But almost immediately another blow fell: on the 28th of February Sir George Couper died quite suddenly – ‘Snuffed out like a candle,’ Albert said. Since 1840 he had been Mamma’s Comptroller, but had long been more than that to her – her intimate friend, protector and adviser, to whom she referred every decision and every difficulty.
‘These are bad news indeed,’ Albert said later that evening, when we had talked over our sadness. ‘Mamma’s health is very indifferent. I’m afraid of what the shock might do to her.’
Mamma had been suffering for nearly two years from attacks of erysipelas (that horrid disease which killed my poor John Brown – though his was exacerbated by too much whisky) but though she was seventy-five now, a great age for those days, I had not anticipated any particular danger. One expects one’s mother to live for ever: that is nature in us. ‘Surely there is nothing to worry about?’ I said.
‘You know she has an abscess on her arm,’ he reminded me. ‘That is the sort of thing that pulls a person down.’
‘But it will soon be better,’ I said. ‘She is very strong. She comes of healthy stock.’
‘My love, I think you should not hope too much,’ he said gently, looking at me steadily.
I began to be alarmed. ‘What is it? Do you know something more than me?’
He nodded unwillingly. ‘Clark said – he told me – he said we should be prepared for the worst.’
‘Clark told you?’
‘Yes. He wanted me to decide whether you should be told or not, and I decided against it because—’
‘When did he say this?’
‘About two years ago, when she had the first attack—’
But I interrupted him, laughing with relief. ‘Clark told you two years ago to expect the worst? But she is still here, you see! Oh, how you worried me for a moment. It is too bad of you.’
He went on trying. ‘My darling, that arm of hers is not good, you know. An abscess like that poisons the whole system.’
‘It will be better in a week, you’ll see,’ I said firmly.
It was not, however, and on the 9th of March Jenner said he must open the arm and try to find the seat of the trouble. It was a trying operation – he had to cut right down to the bone – but the relief was only temporary, and a fresh swelling soon started to gather. Still I had no apprehension. On the 15th of March we were at Buckingham Palace, and I was peacefully marking newspapers while Albert wrote letters, when a message was brought to us from Frogmore from Dr Clark (who was still Mamma’s physician), telling us that Mamma’s condition was desperate.
‘It can’t be true,’ I said, puzzled and alarmed. ‘He is mistaken.’
Albert stood up. ‘We must go to her at once,’ he said. ‘Prepare yourself, Liebchen. I will order the train.’
No time was wasted. We reached Frogmore at eight o’clock that evening, and I would have hurried straight up to Mamma’s room, but Albert put a restraining hand on my arm and said, ‘No, let me go first. Wait here, my love.’ He seemed gone a long time, and I waited in impatience rather than fear. I should be with her, I thought, it is me she will want, her daughter – but they were words of form, making themselves inside my head like idle spindrift forming. At heart I still did not really believe there was anything to fear. Then Albert came back, and his face was wet with tears. ‘Albert?’ I said, rising to my feet. ‘How is she? Is she awake?’
He stood before me, and looked at me so sadly and kindly. ‘She is dying, Victoria,’ he said. ‘The end is very near.’
‘Near?’ I stammered, aghast. ‘You – you mean – she will not get better?’
‘She will not last the night. She is dying, child – dying now.’
‘Oh, God, it can’t be,’ I whispered, putting out my hands to him. He nodded, taking them, and turned with me to walk upstairs. I felt numb with disbelief, not knowing what to think or feel; and I clung to my husband’s hand as the only thing that made sense to me in a world grown strange. He helped me into her room, and there she was, the little, plump old lady, the Mamma I had grown so late in life to love, the brave, kind, warm-hearted grandmamma to my children – lying on the sofa in a pretty dressing-gown of green silk, with a fresh, lace-trimmed cap over her hair. Her head was propped by several pillows, and she seemed to be breathing rather heavily, but otherwise she looked so normal that my heart rallied. Surely, surely she could not be dying? I hurried to her and dropped to my knees beside her, caught up her hand and kissed it and laid it against my cheek. ‘Mamma!’ I said. ‘Mamma, are you awake?’ Her eyes opened, and she looked at me, but she did not seem to know me. For the first time there was no welcoming smile for me. Her eyes looked black and empty, like holes on to nothing. ‘Mamma, it’s Vickelschen. How are you feeling?’
The hand in mine moved; I laid my other hand on her shoulder, and a frown crossed her face, and she pulled feebly away from me and brushed at the thing on her shoulder as though it were a fly or a fallen leaf.
‘Mamma?’
She rolled her head away from me. ‘Don’t fuss me,’ she muttered thickly. ‘Where are my glasses? Fetch my glasses, girl.’
She didn’t know me. My heart was pierced with despair, and I felt the tears slide like a river out of my eyes and down my cheeks in desolation. She was going to die – not one day, but now, this very night; she was going to leave me for ever, abandon me, her child whom she had loved and now turned away from. I struggled to my feet and ran from the room; Albert followed me. Clark was standing there, my good old Clark, having left the room to give me space, and through my tears I looked appealingly into his face. ‘Is there no hope? Oh, say there is hope!’
‘Your Majesty,’ he said helplessly, looking as miserable as a dog left out in the rain, ‘I wish I might say there is. But I fear there is none whatever. Her Grace is very near the end. But it will be easy, we think. She is beyond her pain now.’
Easy? I thought. Death easy? That was doctor’s talk, that was Coburg talk. Death was the enemy, to be fought, to be howled at and defied. Death could never be easy. I wanted to howl myself, and raise my fists, and scream at the heavens, at God, who had dared to do this; but I was the Queen, and there are things queens don’t do in front of doctors. I turned away from him, held out my hand towards Albert, and at once his handkerchief was in my fingers, and his warm hand was upon my elbow, supporting me as I wiped my face. (Oh, blessed time when he was there, always there, when I needed him!) Then I nodded to him, and we went back in.
Oh, what a long and dreary vigil! We sat in silence, for there was nothing to say, watching her sleep away the last dregs of her life, listening to that steady, heavy breathing; and every quarter came the little silvery chimes of the tortoiseshell repeater which I had heard through every night of my childhood, until, becoming Queen, I had left my mother’s room for ever. I had left my mother, too, left her in anger and hatred, until Albert came to soften my heart and clear my reason and give me all that could be salvaged from the wreck of my childhood. I had hated her so much, and it is not possible to hate the mother who bears you without hating something of yourself. Now she was leaving me – leaving me! – and I hated her again. How could she do this to me? How could she care so little for me as to die without saying goodbye? As my father’s watch picked away at the stitches of that last night, and gave silver tongue after the fleeing quarters, I counted the heavy breaths and willed her to wake and to know me, to smile, kiss me, say she loved me, bid me adieu. I counted the breaths and wondered how many of them there were altogether to be spent, and how many left before the end.
In the early hours Albert made me go and lie down on a sofa and rest, but though weary I could not sleep, only doze fitfully, waking to a sense of unreality which made me more tired and sick. At four I went in to the room again, but there was no change. At six, no change. At half past seven I gave up pretence of sleeping and went back to the room, and sat on a footstool beside her, and took possession of her hand again. Now she was so deeply unconscious she could not o
bject. It was not like sleep, this heaviness – it was like going away. Clark came and looked over my shoulder, reached quietly to feel for the pulse. I looked up at him. His ancient, craggy face was so worn with time it could not look tired, though he had not been to bed; but there were white whiskers sprouting from his chin.
‘It will not be long now,’ he said softly. ‘Shall I call His Highness in?’
‘Yes,’ I said; and my voice came out so unused it sounded dusty. Albert came and stood behind me. I could not look at him, but I was glad he was there. He had loved her, always, and called her Mamma. But she was not his mother – she could not betray him, having no faith with him to break. Fainter and fainter grew the breaths, and the hand I held seemed unnaturally soft, limp, and smooth, as though receding life had washed it clear like the sand below the tide-line. Now they really were numbered, those breaths, so few left, coming further apart, like clockwork winding down. And then there were none. I listened for the next – surely it would come? I waited past the moment when it might, still listening for it, and heard instead the silvery chimes of the half striking. Half past nine. She was gone. Left without speaking, without moving, without a sigh – just gone, between one breath and the next, as though it were a matter of supreme unimportance. How could death be so unremarkable? And yet as I looked at the thing before me, I knew it was death. I had never seen a dead body before, but now I would always recognise it. They lie, the poets: it is not like sleep. The solemn, marble flesh which no life inhabits is not like a living person sleeping. It is not a human being at all – it is a foul mockery, got up to cheat the heart, to whisper seductively that the beloved might return, if one is only faithful. But one does not believe it. Like all the Impostor’s works, it is not a good enough cheat to convince.
Behind me I heard Albert break into terrible sobs, the sobs of a man who has lost one who had been almost a mother to him. But she was not his mother! I sat as I had sat unmoving, unable to cry, frozen by the awfulness, the mystery of it, hollow to the depth of my heart with the bitterness of my loss. She had gone, she had left me, and she would never come back, not if I stayed here for ever. Still sobbing, Albert put his arms round me, drew me to my feet, gathered me up to help me from the room. I wished I could cry, but the tears would not come yet, only a savage pain in my breast and my throat as though something iron were being forced into me. Tears would be a relief from that pain, I thought, but for the moment it was Albert who wept, not me. He was not the one betrayed.
26th November 1900
I CAN still remember what a shattering blow it was to me. I had never before had anyone close to me die; and of recent years I had seen Mamma, or exchanged letters with her, daily. She had become to me what mothers ought to be to their daughters, my confidante and adviser, my support in the upbringing of my children, and the person who was interested in all the minutiae of my life – the curl of my hair, the trimming of a new petticoat, the state of my digestion, what I meant to order for luncheon. She was of the fabric of every day, and of late Albert had not been. He would not give up any of his business, though it was making him ill; he was from me for a great part of each day, and when he came back to me he was often too tired or preoccupied to be interested in trivia. Now in addition to everything else, he had Mamma’s estate to sort out, for she had made him her sole executor; the demands on his time were enough to drive anyone distracted, and many of the things we had used to do together had now had to be given up.
And so I missed Mamma, in the exact sense of that over-used expression. She was not where she had been; and a dozen times a day I began to think, ‘I must remember to tell Mamma—’ or, ‘Mamma will like to hear that—’ only to have the horrid truth forcibly ‘brought home’ to me again. It was the irrevocability that distressed me most; the lost opportunities that could not be caught back, the things not said that could now never be. She had left a mass of papers and letters, and sorting through them with Lady Augusta Bruce I was reduced to tears by the discovery that Mamma had never thrown away a single scrap of my writing, however trivial; she had kept all my locks of hair, even my baby-shoes. In her journal I read her tender observations of my babyhood and childhood: all those years I had been hating her – and I had declared passionately to Lord M. that I did not believe she had ever loved me – she had been writing tenderly, affectionately, wistfully about me in her journal. Misguided she had certainly been, but she had never acted from malice or indifference, only from a mistaken idea of what would be best for me. So to loss and grief were added guilt and remorse. Through that dismal, wet, cold spring I mourned, and would not be comforted.
In May, Louis of Hesse came to visit, eager to see his sweet Alice, and was visibly taken aback at the deep mourning and gloom he discovered in the house. But his sympathy for me was intense and practical, and I discovered then what a worthy claimant he was for Alice’s hand. He sat with me for hours, talking quietly and sensibly, listening to me with the patience and tenderness of a woman, looked over the new plans for a mausoleum at Frogmore for Mamma’s remains with respectful enthusiasm surprising in one so young. Unfortunately he took the measles while he was with us, and pretty soon gave them to our children. Arthur, Leo and Baby all went down with them, and in Leo’s case illnesses were never trivial. The poor little boy was very ill indeed, which added to my worries and Albert’s weariness.
In August we visited Ireland to see how Bertie had progressed. He was touchingly pleased to see us, and proud of his achievements, and we watched him march past with his company, looking better than I had expected. Then on our return we went to Balmoral. There my spirits revived at last; I was ready to put aside deep mourning and enjoy the good air, and our simple, good people, and the expeditions that dearest Albert planned for my entertainment. I loved travelling incognito, as we did on those expeditions, staying at small inns and eating whatever the landlady had prepared for her ‘ordinary’ guests. I must admit, though, that the fun was not complete unless a disclosure came at last; otherwise it was like a play in which the highborn heroine takes a situation as a housemaid, and remains unidentified to the end. The best thing was when we were recognised just as we were leaving, and could witness the people’s astonishment and excitement as we drove away. I suspect that the reason this so often happened was that the servants grew tired of not having their eminence appreciated and ‘told’; but the time I was most pleased was at Grantown when it was Albert who was recognised and cheered. I liked to see all his great work appreciated.
But the best thing about Balmoral was that I was able to detach Albert at last from that work, and see him give himself a little to pleasure and relaxation (not that stalking is not very hard work, but it did not make him sick or give him neuralgia or insomnia). At Windsor and in London he was never still: he had even taken lately to running along the corridors instead of walking, to save time. He rose at seven every day and worked at his desk in his padded dressing-gown for an hour before he even dressed; at breakfast he would read The Times as he ate – or rather bolted – his egg and bread and butter, and before the last morsel was swallowed he would be calling for his secretaries to discuss the business of the day. He hated being in the public eye and giving speeches and proposing toasts, yet he never turned down an invitation, if it was for a good cause – and the approach of a speech occasion always brought on the sickness and shivering fits and insomnia. He never cancelled an outdoor appointment on the grounds of foul weather or his own ill-health, and so often came back shivering, exhausted, nauseous, or tortured with rheumatism or neuralgia; he even insisted on keeping an engagement he had made at the horticultural gardens when little Leo was very sick with the measles, which made me very angry. And all this was in addition to the constant flow of questions which were brought to him by every member of the Household and every department of Government. ‘Ask the Prince’ was the solution to every problem which arose; and the Prince never turned anyone away, and delegated far too little.
But at Balmoral I had him back,
and that autumn holiday in 1861 was one of the best I remember. Louis Hesse was with us, and already seeming like one of the family; and Bertie was not with us, which made the household more peaceful. Some of the stoop my darling had got into his shoulders in the last two years went out of them, and something like the old gaiety animated his face. When it was in repose, it had a solemn, grave, dignified cast to it, but no-one who had witnessed it ever forgot his smile, or the delightful, hearty sound of his laugh. We had one or two very good balls, and Albert and I danced several reels, impressing Louis greatly – Albert was still an incomparably graceful dancer, and when I danced with him, I was as light as thistledown. And at night when we retired to our bedroom, I found I had got back my lover again, tender and fond and as passionate as when we had first wed; but now, suddenly, after twenty-one years of blissful, faithful marriage, it seemed that the strange struggle – almost pain – that the final yielding had caused him had gone. He gave all to me as sweetly as fresh, good water bubbles out of a spring, and my heart ached with joy as I held him close to me night after night.
The last expedition we took was on October the 16th, and since once Albert had planned them (which was done with maps and the ghillies and much consultation, down to the last detail) he would never put off, however bad the weather, I was delighted to wake to a perfectly beautiful day. It was one of those windless days you get in October, mild as summer, all blue and gold, and the colours clean and bright and simple, like heraldic painting. There was not a cloud in the spotless, deep blue sky (as blue as Papa’s eyes, Vicky used to say). There had been a sharp frost in the night, and as we breakfasted in our room with Alice, Louis and Lenchen, it still lay white and crisp and thick as powder-snow on the lawns where the shadow of the castle fell. The poor trees were almost leafless, but what few leaves remained were gold and crimson and rust-brown against the sky and the rowan berries were a scarlet blaze.
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