A Flaw in the Blood (26 page)

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.

AFTERWORD

T
HIS BOOK IS ENTIRELY A
work of fiction. It derives, however, from the peculiar childhood and destiny of Queen Victoria, the genetic flaw of hemophilia she passed to three of her children, and the sudden death of her husband at age forty-two from a poorly diagnosed gastric complaint—which may have been stomach cancer or a perforated ulcer, but which almost certainly was
not
typhoid.

Victoria's life has been chronicled and assessed in more volumes than one can enumerate. Those I found chiefly useful in writing this novel were:
Victoria: The Young Queen,
by Monica Charlot (Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1991);
A Royal Conflict: Sir John Conroy and the Young Victoria,
by Katherine Hudson (Hodder and Stoughton, 1994);
Queen Victoria: From Her Birth to the Death of the Prince Consort,
by Cecil Woodham-Smith (Knopf, 1972);
Victoria: An Intimate Biography,
by Stanley Weintraub (E. P. Dutton, 1988);
Victoria R.I.,
by Elizabeth Longford (Harper & Row, 1964);
Queen Victoria,
by Lytton Strachey (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1921);
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals,
selected by Christopher Hibbert (John Murray, 1984); and
Queen Victoria: A Personal History,
by Christopher Hibbert (HarperCollins UK, 1999). The matter of Victoria's hemophilia is taken up in
Queen Victoria's Gene: Haemophilia and the Royal Family,
by D. M. Potts and W. T. W. Potts (Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1995).

Almost as many works address the life and legacy of Prince Albert. Chief among these are Stanley Weintraub's
Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert
(The Free Press, 1997),
Prince Albert: A Biography,
by Robert Rhodes James (Knopf, 1984), and
King Without a Crown,
by Daphne Bennett (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1977).

The first woman to qualify as a medical doctor in Great Britain did so in 1867. Unlike Dr. John Snow, whose work is now part of history, Georgiana Armistead is a fabrication; but her character is drawn from such figures as Elizabeth Blackwell, whose
Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women,
first published in 1895, recounts the enormous difficulties and challenges such women faced. The state of medicine in 1861 may be traced in Roy Porter's
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind
(HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1997),
The Scientific Revolution in Victorian Medicine,
by A. J. Youngson (Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1979),
Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow,
by Peter Vinten-Johansen et al. (Oxford University Press, 2003), and Steven Johnson's excellent
The Ghost Map
(Riverhead Books, 2006).

The state of the Irish in London in 1861 is taken up in such works as
Exiles of Erin: Irish Immigrants in Victorian London,
by Lynn Hollen Lees (Cornell University Press, 1979),
A Survey of the Irish in England, 1872,
edited by Alan O'Day (The Hambledon Press, 1990), and
Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England,
by Martin J. Weiner (Cambridge University Press, 2004). As always Leon Radzinowicz's multivolume
History of English Criminal Law
also proved invaluable (Stevens & Sons Ltd., 1948).

Prince Leopold grew up under the obsessive shadow of his mother, who attempted throughout his short life to prevent him from entering society or the world for which his intelligence and charm clearly fitted him. Her most telling comment about the boy was expressed in a letter to his sister Vicky—that even the death of a
good
child who suffered illness was preferable to the healthy life of a son (like Bertie, the Prince of Wales), whose morals and character must always disappoint. Leopold died at age twenty-eight in the town of Cannes he loved so well, of a cerebral hemorrhage caused by falling on a flight of stone stairs. Something of his life and personality may be gleaned from Louisa Bowater's account of her time with the young prince,
The Journals of Lady Knightley of Fawsley,
edited by Julia Cartwright (John Murray, 1915), and in
Prince Leopold: The Untold Story of Queen Victoria's Youngest Son,
by Charlotte Zeepvat (Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1998).

Princess Alice did indeed marry Louis of Hesse, in a July, 1862, ceremony at Osborne House—and died at the age of thirty-five from diphtheria. Her son Fritzie—godson to her brother Leopold—died of hemophilia as a toddler in 1873. Her daughter, Alicky, married Tsar Nicholas II of Russia—and passed hemophilia to her son, the tsarevitch Alexis. The Tsar and his entire family were executed by firing squad at Ekaterinburg in 1918.

Hemophilia is carried in a recessive gene, and it appears to have passed out of the British royal family as of the twenty-first century. The questions and mysteries of the past—including the source of Victoria's untraceable disease—remain.

Stephanie Barron

DENVER, COLORADO
, 2007

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STEPHANIE BARRON is the author of nine bestselling Jane Austen mysteries. She lives in Colorado, where she is at work on her next novel of historical suspense,
The White Garden,
which Bantam will publish in 2009.

Also by Stephanie Barron

THE JANE AUSTEN MYSTERIES

Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor

Jane and the Man of the Cloth

Jane and the Wandering Eye

Jane and the Genius of the Place

Jane and the Stillroom Maid

Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House

Jane and the Ghosts of Netley

Jane and His Lordship's Legacy

Jane and the Barque of Frailty

A FLAW IN THE BLOOD
A Bantam Book / March 2008

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2008 by Stephanie Barron

Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barron, Stephanie.
A flaw in the blood / Stephanie Barron.
p. cm.
1. Windsor Castle—Fiction.   2. Victoria, Queen of
Great Britain, 1819–1901—Fiction.    I. Title.
PS3563.A8357F63    2008
813'54—dc22      2007023545

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-553-90468-0

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