A Flaw in the Blood

“Delusions of grandeur, most said. A craving for the world’s notice. Oxford put himself on Constitution Hill at a time when Victoria was known to pass. She’d made a habit of driving out to her mother’s place in Belgrave Square every afternoon. He fired two balls, both of which went wide. He was overpowered, then, and confined. The prosecution would have it he acted alone—out of hatred for his betters. And it certainly could be made to look that way.”

“But you disagreed?”

“My employers did. I was then Head Clerk to Mr. Charles Pelham—Edward Oxford’s solicitor. Lord Normanby, the Home Secretary, retained Pelham in Oxford’s defence—and Pelham brought in Septimus Taylor as barrister.”

“Sep!”

“The very same. I was dispatched to Newgate, where Oxford was jailed, to pump the fellow. His wild charges led me on all sorts of adventures— and the intelligence I gathered provided Sep with his case.”

“Which was?”

“Conspiracy, as the Queen would have it. Oxford claimed he’d been hired by Victoria’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, who thought she’d diddled him out of a throne and wanted it back. The Queen was pregnant, y’see, so the Duke had to act fast if he meant to kill her. Two birds with one stone.”

The carriage jolted through the rutted roads of the Heath, the silence beyond broken only by the muffled hoofs of the horses.

“I see why Oxford was judged insane,” Georgie said. “To blame a royal duke for the assassination—”

“It wasn’t the easiest defence to argue. Septimus did his best. The pistols Oxford used had the Duke’s initials engraved on them. And a packet of letters posted in Hanover was found at Oxford’s lodgings.”

“But Cumberland?”

“—Denied everything, of course. As did Victoria. Lord, she was a fury! That was the occasion of my first summons to Windsor.”

He could recall the scene vividly: a scorching afternoon in August, the twenty-year-old Queen already great with child. Ringlets of hair plastered against her temples. Her protuberant eyes blazing.

“What did she say to you?”

Fitzgerald sighed. “It all came down to my Irishness, love. A real gentleman would never have published such a scandalous story! That I had presumed to attack the Royal Family—and chose to do so in the criminal courts—was the height of vulgarity. Or radical sentiment. I’m not sure which she thought was worse.”

“But it was Sep who argued the case, not you—”

“Aye. And me who gave it to him. The idea that a man could be innocent, if he was out of his mind, was quite new in legal circles.”

“Oxford was sent to Bedlam?”

“He’s still there, I believe.”

“And you became a barrister?”

“Sep took me on.”

Georgiana studied him doubtfully in the poor light of the carriage lamps. “But, Patrick—why bring all this up tonight? When the Prince—”

Whatever else she might have said was cut off by the shrill, whistling scream of a horse in terror, the sudden, overwhelming force of a team impaled on a bristling wall—rearing and jibbing in the traces, falling back upon themselves, the equipage jackknifing viciously and the whole box of a world kiting over and over, the curses of coachman, the glass shattering under Fitzgerald’s shoulder as he was thrust brutally against it, Georgie yelling less in fear than in shock—and then, abruptly, stillness.

His ragged breath was the only sound in the shattered cage, his hands slippery with blood.

“Georgie,” he said. And again, “Georgie!”

She did not answer.

Fog rolled into the broken body of the carriage. There was blood in his eyes and a frantic warning in his brain that urged, Run, run, they will be upon you in an instant. He tore at the splintered wood, part of the carriage roof that still stood between him and the Heath. Forced his shaking arms to break a passage.

He was out. Stumbling. Uneven ground, brambles clutching at his trousers, a horse whickering like a whipped child.

The carriage lamps had shattered in the crash. But through the darkness and mist he could make out a palisade—a lashed fence of spikes, tossed in the road like some medieval war engine. The horses had impaled themselves on it, blind in the pitch black. The animals were caught now in the tangle of their own traces. Night and fog and the trapped beasts trampling the coachman’s body—

He reached back inside for Georgie.

The hood of her cape was soaked in blood.

Muttering hurried Papist prayers under his breath, O Holy Virgin we implore thee for the benediction of thy healing Grace, he fumbled for a pulse, he screamed for a pulse, he kissed her sweet mouth, forcing air into her lungs. Then he lifted her and staggered off, a middle-aged man clawing his way up the hillside, heedless of the broken nags behind him or the hideous angle of the coachman’s neck, as the corpse lay sightlessly staring at the Queen’s cypher, VR, Victoria Regina, on the shattered coach’s door.

Chapter Four

He carried her to a public house in Hampstead, where he cried up the tavern keeper with what remained of his breath. He refused to set down his burden on the damp paving stones, and she remained insensible—perhaps dead, he could not tell—but at last the innkeeper unbolted the door and peered out at the lunatic, the weaving drunkard with an armful of woman. Fitzgerald did not wait for an invitation but thrust his way in. Calling for brandy, and a doctor.

It was two o’clock by his pocket watch when he reached Hampstead. At three, Georgiana was still insensible, though he’d bathed the gash in her scalp, forced a dram of spirits through her clenched teeth, and tucked her up warmly in an available bed. The local doctor, a man by the name of Smythe, held Georgie’s wrist a good long while without offering an opinion. From that much, at least, Fitzgerald understood she still breathed.

“An overturned carriage.” Smythe’s fingers were delicate as a bit of jewelry on her arm. “A Royal carriage? That would be the fog, no doubt.”

“Not only fog, I’m thinking. A thicket of spikes, set down to maim the horses. I saw them, look you.”

In Fitzgerald’s trouble and despair, his Irish was back in force, obliterating three decades of life in London; it did not win him any friends in Hampstead.

“Spikes? To maim your horses? Is it possible, Mr. Fitzgerald, that you also received a knock on the head?”

Smythe did not turn from his patient, but the doctor’s mild disbelief sparked Fitzgerald’s fury. He had already said too much. Anxiety had made him foolish. He reached for the bottle of brandy and took a long draught. His hands were shaking.

“Happily I did not, sir. Or this lady would still be lying in a ditch with a broken-necked coachman.”

“As you say,” Smythe replied mildly, “Torning will have looked to the matter of the coachman, I expect.”

Torning was the innkeeper. Fitzgerald’s jabbered tale had sent a party of men and boys out onto the Heath in the bleary night, searching for the wreckage. Fitzgerald was an event in Hampstead, a throwback to the bad old days of highwaymen, a Paddy in the guise of Quality. The fact that he had survived the attack only added to the sensation.

“You are not this lady’s father, I understand?”

Fitzgerald winced. “No.”