That Churchill Woman Page 6

  “At the Club. Would you read this for me?” Abruptly, Randolph held out several sheets of paper. “Gordon’s made a hash of it as usual. You’re better at fixing things than I am.”

  “Of course. When do you require it?” It was vital to respond when Randolph needed her; working together gave purpose to their marriage.

  “I must go over the thing tomorrow night.”

  “My lord—”

  Color flooded Alasdair Gordon’s pale cheeks. He shot Jennie an agonized look.

  “What is it?” Randolph asked impatiently.

  “Are you quite certain you wish Lady Randolph to see the speech? The subject matter—that is…the tone of the debate being a trifle warm…”

  “Venereal disease, Jennie.” Randy’s chin rose and he held her gaze. “Shall you recoil in horror?”

  “Naturally not,” she assured him, smiling.

  He grinned back, her comrade of old. They had been tilting at windmills together for a decade, while Alasdair Gordon was still a schoolboy. Jennie took the speech from Randolph’s hands.

  She noted how pale he was. The flesh of his face had tightened over his bones. He had been ill for six months last year and they had retreated from everything to a rented house in Wimbledon until he was well. Then a restorative trip to visit Papa in New York and Newport, horse racing in Saratoga. But Randolph was still frail. He pushed himself far too hard. Her heart constricted in sympathy.

  “I’ll read it this evening,” she promised. “Good night, gentlemen.”

  Gordon bowed. “Lady Randolph.”

  Randolph turned away without a word and poured himself a glass of brandy. His forehead was clammy and glistened in the sharp electric light. Jennie quelled the impulse to ask how he felt—and pulled the library door gently closed.

  She would order some soup on a tray. She would take a hot bath while it was prepared. Then, she would stop into the nursery and kiss little Jack’s cheek. She saw the three-year-old boy most often when he was asleep—his fists furled close to his chest, eyelashes fluttering in his dreams. Jack was dark, like her. Winston, her elder son, was a redhead and favored the Churchill side.

  Everest, the boys’ nanny, slept in a room off the night nursery, but she was used to Jennie’s nocturnal visits. Sometimes they occurred at two o’clock in the morning. Sometimes the boys—although it was only Jack now that eight-year-old Winston was away at school—were brought to her in her dressing room while Gentry did her hair. It was one of the few times Everest knew that Jennie would be free to see her children.

  She mounted the stairs wearily and made for the large room at the back of the house with the pale blue silk curtains massed around the posts of her bed. Randolph’s was adjacent, with her dressing room in between. It was the usual arrangement, but for the difference Jennie had demanded when they bought the house: each of them had a private bath installed with hot and cold taps. This was commonplace in Newport and New York but extraordinary in England—even Blenheim Palace, the opulent marble barracks where Randolph grew up, made do with hip baths filled from canisters of boiling water that the servants carried up and down the service stairs.

  Gentry had been before her: the bedroom fire was lit, her silver brushes arranged, and her dressing gown laid out to warm. Jennie slipped her furs from her shoulders and reached for the feathered pin that secured her upswept hat, as large as a tea tray. Her head and neck ached from supporting it all those hours from Norfolk on the train. She rolled her skull in a circular motion, easing the muscles, free of the need to perform for anyone. Relief wrapped her as close as a blanket.

  Randolph’s speech fluttered to the floor. Poor Alasdair Gordon might flush at the thought of a woman reading about prostitutes and syphilis, but Gordon was a delicate flower and Jennie was not. She let the pages lie. Gentry would collect them and place them neatly on the soup tray she would set across Jennie’s knees as she sat in front of the fire. Gentry was as much a creature of habit as Jennie was. They had accommodated each other for years.

  Her husband would not disturb her again that night.

  That, too, was the habit of years.

  * * *

  —

  “How did you come to marry Lord Randolph?” Charles Kinsky had asked her that afternoon as they assembled on Sandringham’s back terrace for the final photograph. Recording his good times was Bertie’s favorite ritual. Queen Victoria, his mother, had a passion for photographs, too, but the Queen’s were always of family. Bertie preferred to be surrounded by friends—the Prince himself in the center of a glamorous group, staring straight at the camera while others looked away. Sometimes Princess Alix appeared in them, sometimes not. Like the Queen, she loved to record moments with her three daughters, all dressed alike, or her sister Minnie, the Czarevna, who visited only infrequently from St. Petersburg. Sometimes she and Minnie wore identical dresses in the photographs, like twins, although Alix was a few years older.

  “Why do you ask?” Jennie murmured as the photographer aligned her shoulder with Charles’s and spaced Hartington on the step below Louise Manchester. “Are you considering matrimony?”

  “I met your husband last week at White’s. I should never imagine the two of you in the same room, much less the same…”

  Bed, Jennie thought.

  “Family,” Charles concluded.

  His closeness was challenging. He maneuvered to stand beside her for the photograph, as though he wanted a souvenir of the previous night’s liaison. Jennie absorbed this like an attack—a calculated provocation. A wave of heat flooded over her that had nothing to do with the sunlight on the Prince’s terrace. The memory of Charles’s hips between her thighs. The taut skin of his shoulder blades beneath her palms. She felt her fingers tremble, and balked at her own desire. It betrayed the firmness of her mind. She had taken Kinsky deliberately in order to dismiss him.

  She said easily, “It surprises you that the Duke of Marlborough’s son should choose to marry an American of no rank?”

  “Not when the American is Jennie Jerome.”

  He had learned something about her past, then. Consuelo had been talking. What had she told him? That Leonard Jerome loved racehorses, too, and had launched his own track? That he was called the King of Wall Street, and had helped found the Metropolitan Opera? That he was once part owner of The New York Times?

  “All Americans are gamblers, you know,” she replied dismissively. “I was simply in luck when I met Randolph.”

  Luck. Was that what she chose to call it now? The hollowness of the word smote her.

  The photographer hurried back to his apparatus, set up on the lawn, and lifted a tarpaulin over his head. He raised his left hand, commanding the Prince’s Set to silence. They were forced to hold this position until his hand dropped. It always seemed to Jennie to take an age. But she would not be allowed to step into her carriage and make for the station until Bertie was satisfied. He was, after all, the Heir Apparent to the British Empire.

  “Did you love him?” Charles asked softly.

  She could feel him staring at her. When the photograph eventually appeared, he would be captured in profile, while she gazed deceitfully at the camera.

  “What makes you think I’ve ever stopped?”

  Saturday at Sandringham was neither the time nor place to share personal histories. Kinsky was behaving like a boy. Demanding attention, when she had no more to give. Asking her to declare her loyalties, as though a few hours of shared physical passion required some sort of pledge. Jennie had a train to catch.

  Did you love Randolph? she asked herself now, in the warm, safe haven of her Connaught Place bedroom.

  Ridiculously, she ought to have said. But was that true? Or had she merely been a silly, infatuated nineteen-year-old girl? Randolph had known her all of three days when he proposed. And then his father the Duke refused his consent to the marriage. Hi
s Grace absolutely declined to shackle his younger son to an American nobody of dubious fortune. Good God—if anything happened to Blandford, the Nobody could be the next Duchess of Marlborough! Marrying Jennie was utterly out of the question.

  Clara Jerome had whisked her daughters immediately back to Paris. Jennie, restless and furious, waited for Randolph to act during six long months. She flirted outrageously with legions of men quite ready to pursue her—across ballrooms, along bridle paths, and in the gaslit twilight of chamber concerts. Ivor Rules crossed the Channel in pursuit of her. Rode alongside Jennie’s hack in the Bois de Boulogne, and fed her champagne in a box at the Paris Opera. He made the mistake of trying to undress her by force in a private dining cabinet off the Boulevard Haussmann, where she cut his cheek with a broken wineglass and called furiously for a cab. That was the end of Ivor Rules.

  Jennie punished Randolph for his failed promises with detailed accounts of her insanely good times, dispatched by every post. From Blenheim, Randolph wrote back, aflame with jealousy, and argued viciously with his parents. Finally, he struck a deal with the Duke: he would campaign in the upcoming election. If he won a parliamentary seat, he won Jennie.

  Marlborough agreed.

  Woodstock voted for Randolph by a landslide that January of 1874.

  Ever since I met you, he wrote Jennie exultantly the day after the final vote tally, everything goes well with me—

  Too well.

  I am afraid of a Nemesis.

  Jennie feared nothing. She twirled alone before the mirror in her mother’s French salon, Randy’s letter clutched in her palm, giddy with happiness. She’d won the man who loved her for her mind as much as her body.

  “Don’t cry,” she told a stunned Clarita as she kissed her wet cheek. “Everything is going to be perfect now. Always.”

  * * *

  —

  The Duke’s solicitors discussed financial settlements with Leonard Jerome’s lawyers in New York. But Leonard proved difficult—he refused to turn over Jennie’s money to Randolph. My daughter has the rank of royalty in this country, he telegraphed the Duke from his favorite chair in the New York Yacht Club, and as such she is entitled to the management of her funds.

  The Duke was infuriated. He declined to negotiate further with the Wall Street pirate.

  “If Marlborough cannot be brought to reason,” Clara Jerome declared in February, as an icy rain lashed the tall windows and distorted her cherished view of the Arc de Triomphe, “we shall simply have to end this foolish engagement.” The Duke’s snub rankled Mamma; she had spent too many years being cut dead by Caroline Astor in New York to tolerate English condescension. “Why can’t you or Clarita find a nice French count? The French love us.”

  “A French count would want control of our money as much as the Duke does,” Jennie retorted impatiently. “Don’t you understand, Mamma, that it’s money that makes us marriageable in Europe? It’s only Papa who thinks a woman should be independent. I don’t care a fig for his vulgar funds!”

  “You will in time,” Mamma warned darkly. “Papa knows very well that money means freedom. To give it up to the English would be…un-American.”

  Randolph was in Paris just then on a visit to Jennie, the first he’d been able to pay since the election. But he could stay only two more days, before returning to London for the opening of Parliament.

  Jennie could not bear to see him go with no date set for her wedding. She was desperate for all the negotiation to end. For her fairy tale to begin. She would not be thwarted by the stupidity of mere parents.

  * * *

  —

  Now, nearly a decade later and alone in her bedroom on Connaught Place, Jennie tossed aside the speech she had ruthlessly rewritten for Randolph. She turned down her lamp and slipped under the coverlet. The embers of a coal fire glowed red and low on the hearth; spring rain pattered on the slates and gurgled in the lead gutters. The pale sunshine of her morning at Sandringham seemed as distant as last night’s erotic battle. Jennie sighed, without regret; she had curbed her attraction for Count Kinsky by indulging it immediately. Never mind that he was the most consuming man she’d touched in months. Or that his face lurked at the edge of her mind. It was probable, Jennie decided, that she would never see him again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Charles Kinsky called on Fanny Ronalds as soon as he was back in London.

  Fanny was notable because she dared to open her home to friends on the Sabbath, and because her friends bridged so many worlds. Actors and poets and Eugénie, the deposed Empress of France, met in her drawing rooms in Green Street. Fanny was an elitist—she absolutely refused to entertain prigs or bores—but she was no snob. Birth was far less important to her than genius. Charles suspected this was because she was American.

  He found her warming a clear liquid in a brandy glass over an oil lamp’s flame. Perhaps fifty people filled the double drawing rooms, like so much vivid paint thrown against the dark walls. Someone was playing the piano.

  “You must give me your opinion, Count,” Fanny demanded as she offered him the crystal balloon. “Is it vile or ambrosial?”

  “Insipid,” he returned. “What do you call it?”

  “Sake. A Japanese sort of wine. Mr. Sullivan is experimenting in the Oriental vein and I’m hoping to tempt the Muse.”

  Fanny was in her mid-forties, a beautiful woman who had dwindled to handsome. Once, her clothes had framed a flawless face and body; now, her body framed her clothes. She was known as the finest amateur singer in London. Much of the music during her Sunday evenings was provided by herself and her lover, who paid the rent for Green Street. His name was Arthur Sullivan and he composed comic operas with his partner, W. S. Gilbert, that were immensely popular in England. Fanny was still married to a man she’d left behind in New York. She went about as Mrs. Ronalds, but she had been Sullivan’s mistress for years. Before that, she’d been linked to the Prince of Wales.

  And before him, to Leonard Jerome.

  “I haven’t seen you in an age,” she scolded Charles, her fingers resting lightly on his arm. “Where have you been?”

  “Sandringham.”

  “Good Lord. Was Alix there? Or was it a stag party?”

  “The Princess was in residence. Along with a number of ladies who I presume are her friends. Some of them your compatriots.”

  “Let me guess.” Fanny’s lips pursed in amusement. “Minnie Paget. Viscountess Mandeville. Each eyeing the other like a mortal rival.”

  “With Lady Randolph in between.”

  “Jennie! Has Bertie waved a white flag, then, and declared the Churchills forgiven?” She grasped Charles’s wrist and drew him aside. “Come talk to me. You’ve caught my interest now and God knows when I’ll see you again. Everyone wants a piece of you, Count.” Fanny sank down on a sofa tucked into one of her alcoves. Charles perched beside her. Amid the general clamor of conversation, it was possible to pitch a voice low and be heard. “Was Randolph there?”

  “No,” he replied. “He sent his beautiful wife alone. She referred to herself as a hostage. Is she a sacrificial one?”

  “In Bertie’s bed, you mean? Not on your life.” Fanny’s face filled with amusement. “Jennie does exactly as she chooses. If she travels without Randolph, it’s because she prefers peace to his lordship’s company. I can’t blame her.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “He doesn’t like women,” she said bluntly. “I merely return the favor.”

  “I don’t know either of the Churchills.” Charles eased himself into the curve of her sofa. “Tell me about them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they intrigue me.”

  “They? Or Jennie?”

  “Did you know her in New York?”

  “From the time she was nine years old. We were like sisters. I was a few years older,
of course—”

  At least fifteen years older, Charles guessed. But he did not interrupt her.

  “I used to sing in charity concerts as a favor to my friends. Jennie’s father—Leonard Jerome—owned what you Austrians would call a town palace on Madison Square, nearly an entire city block fronting the avenue.” Fanny’s supple fingers toyed with a knotted string of beads that fell to her narrow waist; garnets, Charles guessed. Arthur Sullivan’s work must not run to rubies. “It was the most marvelous place! Had a three-story mahogany-paneled stables, a ballroom, of course, and a private opera house that seated six hundred. Leonard asked me to perform at one of his parties, years ago, in support of the Union troops. They fought for the Northern side in our Civil War, mind. I wouldn’t expect you to know.”

  Charles frowned; he knew very little about the American civil war. He’d been five years old when Jennie was nine.

  “Leonard was passionate about opera.” Fanny’s eyes glistened, her mind adrift in the past. “All the house lights were cut crystal—Waterford, imported from Ireland—and the theater seats upholstered in crimson silk velvet. That’s how Leonard was. He’d leave a Tiffany bracelet at every woman’s dinner place, as a memento of an evening.”

  “And Lady Randolph?”

  “Shares her papa’s love of music. The first time we met, little Jennie was playing the score of Traviata alone on the opera house Steinway. I was supposed to run through it that morning. She accompanied me.”

  Strange to think of Jennie as a child, bent intently over the keys with a tangle of jet-black curls down her back. Charles remembered her perfect seat on horseback, her ease among royals. Her careless lovemaking. Privilege as birthright.

  “She was raised as a princess.”

  “She was raised to be Leonard Jerome’s firstborn son,” Fanny corrected sharply. “She’s more like him than any man alive. Leonard taught her everything he knows. And he’s ordered her to live life entirely as she chooses.”