That Churchill Woman Page 3

  The open ride to the Wild Wood was graded and beautifully turfed, an invitation to race.

  She gave Candida her head and did not look back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Isle of Wight, 1873

  Jennie Jerome felt a flush of warmth in her cheeks as she mounted the Ariadne’s gangway, her elbow-length satin gloves wilting with humidity. It was hot and sticky this August in Cowes. Most people watched the Regatta Week races in cool linen sailor dresses. But this was a royal tea dance, and demanded evening dress at three o’clock in the afternoon. Jennie quelled a spasm of irritation, and stepped aboard with all the grace of a girl raised on her father’s yacht.

  She wore a cream silk robe overlaid with lashings of bronze lace and gold spangles; unusual and arresting for a nineteen-year-old. The Ariadne was full of virgins in white, shining faintly with perspiration and ambition. Jennie drew a deep breath to steady her racing pulse and glanced around. The Prince and Princess of Wales were posed beneath a white canopy on the Ariadne’s foredeck, receiving their guests. Princess Alix’s sister and her husband—the Czarevna and Czarevitch of Russia—stood beside them. The Russian royals were visiting England for the yacht races, so of course a ball was in order. The Jerome ladies—Jennie, her mother, and her sister Clarita—were among the few American guests. Jennie’s father, Leonard Jerome, was an honorary member of Cowes’s Royal Yacht Squadron.

  Prince Edward Albert of Wales was chatting with Sir Ivor Rules, an aging sportsman just down from London. Rules stopped short, raised his monocle, and swept his gaze the length of Jennie’s figure. She lifted her brows at him satirically—did he think she was a filly at auction?—and let her attention wander to an impeccably dressed young lord with a walrus mustache and a rose in his buttonhole. He was leaning against a mast.

  Randolph Spencer-Churchill. She’d noticed his sketch in the Society columns.

  Lord Randolph’s father was the Seventh Duke of Marlborough. His elder brother, the Marquess of Blandford, was heir to the dukedom and a notorious rake. The family ruled the Cotswolds from the immense and chilly splendor of Blenheim Palace, one of the greatest treasure houses in England. Jennie felt Lord Randolph studying her as she curtseyed to the Czarevna.

  Definitely a filly at auction, she thought wryly.

  Within minutes of her exit from the receiving line, the Duke’s son was at her side.

  * * *

  —

  “You waltz divinely,” Randolph observed as they turned to something by Strauss, “but I’m treading all over your gold sandals, Miss Jerome, and you’re far too kind to kick me. Shall we drink champagne instead?”

  “I’d love to.” The crush was dreadful and Jennie hadn’t eaten in hours. She let Randolph lead her to the Ariadne’s rail and summon a footman. There was salmon and pâté and grapes as well as champagne.

  She accepted a plate. “I understand you’ve recently been in Paris.” A few lines beneath his face in the Society column had told her that. Duke’s son returns from Grand Tour.

  “The charnel house of Europe.” Lord Randolph raised his glass. “Or at least of its hopes. There’s nobody left to execute and nothing left to destroy.”

  “But the Commune’s long since over,” she objected. “Indeed, Mamma is carrying us all back to France next month.”

  “Then you’ve more courage than is good for you.”

  “You don’t think it’s safe?”

  “I’d be inclined to wait at least until Christmas.” His brown eyes swept over her coolly. “But I forget—you’re American. Americans never heed anything I say.”

  She laughed delightedly. “So you think we’re fools, of course?”

  “On the contrary, I think you’re invincible. I’ve yet to visit America, Miss Jerome, but with qualities like yours, I’m persuaded it’s the future.”

  “Now you’re teasing me, my lord. Every Englishman regards London as the center of the world.”

  “Not if they’ve read Gibbon as many times as I have. ‘The ascent to greatness, however steep and dangerous, may entertain an active spirit with the consciousness and exercise of its own power,’ ” Randolph quoted, “ ‘but the possession of a throne could never yet afford a lasting satisfaction to an ambitious mind.’ That’s Gibbon for you.”

  “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Jennie guessed.

  Randolph inclined his head. “I’ve read the entire work at least five times. Thrones like ours are out, Miss Jerome. It’s power that’s all the rage—the power of money. Which your countrymen command in revoltingly prodigious quantities.”

  Was that an insult, or envy? “I shall have to read Gibbon.”

  “Nothing easier. I’ll drop the volumes at your door by breakfast.”

  “Is history your passion, then, Lord Randolph? What do you mean to do with it?”

  “Stand for Parliament,” he said immediately. “I should go mad on a steady diet of grouse shooting and fox hunting.”

  “Are those the only alternatives?”

  “For a man of my class? Tragically, yes. But politics is the greatest blood sport of all, Miss Jerome. Beats bagging tigers all hollow. Have you visited Commons yet?”

  “No, I…” A sense of insecurity and confusion swept over her. She knew nothing about British politics. Mamma did not even take a daily paper in England; ladies were not supposed to read much beyond fashion magazines. Jennie thought fleetingly of Papa, far away in New York—without his influence, the Jerome household was entirely female and firmly superficial. She felt a stab of impatience at the depth of her own ignorance. “I should adore to see Parliament, Lord Randolph.”

  “Come up to London during the session and I’ll secure you a ticket.” His gaze moved past her. “Good God. Are we about to be rammed by a ship under full sail?”

  Jennie glanced around. He was staring at Mamma, who was magnificent but perhaps too substantial in a silk evening gown of old rose satin, massively hooped behind, the entire hem and train draped in garlands of beaded vines and chrysanthemums eight inches wide. She was hurrying toward them as fast as her delicate slippers and the pitch of the Ariadne’s deck allowed. Her expression was forbidding. The three plumes in her dark hair quivered with indignation. Jennie had been too exclusive, speaking to Lord Randolph alone for nearly half an hour.

  With a pang of regret—it had been the most interesting conversation she’d enjoyed all week—Jennie rose hurriedly to her feet. “I must go.”

  Lord Randolph grasped her wrist. “Tell me your name.”

  “We’ve already been introduced!”

  “Your first name. I’ll mutter it like an incantation after you’ve left me.”

  His cool eyes had darkened suddenly. She felt slightly unsteady—had the boat breasted a wave?—and smiled at him.

  “Jeanette. But call me Jennie.”

  “And how will I find you again, Jennie?”

  “We’re on an island, sir. You’ll be sick of the sight of me before the week is out.”

  * * *

  —

  The next morning at the Villa Rosetta, the Jeromes’ rented cottage, she wandered restlessly among the sunlit rooms. No set of Gibbon had arrived with her morning coffee. Jennie tried to shake the specter of Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill, but he persisted in her mind. The quicksilver emotions flitting across his face; the alertness of his brain; the way he dealt words as deftly as some men dealt cards. The unexpectedness of that parting grasp on her wrist. I have never visited the House of Commons. Did he find her gauche? Naïve? Heaven forbid—unintelligent? The wind off the sea gusted through the open casements and tugged at her black hair. And that suddenly, she was nine years old, back in Newport: a pair of donkeys and a dogcart, herself whipping the team up Bellevue Avenue. Children shrieking. She had dirtied her dress. Mamma was extremely cross and she was not allowed down for dinner.

&nbs
p; She stared out at the August daisies, starlike in the Cowes garden, and wished for speed. A dogcart, a team, a whip in her hand. Something reckless that might carry her off.

  “So tiresome.” Her mother’s voice drifted through the open window. “Colonel Edgecombe wants to bring a friend this evening. Which means we’ll have to ask a third, Clarita, or be uneven at table.”

  A murmur from her sister, indistinguishable.

  “Lord Randolph Churchill!” her mother retorted indignantly. “The ugly little man with the courtesy title, who cornered poor Jennie last night. I don’t know when I’ve witnessed such deplorable manners….”

  Jennie flushed and almost called out in protest, then bit back the words. So that was how Mamma thought of him. Deplorable and ugly. It was true that Lord Randolph’s eyes were a bit prominent, arresting above his walrus mustache, but he was of average height and reasonably fit. And when he talked—when his mind was engaged…She’d stayed near him too long just to watch him gesture with his hands.

  She turned irritably from the window. She’d met any number of men that summer in England, aristocrats and rogues alike. Most of them threw out lures to her on a daily basis. That’s what they called improper proposals in England—lures. As though she were a trout waiting to be reeled in to some cad’s bed. Sir Ivor Rules, for instance—a man her father’s age. His constant flirtation relieved the boredom of so many Society parties—Jennie supposed she enjoyed sparring with him—but she was shrewd enough to stop short of disaster. Sir Ivor was married. If she consented to become his mistress, he was perfectly willing to stand her a Mayfair address and all the horses she could possibly ride—but nothing more. Was it because she was American? Or appeared to be fatherless? With no title to bolster her name? It was astounding how many propositions she’d received this summer. And Mamma was oblivious. Determined to regard everyone they met as so terribly kind.

  Lord Randolph Churchill was the first Englishman who’d treated her as though she had a mind as well as a body. As though she were more than a man’s plaything.

  And he was coming to dinner tonight.

  Suddenly breathless, Jennie sat down at the piano and belted out a piece by Beethoven. Crashing and furious and exhilarating at once.

  * * *

  —

  Colonel Edgecombe was Clara Jerome’s latest beau: a bearded and bronzed soldier who’d served in the Eighth Bengal Cavalry and was only recently “home” from India. He was forty-five to her forty-eight and treated her with a blend of dash and deference. He led Randolph Churchill through the cobbled streets of Cowes to the Villa Rosetta that evening along with Tommie Trafford, a friend of Churchill’s who’d been invited to balance the table.

  “You’ll find that the ladies smuggled their cook out of France along with their trunks,” the Colonel confided to the younger men as they waited on the villa’s doorstep. “The Jerome grub is unequaled.”

  The meal, as he predicted, was excellent. It ran to seven courses, the wines well matched. The dining room doors were thrown open to the cool sea night. Edgecombe allowed himself to reminisce about Simla without becoming, he hoped, a Colonial Bore. The two girls listened to him with a pretty air of interest. When the last bite had been savored and Clara rose from her chair, they followed their mother meekly enough—as though, Edgecombe thought, they’d actually been raised properly.

  The port was before him. Edgecombe poured a glass and passed the decanter to his left. “Well, gentlemen—what’s your opinion of our lovely hostesses?”

  Trafford’s lips quirked. “Miss Clarita should be modeled in porcelain. Her resemblance to a doll is remarkable. I gather you’ve been acquainted with the Jeromes for some time, Colonel?”

  “Since last summer. Delightful creatures, and very easy in their acquaintance.” Edgecombe pushed back his chair, one hand thrust into his coat. “I imagine we’ll be treated to the girls’ performance on the pianoforte this evening—the Dark One is very adept, almost a professional.” He gave the word a certain taint. “She lets the Fair One play duets with her sometimes.”

  “Is that what you call them?” Lord Randolph interjected. “Dark and Fair?”

  “Like a story from the Brothers Grimm,” Trafford mused. “Rose White and Rose Red. Surely Miss Clarita should be married by now? She’s been finished to a fare-thee-well in Paris and New York. Speaks Italian and French. Has enough money to figure as an heiress…”

  “And can mount anything on four legs,” Churchill said.

  “Why mount four when you can mount two?” Edgecombe murmured slyly. “But as to that…there’s no birth to speak of, being American. Which may be why the girls don’t take. They say dear Clara is part Iroquois.”

  “Negro, I’ve heard,” Trafford countered. “The Fair One escaped the blemish, of course, but our Jeanette has a lovely color to her skin. I’ll wager she’s a tigress between the sheets.”

  “Careful,” Edgecombe warned. “The Dark One is spoken for.”

  “What do you mean?” Lord Randolph broke in suddenly. His prominent eyes had an ugly look in them. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sir Ivor Rules.” Edgecombe savored the wine and his superior knowledge; it was not often he had a chance to school a duke’s son. “Rules has his eye on the girl. Means to set her up as his mistress. Can’t say I blame him. Jeanette encourages his attentions, and we can all see she’s a ripe one. And not too particular as to morals, I daresay—these half-castes never are. Kept a number of ’em myself in India—”

  There was a tinkle of broken crystal and a blot of wine spread slowly across the tablecloth. Lord Randolph’s glass had shattered in his fingers.

  “My dear fellow!” Trafford cried.

  “It’s nothing,” he muttered, wrapping a napkin tightly around his palm. “Shall we join the ladies?”

  * * *

  —

  Moonlight washed the Solent and the far shore of England; washed the Royal Yacht Squadron as it lay at anchor; washed the towers of Victoria’s beloved Osborne, where the ghost of Albert wandered the halls. Jennie’s music drifted through Randolph’s mind—when he’d joined her in the drawing room, she had played, appropriately, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. Professional did not begin to describe her talent. Randolph might be a dreadful dancer but he understood music. He recognized that Jennie was an artist. He had barely known how to take his leave of her when the last notes died away.

  She had touched his hand with her cool one.

  Tomorrow, she breathed. I walk the Parade before breakfast.

  “Tedious evening,” Trafford complained as the two men strolled through the quiet streets. Orchestral music wafted to their ears; the Prince, no doubt, was entertaining. “Old Edgecombe is a fright, isn’t he?”

  “He should be flogged,” Randolph snapped. “It was all I could do not to slap him with my glove.” I walk the Parade. What time was her breakfast? What time would she wake?

  “Duels have rather gone out, old chap.”

  “But horsewhipping, thank God, has not.” His brother Blandford had flogged a man only last year. It was an act of contempt. Duels, being affairs of honor, implied a gentleman’s respect. Randolph refused to give Edgecombe that.

  Trafford stopped short on the paving and stared at him. “This cannot be about those women?”

  “Can it not?”

  “You’re mad. Ivor Rules, Randy! The betting’s running all his way at White’s, I assure you.”

  “Immaterial. Ivor’s wagered on a mistress.”

  “And?”

  “I intend to make the Dark One my wife.”

  “Bloody hell.” Trafford glanced swiftly at the genteel houses looming around them, as if afraid he’d been overheard. They were standing beneath a ginkgo. The paving was littered with fanlike leaves wet from a recent shower. The scent of decay rose to their nostrils.


  “Even if she weren’t American—even if those rumors are pure tosh—you can’t be serious, Randy!”

  “I believe marriage is usual for a man my age.” He was twenty-four to Jennie’s nineteen. Time to be setting up his nursery.

  “You loathe blushing young girls.”

  “This one interests me.”

  “She won’t for long. And then what will you do, when she invites all and sundry into her bed?”

  “Jealous, Tommie?” he taunted.

  “Don’t be a brute. I’m trying to save you from yourself.” Trafford drew out his matches and a cigar flared between his lips. The odor of tobacco—familiar from a thousand shared nights at Eton and Oxford and Blenheim—wrapped them in memory.

  “You don’t believe I’ve changed,” Randolph said.

  “In some ways, perhaps.” Trafford extinguished his match. “But in others? Never.”

  * * *

  —

  He met Jennie on the Parade the next morning as if by accident, a set of Gibbon under his arm. She wore a navy- and white-striped sailor dress and her bonnet was tied coquettishly with a deep raspberry ribbon under her left ear. She strode at an impatient pace along the Parade, a furled parasol swinging from one wrist, and Randolph finally found words for his attraction—this girl was arrestingly beautiful, yes, but she was also as free and athletic as a boy. Beneath the voluminous skirts her hips were narrow and her legs were long. Randolph’s sisters—he had six—were frail creatures, much given to languishing on sofas and fainting in excessive heat. But this American was an Amazon. She radiated life; he found her vitality mesmerizing.

  He secured another invitation to dinner at the Villa Rosetta that night. Without Tommie Trafford this time.

  “What can you possibly see in those people, Randy?” Trafford demanded.