American Duchess Page 6

  The duke and Ivor went off on their tour. I must say when hounded by the press, the duke said some very snooty things about America. He managed to even get arrested for “coasting” with his feet on his handlebars on a bicycle in Central Park. Oh, what fodder for the New York papers that was! Our wedding date was set for November 5 until Sunny protested that that was Guy Fawkes Day at home, the British celebration, I learned, of the exposure of a plot to blow up Parliament. I had a lot to learn about the British. And how I wished I could yet blow up my mother’s plans. But too late. Much too late.

  So the date of November 6 was decided on. Even I was put out—and Mother almost went berserk—when the duke skipped the wedding rehearsal because he thought it was just for me and my eight bridesmaids. So many differences between my America and where I was going.

  Then came my wedding day.

  I HAD ONCE seen Queen Victoria pass through the streets of London in a carriage with cheering, shouting crowds lining the way. She had been, of course, in her mourning black. I felt I should be now, though I was encased in white. And I kept telling myself that I was going to my wedding not my funeral.

  With the help of the police, Papa and I made it inside old St. Thomas Church. We were twenty minutes late since I had needed repair from crying and clinging. The music of the orchestra and massive choir seemed to shake the stone foundations. My bridesmaids waited in the vestibule and fussed over my skirts and long train. I was handed a huge, heavy bouquet, since the orchids Sunny—yes, I had been told I must call him Sunny now—had had sent from Blenheim had not arrived in time. Tick tock, time to go. Time to become someone I was not and did not want to be.

  “Your mother was so worried,” Miss Harper said, appearing from where I did not know. “You are never late and she thought maybe you . . .”

  “No,” I said, then added the obvious. “I am here.”

  The hymn “O Perfect Love” swelled as my bridesmaids, one by one, walked the long aisle ahead of us through massive bowers of blooms.

  “Are you ready, Consuelo?” Papa asked and squeezed my arm tight to his ribs.

  “I will make myself ready—for whatever befalls.”

  I was not sure he even heard those brave words for the orchestra suddenly swelled in the opening strains of the “Wedding March.” Trumpets, no less. Again the walls seemed to shake. Oh, no, that was me.

  Grateful again for the veil that hid my puffy eyes, I took one step and then another, tugging at Papa once to slow down. People were standing; faces flowed by. Up at the front, Mother was beaming. How I wish she had let me invite Papa’s side of the family, estranged by the divorce she had demanded. I wished she had not made me return their wedding gifts unopened. Only my Vanderbilt grandmother was here. Sometimes I hated my mother.

  At least she had not made me send back the pair of antique candlesticks from Win, but I would not have them shipped to Blenheim. I could not have borne using them, so they must stay unseen and their candles unlit. Strange how my mind darted away from all this: Papa had given me a diamond tiara “fit for a duchess,” he said; my mother had presented me with a long strand of pearls that had once belonged to Queen Catherine the Great. Catherine, too, had been forced to change countries. And, how strange, but at the moment I recalled reading her biography—that she had not liked her future husband when she first met him.

  I snapped back to now, to this—my wedding. With Ivor at his side, Sunny stood ready, looking small in the vastness, looking, well, stoic. He might be the Duke of Marlborough but he seemed nervous, too.

  “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?” the words from the bishop rang out.

  “Her mother and I,” Papa said.

  He stepped away to leave me there alone, now holding the hand of my future husband. Something rose up in me then, my Vanderbilt backbone. I can do this, I told myself. Somehow, I will survive and thrive.

  AFTERWARD, THINGS WERE still a blur, both dream and nightmare. Despite the police cordon, the crowd outside the church surged at us. Two women tried to snatch my bouquet away. Some at least called “Good luck! May God bless you!” I felt I needed both, and yet a strange calm and acceptance had come over me. I was the Duchess of Marlborough. I had a new home, despite the fact we were taking a Mediterranean honeymoon first. And then there was the wedding night. After a reception for over a hundred guests at Mother’s recently acquired home at Seventy-Second Street and Madison Avenue, Sunny and I were headed for a few days to Idle Hour, the Vanderbilt retreat on Long Island near Oakdale, before we left for Europe.

  What I do recall when Sunny and I climbed into our carriage to leave was not the cheering crowds, nor even my teary good-bye to my brothers and Miss Harper. It was, as we pulled away, that I saw Mother in a first-floor window wiping tears from her face. Why was she not smiling? Laughing? Did I understand her at all?

  SUNNY AND I took the ferry to Long Island City, then boarded a special train. We both sat, looking wilted, in our private parlor car heading for the first days of our honeymoon. Sunny perked up when he started reading congratulatory cables from England. He handed them to me after, telling me who was who. Some he was proud of, some he dismissed with a wave of his hand or tossed aside, a lesson for me of who mattered and who did not to my new husband.

  “Ho!” he said and seemed to become much more animated over one. “One from the queen herself! I shall keep this. I have hopes you will be presented at court, even though Her Majesty’s strength is waning these days.”

  “Mine is waning right now, too. But I feel I must be frank about something, clear the air a bit. We have been so busy—with others around.”

  He nodded, frowning, looking up at me at last.

  I sat up straighter. I knew that expression, but I had to clear my conscience of this. I told him, “I am sure we shall both do our best to make the other happy, but I assume you know this marriage was my mother’s idea, not mine. She insisted on it, even though there was another man who wanted me. She made me turn him away.”

  I expected he might mention that he, too, had given up someone he cared for. Would he be angry or wish to know more?

  “Really?” he said with a small shrug as he looked down at the next cable in the pile. “I take it he was an American. I do not see much point in discussing it any further. As far as I am concerned, I never want to see your country again.”

  His lack of concern was like a blow to the belly, and his evident disdain for my dear country stung deep. How could I ever love or even respect this foreigner? How could I bear his children, though I swore to myself right then as I looked out the train window again as America rolled past, that I would teach my heirs—yes, mine—to love not only Great Britain but great and glorious America, too. I would indeed be an American duchess!

  But however was I to get through my wedding night, my honeymoon, my new life?

  AS I WAITED, exhausted and on edge, for Sunny to come to my bedroom at Idle Hour that night, I remembered something I had overheard Minnie Paget, of all people, tell someone once. It was a jest about a British bride on her wedding night not knowing what was expected of her. And, supposedly, her worldly maid had told her something like, “Just lie there and think of the British Empire.”

  I had been readied for bed not by Brooks, my longtime maid, who was not going with me, but by a new French maid, Jeanne, whom Mother had hired. Only Jeanne and Sunny’s valet would be accompanying us on our wedding trip when we left here.

  This grand, old Tudor house held such happy childhood memories. It was Papa’s favorite place, though Mother had designed it. My brothers and I had sailed our small boat, gone crabbing and fishing in the Grand River, and hiked through the eight hundred acres of woods. My parents had the old bowling alley converted to a playhouse where I learned to cook and clean, and invited guests in for tea. I had kept a garden of flowers here and taken them in my pony cart to local convalescing children, one little crippled girl especially. Papa had said I had a good heart for children.

  S
ometimes here at Idle Hour House, Mama—Mother, I mean—had let me take off my iron corset. Strange, but waiting here now in what had been her bedroom while Sunny was next door in my old one made me feel I had put a sort of iron cage on again.

  And it was here at Idle Hour that I had first met Win, when his parents were weekend guests. I thought he was so handsome, clever, and kind. If only he could be coming through that door right now . . .

  Sunny knocked and came in wearing maroon silk pajamas and robe. “I like the sighing sound of the wind in the big trees here,” he said, and I realized that was the most romantic, poetic thing he had ever said to me.

  “You look, well . . . lovely,” he went on. “So much beautiful hair when it is loosed.” He came close, touched it, laced his fingers in it. I thought he would kiss me but he did not.

  “Thank you,” I said. My voice did not sound like my own. “I . . . I love the sound of the wind, too. Especially, I love to hear birds in the morning.”

  “You shall, at Blenheim. And if we visit the prince or queen someday, you will wake up to bagpipes.”

  “So much new to learn.”

  “Yes,” he whispered, touching me at last, flesh to flesh, his hands skimming my arms under my loose-sleeved satin robe. “So much new to learn, and I shall try to teach you.”

  He drew me over to the bed and removed my robe. I shivered despite the fireplace across the room. It crackled. I decided then I would close my eyes and concentrate on sounds, remember the sounds if I did not like the . . . the feel of things.

  Sunny’s touch—his examination of my body when he laid down beside me and lifted my nightgown away—I concentrated on the sound of his increasingly heavy breathing. The house creaked, the fire crackled, the November wind no longer sighed but howled outside.

  And something howled inside me at the thrust of pain and then our union. My heart beat hard, and I held my breath. The sounds of my new destiny, I thought, exhausted, floating . . . flesh moving against flesh.

  After, when I turned over in the bed sometime later, he was gone.

  Part Two

  Duchess, 1895–1906

  The Gilded Cage

  Chapter Eight

  May the Lord God forgive me for thinking this, but our honeymoon seemed endless. A steamer to the Mediterranean, a rough Atlantic crossing with my husband suffering from mal de mer and I suffering from the reality of being married to him.

  We disembarked at Gibraltar and visited chilly, late November Spain. Next, during Christmas in Rome, I was homesick and fell ill, becoming wan and weak. A doctor there actually told me I had six months to live, though he was so inept I did not believe him. I was appalled, however, to overhear that my husband had taken an insurance policy out on my life!

  We skipped across the Mediterranean for a trip up the Nile. Then back to Italy. At Pompeii, where so many had died, I started to feel stronger. In January came the not unexpected news that Mother had married Oliver Belmont. By far, I was happier for her than I was for myself.

  Even my beloved Paris did not really strengthen or soothe me, partly because of my own mistake.

  “Time for the fashion houses here to dress my new duchess in grand style for going home and your first season in London,” Sunny said during a carriage ride in the Bois de Boulogne. “I know some of your gowns are from Worth here in the city.”

  “That will be a new experience, for my mother always ordered my clothes. ‘I chose them, you wear them,’ she said more than once.”

  I thought he might be upset or think I was more of a ninny, but I knew he would believe me. To my surprise, he lit up and turned to me with a smile. “Then I shall help you. I have some styles, jewelry, too, in mind to show off my new wife!”

  He proceeded to take over shopping for me, ordering things I would never wear by choice, overly elegant garments, not my taste at all. As with Mother, I did not see most of them before I went for fittings. His purchases included a nineteen-row pearl choker with diamond clasps that covered my entire neck. Truth be told, jewelry did not really appeal to me. But how appropriate a choker was, I thought, as we finally headed “home” to England with hundreds of new items in tow. Here I was a married woman, Duchess of Marlborough, and I had merely traded one manager for another.

  MY FIRST DAYS in London, before we even went to Blenheim, became a big blur. Most of the Marlborough relations met us as we arrived at Victoria Station. Cousin Winston Churchill was there, a carrot-topped redhead no less, round faced and instantly interesting and kind. Sunny had told me that Winston’s father had died of syphilis only a year before. Missing Papa as I did, I felt great sympathy for Winston.

  He was with his beautiful mother, Jennie Jerome Churchill, also an American, who had wed Randolph Churchill, Sunny’s uncle. She had brought him a fortune in that bargain, too, another “Dollar Bride,” as they were starting to call us imported American heiresses in the press.

  Although Sunny had prepared me for the onslaught, I clung to the fact that we would see some of these family members singly in their London homes. There, I hoped, I could truly get to know them, not just be gawked at or talked about as if I could not hear. And then, while we stayed at Sunny’s leased London townhouse, the visits began in the order of precedence in the Marlborough-Spencer-Churchill connections.

  At the Grosvenor Square home of Sunny’s grandmother, Sarah Wilson, a dowager Duchess of Marlborough, widow of the seventh duke, she said to me, “I do hope your country’s war with South America wasn’t too hard on your family, not to mention the threat of those red Indians.”

  I just stared at her a moment. No, she was not joking, as she sat papery-skinned and powdered in a chair in the corner of her drawing room.

  “Your Grace, perhaps you mean the war between the northern and southern states,” I said as she continually studied me with her lorgnette.

  “I am referring to the war with South America in 1861, my dear.”

  Sunny shifted beside me, recrossing his legs. And then he dared to pop up to pace on the other side of the room to leave me to handle this myself. “Oh, yes, the North-South war,” I said, rather than trying to correct her further. “Actually, it devastated my maternal grandfather’s cotton import business, but good things came from that war, such as the freeing of slaves in our southern states, which went to war with our northern states.”

  “Slavery, a nasty business England handled much earlier than your country.”

  While what she said was true enough, it reminded me once more that the English upper class regarded even educated Americans as yahoos. I learned to fit in, however much everyone kept referring to my American heritage.

  “My dear,” the dowager duchess went on, her gray-eyed gaze piercing me again, “your first duty will be to bear a son, of course. Concentrate on that, not gadding about or entertaining more than you must. It would be intolerable to have that little upstart Winston who thinks he knows it all to become duke, however much Sunny likes him. Are you in a family way?”

  “I . . . I am sure we will begin a family soon.”

  “I should hope so. And I must tell you about Goosey before Sunny comes back.”

  “Goosey?”

  “The nickname for Sunny’s mother—his real mother. Absolutely madcap, so keep an eye on her if he has her about again. Little jokes, inane ones. Something bloody dreadful, like an inkpot above the door or, like slivers of soap in the soup, you know what I mean, or, hopefully, not.”

  “A practical joker.”

  “Nothing practical about Goosey, silly as a goose. Albertha has bats in the belfry, as they say.”

  Oh my. So far I had discerned that Sunny’s roué father browbeat him—or, perhaps actually beat him—and now I learn that his mother was too much of the wrong kind of fun. I thought again about my own parents, where the personalities were reversed, Papa great fun, even a rakehell at times, while my mother browbeat me—and literally used a rod.

  Our next stop on the Marlborough spinning wheel was to Sunny’s uncl
e, the elderly Duke of Abercorn, at Hampden House in London. It was a charming place done by the fashionable interior designer Robert Adam, with grand and spacious rooms. The thin, nervous duke kept popping up to point out various family portraits and telling me I must know who was who despite the fact they were all dead. He wore a velvet smoking jacket and kept tugging the cuffs down.

  He had fussed over removing my coat before Sunny could, then kept staring at the lining of it—Russian sables. “What a beautiful coat. Reminds me of one I own, but these may be better sables.”

  He rang for his butler who ordered his valet to bring his in. “Indeed, these are finer than mine, so I shall have to look for a new one. Sunny, you must tell me, my boy, exactly where you purchased this for Her Grace. You know,” he said with a wink at me, “I can see that the future Churchills and tenth duke will be tall and handsome. Good news, eh, Sunny?”

  Thirdly, though I was starting to wilt, we stopped at Lansdowne House in Berkley Square to visit the Marchioness of Lansdowne, an aunt whom I could tell Sunny preferred to his own mother. I breathed a sigh of relief for she was smiling, gay, and even gossipy. I had met her briefly in India, and my parents had stayed with her when she was vicereine, so we had a starting point, so to speak. It finally occurred to me where Mother got the inkling of pairing me with Sunny: His aunt must have mentioned that Sunny was available and Mother saw him ripe for the picking.

  I was relieved not to have my corseted figure eyed again, as they were all hoping for an heir, but what I thought would finally be an easy visit turned into a “helpful talk.”

  “Now, Consuelo, since you do not know our ways, let me give you some advice,” Lady Lansdowne told me as Sunny nodded throughout. “A lady of your lofty status simply must not walk alone in Piccadilly or on Bond Street, nor sit in Hyde Park unless properly accompanied. You should not be seen in a hansom cab, and it is far better to occupy a box rather than a stall at the theater, and to even be seen near a music hall is out of the question . . .”