Death at Whitechapel (7 page)

“That angel,” cooed one of them enviously. “‘Oo is she?”

“Why, ye silly!” the other scoffed. “She's Lady Randolph Churchill, she is. Don't ye ‘ave eyes in yer witless 'ead? 'Oo cud mistake such a beauty?”

Who indeed, George thought despairingly. No one who had ever seen Jennie Churchill could fail to remember that face—those extraordinary eyes (the eyes of a panther, someone had said), the suppressed sensuality of her mouth, the exquisitely smooth skin. Or that perfect shape, those incomparable shoulders, that generous bust, truly the form of a goddess. As long as he lived, if he lived an entire century, he would never forget their first meeting, the way she had taken his hand, the awareness in her eyes, the smile on her full, ready lips. He had fallen wholly and hopelessly in love with her at that moment, and from then until now his heart and his body—his soul, even!—had been hers alone.

It had been June, at one of those fabulous weekend parties at Warwick Castle, with around-the-clock entertainment and enormous quantities of food and drink, the guests left to as much friendly intercourse as they wished. George had been pleased to receive the countess's invitation but a trifle discomfited as well, for the First Battalion was in the midst of a musketry course and normally he'd have a devil of a time getting excused. But the Prince of Wales was to be a guest at the party, and an invitation to join His Royal Highness (who was also George's godfather) almost amounted to a command. Colonel Hamilton had given him grudging leave and he'd taken himself off to Warwick, where the countess had introduced him to Jennie—who was forty-four to his twenty-two, someone had whispered, although he'd scarcely believed it, for she didn't look a day more than thirty. She was vivacious and boldly flirtatious, and he—who had kissed only the childish cupid's-bow mouths of fragile, wide-eyed young innocents—had been utterly overwhelmed by her frank sensuality. They had drifted down the Avon in a rowboat, he leaning manfully on the oars, she lying in the shade of her white lace parasol, her fingers trailing in the water, her dark-lashed eyes never leaving his. It was an hour that George, whose deeply romantic spirit had been touched by this marvel of a woman, would forever treasure.

Two days later, back with the First, he wrote Jennie a letter decorated with hearts: “I thought about you all yesterday & built castles in the air about you & I living together.” A boy's naive letter, perhaps, but conceived in a man's passion, a passion made bold by
her
passion, the merest thought of which never failed to reduce George to helpless trembling.

Their meetings—first at one country weekend, then another—continued through the summer. They took tea and listened to the military band in Burton's Court, the large green in front of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea, where the Guards played cricket. They went for pleasant walks and rode together, their time interrupted only by George's tedious military duties, such as guarding the Bank of England.

George knew that Jennie was conscious of the great difference in their ages and hesitant to make any sort of serious commitment to him, but her reluctance only fueled his growing obsession, as did his parents' opposition. His mother, who had successfully married both her daughters into wealthy families, pointed out sarcastically that Jennie's friends were known to be fast, that her lovers were too many to count, and that George was just sixteen days older than her son Winston. His father reminded him that he was meant to make himself agreeable to Mary Golet, an American heiress whose fortune could remove the family's entire burden of debt and rebuild Ruthin Castle (the family home in Denbighshire) into the bargain. In no circumstance was George to pursue an impecunious widow who had slept with half the men in the Empire.

But his parents' displeasure only strengthened George's passionate resolve. He wrote to Jennie daily, telegraphed her, begged her to see him when she seemed to respond coolly, fearing all the while that she might be romantically involved with someone else: Major Ramsden, perhaps, that Highlander with whom she had visited Egypt a few months before; or the filthy rich American, Astor. Whenever he heard her name linked with another man's—and he heard this far too often, for her romantic escapades delighted all the gossips—he became wild with an uncontrollable jealousy. She was too beautiful, too cosmopolitan, too much of the world's to be his, and yet she
must
be his and his alone, or he would go stark, staring mad!

In early September, to George's enormous relief, his battalion of Scots Guards was transferred to London. Now that he could press his demands on her, Jennie gave in. While she seemed reluctant to be seen about town with him, she began entertaining him alone at her home in Great Cumberland Place. There, in private, she wore the soft, loose kimonos that seemed to him incredibly seductive and exotic, made of the stuff of dreams, her body the stuff of yet other dreams, even more seductive, more exotic. He sighed and closed his eyes, feeling warm. Surely, where this goddess was concerned, his fierce and ungovernable jealousy could be understood and even forgiven, although it led him to do dreadful things. But surely not so dreadful, given his passion. He loved Jennie desperately, lived only for the moments he could hold her in his arms. He had sworn himself to do anything in his power to protect her from harm, from insult, from other men. Surely, then—

Two stout fellows with Havana cigars passed in front of the sofa, loudly debating the merits of the Royal Navy's shipbuilding policy, which, one insisted, had already allowed the Kaiser to get the upper hand. George's eyes snapped open, and there was the newspaper in front of him, with its story of the discovery of Finch's body, and he was once again in the depths of despair, thinking not only of the appalling sight Jennie had seen—seen with those lovely, pure eyes, which should never have looked on such bloody mayhem!—but that she
herself
had been seen and would surely be identified and hauled before some odious magistrate in some awful courtroom to explain the unexplainable : how it was that she knew the dead man, why it was that she had happened to call on him so soon after he had been visited by a murderer, who she suspected of doing the deed—

George's stomach heaved. He was not only violently jealous but wildly imaginative, and he had created that awful moment over and over again just as it must have happened, seeing the scene in his mind's eye, witness to the moment of murder. That great, horn-handled knife plunged three times hilt-deep into the wretch's back, the sound of the dying man's gurgle and gasp as he pitched face down into his shepherd's pie, the splash of ale as the jug tumbled off the table. Then the retreat down the stairs and—

George shuddered at the thought of it. For him, the worst part had been to see
her
arrive, believing as he did that she had come to visit a lover. To see
her
make the awful discovery, and flee without sounding the alarm—as surely she should have done, had she gone there on some innocent errand. He recalled it again, the moment she had stepped out of the cab. The day was cold and she was wearing a heavy woolen coat and veil of dark tulle, a perfect costume for an assignation.

But perhaps the very disguise that had sent him into a jealous rage would be her salvation, after all. Why, if he hadn't known it was his precious Jennie, even
he
could not have said for certain it was she who climbed out of the hansom and mounted the stoop. George closed his eyes, recalling the furtive glance she had flung over her shoulder, the way she had slipped through the door without knocking, as if she were expected, as if she were accustomed to regularly calling there. And that, he acknowledged bitterly, was the root of his jealousy, the reason he had done what he did: the loathsome idea that his dearest darling Jennie had called regularly at Number Two and was intimate with Mr. Tom Finch.

But there had been no intimacy on that day. Not three minutes after she entered, while George fumed and waited and swore, the outer door had burst violently open and Jennie was fleeing down the steps and into the waiting cab and away, as if the hounds of hell were after her.

And then those hounds had turned on George and had been at his throat ever since. Their ferocity had only increased when he had discovered that Jennie had gone out of town, and that neither Winston nor the servants would tell him where she was.

 

W
inston drummed his fingers on his desk and stared out the window that overlooked Great Cumberland Place, where a few horse-drawn carriages and one or two hansom cabs moved briskly through the gray November afternoon. It had been a trying day, the culmination of a difficult week, and Winston felt himself at the end of his tether. Even as a boy he had been given to fits of black depression, sinking into brooding spells of melancholy so dark, as he had once written to his mother, that he might have been plunged headfirst into the slough of despond. The only antidote to these dreadful depressions was company—the more flamboyant and stimulating and zestful, the better—and incessant activity. “A change is as good as a rest,” he had told his brother Jack, and he whirled from one project to another as madly as a dervish, allowing himself no time to brood over the terrible evidences of his inevitable failures—evidences that, from very young days, his father had not failed to point out to him with great force and equally great regularity. No matter how hard he tried to show what he could do, no matter how much he dreamed of impressing his father with his achievements, it was all for naught. He could do nothing to make his father proud of him, and the thought had filled him with despair.

Of course, Winston knew, his father had to be right in his rebukes, for Lord Randolph was a magnificent man, a paragon, worthy of nothing other than the greatest admiration, respect, and loyalty. For his son, he had held the key to everything worth having, had known everything worth knowing. Winston had been obsessed with his father's image, clipping newspaper stories about his political career, copying his physical stance, mimicking his patterns of speech. When Lord Randolph had died three years before, in the ugly depths of a political and social disgrace that Winston was just now beginning to comprehend, the son had committed himself to the father's redemption: to lifting up his flag, to pursuing his aims to the same successful end that he should have achieved, had he lived.

And therein lay Winston's dilemma. To achieve these ends, he had to claim for himself the political success that his father had so inexplicably cast aside when he resigned his Cabinet post as Minister of the Exchequer. He had, in a phrase, to prove his infallible father wrong when he had said that his son would never,
could
never succeed. In the depths of that profound paradox lurked the true beast of Winston's depressions, a nameless black dog. ready to rise out of even the most trivial of rejections and sink its furious teeth into his heart.

Today's black dog was a fierce one, perhaps the most savage yet. On the surface of it, Winston's despair arose from a relatively minor incident. At the suggestion of several rising Tories who were encouraging his political ambitions, he had gone to Conservative Party headquarters at Saint Stephen's Chambers, where Fitzroy Stewart introduced him to Richard Middleton, the “Skipper,” as he was called. Mr. Middleton was held in great repute because he had steered the Party to its victory in the General Election of 1895.

Up to a point, the meeting had been successful, Stewart and the Skipper praising Winston's
Malakand Field Force
and extolling the letters he had written for the Morning Post as the “talk of Fleet Street.” The party would certainly find a seat for such a promising candidate, who, despite his years and youthful appearance, had already shown himself a force to be reckoned with, a chip, as it were, off the Churchill block.

And then, just as Winston was about to extend his hand to seal the bargain, the question had come. If he truly wanted a constituency, the Skipper had asked, how much could he pay for it? Startled, Winston had replied that he thought he could raise the money to fund his campaign, but that was about the limit. “I'm not a rich man,” he said. “I live by my earnings.” (This was not quite true, for he also lived by his mother's earnings, such as they were. He did not, however, want to publicize this fact.) The Skipper, hearing the phrase “not a rich man,” had grown cool. The price of a safe seat was around a thousand pounds a year; insecure seats, of course, went more cheaply, but none were free. No candidate could assume the Party's backing if he did not back the Party. Winston should return when he could afford to play the game.

Winston buried his face in his hands. If money was what it took to get into politics, it would be a very long time before he could write “MP” after the Churchill name and begin to redeem his father's memory. The only person he could ask for money was his mother, and while she was willing, she did not seem to be able to manage her money and was sometimes so short that she could not pay his allowance. Of course, she might marry again: it had been rumored the year before that she was engaged to William Waldorf Astor. But while Winston couldn't help wishing that the family coffers might be enriched with some of Mr. Astor's six-million-dollar income, he had told his mother that she should never marry anyone for money, not even Mr. Astor. And now it looked very much as if she might marry George Cornwallis-West, for love! Winston could not for the life of him imagine why a woman as enticing, as seductive as his mother should stoop to that callow boy, who was as penniless as he was profligate. Why, it was a pairing so unspeakably absurd that it made his stomach turn. But stoop she had, or rather, tumbled to it, as that sour wit in Punch had put it, in a remark brutal with sexual innuendo. Not even Winston's blunt warning (“Fine sentiments and empty stomachs,” he had told her, “do not accord.”) could keep her from doing whatever she chose.