That Churchill Woman Page 9

  “Doesn’t she always?” Jennie smiled conspiratorially. “Minnie’s never learned to be happy.”

  “Happiness is expensive. And Minnie never spends a dime if she can borrow one.” Consuelo suppressed a burble of laughter. “But seriously, my darling—you ought to consider the costs of this affair. The Paget says Bertie is watching. I know she’s angry that Harry Cust admires you so—but she might actually be right this time.”

  “Connie! This is serious!” Jennie dropped a kiss on her friend’s cheek, both reassurance and dismissal. “Very well. I promise. In all matters of the heart, I shall take care to balance my books. You don’t imagine I wish to go bankrupt, do you?”

  But as she blew out her candle that night, Jennie felt a finger of uneasiness along her spine. She knew the gods punished too much happiness.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Back in London and still blessedly independent, Jennie tried to act on Countess Mandeville’s warning. She tried—for at least three days, before she gave up in despair and met Charles Kinsky for a trot through Hyde Park. She told him nothing of the danger she might be running—the public scandal and utter banishment visited upon her brother-in-law’s mistress. Jennie refused to believe such a shameful folly could happen to them. She was too blissful, too much under Kinsky’s delicious spell.

  May wore away in gusts of sudden rain. She met Charles at concerts and at dinners in the homes of friends and by arrangement in the British Museum, where they sat side by side on benches and surreptitiously held hands as they contemplated the pictures. Jennie had recently taken up painting, with Princess Alix and several of her friends—setting up easels together in the meadows of Sandringham and, on rainy days, in a studio at the Waleses’ London home, Marlborough House. Jennie had a makeshift painting room of her own in the north attic of No. 2 Connaught Place, where the light was best, and implored any stray visitor to sit for her.

  Charles, naturally, was one of them.

  She painted him in an Austrian hussar’s uniform, his expression more than usually disturbing as he stared at her while she worked. He held a plumed shako on his knee. Jennie yearned to throw away her brush and tear his military discipline to shreds. She summoned all her fortitude to concentrate.

  She painted him in disarray as well, the neck of his shirt open and the strong lines of his throat springing from the canvas. It was not uncommon for the work to be interrupted when Charles rose suddenly from his seat and pulled her down on the studio’s chaise longue.

  After one of these interludes, as they shared a glass of wine by the makeshift fire in the attic grate, a fur throw pulled over them both, Jennie fingered the gold signet ring on his little finger.

  “Your coat of arms—explain it to me.”

  Charles eased himself upright and settled her more comfortably on his chest. “The crown of the prince, and the flowing mantle. What is there to explain?”

  “Those three slashing marks. They’re painted white on your carriage crest. Are they supposed to be feathers?”

  “They’re teeth,” he said, with an odd note in his voice. “Of a wolf. And a warning to the world that Kinsky men guard their own.”

  She lifted her head and looked at him. His hand came up to her tumbled black hair.

  “There is a legend in my family from a very long time ago—the twelfth century, in fact.”

  “Tell me.”

  “A young man of our house—and in those times, he would have been little more than a vassal, a breeder of horses and a survivor of rampage—rode through the woods of Bohemia as dusk fell. No doubt he had been hunting—wild boar, perhaps, or a fallow deer. It was winter, because the legend tells how the snow lay white on the ground beneath the trees and cast enough glow for the man to see by, although night was falling.”

  “Yes?”

  “His horse knew the way home and ought to have gone tamely to its feed and its stable, but for the scream that pierced the twilight and stopped both man and beast in their tracks.”

  Jennie said nothing. Her ear rested on Charles’s chest and she could hear the measured thud of his heart, the susurration of blood surging through his body.

  “The scream came again. The man knew without question that it was human.

  “He wove through the leafless trees and came suddenly into a clearing filled with gray wolves, braced to spring, their lips drawn back and snarling. Their prey was a young girl with eyes of blue and a gold braid down her back.”

  Without meaning to, Jennie flinched. He had her firmly in the grip of the tale, his voice low and dreamlike. It was as though they were both tucked up in the nursery—or encamped in the snow on high steppes, with only the talisman of fire between them and barbarity.

  “The man urged his horse forward, and because it was an Equus Kinsky and bred to face without fear any sort of menace in the forests of Bohemia, it carried him into the heart of the pack. The man drew a knife—he was not a knight and so had no sword, but every hunter carries a knife—and slashed at the nearest animal’s throat, leaving it dead. A few of the others backed away, daunted. But the greatest of the wolves leapt onto the horse’s back and lunged for the man’s bare neck. They fell to the ground, rolling together, the wolf tearing at the man’s arms and chest. Blood poured from the wounds and inflamed the wolf further, but the man—my ancestor—rolled uppermost and, in a scant second, plunged his knife into the beast’s heart.”

  “And the girl?”

  “The rest of the pack fled, howling, as the injured man staggered to his feet and whistled for his horse. The noble creature came at once, limping where one of the wolves had savaged its hock. The man skinned the wolf and draped its pelt over the horse’s flanks, so that no Equus Kinsky would ever again fear a predator. Then he lifted the maiden into the saddle and led her home.”

  “She married him, of course.”

  “What else? She was a princess, the daughter of the King of Bohemia, and the House of Kinsky was ennobled from that day forward. I told you it was an old family story. But we keep three wolf’s teeth mounted in gold, in a glass case, in the library of our palace in Vienna.”

  “I should like to see them,” Jennie whispered.

  “You will, my darling.” Warm as velvet, his lips caressed her collarbone. “Someday.”

  * * *

  —

  Randolph returned to London and the House of Commons. If he noticed Jennie’s preoccupation with her new riding partner, he said nothing.

  On the fourth of June, Randolph’s sister Lady Georgiana Churchill married Richard Curzon, George Curzon’s cousin, who would one day be an earl. Georgie was twenty-three and it was high time she went off from Blenheim, but Duchess Fanny felt she had given all the honor in marriage and earned none of it. The Duke had been forced to sell the Blenheim Enamels, some eighty pieces of antique Limoges, to meet Georgie’s dowry.

  Now only eighteen-year-old Sarah was left at home. Sarah was restless and had notions of independence that troubled the Duchess. She had taken to wearing bloomers and riding a bicycle instead of a horse. She was to make her debut later that month with a ball at the house in Berkeley Square the Duke of Marlborough had rented for the Season. Marlborough House, built by the original Sarah Churchill as her London residence in the time of Queen Anne, had reverted to the Crown six decades earlier, a matter of intense regret and mortification to Duchess Fanny. The breathless Marlborough honors had never been equaled by their fortunes. The Prince and Princess of Wales lived in Marlborough House now.

  Jennie wore a new gown of pale blue silk embroidered with silver hydrangea flowers to the wedding at St. George’s, Hanover Square. The jacket bodice had the stiflingly tight collar and sleeves to the wrist that Princess Alix had made fashionable, almost nunlike in its plainness. Her hat was a shallow straw with a masculine brim that Randolph jeered looked like a coal scuttle, but for the broad band of dark blue grosgrain d
ressed with massed hydrangea blooms.

  Georgie floated down the aisle, a plain girl transformed by the prospect of escape into the adult world. Her color was high and contrasted unbecomingly with the ivory satin of her wedding dress. She carried a trailing spray of white lilies from the hothouses at Blenheim. Her bridegroom, a pleasant-looking fellow with a mustache to rival Randolph’s, was a year younger than Georgie and had known her all his life.

  On the seventh of June, Jennie wore the same blue gown to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. There she watched the canny veteran jockey George Fordham win the Gold Cup on the powerful chestnut stallion Tristan. The horse was known to be bad-tempered and tolerated only Fordham on his back; he took the lead a full mile from the finish and won by three lengths.

  “Did you bet to win?” asked a voice at Jennie’s shoulder.

  She turned to find Charles Kinsky, impeccable in top hat and morning dress. A walking stick was tucked under his left arm; his house’s curious coat of arms was emblazoned on the knob. Jennie quelled the urge to run her fingers over the wolf’s teeth. And Charles’s gloved hand…

  “Do I look like the betting kind?” she demanded, tilting the brim of her coal-scuttle hat to meet his gaze.

  “All Americans are gamblers. Or so I’m told.”

  “Very well, then—Randolph placed a pound on Tristan for me. The lovely animal has come in handily. How shall we celebrate, Charles?”

  His eyes drifted beyond her; he inclined his head and raised his topper. Jennie glanced around; a young lady, golden-haired and blue-eyed, like the girl from the Kinsky legend. She could not be more than nineteen, Jennie decided—the age she had been when she met Randolph….

  “My lord,” Charles said, and bowed to her husband.

  “Kinsky! Where did you spring from?” Randolph returned his salute and handed a slim roll of banknotes to Jennie. “Here you are, darling—your winnings. Don’t be in a hurry to squander them.”

  “Nonsense. There’s nothing else to be done with the wages of sin,” she retorted cheerfully. “Are you in luck, too, Count Kinsky?”

  “Always,” he said equably. He did not glance at the blonde again. “As a result, I’ve decided to throw a party. Dinner and dancing for a few select friends—at the New Café, Covent Garden, Friday week. May I hope to have the pleasure of your company, Lord and Lady Randolph, in a toast to great horses that run their hearts out?”

  Randolph pled a previous engagement—a debate in Commons he could not avoid—but Jennie accepted with a teasing curtsey, her right hand on her breast. Through the silk of her nunlike gown, she felt her heart accelerate. A night of dancing with Charles. Could anything be more joyous?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “My lady,” Mrs. Everest said.

  Jennie caught the nanny’s reflection in her dressing-table mirror. It was half obscured by the more immediate image of Gentry, who was wrestling with a wreath of silk evening flowers, cream and gold, that must be woven into Jennie’s curls. They were intended to pair with the cloth-of-gold gown, slashed with cream silk, that she would wear to India House that evening, but at the moment Jennie was dressed only in a lace wrapper and silk stockings bound at her thighs with garters.

  “What is it?” she asked coolly, although her heart surged a little with worry; it was unlike the nanny to seek her out at this hour.

  Everest hesitated in the bedchamber doorway. She was a small, round, middle-aged woman who dressed habitually in fine black wool, with plump, comfortable hands that reminded Jennie of currant buns. Her face under her white cap was rounded, too, the cheeks usually apple red and her mouth smiling. But tonight, Everest’s expression was pinched.

  “Do come into the room,” Jennie urged.

  The nanny approached.

  Gentry, who was wielding an iron curling tong that had to be heated continually in a gas flame (but not so heated that it singed and burned Jennie’s hair), ignored Everest; she was disciplined in her precarious craft.

  “Ma’am, it’s Master Winston. He arrived home from St. George’s today, as I’m sure you’ll know, for his Long Vac.”

  “Yes,” Jennie agreed. More than five hundred years old, St. George’s was the school at Windsor that prepared boys for Eton. Randolph had also gone there, and his father before him. Win had been a boarder ever since they’d returned from Ireland, when he was six. “I remember something about it. But I’m afraid I was from home all the afternoon. Has Win settled?”

  “He has. Proper grateful he is to be back in the nursery, with Master Jack and his soldiers.”

  “Very well.” Jennie met the nanny’s eyes in her mirror. How tiresome that the woman would not simply come out and say what she wanted! “Is something amiss?”

  “I don’t know as how I can say. It’s properly not my place to comment. But I’m troubled in my mind, madam, and I should like you to see him. For yourself. Before the marks fade.”

  “Marks?” Jennie repeated, bewildered.

  “Aye. Wounds, I might almost call them, but for that they’re a few days old and not so raw as they might be. I discovered them when I bathed him this evening.”

  “Wounds? Where? Did he scrape his knees?”

  “His back, madam. Though I cannot believe Master Winston came by them through any clumsiness of his own.”

  “Does he require a doctor?” Everest was notoriously fond of Winston—indeed, Randolph complained she coddled the boy, one reason he’d been sent away to school at the age of six. No doubt this was another instance of her excessive sensitivity.

  “I’ve dressed the weals with salve, my lady. But I reckon it’s a mother Master Win could use right now.”

  Jennie felt a spurt of anger. She was already late and Randolph would be furious when she failed to appear as expected at India House. She was about to rebuke the nanny when she glimpsed, in the mirror, Everest’s hands. They were locked together so tightly the normally ruddy skin had blanched white about the knuckles. Jennie drew a deep breath and rose from her chair. Gentry and the curling tong jumped backward. Jennie wrapped her lace robe more closely around her. “Very well. But I have only a moment.”

  Everest wheeled and, without another word, led Jennie along the second-floor passage to the nursery stairs. At the top, Jennie found herself in the apartment that was her children’s entire world at Connaught Place: a wide sitting room under sloping eaves, with a view of slate tiles and rain-washed square below. A table with children’s chairs where the boys took their supper, and a rocker where Everest did her mending while they read or played. There were shelves of books and bins of toy soldiers; an army of these had been arrayed on the floor in mock battle—Winston had lost no time in deploying his forces. Jack’s hobbyhorse sat near the fireplace, cold now in summer. A night-light burned on a dresser. Two doorways led off this cozy area, one to the bath, and the other to the bedchamber where Winston and Jack shared twin cots. Everest’s room connected to it.

  The nanny picked up the night-light and crossed to the bedchamber door, opening it gently.

  “Woom!” Winston cried. It was the name he had given Everest as a baby. He reared up from his pillow; Jennie saw his small head silhouetted against the white linen. “Why have you come back again?”

  “I’ve brought your dear mother,” she said, “to kiss you good night before her grand party.”

  “Mummie!” Jack shrieked, and both boys tumbled out of their beds and hurled themselves at Jennie’s legs. She was engulfed in a tangle of arms, with a pair of damp heads fresh from the bath and smelling delightfully of talcum. She grasped each boy’s back and patted them fondly. “Careful. Gentry will be frightfully cross with both of you if there’s a single curl displaced. I’ll only remain if you get back into bed at once.”

  Instantly, both boys shot like cannonballs beneath the covers.

  “Sit here, Mummie,” Jack invited, his three-year-old fac
e imploring under his dark hair.

  “She must sit here,” Win retorted decisively, “as I’ve only just come home, and it’s on account of my triumphant return that she’s consented to visit the nursery at all.”

  “I wish I could go away,” Jack said fretfully, “so that I might have a triumphant return.”

  “You should hate school,” Win informed him. “It’s wretched and beastly and not worth even a chance visit from Mummie.”

  Jennie sank down on his thin mattress. “Everest tells me you’re wounded, Win.”

  His freckled snub nose wrinkled in distress. “Not properly,” he assured her. “Not like a Hero of the Empire. Just rather as a matter of course.”

  Jennie placed her cool fingers on his cheek. His blue eyes met hers. “What do you mean, darling?”

  His gaze shifted to his nanny’s face. “Ought I to show Mummie, Woom?”

  “Yes, Master Winston.”

  Obediently, he turned his back on Jennie and lifted the tail of his nightshirt. An expanse of bare buttock emerged, impossibly fair-skinned, and then the frailty of an eight-year-old back. Win’s ribs were visible as a kitten’s and his shoulder blades were sharp angel wings. Jennie was so accustomed to seeing him dressed sturdily in his school uniform that she had forgotten how vulnerable he was.

  She gasped, and raised her hand to her mouth.

  From Winston’s neck to his waist was a brutal scrawl of sharp red lines, cut into his flesh, layer upon layer. He had been whipped ferociously, Jennie saw—whipped not once, but scores of times. The cuts crisscrossed his shoulders and ribs and reached ugly fingers down to his buttocks. Most were old scars. Many were fresh, and red, and raw.

  Trembling, she reached a tentative finger, stopping just short of touching him. Everest’s salve gleamed in the light of the oil lamp. Jennie did not want to cause the boy further pain.

  “Dear God. Who has done this to you?” she whispered.