A Flaw in the Blood Page 19

  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.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “Dear 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 bloo
dy 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

  “The 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. Gi
bbon 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?”