A Flaw in the Blood Page 17

  And indeed, Fitzgerald thought, the boy's instincts were not far wrong.

  “. . . made for the stage, Your Highness,” Georgiana was saying, on the far side of the room; and then she broke off in a fit of coughing that brought an expression of alarm to Lady Bowater's face.

  Soon after, the two of them took their leave.

  “He bleeds very often from his nose and gums, and must rub the latter with a sulfate of soda when they appear swollen and red. He takes mercury and chalk as an emetic—to avoid straining at the bowels. The least thing oversets him, Gunther says—he nearly died from an outbreak of measles last spring, and a sore throat is dreadful; if he coughs, he is likely to cough blood. Sometimes he passes it in his urine, which leads them to believe the internal tissues have frayed. I gather the poor child bumped his arm against a baggage rack when his train carriage lurched unexpectedly before Avignon, and was laid up for weeks upon his arrival here. What should be a bruise for another child, is an incapacitation for Prince Leopold.”

  Georgie said all this in an urgent undertone, between bouts of coughing, as they walked back to their hotel. She was engrossed, Fitzgerald saw, in the symptoms of the case—many of which she must have heard long before, from the Consort, but which she was cataloguing in her mind now, as she talked to him.

  “Gunther says that given the fragility of the boy's frame, it is a matter of conjecture whether he will reach adulthood; and, as such, he treats him much as he would any other little boy—encouraging him to move freely and gain strength by virtue of exercise out-of-doors, regardless of whether he might sustain an injury.”

  “Surely he does not take undue risk,” Fitzgerald protested, “with the Queen's son in his keeping?”

  “Not undue risk,” Georgie conceded, “but he certainly grants the child more liberty than his nurse or his mother should do. That is a very German view of childhood, is it not? —That all manner of ills might be cured by fresh air and exertion?”

  “German, English—what does it matter?” Fitzgerald demanded. “The poor man's not from another planet!”

  He was sharply tired, all of a sudden—of the endless travel, the incipient anxiety, and this constant emphasis on race. It was Theo and his social theorists all over again.

  “Well,” Georgie said mildly, “in a manner of speaking, he is. Gunther's twenty-six years old, and up-to-date on all the newest theories. He's not an old woman, like Jenner and the rest of them at Windsor. He'll do Leo good.”

  Twenty-six. Exactly Georgie's age. Had she enjoyed talking to Gunther, Fitzgerald wondered—someone equally conversant with science? As opposed to the middle-aged Irishman who understood nothing?

  “How long have you known Rokeby?” he demanded. Another fellow with taking manners and an easy competence; his eyes had followed Georgiana throughout the evening, and he had studiously avoided Fitzgerald whenever possible.

  “Some years. His brother will be a duke.” She shrugged. “One met him everywhere before he joined the diplomatic service. A pleasant enough fellow—and not at all dissipated, which is a relief among his kind. Gunther tells me he has behaved most intelligently toward young Leopold.”

  “How so?”

  “—By leaving him in the Bowaters' charge, of course. There was some concern that the loss of Sir Edward would throw all their plans into disarray, but I gather the entire household is to remain at Château Leader through February, as originally planned.”

  “Does Gunther know his trade?”

  “He did admit that he observed several similar sufferers during his studies at the medical college in Bonn.”

  “And? Is he likely to save the child?”

  Her footsteps slowed. “I hardly know. He talked a good deal of theory. That illnesses are more or less common because certain populations remain isolated—that is to say, they have limited contact with the broader world, and circulate their disorders among themselves, through social intercourse and even intermarriage. In some cases, Gunther says, such populations are less susceptible to disease—they appear to grow accustomed to it, and resist it better than those who are not. In other cases, parochial societies encourage disorders to flourish. Entire towns in the Bavarian Alps, he tells me, will manifest certain maladies that cannot be found elsewhere. As though they could be passed among generations, much as the Duke of Wellington's children got his nose—or your Theo got Lady Maude's hair.”

  “But he might not have done,” Fitzgerald countered. “He might have got mine.”

  “Exactly. Not everyone inherits every aspect of their parents, Patrick. Otherwise, we should all look and act exactly the same—whereas in nature, variety is infinite.” She studied him measuringly. “To mention Theo, again—appearances can be deceiving. He looks like Lady Maude to an extraordinary degree. But his inner nature—his intellect, proclivities, even his emotions—may owe just as much to you. It is often the case that conflicts arise between father and son when they are too much alike.”

  Fitzgerald was speechless. He felt raw, exposed—all his vulnerabilities tossed at his feet. She had seen, then, how strained was his bond to Theo; had seen as well how much the boy mattered. How he yearned for an expression of love from his son.

  “I confess that I find Gunther's theories quite intriguing,” she continued serenely.

  “Lord, they seem dead obvious.” Her knowledge of him was too shaming. “Families resemble each other. And so?”

  “—If the appearance of a nose, or a pair of eyes, or a facility for writing poetry can be inherited,” Georgie said patiently, “then, too, can be a weakness for disease. This is a point of some debate, Patrick. Uncle John was adamant that disease is created by squalour, and infects the water or air, as with cholera and typhoid. In Prince Leopold's case, however, one cannot point to a source of infection. His malady has been present from birth.”

  “Inherited? From the Queen? Or the Consort?”

  Georgie's eyes were suddenly alight; he had hit on the point of the whole conversation at last. “Prince Leopold's malady is exclusively found in males, Gunther says—at least, in Germany.”

  “So it came from Albert?”

  She shook her head. “A man with the disease never has a son with the same disorder.”

  “So it isn't inherited?” Fitzgerald asked, bewildered.

  “Please, Patrick—allow me to explain. A man who bleeds will have a healthy son. Males cannot pass it to males. But a bleeder's daughter will quite often have a boy with the bleeding malady.”

  “The illness skips a generation?”

  “And is apparently passed through the mother.”

  “Victoria.” Fitzgerald kneaded his temples, trying to comprehend what this might mean. “You're saying the Queen caused the flaw in the boy's blood?”

  “As much as anyone can, when the thing is so entirely in God's hands.”

  “But she's had three other sons! And none of them—”

  “None of them got the Duke's nose. That's the way of it, with families.”

  His footsteps slowed as they neared the hotel. Something she'd said, just now—something she'd said a week ago, in London . . . “Georgiana, have you thought of what you're saying? About the heritability of Leo's disease?”

  She looked at him searchingly. “What is it, Patrick?”

  “The poor lad got his flaw from his mother. Well and good. But where did she get it?”

  “Who knows?”

  He shook his head. “That won't fadge, love. I've never heard a whisper of a British Royal with this kind of malady. We'd have known. You know how people talk—how the gossip sheets speculate. The wild rumours on every front. Princess Sophia's bastard. Prinny's marriage to Maria Fitzherbert. Cumberland's lust for boys. Something as ripe as unchecked bleeding could never have been suppressed.”

  Georgiana frowned. “There's something in what you say. The Hanoverians have always been known for a lurking madness—old King George, for example. But not this frailty in the tissues. The Duke of Kent certainly was
n't troubled by it, at all events. But his wife—Victoria's mother?”

  “What did Prince Albert think? He'd have known. The Duchess of Kent was his aunt.”

  “I have no idea what he thought,” she said quietly. “I only know what he said. They're often different things.”

  Fitzgerald waved one hand dismissively.

  “He had never encountered Leopold's disorder before,” she conceded. “Among his own people, I mean. That's what he said. That's why he asked for Uncle John's notes.”

  “And burned them.”

  “Yes. Patrick—”

  “If Victoria's mother didn't carry it, and her father didn't carry it, then the disease must have come from somewhere else.”

  “But it's not an illness you just . . . catch,” Georgiana protested.

  “No. You have to inherit it.”

  “You're saying—”

  “—That perhaps Victoria's father wasn't really her father.”

  Georgiana drew a rapid breath.

  Fitzgerald grasped her shoulders with both hands. “Is that it? Is that why she's hunting us? —Because she thinks you know what she's tried to hide from the rest of the world—what has forced her to send her son into exile—that the Queen of England has no right to be queen at all?”

  “It can't be,” Georgie said. She twisted out of Fitzgerald's grasp and began to walk hurriedly into the hotel. “It's too fantastic, Patrick!”

  “Does Gunther know what he's told you? —What possible danger he's in?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “But your Albert hired him!”

  “At the recommendation of a certain Baron Stockmar, a Coburg doctor who has been the Consort's advisor for years. He's quite old now, Gunther says, but has all the family secrets in his keeping—”

  She stopped short, her expression changing.

  “All of them?” Fitzgerald said softly. “—Then why in God's name hasn't the Queen murdered him?”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I tell the world that I made Baron Stockmar's acquaintance on my eighteenth birthday, when Uncle Leopold sent him to wish me many happy returns of the day; but the truth is otherwise. It was a morning in June, when I can have been no more than six years old, and was engrossed in fashioning a daisy chain with dear Lehzen in the park at Kensington Palace, where our household then lived. The stems of the daisies were slippery, and the sun was hot upon the back of my neck; I wore white muslin, as was my invariable habit—a strange thing to consider of, now, when I shall certainly never in my life wear white again.

  And suddenly, there he was: a stranger with an oddly-shaped head who looked at me like a familiar. He had walked up the carriage sweep as though he had a right to be there; and Lehzen actually ran a little toward him, with a glad cry, speaking in German. This surprised me so much that I crushed the daisies beneath my heels, and rose to stare at the man.

  He approached me without the stupid condescension of those who think children know nothing. Because he treated me with respect, I concluded he was safe. When he said, “Let me see your teeth, Princess,” I opened my mouth obediently; when he lifted my dress and ran his hands over my shift, I let him feel the strength of my abdomen and bones.

  When he had smoothed my skirt to my knees and said in a sober and judicious way, “She will do very well, Baroness. She has childbearing hips,” I suddenly felt ashamed. And burst into tears in Lehzen's apron.

  Nothing of Albert's life or death would be comprehensible if one were unacquainted with Baron Stockmar. He is above seventy years of age now, but his first steps on these shores lie far back in the mists of time—to the years before I was even thought of. He came to London as advisor to my beloved Uncle Leopold—who at twenty-five was nothing more than a beautiful face and a fine figure of a man; the third son of the old Duke of Coburg, Albert's grandfather, who could give him nothing.

  In the year of Waterloo, having fought against the Monster Buonaparte and been much admired among the English for his excellent looks, Uncle Leopold aspired to win the hand of the richest heiress in the world—my cousin Charlotte, Princess of Wales. They married, and were deliriously happy, until Charlotte died in childbed a year later, along with her stillborn son. But it was Baron Stockmar Charlotte cried for, in her last moments; Stockmar who held her cold hand as the life ebbed from her fingers; Stockmar who broke the news of his double loss to my Uncle Leopold in the wee hours of the morning.

  Stockmar understood all too well that Charlotte's death meant more than a crisis for his protégé, Leopold; it meant a crisis for the entire British world. For there was no other legitimate heir to the throne of England then in existence. And Charlotte's death is the only reason I was ever born.

  It was essential to secure the succession by producing a legitimate Hanoverian heir; and nobody expected Charlotte's father to do it. He was too old and too fat. His brother Edward, the Duke of Kent, was a betting man who rather fancied his chances—provided he could secure the hand of a proper princess. It was there that Baron Stockmar once again proved his worth.

  My father was more than fifty, and had kept a French mistress for nearly thirty years. It would be as well, therefore, if his prospective wife were a hardened cynic, quite past her first bloom of youth. Stockmar observed that Uncle Leopold's elder sister, Victoire, the Princess of Leiningen, admirably fitted this bill: She was thirty-one, widowed, and had already produced an heir to the Leiningen principality. There could be no objection to her quitting Germany in pursuit of greater fortune.

  My father wrote Victoire a letter; visited her court some once or twice; found her complaisant on the subject of marriages of convenience—as indeed she ought to have been, never having looked for anything else—and the thing was done.

  Within a few months of the wedding, Mama was pregnant; within a year, I was born. And though she may have suffered disappointment, as my father's consequence and fortune were far less than his accumulated debts—Mama had in the end no cause to repine. Rivals to the throne died in infancy; and the way to power was clear for me.

  Having made a Coburg girl Heiress Presumptive of England, Stockmar returned to the Rosenau, where another child had recently been born: Albert, the second son of the present duke, whose wife was unhappy and would soon flee Coburg with her lover, never to be seen again.

  Like a faery godfather, Stockmar watched over the motherless boy's rearing; reported on Albert's schooling and athletic progress to his uncle, Leopold; and when the hour was ripe, dispatched the Beautiful Teutonic Youth to London, where the most powerful Princess in the world fell in love with him at first sight.

  There is something of the Brothers Grimm in the tale, is there not? A little of enchantment, and also of necromancy—of strings pulled and lives crossed, for ends that only the Maker divines. Stockmar has been the canny wizard of such scenes, turning dross to gold with his alchemic wand, his chessman's plotting; and it is Stockmar I must ultimately blame for Albert's death.

  It is all there, in his last letter: the collusion between the two. How fortunate for me that the baron showed his hand, in a few lines of shaky script—and that I might with impunity press the letter upon my curious daughter. Confessions may be infinitely useful—when salvaged, carefully, from the fire.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Wolfgang, Graf von Stühlen, stood at the entrance to Wolsey's Chapel on Monday the twenty-third of December, listening to the melodious voice of the organ. “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The old Lutheran chorale Albert loved so well. The Prince Consort was being borne into St. George's, Windsor, by the gentlemen who had surrounded him for most of his exile in England—followed respectfully by his son. Von Stühlen had only the barest sufferance for the Prince of Wales, who reminded him strongly of Victoria, but on this occasion Bertie's demeanour was above reproach. There were Lord Torrington, and Sir Charles Phipps, and Biddulph and Grey and of course Disraeli and Palmerston . . . all of them freezing in the chill of that stony place, a welter of black, of shining sil
k top hats removed in deference; a sea of men. Ladies did not attend funerals; not even the Queen.

  Von Stühlen stared at the sarcophagus in which his childhood friend—his childhood self—lay rigid and cold. I wish you no peace, he thought; no happy repose of the soul. Albert had gone silently to this grave—he had confided nothing as the most bitter anxiety killed him. That silence told von Stühlen exactly how little, in the end, he had ever mattered to the man he called friend.

  Years of following in Albert's wake, as though the role of courtcard and careless hanger-on had been fulfillment enough, as though he'd rejoiced in his useless days and desperate cadging for money—had ended in nothing. He still had no idea why Albert had been blessed, and not Wolfgang, Graf von Stühlen, when the world abused one as maladroit, and celebrated the other for his charm. Had Fate rewarded Albert's obsession with ideals? His devotion to what he called Duty? From time to time von Stühlen thought he glimpsed an answer—in the immensity of Albert's pain. Fate slowly devoured Albert alive; in its boredom, it never even glanced at von Stühlen. His anger and bewilderment were immense. His mouth tasted of ashes.

  The champagne flowed freely after the ceremony; that would be Bertie's touch. The same group of men uttered the same tired platitudes, about dignity and nobility and sacrifice, as they drank to the dead man's health and the wretched Queen's sorrow. Von Stühlen stopped only once as he made his way through the crowded reception rooms, still hung in black silk—to answer a question of Disraeli's.

  “Von Stühlen! What you've endured, old fellow! A nasty business, that, in Sheerness—”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “A nasty business.”

  He reached Paris the day after Christmas.

  A rough ferry crossing from Dover, and an interminable rail journey to the capital made tedious by an unexpected fall of snow. He was unruffled by these delays, however; there was no longer any need for haste or stealth in the hunt he pursued. Theo Fitzgerald-Hastings had changed everything.