Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (23 page)

Billy daily traveled by motorbike between the hotel and the military camp. It had fallen to him to supervise and keep up the spirits of some two hundred men, not a few of whom seemed as disappointed as he at having been relegated to the status of reinforcements. He and his men were scheduled to receive their orders at some as yet unspecified date after the initial cross-Channel invasion had been undertaken. Kick, meanwhile, had a bike of her own so that she could get about in the market town while Billy was off during the day.

Their time together at the Swan proved to be an immensely happy one. “I am feeling better now than I have since I left America,” Kick reported to her family. “This is the first really good rest I have had for a year. Have put on some weight and am getting plenty of sleep. MARRIED LIFE AGREES WITH ME!” Billy, for his part, would later speak of his month with Kick as the most perfect of his life.

Still, these days of joy were lived against the vivid and unavoidable background of the long-anticipated invasion of Normandy. Some 156,000 Allied soldiers landed in Normandy on D-day, June 6, 1944. That first day alone saw about 10,000 Allied casualties, with more than 4,000 troops known to be dead. And that was only the start of the massive bloodletting.

As Kick and Billy savored Sunday picnics, laughed fondly over certain of their wedding pictures, and made postwar plans that included a trip to the U.S. so that he could meet all of the Kennedy and Fitzgerald relatives—a prospect he was far from certain that he looked forward to—Allied soldiers were trying to battle their way across the Normandy countryside, where they encountered fierce resistance from German forces.

The newlyweds were aware that these could well be their final days together, but when Captain the Marquess of Hartington received his orders at last on June 13, 1944, he attempted to treat their parting as no different, really, from the other forced separations that they had had to endure. “This love seems to cause nothing but goodbyes,” Billy wrote to her before he left for the military camp, where he would be confined until the eighteenth of June, when he embarked for France with the 5th Coldstream Battalion under the command of Lieutenant Colonel the Lord Stratheden. By these tender words Billy seemed to suggest that, as he and Kick had been reunited before, so they would be again.

Nine

Four weeks after Billy waded ashore in the rain from his landing craft on June 23, 1944, he could no longer pretend with Kick that their latest parting would surely be like all the others. Too much had happened in the violent and bloody month since he and Kick had said good-bye.

The 5th Coldstream Battalion had arrived in Normandy three days before General Sir Bernard Montgomery, the commander of Allied ground forces in Normandy, opened a major offensive, Operation Epsom, with the objective of taking the German-occupied city of Caen. The Guardsmen were assigned to hold defensive positions at St. Manvieu and Marcelet, to the west of Caen. Just before dawn on a rain-drenched July 2, Billy and other members of the No. 4 Company, of which he was second in command, went out to patrol a patch of scrubby countryside where the air was thick with the nauseating stench of dead cattle. The men had to withdraw when they came under heavy fire from the Germans, but so far they’d suffered only two minor casualties.

As the day wore on the rain persisted, but the frequent shelling that the English soldiers had already learned to anticipate as a daily fact of life seemed somehow less intense at the moment. At about two
P.M.
, however, the men had a sharp lesson in the randomness and unpredictability of war, when a splinter from an airburst shell struck the company commander, Mark Howard, in the neck.

Major Howard, aged twenty-six, died almost instantly. He was buried near the spot where he fell. A week after Billy arrived in Normandy he stepped in to replace his lifelong friend and former Trinity College, Cambridge University, classmate as company commander.

In retrospect, Debo would cite the news about her great friend Mark Howard as the beginning of the grievous period that she dubbed “the summer of death”—when, one after another, the young men of their group were killed. Good-looking, vital, and high-spirited, Mark Howard of Castle Howard had been a much-loved and much-admired member of the set. Like Billy, he had been intent on launching a political career after the war. He had been one of the fellows in military uniform who had cavorted at the famous London party the previous November, at which Kick and Fiona had attempted to recapture, if only for an evening, some of the frivolity and freedom from care they associated with the aristocratic cousinhood’s halcyon prewar world.

Word that Mark Howard had fallen and been immediately replaced by Billy Hartington caused shock waves among the members of their group who remained behind in England. Many years afterward, Billy’s sister Anne remembered thinking that had the shell splinter’s trajectory been but slightly different, it might have been her brother who died that day.

Indeed, the fact that death had come so close to Billy so soon after he arrived in France heightened anxieties at Compton Place, where Kick had elected to remain with his parents, for the time being at least. She had originally intended to return to the Hans Crescent Club in London in a volunteer capacity as soon as her husband embarked for France. But the Germans’ V-1 buzz bombs, or doodlebugs, each carrying a ton of explosives, which began to pummel London on the very day Billy received his orders, helped persuade her to alter her plans. Part of the psychological effect of the doodlebugs, which were launched from various sites on the French coast, was the eerie twelve-seconds-long interval between the abrupt shutting off of the engine and the deadly roar of the explosion. Kick, who had not been in London at the time of the Blitz, found the V-1s terrifying.

Soon, these precursors of the cruise missile were raining death and destruction on the English coast as well. Nonetheless, Kick still felt safer in Eastbourne, where her presence did double duty by offering comfort to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Before he left, Billy had written his mother to say that his marriage had brought him complete happiness. Kick’s presence among the older couple now served as a cherished reminder of their son’s joy in having won her at last. Besides, the tacit assumption, not only of Billy’s parents but also of the tribe in general, was that Kick might be in the early stages of pregnancy. So at this point it seemed wisest and best to keep her as close to the family as possible.

Meanwhile, the 5th Coldstream Battalion went on to participate in its first battle, Operation Goodwood, named like its predecessor Operation Epsom for a British racecourse. On the eve of the fight, the men jested that the battle was likely to be “a day at the races.” Soon, however, quite the opposite proved to be the case. Among a host of other problems, the British tanks that had been confidently expected to smash through the German defenses faltered when they came up against the formidable earthen walls laced with tree and brush roots that were a prominent feature of the terrain. Nor did the tanks of the Guards Armored Division maneuver easily in the soupy marshland that was to present yet another major obstacle in the course of the Normandy campaign.

Billy’s battalion was shelled in Démouville. British casualties were heavy, culminating on the last day of Operation Goodwood with the wounding of Lieutenant Colonel the Lord Stratheden. When this immensely popular and inspiring battalion commander, who had been personally responsible for raising and training the men, had to be temporarily replaced by Major Michael Adeane, morale plummeted. The 5th Coldstream presently withdrew to Giberville, near Caen. There, subjected to intermittent artillery fire and bombing, the British forces attempted to reorganize and regroup in anticipation of the next battle.

It was during this interlude that Billy, who had now been fighting in France for a month, wrote to confront Kick with the possibility that this time they might not be reunited after all. His letter to her from Giberville was one that she would at length have much occasion to reread and reflect upon. “I have been spending a lovely hour on the ground and thinking in a nice vague sleepy way about you & what a lot I’ve got to look forward to if I come through this all right,” Billy wrote on July 26, 1944. “I feel I may talk about it for the moment as I’m not in danger so I’ll just say that if anything should happen to me I shall be wanting you to try to isolate our life together, to face its finish, and to start a new one as soon as you feel you can. I hope that you will marry again, quite soon—someone good & nice.”

So there it was. He had said the unsayable.

In the year since Kick and Billy were reunited in 1943, there had been much of innocence and denial in their relations. For reasons of his own, he had prized her obdurate blindness to the ravages that the war had wrought. But now, having come so close to death in recent weeks, he at least had to prepare her for the possibility that, like Mark Howard and the rest, he could fall at any moment. As his brother Andrew—who was nearly killed in Italy the day after Billy wrote of death to Kick—later reflected, Billy knew by this time that survival was going to be “all about luck” and that luck was unpredictable. The chances were that, as an infantryman, he would eventually be hit. If he was lucky, he would merely be wounded. If he was unlucky, he would be killed.

Kick had already read Billy’s letter when, on August 8, 1944, she made her first public appearance in Derbyshire as Lady Hartington, the wife of the future Duke of Devonshire. As she later recalled, the fear that her young husband might die was to gnaw at her throughout the summer. Six months previously, she had had to be kept very much in the background in the course of the by-election. Today, by contrast, Kick, attired in her summer-weight Red Cross uniform, was front and center as she attended the Bakewell Fair in the company of Duchess Evie, also in the garb of the Red Cross, the Derbyshire branch of which Billy’s paternal grandmother was both founder and president. Debo attended the fair as well; but as the wife of the second son, she wore civilian dress, a simple cotton skirt and blouse, that emphatically distinguished her from the dowager and the marchioness.

Not that Debo minded that the spotlight was suddenly on her new sister-in-law; on the contrary, she was delighted, both for Kick and for herself. The previous June, Debo, who was still living at the Rookery near Chatsworth, had been called upon to stand in for her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Devonshire, speaking at various fairs and fetes in Derbyshire, an experience that, in correspondence with her sister Nancy, she had professed to loathe from the outset.

Nor, it seems, was she otherwise envious of Kick. Debo liked Kick personally very much, and does not appear to have coveted, even to the most minimal extent, what looked to be Kick’s future life as a duchess. At this point, Debo was exceedingly happy with Andrew and pleased with married life. By now, the couple had had two healthy children, Emma and Peregrine, the latter of whom had recently been christened. What had mattered to Debo at the time of Peregrine’s birth was not that he had been a son, but rather, given the fate of her firstborn, that the baby had survived. It was Kick who, as the heir’s wife, had to be concerned with producing a male offspring.

As contented as Debo had been with Andrew before he left for the front, she looked forward to even better things after the war. Given his refined literary tastes and his abilities, Andrew hoped to become a publisher in the manner of his uncle Harold Macmillan. Andrew also intended to have a political career. But first, of course, he had to come back safely from Italy, where he had been fighting for almost nine months. Mark Howard had been Debo’s closest male friend, and the news of his death in the Normandy campaign had exacerbated her fears about Andrew.

So both young Cavendish sisters-in-law had reason to be desperately worried about their husbands, a circumstance that Duchess Evie had striven unsuccessfully to avoid when she tried to ensure that both of Eddy’s sons would not simultaneously find themselves in jeopardy at the front. It was not, however, Kick’s and Debo’s serenity of mind that the dowager had been concerned about; it was the dukedom, and her desire to guarantee a smooth succession. At any rate, on the day of the Bakewell Fair, Duchess Evie kept a sharp eye on her new granddaughter-in-law, as Kick met and addressed many of the very same electors who by their votes had removed the traditional Cavendish seat in Parliament from the family’s hands. There had been a time when Kick had been the recipient of the dowager’s “dirty looks.” Today, the looks that Duchess Evie cast her way were strictly those of approbation. Billy’s paternal grandmother was mightily impressed by Kick’s assured presentation at the fair. Notably, the old woman was not alone in her assessment. The duke’s longtime political agent, also in attendance that day, was pleased to observe that the fairgoers seemed to absolutely adore Billy’s American bride.

Though at the time of her marriage Kick had acquiesced totally to the duke in his wishes about the religious training of his future grandchildren, she was aware that he persisted in seeing her as, in her phrase, “a sort of evil influence” who had somehow insinuated herself into his family. Indeed, shortly before the Bakewell Fair he had been heard to expound on what one listener, the diarist James Lees-Milne, described as his “ferociously anti-Catholic” views at a dinner party at the Dorchester, presided over by Emerald Cunard: “I am a black Protestant and I am proud of it.… Papists owe a divided allegiance. They put God before their country.” In the course of the dinner party, Duke Eddy had spoken of an ancestor of his who had been cut off by his family because he had so much as stayed at Hatfield House, a Tory High Church household whose religious practices were, in the view of the Cavendishes, dangerously akin to those of Catholicism. And he had spoken of how, for similar reasons, his own father, Duke Victor, had “looked askance” at Eddy’s marriage to Moucher.

Kick, faced with Eddy Devonshire’s abiding horror of anything to do with Catholics and Catholicism, had vowed early on to try to prove herself to him “over a period of years.” As it turned out, she accomplished that objective a good deal more swiftly. At the Bakewell Fair, Lady Hartington won people over with her charm and vivacity, not to mention the hint of glamour provided by the silk stockings that she had had sent over from the U.S. and that, owing to their great rarity in wartime, riveted the eyes of her audience.