Shadow of the Serpent

she almost at once took him over.

For the last ten years he’d been her private secretary; he’d heard the bell of St Paul’s toll the death of her Prince Albert and listened through a door as the Queen cried like a soul bereft. He had seen her through the John Brown scandal, various illnesses, various wars and various threats of abdication if she did not get her own way.

When Victoria became interested in spiritualism after the death of her beloved husband, Ponsonby had even taken part in the darkness, but at a mock Household seance had disgraced himself by laughing so hard that the tears came through the obituary section of The Times, it being part of a newspaper blindfold he had been obliged to wear at the occasion.

Risen through the ranks. First a colonel, then hailed as general and now knighted. But, in his mind somewhere, he was still a decent soldier. Loyal to the bone.

Eliza, as he irreverently called the Queen to others, had valued him as a friend, confidant, and rock upon which impetuous seas might break in vain, most of them being the seas of her own temper when thwarted. But value him, she had most dearly. Until now.

Now he was outside a ring of iron. For he possessed a grievous fault, a terrible sin which had been raised to confront him like a spectre. He was a Liberal.

Of course, he’d always been of that persuasion, proud to be so, pepper the court with the cannon fire of some common sense and a smidgeon of humour. But what had once been regarded with affection, indulgence and, God help him, sometimes even acted upon, was now viewed in the words of one of the Queen’s own telegrams to no less than the Dean of Westminster as ‘opposition proclivities’ to be corrected.

His own wife Mary was also under suspicion but she, God bless her, threatened to go around with a mysterious look on her face as if in hourly communication with the forces of darkness.

Ponsonby could not afford that luxury. He was a servant of Her Majesty, once a most intimate servant, now excluded and distrusted. The Queen had been poisoned against him and he knew the man responsible. As Ponsonby fell, so the other rose in her affections, higher and higher.

Insinuations smeared his good name. That he had carried messages to the enemy, not true, not true, in the midst of Tory plots and opposition counter-plots he took no sides, he steered the middle course.

Much good it did him. He was no longer trusted. It was like a witch hunt. The court of Elizabeth Regina had set the treacherous template for the present one.

Well, mustn’t bleat and moan, one would battle on somehow but it was a damned hard grind.

He looked out of the windows of Osborne House. As happened quite often in the Isle of Wight, there was a fine mist of rain swirling and falling. It was the kind of drizzle that could soak you to the skin. Sly. Insinuating.

Two figures were in the garden. One, tall, emaciated, like a funeral director, by God, held a large black umbrella to protect both himself and the other who sat on a small garden chair and worked busily at a border of flowers.

Yes, he had her under protection all right, humbugged to such an extreme that she detested and feared anyone with connection to the Liberal cause. The very word Liberal, in its essence generous and noble-minded, had been turned into a leprous epithet.

Gladstone in particular was to be reviled and shunned as if he carried that deadly plague. The mere mention of his name caused the Queen to shudder as if someone had walked across her grave.

Ponsonby’s pale, rather protruberant eyes creased in pain at his predicament as he gazed down at the instrument of his fall from favour. The funeral director. Blast and damn the man.

What was that play? His wife had dragged him to it, Hamlet, that was it, lasted an eternity, but there was a moment when the player king fellow had poured poison into someone’s ear. Fatal. Yes. Shakespeare was nobody’s fool.

As the rain smudged its way down the window pane not quite blotting out the view below, the secretary’s lips moved in what was either imprecation or prayer.

In the garden, Benjamin Disraeli swivelled his head to see the pale face jerk back at the upstairs window.

Yes, the fellow was still spying, but Ponsonby could not discern the words exchanged, not unless he had left his ears under the rhododendron bushes.

Normally this observation would have a tinge of humour, but the prime minister did not feel humorous today. He felt like a hunted animal.

His umbrella twitched. Benjamin Disraeli hated the damp. He yearned for a perfect climate and never attained such.

He could almost feel the lining of his bronchial tubes thickening by the second. Another coating of moist slime, courtesy of the English weather.

A drop of water trickled down the hook of his nose and dripped off the end. Prospects indeed were dismal in all senses, marooned on this benighted island.

Yet, if he was being candid with himself, although he only usually used honesty as a facade to confuse his enemies, he had somewhere welcomed her summons to Osborne.

Ostensibly it was to consult him on various matters of state before she left for Germany to attend the confirmation of her motherless granddaughters, diphtheria having removed her beloved Princess Alice some two years before, but really she wished to be reassured by his company.

The nation was voting. In England they were now at the polls and Scotland would follow some days later. A strange and staggered system but God guide their hand and, if not, Disraeli, his representative upon earth, was her man in a crisis. He would bring the ship home.

Disraeli’s lips quirked a mixture of chagrin and bitter amusement. Yes, what a colossus he was to be sure. Had Count Bismarck not hailed him at the Congress of Berlin as der alte Jude, das ist der Mann?

Of course the Iron Chancellor was somewhat in his cups at the time and ballooned with flatulence, but it was a compliment to be savoured, was it not?

He remembered the scene well. Bismarck awash with champagne and black beer, stuffing himself with seven different kinds of sausage, and Disraeli himself wreathed in cigar smoke as a measure of protection against the flood of indelicate stories being poured by the chancellor into his isolated ears.

‘Put not your trust in Princes,’ Bismarck had also told him.

Ah, where would we be without the irony of God?

Another drip fell from his nose to earth. Back to the present. The election. Yes. The election. Well, well.

As for himself, he could do no more. The game was over. It was up to the country. Already, in England, they had begun to vote. The game was over.

In a strange way, at this very moment, he needed Victoria as much as she him.

They trusted each other as much as either of them could ever trust anyone. Lord Beaconsfield and the Queen.

He had arrived to find her flitting around in a state of almost hectic gaiety. She had immediately dragged him out to the garden and, wrapped in waterproofing, thick gloves to hand, was engaged in digging up some of his favourite flower, the wild primrose, which grew in abundance here.

For him to take home. To enjoy. In triumph.

Victoria struggled with some difficulty to rise from the low chair; between her growing plumpness and the myriad layers of clothing which encased the Royal person, to lever oneself up these days was a daunting endeavour.

Disraeli had the same problem. In their earlier days he thought nothing of throwing himself upon his knees and proclaiming his eternal loyalty to his Queen but now it would take a hoist to get him back on his feet.

He offered a spindly but chivalrous arm for her to lean on and, umbrella hovering overhead, escorted her to a garden table where she carefully packed the primroses and their earth into a shallow basket.

She looked up at him and smiled. Her small stolid form was in odd contrast to his attenuated frame.

‘I am so glad you prefer the primrose,’ she said.

‘It is all the better for being a touch wild, and so retains its beauty for a longer time,’ he replied.

As he smiled the skin stretched tight across his cheekbones like papyrus.

She worried over his health. ‘You smoke too many cigars, Mr Disraeli,’ she admonished.