Sunny seemed to care about me more during the days of my pregnancy, at least the times we were together. When he was planning the laying out of the water terraces he hoped to build, he would send for me to come out, be sure I had a chair, and explain his ideas. I agreed the sculpted, terraced beauty would soften and enhance the honey-hued building itself. More than once he promised that as soon as our child was born, I should invite my papa and some friends to see the setting for the future terraces my dowry would provide for the palace.
I spent some time overseeing the purchasing of a layette for our child, boy or girl. I spent so much time with the Bladon and Woodstock poor and elderly—and of course the schoolchildren—that Sunny insisted we head to London early. I will never forget my farewell to Mrs. Prattley as I held her delicate hands in mine. Her voice was like crinkly paper.
“I wish a blessing for yourself and the babe,” she told me, lifting her sightless eyes toward my face as I sat beside her. “All will be well for Your Grace, our Angel of Woodstock.”
“That means so much to me, my friend. It is like a mother’s blessing.”
“But she will be there, you say. Just remember that ‘This too shall pass.’ The difficult parts, the pain.”
“I will bring the child, him or her, here to meet you someday.”
“I do not know, Your Grace. Time weighs heavy on me.”
And on me, I thought in the days after. This endless waiting. The avid expectations of my husband and his family. And my mother coming soon when I had not seen her for months after being under her thumb for so long. I was my own woman now, about to become a mother myself. Would she have changed? Dare she still try to dominate me, a married woman and a duchess?
The month before my actual lying in approached, Sunny leased Spencer House, a gray-stone, many-windowed home in St. James’s, London. He took me on carriage rides and, at the doctor’s request, escorted me on walks, mostly on the grounds or in nearby Green Park, which the three-storied house overlooked.
A week before Mother was to arrive, the most ornate, gilded, and crafted cradle I had ever seen arrived from her. It had been made in Italy, sculpted with twisted sea creatures on its base. A canopy of Belgian lace was draped over it. It belonged in some Baroque palazzio in Venice, but here it was in the room next to mine, close to our new nanny’s bed, waiting, just waiting as were we all.
Since 1897 was the celebration year for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee of sixty years on the throne, there were many London celebrations. Despite my girth, Sunny relented to let me attend the Devonshire House ball at the end of the season. I did not dance but sat with the dowagers off to the side and enjoyed the music and food. After dark, with a guard and two tall Marlborough footmen following us, we walked home through Green Park to lighted Spencer House nearby.
Our men held lanterns, the light of which snagged an occasional family group or old man as we passed. I gasped when I saw a young woman sitting right on the grass with her torn shawl wrapped partly around a baby who was wailing. It seemed as if these poor ragamuffins had emerged full blown from the grass.
“Perhaps I should have brought more men,” Sunny muttered.
“Are they ill?” I asked him. “Not homeless, I hope. Even the poorest in Oxfordshire have a place to lay their heads. Can we give them coins?”
“I am pleased to hear you say that those near Blenheim are tended to. Sometimes,” he said, pressing my arm closer to his ribs, “I worry that you think you must do more for our local poor when that is just the way of things—here too.”
“I do want to do more. If we have to send cold, castoff food to them, if there are orphans or beaten or lonely women anywhere near the estate, if—”
“Consuelo, not now!”
“Why not now? Here we are in the heart of the city, the one you call the grandest on earth, head and heart of the British Empire, in this Jubilee year, and there are some of the queen’s people—in mid-September when the wind will soon turn cold—who—”
“Sush! Do not turn back! See, you stumbled. Are you all right?”
“I just caught my toe. And we all stumble when you and I have just come from a feast and warm, lighted rooms and laughing people, and this is but a stone’s throw away!” I swept my other hand in an arc to encompass the people huddled on the damp grass. How I wanted to go back to that woman with the baby.
He said naught else when I am sure he would have lectured me further had I not been heavy with child. It felt strange to have that power over him, to merely frown and have him inquire if I felt well, to hint I had not slept well and have him fuss.
Whether or not I soon bore an heir for the family and Blenheim or “just a girl,” I vowed to love this child. And to someday, someway, speak out for the poor.
MY MOTHER HAD a knack for pretending nothing had ever gone amiss between us, but I guess I was glad for that.
“I am pleased you like the cradle,” she said the day she arrived. I had told her twice that the gift was most kind and generous of her. “A little piece of Renaissance Italy,” she added.
“A big piece of it, I would say. A work of art.”
“I knew you would approve now that you are here with all this, including a doting husband and heir on the way.”
“And if my firstborn is a girl—as with your own children?”
“Then you will marry her well someday—perhaps to royalty,” she said with a little laugh. “And then try, try quickly again. I did. Never give up, Consuelo. Never stop striving.”
It seemed to me her marriage to Oliver Belmont had mellowed her, though when I pointed out to her one night the ragged folks in the park, she ranted on about women’s right to vote in America, though I did see a connection. Actually, I was amazed and pleased that she was in such fine fettle, and more pleasant than I recall, but then—so far—I was doing just as she, not to mention what Sunny, wanted. Indeed, I silently clung to Mrs. Prattley’s blessing as much as I did the spirited talks from my mother.
SUNNY AND MY mother colluded to keep the doctor around too much. From their being on edge, one would think they were having the baby. In a bad moment Mother had said to me, “You do not call me Mama anymore, Consuelo. Do duchesses feel no more devotion and appreciation than to desert their affection of the Mamas of their youth?”
Coward that I still was, I shrugged. “Mother does sound more formal, and using Mama is more girlish.” I squared my shoulders as we sat across the breakfast table from each other. Sunny had gone to bid Winston good-bye at the railway station. Now was the time for this confrontation as well as for this baby to be born. I felt a thousand eyes were constantly on me.
Putting down my cup of hot chocolate, I told her, “I think of the term Mama as being one from a child, a dependent.”
“Well, indeed you are not my dependent anymore.”
“I mean in the way of trusting. You did so much for me—overly much—that I had not the slightest notion, for example, of how to buy my own clothes when I was on my honeymoon, let alone run a household. I am glad to hear you are concerned about and speaking up for women’s rights at home, but did I not have rights—at least the right to choose my own husband and future?”
Her eyes widened. Her lower lip dropped. But that didn’t mean she did not have a comeback. “I knew what was best, saw the opportunity for your glorious future,” she insisted. “You were so young and—”
“Too young to know whom I loved, what I wanted, what country I would like to live in and rear my children in?”
I burst into tears when I was trying to be strong. My emotions were swelling, going to pop—and why wasn’t this child ready to be born?
“Consider all you have to look forward to, my dear,” she said, rising to come across the table to bend over me. I was amazed she was holding her temper for once. Her new marriage . . . my status, which pleased her . . . Had all that softened her heart? I could not fathom and would not accept that my dear Papa would not have been a good husband. But then, did people think the same of me and Sunny?
“Consuelo, I see you are still too young to understand. Perhaps when this child comes . . . someday later when you have a daughter to provide for and protect. I needed to save you from Win. Oh, yes, he swept you off your feet, but he and his family were not good enough, not for you, not for the Vanderbilts. Think of the status you have now, the things you can do for those beneath you, the very thing I dream of doing for America’s women someday. The older and wiser you get, the more you will realize . . .” She plunged on, but I heard nothing else, wanted to say more, stand up to her even again, stand up to Sunny and just plain stand up, for a pain crunched through my middle and I doubled over to bump my head into my cup and saucer. The cocoa bled dark on the linen tablecloth, and I gripped the arms of the chair.
“Consuelo, did you swoon or are you in pain?”
I wanted to scream at her that I had been in pain for years. Since I could not have the man I had wanted. Since I had been in England. Since I was expected to bear a son.
“Yes,” I managed as the power of that single vast pain still swept through me. “Yes, and I am sitting in . . . in the baby’s water. Mother . . . it . . . it must be time.”
I WAS SWIMMING in the deep blue sea, rocked with waves of agony. I tried to push them away, but they kept rolling back over me, drowning me. My mother’s voice . . . How had she done this three times? A man’s voice, not Sunny’s. Push? Push what?
“We can give her what Queen Victoria took for the births of her children,” the doctor said. “Her Grace’s hips are small. I will get the bottle of ether and the mask, but we shall not use them yet.”
I pictured the queen, that tiny woman who had kissed me on the forehead. Mother had liked that story, but then she would. If she could have pushed me far enough—push, push—she would have turned me into the Queen of England instead of some duchess. Indeed, if that little woman could bear nine children with her narrow hips, I could too. Did being tall not count for something?
“Your Grace,” the doctor’s voice came again, “I’m going to give you something to help with the pain, but you must push hard first. We have the baby’s head crowning but not the body.”
We have the head. Have I lost my head, my mind, to be the Duchess of Marlborough?
Suddenly, I felt a screaming rip, as if a huge black curtain was torn in two. No, someone had screamed. It must be me.
Push, push. Push one’s way into British society, let alone Sunny’s family. Are you in a family way, my dear? I have to bear this child, make a family, make a life here when all I want to do is float up and away, up in a hot-air balloon, but it is so hot in here. I am soaking wet, swimming and here came yet another wave.
Someone was screaming again.
“All right, the baby has more than crowned. If we can just get one shoulder.”
“Can you not give her the ether now, just a little?” a woman asked. That was Mother, but she should be telling him, ordering him. At least it meant she was on my side. For one shrieking moment, I almost called her Mama, almost begged her to stop the pain, stop telling me everything that I must do.
“I cannot do this, I cannot . . .” I cried. “I am going to die.”
I felt a little wire mask pressed around my nose and mouth. Oh, it had a small cloth over it and smelled like the gilt paint Sunny insisted on using before the prince and princess came to visit. Were they here again? Must we give up our rooms and move upstairs at Blenheim?
Floating now, floating. Something left me, left my body. Was it my spirit? Was I really dying?
“Wait until the duke hears this!” a man said.
I just let myself sink farther under the huge waves. Under and far away.