do nothing with him.
“I am not at leisure, Alice,” I said firmly, my eyes upon Vicky's letter. “I have not the quantity of hours you seem to spend in reading your books. I must guard my moments jealously.”
She ignored my words and walked without hesitation into the room. To my surprise, a small cavalcade followed: William Jenner, with an expression of marked ill-ease upon his countenance; the despicable Patrick Fitzgerald; and a lady . . . a lady whose name I fancied I could summon. It was she who closed the double doors behind her, and remained, like a sentinel, before them. She was far too beautiful to bear looking at. I remembered her handwriting on the page—the satisfaction of the flames . . .
I rose from my desk in cold fury.
“We must and shall speak with you, Mama.”
Alice's face was quite pale and her features haggard; I might almost have believed in her spurious illness as she stood before me so straightly, all her father's stubbornness in her upright frame.
“Mr. Fitzgerald you know. But Dr. Armistead is a stranger, I believe—in person, if not in name.”
“Not in name,” I agreed. “But I have no wish to make
My physician extracted a handkerchief from his coat and mopped at his brow. “Forgive me, Your Majesty. Forgive me.”
“Dr. Jenner is here at my request,” Alice said. “I intend that he shall bear witness to all that is said. I applied to Georgiana Armistead from the depths of my misery—in my effort to understand the despair that drove Papa to take his own life—”
“Silence!” I hissed, appalled at this frankness, this exposure of our veiled intimacy—and before such a figure as William Jenner, whose unwitting complicity in Albert's death has been the foundation of all my security. “You shall not speak of it. I shall
“Dr. Armistead told me what I believe you must already know: that Papa was aware our Leopold's illness is a hereditary malady. That all of us may bear a similar flaw, and pass it, indeed, to our children. That there is no possibility of cure. It was for this reason he urged me, on his deathbed, to break off my engagement—”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Leopold's frailty is nowhere evident in the family—neither in the Hanoverian line, nor in Albert's. It is an act of Providence. A tragedy of Fate. That your Papa could not accept God's Will is a measure of how much his science failed him, Alice.”
“It was to suppress all rumour of this... flaw,” Alice continued implacably, “that you pursued Dr. Armistead and Mr. Fitzgerald across England and Europe, with every kind of calumny and crime thrown at their heads. You should rather have seen them hanged, Mama, than admitted to the world Papa's weakness.”
“That is a lie,” I said flatly. “I allowed the Law to take its course. You have been
“Wolfgang, Graf von Stühlen, is dead, Your Majesty,” Jenner murmured. “I received a telegram to that effect from London, but a quarter-hour ago.”
I stared at him and felt my legs buckle, my bulk slide downward, back into my chair. My arms rested heavily on the desk frame; but for its support, I fear I should have fainted.
“You killed him?” I inquired blankly of the scoundrel Fitzgerald.
He shook his head. “The honour, I fear, goes to my late wife. But von Stühlen gave me this before he died.”
He held out a sheet of paper, and mesmerised—still unable to move—I listened while he read the bitter words.
. . . “
“Impossible,” I murmured, my eyes upon Alice.
“Von Stühlen signed it,” the Irishman said. “But I will undertake never to reveal its existence, Your Majesty, on one condition.”
I stared at him, awaiting the inevitable words.
Fitzgerald held my gaze. “That you swear, before Her Royal Highness the Princess Alice and Dr. William Jenner, that you will never again pursue me or Georgiana Armistead at the peril of our lives and reputations.”
I let out an unsteady sigh. It seemed a small enough thing, in exchange for the world.
They have formed the intention, I gather, of emigrating to Canada; and indeed, do not even return to London, but rather will embark with their manservant upon a transatlantic steamer out of Southampton, bound for Halifax.
I signed the trifling paper Fitzgerald presented for my perusal; saw Alice and Jenner witness its execution; and reflected that the Irishman had achieved what even Palmerston could not—he had compelled my attention to a grave matter while breathing the air of the same room.
It was unclear to me what, exactly, they knew or suspected—whether they understood the dreadful uncertainty that hangs over my parentage. Whether they guessed that Albert had recognised it, through the enormity of Leopold's illness—and being a noble soul, incapable of deceit, or of profiting by the indiscretions of others, had insisted that I must abdicate in favour of my cousin, Ernest of Hanover, the unequivocally legitimate heir to the throne of England.
That a prince who possessed the freedom of the world—an unlimited power to act in the name of good—the adoration of his wife and the blessings of his children—should seek to lay down that gift, and to rob his heirs of the greatest Empire on earth—is a kind of insanity for which there is no possible forgiveness. It was the final act of usurpation Albert could commit: to take from me my only purpose in life, the purpose for which I was born.
He was an Angelic Being, far too good to live.
I had to put him down like a sick dog.
I ought to thank Fitzgerald and his doxy, I suppose—they have rid me of a tedious burden in von Stühlen. The Count thought to slip his noose around my neck, like so many gentlemen before him. I should not long have endured the knot; but to free myself, indeed, I might have been forced to an unpleasant exertion.
Once Alice is married and Jenner rewarded with his knighthood, I may reasonably expect to live out my sad years in untroubled solitude. I shall be a walking monument to my Beloved Albert, and exhibit to an admiring public the
But I confess I hate the very name of Patrick Fitzgerald.
Afterword
This book is entirely a work of fiction. It derives, however, from the peculiar childhood and destiny of Queen Victoria, the genetic flaw of hemophilia she passed to three of her children, and the sudden death of her husband at age forty-two from a poorly diagnosed gastric complaint—which may have been stomach cancer or a perforated ulcer, but which almost certainly was
Victoria's life has been chronicled and assessed in more volumes than one can enumerate. Those I found chiefly useful in writing this novel were:
