A Flaw in the Blood Read online

  “Von Stühlen is not my friend, Patrick,” she said sharply.

  “I found his card on the mantel at Russell Square. Did he call this morning to inquire after your health?” He grasped her wrist, his persistent jealousy flaring. “Tell me how you come to be acquainted with that man—and why he hated to see you at Torning’s inn.”

  She stared at him as though he’d run mad. “I don’t have time for this! There is a girl on the brink of death in that room, and it is my duty—my calling, Patrick—to do what I can to save her.” She shook off his hold.

  “What’s wrong with her, then?”

  “Ignorance and desperation.” Georgie threw the words over her shoulder, already leaving him. “Lizzie is but fourteen—on the Game, like her mother—found herself in the family way, and consulted an abortionist. Whatever the butcher did has infected her blood. Her mother, half wild with fear, sent round a note to Russell Square at midnight. I blame myself that I did not find it until this morning.”

  At midnight, Georgie was rolling toward Hampstead Heath in the hands of the Queen’s coachman. Fitzgerald’s fault, again.

  “What will you do?”

  “I shall have to remove the uterus.”

  “Surgery! In this place?”

  She stopped short in the doorway. “I can hardly transport her to the College. As you’re here, you might boil water on that hob and scrub the table. We shall have to operate by the fire—and send the little ones out into the hall while we do it.”

  He wanted to tell her that no common prostitute, however young and desperate, was worth the sacrifice of her safety. He wanted to tell her that the girl would die, no matter what she did.

  “Georgie—”

  “Not another word, until I am at leisure to hear you. Mr. Fitzgerald requires some water, Davey,” she ordered the boy. “Be so good as to fetch it for him.”

  Chapter Nine

  Whatever brutal words he might have thrown at Georgie were stopped in his mouth when he saw the girl.

  She was not a pretty thing, being too thin and already gapping in her teeth. Her faded blond hair was a mass of tangles, her face grey and drenched with sweat. But there was in her slight frame and fragile wrists, in the delicacy of her fingers as they plucked at the rags that covered her, all the possibility of a different life—one of expression and feeling, a world glimpsed but never grasped. The sight of her shamed Fitzgerald. As he bent to lift her in his arms, to carry her to that scrubbed old table where Georgie would slice into her flesh, he thought of all the other men, breaking the twig of her body in half. How many? For how many years?

  Her mother, who was called Button Nance, swore beneath her breath in a continuous stream of vituperation half-realised, half-heard, a diatribe against the world and God and doctors of every description, against men in general and men who paid and men who didn’t, men who demanded little girls instead of women like herself who could stand the nonsense; against little girls, too, and Lizzie in particular—more fool her for not bearing the brat and then pitching it in the Thames—and finally, against Fitzgerald for causing her daughter to cry out in pain as he lifted her. Nancy drank deep from a pitcher of gin, and though it was only noon by the time they laid Lizzie before the fire, her mother was dead drunk.

  He had never seen Georgiana administer the chloroform that John Snow made famous.

  It was a ticklish business, and in the hands of Snow’s imitators, occasionally a fatal one. Impossible to predict how a weakened frame might react to the drug-induced night—whether the constitution, already brought low by illness or accident, might not be extinguished altogether. There were stories indignantly circulated of patients dead at the extraction of a tooth, because chloroform was used; of labouring women whose ease of delivery was swiftly followed by the grave. But John Snow, to Fitzgerald’s knowledge, had never lost a patient. And the possibility of enduring surgery without pain had made his discovery wildly popular, so that for the first time patients went under the knife without terror. Chloroform had revolutionized the practice of medicine in the past decade; all of Europe was ready to take its risk.

  “Patients die because their doctors, terrified of waking them with the knife, continue to drug them long after they are unconscious,” Georgiana said placidly as she placed a drop of chloroform on a square of linen and held it to Lizzie’s nose. “Then the heart rate is depressed and the lungs collapse. Sheer stupidity on the surgeon’s part—but so many of them are untrained, and besieged with requests for anaesthesia. It’s no wonder they kill with kindness.”

  The girl reached out and grasped Georgie’s hand. “Don’t cut me,” she pleaded. “The last one cut me and I’ve not been right since—men don’t like a girl what’s cut.”

  “Hush,” Georgiana said, smoothing the rough hair. “You shall feel a world of difference soon.”

  The steady application of drops to handkerchief continued; Lizzie’s eyelids fluttered, her breath fell slowly into the oblivion of sleep.

  * * *

  The surgery required almost an hour. Fitzgerald stayed at Georgiana’s side and did as he was instructed, though he’d never been one to love the smell of blood. In Lizzie’s case the rich animal scent was overpowered by the stronger one of decay: Her body stank as he remembered the wounds of soldiers stinking, with the foetid pus of inflammation. Georgiana’s face was grave as she opened the girl and removed the perforated uterus, which lay like the liver of a butchered cow on the scrubbed table.

  “A knitting needle, I think,” she murmured as she carefully sewed her incisions closed with catgut. “The abortionist’s oldest trick. The man should be hanged.”

  Fitzgerald stepped to the room’s sole window and opened it a crack, greedily breathing in the cold air. Freezing rain still fell steadily, mingling with the coal smoke and pale northern light of December; it was as though all of London had drawn a cloak of mourning about its shoulders. His hands were shaking again and he craved a drink: He took great draughts of polluted air instead. The stench of the rooms—sweat and stale alcohol and semen—had conjured a march of demons through his brain.

  Unwashed female bodies, torn shifts, a tangle of arms on a single mattress, hair spread like matted fur across the worn boards of the floor—a public house in Cork City. The sweet rot of bodily fluids and spilled ale. His mother.

  His gorge rose; he closed his eyes. The vision was so powerful that for an instant it eradicated the present and he could feel the earth crumble beneath his knees, as he knelt at the edge of her grave.

  He’d been thirteen, the eldest of five, when she died. Fitzgerald was her name, none of them claiming a father to speak of. Cork City was one of Ireland’s finer seaports, and Ma enjoyed the custom of sailors from all over the world—though it never brought her riches. What she made, she spent on drink and her children’s bellies, in that order. When she died, the three girls were sent to an orphanage and the two boys cast out into the world. The innkeeper—whom the Fitzgeralds called Uncle Jack, though he was no relation of theirs—offered to keep young Liam, an open-hearted, grinning lad obsessed with the workings of the brewery. Patrick was good for nothing, being shy and bookish. Uncle Jack bluntly called him a penniless bastard not grand enough for making a priest, and suggested he join a mendicant order. Instead, Patrick stole the pub’s earnings one moonlit night and walked to Cobh, where the great ships left for the English coast.

  He had lived in London for thirty-three years; he’d turned a trick of pure luck and made a life from absolutely nothing—but that grim spectre of the past, the want and the stink and the desperate cruelty of living, could still bring him to his knees.

  The curtain of sleet thickened and lowered. He studied the narrow courtyard below—the buildings leaning on one another’s shoulders like drunkards, the stray mongrel carrying a rat between its teeth—and felt his breath catch in his throat. A man had appeared around the crumbling edge of the tenement opposite; a complete stranger in Fitzgerald’s eyes, but too well-dressed to belong to
the rookery. Barrel-chested, heavy-limbed, with luxuriant muttonchop whiskers, he carried a heavy club known as a cosh. As Fitzgerald watched, he stopped in the centre of the courtyard, his eyes roving among the derelict entries. Was this one of Nancy’s regulars?

  A regular would know where she lived.

  Three other men materialised at the first’s back, obviously in support, and stood silently waiting. Then, in the space of a heartbeat, two more approached from a narrow passage at the courtyard’s far end.

  Six men. Converging.

  Fitzgerald could hear Georgie murmuring to her patient, who was waking now with wracking sobs. She would ask him to carry the girl back to her pallet, soon.

  He opened the door to the hall. “Davey.”

  The boy was minding the younger children on the stairs.

  “Is there a back door out of the building?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Fitzgerald tossed him a shilling. “Run down and see whether it’s all clear. Don’t talk to anybody—there’s a good lad.”

  The child vanished with stealth and swiftness, the coin clenched between his teeth; Fitzgerald turned back inside, and lifted Lizzie in his arms.

  “I might send to Covent Garden for some fresh linen,” Georgiana worried, as he set the girl down on her straw, “but all the shops are closed. I shall simply have to bring some things tomorrow from Russell Square—”

  “You won’t be in Russell Square tomorrow.”

  “Nonsense,” she retorted crisply. “This child must be examined daily. Would you consign her to her mother’s care? She might as well be left for dead.”

  Fitzgerald glanced at Lizzie; she’d lost consciousness from the pain. “There’s a party of killers in the courtyard below. If they’ve found you here, Georgie, they’ve already been to Russell Square.”

  Her face was suddenly, sharply, white.

  “What?”

  He grasped her shoulder, pulled her from the inner room to the window. “Look. There. On the paving. A man with a cosh. Probably still stained with Sep’s blood.”

  She shook her head wildly. “I see nobody!”

  Fitzgerald cursed. Heavy boots resounded through the lower entry; the men were already inside.

  “Get your cloak and satchel. Quickly!”

  She asked him nothing this time, though he could read the disbelief in her face. He seized her hand and pulled her after him, through the hallway.

  Chapter Ten

  There is nothing more trying to the affections of a mother than the caprice of a daughter. I say this with a rueful appreciation of Fate—having been daughter myself to Victoire, Princess of Leiningen and Duchess of Kent, and mother in turn to five girls of my own. I do not believe there is a woman now living who possesses a finer sense of the emotions that tremble between two such females: one in full-blown rebellion against the maternal efforts of the other to guide, to rear, to direct. I considered of this as I studied my second daughter around the hour of ten o’clock, as she sat with bowed head in St. George’s Chapel of a Sunday morning—the holiest place in Windsor. She was weeping for her Papa. The sight of such misery wrung my grieving heart.

  “Alice.”

  The name floated beneath the Gothic architraves, the leaded windows transmuting the wretched December day to a light more infinite and sublime.

  Her head was cradled in her hands, her slight frame already swathed in black—a summer mourning gown she’d last worn for my mother. Alice looked crushed and frail, as though she had been whipped to submission by an overpowering master; it was brutal to disturb such suffering, even by whispering her name.

  Alice is eighteen—a good and affectionate soul, although perhaps a little spoilt by dear Albert. She is engaged to marry Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, and will too soon escape my influence forever. In the short time that is left to me I must endeavour to correct those little flaws that might naturally result from a too-careless indulgence, lest her husband be appalled at her headstrong nature. Albert was undoubtedly appealing to the child, particularly after Vicky went off to her Prussian marriage—but I may say her father delighted perhaps too much in their conversations. Alice is clever, you see; and Albert encouraged her to put herself forward to an unbecoming degree.

  “Alice!”

  She straightened—her head lifted from her black-gloved hands—her crinoline swung, bell-like, as she rose from her knees—eyes trained on the altar. Albert was not yet there, although it seemed as though he ought to be—arranged on a pyre like a barbaric lord of old. My burnt offering.My Beloved’s body still lay in the Blue Room, where the Royal Valets—MacDonald and Löhlein—were bathing and dressing him like a doll. I would not think of the undertakers. Nor of funerals in general. I would make no arrangements. Bertie would, of course, handle everything.

  Alice walked slowly by me, her expression blank, her arms stiff at her sides, to the chapel door. She hesitated at the threshold, but did not turn or glance back; she merely quitted the place without a word. Wonderingly, I followed.

  “Alice!”

  The black figure halted. “You wished to speak to me, Mama?”

  “Indeed.”

  I longed to take the dear child in my arms, to mourn with her over the loss of her Sainted Papa—but Alice looked as approachable as marble. Impossible to caress. Her fortitude was all that was admirable during the last days of Albert’s illness. She haunted his rooms, followed in his steps as he moved sleepless through the Castle at night—played beloved German airs upon the piano to ease his fevered brain. But for all her goodness, I sense in Alice an unfortunate tendency to obstinacy. When she might have served as prop and comfort to her Mama, she prefers to ally herself with the younger children—Leopold, for example, upon whom she foolishly dotes. And Louise. And Helena. They refer to me as “Eliza” behind my back; Alice is the prime mover in all my children’s conspiracies.

  “Pity your poor Mama, my child,” I began, “and do your utmost to console her—though none can, considering the All-in-All I have lost.”

  “You have my pity, Mama,” she returned dutifully. “Of that you may be certain.”

  “Pray sit down, dear child.”

  Near at hand was a settee, placed in an alcove of the wall; after an instant’s hesitation, Alice bowed her head. She sat.

  “I am so very tired,” she murmured.

  “Naturally.” The word had more asperity than I intended. “You have sacrificed yourself perhaps too much for poor Papa—waiting upon him tirelessly, as though there were not a household of servants and doctors at Windsor, possessed of far greater experience and wisdom! But your vigilance could not keep Death from the door, my unfortunate Alice.”

  “No,” she agreed. “Quite useless. All my love and anxiety for him—”

  “I notice that your brother is now resident in the Castle. Who summoned him from Cambridge, pray?”

  She raised her head. “I did, Mama. I could not allow Bertie to remain ignorant of Papa’s crisis.”

  “You could not allow!” Overwhelmed by a sick feeling of despair and helplessness—uncertain what could, or ought, to be revealed to such an innocent of her brother’s moral lapse—I was, for an instant, deprived of speech. “Are you unaware, Alice, that it is because of Bertie—his transgressions, the severe anxiety his weak character has caused—that your Papa lost all will to live? You did very wrong in summoning him. But for Bertie’s presence in the Blue Room—”

  “—Papa might have rallied?” Her lip trembled. “Good God, Mama, when will you see the truth? Papa has been ill for weeks—months, perhaps!”

  “Your father was well enough before the Prince of Wales broke his heart,” I cried. “And then you must dig his grave for him!”

  Alice’s hands twisted convulsively in her lap, but her eyes remained fixed; she did not break down.

  “I hope you will behave with greater modesty, in future,” I said lamely. “There is a degree of self-consequence in all your actions, Alice, that cannot be considered either proper o
r becoming. I shudder to think how your future husband may remark upon it.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  I hesitated; there was much I yearned to know. And yet Alice is such a difficult creature—so aloof, so acute in her understanding...

  “You were almost the last to attend him,” I observed. “You were by his side from morning until night. Never, from this day until the hour of your death, my dear, shall you have the slightest call to reproach yourself. You may be happy in the knowledge that you did your Duty.”

  “Yes. I have that comfort.”

  “He was so cold at the end,” I murmured. “His hands, his face, almost blue. As though the midnight of Heaven had wrapped itself already around him.”

  Alice looked at me finally. I sank down beside her, clasped her hands in mine.

  “And he whispered in your ear. German, of course. A few words, I think?”

  Abruptly, she rose.

  “Dear child, what did he tell you? Did he say anything of... the family? Anything, perhaps, of... me?”

  Alice’s eyelids flickered. “There are other people in the world, Mama, besides yourself. Though you can never be brought to see it.”

  Such cruelty, at an hour when too much has already been torn from me! I rose and faced her.

  “Pray consider, Alice. Do you think it is quite what Beloved Papa would wish—that you should refuse to confide in your suffering parent?”

  She sighed, and closed her eyes. “Papa’s words were utterly unintelligible. The merest ravings. Question me as you choose, Mama, you shall never divine his meaning.”

  She stepped deliberately around me and moved off without haste, unrepentant and unassailable, in the direction of her private apartments.

  Chapter Eleven

  The tenement stairs led up to the garrets, and Fitzgerald took them two at a time, Georgie’s medical bag in his right hand. She followed, her skirts bunched in her fists, her breathing audible and rapid. She would, of course, be fighting the iron grip of stays around her rib cage; it was a small mercy, Fitzgerald reflected, that she hadn’t worn a crinoline that morning. She kept a kind of work uniform—of which the French twilled silk was one—of neat walking dresses designed to be worn over petticoats rather than the swaying bell of whalebone and stiffening; but all those layers were a treacherous impediment to haste. How would she navigate the roof ? And was she in slippers or boots?