Death at Blenheim Palace by Robin Paige Read Free Book Online Page A

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. . . .
     
Winston Churchill to his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough 1898
     
 
 
 
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