A Flaw in the Blood

mentioned that Albert was an accomplished sportsman? He formed the habit, in his Coburg youth, of attending grandes battues, in which an extraordinary quantity of game are driven by beaters into an enclosure and there slaughtered at will by the gentlemen. It is a nauseating sight, and one I endured on few occasions, but I learned its essential lesson: Animals destined from birth to serve as prey for their masters are easily led, and led most often to their doom.

“She could be arrested on the strength of the word alone,” von Stühlen persisted. “But the unfortunate girl Miss Armistead quacked this morning has died of her injuries, and that deepens the magnitude of the crime—to one of murder.”

“Double murder,” I corrected. “You are forgetting the innocent babe that woman cut from its mother.”

“Of course.”

I caressed the stag. So smooth, the porcelain, it might have been my darling's thigh. “We do not know what you are thinking of, Count,” I said fretfully. “You used the word arrest. However great the enormities committed by this . . . creature . . . we cannot allow her to be subjected to the scrutiny of the courts. Much less the Metropolitan Police. Such eventualities would be most undesirable. She is, by all accounts, not unintelligent—and we cannot rely upon her discretion. No—it is in every regard unthinkable that she should be pursued by so public a force as the Law.”

“She might indeed talk—and Your Majesty is afraid of what she might say. . . .”

There was a quality in his voice that surprised me—a quality I could not like.

“One of my people searched Miss Armistead's lodgings this morning,” he persisted.

“They had better have been in church,” I returned tartly, “to pray for the repose of Prince Albert's soul.”

“They found a surprising quantity of papers in her study.”

“A lady does not possess a study.”

“—Letters of business, and correspondence with men of science. Apparently she even presumed to share her views with Royalty.”

A vise closed around my heart. That firm, sloping hand I had consigned to the flames—the false propriety of her address—the hideous things she had disclosed to my Beloved, and the irreparable damage she had done to his Reason . . . “Impossible! You forget yourself, Count.”

My darling's oldest friend drew a folded sheet of paper from his coat, and commenced to recite.

“My esteemed Miss Armistead: Pray allow me to assure you how greatly I enjoyed our conversations regarding housing for the poor, and how deeply I value your approval of my own poor contributions to that realm . . .”

“Give me that paper at once!” I cried.

He eyed me satirically, the letter firmly in his grasp. Can I ever have committed the mistake of believing him handsome? Of believing him a paragon of our age?

“I am in possession of a number of such billets-doux,” he murmured gently. “A correspondence spanning years—on all manner of subjects. Most of them insufferably dull. I shall not trifle with Your Majesty's patience by reading them: water quality, epidemic illness, the management of charitable relief . . . but I am hopeful of discovering more intimate views. Only one doubt assails me, and I must put it frankly to Your Majesty. How is the public likely to regard our dear departed Albert, if his . . . interest in a lady not his wife . . . were to be generally known . . . ?”

“You can say this,” I faltered, “knowing how that Angelic Being loved you?”

The dying stag trembled under my hand, and fell to the floor. Quite smashed. The jagged fragments glittered like knives in the firelight. All the knives were drawn out, on every side and by every hand; I kicked them away with my boot.

“My loyalty to Albert was of a different order from yours,” he told me quietly, his visage dreadfully white; “I will not speak of it here. The problem of the letters is otherwise. Let us call it Albert's legacy to his old friend . . . he certainly bequeathed me nothing else . . .”

“I wonder you dare to speak his name.”

“Your Majesty ought to thank Providence that these letters came to me,” he cut in, suddenly harsh. “Had they been left to unreliable hands—Miss Armistead's, or Fitzgerald's—every sort of scandal might be expected. The question remains, however: What is to be done with them?”

“A true friend would have burned them long since.” I said it with contempt. “That you have failed to do so— that you prefer to tease and bait us—suggests that you are our enemy, Count.”

“My devotion was to Albert,” he retorted. “But unlike him, I did not abandon my birthright to grovel at the foot of a foreign power. Poor Albert expired, worn out by his service; I owe Your Majesty nothing.”

His peculiar emphasis did not escape me. I had long suspected the jeering ridicule of Albert's German coterie—I knew the coarse nature of their remarks.

I strode in a rustle of bombazine to the Red Room door. The blackguard called after me.

“I take it, then, that I may sell these letters to the Morning Post?”

I was tempted to tell him, as Wellington once urged a slighted mistress, to Publish and be damned—but the potential harm to the Kingdom stopped the words in my mouth. “Stay— You know that I may better the papers' price.”

He inclined his head.

He nodded, when any other man would have been on his knees before his widowed and sorrowing Queen.

“I shall offer them to the highest bidder for publication, solely as a last resort—and only then if I am convinced that Your Majesty has no regard for Albert's memory.”

I pressed my back to the door and stared at him. “Very well. And how must I demonstrate my regard, Count?”

“You might reward mine.” He smiled. “An English peerage. An estate and a sinecure, with an adequate income—let us say, of ten thousand pounds per annum?”

My throat constricted with rage and grief. “So little!”

“I have never been an unreasonable man.”

I laughed—and felt immediately overcome by a remorse so profound it almost undid me. That I should laugh, when that dear form lay, cold and unresponsive, in the Blue Room; that the sound of mirth, however bitter, should resound within these walls! Even I am capable, it seems, of the rankest betrayal . . .

My fingers remained frozen on the door handle. If only my darling were present to advise me! That this man he had loved like a brother should blackmail me in my grief—

Von Stühlen waited, as patient as Death.

Chapter Nineteen

“I must go to St. Giles,” Georgiana said frantically. “Where is my wrap?”

“But you haven't eaten!” Fitzgerald protested. “There's nothing more you can do for Lizzie—she's gone, Georgiana. She's gone.”

“I might examine her.” She moved swiftly to the hall. “Certify the death. It's the least I can do—having failed to save her life.”

The bitterness in the words chastened him. “You mustn't blame yourself, lass. She was exceedingly ill.”

Georgie stopped short, her bag in her hands. “Who else am I to blame? Do you seriously imagine that Uncle John ever lost a patient?”