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The Intrigues of Jennie Lee
The Intrigues of Jennie Lee is marvelous in so many ways... An excellent take on the twisted, dangerous politics of 1930s Britain and a rattling good read.
C.J. Sansom, author of Dominion and the Shardlake mysteries.
The Intrigues of Jennie Lee
A Novel
The Intrigues of Jennie Lee
A Novel
Alex Rosenberg
Winchester, UK
Washington, USA
First published by Top Hat Books, 2020
Top Hat Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., No. 3 East St., Alresford,
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© Alex Rosenberg 2019
ISBN: 978 1 78904 458 4
978 1 78904 459 1 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948220
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.
The rights of Alex Rosenberg as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Dramatis Personae
About the Author
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Guide
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Start of Content
Dramatis Personae
About the Author
Preface
Almost all persons mentioned in this work really lived. They actually committed most of political acts and led almost all of the private lives credited to them here, at least before the British political upheaval of August 1931. A Dramatis Personae follows the narrative.
Chapter One
Ramsay MacDonald knew he was a handsome, even charismatically attractive man. That January of 1904, he was thirty-seven, manly, tall, with piercing eyes, a mop of curly dark hair, dramatically streaked white and grey, and a fashionably wide, dark moustache that extended half an inch beyond either side of his mouth.
MacDonald was the leader of the Labour Party. He’d been its parliamentary candidate for Leicester, three hundred miles south, in England, repeatedly unsuccessful but unbowed. Now, he was traveling across the politically more fertile ground of the Scottish coal country, speaking at meetings, making friends among union men still suspicious of socialism, convincing people his party stood a chance. MacDonald had been doing this for more than a decade. It wouldn’t be long now, he felt, before he’d find his way into parliament.
Between the steel trusses of the great railway bridge over the Firth of Forth, the North Sea looked forbidding from his unheated second-class railway carriage. An hour later, at 4:30, the winter gloom had already been enveloped by night when MacDonald alighted on the Cowdenbeath platform; just beyond the railway bridge twenty feet above the High Street, slicing the town in half. Set on a plane between rolling hills, Cowdenbeath was surrounded by coal pits so extensive that after only fifty years or so they were beginning to produce a noticeable subsidence at one end of the High Street. Nowhere in the Scottish coalfields was more fertile ground for Ramsay MacDonald’s evangelical socialism.
The miner’s union had booked him into a convenient local hotel, a temperance hotel. That was no objection so far as MacDonald was concerned. Like the other buildings on the street, the Arcade Hotel was an unimpressive two-storey stone building. He noticed the small attached Arcade Theatre next to the hotel and chuckled. He heard his Scottish forbears whisper: A hotel, even a temperance hotel, hard by a theatre? It had to be a brothel.
The gas-lit glow from the two windows to the left of the entry door was inviting in the early darkness of that late mid-winter afternoon. MacDonald entered and smiled at the man standing behind a small raised counter that didn’t look much like a registration desk. The man looked up and smiled expectantly.
“Good evening.”
“I’m Ramsay MacDonald. I believe I’ve been booked in by—”
“It’s Mr MacDonald of the Labour Party, James.”
It was a young woman’s voice from the vicinity of the fireplace, a half dozen feet away in what passed for the hotel’s lounge.
The woman came to the desk, wiping her hands on an apron and extending both to their guest. It was a warmer greeting than a Scotsman expected or proffered. She looked MacDonald over, seeming to nod to herself as though she liked what she saw.
“I’m Euphemia Lee. This is my husband, James Lee.”
The pair looked more like Edinburgh intelligentsia than coalfield hoteliers. He was thin, slight, studious in his spectacles, with thick dark hair in need of cutting, combed down to the right. James Lee wore a tie, albeit askew from his detachable collar, above a tweed waistcoat, buttoned against the cold. His wife was almost as tall as her husband, decidedly pretty with chestnut hair cut short above the shoulders, quite out of fashion. James Lee had also extended his hand.
“So pleased to meet you.”
MacDonald had to decide whose hand to grasp.
He took the man’s and said, “Pleased to meet you too, sir.”
As MacDonald signed the woman came forward and grasped the Gladstone bag at his foot.
“I’ll show you to your room, Mr MacDonald.”
She was mounting the stair before he could protest. Well, too small a hotel for a porter, I warrant, but it’s no woman’s place to carry a guest’s bag. Stranger still, Euphemia Lee didn’t just unlock the door to his room, she entered, placed the bag on a bureau and opened it. Then she turned to MacDonald, stood and stared hard at him. There was no mistaking the look. MacDonald flushed, went to the door to usher her out. She left with a smile too wide merely to signal hospitality.
Have I indeed come to a brothel? The thought made him smile only briefly. It was followed by a rush of images, emotions, flashes of warmth coursing through his body, and finally by thoughts he’d been raised to call “unworthy.” This had happened before, often enough for MacDonald to think he understood it.
Successful political men exuded a personal magnetism that harnessed people, women especially, to their causes. The temptations had ruined more than one promising career: Charles Parnell’s, Randolph Churchill’s.
He tried to visualise the frankness he’d seen in Euphemia Lee’s look. But he couldn’t. You’re probably imagining it anyway. Still, she’s a breagh lass. The Gaelic came back to him. Then he opened his bag and took out the speech he’d prepared for the meeting of the l
ocal branch of the Labour Party and the Fife and Kinross Miners Association.
* * *
The three were returning from the evening meeting at which MacDonald had spoken, warmly and powerfully, of the need for unity, solidarity, the role of the unions, but also of the Christian roots of socialism as against the secular champions of the cause. James Lee was feeling more optimistic than he had for a long time.
“So, the Prime Minister has really promised you unopposed seats at the next elections? How many?”
“Well, as many as he thinks he’ll lose to the Conservatives if we split the Liberal vote. I think we can hope for upwards of twenty-five seats.”
“A real political party then.”
MacDonald didn’t reply. He was tired, but pleased with the evening. Euphemia Lee was walking between them and now he found himself wondering if the way she brushed against him was accidental, and whether her hand had really grazed his. He wasn’t hoping, just wondering. Surely he’d just mistaken that first glance in his room, fantasised her interest.
James Lee spoke again,
“You’ll be staying tomorrow night, Mr MacDonald?”
The other man nodded.
“There’s a Gilbert and Sullivan company at the theatre tomorrow evening. Mikado I think.“
“I regret, music is not one of my passions, Mr Lee. And I’ve an early train to Glasgow the next morning.”
“Sorry to hear it, sir. I never miss a concert myself.”
They reached the hotel and stepped into the lobby.
“I’ll bid you good evening.” Ramsay MacDonald nodded to them both.
* * *
It was near nine the next evening as MacDonald prepared to retire. It had been a good day; a visit to Fife and Kinross Miner’s Union hall, the mining school, then supper with the priest at the Catholic Parish hall. Labour couldn’t neglect the devout who’d come across the Irish Sea for the work.
He’d already dimmed the only lamp in the room, but MacDonald could still hear laugher and even snatches of song from the theatre next door. As he brought his nightshirt over his head, there was a knock at the door. His first thought was that he had no dressing gown to put on.
“Who is it?”
The voice was Euphemia Lee’s.
“Please open. It’s cold out here.”
He turned the key and before he could open the door, she darted in.
Ramsay MacDonald had never seen a woman completely naked before, not even his wife. Yet there one was, reflecting the light of the gas lamp like a figure in a painting by Alma Tadema. Before he could say a word the woman had embraced him and then began pulling him towards the bed. The single word, “But...” was stifled by the kiss while the rest of his body responded with a swiftness he had never experienced.
Several things happened to Ramsay MacDonald’s body in the next hour he could never have imagined. Things were done to it, things that were beyond his ken. What’s more he found himself responding to her in ways he might have previously described as unspeakable but the woman treated as delightful. And all accompanied by Arthur Sullivan’s catchy tunes wafting in from the theatre next door.