That Churchill Woman Read online

  Bonaparte barked ecstatically and leapt forward on his leash, jerking her mind from its thoughts. She glanced up and saw Charles Kinsky.

  He was standing stock-still in the middle of the paving, staring at her. Bonaparte dragged Jennie forward and rose up on his hind legs to paw Charles’s knees. Charles fondled the dog’s head, his eyes still fixed on her face. “Steady, old chap.”

  “Down,” Jennie said mechanically, and snapped the leash. “Hello, Charles.”

  “I saw the news in the Brussels papers—about Randolph.”

  “Yes,” she said. A cold wind buffeted her cheek; she could not stand out on the street for long. It would draw too much comment from the Duchess’s neighbors.

  “I came as soon as I knew.” He reached out, his gloved hand grasping her elbow in the way she loved best. Intimate, protective. Bonaparte danced at their feet.

  “Whatever for?”

  His eyes widened. “To tell you I was wrong. To beg you to take me back.”

  “Charles—”

  “Six months ago, you talked of duty. Jennie, your duty is dead and buried in the ground.”

  “What about yours? You’re married, aren’t you?”

  He smiled grimly. “Yes. God help me.”

  She began to walk toward No. 50. “I had hoped you would be happy.”

  “Without you?”

  “You’ve managed without me before. I did not force your wife upon you, Charles.”

  “No. I have myself to thank for that piece of blind stupidity.” He strode after her. “Leonie wrote to me. She told me all you felt. I know I hurt you deeply, Jennie—I know I drove you to despair—but, oh, my darling, I’m well served for whatever pain I’ve caused.”

  She stopped short. “Yes. You are. I asked you to wait—”

  “I wanted to punish you. I wanted you to feel pain—as I did—when you toyed with Wolverton, and shut me out, and left on your insane voyage. I wanted you to burn with regret. But some nights I actually envy Randolph. Death is preferable to living without you.”

  All his love was written on his face. When he reached out and grasped her shoulders, she could not stop herself—she had wanted him too long. She stepped as though stunned into his arms. She did not care that anyone might see them. My love, my love, I have wanted you so….

  “Come away with me, Jennie.”

  She lifted her head. “Where?”

  “Paris—New York…Constantinople, perhaps. The Archduke Franz will give me any posting I ask.”

  Again, the cold wind bit her cheek.

  “And what of your Countess?”

  “I’ll have the marriage annulled. Lise will go back to her family. They’ll take care of her.”

  Jennie went still. Then she pushed herself free. “I thought Kinsky men guarded their own.”

  “They do. I do. You’re my own, Jennie.”

  “Is Elisabeth in love with you?”

  His lips parted slightly; he did not answer.

  “Of course she is,” Jennie rasped. Her eyes stung suddenly with unshed tears. “How could she not be? Her knight of the Holy Roman Empire. If you leave, Charles, she’ll never recover from the blow. She’s only a raw girl. I know all about it, you see—because something similar happened to me at her age. I married a man with secrets. I learned the truth about him too late.”

  “Jennie—”

  “But to my great good fortune,” she persisted, “that man stayed. My marriage would never be the fairy tale I imagined on my wedding day. As you know better than anyone. But I claimed my place in Society and the world. Randolph gave me my freedom, Charles, to live as I chose, on my own terms. A life of some purpose.” She paused. “That’s what it means to guard your own.”

  Charles drew a ragged breath. Wordless. Stricken.

  Jennie gathered Bonaparte’s leash in hands that were trembling. Then she rose on tiptoe and kissed Charles deeply, searchingly, on the mouth. Heedless, now, of Duchess Fanny’s neighbors.

  “I need you like some people need drink or opium,” she whispered. “It will cost me dear to cut you out of my life. But I will wean myself free of you, Charles. Go back to your Countess.”

  * * *

  —

  She had one other visitor late that afternoon, when the lamps were coming on around Grosvenor Square and her bedroom was filled with darkness. She had been sitting alone near the fire without any other light, staring at nothing. She had not wept. There had been too much weeping. But her eyes glittered as sharp and brilliant as cut glass in the dusk.

  When Gentry knocked softly on her door, Jennie forced herself to move.

  “My lady,” her maid said. “A gentleman’s come from Government. He wants to see you. Not knowing who he was, I left him in the ground-floor anteroom.”

  “Did he send up a card?” Jennie asked.

  Gentry offered it. Mr. Malcolm Grey, it said. Treasury.

  Jennie smoothed her hair and went down to him.

  “Lady Randolph,” the man said as she entered the anteroom—it was cold from the air off the street, and no fire had been lit; Mr. Grey still wore his overcoat, although he removed his bowler at her appearance. He was a slight man of possibly thirty, with longish blond hair slicked back from his brow. A pointed chin and small bright eyes that reminded her of a ferret’s. One of the new men in Government.

  “My sincerest condolences on the loss of your husband.”

  “Thank you.”

  Jennie waited for him to explain himself.

  “In view of the fact that his lordship can no longer take part in any future Conservative Cabinet, I have been sent to take charge of his official robes.”

  “His what?”

  “His robes of office. The ones he wore as Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

  “Nearly ten years ago?” Jennie struggled to remember. Randolph had been Exchequer so briefly and carelessly that it was hard to conceive anyone cared about his robes or what had become of them. They were black, she knew, like an academic gown, and excessively trimmed with gold brocade that lent a Rembrandt-like opulence. Randy had been lost in their huge folds, but magnificence suited his ducal blood.

  “You want them back?” she said, bewildered.

  “I am under express orders to request their return, ma’am.”

  Jennie considered. Then she lifted her chin. “No.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “But, Lady Randolph, you can have no possible use for the robes—”

  “That is where you’re wrong, Mr. Grey.” She was thinking not of Randolph now, but of Winston, standing at his father’s grave. The brooding purpose on his young face.

  “I am saving them for my son.”

  AFTERWORD

  Charles Kinsky’s wife, Elisabeth, died childless in 1909. In 1914, when world war broke out after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his unsuitable morganatic wife, Sophie Chotek, Charles refused to take up arms against England. Recalled to Austria, he kept his London flat in Clarges Street and asked to be deployed against the Russian Empire, on the Eastern Front. He fought there for four years.

  In 1915, Jennie encountered Kinsky’s butler in London. Tell him you’ve seen me, she said. Tell him I’m well. A few accounts of Charles—now Prince Kinsky—came through the lines. How he was set upon by a group of Russians while on horseback alone and routed them all; how he’d been found by a young relative sitting in camp with a British racing form in his hands, talking parliamentary politics. With Austria’s defeat, however, Charles’s world came to an end. The Austrian Empire was dissolved; his estates and his titles were confiscated or abolished. He died in 1919.

  Years earlier, on the occasion of Jennie’s second marriage, Charles had sent her a card bordered in black. It consisted of only three words in Fre
nch: Toujours en deuil.

  Always in mourning.

  Dedicated to the memory of

  Gwendolyn Ashbaugh Mooney,

  who did so much with her one wild and precious life

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Jennie Jerome Spencer-Churchill was the focus of speculation, adoration, and rabid public interest throughout her life. Her treatment at the hands of some historians after her death merely extended the controversy about her character and worth. Depicted most often as a sparkly afterthought to her extraordinary son, pilloried as a bad mother and a wanton lightweight, Jennie has always figured in my imagination as a profoundly modern woman who lived and died by her own choices, without regrets—a century before that was either forgivable or commonplace.

  That Churchill Woman is obviously a work of fiction. My storytelling drew from a wealth of biography, autobiography, cultural studies, and personal letters that give Jennie her lifeblood. “But what’s true, and what did you make up?” readers will inevitably ask. And so I offer a note on sources. It is a partial one, a taste of what might be read if the reader is motivated.

  The collected letters of Jennie and Randolph, to each other and among various family members, including sons Winston and Jack, are held in the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge. (Only a few notes between Jennie and Charles Kinsky survive.) The digital Churchill Archives can be accessed by subscription, and the libraries of many academic institutions hold such subscriptions, which are, by extension, also available to their affiliates. Lord Randolph Churchill’s parliamentary speeches are similarly digitized and available online in the archives of Hansard, the official parliamentary debate recorder, catalogued by session and date. In some cases, I have edited selections from letters or speeches for the sake of concision. A list of the original letters cited follows these acknowledgments.

  Jennie wrote a glancing autobiography—The Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill (New York: Century, 1908)—which is notable for its reticence, its gaps, and its blatant fiction. It is also notable, however, for the profound ease and charm of Jennie’s voice, which betrays the fluency she had with words, as with so much else—paint, music, people. The literary style of her son Winston is often more didactic, but in at least one of his autobiographical works—My Early Life: 1874–1904 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930)—he sounds like Jennie’s doppelgänger. This account of his childhood and school days through Sandhurst is riddled with telling detail, wildly varying emotions, and humor. Winston also wrote the ponderous and encyclopedic two-volume biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill (London: Macmillan, 1907), although Randolph’s friend Archie Primrose—the former prime minister and Fifth Earl of Rosebery—wrote a far less encyclopedic one with an identical title (London: Harper & Brothers, 1906). More recently, Robert Rhodes James offered his assessment, also titled Lord Randolph Churchill (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995). These biographies focus on the parliamentary and political career and only nod occasionally at the personal life. (Randolph Churchill is long overdue for a completely revisionist look.) The Churchill-authored memoirs offer quotations and family anecdotes that I have embroidered freely.

  Jennie’s biographers include Ralph G. Martin, whose two-volume work titled Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969) remains the seminal work. Martin was able to interview Prince Clary, Charles Kinsky’s nephew, for personal reminiscences and family knowledge of his relationship with Jennie. It is also Ralph Martin who recounts Jennie’s receipt of Charles’s card, from the Austro-Hungarian embassy in St. Petersburg on the occasion of her second marriage, that said only “Toujours en deuil.” (Jennie: The Dramatic Years, 1895–1921, by Ralph G. Martin, Prentice-Hall, 1971, p. 252). Elisabeth Kehoe offered a group picture of the Jerome women in her collective biography of Jennie and her two surviving sisters, Fortune’s Daughters (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), and more recently, Anne Sebba gave Lady Randolph a fresh look in American Jennie (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). Both Kehoe and Sebba benefited from access to the Tarka King Papers, a family archive of documents held by Jennie’s great-great-nephew, including her letters to her sisters. Those documents were also referenced by Anita Leslie, Leonie Jerome Leslie’s granddaughter, for her book Lady Randolph Churchill: The Story of Jennie Jerome (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969) and by Peregrine Churchill, Jennie’s grandson, for his biography, Jennie: A Portrait with Letters, co-written with Julian Mitchell (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974). I have cited these secondary sources for my selections from letters Jennie wrote to Leonie concerning Charles Kinsky’s engagement in 1894.

  Winston Churchill has too many biographers to list, but the fundamental place to start on his life—if not with his own voluminous autobiographical accounts—is William Manchester’s The Last Lion, particularly Volume I: Visions of Glory, 1874–1932 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983). Roy Jenkins’s Churchill (London: Macmillan, 2001) is also indispensable. But I drew as much pleasure from the slim little volume titled Painting as a Pastime (London: Unicorn Press, 2013), in which Winston relates the joy he found in confronting a blank canvas. His mother would have understood. Candice Millard’s Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (New York: Doubleday, 2016) is a marvelous portrait of Winston-the-Late-Victorian, unleashed on an unwitting empire and living to tell the tale.

  Jane Ridley’s The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince (New York: Random House, 2013) gives us Bertie and Alix in the round; The Autobiography of Margot Asquith delivers Miss Tennant’s first meeting with Jennie in No. 2 Connaught Place (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963); and Daphne Fielding’s The Duchess of Jermyn Street (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964) describes the life of Jennie Churchill’s famous cook, Rosa Lewis. Background on Minnie Stevens Paget and Consuelo Yznaga can be found in The Transatlantic Marriage Bureau, by Julie Ferry (London: Aurum Press, 2017). Minnie is invariably referred to as “Lady Arthur Paget,” a courtesy title she received after her husband’s knighthood in 1906, but during the period addressed in this novel she was simply “Mrs.” Marian Fowler’s Blenheim: Biography of a Palace, details the history of the Marlborough ducal seat through generations (London: Viking Press, 1989).

  Greg King’s A Season of Splendor: The Court of Mrs. Astor in Gilded Age New York (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009) is a scintillating portrait of that world. Eric Homberger’s Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) traces the rise of celebrity among the wealthy in the post–Civil War world. Amanda Mackenzie Stuart’s Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt offers some detail about the childhood Jennie and her dancing-class partners shared (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). The Preservation Society of Newport County is a gold mine of information about the Gilded Age; the seaside “cottages” its members so lovingly preserve, including Chepstow, built by Edmund Schermerhorn, should be visited by anyone with an interest in this heady epoch in American life. The house the Jeromes inhabited during the summers before their departure for France in 1867, however, is impossible to identify.

  One of the best portraits of this period in British history and its principal actors remains Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower (London: Macmillan, 1966).

  In recent years, some have questioned the nature of Lord Randolph’s decades-long infection and diagnosis of syphilis, which by varying accounts he contracted and treated when he was an undergraduate at Merton College or later. The alternative, posthumous, and purely speculative diagnosis of brain cancer is offered. I suspect this is a quelling impulse, from those who find it repugnant and unthinkable that Winston Churchill’s father should have suffered what they regard as a shameful disease. Syphilis was, however, one of the most virulent and commonplace afflictions known to man before the discovery of antibiotics. Being the son of a duke and the father of a prime minister was inadequate protection against its effe
cts. I am content to note that Randolph’s doctors told him he had syphilis; that they told his wife he had syphilis; that they eventually revealed to his son Winston that his father had syphilis; and that Randolph was treated with mercury for the disease. In his final year, his doctors regarded him as suffering from General Paralysis of the Insane—the final stage of advanced syphilis. These judgments and decisions determined the nature of his care and his death; they certainly determined the fierce family secrecy regarding his illness during his lifetime. For those interested in the subject, I would suggest The Cruel Madness of Love: Sex, Syphilis and Psychiatry in Scotland, 1880–1930, by Gayle Davis (Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine, Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2008), which details the medical assessment and treatment of those institutionalized for the disease.

  These are some of the works I found most useful in attempting to understand the Jeromes and the Churchills, the Gilded Age and the Edwardians, the Marlborough House Set and the Irish Question. I invite readers to suggest cherished sources and comment of their own on my Facebook page.

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  —

  No one has offered more support, inspiration, or encouragement during the nearly four years I spent on this novel than Kate Miciak, Vice President and Editorial Director of Ballantine Bantam Dell. At various points when most editors would either have passed on the book or accepted a manuscript that was just good enough, Kate urged me to dig deeper to find the heart of Jennie’s story. It is the greatest privilege I know to work with her; she challenges me to improve my craft every time I sit down to write.