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the second son desperately envied Billy his status as their father’s heir, Billy was no less jealous of Andrew’s greater ease with members of the opposite sex.
    Billy, who prized conversation above all other activities, had derived from Lady Alice Salisbury, his maternal grandmother, the tic of rubbing the palms of his hands together in keen anticipation of what grandparent and grandson alike delightedly referred to as “a good talk”—which, from the outset, was precisely what Jean observed Billy to be savoring in his first encounter with Kick. That evening at the Airlie dinner table, Billy and Kick talked and jested and talked some more. The two young people were absorbed in each other throughout dinner. It was as if their other dinner partners—indeed, the rest of the guests—had ceased to exist.
    Both Billy and Kick were visibly distressed when it came time for the group to go on to the FitzRoy dance. An additional issue was that, rather than proceed with the others, Kick was scheduled to participate in another of the ceaseless photo opportunities arranged by her publicity-mad father. She was, she noted pointedly in her diary, “forced” to return to Prince’s Gate. David Ormsby-Gore rescued the situation by volunteering to pick her up there and take her to the dance after she had attended to her publicity chores. When at length David materialized at the embassy residence, it was of no small significance that he was accompanied by Billy Hartington. Ordinarily, Billy was not one to take action in this manner; it was more like him to wait for others to come to him. After that first encounter with Kick, however, nothing in his life would ever again be quite the same.
    Many years later, Andrew would perhaps come closer than anyone to grasping Billy’s relationship with Kick. “It was,” Andrew would say, “difficult for each to imagine the existence of the other. They were so utterly different. They adored being with one another because each was a constant surprise to the other. What were they going to find out about this person? What was this person going to do next?”
    At the Palace of Westminster that first night, the music and dancing went on till daybreak. For most of the young people at the time, the principal drama at the FitzRoy dance concerned not Kick Kennedy, but rather Debo Mitford. To the outrage of her mother, Lady Redesdale, Debo violated the rules by dancing every dance with her great friend Mark Howard of Castle Howard. Her feelings for Mark were by no means romantic. On the contrary, it was Andrew Cavendish in whom Debo was by this point exclusively interested. Having been seated next to an apparently quite fascinated Andrew at a dinner party earlier in the Season—as it happened, shortly before Andrew met Kick—Debo had anxiously looked for him at every subsequent dance and party that she attended. This evening, her consummate disappointment over Andrew’s absence had, by her own account, led to the display with Mark Howard.
    Kick, meanwhile, spent as much time as possible at the Palace of Westminster with Billy. When Kick wrote about the evening afterward in her diary, the word “romantic” appeared there for the first time. And in the scrapbook she maintained separately, she preserved a first press photograph of him, dashing in winged collar and black tie, as he danced with the Speaker’s granddaughter, Mary.
    A week later, Kick and Billy were both included in the July 1, 1938, coming-of-age celebrations for Billy’s cousin Charlie Lansdowne at Bowood House in Wiltshire. Immeasurably complicating the situation was the fact that both Andrew Cavendish and Debo Mitford were present at the ball as well. There had long been an undercurrent of tension between the Cavendish brothers, not least because of a custom observed by the British aristocracy, the purpose of which was to keep the family estates intact. According to the unwritten law of primogeniture, the firstborn male child could