That Churchill Woman Read online

  “Churchill! Mr. Churchill!”

  He threw aside the drawing pad and scrambled up, brushing the seat of his trousers with his hands. “Oy!” he called. “Over here!”

  A messenger boy he recognized was running across the Common, his bicycle tossed behind in the heath. Winston felt a flicker of apprehension. Why were they looking for him? Had he done something wrong? He bent to gather his things into his rucksack and felt again the glancing blow of sunlight on his cheek. Damn. He had been so close to finishing—

  “Mr. Churchill.” The boy came up panting, then bent in half with his hands on his knees, wheezing.

  “What is it, Sid?”

  Sid reached into his shirt, open at the neck, and withdrew a sealed envelope—slightly dampened from his exertions. He flourished it at Winston.

  “From the adjutant.”

  Winston tore open the letter.

  By order of the Secretary of State for War, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, you are to proceed to London immediately upon receipt, there to bid your father, Lord Randolph Churchill, farewell on his last day in England. Special leave is hereby granted at the request of the Secretary of State for War, not to exceed thirty-six hours from the issuance of these orders.

  “My father is leaving England,” he told the messenger boy blankly.

  “Is he indeed, sir? And where is he bound, then?”

  “I have no idea,” Winston said.

  * * *

  —

  Randolph had decided on a world tour three months before, in March, when his old friend Archie Primrose, the Fifth Earl of Rosebery, replaced Gladstone as Liberal Prime Minister. Arthur Balfour was Conservative Leader now, and Randolph was still going into Parliament and attempting to make speeches, but his words were unintelligible. When he rose to speak, his voice snarled forth in bursts of grunts and wheezes, choked and spitting. He no longer had control of his motor functions. His arms and legs shook; he stumbled when he walked. Arthur Balfour sat with his head in his hands on the front bench while the rest of Parliament fled for the exits, the Speaker begging for “Order!” It was a waking nightmare for anyone who had ever loved Randolph Churchill.

  “There’s no curtain,” Rosebery muttered to Balfour. “No retirement. He’s dying by inches in public.”

  It was Rosebery, not Arthur, who paid a difficult call on Jennie that spring. Finances were tight enough that she and Randolph had sold No. 2 Connaught Place entirely and moved in with the Dowager Duchess in Grosvenor Square. After Jennie rang for tea and she and Archie had exchanged news of their racing strings—Rosebery was a formidable owner and his horses were always Derby contenders—he came to the point.

  “Have the doctors told you what to expect?” he asked.

  Archie had been at Eton and Oxford with Randolph; he knew the nature of his friend’s disease, although nothing would ever compel him to name it.

  “They call it General Paralysis of the Insane,” Jennie answered evenly. “A nerve sickness. It cannot be cured. And it will end in death. What am I to do about it, Archie?”

  “Get him away—to Blenheim or somewhere else in the country.”

  “Blenheim is difficult now,” Jennie explained, “with George gone.” She was quite pale, but her voice was firm.

  Randolph’s elder brother Blandford had died suddenly in 1892, at the age of forty-eight. Despite his second wife Lily’s fortune, George had left his affairs in deep disorder. To everyone’s horror and no one’s surprise, he had bequeathed twenty thousand pounds to his last mistress. Winston’s cousin Sunny was now the Ninth Duke. He had entered the House of Lords at the age of twenty-one, but was persistently anxious about money. Sunny was casting about for a rich wife; he wrote to Winston in despair that if he failed to find one, he would be forced to sell Blenheim, bringing dishonor on the family.

  “Could you take Randy abroad? To Biarritz, perhaps?” Rosebery suggested. “Somewhere out of the way, in the sun? His health might improve if he lived more quietly.”

  “But he doesn’t live quietly,” Jennie retorted, her inner flame of anger flaring. “Randy cannot sleep, he cannot sit still. At times he cannot read or write. He cannot ride a horse, Archie, or shoot a gun. He can barely eat without spilling food down his shirt. He is still invited to political dinners, of course, and it’s sheer torture to accompany him—he terrifies the entire table by the time the first course is served. How am I to lock Randy away, I ask you, when what he craves is constant movement?”

  “I see.” Rosebery stared at his clasped hands. “Have you consulted with the Dowager Duchess? Has she any thoughts on the matter? What do Randy’s doctors advise? Might there be some sort of medicine that would render him more…malleable?”

  “You think I should drug him with morphine? Stun him to immobility, so the rest of us can get on with our lives?”

  She rose abruptly from her seat and walked rapidly to the drawing room windows, staring blindly out at Grosvenor Square. She knew Rosebery was no idle gossip; he loved Randolph, and was sincerely concerned about all her family. Which meant Randy had done something unforgiveable in public.

  “Why this sudden concern, Archie?” She wheeled to face him. “Has my husband embarrassed you?”

  “Not me,” he said quickly. “Never me. But there are those in Commons, Jennie—younger men, who do not know what he was—who have no reason to value or understand him…”

  “Ten years ago, he commanded the world.” Her voice trembled with anguish and despair. “Has Randy become an object of fun?”

  Rosebery shook his head, still refusing to meet her eyes. “Of pity, rather. And horror.”

  Jennie’s heart lurched. She reached behind her, grasped the back of a chair. “I see,” she said faintly.

  Rosebery stood and reached for his hat. “Somehow, my dear, you must try to save Randolph from himself. You are the only one of us with the strength and courage to do it.”

  * * *

  —

  Jennie consulted with the Duchess.

  Fanny would always despise and resent her, but Randolph was a problem both women wanted to solve. That made them temporary allies.

  “Cannot one of his doctors remove with him to the South of France?” the Duchess suggested.

  “Roose would never do it,” Jennie told her. “The demands of his practice are too great. And Dr. Buzzard is equally besieged.”

  Thomas Buzzard specialized in diseases of the nervous system; he was a consulting physician at London’s National Hospital for the Paralyzed and Epileptic. Jennie had called him in to advise on Randolph’s case immediately after her husband’s return from South Africa, two years before. Randolph had descended to the dock at Liverpool, haggard and bearded, a refugee from his private war. He had refused to shave the beard; it hid the syphilitic chancres that had broken out on his face.

  Buzzard suggested that Randolph go to Norway for a fishing trip, perhaps with a friend….But Harry Tyrwhitt-Wilson had died, and Jennie doubted that Tommie Trafford would be willing to leave Paris, where he seemed to live permanently these days. They had not met in months. Norway was likely to end only in frustration, in any case: Randolph screaming incoherently by the side of a lake, unable to bait or cast his line.

  “What about Dr. Keith?” Duchess Fanny attempted.

  “My Dr. Keith?” He was a medical man who dealt in women’s matters. “He’s far too busy,” Jennie told her. “Every lady in London consults him.”

  “He has a son, doesn’t he? A rising fellow in medicine?”

  Jennie glanced derisively at the Duchess. “George Keith? Not very young; he’s older than Randy! And last I heard, he was working in New York.”

  “He has returned to London,” the Duchess said with evident satisfaction. “Buzzard told me so—you know what a gossip the man is.”

  Jennie considered the idea. George Keit
h was, like his father, a specialist in female complaints. The Duchess still had no idea that her son had syphilis. In her mind, any doctor would do for a man with a nervous disorder. But it was possible, Jennie realized shrewdly, that Keith could be lured by the prospect of research: Women died of syphilis as well as men. He could learn something from her husband.

  “Young Keith might be the very person to undertake a protracted journey with poor Randolph,” Fanny persisted.

  Young Keith. Fifty years old if he’s a day.

  “Very well,” Jennie said. “I’ll write to him.”

  * * *

  —

  “I want to see Burma before I die.” Randolph kept his eyes fixed on her face, ignoring the medical specialist.

  “He wants to see Burma,” Jennie explained.

  She was serving as interpreter of her husband’s garbled words. Much as she had once translated his political speeches to a common, and accessible, brilliance. They were sitting in George Keith’s consulting rooms. Keith was a man of middle height and thinning hair, already gray. His heavy spectacles glinted in the light.

  “Burma,” he repeated. “That is a considerable distance from England. Perhaps a trip of less ambitious extent…?”

  “I annexed the bloody kingdom to the empire,” Randolph spluttered. “I refuse to die without seeing it.”

  “My husband brought Burma into the empire,” Jennie explained, “while serving as Her Majesty’s Secretary for India in 1885. It is his heart’s desire to see the kingdom. Is it not possible that with such a goal, his health might rally?”

  “Possible, indeed,” Keith said uncomfortably. He was studying Randolph as he spoke, not Jennie; Randolph absorbed all his interest. Bitterly, she knew Keith was already seduced—the chance to intimately chronicle the last stages of General Paralysis of the Insane, with a captive subject, was too great to turn down. Keith was imagining academic papers, submitted to scientific journals, with the subject’s name elided, of course. “Would the object of the trip be to sail directly to the Subcontinent? And then sail east to Rangoon? Or break the journey en route?”

  “We thought to begin our journey in New York,” Jennie said.

  “New York?” The doctor was plainly startled; it was, after all, the opposite direction from the British Raj.

  “Yes,” Jennie said decisively. “I must visit my father’s grave in Brooklyn. We’ll spend a week or two in Manhattan, then travel by train to Bar Harbor, Maine. After that we intend to cross Canada, with stops at the principal towns—Ottawa, of course, and Banff Springs. Then we’ll descend from Vancouver to San Francisco, where we will embark for the Orient, with scheduled halts in Yokohama, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and eventually Madras.”

  “Good Lord!” Keith exclaimed. “And how much time do you expect to devote to such a scheme?”

  “Nine months,” Jennie answered. “Perhaps a year.”

  The doctor fingered his pocket watch fretfully. “A year! I am not sure I may give you an immediate answer, Lady Randolph, as to the feasibility of such a project—or my own willingness to undertake it.”

  “Damned fool,” Randolph growled. “You should be on your knees begging for the chance to see such remote parts of the empire! And without the slightest expense to yourself!”

  For once, inexplicably, the words were clear as a bell.

  Keith stared at his lordship, his lips parted.

  Definitely seduced.

  “We’ll leave you to consider our proposition.” Jennie rose gracefully and, with one of her roguish smiles, extended her hand to Keith. “If you could let us know by tomorrow evening? We would not wish to delay our search for the perfect companion. Come along, darling.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Winston reached London by seven o’clock in the evening that Tuesday. He was able to dine at Duchess Fanny’s in Grosvenor Square, with his mother and Jack, who had been summoned from Harrow to say farewell. Bonaparte lay in ecstasy on Jennie’s lap, unaware that she was deserting him the next day. Duchess Fanny was too much overcome by the imminent departure of her son to join them; she took her dinner on a tray with Randolph in his room.

  “How jolly that you shall see India at last,” Winston crowed. “I remember how you longed to go, Mummie, when Father was Secretary. You must bring back some rubies!”

  “Sapphires, I think.”

  “And by the time you reach the Raj,” he added, “Father will have entirely recovered his strength, and be able to visit the temples with you.”

  “Yes, indeed.” His mother grinned at him with abandon, looking like a carefree girl. “We’ll see all the sights, and I’ll send you sketches. Now tell me more about your riding, Win—are you truly learning to play polo? And what in God’s name will your father say when you demand the price of a few polo ponies?”

  The next morning, they all traveled together by hansom to Euston Station, where his parents would catch the Southampton train. Winston sat next to his father, who did not speak, but at one point, as the carriage slowed before the station, his trembling fingers hovered and descended on Winston’s knee. They had shaken hands on rare occasions in their lives, but Randolph had never touched him with affection. Never hugged or kissed him. Winston blinked rapidly and stared straight ahead as his father’s fingers closed on his thigh. Cadets of nearly twenty did not cry.

  * * *

  —

  Some of their old friends were waiting on the platform to wave goodbye: Archie Rosebery, who was now Prime Minister, and Lord Goschen—who had taken Randolph’s place as Chancellor of the Exchequer years ago when he’d resigned—and Mary, Lady Jeune. She had promised to invite Winston to her London home as often as possible in Jennie’s absence; she was a notable political hostess, and Win would love dining with her powerful friends. Poor Jack would be rather at loose ends on his holidays, Jennie realized—Everest had been sacked a few years ago when she was no longer needed—but Duchess Fanny would take care of him. The Duchess never minded having Jack to stay; he was a quiet boy who caused no trouble.

  Lord Frederic Wolverton was standing on the platform, too, next to Margot Tennant, who had recently become Margot Asquith. Her husband, Henry, was one of the principal members of the Souls—but also a member of Cabinet, and a widower with five children. Margot had astonished the world by marrying him. Which meant, Jennie thought, that it must be a love match.

  “You will be too busy to write,” she said as she embraced Margot, “but I shall send you reams anyway.”

  “Send watercolors instead,” Margot advised. “Then I shall be able to picture exactly how you are.”

  Freddie Wolverton was a dashing fellow of thirty, Margot’s age and the sort she’d been expected to marry. His hair was blond, his eyes were warm, and his teeth were very white. He was a member of the Marlborough House Set and had been paying Jennie a great deal of attention in recent weeks. When she held out her hand in parting, he drew her close and kissed her cheek. “I depend upon a steady correspondence to cheer my broken heart.”

  “Of course, Freddie, if you promise to reply,” she retorted.

  “I shall have nothing better to do,” he mourned. “I’m desolate that you are abandoning me.”

  Jennie laughed. “You’ll have your hands full, keeping Bertie in order!”

  As the train pulled away from the station, she stood in the first-class compartment window, blowing kisses to Winston, who had his arm around his brother, and to the rest of the known world dwindling too swiftly behind her. Soon enough she would smile on Dr. Keith and Randolph and attempt to make some conversation, but for now, she needed all her rigid self-control.

  She was keening silently for far more than her friends and family. She feared she had lost what mattered most on earth.

  Charles Kinsky had not come to say goodbye.

  * * *

  —

  “
He will kill you,” he had muttered into her ear when she’d told him of her plans in April.

  They were waltzing at Consuelo Yznaga’s ball the week after Easter—Consuelo, who was no longer Countess Mandeville, but the Dowager Duchess of Manchester. The old Duke had died in 1890 and thankfully released his wife, Louise, who had finally married her lover, Hart. Lottie was now Hart’s Duchess of Devonshire; the press liked to call her the Double Duchess. But her son, Consuelo’s husband, George, had survived his father by merely two years, dying of drink at the age of thirty-nine. Connie’s only son, William, whom everyone called Kim, was the Duke of Manchester now. Connie lived anything but quietly with her fifteen-year-old daughters at 17 Charles Street, and surveyed her intimate parties from a chaise longue. She was, as always, too lazy to waltz.

  “Or you will kill him,” Charles added. He was staring at Jennie while she gazed determinedly over his shoulder, a fixed smile on her face for the benefit of anyone watching. “It’s sheer folly! A year of wandering, Jennie, with a man who’s losing his mind? I won’t let you go.”

  “You must.”

  “Nonsense! No one would blame you for staying behind. We’ve all seen how Randolph treats you—the rages, the threats….He’s come near to striking you any number of times in public. Let this medical man you’ve hired be responsible for him! Why else pay the fellow’s passage?”