A Flaw in the Blood

bourgeois for beauty; but Albert was extraordinary—tall and graceful and muscled—and when he looked at me I felt as bewitching as the most celebrated courtesan in London.

My mother was sister to his father. Albert and I were delivered by the same midwife, a continent and a few months apart. We watched each other grow with the disinterest of children. For years, my cousin thought I was a spoiled little frump; for years, I considered him fat and stupid. His elder brother Ernest was far more dashing—Albert preferred books to flirtation. Until that day in October, more than twenty years ago, when he traveled from Germany straight to his doom, knowing he must accept my hand in marriage whether he wanted it or not. The Family—the Saxe-Coburgs, our Uncle Leopold most of all—said it was his Duty. The idea of Duty fascinated Albert as flagellation haunts an ascetic; it meant Sacrifice. Otherwise, Duty would have been called Pleasure—and Albert would have had nothing to do with it.

He came reluctantly to London in 1839. He hated the English damp, missed his friends and his hunting grounds acutely. He despised women on principle and was keenly aware that I was graceless—too short in the neck, too full in the cheeks, my chin receding. He had only just completed his studies at the University of Bonn, and was so serious and melancholy he looked like a martyr of old. I could not drink in his beauty enough as I stood at the head of the stairs, stunned, to receive him. I was of an age when I craved the touch and passion of a man—and here was a god, handed to me on a silver salver! I may honestly say I fell in love at first sight.

During the month of his visit, everything about our lives was perfect. We two seemed lost in a rosy world of our own, which nothing—not the hatefulness of Parliament, the ridicule of the press, the jealousy of my relations—could influence or mar.

Mama, of course, loved him from the first. He called her his Dear Aunt, as was most proper. We sang duets, we rode together, Albert sat by my side as I wrote my tedious letters—asking only for the privilege of licking the stamps. And when we were left alone at last, he would take down the pins in my hair and let it tumble across my shoulders, wanton as he loved to see it. Clasp my face between his palms to kiss me.

In body and soul ever your slave, he wrote the night of our betrothal. No mention,then, of the abandonment of Death. And I did not apprehend, as I cried over his passionate note, that it was the slave I was marrying: Albert’s Master always—Duty.

* * *

In the morning, I would be barred from this room; Albert would be given over to Lohlein and MacDonald, his valets; to the hideous men of the undertaking firm. Now, as the bells continued to toll negating the individual hours, I could lie with my face pressed into his groin. Drinking in the last warmth of his soul as it fled through the darkness of Windsor.

I sobbed aloud. I reproached him bitterly for leaving me helpless—and of course he was unreachable, as he always was when passion deranged me. How many times in the past had he shut himself up in his private study? How many times had he locked the door and taken meals on a tray, while I screamed in to my pillow? He wrote me long lectures, like a remote Papa; and I reproached him for that—for growing old without me. He even called me Dear Child, Dear Little One—I, the most powerful monarch in the world—and thought the condescension charming!

But I am no longer, and never will be again, a dab of a girl.

Children came between us so early. I was pregnant with Vicky when Oxford tried to murder me, a mere four months after my wedding, on Constitution Hill.

We were driving to Mama’s. I remember the softness of the June air. I had retched three times that day and already hated the change in my body—I felt betrayed by Albert, by the intensity of the pleasure I took from his sex, the way animal need had produced such misery. That day he almost carried me to the carriage, determined to get me out-of-doors—and, indeed, the air improved me. My head felt clearer. I could look about and nod to the people in the Park who stopped to watch us pass.

And then without warning Albert seized my head, forcing it down,as the lead ball whistled viciously over us.

He would have protected me if he could. That was his nature. 

But I fought his hands, staring without fear at Edward Oxford, a half-mad son of a mad mulatto labourer. I defied him to shoot as he raised his second pistol. The coachman did not drive on. Albert cried out in German. The second ball sang wide.

It was Providence, I suppose, that preserved me. And I read in that preservation a sign: that I am ordained to rule. That it is God’s will for me to endure as Queen of England.

The lunatic Oxford was seized by passersby, and the whole episode devolved into the sordid business of courts and newspapers—of men like Patrick Fitzgerald. Men who owe no one loyalty. Who profit from conspiracy. Who believe a killer may be innocent, simply because he is mad.

Would death then, in the full flower of my youth and love, have been preferable to this abandonment? This grief cutting a trench through my heart?

All those years of pregnancy—child after child after child, nine in all; the deep abiding depression that rode me like a curse;the weight I could not shed; Albert more remote with every birth; the demands of Royalty I refused to face; the way he became King without ever needing the crown.

Only once in recent memory did I recognise the ardent lover of 1839—the youth who took my face in his hands and drank from my lips. It was the day he nearly perished in the wreck of his carriage, and the mistress he pursued was Death.

Did Albert feel that same clarity, as his horses raced toward the crossing bar last autumn? Did he stare down the train as I had Edward Oxford? Neither of us lacked courage. It was for Death to decide whether to take us.

And now I have given Her my Albert. No one will shield me any longer. No one will treat me like a child. It is for me to suppress his ravings, the mad words that drowned him at the end—for me to protect what he was, at last—from such villains as Patrick Fitzgerald.

Chapter Three

“How DID you attempt to topple the monarchy?” Georgiana asked. “All those years ago?”

They had not yet achieved London, inching painfully through the dense fog that swamped the dells of Hampstead Heath. By the time Fitzgerald had descended from his audience in the Red Room, the last evening trains had departed Windsor. There was no choice but to be driven home, by a man indifferent to their comfort now that the Queen had no further use for them. It was cold enough that Georgie’s words hung in the air, opaque as the fog.

“Faith, and I told the truth—in court,” Fitzgerald answered satirically. “You must know Truth’s a curse to monarchs everywhere.”

“You’re the worst of unrepentant radicals.” She smiled, her eyes on the clouded coach window. “I was barely five years old and living in Calcutta, when it happened. Tell me, Patrick.”

It was clear Georgiana was suffering. Fitzgerald could not say what she felt for Prince Albert, how deep her grief went; he lacked the courage to ask. Even his jealousy was a presumption. So, like all good fathers with wounded children, he told her a story.

“There are two versions, Georgie. The one Oxford told and the one put down as history.”

“—That the fellow was mad?”