That Churchill Woman Read online

  Somewhere, the Duchess had apparently heard of Arthur Sullivan. Perhaps she had even heard of Fanny Ronalds.

  “I do think it is the least you could do in support of poor Randolph, after all he has sacrificed for you,” Fanny added.

  * * *

  —

  Although she would never admit as much to her mother-in-law, Jennie did know how to organize a charity concert. She had learned at the feet of the best—Leonard Jerome. She allowed it to let slip during a visit to her milliner that she required a dress for a highly select charity event she was planning—and within hours, the fact had appeared in a gossip column. Sir Henry Irving, who managed the Lyceum Theatre and was himself a notable actor, offered Jennie his stage for the event. The Prince of Wales called in Grosvenor Square, astounding the Duchess, to announce he would sponsor the performance, and he carried a note from Princess Alix with an offer of help. Julian Story—an American portrait painter a few years younger than Jennie—volunteered to design the sets. And a flood of fashionable but tiresome friends clamored to be included in the performances: reciting, pantomiming, or playing instruments with dubious skill.

  Jennie tactfully turned down most of them in favor of Margot Tennant, who was as accomplished a ballet dancer as she was a rider to hounds; the Australian soprano an aging Papa had admired, and considered his discovery—Nellie Melba; and the thirty-year-old Polish pianist Ignace Paderewski, who was a personal friend of Charles Kinsky and only recently introduced to London. Paderewski sported a wild head of orange hair and a badly mended broken nose. He loved to play duets with Jennie, without having the slightest romantic interest in her. Jennie found him refreshing.

  On the night of the charity concert, two of the scheduled performers inexplicably failed to appear, and Jennie was forced to seat herself on the Lyceum’s stage amidst the potted palms, in a dress of bright green that showed up well from a distance. She played a Chopin polonaise for the nine hundred guests. She got through it; the wayward performers arrived, replete with apologies; and the benefit went on to rousing success.

  It was Duchess Fanny, however, who rose to accept a massive bouquet of roses from the Princess of Wales, as the lady sponsor of the Paddington Recreation Ground. She was at her most austere as she sank into her deepest curtsey, and murmured her thanks to “the dear friends who have shown their support for my beloved son Randolph and his constituency.”

  She did not acknowledge Randolph’s wife.

  “So like Lady Randolph to seize the stage,” Minnie Paget sniped as Jennie made her way through a crowd of well-wishers, “when there were so many others of real talent available! I myself had offered to declaim a portion of Antony and Cleopatra. But apparently my poor efforts were not wanted.”

  “Never mind,” the Prince of Wales told Jennie when he took his leave of her. “You shall have a greater reward than one of my wife’s posies. Shall I tell you, hmm? The treat we have in store?”

  He was patting her hand, his twinkling eyes roving from Jennie’s face to Charles Kinsky’s. If the Prince still regarded the Count as a threat to Jennie’s reputation, he no longer told her so. The years between his warning at the New Café and the present evening of Paderewski had convinced Bertie that Jennie was not the sort to elope to Paris with her lover.

  “I am charged with an invitation,” the Prince added, “on behalf of Baron de Hirsch. He has invited us all for a month of shooting at St. Johann, his estate in Hungary. Even Kinsky is included.”

  * * *

  —

  Baron Moritz von Hirsch was a German financier who kept a residence in Paris (where he was known as Maurice de Hirsch), a château in Saint-Cloud, a twelfth-century castle in Moravia, and Bath House in Piccadilly. He also rented Grafton House near Newmarket, where he bred his fabulous racehorses. Jennie had often met him on horseback just after dawn, in halcyon summers, watching the gallops across the North Downs. At the end of last season, he had confided to her that he intended to sell his entire string and shut down his stables. It was Lucien, his son, who had loved racing—and Lucien had died suddenly.

  “My heart has gone right out of it, my dear,” de Hirsch told her pathetically.

  He was nearly sixty years old, but he counted among his friends the much younger Charles Kinsky and Randolph’s childhood friend Natty Rothschild. Like Rothschild, Hirsch was Jewish. His grandfather had been the first Jew allowed to own land in Bavaria, and as banker to the King, the first to be ennobled. The Baron was one of the five wealthiest men in Europe. Having no child any longer—no son and heir—he had begun to give away vast sums to persecuted Jewish communities throughout Europe. No one in London knew what that meant, and most were too well-bred to ask. They accepted the Baron and people like Rothschild because the Prince of Wales did.

  Bertie needed Hirsch’s money. The Baron held enormous mortgages on Sandringham.

  “I suppose, if you have been invited in the company of the Prince of Wales, you must certainly go,” Duchess Fanny said doubtfully, when informed of Jennie’s plans for November. “It would never do to slight the Prince. The Queen cannot live forever. And Randolph’s political future hangs in the balance.”

  Jennie did not believe her husband had any sort of future. But she had no desire to argue with the Duchess. She set Gentry to packing.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The journey to St. Johann began in Paris with a special train. The Baron owned the Imperial Turkish Oriental Railway, an Ottoman line that connected Vienna to Istanbul through the Balkans. They would not be taking that line—or the brand-new train that traveled it, the Orient Express—because the Baron’s hunting lodge was located in Upper Hungary, an area Charles called the Felvidék.

  “That means ‘upland’ in Hungarian,” he explained to Jennie. “You’ll have a glimpse of the Carpathian Mountains while you’re the Baron’s guest. We’ll change lines in Vienna for Pressburg, and after that, it’s all overland by carriage, I’m afraid. It may be tedious for you.”

  “In such magnificent terrain?” she retorted. “Nonsense.”

  Three cars were reserved for the Prince of Wales—a royal sleeping coach, a dining coach, and a saloon where Bertie and his equerries smoked their cigars, read the newspapers obtained at every station stop, and occasionally commented on the scenery. Jennie and the rest of the guests had less private but equally sumptuous spaces assigned to them. They shared a dining car—although they were often summoned to Bertie’s—and a variety of saloons. One was designated as a “smoking” and another as a “ladies’ ” car, rather as they might have been aboard ship.

  They stopped in Reims, Strasbourg, Stuttgart, and Munich. Jennie donned her furs at each halt and walked briskly along the platform to stretch her legs, mourning that there was not time enough to venture into the towns.

  The third morning out of Paris, Jennie pulled aside the curtains of her sleeping compartment to find they had crossed into Austria during the night and had arrived in Salzburg. The air on the platform was sharply colder.

  “From now on, we skirt the Alps on our right hand until we reach Wien,” Charles told her over breakfast, using the German name for Vienna. He became more Austrian, Jennie thought, repressing a smile, with every mile that passed.

  “I wish we could stop there,” she said impulsively.

  He glanced at her. “Let’s.”

  “We can’t leave the Baron’s party!”

  “Not on our way to St. Johann, perhaps. But we might manage it on the way back.”

  She studied him. “Charles, you can’t be serious!”

  “Always, where you’re concerned.” The words were light but his expression was not. He reached for her hand and brought it to his lips. “I want to show you my home, darling. And introduce you to my parents. Normally they’d be in Bohemia at this time of year, but the Archduke is being tiresome and the Emperor has asked my mother to intervene.”
/>   The Archduke meant Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este, Royal Prince of Hungary and nephew to Charles’s Emperor. He was in his late twenties and as yet unmarried.

  “Your mother has an archduchess up her sleeve?” Jennie asked, amused.

  “It’s not that simple. Franz is a member of the Imperial Hapsburg dynasty. He must marry a princess of rank.”

  “The poor man’s had his life turned on end,” Jennie protested. “Surely he might be allowed to marry as he likes?”

  Franz Ferdinand had been plucked without warning from his comfortable world of stag hunting and mock soldiering two years before, when Crown Prince Rudolf—who had danced with Jennie to the strains of tziganes music at the New Café—had shot himself in the head, along with his seventeen-year-old mistress, at his hunting lodge in Mayerling. The girl’s body had been buried within hours at a nearby monastery, and the murder-suicide was hushed up. Charles knew the truth, however, and he had told Jennie. She had thought immediately of Sisi, Rudolf’s mother. The beautiful Empress would wander forever unconsoled now.

  “Jennie,” Charles had said when he explained Rudolf’s suicide. “You know that it’s possible…that his condition…It ends in madness.”

  “Yes.” Rudolf’s condition, like Randolph’s, was syphilis.

  “You must break with your husband,” Charles had urged. “If this curse leads to violence…”

  “That’s hardly warranted.” She had smiled into his eyes faintly. “Randolph’s so rarely in England!”

  Charles had grasped her shoulders. “Don’t you understand, I’m afraid for you. God knows what the man might do when his reason is deranged—”

  “Hush.” She placed her fingers on his lips in a wordless caress. “I keep a Deringer beside my bed, remember?”

  * * *

  —

  They arrived at St. Johann as night was falling. The mile-long drive was lit every ten yards by torches. A liveried servant stood guard with a rifle by each flame.

  The main house on Baron von Hirsch’s vast estate was a square and generous old building dating to the twelfth century, with peaked roofs of dark-stained wood and deeply overhanging eaves that shouldered snow in winter. The walls were clad inside and out with the white stucco pervasive in the region, incised with curlicues and whorls of sgraffiti to reveal a red undercoat beneath. Jennie was charmed by the patterns, and when she was not walking for miles during the day with the men and their dogs and guns, she was absorbed in studying an artisan who maintained the decorative technique. She had decided to attempt sgraffiti in her dining room at Connaught Place.

  The Baron, like Jennie, believed in luxury and convenience. Although there was no electricity at St. Johann, there was infinite hot water and a bath attached to every bedchamber. The beds were blanketed with eiderdowns. An army of servants tended fires and answered every bell, and the refrigerated game locker in the kitchen wing was the largest in Europe—capable of storing seven thousand fowl.

  There was a reason for this.

  Each morning during the shooting party, the Baron and his guests were loaded into victorias accompanied by postilions clothed in blue hussar jackets, and driven out into the field. They were met there by six hundred beaters. Hirsch’s chief gamekeeper would sound a bugle, and the party would advance in a line across the Hungarian plain. Most of the ladies remained at the house, bent over needlework or riding the Baron’s beautiful horses, but Jennie walked out with the men, wrapped in furs, her gloved hands swinging and her cheeks brilliant with exercise. The beaters flushed blackcock and partridges, pheasants and blue hares. Roe deer bounded away in startled panic. At times the huge coveys overhead darkened the light.

  “Have you ever fired at a bird on the wing?” Kinsky asked as he handed his gun to his loader and accepted a fresh one. Every man walked with a bearer and two guns. Speed of reloading was essential.

  “Besides you, you mean?” she flashed, remembering his silhouette in her bedroom window so many years before. “A long time ago. My father had a trap-shooting range at Jerome Park.”

  Charles raised his fowling piece at a forty-five-degree angle, his left arm quite straight as he tracked a partridge, and fired. The bird tumbled out of the air and one of the Baron’s pack of Vizslas sprang to retrieve it.

  “Guns have changed since then,” he said, “but as a former target, I suspect you still have the touch.”

  He took his reloaded gun from the bearer and offered it to her. “Go on. No one will mind.”

  It was an elegant fowling piece, a “London best,” as they were known in sporting circles, made by Holland and Holland. A twelve-bore, double-barreled, breech-loaded, sidelock shotgun with a chased action and walnut stock. Not above seven pounds in weight. Elegant and exorbitant. The sort of gun she could never afford to buy for Winston and that Randolph ought to have given him on his sixteenth birthday. Fathers were meant to pass guns on to their sons, along with the skills to fire them. Randolph had been a great sportsman in his day, before nerve tremors destroyed his reflexes.

  “Do you know,” she said slowly as she took the gun, “I was out at a driven shoot the day my pains came on with Winston—the day before he was actually born. The Duchess blamed the dogcart jerking over Blenheim’s ruts, which was her way of blaming me for joining the shoot. But she was wrong.”

  “Isn’t she always?” Charles flashed.

  “I went into labor because I danced all night at the Blenheim Hunt Ball.”

  He threw back his head and laughed.

  Jennie set the fowling piece’s butt against her right shoulder and sighted a gray partridge. She tried to track the bird’s flight, tried to anticipate where it would be by the time the burst of shot reached its body, but when she had fired she glanced up and saw the partridge still in the sky.

  “Bird away,” Charles said. “Have another go.”

  After that, they shared his guns as they walked, and by the end of the day Jennie had brought down three birds.

  The rest of the party bagged nearly three thousand.

  That night, Charles slid her velvet dressing gown from her clavicle and kissed the purple stain where the gun’s recoil had bruised her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  They passed back through Vienna the third week in November. At Charles’s urging, Jennie had consented to leave the Baron’s party and break her trip in Austria for a few days. But when they stepped down from the special train at Vienna’s main station, and Jennie had collected both Gentry and her numerous trunks, she turned to the Count and held out her hand.

  “This, my dear, is where we part for a time.”

  “What the devil do you mean?”

  He was frowning, eyes furious under his dark gray homburg.

  “I am greatly fatigued, and although I am wild to be introduced to your dear mamma, I must recruit my strength a little. I will take a cab—there are such things in this city, I assume?—to my hotel and rest.”

  “Your hotel?”

  “It’s called the Sacher. Have I pronounced that correctly?”

  “Directly opposite the opera house,” he said impatiently. “But you can’t stay there.”

  “Bertie assures me it is quite respectable.”

  “Bertie?”

  “Are you going to repeat every other word I utter, Charles? It grows quite tedious.” She smiled at him with false mischief. “Naturally I accepted the Prince’s advice on accommodation when I informed him I was leaving the train at Vienna. He swears the Sacher is in an unobjectionable part of town. Which reminds me: What is the German word for cab? Gentry will need to know.” Jennie glanced over her shoulder at her maid, who stood by the porter and a cart full of cases in her black coat and hat, her nose reddening in the cold.

  “Indeed, and she will not,” Charles retorted. “No one speaks German here; the dialect is Austro-Bavarian and Gentry will never mast
er it. You are both coming with me to Palais Kinsky. It is absurd to think of you staying anywhere else.”

  “Darling Charles.” Jennie placed her gloved hand on his sleeve. “If you think I am going to descend upon your ancestral home, entirely unaccompanied by my husband, in the figure of a scheming mistress—expecting to be established opposite the heir’s bedchamber and eyeing the family jewels across the dining table—you are utterly mistaken. I shall go discreetly to the Sacher, with the Prince of Wales’s approval, and call upon you tomorrow.”

  “I wired ahead to my father to expect us. Preparations will have been made.” The wolf look was in Charles’s eyes.

  “And the relief will be infinite when I demonstrate that I am, after all, a lady of breeding.” Jennie drew a deep breath, summoning all her resolution. She refused to enter Charles’s palace as his indiscretion. “If you persist in arguing the point, I shall catch the next train west.”

  He held her gaze a moment, saw no hint of weakness in her face, and threw up his hands. “Very well! My mamma receives between one and three o’clock in the afternoon. She does not speak English, but her French is excellent. Never mind the word for cab—I shall order yours, and accompany you to the Sacher, while sending my baggage to the palais with my man. Gentry can go in a third carriage with your things.”

  Jennie tilted her head and smiled. “Thank you, Charles. You’re very good.”

  “And you make me feel like a thief in the night.”

  She affected surprise. “But that’s exactly what I want to avoid!”

  He leaned close and growled into her ear. “When will you learn, my beloved Jennie, that scandal touches only those who fear it? Stare down the gossips and they have no power.”