Gladys’s giddiness might get her into trouble-as it very nearly had when the Crown Prince of Germany had fallen in love with her the year before, and insisted on exchanging his mother’s communion ring for Glady’s bracelet. The ring, of course, had been returned at the Kaiser’s command, but the indiscreet flirtation had nearly created an ugly international incident.
Consuelo glanced up to see her young friend watching her in the mirror, her luminous, wide-apart eyes the color of sapphires, a sphinxlike look on that beautiful face with its lovely straight, fine nose that Consuelo, despite her best intentions, could only envy. She had overheard a pair of housemaids whispering that the girl had persuaded a doctor at the Institut de Beaute to inject paraffin wax into the bridge of her nose, to form a classical line from forehead to tip. It was likely true, Consuelo thought, having herself noticed something of a difference in Glady’s profile, as well as a slight puffiness between the eyes. But it had been a ridiculous and dangerous thing to do-and quite unnecessary, for Gladys had been perfect just as she was.
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
My dear…
I hesitate how to begin. “Sunny” though melodious sounds childish: “Marlborough” is very formal; “Duke” impossible between relations; and I don’t suppose you answer to either
“Charles” or “Richard.” If I must reflect, let it be Sunny. But you must perceive in all this a strong case for the abolition of the
House of Lords and all titles…
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,
