A Flaw in the Blood

“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.”