A Flaw in the Blood

Fitzgerald glanced at Georgiana. “Very dashing of you, my dear Miss Bowater, but foolish. If we were dangerous folk, you'd be regretting our acquaintance by and by. We might carry you and Prince Leo off, as Royal hostages.”

“It was Leo who would come,” she said simply. “He refused to believe you were the sort of man who could shoot his own son in cold blood. Any more than I can believe it. And the idea that Miss Armistead could place all her love and trust in such a monster—”

Fitzgerald stared at her, uncomprehending. His heartbeat had suddenly thickened and slowed, filling his mind with a throbbing roar that demanded all attention. “My son? For the love of Christ—what did you say about my son?”

“His name was Theo.” Leo reached for Fitzgerald's cold hand, his voice oddly commanding. “Rokeby said so. Did you not know that he was dead, sir?”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Unlike Windsor, Osborne was a very new house—built some sixteen years previous on the site of an old and miserable Georgian structure overlooking the Solent near Cowes. Prince Albert had designed the house in the Italian style, with warring campaniles—one sporting a clock, and the other, a flag. The central Pavilion was intended entirely for his own family, while guests and members of the Household occupied the wings. Many of those who visited it thought it very ugly, with its marble columns and stucco façades; others found the arrangement of rooms somewhat daring. Most of the principal ones were open to each other—the dining room giving way to the drawing room, and this to the billiards room—around three sides of the central staircase, which made it an airy house in summer and a chilly one in December.

But Papa, Alice thought as she hurriedly descended the Pavilion staircase beneath Dyce's Neptune Entrusting Command of the Sea to Britannia, hadn't cared much about the crowds of guests and their accommodation. At Osborne, he'd been trying to find some peace—and found it out-of- doors. With a narrow band of sea between himself and England, he'd tried to recapture the Rosenau of his childhood.

He'd purchased nearly two thousand acres of the Isle of Wight at immense cost, from Mama's private funds. There was a secluded beach where they bathed in machines; a progression of valleys and woods; gardens leveled and drained at Papa's instruction; and of course—their model farm.

We must practice the virtues of life, children, he'd said as the four eldest were given their garden tools, perfectly sized for their hands and engraved with their initials. They'd each planted a tree, which Bertie marked with their names on carefully-painted signs. Later, they'd learned to mould brick and lay stone, the Swiss Cottage rising under their hands, Affie hauling dirt in a barrow like a common labourer. Papa had paid the boys a set wage for the hours they spent with the carpenters. A lieutenant in the Royal Engineers had directed the digging of earthen fortifications. The Cottage had an entire kitchen where she and Vicky learned to cook, scrubbing out the copper pots with their own hands.

They had talked a good deal of the future in those days, while the soups simmered and the bread baked in the wood-fired oven—dreaming of love, and romance, and elaborate weddings. Papa would ultimately determine who they married, of course—and Vicky had spoiled sport by falling in love with the first man she met, at fourteen. Fritz was a man, too, Alice thought—ten years older than Vicky—and he'd decided to marry her when she was only ten. His calculations were obviously dynastic; he was Crown Prince of Prussia, she was the Princess Royal of England. He could not have presumed to a better match. But it was dampening, all the same, to think that the snug conversations of the Swiss Cottage had always been pointless. Stupid and unreal. Just dreams.

Alice shuddered slightly as she pushed through the heavy back doors to the terrace, and almost ran down the broad stone steps to the gardens. How often had she fooled herself ? Wasted time in hopes and plans, when everything about her life was a foregone conclusion? Had she truly chosen Louis for herself—kind, charming, good- humoured Louis? Or had she, too, been maneuvered into marriage by Papa?

You cannot marry Louis, Liebchen. The flaw in your blood . . .

Had Vicky even seen her own kitchens, in Potsdam and Berlin?

Old Crawford, her favourite of the gardeners, had gone into blacks for Papa. Alice eyed him covertly as she wandered among the winter beds laid out beside the Swiss Cottage; he had probably had his work clothes dyed, she decided, rather than mourning made up fresh. She hoped it had not cost him his Christmas.

“Good day, Crawford,” she said as she approached the playhouse door. “How are you keeping?”

“Very well, Your Highness, and kind you are, I'm sure, to ask.” He doffed his soft cap and clutched it to his chest, his rheumy eyes filling with tears. “Terrible news about the Consort, if I may presume to say it.”

“Yes,” Alice replied. She had no desire to talk about Papa, even to Crawford—who had worked under the direction of Toward, the head gardener, on every square inch of Osborne's gardens. The old man's sympathy was immense; it would smother her like a shovel full of earth.

“I can't get it through my head that I won't be seeing him striding down the path from the big house,” the gardener persisted, “like always. Let us cultivate our garden, Crawford, he used to say —meaning the garden of life, as it were. Very deep thinker, the Consort.”

“Yes,” Alice said again. “Thank you, Crawford. We shall all feel his absence acutely. What am I to plant this spring? It will be my last garden at Osborne, you know. I am to be married in July.”

“Then we must plant lilies, Your Highness, so you've sommat more'n orange blossom to carry to the altar.”

She smiled; he read her look as one of dismissal, and touched his hand to his forehead. She began to walk aimlessly among the beds, remembering what had flourished here, what had faltered there. Each of them had a garden, where they were allowed to grow whatever they liked—although vegetables, Papa had said, were an absolute. He liked the idea of them eating what they'd grown—another illusion of self-sufficiency, she thought. But it was true the bits of earth became the only places in the entire Kingdom that any of them thought of as theirs. Even now that Bertie and Affie and Vicky had grown up and gone away, they sent instructions to Crawford each year, about the choice of plants and arrangement of things in their private beds. It was important to know that some part of them remained rooted at Osborne.

And here was Leopold's garden.

Her brother loved roses, and these were carefully set out among a quantity of peonies, whose lush foliage hid the gawky canes even after their flowering was done. In the dark days of December, however, the garden looked like it had been swept by fire—or laid waste by blight. Thorns held aloft on bare sticks, no sign of the petals slumbering beneath the ground. The worked beds looked as raw as a newly-turned grave. She shivered again. What if Leo—

You're reading portents into everything, she chided herself. It's absurd.

A bright splash of green on the soil, close to the brick edging, drew her eye; she bent down to examine it closely.

“How is the young master, if I may be so bold?” Crawford asked suddenly at her elbow.

“Very well. You know he is gone to Cannes, for his health?”

“I heard as how he was packed off to France,” the old man said darkly. “I don't hold with France for children, myself.”

“I'm sure Leo will have the strength to resist its delights.” She rose, dusting off her gloves. “What is that green stuff, Crawford?”

He started forward. “You've never touched it, Your Highness? That's a bit of ratsbane I set out for them voles. Ravaging the rootstock, they are. I won't have that, in my gardens.”

“But what makes it green?”

“The arsenic,” he explained. “Grey in the packet, but green in the earth. Scheele's Green, they call it. Used for all manner of things, I reckon.”

Alice crouched down once more, her black silk skirts pooling around her boots, and studied the bright green