A Flaw in the Blood

Chapter Thirty-One

The donkeys were named Jacques and Catherine—pronounced in the French fashion, ka-TREEN. They were picking their way with complete certainty among the stone pines and the arbutus scrub, toward the mouth of the waterfall, and the sun was hot on Louisa Bowater's neck.

She shaded her eyes with one hand and looked back down the precipitous trail. She had never seen such a landscape before, had never felt such an exultant rise of spirits at the unexpected glimpse of the sea; had never ridden a donkey, if it came to that, before this sudden descent into the south of France. She was nineteen years old, surrounded by strangers, and in deepest mourning. But here, on the dusty path cut through the olive groves, she could almost believe in the possibility of happiness.

Leo had never ridden a donkey, either. He had barely been allowed to mount a pony at home—and that, only in Scotland, where he was hedged about with burly attendants. He injured himself so easily that if the donkey stumbled and tossed him onto the rocks—or if he slipped out of the saddle through sheer inattention—he might actually die. A careless bump in a railway carriage on the way to Avignon had rendered his arm useless for weeks. But he seemed unaware of the ridiculous risks he ran today. He trusted Gunther. And Gunther had told Leo, in his positive German way, that he would never be well unless he exercised.

Louisa had no intention of contradicting the doctor—of burdening Leo with exclamations or sanctimonious warnings. They had long since moved beyond the stilted conversation of hired companion and dutiful child, to something more like the easy relationship of a brother and sister. Indeed, at nineteen, Louisa might have been Alice or Vicky—Leo treated her much as she guessed he had once treated them, before engagements and marriage and sudden exile had changed everything.

He was holding the reins loosely in his right hand, and with his left, whacking at passing rocks with a bit of stick. He sang a tuneless little song as the donkey—he insisted on riding Catherine, always—lurched upwards. It was Christmas Eve, and they had come in search of a proper tree. Gunther carried the axe.

It was the first fine day since Sunday, when the mistral had howled in off the sea, past the Îles de Lérins and the Esterelles jutting whitely into the foam, slamming doors and whirling dust into every corridor. That night, Louisa could hear voices crying in the old house's eaves. Lost souls, beseeching and desperate; she had not dared to ask Leo whether he heard them, as he lay in his narrow iron cot in the high-ceilinged room. She simply ordered fires to be lit in the bedchamber hearths, for a bit of comfort. This was, after all, her first experience of death and its hauntings.

They had come to Château Leader, the grand pile of limestone fronting the Toulon road in the heart of Cannes, more than a month ago. Louisa had recorded the trip almost hourly in her journal: the landing at Boulogne, and the burly French peasant women who strapped baggage to their backs; the few days in Paris, as guests of the British Embassy; and then the slow, erratic descent to Avignon and Fréjus. The weather had grown steadily warmer and drier, the familiar vegetation of the north replaced by resinous stone pines and olive groves, arbutus and juniper. There were lizards on the rocks, and carts full of wine casks filling the narrow roads through the hills. Louisa's papa, Sir Edward Bowater, had been reminded more than once of his years with Wellington in the Peninsula, fifty years back; and he'd told the most exciting tales of war, Leopold hanging on his words in the tedium of the carriage, so that the boy and the elderly soldier had grown quite comfortable with each other—Leo going so far as to call Sir Edward Grandfather. He could not remember his own.

But Papa had fallen ill in Avignon. By the time they reached Cannes, it was evident he would not be capable of caring for the child. Gunther—the young German doctor Prince Albert had sent as Leo's tutor—had looked increasingly anxious. His medicines helped Papa not at all. Hurried communications flew between Windsor and the consulate in Nice. Mama—who was Papa's second wife, and years younger than Sir Edward, with her daughter to think of; Mama, who had borne with the loss of the estate and the money troubles and this sudden uprooting to the Continent as a Royal guardian—had sunk daily into greater depression. Leo's amusement and care had fallen almost entirely on Louisa's shoulders—and she hadn't minded, really. It was a relief to put the sickroom to their backs, and head out on the donkeys into the vineyards and terraces. Together they discovered aqueducts, or the ruins of them. They took picnics with Gunther into the mountains. They climbed the rocky cliffs, Louisa's skirts bunched in one hand, and talked of botany.

And then Papa had died.

Leo was sent to a hotel while Sir Edward breathed his last, but the next day—another Sunday, Louisa remembered, with bells ringing from the churches among the dreaming white houses of Cannes—he had unexpectedly returned with Lord Rokeby, who'd arrived from the consulate in Nice. At first she thought Rokeby had come to take leave—that Leo would be torn from them, she and Mama left alone in this sun-baked foreign town to bury her father. But what Lord Rokeby had brought was Alice's telegram from Windsor.

It became an unspoken bond between Leo and Louisa, this loss of their fathers on the same day.

Mama was beside herself—unable to credit the working of Providence, which had bestowed Royal favour with one hand, only to take Sir Edward with the other, and abandon them in exile. Louisa, however, did not bother abusing the Fates. There was a quality to the light and air of Cannes that suspended time; she might exist solely in this moment, the creak of saddle leather and the pungent smell of sweating animal; the hot breeze tugging at her hair. Without the dizzying view beneath her she might think, instead, of the future—and she dreaded that almost as much as Leo did.

He had pulled up his donkey on the trail ahead, and was almost standing in his stirrups, staring at Gunther. “What is it?” he demanded excitedly, in his high, cracking voice. “Have you found a tree?”

Dr. Gunther—who was only in his twenties, absurdly formal in his German way, and lonely, Louisa thought, as all men of limited means must be—was standing stock-still in the middle of the trail. He held one hand at waist height, in a silent gesture of warning.

She kicked Jacques forward and looked.

They had reached the summit of the trail, which gave out onto the Fréjus road. Directly opposite, the waterfall tumbled whitely through a scattering of boulders spiked with juniper; it was one of these Gunther intended to cut. And to the left, on the brow of a hill, was a traveling coach pitched at a crazy angle. One of its near wheels was missing, and two men in shirtsleeves laboured with the axle. A young woman stood at the horses' heads.

From something about the party's dress and general appearance, it was clear to Louisa that these people were not French. She caught a few words indistinctly on the breeze, and said aloud, “Why, they're English!”

Leo came up to join her. His face was very white, suddenly, under the blazing sun; it was more than usually ugly, with fear.

“I know that lady,” he whispered. “I've been to her house, in Russell Square. She's . . . acquainted with Papa.”

He reached across the saddle horn and grasped Louisa's hand tightly in his icy paw.

He's terrified, Louisa realised, that they've come to take him home.

Together, they waited.

Gunther hailed the strangers in his deliberate German way. One of the men straightened, and came forward to meet him; the other doggedly persisted in repairs to the carriage. Handshakes, gestures followed; Louisa interpreted a broken lynchpin. It ended with them all sitting down near the waterfall to share the food she'd brought in panniers strapped to Jacques's back. The French driver walked into Cannes to fetch a wheelwright.

“Did Mama send you?” Leo blurted out almost as soon as they had sat down. “Is she desperately unhappy because of Papa?”

“I am sure she must be,” the woman said. “But no. I have come to the south of France for my health—not on behalf of the Queen.”

She was certainly thin with illness, and her voice was guttural in her throat.

“You're looking remarkably well, Your Royal Highness. Cannes agrees with you. I should not have known you for the boy I saw in Russell Square.”

“It is all the exercise I'm taking,” Leo said proudly. “Gunther insists upon it. He's a doctor, too.”

“Too?” Louisa interjected.

“I qualified in Edinburgh,” Miss Armistead said apologetically. “The Consort was so gracious as to request that I . . . visit with Prince Leopold. But that was at least a year ago. How extraordinary that we should meet again, in a foreign clime!”

“Yes,” Gunther murmured. “Quite extraordinary. I once spoke with your late guardian, Miss Armistead—I should say, Dr. Armistead—regarding the statistical manifestation of scrofula among able seamen in the Royal Navy . . .”

They walked off a little way together, among the junipers.

The Irishman called Fitzgerald smiled down at Leo. He was too old to be handsome, Louisa decided—forty if he was a day—but there was a charm to his tousled head and a humour in his looks that were oddly winning. Was this what Mama termed a rake? she wondered suddenly. Was the stranger, despite the decent cut of his clothes, not quite a gentleman?

“What if the three of us were to find this Christmas tree, while the others talk of Science?”

Louisa smiled. She could see that the roguish Mr. Fitzgerald did not approve of women pretending to medicine.

After that, they were able to enjoy the piney sunlight and the cool sound of water over stone. Louisa felt perfectly comfortable inviting the strangers to Château Leader, for Christmas.

Chapter Thirty-Two

I am Tired, and the hour is late; but I must not sleep: I must not drink the sedative dear Jenner has sent to me. In the silence of an Osborne Christmas Eve, I may compose myself, and write, as I must, to the precious ones who are far away. Vicky, of course, in whom it is as natural as breathing to impart the most sacred thoughts of the hidden soul, and to Affie at sea, and to Leopold.

My wretched, miserable existence is not one to write about, I began—and then set down my pen.

Poor orphaned boy! To be left fatherless, at such a season and at such an age—when one is far from home and lodged among strangers, however kindly disposed toward one—however well paid! What to say to little Leo, of the awful stillness of the Blue Room, when once that dear soul had departed? He is unlikely to comprehend very much, after all.

You are an affectionate little Boy—& you will remember how happy we all were—you will therefore sorrow when you know & think that poor Mama is more wretched, more miserable—than any being in this World can be!

Impossible to write the truth. I have never regarded Leo as particularly intelligent. His temper is so very bad; he is unlikely to feel his loss as he ought. He is the least dear to me of all my children—being so delicate, and giving rise to such anxiety and trouble in his father's breast and in mine, he has never been anything other than tiresome.

I pine & long for your dearly beloved precious Papa so dreadfully . . .

I do not think poor Leo ceased crying in rage from the first hour of his existence until the close of his first twelvemonth; and even at two, he was so frequently given to fits of screaming that I once remarked he ought to be soundly whipped. He resembles a frog in his features, and his posture is generally stooped, so that I have never been moved to sketch him in any manner other than the grotesque— Indeed, I avoid the necessity of drawing him at all. I find better subjects in Arthur, who is so charming and well-favoured that everyone adores him; and in the pretty ways of Louise and Beatrice.

Leo's frequent clumsinesses and the resultant confinements to bed—here with bruised knees, there with an oozing lip, yet again with a swollen elbow—make him a pitiable object; but one cannot help feeling exasperation at his endless demands for attention. Not even the best of governesses could make him more like other children—by the time he reached the age of five, I had despaired of any improvement in looks, bearing, manners, or disposition. His speech was marked by an impediment, and his tantrums not to be endured. These past several months in which he has been absent, in the south of France, should have been the most restorative of my life—but I am doomed to find the prospect of peace and happiness forever set at a remove. They are not for me; or at least, not this side of the grave.

I shall enclose in Leo's letter 2 photographs of beloved Papa, wh you can have framed—but not in black,—a Locket with beloved Papa's hair & a photograph—wh I wish you to wear attached to a string or chain round your neck . . .

Leopold is flawed—dreadfully flawed, in every aspect of body and soul. My darling Albert searched, to the very hour of his last breath, for causes he could name—enemies he could accuse—demons he could exorcise. My heart whispers that in pursuing the Truth—in daring to question the goodness of Providence—Albert tasted a bitterness that broke his heart. But for Leopold, we should all have gone on as before—innocent in our happiness.

Is it any wonder I quite detest the child?

Chapter Thirty-Three

“Have you ever seen a sea so glorious?” Georgiana exulted as they walked up the Toulon road together at noon the next day. Her voice was still husky with disease, and she had certainly grown thinner; the bones of her face looked fragile as porcelain beneath the tissue-wrap of her skin. Illness had honed her beauty so that it became almost terrible. Fitzgerald could not stare at her enough.

“Never,” he said, “though I will always prefer the view from Cobh.”

“You miss Ireland so much?”

“The view was precious, because I was looking away.”

She grasped his hand and shook it slightly; the warmth ignited his fingertips, and for an instant, he could hardly breathe. The need to take her in his arms—potent and ravaging—had been growing in Fitzgerald for most of the past week, when Georgiana had never been out of his thoughts and only rarely out of his company.

We'll tell people I'm your niece, she had suggested when they landed at Calais, so that no one makes a fuss about arrangements.

Arrangements. Train compartments and carriages. Tandem hotel rooms. Fitzgerald lying awake during the long hours of the night in the hope of hearing her movement through the wall.

“That's how I feel right now,” she said. “That I've escaped. Everything. I'd no idea life in London had grown so dreary.”

He tried to smile at her, tried to catch her lightness of tone; but most of him was still on guard, for von Stühlen and the men who did his killing.

They had taken ship by night in Sheerness—a private vessel, the skipper quite willing to cross the Channel once Fitzgerald showed him his purse. No papers were required to enter seaports, which were open to all for purposes of trade; but once in Calais they had to stop at the town hall, and list the villages they intended to visit—an internal passport being necessary for travel through France. Fitzgerald hated this unavoidable disclosure of their plans: It left a calling card, he thought, for anyone who might follow them.

He had been to Paris a few times before—but in Maude's company, Maude's circle: buffered from want and responsibility. He avoided the capital altogether this time, heading south from Calais, feeling his way toward Cannes, with Georgie persistently sick, unable to travel swiftly. In this Gibbon was invaluable: He struck up conversations in back rooms, accepted the wisdom of potboys and ostlers. Gibbon found them good inns at modest cost, in Orléans and Avignon and Vidauban. He chose horses when they needed them. Fitzgerald guessed that he also watched their backs—he, too, was tensed for the first sign of pursuit. None had come.

The absence of threat made Fitzgerald's skin crawl.

“My deepest sympathy, Lady Bowater, on the loss of your husband,” he said, as he bowed over the hand of the faded woman in the Château Leader's drawing room. In her black silk dress and crinoline, hastily procured from an establishment in Nice, she would not have looked out of place in a great English country house—a dark paneled room with heavy red hangings, fussy with ferns. Here, awash in strong sunlight, marooned in the midst of a marble floor, she was as anomalous as a bat among butterflies.

“How delightful,” she breathed, clasping his hand between two of her mittened ones, “to hear a voice from home, even if you are only Irish! One grows so tired of French! Is that not so, Lord Rokeby?”

This gentleman had driven over from Nice to wish his compatriots a happy Christmas; a peer's younger son—elegant and distinguished. All that Fitzgerald was not.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” Rokeby observed somewhat distantly, “—and may I add that the lady requires no introduction. What a pleasant surprise, Miss Armistead, to find you in the south of France! And Mr. Fitzgerald is by way of being . . . a relation of yours?”

“I call him my uncle,” Georgiana said simply, “as he has served as guardian since the untimely death of Dr. John Snow. But I might as fondly call him a father—for all the consideration he has shown, in recent years. It was anxiety for my poor health which urged Mr. Fitzgerald to bring me to Cannes.”

A father, Fitzgerald thought violently. A father, by all that's holy.

“Ah,” Rokeby murmured. “Exactly so. And how was London, when last you saw it?”

“Plunged in mourning, I need hardly say.”

They moved toward the hearth, engrossed in the kind of polite nothings which Fitzgerald found so difficult to master; Georgiana managed them effortlessly, an artifact of her breeding—or the finishing school she had abandoned as soon as she was decently able.

“Lord Rokeby is attached to the consulate in Nice,” Gunther supplied, “and was charged with breaking the news of the Consort's passing to young Prince Leopold. I believe he may take the child off Lady Bowater's hands, with time. In the meanwhile, his delightful manners and conversation are a great comfort to her ladyship—in being less foreign than my own.”

The German doctor gave no particular edge to the words, but Fitzgerald detected a circumstantial bitterness. He had worn Gunther's boots in his time. He would have liked to have drawn the man out—established a certain understanding—but Georgie had made her tactics plain. You had better leave Gunther to me, she had said. It is fortuitous that he was acquainted with Uncle John; and besides, I shall know what to ask him about young Leopold.

“Have you seen my fretsaw?” the boy asked Fitzgerald suddenly, holding out the tool. “I have all sorts of building things. Gunther gave them to me as a Christmas present. But Papa ordered them, he said. Papa thought of me. Though he was quite ill.”

The boy's fingers were clenched on the saw's handle. Fitzgerald took it from him: a well-balanced tool of wood and steel, proportioned for small hands. The blade was a marvel of precisely jagged teeth.

And they had given it to a child who bled at the slightest provocation.

He glanced at Leopold. “It's grand! Have ye tried it yet?”

“No.” He looked uncertain, half-scared. “I have some wood, though—on the terrace.”

“Then let's show your papa,” Fitzgerald suggested, smiling, “what his saw is made of. Come along, lad.”

There were other gifts as well, which Gunther had procured on instruction from Windsor, well before the seriousness of the Consort's illness was understood. Lead soldiers, a pocket compass. A battledore and shuttlecock. Numerous books, some in German. A fabulous kite, fanciful and clearly French, made of silk and covered in fleurs-de-lys. A miniature violin, perfect as the fretsaw, for an eight-year-old's hands.

“Ten pounds I was given!” Gunther exclaimed, clearly shocked. “Ten whole pounds, for a child's gifts!”

Princess Alice had sent a game of table croquet, all the way from London.

“She must have read Leo's letters,” Louisa explained, as though this were unusual among the Royal Family. “He has developed a positive mania for croquet. We play tournaments, in teams, when the weather is fine. You must join us tomorrow.”

“I've been winning,” Leopold observed. He looked up from the small wooden box he was crafting carefully with hammer and nails. “Gunther and I are allies. The French know nothing of the game. Fancy being ignorant of croquet!”

After dinner—beef and an approximation of Yorkshire pudding, which failed miserably to suit, owing, as Lady Bowater said, to the “stupidity of the servants, who insist upon cooking in the French style,”—there were charades, and tableaux vivants.

Lord Rokeby began, with an interpretation of The Sorrows of Young Werther, which the entire party comprehended almost at an instant. Louisa followed, animating the word belle, by alternately swinging her skirts vigourously and pretending to flirt with every gentleman in the room, to the visible disapproval of Lady Bowater. Leopold disappeared after this, and when the drawing room draperies were once more parted, materialised in a black cape and the heavy worsted cloth of a French peasant, stooping and shuffling about the room in search of alms.

“It is that beggar who followed us,” Louisa whispered soberly to Fitzgerald, “the whole of our first day in Cannes. Leo and I were quite alone, and this sinister figure—we knew not whether man or woman—dogged our footsteps, muttering scraps of French, hand held out all the while. It made quite an impression on Leo; he could not shake the idea that the figure was Death. And indeed—”

Her voice trailed away uncertainly.

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 wasn'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 silk 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.

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 Sea 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.

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 bloody 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. Gibbon 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?”

Gibbon was sobbing now, his eyes screwed closed. “You killed Master Theo,” he gasped. “Didn't you? And said Mr. Fitz done it. You bastard.”

“Gendarme—some salt, please.”

“No!”

Von Stühlen grasped the man's hair in his fist. “He left you here, didn't he? He ran—and you've had to suffer for it. You don't owe him a thing. Tell me why he came to Cannes.”

“To see the Prince,” Gibbon slurred. His eyes were barely focusing. “To meet young Leopold. Miss Georgie knows why the lad's ill.”

Von Stühlen frowned. He had assumed the Royal Household had drawn Fitzgerald south—there could be no coincidence in that coincidental meeting—but he'd suspected a kidnapping: the boy held hostage against a promise of clemency from Victoria. Von Stühlen still did not know why she was hunting Fitzgerald and Georgiana Armistead—the precious letters from Albert he'd used as a bargaining chip had told him nothing. Or at least, nothing he'd understood.

Leopold's illness. There had been one letter from Albert, requesting notes made at the boy's birth; and a second, he recalled now—so insignificant he'd barely read it—informing Dr. Armistead the notes had been burned . . .

Was it possible the Queen was mortally afraid of her own son?

Von Stühlen stared at Gibbon. “What about the illness?”

“I don't know. God's my witness, I don't know a thing.”

The man was shuddering violently, saliva pouring from his mouth.

“Von Stühlen!”

The voice was Rokeby's. The British consul stood at the edge of the courtyard, a mixture of disgust and outrage on his face.

“Cut him down,” von Stühlen ordered, and walked swiftly toward his carriage.

Chapter Forty

Monday, the thirtieth of December, and Lord Palmerston come all the way to Osborne—some three hours' travel by coach and steamer—with his despatch box and papers.

I would not see him at first, my indignation at this violation of my grief knowing no bounds. A note was sent in to my rooms, in the hands of Arthur Helps, the Clerk of the Privy Council—Lord Palmerston's respects, and would the Queen be so good as to attend the Privy Council meeting, the matter at hand being the successful resolution of the affront to British sovereignty on the part of the United States of America, in seizing two Confederate envoys from Her Majesty's ship Trent . . .

I tossed the Prime Minister's missive on the fire and said to poor Helps, “Indeed we shall not. You may inform Lord Palmerston he is to conduct his business through the agency of Princess Alice.”

“Mama!” that serpent's tooth cried in protest—she had led Arthur Helps to my door—“that cannot be proper. I am not the person the Government must address, on matters of State—”

“Very well,” I told the Clerk. “Pray inform Lord Palmerston he may speak to our private secretary—General Grey.”

“General Grey is . . . was . . . Papa's secretary, Mama,” Alice faltered.

“So he was. And now he is the Queen's. What better person to stamp the Government's papers for them? He will know exactly what Papa should wish. Very well, Helps—you may go.”

The unfortunate fellow bundled himself off, and Alice followed—without a word or a look for me. I gather from my daughter's air of disapproval that she regards me as indulging my sorrow—as requiring this fresh expression of melancholy each hour, as a child might demand a sweet. I am quite content to confound her hopes of improvement; to exercise every whim a pitiable widow might dream up; to ignore, in short, all who would urge me to fortitude.

Helps very quickly reappeared, with General Grey in tow, to protest the new arrangement—Palmerston delivering himself of a peroration on the nature of monarchy, and the power that resides in my person, which none other may assume. I suppose he is perfectly in the right—although he cannot possibly argue that My Sainted Angel did not often assume the duties of sovereign—that he governed in my place—that he pretended to all the powers of a king, without benefit of coronation. All these, no one would deny. It is Albert's absence—not mine—from the Privy Council, that has them in an uproar.

Grey seconded Palmerston's views.

We argued the point by exchange of letter for full half an hour.

It ended with the Council in one room and I in another, the connecting door open between. In this manner, they could record my presence; and I could avoid attending.

Helps carried the papers to and fro across the threshold.

Before I signed, I glanced continually at Albert's portrait—whispering to him in German, all the while. Once or twice I nodded, as though in complete accord with his advice; and only then did I lift my pen.

I am not above appearing mad, if it ensures I am left in peace, and left alone.

The questions I might otherwise be forced to answer do not bear thinking of.

From one man at least, I may fear nothing.

William Jenner attended our party to Osborne, as is his custom at Christmastime; the man has no family of his own worth speaking of, and his anxiety for my reason is so acute, that he should never have been parted from me in my hour of need. I believe that the doctor dreads the possibility of blame, for having lost so august a patient—he dreads the idea that history will call him incompetent.

“Queries have been raised,” he mused last evening when I consented to see him—ostensibly to receive a copy of the death certificate he filed on the twenty-first of December—“theories, conjectures . . . in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal. It would seem they cannot reconcile my diagnosis with the medical bulletins issued from Windsor.”

“How should they?” I demanded reasonably. “We did not authorise a full disclosure of the Prince's condition. We saw no reason to make his agonies public. While there was a hope of his rallying, there was no cause to alarm our subjects with the spectre of his loss.”

“You will observe, Your Majesty, that I noted the cause of death as typhoid fever, duration twenty-one days. I marked the onset from the occasion of his fatal walk with the Prince of Wales, at Cambridge.”

“Yes,” I murmured. “He was struck down. Bertie! That dreadful cross—it was to escape him that we fled here to Osborne. But what possible objection should the medical journals make? You were upon the scene, Dr. Jenner—the editors of the Lancet were not.”

Poor Jenner hesitated. His face is grown puffy and grey; a decade of age has descended in a fortnight. “The Windsor bulletins referred only to a low fever, with a generalised depression. We did not say typhoid. And the fact that no one else at Windsor contracted the illness—”

“The Lancet is forgetting our nephew the King of Portugal,” I said comfortably, “who died of typhoid in November; and our Royal envoys, General Seymour and Lord Methuen, with whom Albert would meet, upon their return from Pedro's funeral. No doubt Methuen and Seymour bore traces of contagion.”

“But they met with the Consort less than a week before his death,” Jenner faltered. “And I cannot deny that the Prince was poorly for nearly a month.”

“Nonsense. We repose complete confidence in your diagnosis, Doctor—for why else should the Prince have died? He was a large and healthy man of but forty-two.”

When he continued to look troubled, and would have uttered still more devastating truths, I approached within inches of his person and spoke for his ears alone.

“No word of doubt or reproach shall ever pass my lips,” I said. “I make you the solemn promise of a Queen. You did for my Beloved what you could, dear Jenner—and I shall be forever grateful for your presence by his bedside, at the last. I believe we may consider the possibility . . . of a knighthood.”

Sir William Jenner. How well it sounds.

He went away a trifle cheered, and I, a trifle less so. Medical journals! Pray God that only medical people read them, and not the general run of my subjects! My seclusion, and the sympathy accorded a widow and queen, should end such trouble with time. What is essential, however, is that nothing more be found to feed it.

“Don't you wish to know, Mama?” Alice said to me after dinner.

“Know what, my dear child?”

“Why Papa killed himself ? That is the burden of all your hints, I presume—that Papa was guilty of self-murder?”

“I do not need to ask myself such a question,” I returned. “I know how your Papa was destroyed. He was cast into an abysm of despair—by the horror, the knowledge of your brother's misconduct. I am in full possession of all the disgusting details of Bertie's sordid affair. Your Papa spared me none of them. I can only shudder when I look at the Prince of Wales. But your angelic Papa was too good to live with such wickedness.”

“Fustian,” she said calmly. “Stockmar's letter refers to Papa's accident last autumn, and that was more than a year ago—long before Nelly Clifden.”

The baron had said little that was explicit; but what he had said was enough. That is why I saved his letter. I might have quoted it to Alice, from memory.

Your desire for death, revealed to me during our talks at the Rosenau, is one you must fight to your last breath. Whatever the nature of your doubts about your children, my dear Prince, you can do nothing to alter the past. Let us have no more accidents with carriages, no dramatic runaways. Make of each day what you can, by ensuring that it is not your last.

I rose from my chair. “For most of your brother's life, poor dear Papa regarded him as unfit to rule. He strove to improve Bertie's mind and character, throughout his childhood; but to no avail. Bertie's flaws broke Papa's heart. It was the recognition of failure—for the Kingdom and the world—that drove your Papa to his grave. And I shall never forgive your brother for it. Never.”

“Bertie's flaws,” Alice repeated. “The flaw in his blood?”

“If you will,” I flashed. “Yes. The blood of our Hanover line. You know what the Regent was! And my Uncle William, with his ten bastard children! No amount of whipping could beat the tendency out of Bertie. We tried every method possible to break your brother's spirit.”

“Thank you, Mama,” Alice said. “I see matters quite clearly, now.”

And she left me without another word—chastened, I hope and pray, by the evidence all about her of masculine frailty.

Chapter Forty-One

They reached Coburg a few minutes past four o'clock on the last day of the year.

The red-tiled roofs of the stucco houses tumbling down from the great castle on the hill were wrapped in shadow, and there was snow in the cobblestoned streets.

The weather had turned steadily colder as Fitzgerald and Georgie left the Mediterranean behind them, climbing north from Toulon, where Fitzgerald—dangerously low on funds—sold his watch, and Georgie her dress. They embarked on a train for Lyon at nightfall, and by dawn had veered east to Dijon. From there, they went north through Reims, east again to Namur in Belgium, and finally crossed the Rhine into the great city of Cologne—which Protestant Prussia had claimed from the French after Waterloo. Cologne was several hundred miles away from Prussia, across a clutch of autonomous duchies, and its people were steadfastly Catholic. Constant strife between rulers and ruled was the result—so that Fitzgerald, a scion of another colonized people, felt immediately at home there. The bells of the Angelus tolled and the great cathedral of the archbishopric loomed blackly against the sky. They spent the night in an inn near the river, and pressed on again to Mainz in the morning.

There the direct route ended, and the rails became local affairs, halting endlessly at every Thüringen station between Mainz and Coburg. They were aching and dispirited as they stepped down from the coach at last. Georgiana shivered in her French peasant's clothing, though they had spent precious coins in Namur to purchase a coat for her. She had insisted on posing as Fitzgerald's manservant—and demanded that he call her George.

She had settled into her role and grown more remote with each mile they traveled into central Europe. Perhaps it was her lingering illness, or her sense of urgency. Fitzgerald could not be sure. Once, when they found themselves completely alone in a train car, they had debated what they knew.

“If the Queen fears for her own legitimacy—if she thinks that Leopold's disease betrays her dubious parentage, and threatens her right to rule—I understand why she wants to silence me,” Georgiana said. “But any number of people might stumble on the truth. She cannot fight science forever, Patrick.”

“Few of us understand your theories, lass,” he said gently. “And there's no proof. What we suspect is sheer guess—with the truth sealed by a parcel of tombs. Victoria's devout enough; she'll trust to Providence, and some sort o' Divine Right of Queens, to carry her through.”

She looked out through the train window at the rolling landscape of Flanders. “But you, Patrick. I don't understand why she's hunting you. That business about Edward Oxford—the assassination attempt in 1840—how can it matter now?”

“I've given it some thought,” he said. “You remember the conspiracy behind the murderous lad? The pistols marked with the Duke of Cumberland's initials?”

“Victoria's uncle—yes.”

“Cumberland said he was the right ruler of England. He called Victoria usurper in Oxford's letters. Most people dismissed the word, but—”

“You think Cumberland knew something?”

“Or thought he did. Victoria's old dad—Cumberland's brother—had a girl in keeping for thirty years, a Frenchwoman he acquired while playing soldier in Gibraltar; but she never produced a child. Maybe Kent couldn't father one.”

Georgie knit her brows. “The world would know if he had. All the Royal by-blows are acknowledged. I suppose Kent's mistress might have been barren—”

“So she might. Cumberland couldn't prove anything wrong with Victoria's parentage. And he's been dead now at least ten years. But the Queen still feels unsafe—there's Cumberland's son to think of, the present King of Hanover. He might want to rule Great Britain. And if someone gave him cause—”

“You're the only person who remembers that old conspiracy, Patrick.”

“I'll lay money Cumberland's son has not forgot! Think, Georgie! To rule the empire that rules the world! He'd be a fool not to watch for his chance.”

When she still looked doubtful, he persisted. “Why else summon me to Windsor and make me swear I'd never revive the story? Albert's dying must have stirred the poor Queen's fears, all her vulnerability. I'm Irish, Georgie. She assumes my kind want her torn from the throne. And if she learned somehow of my friendship for you—”

“—von Stühlen again—”

“She may have believed I'd carry your theory direct to Cumberland. We're both dead dangerous.”

They were speaking very low despite the privacy of the carriage, their faces mere inches apart; and regardless of her boyish clothing or perhaps because of it, Fitzgerald was sharply aware of Georgiana's body. His gut constricted; his hand rose to her cheek. Her eyes were dark wells, unblinking; her lips parted; she stunned him then by reaching for him hungrily.

Roaring in his ears, and a wave of heat; the tightness of her arms on his shoulders and the sense of falling into her, like falling into night. Everything in his being—grief, love, the wildness of frustrated touch—came to life and he might have taken her there in the empty compartment without hesitation. But a porter thrust open the passage door, proclaiming the next station in heavy Flemish; Georgiana broke away, gasping.

She was harder than ever to reach after that. Fitzgerald was careful not to touch her again.

The river Itz ran through the heart of Coburg, which was larger than he'd expected. The castle looming on the heights was uninhabited; Ernest, Duke of Coburg—Albert's syphilitic brother—preferred the Rosenau. It lay dreaming beyond the city's edge, wrapped in its forests above the river.

“We shall have to ferret out this baron of yours,” he told Georgie.

“That shouldn't be difficult. He's rather well known.”

“But we've got no German, lass. We'll be marked as foreigners,” Fitzgerald muttered. “That could be dangerous, if von Stühlen is on our heels.”

“I'll use my French,” she said brusquely. “It got us this far.”

There had been no hint of pursuit, during the long hours of relentless travel; and it was just possible, Fitzgerald thought, that they had escaped—that von Stühlen was still in Paris, watching the Channel ports in the belief that they would double back to England.

But the suspense—the constant watchful apprehension—was taking its toll on them both. Fitzgerald's deepest desire was to turn and face his enemy: make von Stühlen scream his crimes aloud, as he died in pain for Theo's sake. He continued east only by an act of will. The part of his mind still unconsumed by rage recognised that the answers lay in Coburg. If Georgie was ever to be allowed to live her life in peace, the answers must be found.

For his own part, he cared nothing for the future. He could not think past the moment when he confronted von Stühlen in the flesh, and tore his life from his frame.

They stumbled on an inn several streets off the main square. Servants were expected to sleep on the floor of their masters' rooms; hiring a separate one would excite comment. Georgie had accepted this prosaically; Fitzgerald gave her the bed, and took the pallet on the floor. That first afternoon in Coburg she threw herself on the mattress and slept in her clothes like a dead thing.

Fitzgerald studied her inert form, then closed the door gently and made for the taproom. Unlike Georgie, he spoke no French. He thought, however, he could find someone who knew where Stockmar lived.

But would the Baron consent to see them?

Chapter Forty-Two

Wolfgang, Graf von Stühlen, was only a day behind Patrick Fitzgerald, and gaining on him every hour.

He knew the roads and towns of the Rhineland and Thuringia, the border lands of Bavaria, as well as he knew his father's estates. He rode hard, on horseback, avoiding the delays of railways and weather; his baggage and his valet followed more slowly behind.

It was a hunch that drove him toward Coburg: a seed in the gut that Gibbon planted unwittingly in the courtyard of a French gendarmerie. It grew during an interlude at the Château Leader in Cannes and would flower, von Stühlen felt certain, in a day or two at most.

He had not tried to wring information from young Leopold—who clearly had helped Fitzgerald escape; the loss of the donkeys was common knowledge in the Bowater ménage. Nor had he approached the girl Louisa, who seemed frightened of him. He assumed he had his eye patch to thank for this—and Lady Bowater, who clearly knew his reputation and treated him with chill civility. Gunther, however, was different. Gunther was German.

Von Stühlen talked to the young medical man of his training in Bonn—recounting his own student days with Prince Albert—and then of the boy in Gunther's charge. He had never really paid attention to Leopold before; Windsor's nursery set held little interest for him.

“This woman doctor,” he mused, as though he knew nothing of Georgiana Armistead. “She was acquainted with Prince Leopold?”

“She had examined him—at the Consort's request.”

“So she claims.”

“Leopold volunteered the fact. I find nothing singular in Prince Albert's confidence; despite her sex, Dr. Armistead is highly regarded in British scientific circles.”

“A pity, then, that she should throw herself away on such a disreputable fellow as Fitzgerald.”

“Ye-es,” Gunther agreed doubtfully. “I must assume we have an imperfect understanding of the facts. I cannot believe a lady of Miss Armistead's—I should say Dr. Armistead's—intelligence and character should be capable of duplicity.”

They spoke in German, of course, as they walked against the force of the mistral, on the château's terrace: two men shoulder to shoulder, von Stühlen nursing a cigar.

“I see you were susceptible to her charms, my unfortunate Theodore,” he said with amusement. He had decided to treat Gunther like a younger brother. “My condolences. But you are not the first to be flummoxed by a pretty face.”

“It wasn't like that,” the doctor protested. “We talked of theory, always. The heritability of disease.”

And as they walked in the weak December sun, waves booming off the Esterelles, Gunther told von Stühlen exactly why Georgie's mind was so stimulating.

By the time von Stühlen made his farewells, the name Stockmar had reached Gunther's lips. The Count was intimately acquainted with Albert's old friend.

Three hours later, he was on the road to Coburg.

Christian, Baron Stockmar lived with his wife in the Weber-Gasse, not far from Fitzgerald's hotel.

It was the baroness who led them to her husband's study. In all the years he had spent in England, he had always traveled without her; and she seemed resigned to this secondary role of messenger, of a life spent in subordination to the demands of the Saxe-Coburgs, barely meeting the baron's eye as she opened the double mahogany doors. She left them to face the dragon: an elderly man with sparse white hair, his neat clothes entirely black.

His hands shook as he took off his spectacles, and he braced them against his knees when he bowed to Georgiana. For this one important call she had abandoned her servant's clothes and donned a bombazine dress and sober bonnet Fitzgerald had purchased for her, second-hand, from a Coburg mourning warehouse.

“I had formed no intention of receiving visitors, and had you been anyone else, I should not have been at home.”

“You have our gratitude, sir,” Georgie said.

“You may thank your late guardian, Dr. Armistead. Oh, yes—I was acquainted with John Snow. We met in London, during the summer of the Great Exhibition. He was a rising man, then—but already marked by genius. A tragedy, to die as he did!”

Georgiana's lips parted; for an instant, she seemed at a loss for words. “We might say the same of the Consort.”

Stockmar smiled thinly. “I have lived too long, when I must bury a man who might have been my son. There are those in Coburg who feel compelled to offer condolences to me—to Stockmar!—who is nothing but an old man with one foot in his own grave. But you will hardly be so stupid. Albert spoke of you, some once or twice; and as he rarely spoke of anyone other than himself, in his letters to me, I comprehend what an impression you must have made. Your intelligence.” He cocked his head and studied her keenly. “Yes—your intelligence. It is a supreme mark of respect, that he should have admired it.”

“I knew how to value his good opinion, sir.”

“Of course you did. You are not a fool, like most women. And this gentleman with you—he is your guardian also?”

“At Dr. Snow's request.”

“At your age, Dr. Armistead, I should not think you required any. Fitzgerald.” Stockmar wrapped his spectacles over his ears—which protruded rather like a monkey's from his bony skull—and consulted a folded bit of notepaper. “You sent me this note from the hotel. Fitzgerald. As I recall, it was a barrister of that name who defended the Queen's would-be assassin, some twenty years ago. Are you the same?”

“I am, sir,” Fitzgerald said, astonished.

Stockmar frowned at him. “In Coburg, you should never have been allowed to present your case. But that is by the by. Why have you come all this way to talk to me?”

“Because the Prince Consort is dead,” Georgiana said. “And because we cannot believe it was typhoid that killed him.”

They had agreed, that morning at the hotel, that no word of the Queen's pursuit would pass their lips. It was essential that Stockmar know nothing of their true position; his being Albert's confidant did not necessarily make him theirs.

“Typhoid.” The baron began to hunt among the papers on his desk, his palsied hands touching and discarding things with the frustration of age. “I disregarded the bulletins from Windsor—they were pure nonsense—and telegraphed directly to Squires, the Royal apothecary. They told me which medicines the Consort's doctors prescribed. I, too, am a doctor, you realise.”

“You diagnosed his illness from their prescriptions,” Georgie concluded. “And what was Prince Albert given?”

“Almost nothing but tea and brandy, at the end,” Stockmar returned sardonically. “Old women, all of them—Holland. Watson. Sir James Clark. They got him drunk in his final hours, so he wouldn't feel the pain. For years Albert complained of gastric disorders, Dr. Armistead—a perpetual weakness brought on by the cares of his station—but the inclination took a morbid turn as lately as November. The Prince lost the will to fight. Let me read you something.”

He settled his spectacles once more, and licked his forefinger to aid in thumbing the pages. “This is from Albert—the very last letter I received of him, dated the fourteenth of November last. I am fearfully in want of a true friend and counsellor, and that you are the friend and counsellor I want, you will readily understand. You see in what despair he was.”

Georgiana glanced at Fitzgerald. “Are you suggesting, sir, that he died of unhappiness?”

“Unhappiness—overwork—disappointment—doubt. A year ago I told his brother, Duke Ernest, that if anything happened to Albert—he would die. His mind was so given over to melancholy, he had not the resources to survive. But surely you cannot have come so far to learn what you already know? Having been acquainted with the Consort, Dr. Armistead, surely you observed his decline over the past twelvemonth?”

“To a degree,” she replied guardedly. “But what can have occurred in November to make him lose all hope?”

Stockmar shrugged. “I have had a letter from his wife, the Queen. She blames some trifling indiscretion of the Prince of Wales's. As though Albert had not grown up in the Rosenau! Where every kind of vice was encouraged and displayed— Bah! It is nonsense, again.”

“You knew him better than anyone alive, I think,” Georgiana said gently. “Surely you must have an idea.”

“Love is no protection against death, my dear.” Stockmar rubbed at his eyes fretfully. “One can see what is best for another soul—one can fear for him—offer counsel . . . and in the end: One is powerless to save him. That is the agony of being human.”

Theo, Fitzgerald thought. He rose from his chair and turned restlessly about the room, his agony so physical he could not contain himself. Had he even tried to save his son? Or had he thrown him to the dogs without a second thought? He deserved this Divine retribution. This ripping of his soul in half. He wanted to drown his pain in drink so stupefying he would feel nothing of love or sorrow until he died; but he would not do it with Georgie watching.

She had fallen silent. Stockmar waited without a word, his eyes following Fitzgerald's jerky course about the room. Fitzgerald stuttered, “Sure and I beg your pardon—a brief indisposition only. Pray continue.”

Stockmar inclined his head austerely.

“Might the Prince have been anxious about his youngest son, rather than the eldest?” Georgiana suggested. “We understood he sought your opinion regarding Prince Leopold. That you recommended a man of your acquaintance—one Dr. Gunther—to care for the boy in Cannes.”

“I did,” the baron answered impatiently. “But what of Leopold? He was absent for the whole of his father's final illness. He can have had no effect on Albert whatsoever.”

Fitzgerald had the strong impression that the baron was surprised—that the conversation had taken an unexpected turn. Stockmar was unsure how to meet their questions. He stared at them frowningly.

“Leopold's disorder is generally regarded as a family one,” Georgiana observed. “The Prince asked me, more than a year ago, whether any cure was possible—and required me to examine the child. In some wise, I feel responsible for him—my inability to reassure the Consort . . .”

She smiled at Stockmar faintly. “As a medical man, you will no doubt understand. Leopold's condition demonstrated the limits of my science; his fate has haunted me. I suggested that the Consort search for the illness among ancestors of his own line, or the Queen's, to understand the progression of his son's disorder. It appears to be a disease manifested only in males, but passed most often through females.”

“Victoria,” Stockmar said.

“Yes. Her mother being a Coburg—can you tell us anything at all about the family, sir? Whether Leopold's illness, or something like it, is known among its various branches? Is it possible that the Duchess of Kent, Victoire—”

Stockmar rose. He took off his glasses. His mouth had set in a forbidding line. “There is nothing I can tell you, Dr. Armistead. My service to the august family of Saxe-Coburg was limited to two men—Leopold, King of Belgium, and his nephew Albert. The women interest me not at all. And now I believe I must bid you both good day—I am an old man, worn down by grief, and I guard my privacy closely.”

“We understand, of course,” Georgiana murmured, “and are grateful for your time. Perhaps tomorrow—”

“I travel to Erfurt tomorrow, on a matter of business,” he said with finality. “It has been the greatest pleasure. Mr. Fitzgerald—”

The baron clicked his heels together, bowed, and reached for the bellpull beside his desk.

The mahogany doors opened so swiftly, Fitzgerald was certain the baroness had been waiting just outside, in readiness for this summons. She stood as still as a statue on the threshold, her aged hands folded over her skirts. Had she listened to their conversation? Did she understand English? She watched impassively as Georgiana curtseyed to Stockmar. Then she turned and swept to the front door.

It was only as they said goodbye that the baroness spoke at last.

“He thinks I see nothing, understand nothing. He thinks I am only a woman. Pah!” She spat venomously at their feet. “It is to Amorbach you must go, natürlich. Inquire of the equerry's frau.”

And the heavy door shut with the softest of thuds behind them.

Chapter Forty-Three

Later, Fitzgerald would realise that their decision to push on to Amorbach that same afternoon—it was New Year's Day, 1862—was one of the odd turns of Fate that kept them from encountering von Stühlen. And blind to the fact that he was on their trail.

“Amorbach,” Georgie muttered. “Where in heaven is that?”

“And why should we care?” Fitzgerald added bitterly. He was weary and dispirited; their days of hard travel had ended in a closed door. If either of them was ever to return to England, they needed the truth in their pockets. Nothing else would help them survive.

“Let's find out,” Georgiana suggested. “May I buy you a tankard of ale?”

“If you change your dress for trousers, first. Ladies never drink in public taverns.”

It was the innkeeper who told them, in broken French, that Amorbach was the seat of the Princes of Leiningen. The town sat in the northwest corner of Bavaria—an appendage once belonging to Hesse, and tacked on to the region by happenstance. Leiningen's ancient princedom had lain west of the Rhine, where Napoleon seized it for his Empire; after his fall, it had been “mediatized”—absorbed into the Rhineland—though the Prince was allowed to keep his hereditary title. His new home was in the Miltenberg district of Bavaria, southwest of Coburg, not far at all as the crow flew.

“Trains?” Fitzgerald asked.

A local one existed, to be sure. They could change at Würzburg.

They thanked him, paid their bill, and put Coburg to their backs an hour and a half later.

“The present Prince of Leiningen, Charles, is Queen Victoria's half brother,” Georgie said as the train chugged slowly south. “Their mother—the Duchess of Kent to us—was married to the old Prince when she was just seventeen. Two children and a decade or so later, he died—and the widow married Edward, Duke of Kent. Poor Kent survived only a year after the wedding. He left his duchess to raise their girl to be queen. But what has all that to do with an equerry's wife?”

Fitzgerald frowned. “There were always rumours, I believe, about the Duchess of Kent and her man-of-all-work, Sir John Conroy. He was the Duke's equerry before he became the Duchess's man, after Kent's death. But he was Irish—and had no ties to Amorbach I ever knew.”

“The person the Baroness spoke of must be a link to Victoire,” Georgie mused. “It is her past—or perhaps I should say the Princess of Leiningen's, as she then was—we're seeking in Amorbach. Victoria—or Albert, for that matter—never had anything to do with the place.”

“Then we must find out who served as the Prince of Leiningen's equerry in Victoire's time.”

“Is anyone likely to remember?” Georgiana threw up her hands in frustration. “She married Kent and left Amorbach in 1818. We're asking the local people to think back more than forty years. Patrick, it's impossible!”

“I know.” He ran his fingers through his tangle of hair. “This whole trip has been a fool's errand, hasn't it? We can't exactly drive up to the palace and ask Victoire's son for the name of his mother's lover. He'd be unlikely to know much at all. He must have been a child when she married Kent.”

“A servant could tell us something. One of your old retainers, long tied to the Leiningen family.”

“Let's hope, then, that they feel no loyalty to Victoire's memory.”

They had been expecting something like Coburg: a thriving city, fit for a prince. But Amorbach was a small town lost in the hills and the dense growth of the Odenwald Forest. It was known for its Benedictine abbey, which had been founded in the thirteenth century and converted to a country manor in the last one; for the cathedral that graced its northern heights; and for the schloss that dominated the western edge of town. In between, there wasn't much: pretty half-timbered cottages, a tavern or two, and the railway station where the trains from Würzburg and Mainz arrived each hour.

They were the only passengers getting off. Georgiana glanced about her as they descended to the platform.

“There can't be more than a thousand people in this place,” she said to Fitzgerald. “It might be Windsor, but for the trees.”

“Let's try a tavern, first.”

They chose what seemed to be the principal inn, on a side street not far from the cathedral, with the arms of Leiningen swinging over the door.

Fitzgerald presented himself as an English writer, commissioned to research the life of the late Duchess of Kent—almost a year after her death, he told the credulous, he was preparing a distinguished biography at the direction of the Queen. The work would be serialised in the London papers and published later, in three quarto volumes, by a prestigious British press.

His manservant, George, translated this deferentially into French, which the innkeeper's wife at least understood. She had been educated at the convent school in Mainz. When they had done with the explanations, she conferred in German with her husband, and then called out into the taproom. A hurried confabulation with two men ensued, after which she turned once more to Fitzgerald.

“She says that most of Victoire's household have died, but we must of a certainty talk to the Prince of Leiningen's nursemaid, who is nearly eighty, and pensioned off,” Georgiana murmured. “The nurse came from Coburg to Amorbach with Victoire, at her marriage to old Prince Emich, God rest his soul; and now lives with her son, a tenant farmer, near the Schloss Leiningen.”

“Eh, that's grand.”

“There is also the late prince's old steward, who lodges here in town.”

“Ask if the equerry is anywhere to be found.”

Georgiana put the question; Fitzgerald saw the woman hesitate, shake her head, and then add a few words.

“Dead years and years ago, she says. And, of course, Captain Schindler—that was the equerry's name—was a military officer, far above the serving class, so she did not even consider of him. But his widow”—Georgiana's voice trembled slightly with excitement—“his widow lives with her married daughter, in the Otterbachtal. The innkeeper will draw us a map.”

In the end, they put very few questions to the equerry's wife. Not many were necessary.

They found their way to her daughter's house, a handsome and substantial home belonging to an Amorbach burgher, on a morning of uncertain sunshine. The widow Schindler received them in the morning room, which overlooked a snowy garden; a fire burned brightly in the hearth. She was a faded beauty of perhaps sixty, purposeful and calm. To their relief, she spoke French; and again, in the guise of manservant, Georgiana served as translator.

She had married Captain Schindler forty years before, long after the Princess of Leiningen left Amorbach for England. “My husband was in his late twenties, then. When the Princess married Kent, Richard was made head of the schloss's household guard by the Royal Wards—the council that served as Regent for the young Prince Charles, until he came of age. Prince Charles spent a good deal of his youth with his mother in England, you know, when he was not in Amorbach; and the Duchess of Kent—as she became—was exceedingly worried that his throne would be usurped. Old Prince Emich, Charles's father, had a number of bastards—all pretending to the crown. But with my husband at the castle, the Duchess could be easy.”

“He was devoted to her interests?”

“Of course,” Frau Schindler said simply. “Richard adored the Princess. He told me once that he would have died for her. And she rewarded him for it. Even after she went to England and married Kent, she sent him a yearly draft on her bank. Coutts, I think it was. I saw the letters come, year after year. When he died, of course, they stopped.”

Georgiana glanced at Fitzgerald.

“Did you ever meet the Duchess of Kent, ma'am?”

Frau Schindler shook her head. “I married Richard four or five years after she left Amorbach. Even Richard did not see her once she removed to England. He did not like her husband, the Duke. He thought the man much too old for Victoire—lacking in vitality. A mariage de convenance. The Duke came to Amorbach once after their marriage, before the child was born. Et voilà! It was as my Richard said: The Duke was dead before Victoria was a year old. Richard did not see the Duchess again after that. He began a new life. Later, we were married, when I was just sixteen.”

A visit to Coburg, before Victoria was born. Yearly payments, from an account at Coutts. Had the Duchess bought her lover's silence?

Fitzgerald calculated rapidly. The Kents were married in London in July 1818. Their child was born at the end of the following May. Victoria must have been conceived in late August or early September.

“Ask her when the Kents visited Coburg,” he told Georgiana. “Sometime in the autumn of 1818?”

Frau Schindler shrugged. She could not remember something she had heard about only once or twice, four decades ago.

“How did she lose her husband?”

The door to the morning room was thrust open, and a little boy of about six limped carefully across to his grandmother. He held a tin soldier in one grubby fist; tears stained his cheeks. Frau Schindler went to him, and held him close—then spoke hurriedly in French.

“Her daughter's youngest, and very delicate,” Georgiana told Patrick, her brows knitting. “He has just had a bruising fall. It is best that we leave . . .”

Fitzgerald rose and bowed. “Je vous remercie, madame,” he said haltingly. “Now ask her, for the love of God, how her husband died.”

Georgie hesitated, her eyes on the child. His trousers, wet with blood, were torn above the right knee. She reached into her coat for a handkerchief and began to tear it into strips, then knelt and bound it around the boy's knee. Immediately, red stains soaked through the linen.

Frau Schindler murmured something. Fitzgerald noticed her hands were shaking as they smoothed her grandson's hair.

“It was the same with Richard,” Georgiana translated for him. “The bleeding. One day he fell on the marble steps at Schloss Leiningen—and bled to death.”

Chapter Forty-Four

Neither of them spoke as they left the widow Schindler's house. Georgiana had blood on her hands; Fitzgerald stopped in the street and searched for his handkerchief.

“You know, love,” he said as he rubbed at her palms, “we can prove nothing. Nothing a'tall.”

“But we know,”

Georgiana insisted. “We know what Prince Albert must have discovered. He came back to the Rosenau last September and delved deep into the records, studying his family line. He learned what we learned. There are no bleeders among his Coburg ancestors. There are no bleeders in the House of Hanover. The disease must have come from elsewhere.”

“D'ye think he met the widow Schindler?”

“Something made him desperate enough to attempt suicide, in that runaway carriage.”

“But why?” Fitzgerald demanded. “He never caused this!”

“No,” she said quietly. “But neither was he the man to profit from a lie.”

They stood for an instant, in silence.

“He probably didn't want to believe it.” Fitzgerald balled up his handkerchief. “He talked to yon lady. Thought about her grandson. Read up on the science. Asked for John's notes—”

“And then, in the middle of November, he accepted the truth. To his utter despair. I am fearfully in want of a true friend and counsellor . . .”

“The Duchess of Kent had a cuckoo in her nest—and put her right on the throne of England. The Saxe-Coburg fortunes were made forever! Albert went from being the second son of a minor duke, to running the show in England—and his children after him. . . . I wonder if he told his wife what he suspected?” Fitzgerald said thoughtfully.

“She's terrified of something.” Georgiana stopped short near the entrance to the inn. “Why hunt for you otherwise? Why attempt to silence me? Why send poor Leopold into exile in France?”

“The boy's hardly pining away,” Fitzgerald objected. “He's having a rare adventure, look you. Imagine the scene when he's summoned home.”

“That's beside the point. Patrick—what are we going to do?”

“We're going back to England,” he said, “and have a talk with the Queen. We must buy our freedom, Georgie—with a promise of silence. In writing.”

“You would do that? Suppress the truth—swallow the murders of Sep and Lizzie and Theo—to save your own skin?”

She was staring at him accusingly: a pert young boy in shabby clothing, her hands thrust into her pockets for warmth. He yearned to pull her to him and cover her face with kisses; but he simply said, “To save yours, my darling, I'd deny the resurrection of the good Lord Himself. Now pack your things. I'll fetch tickets for Mainz. Be ready in an hour.”

The Mainz train left Amorbach twelve times a day. From there, the line ran directly to Cologne—and from Cologne, it was possible to reach London in thirty hours. Lacking a watch, Fitzgerald glanced at the station clock: nearly noon on Thursday, the second of January. They could make the two o'clock train and be back in London, barring a major mishap, by Saturday night at the latest.

He spared a thought for Gibbon—not the first during the long ordeal of German travel—and hoped he'd managed to find his way from Cannes to Dover. A letter to Bedford Square would reach Gibbon only when they did; and if the Metropolitan Police intended to charge Fitzgerald with murder, he must avoid Bedford Square above all else. There would be difficulties re-entering the country—the ports were probably watched. He would have to avoid the usual Channel packets and hire a private boatman, who might put them off discreetly somewhere along the English coast. Was the Queen at Windsor? —Or had she left, as was her custom, to spend January at Osborne House? An English newspaper could tell him. The Isle of Wight was directly accessible by boat, and London could be entirely avoided—if only he still had the Dauntless. . . .

Theo.

The thought of Sheppey flared within him, and burned.

He bought two tickets and turned back to the inn. Feverishly calculating expenses. It was possible he would have to sell something else in Mainz. His coat?

Taking the stairs two at a time, he dashed up to his room.

The door stood open, his few belongings exactly as he'd left them. Georgiana's medical bag. The gown she'd worn to call upon Stockmar. The rumpled pallet where he'd slept, which the maid had yet to tidy. But the single straight-backed chair was overturned, and at the sight of it, Fitzgerald was dizzy with nausea.

“Georgie,” he said aloud, knowing she would not answer.

Georgiana was gone.

Chapter Forty-Five

He was waiting for her when she entered the bed-chamber: hidden in the shadow between door and wall. She had no time to cry out—he thrust a wad of cotton, dipped in chloroform from her own supplies, against her nose and mouth. In his other hand he held her neck.

She might have kicked him—might have toppled the chair Patrick found on the floor—but the struggle was short and utterly silent. Von Stühlen won.

Later, she understood that they'd been careless: too driven by the scent of their elusive trail to have a thought for their own safety. Von Stühlen had arrived in Amorbach the previous night and learned immediately from the innkeeper—whom he'd known for years—that an Englishman and his manservant were lodged upstairs. He'd watched them leave for the Otterbachtal that morning. He'd watched them return. When Patrick made for the station and she chatted with the innkeeper's wife as she settled their bill, he'd prepared his strike.

When she regained consciousness, he was slapping her.

She tried to struggle upright, but her hands were bound behind her back. Her mouth was gagged. She was lying prone, on the bench seat of a traveling coach. She stared at von Stühlen, whose head loomed over her, his face expressionless; his hand clenched, and he slapped her again, deliberately. Her gorge rose—chloroform always made her sick—and she knew that she would choke.

She rolled sideways, head hanging over the seat, gagging wretchedly. He tore at the knot he'd made at the base of her skull and she puked all over his boots.

She cleaned them with a shaving towel herself, while von Stühlen held his dueling pistol to her head. When he was satisfied with her work, he handed the boots to his valet—a broad-shouldered prizefighter of a man, who sat beside him in the coach, grinning at her stupidly.

“We'll have to change carriages,” von Stühlen observed, rolling down the side windows. “The place stinks like an abattoir. Tell me, Miss Armistead—why did you come all the way to Amorbach in a servant's clothes? You're an insult to womanhood.”

Georgiana said nothing. She was bent slightly forward on the seat, her hands tied once more behind her back.

“Heinrich, I can't stand to look at her,” von Stühlen said conversationally. “Something must be done. Take off her clothes, there's a good chap.”

She definitely kicked him this time—viciously, on the shin—but with a deft movement von Stühlen clasped her knees together and put all his weight on them. The valet started with her coat—dragging it down over her shoulders until it snarled on her bonds—and then ripped her shirt from neck to waist. She had bound her breasts flat with strips of cloth.

The two men stared at her bandaged chest. Then von Stühlen reached for his knife.

It took Fitzgerald a good quarter-hour to decipher what the innkeeper's wife had seen. Her French was heavily accented and he didn't speak the language anyway; it was mostly guesswork, with her husband interjecting a word or two of German unhelpfully along the way. His manservant George had been carried, drunk as a lord, from the inn after settling their bill—and gone off with his new friends in a carriage, rather than a train.

However vague the details, von Stühlen's name was unmistakable.

“Direction?” Fitzgerald demanded.

“À l'ouest,” said the innkeeper's wife. “À Mayence, peut-être.”

Mainz. He had a railway ticket in his pocket, but von Stühlen was traveling fast, perhaps a half-hour ahead of him; he could not lose time on the agonising local train. Not when Georgiana was in the Count's hands. How had she said he earned his dreadful reputation? —For raping the unwilling.

“I need a horse,” he told the innkeeper's wife. “Un cheval. Vite!”

It was another twenty minutes before he clattered out of the stable on a nag he'd promised to leave in Mainz—and his purse was almost empty.

“Why are you doing this to me?” Georgiana demanded. “Because I laughed in your face at Ascot? Are you so thin-skinned?”

He had chloroformed her again at dusk when they pulled into the yard behind the small woodside tavern. The handkerchief terrified her, because von Stühlen had no medical knowledge at all; he thought of the drug as a means of control, while she recognised it as a source of death.

She did awake, however, in a tavern bedchamber—her wrists and ankles tied to the bedposts, her legs spread-eagled on the frame. She was completely naked, and the world outside the single narrow window had gone completely dark. The German Count was sitting in a chair in the corner, smoking one of his cigars. She felt the familiar nausea rise and willed herself not to be sick, to steady her whirling head.

Imagine he's a doctor, she told herself. Imagine this is a medical examination.

“Thin-skinned?” he repeated. “You exaggerate your individual importance, I'm afraid. Women, you know, will always be interchangeable; like horses, some of you boast better blood or better lines—but you're fundamentally there to be ridden. When you, Miss Armistead, chose to ridicule me in the face of the world—the equation changed.” He withdrew his cigar and examined it. “A horse that tosses his rider is first broken to bridle—then sold.”

Georgiana stared fixedly at the ceiling, her teeth clenched against her fear. It was possible Patrick was following them. It was possible she would be saved.

The door to the room opened a crack, and von Stühlen's valet slipped inside. The Count asked him something in German; the man replied in the negative.

They're watching for him, she thought. I'm the trap. And willed Patrick not to come.

“Heinrich has never enjoyed a woman of your quality,” von Stühlen observed. “I've told him you're no virgin, of course, but he's pathetically eager to experience your charms.”

The valet was already kicking off his boots.

“What do you want to know?” Georgiana asked desperately. Trying to buy time. “Why have you come all the way across Europe, after me? Not because of Ascot. Even I don't believe that.”

“It hardly matters.” Von Stühlen studied the end of his cigar with his good eye; he was smiling faintly. “You're an abortionist, my dear. And your last patient died at your hands. Lizzie, her name was.”

“That's a lie!” she spat. “Lizzie was murdered—but not by me. The poor girl was smothered with a pillow. Did you order it?”

“That's a double murder charge under the Offences Against the Person Act,” he continued, as though she hadn't spoken. “—An Act just passed by Parliament this year. Abortion is noted in section fifty-eight. But perhaps you don't follow legislation as closely as you do your prostitutes.”

Heinrich clambered into the bed, and straddled her pinioned body.

“What do you want to know?” she gasped.

“Don't worry,” von Stühlen said soothingly. “You'll tell me everything you can think of. Heinrich will make sure of that.”

Chapter Forty-Six

The man shaking out the drugget on the area steps moved with a certain painful hesitation, as though his muscles were sore from overuse. He winced slightly as his hands rose and fell, a cloud of dust billowing from the length of carpet; and then, abruptly, his arms dropped and he turned away from the January morning, the fog that flowed down the steps like a predatory snake. The carpet hung disconsolately at his side; he kept his eyes fixed on the ground. There was a fire in the kitchen hearth, and he was in a hurry to get back to it.

He'd been a cheerful enough fellow before his master turned murderer, the Bobby thought as he strode past Patrick Fitzgerald's doorstep. Bedford Square was the Bobby's route, and often were the times he'd traded gibes with Gibbon. But guilt could do that to a man—rob him of all the joy of living. The valet knew more'n he would say. A prisoner in his own few rooms, he was; a goat tethered for the kill. He knew the police were watching him. Never went out anymore, for all he lived so lonesome, except to buy the odd egg and rashers. Never talked to the neighbours, though some said he'd been sweet on the housemaid four doors down, before everything happened. Waiting, that's what he was—waiting for Fitzgerald to show himself. They were all waiting. Gibbon's return had got the Law's hopes right up. But the man had been back four days now, and no sign of the master.

The Bobby sighed as he went his monotonous way, longing for a sit-down by the fire himself.

The men at the Nice gendarmerie were content to let him die. Rokeby had said that was nonsense, and sent a military surgeon of his acquaintance to salve and bind Gibbon's wounds. The pain, at first, made him faint every time he moved, and a fever set in; but by the second morning, when Rokeby reappeared in his prison cell, he was able to sit up unaided.

“I've told the gendarmes to let you go,” the consul said. “Whatever your master may have done, it's clear you had no part in it—if you had, you'd have screamed it to the heavens when von Stühlen whipped you. There's no shame in that,” he added hurriedly. “You were served with excessive violence—I may even say, out of all proportion to the cause. Have you enough money for your journey home?”

Perhaps it was guilt that motivated the consul's kindness, or a desire to be rid of an embarrassing episode. Whatever the cause, Gibbon's clothes were returned and his seat purchased on the public stage to Toulon.

He landed at Dover on the first day of the New Year.

The Bobby was right: Gibbon knew the Law was watching him. He'd been met at the packet by a pair of detectives Rokeby had wired from Nice, who escorted him to what they called Scotland Yard—the Metropolitan Police headquarters. There, the same old ground was gone over at the direction of a detective chief inspector. Gibbon told them how his master had found Septimus Taylor attacked in chambers, the day after the Consort's death, and called for a doctor to save him. He explained how he, Gibbon, had watched young Theo escort Lady Maude on the road to Sheerness, as Fitzgerald turned for a boat in the opposite direction. He told them, moreover, how Wolfgang, Graf von Stühlen—who claimed to have discovered Theo's body—had pursued them all the way to Cannes. A zeal for justice, the detective chief inspector murmured. In answer, Gibbon showed him the wounds on his back.

The police shrugged, but declined to throw him into Newgate. They conducted him instead to Bedford Square. Fitzgerald's house had been thoroughly searched before—for what, Gibbon was never sure. They left the valet in possession of their mess, with a warning that he was not under any circumstances to flee London. If his master returned, he was to inform them immediately—on pain of conspiracy charges.

He settled in, as they expected, to wait. Fitzgerald would undoubtedly come back; and it was Gibbon's job to make sure he ran well clear of the Law. He had identified three of the men who watched his days by the end of the first thirty-six hours; loiterers near a flaming ash can, who took the job in shifts. They hovered near the gated entrance to Bedford Square. The mews behind the house had only one watcher: a gent in a greatcoat, who lounged aimlessly near the neighbour's coach house, blowing on his fingers in the bitter January cold.

Gibbon developed a routine to pass the time. Fires in the principal hearths at seven A.M., so the damp did not penetrate the deserted rooms. Tidying of the kitchen and scullery by eight. Slicing and ironing of the newspaper, as though Fitzgerald might require it. General housework and thorough cleaning, such as he rarely found the time to do when Fitzgerald was in residence. An hour with the newspaper over his dinner, which he took at two o'clock when left to his own devices; and the luxury of a pipe to follow. Silver polishing in the afternoon, and assessment of his master's wardrobe—what could be mended, what must be brushed and pressed, what given away to the rag-and-bone men who loitered in the mews. Supper he took in a local pub: a simple affair of bubble and squeak, or bangers and mash, washed down with the publican's porter. A watchful stroll around the square—if Fitzgerald made contact, it would probably be at night—and the throwing of the bolts before an early bed.

He managed the household accounts carefully from the strongbox he stored under his floorboards. They had left London near the end of the previous month, and Fitzgerald's January wages and domestic cash were sorely lacking. Gibbon had a bit put by, however—the steady savings for his old age—and he was not beyond tapping it if Fitzgerald's absence was prolonged. Tradesmen's bills were a nagging worry: If demands proved exorbitant, he would have to consider shutting up the house by the end of the month, and lodging with his sister near the Elephant and Castle. This weighed on Gibbon's mind; how would Fitzgerald find him if he vanished from Bedford Square?

On the morning of January second, however, a new interest appeared to divert his mind.

He had taken to scanning the Personal column in the London Times while he dined. Quite often the notices were perfunctory, but sometimes they were amusing.

MISS KILDARE'S RESPECTS TO MR. TIMMONS, WITH HER REQUEST THAT HE RETURN, PRIOR TO HIS WEDDING DAY, THE CORRESPONDENCE SHE SO FAITHFULLY CONDUCTED OVER THE COURSE OF THE PAST FIVE YEARS; ALL REPLIES TO BE SENT 25, GRACECHURCH STREET, LONDON. . . .

A WALLET OF MONEY, AND THE DOCUMENTS CONTAINED THEREIN, SUBSCRIBED MR. A—— PR——, MISLAID WHILE THE OWNER WAS ENGAGED UPSTAIRS AT THE SIGN OF THE LUCKY PENNY: REPLIES TO MRS. BARNACLE, PROPRIETRESS. . . .

He could perfectly envision Mrs. Barnacle, who undoubtedly kept a bawdy house, and would make the discomfitted Arthur Protheroe pay for the return of his property—if she did not blackmail him for the remainder of his useless existence; and Miss Kildare, who had hoped in vain for an offer from her young man, only to read the announcement of his engagement in that selfsame Times . . .

He never expected to read the name of someone he knew.

PRIVATE COMMUNICATION TO DR. ARMISTEAD . . .

A brief notice, without the slightest hint of its author's identity. Replies must be sent to the postal office, Cowes, to be left until called for.

It worried Gibbon that this plea—so oblique, but potentially so important—should go unanswered. Worry nipped at his heels all day, as he shook carpets in the area and ignored the gaze of the local Bobby.

That evening, after his stroll around the square, he sat down at Fitzgerald's desk—and composed his careful letter.

Chapter Forty-Seven

At first she kept her eyes tightly shut, as if she might not feel the rape if she could not see it. But Heinrich's chest was a lead weight on her own and his hands pressed down on her wrists, forcing her arms painfully into the horsehair mattress; he braced one knee against her thigh. She felt the shaming panic rise—the animal instinct for flight, all her muscles contracting away from him—and her eyes flew open.

She looked straight into his face.

He hesitated under the glare of her gaze; his grip eased. Her accusing look had disconcerted him; he was sweating slightly, his colour mounting. To avoid her eyes he buried his face in her shoulder and thrust his pelvis against hers.

Without thinking, she turned her head and sank her teeth into his neck.

He yelled in shock and reared away from her, his skin torn and bleeding: a thickset man, crouched like a wrestler, his hand raised to strike.

Von Stühlen was laughing—a guttural noise entirely without mirth—and Heinrich turned slightly to stare at him, his frame buckling like a whipped dog's. Von Stühlen clapped his gloved hands in a studied way, as though applauding a new star of the comic opera from his private box.

“Highly diverting. A vixen's jaws snap, when she's brought to bay—”

He tore at his cravat, unwinding the linen and running it through his hands; it made a length of rope nearly two yards long. More than enough for a gag.

Georgiana kept her teeth bared and her eyes fixed on his. These were her only weapons.

Fitzgerald might have missed von Stühlen entirely. There were any number of places on the road to Mainz where a traveling coach could halt for the night. At every toll gate that spanned the neatly-tended country roads, he asked for the coach-and-four that had traveled ahead of him. Just past Rodau, on the Darmstadt road, he drew a blank.

He backtracked to the town. There were three principal inns; only two of them provided a change of post-horses. Hand gestures and a few words of German among the ostlers revealed that no coach, and no gentleman of von Stühlen's description, had stopped at either.

He bought a tankard of ale and downed it to steady his nerves. Frustration welled in his fingers, making them twitch on the reins. Though it was barely half-past four, the early winter dark of central Europe was falling. Had the Count pushed on, driving his horses to the limit, and reached a different town—one not on the direct road to Mainz?

Remounting, Fitzgerald urged his tired horse back along the way they'd come. A crossroad bisected the turnpike just before Rodau, running north and south off the main westerly route; the signpost read Bensheim. It was possible von Stühlen had deliberately tried to throw off pursuit. But he would be unwilling to lose much time tomorrow in regaining the main road. Would he dodge north, therefore, or south? Fitzgerald had no idea; he was a stranger in a strange country, without even a rudimentary map.

As his horse pawed the tarmacadam uncertainly in the centre of the crossroad, a train whistle sounded mournfully in the distance. Fitzgerald's head swung north, listening.

The railway ran to Mainz. Von Stühlen would lose the least time the closer he kept to it.

He took the whistle as a sign in the gathering dark, and turned north.

The inn was a small one sitting close to the road: a local affair for farmers and their beer, in a village of a dozen houses. It boasted no stable yard and no ostlers; but von Stühlen did not require a change of horses—he intended to rest his team overnight. Fitzgerald could see the looming bulk of the traveling coach pulled up behind the inn, beside the publican's waggon.

He dismounted, and tied his nag to a post near the tavern door. His pulse quickened in his temples, and his hands trembled slightly; he felt for the repeating pistol he had carried in his coat ever since Shurland. He could not hope to recruit the publican; he could not demand the police. He would have to bluff his way through.

He pulled open the door and stepped inside.

The taproom was full at five o'clock; at least seven men, farmers by the look of them, were clustered in small knots drinking and talking. He stood in the doorway, waiting for the dead silence to fall, for the heads to turn and stare. “Der Gastwirt?” he demanded, summoning the German word for innkeeper from the sea of words he'd heard that week.

A bearded fellow with iron-grey hair and a withered arm pushed back his chair from one of the tables.

“Ich bin der Gastwirt. Was wünschen Sie?”

“Mein Kamerad,” Fitzgerald said with a smile. “Graf von Stühlen.”

“Nein,” he said stonily. “Keine Gäste.”

Fitzgerald held up a coin; it was his last gold sovereign. It glinted in the firelight as he tossed it to the innkeeper.

The man caught it in his good hand, and jerked his head toward the stairs.

Fitzgerald left them to their drink.

There were only four rooms giving off the hallway above. One was closed and occupied; a thin line of lamplight seeped over the threshold.

Quickly, he glanced at the open doors lining the passage: old-fashioned affairs that closed with a latch. Possible to lift with a penknife. If no one heard him coming.

He crept silently toward the room where Georgiana must be. And caught the sound of clapping.

A writhing mass of naked flesh. Blood throbbing in his head, clouding his sight.

She saw him standing in the doorway before the two men did. Her eyes widened desperately as she met his gaze and she might have shaken her head in warning; von Stühlen assumed she was fighting the gag, as he brought it down over her mouth.

“If I'd known you were such a fighter,” he said in amusement, “I'd have taken you myself.”

Fitzgerald's gun butt smashed into the side of Heinrich's head as he crouched on the mattress; the valet fell into von Stühlen with a grunt, knocking him off balance. The Count stumbled to the floor, Heinrich's full weight on top of him. The valet lost consciousness with a sigh.

Fitzgerald thrust his pistol in his coat and seized von Stühlen's neck with both hands. A bullet was too clean a death for such a man; he wanted to feel von Stühlen's pain. He began to pound the Count's head ruthlessly on the floor. For an instant the only sound in the room was the hideous gurgle of a man whose windpipe was rapidly being crushed. Then von Stühlen's fingers locked in his hair and they were grappling together, Fitzgerald's mind singing with the primal joy of it all. Revenge.

“Patrick!” Georgie screamed. “Patrick! Stop it! You'll kill him! Patrick!”

“It'd feel grand to kill you,” he muttered, as the two of them rolled across the floor, coming up hard against the valet's inert body. “It'd feel grand to cut your bowels from your gut and throttle you with 'em.”

“Patrick! Kill him and you kill us all—”

Fitzgerald rolled upright, the miasma clearing. Georgie. He pulled out his pistol and laid it coldly against von Stühlen's remaining eye.

“Don't move,” he said. “Or I'll blind you, sure as look at you. My bullet might even find that lump you call a brain.”

Von Stühlen's jaw clenched; Fitzgerald knew he was reckoning the odds. Could he dislodge the gun, and reach for his own? Could he run the risk of failing—and die because he failed?

Fitzgerald pushed the dead weight of the valet to one side, his gun within inches of von Stühlen's occipital bone. He patted the man's coat in search of a pistol, found it, and tossed it behind him on the bed.

“He has a knife,” Georgiana said clearly. “He keeps it in a sheath at his hip.”

“On your feet.” Fitzgerald grasped the Count's collar and hauled him upright, felt for the knife. “Don't bother shouting for the innkeeper. I paid him to play deaf.”

With his foot, he drew forward the room's sole chair and pushed von Stühlen into it, the pistol trained on his head.

The Count smiled up at him. The black canvas patch over his eye was flecked with sweat.

“You shot my boy,” Fitzgerald said. “My beautiful Theo, with the life bled out of him. I ought to finish it now, and leave by the window. I'd like your blood on my soul. It might help me sleep of nights.”

“But you won't, will you?” Von Stühlen was studying him. “You have it, too. That look of Albert's. You can't do violence to another man, simply because it serves your ends. You're nothing like me—either of you.” He leaned toward Fitzgerald, ignoring the angle of the muzzle. “Pull the trigger, Paddy. It's just Fate, having its final laugh at Wolfgang's expense.”

“Sure, and I wouldn't give you the joy.”

“You think I'm afraid to die?”

“Lord, no.” Fitzgerald shifted his pistol deliberately downward, so that it was trained on the Count's crotch. “But I imagine you've the Devil's own dread of maiming. I can think of several ways to make life a burden to you.”

He stepped backwards a pace and cut Georgiana's right wrist free. Then he dropped the knife beside her. As Georgiana cut the rest of her bonds, he drew a shuddering breath.

“As you're not afraid to die, von Stühlen,” he said brusquely, “I have a confession for you to sign.”

The paper was a square Fitzgerald had kept in his wallet; on the reverse was a list of train times and destinations he'd jotted absentmindedly in pencil. The pen was his; the ink Georgiana found in a drawer in the room. She stripped a sheet from the bed and wrapped it around herself; her own bonds—cut from the bedpost—she used to tie the valet's wrists. He was groaning now, on the verge of consciousness; they did not have much time.

Georgie was dead calm, Fitzgerald thought, but it was the insensibility of shock; it would pass, and the reaction could be frightful. He had not had enough time to look at her. He was terrified of what he might see.

In his lawyer's neat hand, he drew up the words:

I, Wolfgang, Graf von Stühlen, second son of Wilhelm, twelfth Landgrave of Stühlen and Count of Tauberbischafsheim, do hereby declare that I am of sound mind and body, and do confess before the eyes of God and at the mercy of the Queen of Great Britain, Victoria Regina, that I did with malice aforethought and without provocation, kill and murder Theodore Fitzgerald, subject of Great Britain. Also that I did order the assault upon one Septimus Taylor, barrister of the Inner Temple, which assault resulted in said Taylor's death. Also that I did falsely accuse Patrick Fitzgerald, Esquire, of the murder of his son, Theodore Fitzgerald, and of the assault upon his partner at law, Septimus Taylor. Finally, that I did perform these acts at the implied wish of THE QUEEN, Victoria Regina, whose confidence I hold.

Signed by me this second day of January in the year of our Lord 1862.

“Sign it,” Fitzgerald ordered, holding out his pen.

“Do you seriously think a confession like this has any value? If you try to use it, I'll deny every word.”

“Sign it.”

“I'd rather you shot me now.”

Fitzgerald thrust his pistol against von Stühlen's thigh and pulled the trigger.

The Count gasped and clutched his leg as the bullet ploughed through his flesh; his shin jerked convulsively. “You filthy Irish—” he breathed.

“That's flesh, look you. The next one will hit bone. Or your gut—a particularly nasty way to die. Sign the paper.”

“Get me some cloth . . . a towel. The blood—”

“Sign.” He shifted the pistol to von Stühlen's left knee.

The Count took the pen; he scrawled his name at the bottom of the page.

Booted feet pounded up the stairs from the taproom; the shot had galvanized the rural drinkers. Fitzgerald seized the Count's cravat from the floor where it had fallen, and knotted his hands together behind his chair.

The innkeeper thrust open the unlatched door.

“Ah. Here are our witnesses, Georgie,” Fitzgerald said. “Gastwirt, if you would sign your name below the Count's, please—”

Fitzgerald gave Georgie her second-hand black dress and a few minutes to don it, then threw her up behind him in the saddle and kicked his mount forward.

Von Stühlen would pursue them. His leg was bleeding and his horses were tired, but so was Fitzgerald's; he could assume a bare quarter-hour before the Count found a better animal and rode off, regardless of his wounded thigh, to find them.

The railroad cut through the dense Hesse forests a half-mile north of the town, and Fitzgerald made for it, forcing his way through the trees. He followed the rails along the gravel verge in the profound winter silence, snow beginning to fall, hoping against hope that von Stühlen would not find their hoofprints—that he would take the obvious road toward Mainz.

When, perhaps a half-hour later, a train whistled behind them in the darkness, Fitzgerald dismounted and helped Georgie to the ground.

Her hands, where they gripped his waist, were cold as death and her lips were colourless.

He held her close, trying to enfold her in warmth, to tell her of his love without using words, the ache in his throat at the misery she'd endured making all speech impossible.

She clung to him. He felt her body shaking.

“Patrick. I hated being afraid. My fear just gave him more power.”

“There, there, lass. You're safe now. Did he hurt you badly?”

“Nothing compared to what it could have been.” She reached up with both hands and grasped his head, pulling his mouth to hers, kissing him passionately. “I love you, Patrick. I love you with all my soul. I know it's a sin before God—I know you have a wife—”

“Georgie—I'm not worthy. I'm a crying shame. A drunkard and a care-for-nothing. Georgie, I'm old enough to be your father—”

The train was almost upon them, chugging slowly toward them, the great lantern at its fore catching them in its beam.

“—but I need you more than strong drink or air, more than all else in life together. Georgie—I'll try to do better—”

She put her fingers across his mouth.

Fitzgerald slapped his horse's rump and sent it off into the forest. “Can you jump onto the platform, lass?”

“Lift me,” she said.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Gibbon carried the stack of old shoes and worn shirts carefully through the scullery, negotiating the narrow doorway and the three steps to the small back garden. Twenty feet farther was the wrought-iron gate giving onto the mews, and the familiar bearded face of the rag-and-bone man who worked the Bedford Square neighbourhood.

Percy was his name, although Gibbon had formed the habit of addressing him as Perceval—this added a fragile dignity to the scavenger's occupation. He was not admitted to the gated central square, but the mews were open to carriage traffic, and thus approachable by all manner of riff-raff; and the riff-raff performed their necessary functions: nightsoil men who cleared the few remaining cesspools (most of the houses had converted to sewer lines, running into the ancient mains), knife-grinders, milkmaids, and coal vendors.

Percy was waiting when Gibbon unlocked the back gate; he placed the clothes carefully in his handcart, and gave Gibbon a pile of coins warm from his wool-mittened palm. They had haggled over prices Saturday, and Percy had returned this Monday morning to collect the goods. Fitzgerald's bespoke castoffs would be sold to a second-hand clothing shop, at a minor profit for Percy; and from there, they would descend through the social scale over the next decade: mended and re-mended and then torn to pieces a dozen times to fit, eventually, the smallest child of the back slums.

The Yard's back-mews man watched the exchange with obvious boredom from his lounging vantage against the carriage house wall.

“Thank you, Perceval—that will be all,” Gibbon said formally as he made to close the wrought-iron gate. But Percy was fumbling in his pocket, his look one of leering cunning as he gazed at the valet from under his bushy eyebrows.

“Might be as I've somefink you'll like, Mr. Gibbon,” he suggested. “Somefink you've been looking for. Might be as we could agree to a price. If it's worth your time o' day.”

He flashed a bit of paper in the soiled palm of his hand before returning it to his pocket.

“We agreed on the figure,” Gibbon said. “I won't give you a penny more.”

“Somefink from your master a'zus scarpered,” Percy muttered, his eyes shifting to left and right.

“Very well,” Gibbon said with studied indifference. “If you insist on the charge—I'll give you sixpence.”

“A shilling.”

“Ninepence and no more.”

“Done.”

Gibbon dropped a few of Percy's cooling coins back in his palm; the slip of paper slid into his own.

“Good day,” he said distantly, and locked the gate with a clang.

The train they had caught in the woods Thursday night was bound not for Mainz, but Frankfurt. They reached it by midnight, and too tired to go any farther, took a room in a hotel not far from the station.

They registered as Mr. and Mrs. John Smith. Georgiana refused to let Fitzgerald sleep on the floor; she was afraid, she told him, of what might happen—of men bursting through the door, of dreams turning to nightmare. She drew him down into her bed and when he asked if she was sure of what she was doing, she said simply, “I could die at any time, Patrick. So could you. We could be parted forever as soon as we reach England. There's no certainty in the future. I knew that, tonight, when I lay in that man's power— But we're together now. I refuse to waste my chance.”

“I would marry you tonight if I could,” he said.

She blew out the candle.

From Frankfurt they made for Koblenz, and from there, on Saturday morning, reached Ostend.

Fitzgerald had only a pound left in his pocket by that time, not nearly enough to buy their passage across the Channel. He sold his clothes and bought a second-hand set of worker's togs, then spent an hour looking for a steamer that was short a deckhand.

They had agreed that if he worked his way across to England, Georgie would travel in a respectable second-class berth as though they were strangers. If he could not find work that day, he would try the next. But it was vital, Fitzgerald thought, that she get out of Europe. He wanted her as far from von Stühlen as the sea could put her.

The seventh ship he queried had lost two men to the brothels, and was sailing that afternoon.

It was, Fitzgerald observed with an inner smile, his eternal recurrence: the Irishman who lived by his wits, making his way toward an uncertain future.

By dawn Sunday they'd landed at Dover.

Georgie boarded a train bound for London, and the refuge she hoped to find with John Snow's retired housekeeper is Islington; Fitzgerald made his way to Canterbury, and from there, by gradual degrees and found conveyances, reached London four hours later.

There had been no sign of von Stühlen since they'd left Hesse. But Fitzgerald was not a fool. He knew the Count would discover them, or die trying.

The note had told Gibbon to leave as usual for his supper at the local pub. Tonight, for the benefit of the police, he was to order his food and then seek the lavatory. Fitzgerald would be waiting for him in the alley behind the public house.

A sick thread of excitement was curling in Gibbon's gut, so that for the first time in weeks he forgot the lingering soreness of his healing back. His pulse was uneven and his colour high; if it had not been dark, he'd have given the game entirely away.

He was trailed, as usual, to the Fox & Badger; it had become a habit for the Yard's front-door men to order pigeon pie on these evenings, while Gibbon waited for his bangers and mash. He dawdled until the two of them tucked into their food before making his way to the rear of the establishment.

But his heart sank as he stepped through the publican's scullery, into the cold of the alley. Snow was falling gently on the rutted gravel, and a single man stood with his hands hunched in his pockets, no coat against the cold—a man with a soft slouch hat and several days' growth of beard. A working-class lout where Fitzgerald should be.

“Gibbon,” the man whispered softly.

He peered at him through narrowed eyes, stepped down off the rear stoop of the public house. “Lord love you, Mr. Fitz, you're rigged out like a navvy.”

“If you don't know me, Gibbon, I've achieved my end.”

He offered his hand, and the valet clasped it fervently. “I knew you'd come back to face the music. There's a price on your head—you know that?”

“Yes. But I slipped away when our packet landed at Dover, and I've steered clear of Bedford Square—I'm bedded down for the night at the Inner Temple. The police aren't watching my chambers at night.”

“Be out of there by dawn, if I may be so bold as to give advice. And Miss Armistead?”

“—is well enough. Gone to friends in Islington. You found your way back from France—well done, my Gibbon!”

Gibbon swallowed; there was much he might have said, but no time to say it. He reached into his coat.

“Here's some money, and a letter as Miss Georgie should see.”

“Good lad,” Fitzgerald said with difficulty. “I shouldn't take your bit savings—”

“It's all that's left of the housekeeping. Nobbut two pounds, four shillings, fivepence—I cleared the wardrobe and sold the castoffs.” Gibbon found he could not quite meet Fitzgerald's eyes; the world was topsy-turvy, when the valet paid the master.

Fitzgerald turned the envelope in his hands. “And the letter?”

“From HRH Princess Alice,” Gibbon said sheepishly.

“What?”

“We've been corresponding, Mr. Fitz. Seems she's mortal desperate to talk to Miss Georgie. It's summat to do with the Consort, I gather. She put a notice in the Times, and being curious as to who'd address Dr. Armistead in that manner—and not knowing when you might get a foothold in London again—I undertook to answer it. The Princess thinks I'm Miss Armistead.”

“By all that's holy,” Fitzgerald said blankly. “What does she want?”

“A meeting. Day after tomorrow, in Portsmouth. She's staying at Osborne House with the Queen, I reckon, and means to take the steamer from Cowes.”

“I must think.” Fitzgerald stuffed the letter in his pocket. “I must consult with Georgie. It could be a trap, Gibbon—”

“Aye. On the other hand—”

“Can you nobble those men who watch our house?”

Gibbon grinned. “Just give me the chance, Mr. Fitz! I've had a deal of time to consider of the problem—and I reckon I can pull the wool over their eyes.”

“Good. Meet me tomorrow at Victoria Station. Eight o'clock sharp. We'll take the first train that offers for the south coast. And Gibbon—God bless you. I don't deserve such loyalty.”

Gibbon thought of the horsewhip, the sun of Nice and the gendarmes' courtyard. The man who whispered in his ear the words of Judas: He ran—and you've had to suffer for it.

“It's naught to go on about, Mr. Fitz. Mind you don't oversleep yourself in chambers. Wonderful patient the police are, seemingly—and they want to seize you in a powerful way.”

He watched as the figure disappeared in the snow, then turned back to his cold supper.

Chapter Forty-Nine

As it happened, Fitzgerald did not sleep at all that night.

For the past twenty years, the chambers he'd shared with Septimus Taylor had never varied. The two barristers kept separate offices, each boasting a casement window overlooking the precincts of the Inner Temple. The clerks—there were five of them, ranging from Samuel Smalls, age fifty-three, down to a lad they all called Tiffin, who was barely thirteen—sat on stools before their desks, which were tilted to support a variety of ledgers and inkwells. The clerks' room ran the length of the barristers' offices combined, and was windowless, being a reception area for the main chambers; but the clerks had their own fireplace. The room was usually warm and well-lit to accommodate legal writing.

Fitzgerald established himself here, with the outer door barred and an oil lamp burning brightly. He had no desire to attract attention with a midnight glow at his office window, and for the same reason, forbore to light the coal fire. The chambers had a sad, disused, and neglected air; he noticed the stores of tea and lamp oil were running low. But the chaos left by Taylor's attackers had been cleared and tidied, and the folios of clients' papers restored to their shelves. Someone—probably the head clerk, Samuel—had taken care to set the chambers to rights, regardless of the future or whether he might be paid. This small evidence of loyalty cheered Fitzgerald; he stood on the inner threshold of his own office, staring through the darkness, with an ache in his heart. He would not see it again.

Numb in the fireless room and the January cold, he sat himself before Samuel's high desk and filled his pen. In his neat, lawyerly handwriting, with the hard stool boring into his backside, he drew up a fair copy of Wolfgang, Graf von Stühlen's signed confession. It had no legal force whatsoever, but as a salve to his conscience it was immeasurably important.

My dear Maude, he wrote on the covering sheet, If ever you held any faith in my name, honour that faith now—and read the enclosed. You know how precious the boy was to me. Forgive, if you can, what I cannot change or restore—and all the ways I have failed you. Patrick.

He sealed the letter and addressed it to Lady Maude in Kent. Then he stole into his shuttered office and by instinct as much as sight, retrieved the strongbox stored in a locked floor compartment beneath his desk. It had always been Fitzgerald's task to manage the chambers' finances; he kept a quantity of cash in the strongbox for the purpose. He left the clerks' monthly salary in an envelope marked with Samuel's name, and took what remained—some seventy pounds—for himself. Then he sat down once more to write out his estimate of the clerks' characters. It was probable no one would hire Samuel or Tiffin or any of the others when they read Fitzgerald's signature on the page; but he owed the boys an honourable dismissal.

It was nearly dawn by the time he finished. He turned down the oil lamp, collected his documents, and gave one last look around his chambers. It seemed, suddenly, as though the life he'd lived there—his marriage, the cases he'd tried and won, Theo and the love for him he'd hidden—was nothing but a dream.

Old Mrs. Russell, who had once been John Snow's housekeeper, lived in Albion Grove in the centre of Islington. It was a district of London that had once been prosperous but was now fallen on hard times; the aged Georgian house fronts were dingy with coal smoke. Snow had provided a pension for Mrs. Russell under his will, however, and she kept tidy lodgings; Georgiana had been in the habit of visiting her there one morning each month, to ensure the old lady wanted for nothing. It had been the obvious place for her to turn, after landing from Ostend.

Fitzgerald paid a boy loitering in Hemingford Road to carry a message to Mrs. Russell's door at seven-thirty that morning. The police might be following him, despite his wariness—and he had no wish to incriminate Georgie. But it was Mrs. Russell who answered his summons, her broad pink face suffused with worry. She climbed up into the hansom to give him the news.

“Arrested,” she said, “when we'd no sooner sat down to our supper. An information was laid, the Bobby told me—though as to who laid it, he would not breathe a word! Abortion! And her doing her sainted best to see those poor women comfortable, whichever way she can, and never mind the cost to herself. What would the dear doctor say, Mr. Fitzgerald, had he lived to see this day?”

You didn't keep her safe, Patrick, John Snow's voice muttered once more in his ear.

He tried desperately to ignore it. He tried to throttle Snow's ghost, to quell his strident conscience, but the voices kept ringing. Theo's. Maude's. Georgie's. All saying the same thing: You didn't keep me safe.

He could not silence them now, but he could push onward through the rising clamour, to Victoria Station where Gibbon was waiting, cautious newspaper raised, in easy view of the Portsmouth train.

“She goes before the magistrate today,” he told him, “in Bow Street. I can't appear for her, Gibbon—I'd only get myself thrown into gaol. But I can find Button Nance. I can force that woman to tell the truth. Will you help me?”

Jasper Horan fingered the telegram in his coat pocket. It was the first he'd ever received, and the printed lettering on the stiff yellow paper made him feel important, as though he'd joined the ranks of civil servants and army officers, men too important for mere letters in the post. The telegram had come yesterday, direct from the Dover packet office to the City warehouse where Horan was employed as head watchman. Von Stühlen's name at the end of the brief message.

His instructions were clear: Proceed to Miss Armistead's house in Russell Square and watch the premises for any sign of the lady's arrival. Then report the same to von Stühlen. Horan was not, under any circumstances, to let Miss Armistead slip through his fingers.

He'd told the tea merchant who paid his wage that he was sickening for a fever. He'd hailed a hansom for Russell Square and spent the next four hours and twenty-three minutes watching the premises in question. The house appeared deserted, and Horan had almost given it up as a bad job—when a hired fly rolled to a stop at Miss Armistead's door. The driver had stepped down, and conferred with the personage who answered his ring. After a wait of perhaps ten minutes, the horse stamping and the driver pacing in the cold, a maid appeared with a packed carpet bag, which she handed into the fly. The driver mounted the box—shook up the reins—and put Russell Square immediately to his back.

Horan, by this time, had engaged a cab and was hot in pursuit. He trailed the fly to Albion Grove, where another maidservant retrieved the carpet bag. It was a simple matter, after that, to report Miss Armistead's whereabouts to von Stühlen.

It was Horan who had the pleasure of summoning the police.

Chapter Fifty

The rookery in St. Giles was colder than it had been three weeks before, but the same smell of cats and unwashed bodies permeated the entryway, and the same cluster of children was draped along the stairs.

A stranger answered the door of Button Nance's rooms: a faded woman with a jaw like a bear trap. She had no interest in Fitzgerald and no time to spare for the dead.

“Fell off Waterloo Bridge,” she told them briefly, “couple o' nights back, when she'd took a bit too much; and the little'uns gone to the work'us. No loss, I reckon. She were a vicious ol' bitch and 'ad the pox in 'er.”

The workhouse belonged to St. Paul's, the actors' church in Covent Garden, and it was a small matter for Fitzgerald and Gibbon to inquire after the children. Three little girls were pointed out among the welter of grey-clad orphans working the parish mangle; of the boy, Davey, there was no sign.

“Lemme talk up the lads what sweep the crossings,” Gibbon suggested. “They'll know summat, I reckon.”

It was nearly eleven o'clock, and Georgie would be brought before the magistrate at two. Fitzgerald gave the little girls a shilling each, and left the steaming laundry for the throngs of idle and savage boys who haunted the nearby market.

Davey had never gone back to Button Nance's after Lizzie died.

He took to working the Oxford Street omnibus line from Edgware Road to Bishopsgate: swinging up onto the platform with the crowd of working-class men each morning, and pinching a pocket or two before leaping off into the darker byways. When another 'bus came by, he repeated his performance, the wallets and purses tossed each time to the guv'nor what kept him fed, in an attic room full of similar boys, deep in the heart of his old rookery. Davey had quick, delicate fingers and agile legs; the work came easily and paid better than sweeping crossings. He lived now only four streets away from St. Giles, in a warren of windowless and airless rooms lined with pallets, where he slept most nights; days he spent on the street. Twice, he had glimpsed his little sisters in the St. Paul's workhouse yard; but it did not do to stare at them too long. They might notice Davey, and call out—and Davey had vowed never to be taken alive into the parish workhouse.

He was standing on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, eyeing an approaching 'bus that looked sadly empty so close to the noon hour, the wet straw of the inner compartment sifting dirtily down the platform steps, when a hand clapped him on the shoulder. Instinctively, he twisted free and darted to one side—straight into Fitzgerald's arms.

“Wotcher,” he snarled. “I ain't done anyfink. Lemme go!”

It took both of them to carry the struggling boy into a nearby public house, and it was only when Fitzgerald threatened to turn him over immediately to the police that he stopped calling loudly for help and grudgingly agreed to accept their offer of small beer and a pasty.

They sat with Davey firmly between them, Gibbon holding the boy's left wrist. Fitzgerald waited until he had devoured most of his meal before he even attempted to get the boy's attention; he had known that look of starvation intimately before.

“Would you like another?” he asked, and when Davey nodded, his mouth too full to speak, Fitzgerald jerked his head at Gibbon. “You order. I'll be all right. The lad won't run while we feed him.”

When the valet stepped cautiously away from the table, a look of misgiving on his face, Fitzgerald told the boy, “I'll give ye a pound for an afternoon's work. That's money you won't have to share with anyone else—provided you keep it hidden.”

Davey raised his eyes from his empty plate and studied Fitzgerald narrowly. “You're the toff what came with the lady,” he said. “When Lizzie was sick. Afore she died. But you're not a swell no more. I reckon you ain't got a pound between you, you and the other cove what calls you mister.”

Fitzgerald drew the note from his pocket and held it in front of Davey's face. “I don't keep my wallet in my coat, so don't get any ideas. This is yours—provided you earn it.”

“Wot's yer lay?” Davey demanded.

“Justice,” Fitzgerald said softly. “For your sister Lizzie. And the lady who tried to save her.”

A shadow passed over the boy's face and his eyes slid away. For perhaps thirty seconds, he weighed Fitzgerald's words. Then, without warning, he darted out of his seat and shot like lightning for the public-house door.

St. Giles Street, where Lizzie had died, fell under the Bow Street magistrate's jurisdiction. Georgiana had spent a restless night in one of the old magistracy's cells, attempting to learn what she could of the charges against her. She gathered that Button Nance had informed Bow Street of her daughter's death at the hands of an abortionist, and had named Georgiana as the party responsible. But Button Nance had disappeared. The man who had caused Georgie's arrest was a complete stranger to her.

A half-hour before she was to appear in front of the magistrate, an ancient with a face like a sun-dried orange materialised at the door of her cell. His fingers were stained yellow with tobacco and a trail of snuff dusted his waistcoat; he wore a grey peruke on his bald scalp. He peered at her distastefully through the bars.

“You are Georgiana Armistead?”

“I am. But I have not the pleasure—”

“I am your solicitor, madam.” The old man's voice was dry as paper. “Unless there is another you would prefer to act for you?”

Georgie stared at him.

“You are accused of committing abortion. That is a crime under section fifty-eight of the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861, passed into law by act of Parliament, 24 & 25 Victoria. It is punishable by death. Or possibly transportation, should you wring the hearts of the jury. Our purpose today is merely to hear the charges read against you. Your trial, should you be committed to trial, will occur at the next Assizes, by which time you will, of course, have retained a barrister. Have you any money?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Money? To meet your legal obligations?”

“Of course,” Georgiana stammered. “I can give you a draft on my bank.”

“My fee is five pounds. Have you anything you wish to say?”

“I should like to know your name, sir.”

He closed his eyes in a gesture of long suffering. “I hardly think that is necessary. Until, of course, we come to the matter of payment. You will protest your innocence, Miss Armistead. It is the only possible defence available to you.”

She had hoped, in her heart of hearts, to see Fitzgerald in the room that served as Bow Street's court. But there was no one present except a small knot of the Accused, awaiting their fate before the magistrate, and the solicitors who had agreed to act for them. Such men were the scavengers of the legal world—they hung about the magistracy in search of clients, hoping to collect a fee for their casual representation.

At the rear of the room stood a barrel-chested man with overlong arms and a simian aspect; Georgie felt his gaze follow her as she was led forward by a constable. She was trembling, the exhaustion of recent days overwhelming her, the words punishable by death or transportation screaming insistently through her brain. Punishable by death or transportation.

“You are one Georgiana Armistead, spinster, of Number 113, Russell Square . . . that you did willfully and knowingly commit the dreadful act of abortion on the night of fifteenth December last, on the person of Elizabeth Tyler, age fourteen, of this parish, who subsequently died of injuries of your infliction . . . Who brings these charges?”

“I do, Yer Honour.”

Georgiana glanced over her shoulder; the simian man at the back of the room, leering at her. Punishable by death or transportation. She had never seen him before in her life, yet there was something familiar . . . a knot of figures on the roof of a tenement building, her booted feet sliding on the ice . . .

“Miss Armistead,” the magistrate repeated, “I asked whether you have anything to say in answer to these claims.”

She looked at him: a lined face, bleak eyes, no expectation of innocence. “Your Honour, I am a doctor certified by the Medical College of Edinburgh. The child's mother called me to Lizzie's bedside on the fifteenth of December, when fever and generalised infection had already weakened the girl's frame. I examined her and found that an abortion had been done some days previous, by a hand unknown to me. I administered chloroform and removed the child's uterus, which was gangrenous. I learned later that evening that the child had died. I deeply regret the fact of her death—but regard myself as in no way responsible for it. I am innocent of these charges.”

The magistrate regarded her steadily. “I am astonished, Miss Armistead, that you would add insult to the injuries already committed, by claiming to be a doctor. Mr. Troy, you are acting as solicitor for this woman?”

“I am, Your Honour,” replied the ancient wearily. “Perhaps we shall discover that she is mad.”

From the rear of the room came a stifled guffaw.

It was over, and Patrick had not come.

Dazed, Georgiana allowed herself to be led from the front of the room once more, the hand of the same constable beneath her elbow, the simian face leering from the shadows. Punishable by death or transportation. If she managed to wring the hearts of the jury. If she suggested that she was mad. If she denied the truth of her own science and threw herself on the mercy of the ignorant—

“Gibbon,” she said aloud, as her eyes met those of the valet standing in the doorway.

His gaze flicked over her; he gave a barely perceptible shake of the head. With both hands he held the upper arms of a young boy, his head hanging, who appeared to have been dragged through the doorway. With a quickening of her heart she recognised Davey.

“Mr. Troy? Where is Mr. Troy?” Gibbon called clearly. “I've evidence as he'll wish to hear.”

“I am Mr. Troy.” Georgie's ancient sighed. “If you must needs speak, perhaps we might adjourn to the Bear—?”

“No,” Davey burst out. “I've come to see justice done. Mr. Magistrate, sir—” he raised his hand and pointed at the barrel-chested man with the leer—“the lady didn't hurt my sister Lizzie. That cove did. He put a pillow over her head and stifled the life out of her. His name is Jasper Horan.”

Chapter Fifty-One

When he received Odaline DuFief's card that Wednesday, the eighth of January, von Stühlen held it in his palm for several seconds, debating whether to deny his presence.

He had returned to London only hours before, well aware of the risk he ran. But his signature at the base of a damning confession meant he had only two choices: to live out his days in poverty in Hesse—where the family's mortgaged estates held nothing for him—or to hunt Patrick Fitzgerald down, and kill him. So much was within his grasp: a comfortable income. An English title. His hand in Victoria's purse as a condition of his lifelong silence. He would not give up any of these; he did not accept the inevitability of death.

He was hampered in travel by the wound in his leg and the disappearance of his valet, Heinrich—who had vanished into the night somewhere around Rodau. Solitude and pain honed his taste for violence; honed his calculations as well. Georgiana Armistead was the lynchpin of all his plans. She alone could bring Fitzgerald to bay: If von Stühlen found her, threatened her life and security, the Irishman would walk freely into his trap.

Luck favoured him. Jasper Horan did his work well. The girl was stupid enough to send for her clothes in Russell Square.

He was waiting, now, for Horan's report from Bow Street—he would not go near the magistrate himself, out of fear of that signed confession. When he took Fitzgerald, it would be in isolation and darkness, far from the aid of the Law.

He weighed the stiff card in his hand. Odaline duFief. He had no time to spare for a social call, but the woman might prove useful—she might know where Fitzgerald would hide. She obviously wanted his blood as badly as von Stühlen did.

“Show her up,” he ordered the porter. “She's alone, I expect?”

“Quite alone, sir.”

“How daring of her.” Von Stühlen smiled.

There was one benefit of maintaining the fiction that Papa had died of typhoid, Alice thought; it allowed her to plead a vague and potentially dangerous set of symptoms throughout those first few weeks of January, and no one—not even Mama, for obvious reasons—would attempt to argue with her. Uneasy headaches. Loss of appetite. Restless sleeping. All the members of the Household, even the servants, were worried she was sickening for the dread disease—she who had nursed Papa to the last.

She cultivated the habit of retiring to her room at midday, reclining on a sofa with her books or her writing paper. Her old nurse ordered everyone at Osborne to leave her in peace. From time to time she felt Mama's eyes follow her in speculation—from the Queen at least she had no secrets; but Mama's hand was stayed. She could not proclaim to the world that her daughter was promulgating nonsense.

So when Alice left her rooms that Wednesday morning, no one was available to watch her hurried flight down the broad back-terrace steps. She avoided the stables. It was more than a mile's walk into Cowes, but she had allowed herself plenty of time. She knew the Portsmouth steamer's schedule by heart. It was only as she attempted to board, heart pounding and mind singing at her escape, that someone had the courage to speak to her.

“Bonjour, madame.”

Von Stühlen bowed with his usual grace, but Odaline duFief seemed unimpressed. She was heavily veiled against the January streets and carried an enormous fur muff; her clothing was black and severe. Mourning, he thought. How she embraces the old bitch's cause! Or is this for Albert? More of the national hypocrisy?

“You are very good to receive me,” she murmured; he caught the trace of an accent, the glint of unblinking eyes behind the veil.

“Not at all. I imagine we both work toward the same end—justice for that unfortunate boy. Pray sit down, and tell me how I may serve you.”

She did not accept the invitation, but crossed the carpet deliberately, as though drawn by the sound of his voice.

He hesitated, aware of something unanticipated in her manner. She was too much in command of herself—she had no desire for complicity, though she halted barely a yard from his face.

“My husband, you see, has told me all about you.” She withdrew one black-gloved hand from her muff and reached dreamily for her veil. As he watched her unwind its smoky length, the face emerging like an apparition, the muff dropped carelessly to the floor. In her free hand was a gun.

“Lady Maude,” he stammered, stepping backwards. “I thought—”

“You thought I was a fool,” she said.

And fired at his heart from point-blank range.

“Good morning, Your Highness,” Georgiana said quietly in the girl's ear.

Princess Alice turned, an expression of fright flitting across her features.

“I am Dr. Armistead. You wished to speak with me, I believe? I thought it best to come to you, rather than demanding the exertion of a Solent crossing.”

“Dr. Armistead?” The Princess's gaze flicked past Georgie to the pair of men standing several paces behind her. “But . . . you are a lady—”

“I am also qualified in medicine. Your late father the Prince Consort was a valued acquaintance. It was to speak of him, I believe, that you placed that notice in the Times? Although, to be frank, he was never my patient, Your Highness. He consulted me on behalf of your brother.”

Alice said nothing for an instant, glancing about with a hunted look.

“We have engaged a fly,” Georgiana attempted. “If you will consent to enter it, we may speak in complete privacy. For my part, I promise no harm shall come to your person or reputation.”

“Of course. It is only that— If only I could be certain—”

“That I am who I claim?” Georgiana smiled. “Would it help you to know that I am recently returned from Cannes? That I met your brother Leopold there? And that he was so kind as to lend me his donkey, Catherine?”

“Leo!”

“The Prince and I are old friends. It was he your Papa required me to examine.”

Alice's expression clouded. “Then I was wrong. I thought perhaps you knew something of my father that I did not—that you might be capable of dispelling some grave fears that have attended me since his tragic death—but if you were Leo's physician—”

“There is much that we might discuss,” Georgiana said carefully. “But not in such an exposed place. May I beg to introduce another who is closely concerned in these affairs? Your Highness, may I present Mr. Patrick Fitzgerald to your acquaintance?”

She stared down at his body where it lay on the carpet, blood spreading across the elegant white shirtfront, a darker stain on the black cloth of his waistcoat. His sensual lips were parted, exposing the teeth; his one good eye stared coldly at the brass fender.

She had an idle fancy to remove the eye patch and probe the empty socket with her finger; or to kneel down and kiss those parted lips—either would have been a sensation she might have enjoyed, in the past. But she was so very tired now. To kill him had required all the attention and energy she could summon from her dying frame, all the mental force she could muster. She wanted, now, to sleep.

Maude did not intend to hang for von Stühlen's murder. She would not appear at the Bar to offer her confused testimony. She simply placed the copy of the Count's confession in his dead right hand, and composed herself in a convenient chair. When the porter's running feet had reached the door of the third-floor flat, she fired the gun a second time.

Chapter Fifty-Two

I was pretending to read one of Palmerston's dispatches, which the excellent Mr. Helps had conveyed across the threshold—although in truth I was composing a letter to my daughter Vicky, full of sad reflections upon Those Who Are Gone—when Alice appeared at the door of my private sitting room.

I barely glanced at her, having lost all patience with her melancholy airs and her wicked attempts to cultivate illness. It is a very good thing that she is to be thrown away upon Louis of Hesse—who is nothing but a Ludwig, after all, dressed up in a French name. Kind but dull, and his teeth so very bad that even our dentist could do nothing with him.

“I am not at leisure, Alice,” I said firmly, my eyes upon Vicky's letter. “I have not the quantity of hours you seem to spend in reading your books. I must guard my moments jealously.”

She ignored my words and walked without hesitation into the room. To my surprise, a small cavalcade followed: William Jenner, with an expression of marked ill-ease upon his countenance; the despicable Patrick Fitzgerald; and a lady . . . a lady whose name I fancied I could summon. It was she who closed the double doors behind her, and remained, like a sentinel, before them. She was far too beautiful to bear looking at. I remembered her handwriting on the page—the satisfaction of the flames . . .

I rose from my desk in cold fury.

“We must and shall speak with you, Mama.”

Alice's face was quite pale and her features haggard; I might almost have believed in her spurious illness as she stood before me so straightly, all her father's stubbornness in her upright frame.

“Mr. Fitzgerald you know. But Dr. Armistead is a stranger, I believe—in person, if not in name.”

“Not in name,” I agreed. “But I have no wish to make Miss Armistead's acquaintance. She is guilty of abortion and her paramour of murder. Jenner— Summon the footmen and we shall have these two bound over to the Law at once! I must thank you, Alice, for doing what others less worthy of trust could not!”

My physician extracted a handkerchief from his coat and mopped at his brow. “Forgive me, Your Majesty. Forgive me.”

“Dr. Jenner is here at my request,” Alice said. “I intend that he shall bear witness to all that is said. I applied to Georgiana Armistead from the depths of my misery—in my effort to understand the despair that drove Papa to take his own life—”

“Silence!” I hissed, appalled at this frankness, this exposure of our veiled intimacy—and before such a figure as William Jenner, whose unwitting complicity in Albert's death has been the foundation of all my security. “You shall not speak of it. I shall not listen.”

“Dr. Armistead told me what I believe you must already know: that Papa was aware our Leopold's illness is a hereditary malady. That all of us may bear a similar flaw, and pass it, indeed, to our children. That there is no possibility of cure. It was for this reason he urged me, on his deathbed, to break off my engagement—”

“Nonsense,” I said. “Leopold's frailty is nowhere evident in the family—neither in the Hanoverian line, nor in Albert's. It is an act of Providence. A tragedy of Fate. That your Papa could not accept God's Will is a measure of how much his science failed him, Alice.”

“It was to suppress all rumour of this... flaw,” Alice continued implacably, “that you pursued Dr. Armistead and Mr. Fitzgerald across England and Europe, with every kind of calumny and crime thrown at their heads. You should rather have seen them hanged, Mama, than admitted to the world Papa's weakness.”

“That is a lie,” I said flatly. “I allowed the Law to take its course. You have been imposed upon, Alice; your new friends are criminals, unworthy of your trust. Jenner, how long must I listen to this? My nerves—”

“Wolfgang, Graf von Stühlen, is dead, Your Majesty,” Jenner murmured. “I received a telegram to that effect from London, but a quarter-hour ago.”

I stared at him and felt my legs buckle, my bulk slide downward, back into my chair. My arms rested heavily on the desk frame; but for its support, I fear I should have fainted.

“You killed him?” I inquired blankly of the scoundrel Fitzgerald.

He shook his head. “The honour, I fear, goes to my late wife. But von Stühlen gave me this before he died.”

He held out a sheet of paper, and mesmerised—still unable to move—I listened while he read the bitter words.

. . . “Finally, that I did perform these acts at the implied wish of THE QUEEN, Victoria Regina, whose confidence I hold. . . .”

“Impossible,” I murmured, my eyes upon Alice.

“Von Stühlen signed it,” the Irishman said. “But I will undertake never to reveal its existence, Your Majesty, on one condition.”

I stared at him, awaiting the inevitable words.

Fitzgerald held my gaze. “That you swear, before Her Royal Highness the Princess Alice and Dr. William Jenner, that you will never again pursue me or Georgiana Armistead at the peril of our lives and reputations.”

I let out an unsteady sigh. It seemed a small enough thing, in exchange for the world.

They have formed the intention, I gather, of emigrating to Canada; and indeed, do not even return to London, but rather will embark with their manservant upon a transatlantic steamer out of Southampton, bound for Halifax.

I signed the trifling paper Fitzgerald presented for my perusal; saw Alice and Jenner witness its execution; and reflected that the Irishman had achieved what even Palmerston could not—he had compelled my attention to a grave matter while breathing the air of the same room.

It was unclear to me what, exactly, they knew or suspected—whether they understood the dreadful uncertainty that hangs over my parentage. Whether they guessed that Albert had recognised it, through the enormity of Leopold's illness—and being a noble soul, incapable of deceit, or of profiting by the indiscretions of others, had insisted that I must abdicate in favour of my cousin, Ernest of Hanover, the unequivocally legitimate heir to the throne of England.

That a prince who possessed the freedom of the world—an unlimited power to act in the name of good—the adoration of his wife and the blessings of his children—should seek to lay down that gift, and to rob his heirs of the greatest Empire on earth—is a kind of insanity for which there is no possible forgiveness. It was the final act of usurpation Albert could commit: to take from me my only purpose in life, the purpose for which I was born.

He was an Angelic Being, far too good to live.

I had to put him down like a sick dog.

I ought to thank Fitzgerald and his doxy, I suppose—they have rid me of a tedious burden in von Stühlen. The Count thought to slip his noose around my neck, like so many gentlemen before him. I should not long have endured the knot; but to free myself, indeed, I might have been forced to an unpleasant exertion.

Once Alice is married and Jenner rewarded with his knighthood, I may reasonably expect to live out my sad years in untroubled solitude. I shall be a walking monument to my Beloved Albert, and exhibit to an admiring public the fortitude with which Majesty endures an irreparable Loss. I may live to see all of Albert's children take their rightful places among the kingdoms of the world, and know that my descendants shall hold sway in England for centuries to come.

But I confess I hate the very name of Patrick Fitzgerald.