A Flaw in the Blood (18 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

S
IR THOMAS ROBINSON WOOLFIELD WAS
an immensely wealthy Englishman. He had made his money in the building trade, and used it, during his prime, to bring the seaside village of Cannes into fashion. His great friend, Lord Henry Brougham—who had founded the
Edinburgh Review,
abolished slavery in the English colonies, and sat in Earl Grey's cabinet before his elevation to the House of Lords—liked to say that
he
had discovered Cannes thirty years before, and made it the sanitorium of Europe; and to be fair, it was Brougham's living there when Parliament was out of session that made the village such an object of curiosity to the London
ton.
It was Robinson Woolfield, however, who built the houses the Fashionable Great chose to live in, while they strolled the
promenade des anglais
in Nice.

He had built one such house for himself, of course—a very grand edifice of limestone he dubbed the Villa Victoria, being nothing if not a loyal subject. Behind and around its classical grey walls he set a botanic garden, filled with exotic specimens impossible to grow in the English climate. It was a perfect place for parties, and for assignations among the palms; for larcenous negotiations and amicable se-ductions. Lately, he had ordered a croquet lawn to be established there—for the use of Prince Leopold and his circle.

Fitzgerald and Georgiana were standing together, under one of the palm trees, with a gargantuan jardinière of jasmine scenting the air around their heads, watching Leopold as he carefully aligned his square-headed mallet and with considerable finesse, whacked his dark blue ball. It rolled with perfect momentum across the shaved grass of Sir Thomas's perfect lawn, and struck Louisa's yellow ball with a dull thud.

“Huzzah!” he cried, swinging his stick into the air. “Now I must
send
you, Louisa!”

“Of course you must,” she sighed, “and we shall all of us be probing among the plumbago for the next quarter-hour while you go merrily around the wickets. I should like to win just
once,
Leo, before I return to London!”

The boy grinned at her, but utterly without mercy; he set his black ball close to hers, put his boot firmly upon it, turned his mallet in the direction of the dense growth of plumbago, and whacked again. His stroke, reverberating through his ball into Louisa's, sent it careening wildly off the shaved grass and into the jungle of Sir Thomas's garden.

“I'm afraid of you now,” Georgie declared, as she lifted her mallet. “You're going to dispatch all of us in a similar fashion, aren't you?”

“If you will but give me the opportunity,” Leopold said with dutiful politeness. “I always play by the rules, you know. I'm not a poor sport, either. I should like for Louisa to win—
truly
I should—but I do not think she is cut out for it. She doesn't want victory enough. I do. I suppose it's the blood of kings that runs in my veins.”

He uttered the words offhandedly enough; but for an instant, as he stood in a blaze of southern sunlight with his head high and his jubilant gaze surveying the company, Leopold looked invincible. The tentative boy of yesterday, too terrified to handle a fretsaw, seemed a chimera of a nursery fable.
What mightn't the lad do,
Fitzgerald mused,
if he could shake this illness off his back?

Then Louisa uttered a groan of despair from deep within the shrubbery, and the moment dissipated.

It was a tradition, at the Villa Victoria, that Gunther and Leo formed a team. Georgie and Fitzgerald were designated another. Louisa was left to Sir Thomas, who, while not old enough to be her
actual
late father, was certainly old enough to be a father of some kind.

“Good Lord!” he cried, as he set down his whiskey and soda on one of a group of small tables that lined the croquet lawn. “Miss Bowater! How are we to set a fashion for croquet in Cannes, my dear, if the ladies observe you to be perennially on your knees in the flower beds?”

“It
is
unfortunate that Lord Rokeby could not have formed another of the party,” Georgie murmured to Fitzgerald. “He's exactly the sort of person Louisa Bowater ought to marry. Well-breeched, no more than thirty, ambitious in his career—none of your Bond Street Beaux—but an intelligent fellow and exceedingly well-bred. I quite like him.”

“I never knew you for a matchmaker, Georgie,” Fitzgerald chided. “As I recall, you hated the well-meaning busybodies who attempted to order
your
life.”

“Am I a
busybody,
Patrick?”

Her chin lifted imperiously. He was pleased to see colour in her sunken cheeks; even her voice was less hoarse than it had been yesterday, at the Château Leader Christmas feast. The sun of Cannes agreed with her, as did the light muslin gown she had unearthed somewhere in a shop, impossible to discover at such a season in England. She had worn black gloves in respect of Leopold's loss, of course. Fitzgerald, like all the men present, sported a crepe armband.

His hand moved involuntarily to cup the nape of her neck, to draw her mouth to his, to kiss away her outrage, and silence the mere suggestion she was matronly—but his fingers clenched in midair.

“Of course not,” he said. “You're right about Louisa. Rokeby's a fool. Of what possible use is a diplomatic career if it ties one everlastingly to a desk?”

A cry of triumph emanated from the plumbago; Sir Thomas's debonair moustache and side-whiskers emerged from the foliage, with Louisa's yellow ball held high. Leopold, Fitzgerald noticed, had nearly circled the course in the interval. Sir Thomas's shout, however, put the boy off his stroke; the ball glanced away from the final hoop, and with an exaggerated look of agony, the Prince tossed his mallet over his shoulder and fell to his knees.

“Your turn, I think, Miss Armistead,” Dr. Gunther said with a punctilious bow.

“The boy should not engage in dramatics,” she murmured. “He'll be bleeding from those knees by bedtime.”

In the event, however, Georgie was proved wrong: Leopold was in good enough form that evening to steal away from the Château Leader, and the party of men who unexpectedly called upon Lady Bowater, just after dinnertime.

The eight-year-old understood only part of what was said. He was supposed to be in his nursery, and was forced to hang over the balustrade of the grand limestone staircase in order to catch Lord Rokeby's conversation. His Royal Highness had been in France long enough to recognise the uniforms of the gendarmes. He was worried they'd been sent to carry him back to England—but quickly realised his mistake when the talk turned to murder.

“Louisa,” he whispered urgently through her door a few moments later. “You must
help
me. We must
warn
them.”

“Who?” she demanded, looking up from the book she was reading by the nursery night light.

“Dr. Armistead and her friend. Rokeby means to arrest them. Do you think we can saddle the donkeys by ourselves?”

*    *    *

It was Louisa who sent up a note to Georgiana, while she and Leo waited uneasily in the main reception room of the hotel on the Toulon road, trying not to draw attention. As Leo had spent several nights there while Louisa's father died, it was likely the staff would recognise him and fuss. He had very nearly elected to remain outside with Jacques and Catherine, who were tethered to a hitching post; but resolution and courage seemed demanded by the peculiar circumstances. Leopold had endured pain enough in his short life to fully comprehend that such things as discomfort and fear were temporary; on no account should they be allowed to dictate his choices or behaviour. He was, had he known it, singularly like his father Albert in this respect; far more than his brothers, he could subsume the physical to a higher mental purpose. But Leopold, as he grasped Louisa's hand and pulled his soft hat lower on his forehead, thought only that Affie and Bertie would call him poor-spirited if he hung back; and such a thought was insupportable.

“Tell me the tale from the beginning,” Fitzgerald said. “Lord Rokeby is come from Nice, with a party of gendarmes, expressly to arrest me?”

“And Dr. Armistead,” Louisa said unsteadily. She looked, Fitzgerald thought, as though she had been crying. “There was a telegram from Paris, I gather—with some sort of information—I didn't hear all the talk myself. It was mostly Leo—and we were afraid to linger any longer. It was imperative that we not be discovered overlistening Lord Rokeby's conversation. Else we might have been prevented from warning you.”

Fitzgerald glanced at Georgiana. “Very dashing of you, my dear Miss Bowater, but foolish. If we
were
dangerous folk, you'd be regretting our acquaintance by and by. We might carry you and Prince Leo off, as Royal hostages.”

“It was Leo who
would
come,” she said simply. “He refused to believe you were the sort of man who could shoot his own son in cold blood. Any more than I can believe it. And the idea that Miss Armistead could place all her love and trust in such a monster—”

Fitzgerald stared at her, uncomprehending. His heartbeat had suddenly thickened and slowed, filling his mind with a throbbing roar that demanded all attention. “My
son
? For the love of Christ—what did you say about my son?”

“His name was Theo.” Leo reached for Fitzgerald's cold hand, his voice oddly commanding. “Rokeby said so. Did you not know that he was dead, sir?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

U
NLIKE WINDSOR, OSBORNE WAS A
very new house—built some sixteen years previous on the site of an old and miserable Georgian structure overlooking the Solent near Cowes. Prince Albert had designed the house in the Italian style, with warring campaniles—one sporting a clock, and the other, a flag. The central Pavilion was intended entirely for his own family, while guests and members of the Household occupied the wings. Many of those who visited it thought it very ugly, with its marble columns and stucco façades; others found the arrangement of rooms somewhat daring. Most of the principal ones were open to each other—the dining room giving way to the drawing room, and this to the billiards room—around three sides of the central staircase, which made it an airy house in summer and a chilly one in December.

But Papa, Alice thought as she hurriedly descended the Pavilion staircase beneath Dyce's
Neptune Entrusting Command of the Sea to Britannia,
hadn't cared much about the crowds of guests and their accommodation. At Osborne, he'd been trying to find some peace—and found it out-of-doors. With a narrow band of sea between himself and England, he'd tried to recapture the Rosenau of his childhood.

He'd purchased nearly two thousand acres of the Isle of Wight at immense cost, from Mama's private funds. There was a secluded beach where they bathed in machines; a progression of valleys and woods; gardens leveled and drained at Papa's instruction; and of course—their model farm.

We must practice the virtues of life, children,
he'd said as the four eldest were given their garden tools, perfectly sized for their hands and engraved with their initials. They'd each planted a tree, which Bertie marked with their names on carefully-painted signs. Later, they'd learned to mould brick and lay stone, the Swiss Cottage rising under their hands, Affie hauling dirt in a barrow like a common labourer. Papa had paid the boys a set wage for the hours they spent with the carpenters. A lieutenant in the Royal Engineers had directed the digging of earthen fortifications. The Cottage had an entire kitchen where she and Vicky learned to cook, scrubbing out the copper pots with their own hands.

They had talked a good deal of the future in those days, while the soups simmered and the bread baked in the wood-fired oven—dreaming of love, and romance, and elaborate weddings. Papa would ultimately determine who they married, of course—and Vicky had spoiled sport by falling in love with the first man she met, at fourteen. Fritz
was
a man, too, Alice thought—ten years older than Vicky—and he'd decided to marry her when she was only ten. His calculations were obviously dynastic; he was Crown Prince of Prussia, she was the Princess Royal of England. He could not have presumed to a better match. But it was dampening, all the same, to think that the snug conversations of the Swiss Cottage had always been pointless. Stupid and unreal. Just dreams.

Alice shuddered slightly as she pushed through the heavy back doors to the terrace, and almost ran down the broad stone steps to the gardens. How often had she fooled herself ? Wasted time in hopes and plans, when everything about her life was a foregone conclusion? Had she truly chosen Louis for herself—kind, charming, good-humoured Louis? Or had she, too, been maneuvered into marriage by Papa?

You cannot marry Louis, Liebchen. The flaw in your blood . . .

Had Vicky even
seen
her own kitchens, in Potsdam and Berlin?

Old Crawford, her favourite of the gardeners, had gone into blacks for Papa. Alice eyed him covertly as she wandered among the winter beds laid out beside the Swiss Cottage; he had probably had his work clothes dyed, she decided, rather than mourning made up fresh. She hoped it had not cost him his Christmas.

“Good day, Crawford,” she said as she approached the playhouse door. “How are you keeping?”

“Very well, Your Highness, and kind you are, I'm sure, to ask.” He doffed his soft cap and clutched it to his chest, his rheumy eyes filling with tears. “Terrible news about the Consort, if I may presume to say it.”

“Yes,” Alice replied. She had no desire to talk about Papa, even to Crawford—who had worked under the direction of Toward, the head gardener, on every square inch of Osborne's gardens. The old man's sympathy was immense; it would smother her like a shovel full of earth.

“I can't get it through my head that I won't be seeing him striding down the path from the big house,” the gardener persisted, “like always.
Let us cultivate our garden, Crawford,
he used to say—meaning the garden of life, as it were. Very deep thinker, the Consort.”

“Yes,” Alice said again. “Thank you, Crawford. We shall all feel his absence acutely. What am I to plant this spring? It will be my last garden at Osborne, you know. I am to be married in July.”

“Then we must plant lilies, Your Highness, so you've sommat more'n orange blossom to carry to the altar.”

She smiled; he read her look as one of dismissal, and touched his hand to his forehead. She began to walk aimlessly among the beds, remembering what had flourished here, what had faltered there. Each of them had a garden, where they were allowed to grow whatever they liked—although vegetables, Papa had said, were an absolute. He liked the idea of them eating what they'd grown—another illusion of self-sufficiency, she thought. But it was true the bits of earth became the only places in the entire Kingdom that any of them thought of as theirs. Even now that Bertie and Affie and Vicky had grown up and gone away, they sent instructions to Crawford each year, about the choice of plants and arrangement of things in their private beds. It was important to know that some part of them remained rooted at Osborne.

And here was Leopold's garden.

Her brother loved roses, and these were carefully set out among a quantity of peonies, whose lush foliage hid the gawky canes even after their flowering was done. In the dark days of December, however, the garden looked like it had been swept by fire—or laid waste by blight. Thorns held aloft on bare sticks, no sign of the petals slumbering beneath the ground. The worked beds looked as raw as a newly-turned grave. She shivered again. What if Leo—

You're reading portents into everything,
she chided herself.
It's absurd.

A bright splash of green on the soil, close to the brick edging, drew her eye; she bent down to examine it closely.

“How is the young master, if I may be so bold?” Crawford asked suddenly at her elbow.

“Very well. You know he is gone to Cannes, for his health?”

“I heard as how he was packed off to France,” the old man said darkly. “I don't hold with France for children, myself.”

“I'm sure Leo will have the strength to resist its delights.” She rose, dusting off her gloves. “What is that green stuff, Crawford?”

He started forward. “You've never touched it, Your Highness? That's a bit of ratsbane I set out for them voles. Ravaging the rootstock, they are. I won't have that, in my gardens.”

“But what makes it green?”

“The arsenic,” he explained. “Grey in the packet, but green in the earth. Scheele's Green, they call it. Used for all manner of things, I reckon.”

Alice crouched down once more, her black silk skirts pooling around her boots, and studied the bright green smear from a distance. It was vivid enough to colour paint, or dye fabric. Or shade the leaves of an artificial flower, for the trimming of hats . . .

“Where do you get your ratsbane, Crawford?” she asked him idly.

“From the chemist's shop, in Cowes.”

“Very well. I'll write to Leo about the voles.”

That evening, after she had read Bertie's letter from Cambridge a second time—a brief two paragraphs recounting the essentials of Papa's funeral, and a longer passage about Natty Rothschild's latest party, and a prank he and Natty had got up among the regius professors—she sat in contemplation by the fire.

Lacking Violet, Alice had been thrown back on her own resources. She had pled a headache at teatime, and slipped away in the dog cart to Cowes.

It never occurred to Mr. Daggett, the chemist, that a princess might wander into the village entirely by herself. He had talked to her in complete ignorance of her identity—and been most informative.

“Well, naturally, miss, if your flowers were in water the whole vase was tainted,” he'd scolded her. “I'm not surprised your kitty died. Wonderful prone to lapping water from vases, cats are . . .”

Alice was explicit about her Snowball's demise: the low fever, the gastric distress, the vomiting and loss of appetite.

Cupric hydrogen arsenite,
Mr. Daggett said. A common pigment, known as Scheele's Green, from the Swede who invented it a hundred years ago. Used to colour wallpaper. Paint. Fabric. Even decorative sugars, for use in pastry . . .

She understood, now, what Mama had tried to tell her—with cryptic utterances and frigid contempt. Baron Stockmar's letter—and a quarter-hour with Mr. Daggett—had made it all quite plain. Papa had leached the poison quite deliberately from her bright green leaves, and drunk it down neat.

Why?
she demanded of the blue flames at her feet.
If you chose to end your life, Papa, I want to know why.

But there was no one at Osborne who could tell her.