by Lucy Worsley
One day I realised that my father still had not named a date for our proposed return to Arborfield Hall. Our departure had been pushed back once or twice already. So I asked him at teatime when we were to leave.
He didn’t answer, but looked up from his newspaper and gave me one of his sharp stares. Apparently what he saw satisfied him. He looked down again and continued reading.
‘Miss V!’ he said to me at last, through the pages of the paper. ‘You are not in a hurry to go home, are you? You are doing so well here.’
I thought it over. It was true. I was not especially looking forward to returning to Arborfield.
‘Suppose,’ he went on carelessly, ‘you were to live here for quite a few months more, maybe years. Would you mind?’
I noticed that although he appeared to be reading, my father had not turned a page in some time. It flashed into my mind that he was anxious to hear what I would say.
‘Of course not!’ I said at once, keen to reassure him. ‘I quite like it here.’
‘Good girl!’ he said warmly, glancing up again with his flashing smile. With a satisfied sigh, he stretched out his toes towards the fire and went on reading.
Twisting my teacup in my hand, I examined my feelings carefully, like a person who has fallen downstairs and is not sure whether or not she is hurt or just surprised. For I had said what I knew he wanted to hear rather than what I really believed.
But it turned out to be true. I did not mind the prospect of remaining at Kensington Palace. Jane was away on some long country visit; I could not believe that my mother was missing me much.
So our life at Kensington continued, until the fateful afternoon when Victoria was called from our schoolroom to go to meet some bishop or other.
Occasionally distinguished friends of her father, the dead duke, would visit, and she was supposed to go along to demonstrate how many Bible stories she had learned, and other tasks of that nature. I wondered how she performed on these occasions, for I knew that her knowledge was very sparse and likely to remain so just as long as Lehzen let us concentrate in our lessons on reading plays, tracing drawings and making new dresses for the dolls. But then Victoria was not naturally a bookworm, like me. If asked to think about anything serious, she soon grew impatient. If asked about the future, she would say she wished only to become an opera singer or the painter of the scenes in a theatre.
And so I was left alone in the dark green drawing room. I never relished being on my own in there because I was always conscious of that terrible parrot watching me. Even when the cover was on his cage to keep him quiet, I somehow sensed his evil gaze. I knew that he belonged to the princess’s mother, who I had still never met. I imagined the parrot as her creature, like the cat of a witch, standing in for her and keeping watch over her daughter and me.
It was merely in order to distract myself from the thought of the parrot that I began to turn over the books on the shelf, and found among them a blue-covered exercise book. I thought it was the history book in which Victoria had been writing yesterday, and I thought I might review our lesson. I took it over to the window, for as usual the oil lamp was not lit.
I smiled as I opened it: the first page upon which my eye fell was covered in Victoria’s very slanted and loopy handwriting. ‘Today I was NAUGHTY!’ it read. The words brought her to life so vividly it was almost as if she had spoken them out loud.
But seconds later my grin faded from my face, and I looked up from the page in confusion. This was not history, after all. Flipping back to the beginning of the book, I found the first page and recognised Lehzen’s hand: The Princess Victoria. Good Behaviour. 1830.
It was a diary, of sorts, though it was clear that the emphasis was not on what happened – well, nothing much ever happened at Kensington Palace – but how the princess had reacted.
‘Tuesday. Lessons, studied the counties of the British Isles, wrote fifteen lines,’ it ran. ‘Lehzen said to play the piano well I must practise. I told her that there was no need for a princess to practise. Everyone says I play beautifully already. I was naughty.’
I turned over a few pages together.
‘Saturday. My mother is in bed again. She cannot take me to the opera. Not that she meant to anyway. She always finds some excuse. Lehzen gave me caraway seeds and told me stories of Germany.
‘Sunday. Aunt Sophia in chapel patted my head and said that I am a sweet girl. I bit her.
‘Monday. I was very, very, very horribly NAUGHTY!’
The word ‘naughty’ cropped up on almost every page, almost like a challenge to the reader to sit up and pay attention.
And then I noticed something that made my heart stand still.
‘Miss V. Conroy came today. She is horrid.’
The room was very quiet. I glanced up and around me, like a cat burglar checking that the coast was clear.
All I could hear was the ticking of the clock and the thudding of my own heart. I felt a great tide of blood rise up and course through my cheeks. I was sure they were crimson. But nobody came, nothing stirred, and I returned my eyes to the book.
And the next day: ‘I was rude to Miss V. Conroy. She is a SPY.’
And the next: ‘I wish Miss V. Conroy would leave me alone.’
And the next: ‘I love Dash! Today I gave him a bath. He looked adorable. Put him in his blue trousers. Perfect afternoon spoiled only by Miss V. Conroy.’
I could no longer deny to myself that there was something amiss with my vision. Tears had come between my eyes and the page. I remembered the afternoon when we had bathed Dash. It had been fun, I thought, and I had almost cried with laughter as Victoria wrapped him in the linen towel as if it were a christening gown and he a bald little baby.
The blue book in my hand shook, and a large tear fell down and blotted the page. Aghast at this evidence I had left of my nosiness, I tried to dry it with my handkerchief. I fumbled to put the book back on the shelf, suddenly feeling very cold and very stupid. My legs could scarcely hold me up because of the unpleasant fizzing sensation in my stomach.
I gazed out of the window, feeling my breath coming fast and shallow. With a sharp fingernail I peeled down a cuticle, until a pang of pain ran through me.
My father would be furious, was my first thought. What would he say when I reported this back to him? That the princess herself had accused me, in writing, of being a spy? Could I even bear to tell him that she did not trust me as much as I had thought? For the first time, I considered keeping a secret. But could I really do that? Could I hold out against that terrible pressure when he stood over me, waiting for his report?
‘You can count on a Conroy.’ He always made a point of saying it as he handed me my teacup afterwards, satisfied that I had made myself indispensible to the princess.
But as well as that, I felt angry with myself. How foolish I had been to think that Victoria and I were becoming friends. How foolish I had been to think that anyone might want to become friends with me. Of course I was not worth it. With scarcely a thought now for the noise I might make, I left the room in a hurry. I even banged the door.
Victoria would not miss me when she came back to find me gone.
Chapter 11
A Friend
That night I lay sadly in bed, looking out between my curtains at the clouds hurrying across the moon. Although I’d tried hard to retain my composure, my father had noticed that I was upset.
‘What’s up, my little owl?’ he’d asked me as we drank tea after supper, he at the table with a pile of papers, me on the sofa. ‘No piano tonight?’
I had shaken my head silently at him, not lifting it from my book.
‘Are you quite sure that the princess is happy and well?’ he asked. I could tell that he was looking searchingly at me, narrowing his eyes. Earlier I had reported that nothing at all had happened that day, the very first time I could remember deliberately telling him a lie.
‘Are you quite sure,’ he said again, ‘that there is nothing you need to t
ell me?’
If I’d told him that Victoria was suspicious of me, he would certainly have been angry. He might even have sent me away back to Arborfield.
He held the silence, pen raised, listening and waiting. I felt like wolves were tearing my insides apart as I forced myself to lift my chin, meet his gaze and silently shake my head. It was a breach of the System not to tell him, but what she’d written wasn’t true. I wasn’t a spy! I hadn’t let him down! It was best forgotten.
All this was passing through my head when a new horrible thought occurred to me. If Victoria were sitting with us now in our drawing room, watching and listening to my father questioning me, she might well think that she was being spied upon.
What was the truth of it? I did not know.
At very long last, my father had got tired of waiting for an answer.
‘Well, have it your own way!’ he’d said huffily. ‘Sometimes I think I’d get more conversation out of a statue.’ And he’d turned back to his book of accounts.
I knew that the duchess’s unpaid bills were on his mind once again, as Lehzen had mentioned them earlier that afternoon.
At the evening’s end I had trudged wearily upstairs, allowing a tear or two to flow again once I was alone in the dark of the passage. I blew out my candle almost immediately and tried to sleep. Of course I could not. As I pummelled my pillow, I went over in my mind all the times Victoria had smiled or laughed. What a little actress she was!
My father had sent me to care for her, and care for her I had.
Perhaps, I now thought, I’d cared too much.
I sighed and turned over. The wind really was very high tonight, and the branches of the trees in the garden gave out great groans as they rubbed together.
But that sharp sound, surely, was not the wind. It was the clatter of a slate or tile falling from the roof and hitting the ground below. This was not an unusual occurrence at Kensington Palace, where time and decay were doing their best to take the building down.
All of a sudden, though, the moon was blotted out by a dark shape. My windowpane was being rapped upon imperiously. Someone was there!
‘Let me in!’
I froze in my bed. Could this be robbers, or spies? But would robbers or spies speak with such a girlish voice?
‘Come on, Miss V, let me in!’
More rapping. I grew anxious that my father would hear. He had been unutterably furious about the day in the gardens when the crowd had glimpsed Victoria through the gap in the hedge. And now she was breaching the System again, with my father sleeping only just down the passage.
As quietly as possible, I glided across the room and tried to unfasten the catch.
‘Shh!’ I said in some desperation. But Victoria was incapable of doing anything quietly, especially not climbing in through a window at night. Her teeth were chattering, as she had come in her white nightgown along the leaded roof hidden behind the parapet of the palace.
I had often looked out at the roofscape to each side of my window, wondering if it were possible to get along that gutter to the other peaks and gables and troughs of the palace’s many roofs. But I would never have had the courage to attempt it for myself.
‘How did you escape?’ I whispered in some amazement, for I knew that Lehzen or Späth or Victoria’s mother, the duchess, always slept with her in her room.
‘Oh, mother is out cold,’ she said. ‘She has taken her drops. And Lehzen has a sick headache and has gone to the water closet.’
‘Victoria, you’re so cold you’re shaking! And it was so dangerous! Have you been on the roof before?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She said it with an offhand boldness that I had to admire. ‘But not often,’ she went on, ‘for you know how carefully they watch me.’
Silently I handed her the flowered eiderdown from my bed, and she wrapped it round her. ‘Yes, I know that my gown is dirty,’ she said mockingly. Of course I had noticed a great black streak down her nightgown, produced by some obstacle she must have encountered upon the roof. She had evidently read the disapproval on my face. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she explained. ‘It’s an old one. I put it on specially.’
But having wrapped her up warm, I could not think what next to do. My mind was fully occupied in wondering why she had come. For her part, Victoria was looking round my room in interested silence. She was taking in the neat pincushion, the stack of novels, my framed print of Christ washing the feet of beggars. For once, she seemed lost for words. And I still said nothing, although the diary and the pain it had caused me was vivid in my head.
When she did begin to speak, it was characteristically abrupt.
‘I know,’ she said suddenly, ‘that you read my Behaviour Book.’
At that my heart convulsed, and I groped behind me for the mahogany washstand to give me some support. I felt so guilty and mean for having read it. I knew I should not have read a private diary. I had known it even as I picked it up.
‘But … how?’ I whispered the words, not daring to look at Victoria. Shame pulsed through me; I could feel it thumping in the veins of my forehead. At the same time I clenched my fists with another, more unfamiliar feeling. Then I realised. I was angry! Yes, angry! She had deceived me.
‘Easy!’ she said scornfully. ‘It was out of its place on the shelf, someone had got it all wet, and you were missing at teatime. You left me all alone, you know. It was like having tea in a tomb. So that’s how I know you read it.’
I could not deny it, and she could see it in my crimson face.
I was expecting rage on her part, or maybe cold anger, the type my father showed when something had gone very badly wrong. I found that my hands, all by themselves, had relaxed their clench and raised themselves up to hide and shield my face.
But then there was a gentle tap on my shoulder. She had stepped forward and was holding out half of the eiderdown, as if to put it round my shoulders too. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I accepted it, and together we sank to the bed.
‘I wanted to say …’ she began, but stopped.
‘It’s all right,’ I whispered quickly. ‘It’s true my father sent me to you, and I know you don’t like him. I’m sorry.’
‘No!’ she said fiercely. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. All wrong! I mean, I did write nasty things about you in the book, but only because they read it. Every day, Lehzen or my mother, one of them or the other or even both, reads the Behaviour Book. It’s part of the System.’
I could feel my eyes popping out of my head with surprise. If I knew it was wrong to read a diary, surely these grown-ups must know it too?
‘It’s a sham diary,’ Victoria explained. ‘I have to put down something that they will swallow. And I have to convince them that we are not friends. If they think that I have a friend or a new sister …’
Here she shuddered, and I felt the pressure of her shoulder against mine.
‘… they will take you away.’
‘Take me away! But where? And why?’
‘Because the System requires it. The System means I must have no friends, be left all alone.’ She was angry now. I could feel her fists closing and grasping on the soft eiderdown.
‘Victoria, Victoria, don’t upset yourself!’ I was stroking her hair as I might have done to Dash. But she was gone from me, in one of her strange, passionate fits when no words could reach her. Her eyes were staring at something beyond the patterned paper of the wall opposite the bed.
‘Did you know I had a sister once?’ Victoria asked suddenly. ‘Feodora. My half-sister. Our mother had Feodora with her first husband, before she married my father.’
‘And what happened to Feodora?’ My hand fell still on her hair. I was on guard once more, for I clearly remembered Victoria telling me that she had no brothers or sisters.
‘Taken,’ she said glumly. ‘She’s as good as dead to me. Feodora was my friend. She cared for me and loved me much more than my mother does.’
‘Did she live with you here at Kensington Pala
ce?’ I asked in wonder. I had never heard of any of this.
‘Yes,’ Victoria said bitterly, ‘until they sent her away. It was ages ago, more than two years. They got rid of her by making her marry a penniless German prince so that she’d have to stay at home with him. She’s in Germany now. She writes, but she doesn’t love me any more. She has forgotten me.’
I pondered this. It didn’t seem particularly likely, but then nothing about this girl’s life seemed normal. Victoria’s grief was undoubtedly genuine, and I started to stroke her hair once again. Still, I couldn’t believe that my father would have done such a thing as to send away Victoria’s sister.
Perhaps she sensed this.
‘You don’t believe me,’ she suddenly hissed, with powerful force, ‘but it’s true. That’s why your father is an evil man. He got rid of Feodora, who loved me. He drugs my mother – that’s why she sleeps all day.’ Twisting herself free from my grasp, she was sobbing and panting.
‘No, Victoria,’ I said. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. He, he cares for your safety, you must believe that.’
But she wasn’t listening and continued to talk over me. ‘I don’t know how you can worship him like you do.’ Here I could tell that she was rolling her eyes as well as shaking her head.
Eventually she became still. When next she spoke, it was in a much calmer voice.
‘But you are not like him, Miss V,’ she said. ‘I do know that.’
She laid a hand theatrically upon her heart and turned to look at me. Then she lifted her fingers to place her palms near my ears, each side of my head, and slowly turned me to face her. Gently, but inescapably, she pulled me nearer until our foreheads touched.
‘You are my sister now,’ she said quietly and solemnly. ‘Never forget it. I love you like my sister, and you are my only friend in all the world.’
I could hardly look back at her because my eyes were so full of tears. A great flower had just opened up inside me.