A Flaw in the Blood Read online

  When the boy lunged for his pistol and attempted to wrest it from his hand, von Stühlen had experienced one of those odd moments that intersect a life, from time to time: an instant of clarity that would hang, persistent as a mirage, before his mind until he died. The duel in which he had lost his eye was one of these. So, too, was the childhood vision of his mother returning from a morning call, with her left stocking laddered—he had seen her depart the house a few hours earlier with the same ladder on her right leg, and understood, in a flash of pain, that she had somehow removed her clothes quite carelessly during the interval. In that single image was contained all he need ever know about women: their betrayals, their fundamental whorishness, their stupidity. Theo's death was a crystallised revelation, like all of these.

  He had watched the pistol discharge into the boy's collarbone, had seen the mouth open in agony as the young body went down; had known, without hesitation, what must follow. The pool of blood growing on the stones of the ancient forecourt. Jasper Horan seizing the bridle of the plunging horse and the other men hanging back, all of them afraid.

  He could have staunched the bleeding. Driven Theo to a doctor in Sheerness in his hired fly. But the boy would have told everyone how he came to have his wound, and von Stühlen saw no point in that. Compassion had never been his failing.

  He stood over Theo while his life bled away, the pistol still leveled. At first the boy thought he was toying with him—that he merely wanted some kind of information—but von Stühlen made no answer to his desperate questions. When Theo finally stopped pleading, von Stühlen had the horse put into the stable and the body laid nearby, in the straw.

  Later, at the funeral in Kent—the Earl of Monteith entombing his heir, a collection of somber men walking behind the black horses and carriage—von Stühlen recounted what had happened. How he'd arrived at Shurland intending to pay a call upon Lady Maude—an old acquaintance—and had found the house empty and the boy bleeding to death in the straw, half-conscious. He had done what he could, of course. It had not been enough. But before he died, young Theo had named his killer.

  “I would not have thought it of him,” Monteith said brokenly, shaking his head. “Even an Irishman ought to cherish his son. Even an Irishman cannot be so entirely a stranger to decency—”

  “There was bad feeling between them,” interjected the Frenchwoman, Madame duFief, when she met von Stühlen later, at the Earl's seat. “On account of my Lady Maude. Theo could not abide his father, you know. He blamed him. Poor child. So much tragedy, so young—it is a family destined for unhappiness, is it not?”

  She would, von Stühlen thought, be a useful witness at Fitzgerald's trial.

  The afternoon of his arrival, he paid an informal call at the British Embassy.

  It was a beautiful old hôtel particulier in the Palladian style, just off the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, with a court embraced by two wings and a garden out back. The Queen's envoy to Paris, Henry Richard Charles Wellesley, Earl Cowley, was a stranger to von Stühlen—he had been at his post for the past nine years. But that meant nothing; the Earl was Wellington's nephew and von Stühlen was everywhere recognised as one of the late Consort's intimates. He was accustomed to doors opening without hesitation.

  “An Irishman? Wanted for murder?” Cowley sniffed. His own extended family was Irish born and bred, and the scandal must be felt. “I've had no wind of him—no, sir! Nor his woman neither. Had all the local community of English into the embassy, of course, for wassail and waits—burning of the Yule log and lighting of the festive tree, don't you know—a few days back; but an Irishman? Not a hair. Should've remembered that. And the lady's beautiful, you say?”

  “In her way,” von Stühlen agreed. “Highly-cultivated—with an air of intelligence and breeding. Her name is Georgiana Armistead.”

  “Damme if I don't know what gels get up to these days,” Lord Cowley muttered. “Have one or two of my own, and couldn't get them married soon enough. Well! You've escaped parson's mousetrap clear enough, hey? And more power to you. What's the rogue's name, then?”

  “Fitzgerald, my lord.”

  “Fitzgerald! No relation to Leinster's family?”

  Henry Wellesley, thirty years before, had married one of the Duke of Leinster's granddaughters—Olivia Fitzgerald. Von Stühlen smiled faintly at the notion of a barrister being related to a duke.

  “He's a Papist. No possible connexion of yours.”

  The Earl blinked owlishly, as though debating whether to resent this German's display of family knowledge—then abruptly slapped his hand on his mahogany desk.

  “If the man's a murderer and this Armistead woman is in his keeping, we shall have to do our all to apprehend them. I shall speak to the Minister of Police, naturally—but the pair mayn't still be in Paris. You've thought of that, I suppose?”

  “Perhaps a telegram, to your consulates,” von Stühlen suggested. “Fitzgerald will have submitted his intended route of travel to a mairie somewhere, upon landing in this country. There should be a trail we may follow. The consulates will find it—or their local police.”

  “Damme!” the Earl said again. “A cloak-and-dagger business, enough. Yes, Wentworth—what is it?”

  “Lord Rokeby's report from Nice, my lord,” said a junior political officer, breezing into Lord Cowley's office. “He appears to have enjoyed an admirable Christmas feast with the ladies at Château Leader.”

  “Ah! Indeed. Excellent man, Rokeby. Played cricket with his father at Eton, you know. He's standing unofficial guardian to the little Prince sent down to Cannes for his health, now that Sir Edward Bowater has most unfortunately stuck his spoon in the wall. P'raps you're acquainted with the lad?”

  “Leopold?” von Stühlen repeated. “Naturally I am acquainted with him. How does the boy fare, in France?”

  “Well—hear for yourself!” Lord Cowley settled a pair of spectacles on his ears and commenced to read aloud, to his guest's increasing interest, Lord Rokeby's report of everything—and everyone—who had celebrated Christmas with the Prince in Cannes.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Sir 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

  Unlike 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 Se
a 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.