A Flaw in the Blood

Alice unlatched her door and peered into the passage. It was empty save for Madame Hocédé, the French governess, who disappeared into the private parlour as Alice watched. She closed the chamber door behind her and descended the main stairs, searching for the taproom. It was possible that Papa's unknown doctor might be waiting there—and she was desperate to speak to him, to hear him soothe the terror that had gripped her since Papa's death, to know that her life was not destined to be tragic, after all.

But the inn was closed to all but the Royal party. Though she wandered the main floor until the carriages were brought round, and she was forced to submit and enter one—no one appeared to answer Alice's prayer.

Part Two The Continent

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.