That Churchill Woman Read online

  “Does she?”

  “Of course. Lord Randolph doesn’t even attempt to control her. Some people say it’s because he lives on her money—Leonard gave Jennie a good deal, although he lost his fortune in a crash about the time she and Randy married. That must have been awkward for her; it was understood that Marlborough bartered his son for her bank account. Leonard righted his ship eventually; he always swings with the market. That’s what American speculators do. But the Duke of Marlborough calls him a pirate.”

  “Preferable to a thief,” Charles said dryly. “When did you leave New York, Mrs. Ronalds?”

  “When Clara Jerome left Leonard.” Fanny’s mouth curved in a sudden smile. “You might have heard he left her for me. But that isn’t true. Leonard has his amusements, but Clara remains his wife. When the ship sailed for France, we girls sailed together. We lived in each other’s pockets in Paris, as we used to do in Newport; and after the Prussians and the Communards destroyed the city, we ended up here.”

  “And Lady Randolph married.”

  “Eventually. Poor Jennie was engaged to Randy for months. At first, the Duke refused his consent—because of Leonard’s being a pirate. And then, without warning, the wedding was hurriedly staged at the British embassy chapel in Paris. I was there.” She paused. “Winston was born less than eight months later.”

  She let the implication hang in the air between them.

  A marriage at sword point, Charles thought. By whose design?

  “It wasn’t the worst bargain she could have struck,” Fanny offered, as though she had read his thoughts. “Randy got a handsome settlement—fifty thousand pounds in trust—which as a younger son he sorely needed. I believe they live on the income to this day. Jennie got a courtesy title and a foothold in British Society. The child got a name. Thankfully, there’s no mistaking his parentage—Winston’s as ugly as every Churchill ever born.”

  “Have they been happy?”

  Fanny smiled faintly before replying and lifted a finger to Charles’s lips. “What a question, poppet! How many happy people have you met in this world? The Churchills have been a success. Isn’t that far more important?”

  “No.”

  Fanny sighed. “A romantic! Not everyone achieves personal perfection, Count. Some of us compromise. I don’t love Randy, but he’s certainly a political sensation. And he may well be Prime Minister one day. Jennie’s smart as a whip and as seductive as her father; all of political London flocks to her parties. I applaud her for one thing—she’s made herself fashionable again, after the horror of the Aylesford affair. In London Society, that’s not easy to do.”

  Arthur Sullivan had taken over the piano. Strains of his latest production—Iolanthe, which had opened the new Savoy—filtered through the drawing room. Heads were turning in Fanny’s direction.

  She rose. “Arthur will want me to sing. I must fly, darling.”

  Charles kissed her hand.

  Fanny launched into “The Lost Chord,” Sullivan’s tribute to his dead brother, her voice swelling as she glided across the elegant drawing room. It was her signature piece and her voice was beguiling, but Charles did not stay to listen. He slipped from the house and walked in the direction of his club. He wanted to know more about Randolph Churchill.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  On Monday, Jennie’s carriage took her to Westminster. The hour was well after tea and dusk was falling. Nothing of note ever got done in the House of Commons until late afternoon, and debate was always broken by the dinner hour at the men’s clubs in Pall Mall. After the wine had been drunk and the beef consumed, MPs returned to argue long into the night. Jennie rarely saw Randolph in his own home during the session, but they met as a couple at evening engagements.

  She was deposited at the St. Stephen’s entrance and hurried through the long passage to the Central Lobby. There she mounted the public stairs that led to the private viewing galleries suspended above the Commons floor. The Ladies’ Gallery and the Speaker’s Gallery—reserved for the wife of the Speaker—were usually filled with women addicted to politics. The Ladies’ Gallery assigned its seats by lottery, but seats in the Speaker’s Gallery were secured only at the invitation of the Speaker’s wife. Jennie was on the list this afternoon.

  The Speaker’s Gallery was rather small and dark, set behind a carved Gothic screen fitted from top to bottom with a wire grille. As many as fifty ladies could be crammed into its chairs on important occasions, but it was far more bearable when only twenty were present. Jennie always referred to the gallery as the Speaker’s Harem, because its segregated atmosphere was as profound and inarguable as an Ottoman palace. Women must not be visible to the Members below, and they must only talk in whispers, as though at church.

  A clerk admitted her through a baize-lined oak door. Jennie paused as it closed behind her. The first row of chairs was separated from the second by a slim horizontal brass rod placed at neck height. The second and third ranks of chairs were elevated behind the first, stadium-fashion. The lucky few who bagged the first row of seats, their knees pressed painfully against the grille, could search out their distinguished husbands, sons, and friends below through delicate opera glasses. The rest usually gave up and listened blindly to debate, or wandered forlornly into the anteroom, where they wrote letters on House of Commons stationery and drank excellent tea sent up from the Members’ Dining Room.

  Today the gallery was pleasantly thin. Mrs. Gladstone, the Prime Minister’s elderly wife, was in her habitual seat. She was sacred to the other political wives and always accorded the best spot, despite the fact that she was notoriously untidy and left a scattering of handkerchiefs, hairpins, and biscuit crumbs in a tidal wrack around the hem of her skirt. If she was absent from the gallery, no lady would dream of sitting in her place. Mrs. George Cavendish-Bentinck, who was several decades younger than Mrs. Gladstone and far more passionate about politics, was nestled in the far corner. There, if she leaned well forward, she could see her husband. George Bentinck, like Randolph, was a Conservative Member of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

  The Speaker’s wife, Mrs. Henry Brand, was nowhere to be seen. Jennie felt a spurt of relief; Eliza Brand was a chilly woman in her sixties who despised what she called “foreign marriages” to American girls. She usually greeted Jennie with a brief nod and an acid glance at her carriage gown, followed by a disapproving snort. Eliza’s mother had been illegitimate—the love child of the notorious Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Earl Grey—so of course, she used snobbery as a sword. Jennie had learned long ago that socially vulnerable women were the most vicious.

  She tossed a smile at Prudie Bentinck in her corner, then settled into a seat in the center of the gallery’s first row. Her day dress of claret-colored wool and silk brocade had thick, stiff panels embroidered with gold threads; it lapped the seats on either side of her, thankfully empty. Jennie set her leather pocketbook by her feet and folded her hands, gloved in black kid. She leaned slightly forward to glimpse the floor of the chamber. A Liberal Member she recognized as James Stansfield—a pious Yorkshireman—was protesting vehemently below.

  “…draft report was submitted without marginal reference to the evidence, and was voted en bloc by Members who did not take the time necessary to read and understand the paragraphs…”

  Several men interrupted him with shouts of derision.

  “That may seem ridiculous,” Stansfield burst out, his face reddening, “but the Honorable Member must know that it is so.”

  “What exactly has Stansfield moved?” Jennie whispered.

  “That the House disapproves of the compulsory examination of women under the Contagious Diseases Act,” Prudie muttered back.

  Catherine Gladstone sighed and bowed her head as though in prayer. The Gladstones were fervently religious and spent inordinate hours reclaiming fallen women. The Prime Minister brought girls home at night for a sermon and a
cup of cocoa in his kitchen. Catherine gave them her outworn gowns. Jennie thought that was enough to drive any young girl back onto the streets.

  She peered about for Randolph and found him on his usual bench at the front of the Opposition, next to Arthur Balfour. The men lounging below her would argue about the form of the debate for a little while—that was the cut and thrust of politics they all loved—but she doubted whether they would uphold Stansfield’s resolution.

  The Contagious Diseases Act had been law for nearly twenty years. It allowed policemen in British port and garrison towns to arrest any woman on the suspicion of prostitution, and subject her to a doctor’s physical examination for disease. If she was found to be infected, the woman was forcibly quarantined, often in a poorhouse, for at least three months and treated until she was no longer contagious. The treatments were dubious—doses of mercury, arsenic, and sulfur that seemed to diminish symptoms for a time, but sickened the patient further. When women resisted treatment, they were simply arrested and subjected to hard prison labor. And as these women were often raising children alone, with no other means of support, families were devastated. Children were abandoned to the care of the parish and ended up in orphanages. Their mothers’ names were listed for the rest of their lives on prostitution registries.

  Men were not arrested or examined or confined against their will on the suspicion of venereal disease. Women alone bore the burden of what was called public hygiene, particularly in military centers where arrests were most common. Soldiers and sailors must have sexual relief; as heroes of the empire, they were spared the embarrassment of personal examination.

  This blatant unfairness had stirred social critics to action. Some of them were women Jennie knew. The Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act protested that police persecution amounted to a double victimization of women who had already been degraded by men.

  James Stansfield, the Liberal Member who had moved to condemn the arbitrary examinations, had a different objection to the act: by registering women and designating them as whores, he argued that the Government publicly condoned Sin. What was Stansfield saying now, from the Government benches? Jennie strained to make out his words. “The prostitution of women is the supply to the demand of the sensual appetites and vices of men…you offer a Government sanction to this sexual vice…you say by Act of Parliament…we will provide for you clean women to satisfy your lusts.”

  “Good Lord,” Jennie murmured. “The Honorable Member is a fire-breather.”

  “And sadly in the wrong,” Catherine Gladstone said, quite loudly. “Gladstone has no interest in satisfying lusts, I assure you.”

  There was a stirring from the benches below them; a few faces turned up toward the gallery. The Prime Minister alone was oblivious to his wife’s voice; he was quite deaf.

  Randolph, Jennie knew, wanted the Contagious Diseases Act repealed. He and a few others called it a damnable invasion of privacy when the law subjected anyone to an unwanted physical examination. But that was a pose for public consumption. What Randy really feared, Jennie guessed, was that Gladstone’s Government might one day turn its zeal for public hygiene on men.

  She had torn apart and reassembled his speech. It was far bolder now, if less obscene, than the one Alasdair Gordon had drafted. She had consulted the Ladies National Association’s open letter to the Daily Mail, which almost every thinking woman of social prominence had read and many, including Florence Nightingale, had signed. Jennie ignored the Ladies’ argument that men were responsible for the spread of venereal disease—Randolph would never utter such words aloud in Commons. Instead, she emphasized that the Government was brutalizing one-half of its population.

  Somebody was running tediously through a column of figures. Rates of infection in the military cantonments of Devonport and Portsmouth and Chatham. These were male infections, of course—statistics on the women were not kept. It was the saving of fighting men that counted.

  She waited impatiently for Randolph to rise. Instead, the Speaker recognized the Judge Advocate General, a Liberal whose job was to throttle the outraged Stansfield. Jennie caught the phrase “from the evidence of clergy, medical officers, and police…it was clear that the condition of the unfortunate women who were subjected to these restrictive and sanitary measures had been favorably influenced, and that a comparatively large proportion of them had been reclaimed….”

  “Reclaimed,” Prudie Bentinck breathed beside her. “Like parcels from the Left Luggage. Bloody ass.”

  Jennie peered down at her husband. He was lolling against the front bench with his legs crossed, both arms flung along the wooden back. The diamond cross on his right ring finger flashed in the gaslight. His chin rested on his chest; she could glimpse only the back of his head, the hair slickly controlled with pomade. In Commons, Randolph often looked like he was sound asleep. His neck was thin and narrow, almost too weak for the support of his skull. He had run fevers in January. But he was nonetheless an elegant figure as he rose now to address the House—lean and brilliant, like his words.

  Jennie felt a surge of pride. Randolph in public, with a captive audience, was like nothing else on earth.

  He can have anything he asks for, the late Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had told her years ago when she was a young bride, and soon he’ll make them take anything he’s willing to give them.

  “Neither the Honorable Member from Halifax nor the Judge Advocate General have cited the most obvious objection to compulsory examination under the Contagious Diseases Act,” Randolph began. “It violates all notion of habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence enshrined under the British Constitution. Is every woman to be presumed guilty, and shamed with a forced examination? In the name of military health and the gods of war, any outrage may be accepted! These are merely women, my fellow Members exclaim! And women ought not to be regarded as the equals of men under the law or Constitution. They have no right to vote. They are not fully Her Majesty’s subjects. Have they the right to habeas corpus, then, as the law regards it?

  “I would put it to the House that every feeling Member among us must insist that they do. There are those who believe that upon marriage, husband and wife become one, and the wife ceases to exist in any legal sense. But I would remind my fellow Members that last year this Government passed the Married Women’s Property Act, which accords women the right to claim earnings, inheritance, and the ownership of property as well as the financial obligations implied in the ownership of property. Women are therefore subjects in the eye of the law. They are not dogs, to be kenneled and leashed at the whim of their masters. Nor are they cows, to be penned and dosed for the greater good of the bull.”

  Jennie sat upright, holding her breath as she listened to her own words. Once, when she had spoken publicly to female members of the Conservative Party’s Primrose League, Arthur Balfour had remarked that her speeches were remarkably similar to Randolph’s. “My husband’s very sweet about my poor efforts,” Jennie fibbed. “He improves my drafts when he possibly can.”

  The three of them—Jennie, Randolph, and Balfour—had come up with the idea of the Primrose League one night in the drawing room at Connaught Place. It was a key part of Randy’s push for what he called “Tory Democracy,” extending the party’s appeal to common people—middle-class workers and even women—by giving them a voice in politics they’d never had. His enemies called him a rabble-rouser. His supporters called him a revolutionary. For a trifling donation, the League members got a silk primrose—the flower Disraeli had always worn in his buttonhole. They also got a personal stake in a local Conservative chapter and a voice in the formulation of its platform. Nothing like the Primrose League had ever been seen in Britain before. The Liberals were falling over themselves to discredit Tory Democracy—and Randolph Churchill.

  It was Jennie, who’d been reared in the machine politics of Tammany Hall New York, wh
o urged Balfour and Randolph to give women a role in the League, although women could not vote. “Women have opinions,” she insisted. “They argue and persuade. They do it in bed and at the dinner table. Women raise future Conservatives.”

  “What a gross insult to privacy it is,” Randolph cried now on the floor below her, “when the guardians of our streets are unleashed with whistle and truncheon upon the weaker sex—one-half of our Queen’s privileged subjects—the women who ought most to be protected by the Crown—to browbeat them into submission and a brutal examination of far too intimate and violating a nature. Her Majesty, with the keenest fellow feeling for her sex, has expressed her repugnance for the Contagious Diseases Act. Even the Honorable Member from Halifax would abhor a similar practice being visited upon his wife or sister, his daughter or mother—and yet he settles his conscience now with the notion that the victims of the act are never good women. A whore deserves no protection, he thinks, having forfeited it with her embrace of Sin. But who is the Honorable Member, I would ask, to judge the soul of a stranger? Is he God, that he may see into a veiled heart? So long as one good woman is unjustly violated—so long as the reputation and livelihood of one good woman are sacrificed—we cannot hold up our heads. Let us resolve not only to condemn forced examinations—let us resolve to return all notions of public hygiene from Mr. Gladstone’s kitchen, to the sanctity of the bedchamber, where they belong!”

  A chorus of hear-hears from the Conservative benches.

  The baize-lined door behind Jennie opened; she turned her head. The porter handed her a note. She broke the wax—the seal was one she did not recognize, a crown with a flowing mantle and three slashes like claws.

  Jennie.

  Join me in the anteroom.

  Kinsky

  CHAPTER NINE