A Flaw in the Blood (19 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

D
EAR GOD,” GEORGIANA SAID, SINKING
down on a settee, “you must be mistaken. We all saw Theo leave on horseback, Patrick—he escorted your wife to Sheerness!”

“Tell me everything you heard.” Fitzgerald crouched to Leo's height. “Everything you know.”

“There's not much.” The boy was too pale, but he spoke as firmly as though delivering an oration to an exacting tutor. “Rokeby received a telegram from the embassy in Paris. He'd told them about our Christmas, you see—that we'd all spent the day together; it's Rokeby's job to report my doings in Cannes. And the embassy wired back that you had shot your son, and escaped to France. Rokeby is to fetch you back. But he stopped first to place a guard at Château Leader. You scraped our acquaintance, he said, in order to do us some harm. But that's
nonsense,
isn't it? Because we just stumbled onto you, on the Fréjus road, and you can't have known we'd be there; and anyway, Dr. Armistead is a friend of Papa's. So I told Louisa that Rokeby's got it all muddled and we have to help. Papa would never swerve from his Duty to a Friend.”

“I knew there must be some mistake,” Louisa added. “Shouldn't you tell Lord Rokeby what happened, Mr. Fitzgerald, and clear matters up—so that we all may be quite comfortable again?”

Fitzgerald stood like a stone in the middle of the room, his expression closed, as though he heard and saw nothing of the scene before him. “Von Stühlen,” he muttered. “Or one of his rogues. They crushed my boy when they couldn't find me.”

“I'm so sorry,” Georgie said brokenly.

“I'll
kill
the man.” He glanced wildly around, as though von Stühlen were lurking in the shadows. “That's what I've got to do, Georgie—kill the bloody villain with my own bare hands! Oh,
God
—my boy, my boy . . .”

He turned his back, head buried in his fingers.

From beyond the reception room doorway, there was a sudden bustle of arrival—the sound of men's voices calling, some of them in French.

“Rokeby,” Louisa said. “Oughtn't you to
explain
?”

“You'll gain nothing by talking, Patrick,” Georgiana warned. “We'll be carried back to London and thrown in Newgate. She'll have us
exactly
where she wants us.”

“
Who
shall?” Leo demanded alertly.

Heavy footsteps clattered across the stone floor of the hotel.

Fitzgerald seemed unable to move.

Leopold tugged his hand. “You must take the donkeys, sir. They're tethered out front. We've put the peasant things from the Christmas charades in the panniers. You may wear them, as a disguise.”

He had clearly planned this in the haste of stealing from the Château Leader—and Fitzgerald, despite his strange paralysis, recognised the boy's selfless courage.
That blood of kings,
he thought.

“Quickly, through the French window,” Louisa urged. “We shall detain Lord Rokeby for a moment. But only a moment.”

“Gibbon,” Fitzgerald attempted.

“If you will be so good as to ask Mr. Fitzgerald's manservant to settle his bill, and return with our traps to London,” Georgie suggested. “And thank you both. We are exceedingly in your debt.”

“Sir.”
Leopold looked beseechingly up into Fitzgerald's wooden face, then dragged him by the hand to the window.

“Lord Rokeby!” Louisa cried from the doorway. “We did not think to meet you here! Leopold and I have been enjoying a bit of a lark!”

They lost themselves among the twisting streets and white houses of Cannes, which glowed faintly in the December darkness as though they had absorbed the phosphorescence of the neighbouring sea. At first Fitzgerald was capable only of giving his donkey its head, and made no effort to guide it, haste being paramount; and Georgiana followed. But at length she thought it wise to say gently, “Patrick—this beast is making straight for its stall at the Château Leader,” and Fitzgerald roused himself from the black thoughts in which his soul had sunk, and looked around him.

“We'll make for the Fréjus road,” he said, “through the pines. There's a bridle path the donkeys use.”

Fréjus lay west, over a mountain pass toward Toulon, while Rokeby and Nice lay east. From Toulon, perhaps, they could find a train north.

They rode in silence for some time. No one pursued them.

Emerging at the summit of the road where they had encountered Gunther and his party two days before, Georgiana pulled her donkey to a halt and dismounted.

She walked a little way into the trees.

When she reappeared a few moments later, she was dressed as a peasant boy.

“I shall sell these in Toulon,” she declared, thrusting her petticoats and gown into one of Catherine's panniers. “We'll need the funds if we're to reach Coburg swiftly.”

They stopped that night beneath a farmer's haystack, just past Fréjus. There were thirty miles to travel the next day; they would have to sell the donkeys in Grimaud, Fitzgerald decided, and purchase seats on a public stage. Alone, he would have pressed on through the darkness, forgoing sleep—but the chill night air had settled in Georgiana's lungs. She was coughing again.

He waited until she fell asleep to wrap his arms around her. She needed his warmth. But it was Theo he thought of as she dreamed beside him—another child, vulnerable and beloved, that he'd failed in the dark.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

T
HE MANSERVANT WAS TAKEN?
”

“Yes,” Rokeby said. “He's being held at the gendarmerie here in Nice. We expect to release him, however—it's no crime to be employed by a renegade.”

“Unless, of course, one has assisted in his crimes,” von Stühlen observed.

“There's not the least evidence this man did so. Or none that would stand up in court.”

“And being the servant of a barrister, he presumably knows the rules of evidence?”

“Being an Englishman should be enough,” the diplomat retorted.

Von Stühlen repressed a smile. They were so proud of their laws, these English lords, as though an unwritten constitution could erase the barriers of wealth and privilege. They regarded him with something like pity—something like contempt—as the product of a feudal world. And yet, he could learn more from Fitzgerald's valet in half an hour than Rokeby had managed in two days. He understood the fine points of pain.

“I must talk to him,” he said with finality. “Particularly if you intend to let him go. And when he leaves his gaol, I will follow him.”

“You think he'll go after Fitzgerald, then?”

“Naturally.”

Rokeby shrugged. “Suit yourself. It's no affair of mine. I think you've made a mistake, first to last. The fact that Miss Armistead vouches for Fitzgerald ought to be enough. She's above reproach. Didn't you have an interest in that quarter at one time, von Stühlen?”

Had Rokeby witnessed his humiliation at Ascot?

That would account for the determined coldness, the air of tolerating him only for the sake of Lord Cowley's good opinion.

The lines deepened on von Stühlen's face; his teeth bared in a grin. Without warning, he reached across Rokeby's desk and grasped the man by his lapels, pulling him half out of his seat.

“You worthless rabbit,” he hissed. “A child could have taken Patrick Fitzgerald. You lost him on a pair of donkeys. He has probably crossed into Spain by now—or taken ship for North Africa. The Queen shall hear
exactly
how you betrayed her trust.”

Rokeby stood rigidly; but his eyes held contempt. “Unhand me. Before I'm forced to call you out.”

Von Stühlen laughed. “Your career is finished, my friend. Be thankful you've still got your life.”

Unlike Cannes, which still retained the air of a seaside fishing village, Nice was a sprawling port, and had been since ancient times. The Greeks had named it for their goddess Nike, and Rome had colonized its streets. Von Stühlen was a student of the classics—like Albert, he had spent hours debating Plato at Bonn—but he rode past the ruins of the Ancients without glancing to either side, until his fly pulled up in the Rue de la Gendarmerie.

Rokeby had spoken with Gibbon before the French police tossed him in a cell and forgot about him. The valet knew nothing of Fitzgerald's plans, however, or even which direction he might have taken from the hotel in Cannes. On the subject of the dead boy he'd proved more forthcoming.

“Mr. Theo was alive when last I saw him, the night of the seventeenth. Escorting his mother to Sheerness, he was; mounted on his hunter, and riding alongside her gig. What happened to him after, I cannot say—my master and I, and Miss Armistead, having took ship across the Channel. But one man has hounded Mr. Fitz from London to Cannes, and that's this German with the eye patch—Count von Stühlen. First Mr. Septimus Taylor was struck down in chambers, and now it's poor young Theo. Mr. Fitz calls the German a killer.”

Rokeby was brought to a stand by this account. He knew von Stühlen had been the one to find Fitzgerald's son. It was possible he'd fired the pistol that killed the boy—but it was totally improbable. Von Stühlen traveled with the authority of the Queen. The man had the ambassador's confidence. Why shoot a seventeen-year-old on a remote island?

If after the encounter in his consular office Rokeby revised his opinion of von Stühlen, the outcome remained the same. He wanted von Stühlen out of Nice as soon as possible. He permitted the Count to interrogate Gibbon.

“Strip his shirt and take him out into the courtyard,” he ordered Gibbon's turnkey in flawless French.

The valet tore his arm from the gendarme's grasp impatiently. “Leave me be. And get that fellow out of my sight, damn yer eyes.”

“He doesn't speak English,” von Stühlen said wearily.

A second gendarme hurried forward and grasped Gibbon's free arm. Gibbon was hauled, stumbling, into the courtyard. His shirt was ripped from his body.

Von Stühlen held out his hand for the horse whip. He watched idly as Gibbon was tied by the wrists, hands over his head, to a wooden post in the middle of the courtyard; it was employed, from time to time, for executions by firing squad. The manservant was short, like all of his kind, but sturdy enough; his exposed back made a simple target.

Von Stühlen cracked his whip.

Gibbon let out a yell of shock and pain.

Von Stühlen struck him again.

Deep furrows in the muscle, immediately oozing red.

The whip hissed through the air a third time.

“I don't know anything!” Gibbon screamed wildly. “I don't know where Fitzgerald's gone!”

Von Stühlen strolled toward him, the coils of leather dangling from one hand. The man was breathing heavily, sweat pouring from his face; such a little thing. Three strokes. Von Stühlen had seen men whipped to death in his time.

“I don't care where he's gone,” he said. “I want to know why he came.”

“What?”

“Why he came to Cannes in the first place.
Tell me
.”

“Miss Georgie's health! She's got an inflammation of the lung!”

Von Stühlen retraced his steps.

He lashed the valet again.

And again.

The man was screaming at every stroke, the whip cutting fresh furrows over old, the skin hanging from his back in raw strips. Von Stühlen considered the choice: aiming for the arms next, and possibly exposing the vertebrae of the neck, or lashing the back repeatedly until the spine was cut.

“Why did he come to Cannes?”

No answer but a scream.

Von Stühlen sighed. This was growing tiresome. He expected the man to die eventually, but he preferred to learn something before he did. He walked toward him again.

“I can order them to dust your back with salt,” he said conversationally. “I've seen it done. Agonizing, I assure you. Why did Fitzgerald come to Cannes?”

Gibbon was sobbing now, his eyes screwed closed. “You killed Master Theo,” he gasped. “Didn't you? And said Mr. Fitz done it. You
bastard
.”

“Gendarme—some salt, please.”

“No!”

Von Stühlen grasped the man's hair in his fist. “He left you here, didn't he? He ran—and you've had to suffer for it. You don't owe him a thing. Tell me why he came to Cannes.”

“To see the Prince,” Gibbon slurred. His eyes were barely focusing. “To meet young Leopold. Miss Georgie knows why the lad's ill.”

Von Stühlen frowned. He had assumed the Royal Household had drawn Fitzgerald south—there could be no coincidence in that coincidental meeting—but he'd suspected a kidnapping: the boy held hostage against a promise of clemency from Victoria. Von Stühlen still did not know
why
she was hunting Fitzgerald and Georgiana Armistead—the precious letters from Albert he'd used as a bargaining chip had told him nothing. Or at least, nothing he'd understood.

Leopold's illness.
There had been one letter from Albert, requesting notes made at the boy's birth; and a second, he recalled now—so insignificant he'd barely read it—informing Dr. Armistead the notes had been burned . . .

Was it possible the Queen was mortally afraid of her own
son
?

Von Stühlen stared at Gibbon. “What about the illness?”

“I don't know. God's my witness, I don't know a thing.”

The man was shuddering violently, saliva pouring from his mouth.

“Von Stühlen!”

The voice was Rokeby's. The British consul stood at the edge of the courtyard, a mixture of disgust and outrage on his face.

“Cut him down,” von Stühlen ordered, and walked swiftly toward his carriage.

CHAPTER FORTY

M
ONDAY, THE THIRTIETH OF DECEMBER
, and Lord Palmerston come all the way to Osborne—some three hours' travel by coach and steamer—with his despatch box and papers.

I would not see him at first, my indignation at this violation of my grief knowing no bounds. A note was sent in to my rooms, in the hands of Arthur Helps, the Clerk of the Privy Council—
Lord Palmerston's respects, and would the Queen be so good as to attend the Privy Council meeting, the matter at hand being the successful resolution of the affront to British sovereignty on the part of the United States of America, in seizing two Confederate envoys from Her Majesty's ship
Trent . . .

I tossed the Prime Minister's missive on the fire and said to poor Helps, “Indeed we shall
not
. You may inform Lord Palmerston he is to conduct his business through the agency of Princess Alice.”

“Mama!” that serpent's tooth cried in protest—she had led Arthur Helps to my door—“that cannot be proper. I am
not
the person the Government must address, on matters of State—”

“Very well,” I told the Clerk. “Pray inform Lord Palmerston he may speak to our private secretary—General Grey.”

“General Grey is . . .
was . . .
Papa's secretary, Mama,” Alice faltered.

“So he was. And now he is the Queen's. What better person to stamp the Government's papers for them? He will know exactly what Papa should wish. Very well, Helps—you may go.”

The unfortunate fellow bundled himself off, and Alice followed—without a word or a look for me. I gather from my daughter's air of disapproval that she regards me as indulging my sorrow—as requiring this fresh expression of melancholy each hour, as a child might demand a sweet. I am quite content to confound her hopes of improvement; to exercise every whim a pitiable widow might dream up; to ignore, in short, all who would urge me to
fortitude.

Helps very quickly reappeared, with General Grey in tow, to protest the new arrangement—Palmerston delivering himself of a peroration on the nature of monarchy, and the power that resides in my person, which none other may assume. I suppose he is perfectly in the right—although he cannot possibly argue that My Sainted Angel did not often assume the duties of sovereign—that he governed in my place—that he pretended to all the powers of a king, without benefit of coronation. All these, no one would deny. It is Albert's absence—
not mine—
from the Privy Council, that has them in an uproar.

Grey seconded Palmerston's views.

We argued the point by exchange of letter for full half an hour.

It ended with the Council in one room and I in another, the connecting door open between. In this manner, they could record my presence; and I could avoid attending.

Helps carried the papers to and fro across the threshold.

Before I signed, I glanced continually at Albert's portrait—whispering to him in German, all the while. Once or twice I nodded, as though in complete accord with his advice; and only then did I lift my pen.

I am not above appearing
mad,
if it ensures I am left in peace, and left alone.

The questions I might otherwise be forced to answer do not bear thinking of.

From one man at least, I may fear nothing.

William Jenner attended our party to Osborne, as is his custom at Christmastime; the man has no family of his own worth speaking of, and his anxiety for my reason is so acute, that he should never have been parted from me in my hour of need. I believe that the doctor dreads the possibility of blame, for having lost so august a patient—he dreads the idea that history will call him incompetent.

“Queries have been raised,” he mused last evening when I consented to see him—ostensibly to receive a copy of the death certificate he filed on the twenty-first of December—“theories, conjectures . . . in the
Lancet
and the
British Medical Journal
. It would seem they cannot reconcile my diagnosis with the medical bulletins issued from Windsor.”

“How should they?” I demanded reasonably. “We did not authorise a full disclosure of the Prince's condition. We saw no reason to make his agonies public. While there was a hope of his rallying, there was no cause to alarm our subjects with the spectre of his loss.”

“You will observe, Your Majesty, that I noted the cause of death as typhoid fever, duration twenty-one days. I marked the onset from the occasion of his fatal walk with the Prince of Wales, at Cambridge.”

“Yes,” I murmured. “He was struck down. Bertie! That dreadful cross—it was to escape
him
that we fled here to Osborne. But what possible objection should the medical journals make? You were upon the scene, Dr. Jenner—the editors of the
Lancet
were not.”

Poor Jenner hesitated. His face is grown puffy and grey; a decade of age has descended in a fortnight. “The Windsor bulletins referred only to a
low fever,
with a generalised depression. We did not say typhoid. And the fact that no one else at Windsor contracted the illness—”

“The
Lancet
is forgetting our nephew the King of Portugal,” I said comfortably, “who died of typhoid in November; and our Royal envoys, General Seymour and Lord Methuen, with whom Albert
would
meet, upon their return from Pedro's funeral. No doubt Methuen and Seymour bore traces of contagion.”

“But they met with the Consort less than a week before his death,” Jenner faltered. “And I cannot deny that the Prince was poorly for nearly a month.”

“Nonsense. We repose complete confidence in your diagnosis, Doctor—for why else should the Prince have died? He was a large and healthy man of but forty-two.”

When he continued to look troubled, and would have uttered still more devastating truths, I approached within inches of his person and spoke for his ears alone.

“No word of doubt or reproach shall ever pass my lips,” I said. “I make you the solemn promise of a Queen. You did for my Beloved what you could, dear Jenner—and I shall be forever grateful for your presence by his bedside, at the last. I believe we may consider the possibility . . . of a knighthood.”

Sir William Jenner. How well it sounds.

He went away a trifle cheered, and I, a trifle less so. Medical journals! Pray God that only medical people read them, and not the general run of my subjects! My seclusion, and the sympathy accorded a widow and queen, should end such trouble with time. What is essential, however, is that
nothing more
be found to feed it.

“Don't you wish to know, Mama?” Alice said to me after dinner.

“Know what, my dear child?”

“Why Papa killed himself ? That is the burden of all your hints, I presume—that Papa was guilty of self-murder?”

“I do not need to ask myself such a question,” I returned. “I know how your Papa was destroyed. He was cast into an abysm of despair—by the
horror,
the knowledge of your brother's
misconduct
. I am in full possession of all the disgusting details of Bertie's sordid affair. Your Papa spared me none of them. I can only
shudder
when I look at the Prince of Wales. But your angelic Papa was too good to live with such wickedness.”

“Fustian,” she said calmly. “Stockmar's letter refers to Papa's accident last autumn, and that was more than a year ago—long before Nelly Clifden.”

The baron had said little that was explicit; but what he had said was enough. That is why I saved his letter. I might have quoted it to Alice, from memory.

Your desire for death, revealed to me during our talks at the Rosenau, is one you must fight to your last breath. Whatever the nature of your doubts about your children, my dear Prince, you can do nothing to alter the past. Let us have no more accidents with carriages, no dramatic runaways. Make of each day what you can, by ensuring that it is not your last.

I rose from my chair. “For most of your brother's life, poor dear Papa regarded him as unfit to rule. He strove to improve Bertie's mind and character, throughout his childhood; but to no avail. Bertie's flaws broke Papa's heart. It was the recognition of
failure
—for the Kingdom and the world—that drove your Papa to his grave. And I shall never forgive your brother for it.
Never.
”

“Bertie's flaws,” Alice repeated. “The flaw in his blood?”

“If you will,” I flashed. “
Yes.
The blood of our Hanover line. You know what the Regent was! And my Uncle William, with his ten bastard children! No amount of whipping could beat the tendency out of Bertie. We tried every method
possible
to break your brother's spirit.”

“Thank you, Mama,” Alice said. “I see matters quite clearly, now.”

And she left me without another word—chastened, I hope and pray, by the evidence all about her of
masculine
frailty.