Free Death at Blenheim Palace by Robin Paige Page A

woolly adventure, and so out-and-out American! Almost as brash as Roosevelt’s scheme to dig a canal across the Isthmus of Panama.”
    He sobered. “Although of course Roosevelt has exactly the right idea. If he has a canal, he won’t need two navies, one on the east coast and one on the west.”
    “The canal, the motor car trip—it’s all the same idea, when you stop to think about it,” Charles replied. “A linkage between east and west. Except that Horatio Nelson Jackson—what a wonderful name!—is doing it on his own. The ultimate personal effort.”
    “The ultimate folly, if you ask me,” Marlborough said, pulling his thin eyebrows together. “What idiot would want to drive a motor car where there aren’t any roads? And if Jackson wanted to get across the country, why didn’t the fool simply go by train?”
    “Where’s your sense of adventure, Sunny?” asked Miss Deacon playfully. “I think it sounds like divine fun, and frightfully dangerous.” She shivered deliciously. “Why, the man might be captured by Indians, or murdered by robbers!”
    “As a matter of fact,” Charles said, “I read that Jackson drove safely into Omaha, Nebraska, on Sunday. Must have been quite a celebration. But he still has a long way to go—some thirteen hundred miles.”
    “Yes, but if he’s got as far as Omaha,” Kate said, “he’s more than halfway there. And he’s over the Rocky Mountains, which must have been the worst part. It’s all downhill from there, so to speak.”
    “I’d give anything to be in New York when he arrives,” Consuelo said, her eyes sparkling. “Wouldn’t you, Kate? Such an amazing feat—I’m sure the whole city will turn out. There’ll be a parade on Fifth Avenue, and bands and bunting and flags flying everywhere, just like the Fourth of July. Glorious!”
    “You Americans,” Marlborough said scornfully. “Always so childish. Any silly excuse for a parade.”
    Consuelo, obviously wounded, lowered her eyes. Charles thought the remark offensively patronizing, and did not even smile, but Miss Deacon laughed and Northcote and Winston joined in.
    And with that, dessert was served.

CHAPTER NINE
    Thursday, 14 May
     
 
 
Rosamond the fayre daughter of Walter lord Clifford, concubine to Henry II (poisoned by queen Elianor as some thought) dyed at Woodstocke where king Henry had made for her a house of wonderfull working, so that no man or woman might come to her, but he that was instructed by the king, or such as were right secret with him touching the matter. This house by some was named Labyrinthus . . . which was wrought like unto a knot in a garden, called a maze. . . .
     
Stowe’s Annals, ed. 1631
     
 
 
 
Walking was one of Kate’s passions. When she was at home at Bishop’s keep, the estate she had inherited from her Ardleigh aunts, she went out for a tramp through the lanes and footpaths almost every day, wearing sensible boots and an ankle-length walking skirt and carrying field glasses and a stout walking stick. She’d brought her walking gear to Blenheim and hoped to go out often, if only to escape from the uninhabitable palace.
    How did Consuelo manage, she wondered with a shudder, living day after day in such a dispiriting place? She couldn’t endure it, she knew. Blenheim would suck all the life and creativity right out of her. Perhaps it was her American democratic spirit, but she knew she’d feel as if she were living in a vast imperial museum, full of relics of British conquest and domination, and she was its curator. Or a splendidly gilded jail, and she was both its jailor and its prisoner.
    But the Park around the palace was lovely beyond words. This morning, the rising sun was a pale silver globe draped with ghostlike mists, and in the pearly light, Kate could see geese and ducks and swans sailing on the lake and hear them speaking to one another in low, comforting calls. However she might feel about the palace, she had fallen in love with the lake and