A Flaw in the Blood

already cooling.

He did not find Taylor at the Reform Club, and a brief cab ride to his partner’s home in Great Ormond Street failed equally to produce him. Perplexed, Fitzgerald debated whether Taylor was likely to be at church, in respect of the universal mourning that had swept the City—or to have visited chambers on this dark and stormy Sunday, when any sane man would be established before the fire. He decided against church, and directed his cabbie to Temple Bar.

The Outer Temple was deserted; his footsteps resounded in the desertion of Middle Temple Lane; and when he reached the entry of his chambers at the Inner Temple, Fitzgerald felt a sharp upsurge of unease: No light shone through the mullioned windows, but the outer door was unlatched, and swinging gently in the gusty rain.

He entered as quietly as he knew, even his breathing suspended, and paused on the inner threshold.

The clerks’ room, empty of life, was a chaos of paper, strewn over floors and desks; smashed bottles of ink trailed black smears on the floorboards; an entire ledger had been tossed in the cold grate. “Sweet Mary and Jesus,” he muttered, and crossed to Taylor’s room.

He was lying on his stomach, one arm trapped beneath him, the other flung over his head; he had been struck a hideous blow from behind, probably as he rose from his chair. The ooze of blood through Sep’s sparse grey hair testified to a cracked skull. Fitzgerald’s stomach lurched with sick despair as he probed the wound; the bone beneath his fingers was fragile as eggshells, the scalp spongy with blood. He bit off a curse and rolled Sep carefully on his side. His friend gave no sign of consciousness; not even pain could recall him to the world.

Fear, sharp and jagged, knifed through Fitzgerald. Had Sep surprised the searchers when he entered the chambers? Or had they surprised him? Probably the latter, given that he’d never gotten farther than a yard from his own desk.

“Sep,” Fitzgerald called urgently, searching for a pulse in the neck, “for the love of Christ, who did this to you?”

His friend did not reply. But he was still warm, and there was a flutter of life in his veins. For the second time in the space of eight hours, Fitzgerald ran in search of aid.

Chapter Seven

My darling did not enjoy an easy night’s sleep for weeks before he died. He was haunted, I believe, by a conviction of unworthiness—which must always be Duty’s sneak thief, robbing us of the pleasure we ought to derive from sacrifice. It was Albert’s habit to answer every call, no matter how humble: he directed Boards, governed Universities, patronised Science; effected economies in the household accounts, set limits on the use of candles, decided the servants’ quarrels; drafted architectural plans for each of our homes, and oversaw the design of gardens; averted war, or made it, throughout Europe, and brokered entire Cabinets here at home; mended dolls and shoveled the moats of toy fortifications— in short, he made himself indispensable to me, to his children, to the English nation—only to discover, in middle-age, that there was no one in the world who could replace him.

If he lay sleepless of nights, it was in agony at his inevitable failure: He would die, and the son that must follow him was not one-hundredth of Albert’s quality.

You will think me harsh, and utterly lacking in the sentiment proper to a mother—but I am a monarch first, and mother as well to all the Kingdom.

“Dashed bad luck,” Bertie stammered, as he stood before me in that dreadful room, with his father’s body cooling beside me. “Never thought the Governor would take off—the most trifling cold! All the betting in the clubs was odds-on for the Old Man’s rallying! Assure you!”

Even in the face of death, my son and heir was incapable of frankness. No word of the tortures his father suffered at the knowledge of Bertie’s affaire with that sordid Irish trollop. No remorse at the disgusting headlines that have surfaced throughout the Continent, or the damage to his reputation. Bertie is incorrigible. He cultivates excuses. Although the entire world knows that Albert contracted typhoid through walking in the rain with his son at Cambridge a month ago—anxiety having driven him to confront Bertie about the debauchery with Miss Clifden, the dire consequences that must result, the possibility of a disease or bastardy, etcetra, etcetra, all of which was to have been kept from me, and all of which Albert shared—Bertie insists his father died of a trifling cold.

He was mortified, I suppose, at his father giving him a trimming before his schoolfellows, and suggested a walk through country lanes in an attempt to snatch at privacy. It is a scene so entirely typical of Bertie: a November storm coming on, his utter confusion in the landscape, Albert steadily more morose, the silence and misery growing between them. Bertie never learned his way around Cambridge, it would seem, never having spent much time at his studies—and the betrayal of his ignorance could only sink him further in Albert’s estimation. It was ever thus. When Albert sent him to Curragh to be trained as an officer, Bertie could hardly meet his superiors’ requirements, and failed miserably to attain his expected rank. His tutors, from the time he was a little child, despaired of his mastering anything. In one field alone does Bertie excel: He dresses to admiration. His style and appearance are the envy of his set. In such frivolous distinction he takes inordinate pride, and will suffer any expense to meet it. I need not observe how little Albert found to approve in his son’s dissipation—or the fondness for Society, and gambling, and low entertainments, that inevitably followed on its heels. Even as my Darling’s death-hour approached last night, Bertie was summoned from a party at Natty Rothschild’s. He arrived at Windsor in evening dress, the odour of cigar smoke clinging to his hair.

When Albert’s last breath was drawn, and I lay upon the sopha in the Red Room in the most bitter agony, incapable of tears or speech, Bertie simply stood like a stone with the other children, mute and unmoved as they sobbed. Perhaps at that moment he felt how much he was to blame. I cannot say. His failure to betray the slightest suffering has utterly closed my heart to him. I do not think I can bear to be in the same room with my son.

The betting in the clubs was odds-on for the Old Man’s rallying. Dear God—and the Old Man was all of forty-two...

Chapter Eight

“Assaulted? in your chambers?”

He had run Georgiana to earth at last, after a fruitless interval at her home in Russell Square, spent pacing before the drawing room fire and fingering the calling cards he found there. None of the servants could tell him where she had gone; in rising anxiety, he resorted to the cab stand.

The fifth man in the queue admitted he’d driven Miss Armistead to Covent Garden that morning. Twenty minutes later, he deposited Fitzgerald before a tenement dwelling in the rookery known as St. Giles.

It being winter and early in the day, the females of the district were within doors; but Fitzgerald had known them to stand in front of their dwellings, naked to the waist, with a bottle of gin in their hands. Most of them were Irish. What could Georgie possibly find to occupy her in this wretched place?

He entered a narrow hall stinking of urine and cooked pork. There was no light, and he cursed as a cat twined itself sinuously between his legs. A blasted staircase led upwards, past a group of children disposed on the treads, playing at skittles with bleached bones. They told him where to find the lady.

A cramped set of rooms, notable for a smoking coal fire and four young faces that turned to him expectantly as he hesitated in the doorway. A boy he judged to be no more than ten was toasting a hunk of bread on a poker thrust near the coals; the others huddled at his knees. The straw pallets on which they had slept lay tousled by the fire.

“Is Sep conscious?” Georgie asked now as she closed the door behind him. “Patrick? Have you summoned a doctor?”

“He was insensible when I left—a severe concussion of the brain, so the sawbones says. I asked that I be sent word, when he wakes. But I’ve not been home since—”