Granny, I am so glad you’re here!” my beautiful eighteen-year-old granddaughter greeted me with a kiss and a hug and then hugged Jacques, too. “Everything is so exciting!”
The grand staircase she had hurried down to meet me had never looked so lovely or filled with light. The marble bust of the first duke over the Saloon door might even have been smiling, and I felt a great weight lifted to be happy to be back for this event, though we’d visited Bert’s family here before. Yet this day with Sarah seemed special. I doubt that the vast building had changed, but with Bert’s family here, returning seemed like a homecoming.
This July 7, 1939, we were at Blenheim for Sarah’s debutante ball, which was called by some in society the event of the summer season. It was almost like the old days under King Edward, I thought, as Sarah rattled off the names of guests who would be here. “Oh, and Father is so excited that the Duke of Kent has accepted. Royal family, but then I guess you knew them all!”
“He is one I do not know, so that will be lovely.”
As both Bert and Mary greeted us and words flew fast, I was hoping this would all indeed be lovely. Jacques was worried for France, because his countrymen were trying to ignore the German threat, and he had seen that all before. Winston, who would be here soon for this event, was ever dour over Adolf Hitler, who was dictator now, despite the fact that his title Der Fuhrer meant leader or even guide.
We settled in our room, then had iced coffee and cakes with Bert’s family on the terrace overlooking the parterres the duke had worked so hard to build. Ivor had joined us now. He was here for the event, too, taking precious time from the art purchasing business he was building. I knew he was still itching for me to fulfill my promise to him, which I had reneged on twice before. He wanted me to visit his father’s grave with him. Jacques had said he understood, but I was reluctant.
It was enough to be back in this massive palace with all the memories. At least Bert’s family’s living here helped to erase the hard times and sad legacy of Gladys, who, we had heard, was still in psychiatric care. We came here several times a year to see the children, and they came to visit us, but each time before this, the huge house itself oppressed me. At least we were outside now, for the views were always grand.
“So, how is the new property you two bought in Florida?” Bert asked. “We shall love to visit you some winter, if we can get away.”
Jacques said, “You do know your mother named it Casa Alva, yes? A fitting tribute to someone who was always buying and decorating, part of her mother’s heritage, since Consuelo does the same thing.”
I reached out to playfully smack his arm. “As if you are an innocent bystander in all of that. Yes, we brought photographs to show you now that Casa Alva is all put to rights. We fell in love with the area—for the winters—when we were visiting my brother. It is a villa fronting the ocean about fifteen miles from Palm Beach with white stucco walls and graceful wrought iron. I must admit I shipped some of my most prized possessions there from Paris and Saint-Georges-Motel in case—well, in case things change,” I said with a sideward glance at the younger children who were kicking a football around on the grass while Sarah sat with us adults.
Ivor said, “Wait until Winston gets here tomorrow if you want to hear carping that the British people are not alert to foreign dangers.”
“Same with France,” Jacques said with a sigh. “Our officials want compromise with Berlin—no more war—but you cannot make friends with the devil. People go about saying ‘C’est la vie’ instead of realizing war could come again.”
“Let’s just talk about tomorrow!” Sarah said, frowning and pouting. “Granny, you should see all the magnums of champagne that are here, the orchestra will be here soon and you simply must see my gown. You had a grand coming out, didn’t you? I mean way back when, in America.”
“I did,” I told her, and described a bit of that day, but my mind skipped to the first time I met and danced with Jacques. And I recalled being here, at Blenheim, when the duke was so thrilled at the Prince of Wales’s and Alexandra’s first visit. It was hard to believe that my dear friend Alexandra had died fourteen years ago. So many of the important people who had been here then were . . . were simply gone.
I blinked back tears but smiled at Sarah. “It will be a wonderful, memorable event, especially for you, so remember and cherish it always.”
Bert beamed proudly, and melancholy Ivor even smiled.
“I promised I would take a walk with Ivor, and so I shall,” I told them and stood. “Jacques, would you like to come along?”
“I am dying to tell Bert about the new innovations on the planes,” he told me. “The Germans may have their Luftwaffe, but we will not be left behind! So you may leave me behind now, my dear.”
Sarah popped up when the motorbus with the orchestra arrived and the others bustled off. It had been a hot summer, so I borrowed a parasol from Mary, took Ivor’s arm, and we started out.
“I DIDN’T MEAN to insist,” Ivor said as we walked the lane toward Bladon church and its graveyard.
“I know it means a lot to you for me to see his grave.”
“Not so much that really, as I just want you to know that I mean to be buried there.”
I gasped and turned him to me. “You are not keeping something from me? Your health—”
“As up and down as ever, but no. I did not mean I have an imminent demise on the horizon.”
“You would tell me if you did?”
“I swear! Well, you mean that Father kept his cancer a secret.”
“I was not part of his life then. He did not have to tell me. Listen, Ivor,” I said as we began to walk again toward the gate, “I want you to know that your father loved you very much. I think since you were sickly at first—”
“And now.”
“Do not say that. It scared him that he might lose you, so he pulled back a bit, perhaps did not treat you the way he did Bert.”
“Bert the bold, Bert the heir—now duke. You know, I have found my own purpose in life, to encourage artists, preserve and even treasure their art, and if I had been the rough-and-tumble sort like Bert, perhaps I would never have seen the beauty in art—in life.”
We walked across the road and went into the graveyard through the simple wooden gate that stood ajar. An elderly villager was cutting grass with a scythe around the farthest, oldest tombstones. He almost looked like those drawings of Father Time. Evidently, recognizing us, he snatched off his cap and stopped to stare.
“I vow, ’tis the good duchess, one they used to call the angel,” he said.
“It is indeed,” Ivor said, “just come to pay respects.”
I would have talked to the man and asked his name, but he scurried out. I felt bad about that, but I appreciated his thoughtfulness. How long ago it seemed that I had visited the poor and ill roundabout Blenheim and had spent hours with dear, blind Mrs. Prattley.
The 9th Duke of Marlborough’s grave was not grand or great, so I was surprised at that. The stone was fine, though, cleanly incised. Green turf covered it like a blanket. He had been gone six years already, I realized, as I read the dates. Perhaps I should have come sooner.
As if Ivor had read my mind, he said, “If I lie here someday, come and visit. Sit down and stay a while with me.”
“Pray God, if you lie here someday, I will be long gone for I wish a full life for you, my dearest. And you must not be so melancholy,” I said, squeezing his arm to my rib cage. “You have a long life ahead, and I hope you will find a wife and have a family of your own, for that is something that really matters as well as your pursuit of and love of art. But you know, it is so peaceful and beautiful here . . .”
He bent to kiss my cheek. “Let’s go back,” he said. “I am grateful, though I do not live at Blenheim, that you are willing to come back. Come on, then, for this is Sarah’s special day, and you are special to her—and to me.”
We went out the gate to the road. At least a dozen people stood there with more hurrying up. A woman I did not recognize called out, “So glad you come out of the big house to see us like you done years ago. I was Lizzie Millbank then, Your Grace . . .”
Others called out their names or greetings, calling me duchess or Your Grace. Several said something about my being the good duchess. I shook everyone’s hands. Of all the accolades and honors I had been given lately, including the Legion of Honour award in Paris for starting my children’s hospital and helping with one in Paris, this moved me deeply. So why did I see doom on the horizon and still fear what was coming next?
DESPITE THE WARM weather, the high-ceilinged, huge rooms at Blenheim kept us fairly cool, even when dancing. Sarah Consuelo’s debutante ball was a smashing success. It was indeed like the old days.
Clemmie, however, was not speaking to Winston because he kept muttering—thank heavens where Sarah could not hear him—things like, “You know Nero fiddled while Rome burned. It is coming, Consuelo, dark days. I have done my last pretty peacetime painting.”
Jacques and I relished the music and kept out on the floor, especially for each waltz. I could not believe I was sixty-three and he almost seventy-two, for, I believe, neither of us felt or looked our ages. How long and how far we had come since that first dance we had shared in Paris. As we left the dance floor again, my head was spinning with the “Blue Danube Waltz” and champagne when the Duke of Kent, the king’s younger brother, came up to talk more, for we had met him earlier. He and Princess Marina were such a handsome couple, and he greatly resembled his brother, the king.
“You two must come dine with us next time you are in London,” he told us. “Consuelo, I have heard you were friends with my grandmother, Queen Alexandra.”
“Indeed, for she was very kind to me when I first lived in England and I was a fish out of water. And she tried to help me with my hearing problem.”
“Ah, she would. If this were a Catholic country, I would nominate her for saint. Without her love and that of my wonderful nanny, Charlotte Bill at Sandringham—of course my parents too—who knows what sort of layabout or ruffian I would be.”
So he had a good sense of humor amid all the war talk. As for considering Alexandra a saint, I wondered if he was referring to King Edward forever “cheating” on her, as they put it now. But it was not long before the duke and Jacques were talking aeroplanes, for the duke said he had long been fascinated by flying.
“I earned my pilot’s license in twenty-nine,” I heard him tell my husband, “and two years ago I became a Royal Air Force group captain.”
And so, they were off to the races—the flying races. After a half hour of such chatter with much gesticulating while I talked to Princess Marina, the duke turned to me again. “I apologize for ‘capturing’ your husband,” he told me. “The next time we are in the same vicinity, as I said, both of you must be our guests. Either I will take your Jacques—and you—up in an RAF plane or he will take me up next time I am in France—that is decided. God bless you ladies who put up with the avid airmen the likes of us.”
He took my hand, then started away. Soon I saw Jacques dancing with Sarah. She looked so young, so happy, and I prayed that is the way she would stay.
OUR LAST NIGHT at Blenheim I felt like a silly schoolgirl sneaking out with Sarah at the top of the stairs, but she was still so excited she knocked on our door because she could not sleep. She and I were in nightgowns and robes, for the halls were cool at night. Because of the rising national tensions I was not sure when I would see her again, so I was happy for more private time with her.
“You have a wonderful, blessed life ahead of you, my dear,” I told her. “But do not just be a social butterfly or gadabout. Find some way to help other people, and if—when—you find someone to love and make a home with, make your family your very first priority.”
“I will, Granny. But did you miss your family terribly when you wed and even had to leave your home and country?”
“Yes. My father and brothers at least, for I had a difficult mother.”
“I remember hearing all that. I think I have rather a good one, because we have girl talks, just like you and I . . .”
Her voice trailed off and she stared down the staircase into the darkness. No, not darkness for someone was coming up toward us, the footsteps clear, the old staircase creaking a bit. But there was no solid form there, only the shape of a woman with one hand on the banister and her head held high. She wore a tiara like the one passed down by Marlborough duchesses and a pale, flowing silk gown.
Sarah gripped my hand so hard I flinched. I shuddered with goose bumps and scooted closer to her, pushing her over as a strange coolness wafted at us and I felt the air move.
“No peace,” I thought I heard a female voice say, an angry voice, but then there was nothing.
“It was her!” Sarah said, so quietly I could not really hear her, but I knew what she had said. “I think she said something, didn’t she? Well, I guess you couldn’t hear her, Granny. I think she was looking for a piece of something.”
“Yes, that must be it,” I told Sarah. “And we shall tell no one of this, because they will think we are daft. She let us see her, hear her, so that is special that we were together. As I told you years ago, never be afraid of Duchess Sarah.”
But I was afraid now. Here I was partially deaf without my hearing aid, and I would have sworn I heard “No peace,” a terrible omen from beyond.
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER of that year, I held tight—very tight—to Jacques. We stood on the front lawn of our château while his motorcar loomed nearby. Jacques was in uniform, a colonel in the French Air Force. He had been away on duty but had come home and was leaving me here now. Germany had invaded Poland while France and England were waiting for Herr Hitler’s next move in a period the papers had dubbed “The Phony War” because we were not yet under attack. But there was nothing phony about Jacques’s departing for duty again. I planned to wait for him here at Saint-Georges-Motel, nearest to his airfield where he oversaw pilots, but I could not bear to let him go.
“Consuelo, my love, I will be late, so I must go,” he whispered. But he held hard to me, too. “You . . . you do not have some special premonition, do you?”
“About you? No. I just cannot shake this general feeling of doom. But I will keep busy here with the ill children. In case there is an invasion—”
“More likely as the Huns get closer, it will be refugees streaming through here in the thousands, but I am sure our Maginot Line will hold.”
“I could help with refugees, too. I just cannot bear it that the places and life we love, and came to so late, should perish.”
He stepped back only to seize both my hands hard in his. “Listen to me, Consuelo. France will fight and I with it. And I fight for you, too, my wife and my life. You must be strong for me, because—”
“Pardon, Monsieur Jacques, but there is a phone call for you,” our butler called from the front door of the château. “Important, the man insists, else I would not interrupt you now.”
I bit my lower lip. He kept my hand in his, and we went back inside to his study where he took the call. I could hear rapid French, a deep voice, but could not catch the meaning of the words.
My heart thudded. Something wrong at Blenheim, something about Ivor? “Yes, of course, I will tell her,” he ended the conversation and put the receiver back in its cradle.
“Tell me what?”
He sat at his desk and pulled me onto his lap. “No one is dead or even hurt,” he said, his voice tight, his face so stern. “But the Red Cross has learned there is a hostage list of wealthy people the Germans think they can kidnap to extort much money for their war machine.”
“I heard they did that to Baron Louis de Rothschild in Vienna. It took his family millions of dollars to get him returned. And you are on that list? Then you cannot leave for duty, but must stay here since it has been deemed a safe area by the government.”
“Shh!” he said and put two fingers on my lips. “Yes, I have been told this rural area is safe for now, and they would, no doubt, like to get their filthy hands on me. But the person who is on that Nazi list, my darling, is you.”