Death at Blenheim Palace (6 page)

To be fair, Consuelo could understand why her husband was infatuated with the girl, whose slender, boyish figure and enchantingly mercurial temperament gave her the air of a provocative young god. She herself had loved Gladys from the moment they met, although not, she supposed with her usual caustically self-deprecating humor, in quite the same way as did Marlborough.

Or Lord Northcote, for that matter—Botsy, everyone called him, who had turned up at Blenheim the previous week, in pursuit of Gladys. Botsy was simply mad for the girl, and had even told Consuelo that they were engaged. At first, Consuelo had welcomed the news with relief, thinking that Gladys’s marriage would put Marlborough off the chase. But when she had asked Gladys about it, the girl had only smiled her lovely, mysterious smile and refused to say whether it was true. Unfortunately, Botsy only seemed to add to the general tension, and Consuelo found herself wishing that the fellow—he was really rather silly, she thought, and not much of a match for Gladys—would go away again.

Consuelo picked up her engraved silver mirror, turned to inspect the arrangement of her hair at the back of her neck, and smiled at the girl. “I’m glad the Duke has amused you, my dear.” The gong sounded again, signalling teatime, echoing like a hollow, damning voice through the empty corridors of the immense house. She put down the mirror with a sigh. “Shall we go down to tea?”

As if they had any choice, she thought with dull resignation, following Gladys out of the room. For when the Blenheim gong sounded, everyone obeyed, like it or not.

CHAPTER SIX

 
Winston Churchill to his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough 1898

 
 
 
 
Hearing the distant dressing gong, Winston put down his pen, took out his pocket watch, and glanced at it. Tea in half an hour—he had just time to change.

He leaned back in his chair and surveyed the pleasant room in which he was working, just off the arcade beneath the Long Library. The shelves contained his research material—books and documents he had carried down from the Muniments Room—as well as eight plaster busts, of no particular artistic merit, of the eight previous dukes of Marlborough. The table contained the stack of manuscript pages he had written so far in his
Life of Lord Randolph Churchill
.

The work was good, indubitably so, he thought with a comfortable pleasure. When it appeared in print, it would finally silence his father’s critics (of which there were still a surprising number, given that Lord Randolph had been dead for eight years). And it would please the Duke, his father’s nephew, which was not a trivial outcome. While Winston was confident that he had the grit and the muscle to fight his own fight, having the Duke of Marlborough in his corner was an asset that not many junior members of the House of Commons could claim.

As if summoned by Winston’s imagination, the door opened without a tap or an announcement, and His Grace slipped inside, moving with his customary stealth. Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill had been called Sunny as a child, not for his disposition but for his title as Earl of Sunderland. The undersized child had grown into a small man, with dark hair parted at one side and smoothed back from his forehead, a melancholy aristocratic face, a petulant mouth under a thin, turned-down moustache, and the prominent eyes of the Churchills—“bullfrog eyes,” Winston’s mother Jennie had called them. The Duke’s narrow shoulders seemed bowed under the burden of Blenheim’s past and future, which he had assumed when his father died a decade before.

It was a weighty burden, Winston knew, for the seven-acre house and twenty-five hundred-acre parkland easily swallowed a hundred thousand pounds a year in mere upkeep, never mind improvements (like bathrooms) or major repairs (like the roof). Winston himself was a romantic at heart and would never think of marrying for money, but he understood the dilemma his cousin had faced—that
he
would have faced, if things had gone a different way and Winston Spencer-Churchill had become the ninth Duke. Sunny was obligated to maintain Blenheim, and he’d had no choice but to go in search of a dollar duchess: an American heiress with her own money.

And Consuelo Vanderbilt had come with a magnificent purse: $2,500,000 in railroad stock and $100,000 in annual dividends for both Consuelo and the Duke, although of course everything came to the Duke. The annual payments had been enough to repair the roof, gild and refurbish the drab rooms of state, and replace the books, tapestries, and paintings auctioned off by Sunny’s father and grandfather. Winston, whose strong family pride had been wounded by Blenheim’s seedy appearance, could only applaud the uses to which the Duke had put the Duchess’s money.

“Ah, Winston,” Sunny said, in his almost inaudible drawl. “Hard at the writing still, are you?”

“Just stopping for tea,” Winston said. He paused, then added, in a guardedly neutral tone, “I trust that you enjoyed your walk with Miss Deacon?”

Winston disapproved strongly of his cousin’s relationship with the young American woman. Gladys Deacon might have the gamine winsomeness of an innocently mischievous child, but in Winston’s opinion, she was dangerous. She was duplicitous, deliberately provocative, and entirely out for Gladys. And what was worse, in Winston’s opinion, both Sunny and Consuelo seemed blind to her true nature—a fact which made Gladys even more dangerous.

Even so, Winston was ambivalent, for he could not deny that Gladys was dazzling—even more attractive than Pamela Plowden, whom he had hoped to marry someday. But his political ambitions had quite naturally occupied all his time and attention for the past several years, and the impatient Pamela had given up and flounced off to marry Bulwer-Lytton. And of course, no rational man who aimed at higher office (Winston himself had some exceedingly high aspirations) could afford to be involved with someone like Gladys. She was lovely, yes, indeed, but she was unwise and undisciplined and could never be trusted to avoid the pitfalls that frequently opened at the feet of political wives.

So it was with some smugness that Winston congratulated himself on having the wisdom and foresight not to fall in love with Miss Deacon. He also congratulated himself on being able to see through her, which was more than the Duke could do, or Botsy. Botsy—Lord Henry Northcote—was making a monkey of himself over the girl. Winston had even heard that Botsy had asked her some weeks ago to marry him, when they were both guests at a houseparty weekend. Of course, one couldn’t trust rumor, but it was also said that he’d given her a valuable diamond necklace that had belonged to his paternal grandmother. Winston doubted if the Duke knew this, and he did not mean to be the one to tell him.

Sunny shifted uncomfortably, but when he replied to Winston’s question, his voice as carefully neutral as his cousin’s. “Yes, thank you. Gladys and I had a most pleasant walk. The gardens are coming along nicely. Still a great deal of work to be done, of course.” His tone warmed. “I’ve commissioned Waldo Story to do a Venus fountain, which is to stand in the exact center of the Italian Garden. Miss Deacon has generously agreed to allow the sculptor to use her likeness.”

Winston regarded his cousin. Having refurbished the interior of the palace, the Duke had turned his attention to the vast Blenheim landscape. He lined the Great Avenue with elm trees, replaced the grass in the three-acre Great Court with stone pavings, and built a parapet, a stone wall, and iron gates along the north front to keep out the curious. Now he was working on the gardens outside the east wing, where he had laid out an intricate arabesque in dwarf box hedge, with orange trees in tubs and flowers in jars. Consuelo did not appreciate this fastidious formality, but it intimately revealed, Winston thought, the Duke’s turn of mind. The perfect palace was to be displayed within the perfect setting, and Marlborough, both the owner of this incredible jewel and its jeweler, could never stop polishing and perfecting it. And now this statue of Venus.

The idea of Gladys Deacon’s stone likeness planted in the center of the Duke’s garden brought Winston a deep disquiet. For Sunny, Blenheim was much more than a family obligation, it was an obsession—and, like his obsession with Gladys, dangerous, for in his passionate indulgence, he totally ignored his wife. Both Blenheim and Gladys, Winston very much feared, had the potential of destroying the Marlborough marriage.

And that would be a great pity. Consuelo had admirably performed the first duty of a duchess, having given the Duke not just one son, but two. She was a conscientious mother and a superb hostess as well, and Blenheim would not be the same without her. While Winston didn’t like to think of the matter in terms of money, one had to be realistic. If Consuelo left, she took with her nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year. The Duke did not seem to realize it, but losing his wife would be a terrible blow, both to the family pride and to the family purse.

Winston and his cousin had always enjoyed a cordial friendship, in part, perhaps, because they rarely spoke of personal feelings. Politics, the Royals, family history, the latest novels of Henry James, the plays of Ibsen and Stevens, Marconi’s triumphs, the reforms of the Webbs and the Fabians—the two men had a world of things to discuss, but personal relationships were never on the table. Gladys, however, was becoming too serious a threat to simply let the business slide. Winston felt he must say something.

He cleared his throat. “My dear Sunny,” he said awkwardly, “I wonder if we might have a confidential word—man to man, I mean.”

The Duke dropped his eyes and ducked his head as he always did when he felt uncomfortable. “About what?”

Winston moved a book a quarter of an inch to the right. “About Miss Deacon.”

There was a long silence. The phalanx of plaster dukes, like a Greek chorus, peered down, dumb and empty-eyed, at two very different descendents of John Churchill. Winston was a physical man, robustly, energetically self-assertive, while Sunny, pallid and polite, maintained an aloof disdain. Winston’s father had left him nothing but debts, and he had to depend on his pen and his wits to fill his pockets. Sunny’s father had left him an estate and a title; he had traded the title for his wife’s American fortune, and now his pockets were full. Winston lived a restless, hard-fought life in the world at large; nothing came easily to him, nothing seemed guaranteed, whether it was besting a political opponent or conquering a childhood stammer. Sunny, on the other hand, confined himself to Blenheim, where everything came easily to him, where everything was guaranteed—except happiness.

But while they might be very different, what bound these two Churchills together was their passionate love of Blenheim and their common determination to once again raise the Marlborough standard to its previous heights of respect and admiration. That was why Winston was smoothing over the rough places in his father’s life, and why the Duke was landscaping the palace. And that was why Sunny must be made to understand, Winston thought, that Gladys Deacon threatened all of them—not just Consuelo, or Sunny, but the entire family.

Sunny, however, was not to be confronted. He raised his hooded eyes and met Winston’s challenging look with the famous Marlborough blank stare.

“I believe I heard the gong for tea,” he said. “I think we had better change. We do not want to be late.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

 
King Henry IV, Part I
William Shakespeare

 
 
 
 
It was early Wednesday evening as Alfred hurried through the small gate beside the River Glyme where it flowed under the Park wall. In fact, the hour was so early that Bulls-eye might not yet have put in an appearance at the pub. But Alfred had no choice—it was now or not at all. And by this time, he was feeling desperate.

Alfred’s destination, the pub called the Black Prince, was located just across Manor Road, a much-traveled coach-road which ran from London to Oxford and Woodstock, then northward to Chipping Norton and Stratford-upon-Avon. Alfred darted across the road, busy with the usual clattering traffic of carts and drays, and pushed through the crowd of hooting children and barking dogs which was trailing a noisy motorcar. He paused at the door of the Prince, pulling down his cap to hide his powdered hair and allowing his eyes to grow accustomed to the dimness.

The Prince was certainly not one of Woodstock’s poshest pubs. The ceiling was low and smoke-stained, shoals of filthy sawdust drifted across the stone floor, and the company was rowdy and quarrelsome. But the place was dark as a pit, even in broad daylight, and the din of the crowd blanketed private conversation, which made it a right-enough place to meet somebody if you didn’t want to be noticed or overheard. Over the weeks he’d been in service at Blenheim, Alfred had spent a leisurely evening or two here, in the company of one or another of the other footmen.

But tonight Alfred was in a hurry. It was his half-day off, officially, but Manning had hurt his hand and Alfred was made to serve at tea. He would have to serve at dinner, too, which meant that he had to get this business done and get back before old Stevens missed him. The butler wasn’t hard on the footmen, but he was particular about seeing that everyone kept to the duty roster. With relief, he spotted Bulls-eye at his usual table in a far dark corner, hunched over a mug and a pitcher of ale. He pushed his way through the crowd toward him.

At the table, Bulls-eye lifted his head and regarded Alfred with a frown. “Wot’re ye doin’ ’ere?” he demanded, over a roar of laughter at the bar. If he was surprised, he didn’t betray it, only looked annoyed. “There’s a rule ’bout meetings, y’know. Less we’re seen together, the better fer all concerned.”