A Flaw in the Blood (21 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

L
ATER, 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

N
EITHER 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.