Read Online Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter by Barbara Leaming - Free Book Online

demands.
    Every beat of the proceedings was minutely analyzed and assessed by the Cavendish boys and their guests at Churchdale Hall. One speech, though, seems to have had particular resonance for the group. Lord Cranborne, the duchess’s brother, set out to dismantle Chamberlain’s claims to have obtained peace with honor. “Peace he certainly brought back to us, and there is not one of us who will not wish to thank him with a full heart for that priceless gift … But where is honor? I have looked and looked and I cannot see it. It seems to me to be a wicked mockery to describe by so noble a name the agreement which has been reached. The peace of Europe has in fact been saved—and we had better face it—only by throwing to the wolves a little country whose courage and dignity in the face of almost intolerable provocation has been a revelation and an inspiration to us all.”
    Cranborne was equally dismissive of Chamberlain’s assertion that he had secured peace for our time. Hitler, Cranborne pointed out in acid tones, had failed to keep earlier promises with regard to Austria and Czechoslovakia. “These precedents do not justify us in abandoning our anxiety.”
    So, the question of whether there might yet be war persisted in looming over Billy and Kick on the one hand, and Andrew and Debo on the other, when, in the course of the house party, the two couples visited nearby Chatsworth, the family seat of the Devonshire dukes. Though Eddy Devonshire and his family were not due to take up residence at the ducal palace until Christmastime, Billy seemed unable to wait to show Kick all that would one day be his. The great house—for the family always referred to it as “the house”—had been built in its original form by Sir William Cavendish and his wife, Bess of Hardwick, after their marriage in 1547. Now, much altered, enlarged, and enriched by the generations since, Chatsworth, its yellow stone facade glittering in the sunlight, had achieved a completely unique, and somehow magical, romantic perfection. Beyond its doors were 175 rooms and miles of corridors filled with the treasures accumulated over centuries: astonishing collections of paintings, drawings, manuscripts, books, minerals, furniture, and jewels. The house itself was situated in a thousand acres of parkland, and within the park there was a garden covering more than a hundred acres.
    In the midst of wandering along garden paths lined with mysterious rock arrangements and towering trees, Kick, with her sense of fun, seemed to take special delight in the famous Squirting Tree, as it had been dubbed by the future Queen Victoria when she first happened upon it at thirteen years of age. Activated by a wheel hidden behind some adjacent rocks, the metal branches of what looked to be a willow tree squirted water on unsuspecting passersby. The Squirting Tree was a trick, a practical joke. But as Andrew would darkly reflect many years afterward, it was the future that was destined to play tricks on these four unsuspecting young people—tricks that neither couple had anticipated on that laughter-filled autumn day in 1938.
    On the sixth of October, Kick and Debo headed back to London, and Billy and Andrew went on to Cambridge, where the elder brother was in his last year and the second son entered his first term. That same day, despite the attacks on the Munich Agreement that had riveted the young people’s attention, a motion supporting Chamberlain’s actions—“That this House approves the policy of His Majesty’s Government by which war was averted in the recent crisis and supports their efforts to secure a lasting peace”—passed by an emphatic vote of 366 to 144. Nonetheless, the words of the critics who questioned the morality and efficacy of the prime minister’s deal with Hitler had opened a national debate that would go on for months to come—until, in Andrew’s formulation, shame over what Chamberlain had done at Munich finally trumped