A Flaw in the Blood Read online

  She puled 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 mater.”

  “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 mater? 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. Al 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 when I first came to the throne how to think on every subject of importance. I loved Melbourne like a father—the father torn from me too early—and but for the impertinent who dared call me Mrs. Melbourne, might have lived entirely in his pocket, as the saying goes. He was such a droll character, despite a tendency to talk to himself or snore in church—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.

  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 tides of politics 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 scoundrels of the press. I loved to dress, too—dearly 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 never beautiful, not even at twenty, my features too lumpen and bourgeois for beauty; 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. Albert and I 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, my cousin 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 in 1839. He hated the English damp, missed his friends and his hunting grounds acutely. He despised women on principle and was keenly 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 the University of 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 to me on a silver salver! I may honestly say I fell in love at first sight.

  During the month of his visit, 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 relations—could influence or mar.

  Mama, of course, loved him from the first. 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—asking 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 let it tumble across my shoulders, 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 note, that it was the slave I was marrying: Albert’s Master always—Duty.

  * * *

  In the morning, I would be barred from this room; Albert would be given over to Lohlein 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 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 had he shut himself up in his private study? How many times had he locked the door and taken meals on a tray, while I screamed in to my pillow? He wrote me long lectures, like a remote Papa; and I reproached him for that—for growing old wit
hout me. He even called me Dear Child, Dear Little One—I, 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 murder me, a mere four months after my wedding, on Constitution Hill.

  We were driving to Mama’s. I remember the softness of the June air. I had retched 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. That day 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.

  And then without warning Albert seized my head, forcing it down,as the lead ball whistled viciously over us.

  He would have protected me if he could. That was his nature.

  But I fought his hands, staring without fear at Edward Oxford, a half-mad son of a mad mulatto labourer. I defied him to shoot as he raised his second pistol. The coachman did not drive on. Albert cried out in German. The second ball sang wide.

  It was Providence, I suppose, that preserved me. And I read in that preservation a sign: that I am ordained to rule. That it is God’s will for me to endure as Queen of England.

  The lunatic Oxford was seized by passersby, and the whole episode devolved into the sordid business of courts and newspapers—of men like Patrick Fitzgerald. Men who owe no one loyalty. Who profit from conspiracy. Who believe a killer may be innocent, simply because he is mad.

  Would death then, in the full flower of my youth and love, have been preferable to this abandonment? This grief cutting a trench through my heart?

  All those years of pregnancy—child after child after child, nine in all; the deep abiding depression that rode me like a curse;the weight I could not shed; Albert more remote with every birth; the demands of Royalty I refused to face; the way he became King without ever needing the crown.

  Only once in recent memory did I recognise the ardent lover of 1839—the youth who took my face in his hands and drank from my lips. It was the day he nearly perished in the wreck of his carriage, and the mistress he pursued was Death.

  Did Albert feel that same clarity, as his horses raced toward the crossing bar last autumn? Did he stare down the train as I had Edward Oxford? Neither of us lacked courage. It was for Death to decide whether to take us.

  And now I have given Her my Albert. No one will shield me any longer. No one will treat me like a child. It is for me to suppress his ravings, the mad words that drowned him at the end—for me to protect what he was, at last—from such villains as Patrick Fitzgerald.

  Chapter Three

  “ How DID you attempt to topple the monarchy?” Georgiana asked. “All those years ago?”

  They had not yet achieved London, inching painfully through the dense fog that swamped the dells of Hampstead Heath. By the time Fitzgerald had descended from his audience in the Red Room, the last evening trains had departed Windsor. There was no choice but to be driven home, by a man indifferent to their comfort now that the Queen had no further use for them. It was cold enough that Georgie’s words hung in the air, opaque as the fog.

  “Faith, and I told the truth—in court,” Fitzgerald answered satirically. “You must know Truth’s a curse to monarchs everywhere.”

  “You’re the worst of unrepentant radicals.” She smiled, her eyes on the clouded coach window. “I was barely five years old and living in Calcutta, when it happened. Tell me, Patrick.”

  It was clear Georgiana was suffering. Fitzgerald could not say what she felt for Prince Albert, how deep her grief went; he lacked the courage to ask. Even his jealousy was a presumption. So, like all good fathers with wounded children, he told her a story.

  “There are two versions, Georgie. The one Oxford told and the one put down as history.”

  “—That the fellow was mad?”

  “Delusions of grandeur, most said. A craving for the world’s notice. Oxford put himself on Constitution Hill at a time when Victoria was known to pass. She’d made a habit of driving out to her mother’s place in Belgrave Square every afternoon. He fired two balls, both of which went wide. He was overpowered, then, and confined. The prosecution would have it he acted alone—out of hatred for his betters. And it certainly could be made to look that way.”

  “But you disagreed?”

  “My employers did. I was then Head Clerk to Mr. Charles Pelham—Edward Oxford’s solicitor. Lord Normanby, the Home Secretary, retained Pelham in Oxford’s defence—and Pelham brought in Septimus Taylor as barrister.”

  “Sep!”

  “The very same. I was dispatched to Newgate, where Oxford was jailed, to pump the fellow. His wild charges led me on all sorts of adventures— and the intelligence I gathered provided Sep with his case.”

  “Which was?”

  “Conspiracy, as the Queen would have it. Oxford claimed he’d been hired by Victoria’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, who thought she’d diddled him out of a throne and wanted it back. The Queen was pregnant, y’see, so the Duke had to act fast if he meant to kill her. Two birds with one stone.”

  The carriage jolted through the rutted roads of the Heath, the silence beyond broken only by the muffled hoofs of the horses.

  “I see why Oxford was judged insane,” Georgie said. “To blame a royal duke for the assassination—”

  “It wasn’t the easiest defence to argue. Septimus did his best. The pistols Oxford used had the Duke’s initials engraved on them. And a packet of letters posted in Hanover was found at Oxford’s lodgings.”

  “But Cumberland?”

  “—Denied everything, of course. As did Victoria. Lord, she was a fury! That was the occasion of my first summons to Windsor.”

  He could recall the scene vividly: a scorching afternoon in August, the twenty-year-old Queen already great with child. Ringlets of hair plastered against her temples. Her protuberant eyes blazing.

  “What did she say to you?”

  Fitzgerald sighed. “It all came down to my Irishness, love. A real gentleman would never have published such a scandalous story! That I had presumed to attack the Royal Family—and chose to do so in the criminal courts—was the height of vulgarity. Or radical sentiment. I’m not sure which she thought was worse.”

  “But it was Sep who argued the case, not you—”

  “Aye. And me who gave it to him. The idea that a man could be innocent, if he was out of his mind, was quite new in legal circles.”

  “Oxford was sent to Bedlam?”

  “He’s still there, I believe.”

  “And you became a barrister?”

  “Sep took me on.”

  Georgiana studied him doubtfully in the poor light of the carriage lamps. “But, Patrick—why bring all this up tonight? When the Prince—”

  Whatever else she might have said was cut off by the shrill, whistling scream of a horse in terror, the sudden, overwhelming force of a team impaled on a bristling wall—rearing and jibbing in the traces, falling back upon themselves, the equipage jackknifing viciously and the whole box of a world kiting over and over, the curses of coachman, the glass shattering under Fitzgerald’s shoulder as he was thrust brutally against it, Georgie yelling less in fear than in shock—and then, abruptly, stillness.

  His ragged breath was the only sound in the shattered cage, his hands slippery with blood.

  “Georgie,” he said. And again, “Georgie!”

  She did not answer.

  Fog rolled into the broken body of the carriage. There was blood in his eyes and a frantic warning in his brain that urged, Run, run, they will be upon you in an instant. He tore at the splintered wood, part of the carriage roof that still stood between him and the Heath. Forced his shaking arms to break a passage.

  He was out. Stumbling. Uneven ground, bramb
les clutching at his trousers, a horse whickering like a whipped child.

  The carriage lamps had shattered in the crash. But through the darkness and mist he could make out a palisade—a lashed fence of spikes, tossed in the road like some medieval war engine. The horses had impaled themselves on it, blind in the pitch black. The animals were caught now in the tangle of their own traces. Night and fog and the trapped beasts trampling the coachman’s body—

  He reached back inside for Georgie.

  The hood of her cape was soaked in blood.

  Muttering hurried Papist prayers under his breath, O Holy Virgin we implore thee for the benediction of thy healing Grace, he fumbled for a pulse, he screamed for a pulse, he kissed her sweet mouth, forcing air into her lungs. Then he lifted her and staggered off, a middle-aged man clawing his way up the hillside, heedless of the broken nags behind him or the hideous angle of the coachman’s neck, as the corpse lay sightlessly staring at the Queen’s cypher, VR, Victoria Regina, on the shattered coach’s door.

  Chapter Four

  He carried her to a public house in Hampstead, where he cried up the tavern keeper with what remained of his breath. He refused to set down his burden on the damp paving stones, and she remained insensible—perhaps dead, he could not tell—but at last the innkeeper unbolted the door and peered out at the lunatic, the weaving drunkard with an armful of woman. Fitzgerald did not wait for an invitation but thrust his way in. Calling for brandy, and a doctor.

  It was two o’clock by his pocket watch when he reached Hampstead. At three, Georgiana was still insensible, though he’d bathed the gash in her scalp, forced a dram of spirits through her clenched teeth, and tucked her up warmly in an available bed. The local doctor, a man by the name of Smythe, held Georgie’s wrist a good long while without offering an opinion. From that much, at least, Fitzgerald understood she still breathed.