A Flaw in the Blood

“Does she have one?”

“Miss Armistead is alone in the world,” he retorted. “I am a family friend of long standing—an acquaintance of her uncle’s. Being a medical man yourself, you may have heard of him—Dr. John Snow.”

“Ah.” Smythe released Georgie’s arm and looked at him at last. “What a loss to the world when that genius was taken! Such a man would wish to be with this lady now—and would send me speedily about my business!”

The name had done what Fitzgerald’s could not: blotted out in an instant all questions and doubt. John Snow, child of a lowly Yorkshire carter, who had revolutionized medicine in his day; Snow, who had declared that the great London cholera epidemic of ’54 was a disease born of fouled water, and proved it with a map; Snow, who had advocated the use of chloroform in labour, despite the outcry of the clergy—who insisted that Woman must bring forth her babes in suffering and pain. Snow, who administered that twilight sleep to no less a personage than Queen Victoria herself, at the birth of her eighth child, Leopold. . . .

“Her Majesty must sorely miss Dr. Snow,” Smythe observed casually, “with the Prince so ill.”

Fitzgerald might have replied that yes, in her trouble the Queen had summoned Snow’s niece, for the comfort of former association; or he might have told Smythe the Prince Consort was dead. But the bells were tolling throughout the boroughs of London now and Smythe did not require Fitzgerald’s information. He took another drink of whiskey and let the doctor pack up his bag in silence.

John Snow would not have thanked his old friend for taking Georgie anywhere near Windsor. He’d hated his ward’s unwomanly skill with the scalpel, her passion for science—though he had taught her most of what she knew.

“Summon me if she wakes,” Smythe said.

If.

He showed himself out.

Fitzgerald settled down to pray for life.

What in God’s name were you thinking, man, to tangle her with the Queen?

She won’t sit quiet at home, John, when there’s a sick man at the end of the road.

Bollocks.

Snow had a right to be angry. He had commended Georgie to Fitzgerald’s care on his deathbed some three years ago—gone at forty-five, all his brilliance snuffed out like a candle. She was not really his niece and Fitzgerald was the last man to stand as guardian, being already enslaved to Georgiana Armistead and dangerous with it. Perhaps Snow expected him to carry the lass off somewhere. Perhaps he ought to have moved heaven and earth to snatch her from London, his careful years of ambition gone over the bridge and into the river, the past tossed like dirt in John Snow’s grave. Fitzgerald did not know. He knew only that never, on the day of Snow’s death or any day thereafter, did Georgie give the least hint of desiring a conventional life. She had lived a singular one for too long.

The daughter of Charles Armistead, a military doctor attached to an Indian regiment, she was fretting herself in a finishing school when Snow rescued her—Armistead dead of a fever in Calcutta. Snow took Georgie back to Sackville Street and put his housekeeper in charge of the girl. But Georgiana demanded a different kind of education.

From the very first, she haunted Snow’s surgery. When he set out on his wanderings through the back slums of London, she had insisted on riding in the coach. He refused to teach her medicine, but when the cook complained of dissections of poultry and the odd hoarding of beef organs—a heart, a liver carefully saved—he began to lend Georgie books from his own library. A satisfaction of curiosity, he thought, however improper for a woman. The girl talked so intelligently that before long she was observing his anatomizations at the College of Surgeons—suitably veiled, of course, and always accompanied by her maid. After the first maid swooned, she went alone.

Snow blamed himself. He knew he had ruined her—for what gentleman would marry such a girl? Georgiana was Eve, all apples and dangerous knowledge. No London medical board would certify a woman, so Snow sent her to school in Edinburgh. He shared his guilt with Patrick Fitzgerald—whose peculiar loneliness and unfortunate circumstances made him an eligible confidant, an expert at sorrow. Fitzgerald absolved John Snow of all sin.

Georgiana was singular among females, to be sure; the lass was what the fearful and the envious termed a bluestocking. But she was also magnificent. The full bloom of her mind animated her every word. If this was the terror of the Garden, Fitzgerald was already seduced, a worshipper of apples.

Then take her away. Take her anywhere. You did not keep her safe, Patrick.

She didn’t want me to, John.

It was John Snow who made the acquaintance of the Prince Consort.

That would have been in connexion with the Great Exhibition, ten years ago now. Albert, with his German love of science, had seized on this rising man, this ambitious doctor who kept meticulous records, who believed that statistics held the key to the spread of disease. Snow’s orderly method, his emphasis on fact rather than God or superstition, appealed to Albert’s clockwork mind. The Prince had never been a great one for Society; where an English peer might cultivate the Ancients, or turn a compliment for a lady, Albert preferred to analyze machines. He loved steam and turbines, factories and shipping; he worshipped gasworks and railways and guns. John Snow was one of the few who might be said to have understood him. It was probably Albert who urged the Queen to try Snow’s chloroform at the birth of Prince Leopold. The year was 1853. What Snow witnessed at Windsor then was to change all their lives.

Georgie’s head turned on the pillow; she gasped in pain. Fitzgerald had not prayed much—but perhaps he had gotten Snow’s attention, wherever he was.

“I’m going to be sick,” she said. And reached for the washbasin.

They brought in the dead coachman at twenty minutes past four.

“Neck’s broke,” the innkeeper said with satisfaction. “Wrung clean as a chicken’s. You were lucky to crawl away from that smash— but then, the Irish are born with the Devil’s own luck.”

Fitzgerald was leaning over the corpse, laid out on a scrubbed oak table in the public room—a man younger than himself, hatless but clothed in the scarlet livery of Windsor. The brown eyes were still staring; he closed them gently. “You found the spikes?”

“What spikes?”

The voice came from a tall figure looming behind the innkeeper, a deeper shadow in the darkness beyond the candle flame.

“A palisade of lashed poles, set out in the road to snare the horses.” Fitzgerald straightened. “And you, sir, would be . . . ?”

“Wolfgang, Graf von Stühlen.” He stepped into the light.

He was dressed for riding, in the polished boots and hacking jacket of a gentleman, a cloak flung carelessly over one shoulder. Gloves and a top hat under his arm, a luxuriant moustache and side-whiskers on an otherwise clean-shaven face. Had Fitzgerald never heard the name, he still would have known von Stühlen instantly: Wolfgang von Stühlen was one of the Prince Consort’s cronies, famous for the black canvas patch that covered his right eye. A duelist had winged him there, before dying. He was roughly Fitzgerald’s age—but looked younger, fitter. And far better bred. So much elegance at four o’clock in the morning made Fitzgerald feel like a peasant.

“I set off immediately when news was received of this . . . accident.” Coburg in his tone; a faint Oxonian drawl. “The Queen will be most displeased. Two horses dead. And a coachman.”

“Not to mention the shock to her guests,” Fitzgerald retorted. “You astonish me, Count. Such an errand’s beneath you, surely?”

A flash of white teeth, with no mirth behind it. “Nothing the Queen desires is beneath her loyal subjects. Particularly at such a time. You will have heard of the Consort’s passing?”

“Aye, that we have.”

Von Stühlen bowed; the Count’s gesture had the force of an insult. He said to the innkeeper: “You will see that the body is kept in order until the inquest. It must be held here. Send word when the panel is done.”