Jane and the Barque of Frailty (34 page)

“The Prince will rally,” Jenner said.

From the vehemence of the doctor’s words, Fitzgerald concluded that there was no hope.

He followed Jenner up a broad staircase. Through shadowy passages and paneled doors. The final hallway was remarkable for its dimness; oil lamps burned low. A pair of footmen stood immobile by one chamber. He was led beyond, to the Red Room.

“Wait,” Jenner ordered, and stalked away.

To sit would be forbidden. Indeed, it was a testament to the chaos of this night that Fitzgerald was left alone at all, in such a place—that he should have the freedom of Windsor—and for a wild instant he was tempted to fly back into the passage, to trust in the footmen’s trained invisibility, to roam at will over the seat of British power and take from it such tokens as he chose. But Patrick Fitzgerald was not quite the savage young man he’d been on his first visit more than twenty years ago. He was six-and-forty years now, he had earned a reputation at the Bar, there was talk of a university appointment back home or a safe seat in the Irish parliament. For an instant, Georgie’s eyes rose before his mind and he wished with all his heart and soul that he was still raw, still young, still braced with hope. Then the rustle of silk proclaimed her coming.

“Your Majesty.” He went down on one knee.

“Mr. Fitzgerald.”

She had taken up a position behind the sopha. The plump white hands grasped the wooden frame; had her grip been less fierce, the fingers might have trembled. She was a short woman of forty-two, with sagging cheeks and a mass of dark hair dragging at her temples; but once she had been a dab of a girl—a joyous girl, tricked out in silver net and flashing diamonds, her hand coquettish on her husband’s arm as he led her into the opera. A bruising rider on her gallops through the park—a passionate performer on the pianoforte. The unkind and malicious said she ate like a glutton. That she was given to odd fits of temper and caprice, like her mad old grandfather. They said a woman was too weak to rule. Fitzgerald knew better. Weakness had never been Victoria’s failing.

“I am here at your command.” He chose his words carefully. “Pray inform me how I may serve Your Majesty.”

With a gesture, she bade him rise. “You know of our great trouble? Of the Prince’s … illness?”

“You have my deepest sympathy.”

A blank expression of terror in her blue eyes; contempt as she looked at him. “We do not want your sympathy, Mr. Fitzgerald! Our doctors assure us there is every cause for hope.”

“There must be, while Prince Albert breathes.”

Her eyes slid away from his face. “He will not fight it as he ought. He has no tenacity for life. If it were I—”

“Your Majesty should have rallied days since.”

Perhaps she had been speaking only to herself. She flashed a look of pure hatred in his direction, as though he had been dangling at her keyhole.

“Good God, that we should waste our precious moments in this! Mr. Fitzgerald, some two decades ago you inserted yourself in our affairs, on the occasion of an attempt on our life in Green Park. You undertook, during the summer of 1840, to insinuate yourself among those who were not our friends—to purchase scurrilous information—in short, to besmirch the reputation of the Royal Family—with a view to vindicating the wretched creature who would have murdered his Queen.”

She had torn him to shreds in just this way, all those years ago. Then he was an ill-dressed solicitor’s clerk, cap crushed in his hands and heart pounding in his chest. And the dupe, Oxford, had waited to be hanged in Newgate Gaol.

“I was a servant of justice, Your Majesty!”

“You were an uncouth lackey of the Irish rabble,” she retorted. “And your late success has not improved you one whit. I know what you are, Patrick Fitzgerald. I know that you have chosen to insert yourself again in my affairs—that you will not rest until you have toppled this monarchy!”

Angry heat mounted in his cheeks. “That is a lie! Yes—though the Queen herself says it!”

“I would not spare a blackguard such as you one second of notice,” she continued, “were it not for the Angelic Being who lies wasting in the next room! Were it not for the ravings he has uttered—”

She broke off. She closed her eyes, swaying slightly.

“Ravings,” Fitzgerald repeated. “The Prince has … wandered, in his fever?”

“Oh, God,” she murmured brokenly. “My reason—my reason … Do you care nothing that I shall go mad?”

She sank heavily against the back of the sopha, her nails raking the silk.

“Majesty … ” He crossed toward her, afraid she would collapse at his feet—but one upraised arm checked his steps.

“Do not even think of touching me.” She said it venomously. “Get Jenner. He will tell you what to do.”

She pulled herself upright. Drew a shuddering breath. And, without glancing again in his direction, left him.

“What is it?” Georgie asked the moment he slid into the forward seat of the coach and the muffled wheels began to turn. “What did she want? What did she ask of you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Tell me! I’ve waited nearly an hour—” Georgie bit her lip. “Please, Patrick.”

“I was ordered to sign a bit of paper,” he answered. “Affirming that every fact I discovered, every witness I deposed, every rumour I substantiated in the summer of 1840, was nothing more than a fabrication of my own treacherous Irish mind. And that, having repented of my calumnies, I hereby swear to lead a better life in allegiance to my Crown, so help me God—”

“No!” Georgie gasped. “But that is … that is wicked! You did not sign it?”

“I threw it on the fire, lass.”

“Why does it matter? Why should she care about that old business? With the Prince so ill?”

“Lord alone knows. Poor thing was half out of her mind, I think.” He glanced at Georgiana—her luminous skin, her eyes filled with intelligence and fatal truth. “She talked of conspiracy. Accused me of trying again to topple the monarchy. As though I ever have!”

“There must be some mistake. A misapprehension—”

“The Prince is raving, seemingly. In his fever.”

“And when you refused to recant?”

“Jenner threatened me. Informed me my life has no more purchase than a sparrow’s.” Fitzgerald smiled faintly. “If I’d signed, of course, he’d have made me an honourary Englishman.”

Humour for Georgie’s sake, but she knew Jenner, and she seized on his significance at once.

“He was there—attending to the Prince? Then it is typhoid.” She reached impulsively for the carriage door. “We must go back, Patrick. You know I could prevent the spread of contagion—”

Fitzgerald’s heart twisted. All her passion in her beautiful eyes.

“Georgie love,” he said gently as the bells of Windsor began to toll, “the Prince is dead.”

Chapter Two

It is true that I was a dab of a girl at twenty, a coquettish young thing on Albert’s arm. I loved the attention of men, the interest and conversation of brilliant blades like William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, who taught me how to think on every subject of importance when first I came to the throne. I loved Melbourne like a father—the father torn from me too early—and but for the impertinent who called me Mrs. Melbourne, might have lived entirely in his pocket, as the saying goes. He was such a droll character—despite a tendency to snore in church, or talk to himself—and so clearly handsome at sixty, that I must have been quite overpowered to have met him in his prime. I was, however, not even thought of then—and he was his wife’s devoted slave. Lady Caroline Lamb trampled Melbourne’s character and name in the dirt, offered every possible exhibition of indecency to the wondering eyes of the ton, and destroyed all hope of future happiness by producing an imbecile son almost as recklessly as she seduced Byron—but Melbourne stood by her until her death, despite the pleas of a multitude in favour of divorce.

In this, too, Melbourne most truly taught me the meaning of the word gentleman: One who backs his wife to the limit, however grievous the peccadillo or infraction; one who, having loved, can never recant or betray.

I may declare that Melbourne loved me, in his fashion—and had the Whig losses not utterly divided us, might have continued to haunt my Windsor walks until his death. As a woman’s first Prime Minister, he was all that could be desired. And though in later years he resented Albert’s monopoly of my interest, and a coolness fell between us, indeed I am very fortunate to have known him—

But I was speaking of myself, not dear William Lamb, who has been dead now these thirteen years.

I am capable of the most profound and intense love, but must confess that I am capable of loving only one person at a time. As a child, I adored dear Lehzen, my governess, and quite hated Mama; when Albert came, Melbourne was forced to quit my heart. So it has always been. And that is how it happens that I am lying here, with my cheek on Albert’s breast, my hands clenched in the bedclothes Jenner drew, at the last, over his dear face—I must endeavour to explain how love, the purest love, for that Angelic Being, has brought me to this parting.

Perhaps I was a little drunk early in my reign, with my first sips of independence and power—I had banished Mama from my household and thought the credit of a Queen equal to even the most daring behaviour. I played favourites; snubbed those I ought to have embraced for political reasons; circulated scandal; laughed at the press. I loved to dress, too—loved the feel of silks and satins next to my skin, loved jewels and the way they took on the warmth of my full breasts, swelling above the line of my gowns. I was neverbeauti-ful, not even at twenty, my features too lumpen and bourgeois for words; but Albert was extraordinary— tall and graceful and muscled—and when he looked at me I felt as bewitching as the most celebrated courtesan in London.

My mother was sister to his father. We were delivered by the same midwife, a continent and a few months apart. We watched each other grow with the disinterest of children. For years, he thought I was a spoiled little frump; for years, I considered him fat and stupid. His elder brother Ernest was far more dashing—Albert preferred books to flirtation. Until that day in October, more than twenty years ago, when he traveled from Germany straight to his doom, knowing he must accept my hand in marriage whether he wanted it or not. The Family—the Saxe-Coburgs, our Uncle Leopold most of all—said it was his Duty. The idea of Duty fascinated Albert as flagellation haunts an ascetic; it meant Sacrifice. Otherwise, Duty would have been called Pleasure—and Albert would have had nothing to do with it.

He came reluctantly to London, hating the English damp, missing his friends and his hunting grounds acutely, despising women on principle and aware that I was graceless—too short in the neck, too full in the cheeks, my chin receding. He had only just completed his studies at Bonn, and was so serious and melancholy he looked like a martyr of old. I could not drink in his beauty enough as I stood at the head of the stairs, stunned, to receive him. I was of an age when I craved the touch and passion of a man—and here was a god, handed me on a silver salver!

For a matter of weeks, everything about our lives was perfect. We two seemed lost in a rosy world of our own, which nothing—not the hatefulness of Parliament, the ridicule of the press, the jealousy of my Hanoverian relations—could influence or mar. Mama, of course, loved him from the first—and he called her his Dear Aunt, as was most proper. We sang duets, we rode together; Albert sat by my side as I wrote my tedious letters—waiting only for the privilege of licking the stamps. And when we were left alone at last, he would take down the pins in my hair and drape it across my shoulder, wanton as he loved to see it. Clasp my face between his palms to kiss me.

In body and soul ever your slave, he wrote the night of our betrothal. No mention, then, of the abandonment of Death. And I did not apprehend, as I cried over his passionate words, that it was the slave I was marrying— his Master, always, Duty.

When they finally left me tonight—-Jenner, Alice, Bertie in disgrace and stammered sympathy—I abandoned myself to his cooling body.

In the morning, I would be barred from this room; Albert would be given over to Löhlein and MacDonald, his valets, to the hideous men of the undertaking firm. Now, as the bells continued to toll, negating the individual hours, I could lie with my face pressed into his groin. Drinking in the last warmth of his soul as it fled through the darkness of Windsor.

I sobbed aloud. I raved. I reproached him bitterly for leaving me helpless—and of course he was unreachable, as he always was when passion deranged me. How many times in the past has he shut himself up in his private study, locking the door and taking meals on a tray, while I screamed into my pillow? He wrote me long lectures, like a remote Papa; and I reproached him for that—for growing old without me. He even called me Dear Child, Dear Little One, when I am indeed the most powerful monarch in the world—and thought the condescension charming!

But I am no longer, and never will be again, a dab of a girl.

Children came between us so early. I was pregnant with Vicky when Oxford tried to kill me, but four months after my wedding, on Constitution Hill.

We were driving to Mama’s. I remember the softness of the June air. I had vomited three times that day and already hated the change in my body—I felt betrayed by Albert, by the intensity of the pleasure I took from his sex, the way animal need had produced such misery. He almost carried me to the carriage, determined to get me out of doors—and indeed, the air improved me. My head felt clearer. I could look about and nod to the people in the Park who stopped to watch us pass.