  “I’m very tired,” Jennie said tersely. “Once you’ve helped me out of this gown, you may leave me. I shan’t want anything further tonight.”

  Gentry set down the mending, removed her thimble, and swiftly unbuttoned the back of Jennie’s dress. “When you didn’t return to dress for dinner, I was that worried you were set upon by thieves. Tossed in the river with your throat cut, my lady, and how I was to manage the bill here at the hotel, nor break it to the young masters back home, I didn’t dare think.”

  Jennie made no answer. She knew Gentry considered it indecent to travel alone in foreign parts, but she had not explained her errand to her maid. Gentry would approve even less of a woman who chased after her straying husband.

  “And not a word left with the hotel porter, which you might have done if you’d spared a thought.”

  The gown slid to the floor; Jennie stepped out of it. Gentry gathered up the mass of silk and wool and draped it over a chair. Jennie felt her fingers an instant later, undoing the tapes that held her half bustle at her hips. This folded together like an accordion and was propped at the chair’s foot. Then Gentry’s fingers again, loosening her corset laces. Jennie’s waist still measured eighteen inches, despite two pregnancies. She drew air deep into her lungs as the confining whalebone eased. Gentry placed a silk dressing gown over her shoulders and waited until she was seated before a mirror.

  “I made do with some soup and cold fowl,” the maid said grudgingly as she loosened the pins in Jennie’s hair. “They’ve a good enough servants’ dining parlor near the kitchens, and the folk come from all over. Not as many from home as I’d like, but respectable. Few of our sort are wishful to leave home in this season.”

  Jennie closed her eyes as Gentry began to brush her hair. The maid’s strokes were swift and thorough. It was the one habit that recalled childhood, Dobbie moving from each of the four girls in the Newport nursery, shooshing away the cobwebs, as she liked to say, their scalps tingling and their minds drowsy. Camille’s curls looped around Dobbie’s fingers. The translucent gold of the nautilus shell the Recluse had tucked in her coffin—

  Jennie did not tell Gentry that she had come to the Deux Mondes because it was Randolph’s favorite hotel in Paris and she had hoped to find his scrawling signature in the guest register. She had looked; it wasn’t there. Neither was the careless Mr. Spencer. The clerk at Reception had shown no interest in her name.

  The maid left her.

  Jennie settled herself in bed and took up a book—Rimbaud’s Illuminations, published a few months before. She had been longing to read it, and had purchased a copy almost as soon as she reached France. But now the lines of poetry swam before her eyes. Shadows of memory loomed in the corners of her room.

  She had entered this hotel only once before—as a girl of twenty, in the spring of 1874, impatient for the man she was determined to marry.

  February 1874

  It was unusual for an engagement to run six months without a wedding date. Jennie was allowed to write to Randolph. And he found a way to visit Paris in February, after he won his seat in Parliament.

  Clara Jerome invited him to dine at her comfortable home in the Rue de Presbourg. But the visit was short—Randolph was expected in London for the opening of Parliament. And the Jeromes were being mulish about the marriage settlements.

  Jennie did not argue with her mother anymore or write another letter to Papa. It was time to take matters fearlessly into her own hands. Heart hammering, she slipped out of the garden entrance of her mother’s house after breakfast, while Clara was still dressing. In a matter of minutes, she was at the Hôtel des Deux Mondes.

  * * *

  —

  Randolph’s valet, Walden, opened the door of his suite and stared at Jennie in surprise.

  “Darling?” Randolph said.

  He was in a silk dressing gown, paisley figures in scarlet and blue, seated at a small breakfast table. He had been bathed and shaved and already wore a white shirt and collar beneath the gown.

  “Walden, fetch my laundry from the nether regions, there’s a good chap.”

  “Very good, my lord.” The valet’s eyes shifted uneasily to Jennie’s, but he was not in the employ of a duke’s son for nothing. He moved noiselessly through the door and Randolph made sure it was locked behind him.

  “What are you doing here, Jeanette? Trying to provoke a scandal?”

  “Yes.” Jennie stood defiantly in the center of the room and looked around her, intensely conscious of how masculine Randolph’s things were. Leather-bound books. Tobacco. A traveling case with whisky in it. Like Papa’s library on Madison Square, another sanctum she had violated.

  “What is it?” He reached for her hand. “Has something happened?”

  “No. It’s just…” Color bloomed in her cheeks. She could not say to him: Mamma is hateful. Mamma is against us. “You’re leaving tonight. And it could be months before I see you again. If ever! They may succeed, Randolph.”

  “Who?”

  “Everyone. All the people ranged against us. What if we are parted forever?”

  “Would that make you unhappy?”

  “I shall die if I can’t be with you!”

  He reached for her narrow waist. She clutched at his lapel, turning her face up to his. And then he kissed her.

  It was the first time she felt hunger in Randolph. The first hint of what she would later identify, as a more experienced woman, as passion. Perhaps he responded because she was so eager, so untutored—so clearly a creature to be molded to his need. He prolonged the kiss and allowed his hands to roam across her pelvis, her narrow shoulders, the small of her back. She was encased in so many clothes. Contained in a structure of whalebone and cloth and steel. Her absurd hat came between his forehead and her own. She reached up and tore it off, though her careful chignon was destroyed in the process.

  She slid her hands beneath the edge of his silk dressing gown and wrestled it off his shoulders. It pooled brightly at his feet.

  He was breathing quickly but his expression was strange—almost disgust. Surely she was wrong? Surely he did not despise her? She thought suddenly how male that seemed—that he should be capable of detachment when she herself felt swept helplessly into a raging current.

  “How long will your valet be gone?” she whispered.

  “I’ve locked him out.” He met her eyes then, his own dilating slightly. “What do you want, Jennie?”

  “You.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Help me, Randolph.”

  He undid her myriad small
buttons. She loosened his collar with inexpert fingers. So many clothes. She found his skin before he found hers—shifts beneath petticoats beneath corsets that must be removed. They made a bed of them. Their hands slid over each other. Jennie was surprised at how fragile Randolph’s bones felt beneath her fingers—as delicate and pliable as the baleen in her stays.

  “I have never wanted anything so much as you,” he muttered.

  And in her determination and need, she believed him.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of that March, Clara Jerome suddenly dropped every objection she held to the match between Lord Randolph Churchill and her daughter Jennie. The wedding was hurriedly set for April 15, Clarita’s birthday. It was also the birthday of Duchess Fanny, but Her Grace had no intention of wasting it in Paris. Randolph might run his ruinous course without his parents. She and the Duke would remain at Blenheim, and content themselves with a telegram.

  Clara Jerome had set her heart on a large Society wedding. Seven hundred of England’s notables, at St. George’s, Hanover Square. She settled instead for a ceremony at the British embassy chapel in Paris. The guests were an intimate group, composed of the Jeromes and three of Randolph’s sisters—the older, married ones—who crossed the Channel for the occasion. Randolph’s brother Blandford came, without his wife. Sir Francis Knollys, secretary to the Prince of Wales, stood up as best man.

  Jennie’s trousseau had been ordered with a different wedding in mind. Piles of embroidered lingerie, seven outrageously fetching hats, twenty-three dresses, and countless shoes, shawls, capes, and gloves. All heroically finished in record time by the seamstresses who slaved for Charles Frederick Worth.

  Which was the main reason Jennie was hustled off to the British embassy chapel: Madame Worth, the couturier’s French wife, had discovered her secret.

  * * *

  —

  She was being fitted for her wedding gown, white satin with a long train and rivers of expensive Alençon lace. Satin was very new in 1874, as far as milliners’ stuffs were concerned—an invention of Worth’s and the silk weavers of Lyon.

  This was Jennie’s second fitting, the third week in March. She had chosen the gown soon after Randolph left Paris for Parliament, on the superstitious hope that if her dress was ordered, nothing would stop the marriage. But something was wrong. The vendeuse in attendance eyed the girl fitting the pins in the seams of Jennie’s bodice. She was letting out the delicate fabric across the breasts and pelvis.

  “My word, Jeanette,” Clara said crossly as she watched in the long mirror. “Have you been indulging yourself on cakes and bonbons? Or did this stupid girl take your measurements wrong?”

  The vendeuse made her way to Madame Worth.

  Madame came on noiseless feet, magnificent in pale lilac. She stood silently at Clara’s shoulder, studying the girl’s body, the flush of her cheeks.

  “When is the wedding to be, Miss Jerome?” she asked softly.

  Jennie shrugged. “We have not yet decided. Before June, I hope—or this satin will suffocate me.”

  “Decidedly before June,” Madame murmured. The girl was either abysmally ignorant or shameless. “Mrs. Jerome, would you take coffee with me in the salon? We must discuss the lamentable error in your daughter’s fitting.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  When Charles left her in the Avenue de l’Opera, he gave his fiacre driver a simple order.

  “Number twelve Rue Chabanais.”

  The most famous brothel in Paris was only a few short blocks from Jennie’s hotel. Run by an Irishwoman known as Madame Kelly, it was a luxurious and sprawling townhouse fully licensed for business. Prostitution was legal and closely monitored in France. Sex was one of Paris’s greatest confections, and the entire world knew it. Tourist guides like The Pretty Women of Paris, by an anonymous Englishman, and Le Guide Rose, by a Frenchman, were sold out in European bookstores. Precious copies passed from hand to hand among upper-class men and the servants who procured for them. The pocket-sized books provided addresses and descriptions of the principal whorehouses, according to personal inclination or fetish, and physical descriptions of individual courtesans—the grandes horizontales, as they were called—who might be kept for a month or a year if one had the money to spend.

  Madame Kelly was backed by a tightly knit group of investors, most of them members of the exclusive Jockey-Club de Paris. Le Chabanais, as Kelly’s maison close was called, had cost millions of francs, but there were rich profits to be made from this world. It housed thirty young women of every physical description and taste, who entertained their wealthy clientele in exotically decorated rooms—Moorish, Japanese, Hindu. They charged breathless fees, and Madame Kelly’s investors pocketed most of them.

  Bertie, the Prince of Wales, had his own room at Le Chabanais with his coat of arms mounted over the bed. Charles had glimpsed him there only the month before, mingling with friends and elegant, if loosely gowned, young women in the house’s main salon. The Prince had a copper bathtub, too, that was filled with champagne at his request; he liked to bathe two girls at once in the sparkling wine. Near the tub was a special upholstered chair that suggested something out of an operating theater—the back reclined, and there were stirrups for a lady’s feet. Bertie had designed it himself. He preferred to stand between the stirrups when he ministered to one of Madame Kelly’s girls; his bulk was best accommodated upright.

  Charles paid off the driver and approached the door, drawing a token from his pocket—a gold coin engraved with the image of a grotto on one side and No. 12 on the other. He handed this to the porter, and Le Chabanais, like Ali Baba’s treasure cave, was opened to him.

  The entrance hall was carved out of stone to resemble the yawning mouth of a cavern. It was lit by torches set into niches on either side. There were fur skins underfoot, tossed opulently over marble. Charles removed his hat and coat and handed them to a bare-breasted Nubian slave; her tawny skin gleamed with oil and her eyes were rimmed with kohl.

  “Where is Madame Kelly?” Charles asked.

  “She is not to be disturbed.”

  Charles drew a card from his case and offered it. “Please. Beg her to join me for coffee and cognac.”

  “Monsieur le Comte is quite early.” The girl eyed him dubiously. “Madame never takes cognac at this hour.”

  Charles handed her a franc. “Oblige me.”

  She swiftly tucked the note behind the leather cord that bound her waist and left him.

  Charles wandered into the main salon. This was a high-ceilinged space with low couches and cushions scattered about the floor between the double fireplaces, which were burning brightly. The gas jets in cut crystal were kept low, bathing the women lounging throughout the room in something like moonlight. Most looked at him languidly as he passed; they could sense he was uninterested in sport this evening. Some were smoking from long cigarette holders; others were glancing through magazines. All were jeweled, exquisitely or nakedly dressed, their hair elaborately coiffed or flowing freely. Some were in costume. Some wore only corsets and stockings.

  A girl with brilliant gold hair and sumptuous breasts wore nothing at all except a pair of high-heeled pink slippers. She crouched on her hands and knees in the center of the room, a massive gold chain looped around her neck. Her buttocks were perfect: smooth and muscled as a stallion’s. Another girl, equally naked except for a pair of high black boots, held the long end of the chain like a leash. She was spanking the blonde’s sleek bottom with a rolled copy of Le Figaro while two men in white tie and tailcoats watched.

  “Monsieur le Comte.”

  The scent of lilies of the valley; a voice as cool as springwater. Charles turned. “Madame.”

  She offered her hand. He bowed low and kissed it.

  Alexandrine Jouannet had been born in Dublin and she had taken the surname of the Irishman who deflower
ed her at fifteen, but no one would mistake her for anything but a Frenchwoman. She was tall and lean in a daring black gown that was emphatically not from Worth. She had expressive features and artistic, long-fingered hands carelessly dotted with emeralds. Her eyes were wide and violet and thickly lashed. Her nose and chin were harsh. She was a jolie laide, a beautiful ugly woman, with vivid hair the color of mahogany. She appealed to young men searching for an older woman to adore and to those who found most women distasteful. Her discernment in matters of business was unquestioned.

  “Welcome to Le Chabanais. You wished to see me? You have an acute and particular desire, perhaps?”

  I do, Charles thought, with a fleeting sense of Jennie’s skin as it had looked in the candlelight of Lapérouse. And nothing you can offer will satisfy it.

  “Will you do me the honor of sitting down for a moment?” he said. “A little conversation. On the most discreet terms.”

  “But of course.”

  She led him through a cut velvet portiere in the far corner of the room. He recognized the fabric as from the Venetian silk house of Bevilacqua, a weaver his mother patronized. There was a table and two chairs in the mirrored alcove. The small space was lit by branches of candles on the wall and on the floor. A carafe of wine and two glasses rested on the table.

  “Your every need is anticipated,” she said simply, and offered him a seat. “Château Haut-Brion?”

  “No, thank you. May I smoke?”

  “Naturally.”

  Charles drew a gold case from his pocket; cigarettes were very chic now in France, only recently mass-produced and sold to the masses. But like his father, he still preferred Cuban cigars. He clipped the end of his Havana with a pocketknife and bent over the flame of the candle to light the tight wand of tobacco, mouthing the smoke as it rose.

  “I shan’t waste your time,” he said to Alexandrine. “You’ve given me too much already.”