My Name is Victoria

by Lucy Worsley

  As I drew near the turn where our boarding house stood on the clifftop, a buffet of wind knocked me almost off my feet. This meant that at first I did not notice the barouche, its hood raised, pulling up alongside me. The fine dark horses were showy, and the vehicle itself, although unflashy, was obviously a luxurious and expensive one. Who could be driving such a vehicle in Ramsgate? For a second, the thought of the Duke of Cumberland crossed my mind. Was he still working his sinister magic? Had he sent someone to find Victoria, invading the privacy of her holiday?

  As the mysterious vehicle crept alongside me, drawing to a halt, an icy finger of wind found its way beneath my bonnet and down my back, making my spine tingle. There had been no further hint of trouble since that strange night, years ago, at Kensington Palace. I had never forgotten the dark shape of a man seen against the night sky, a memory that still sometimes woke me sweating and trembling from my sleep.

  But we weren’t in a novel; we were in Ramsgate. My imagination was running away with me again. Of course, this must be Victoria’s Uncle Leopold travelling incognito. He had arrived a little early. The conclusion still left my heart beating unpleasantly fast. Despite my recent immersion into society, the thought of having to talk to people I did not know well filled me with dread.

  Now the door to the barouche was opening, and a bald, beaky face was looking out at me. King Leopold was gesturing me in, out of the wind. I had met him before. He was Victoria’s mother’s brother, German like her, although he seemed much more sensible. Among all her relations, Victoria loved this uncle uniquely well. He was quite different and much wiser than the prickly, pompous and even frightening uncles who were the British brothers of her dead father.

  Victoria might call him ‘Uncle Leopold,’ but to me, and to the world, he was the King of the Belgians, so before placing my foot on the step to climb in, I made a low curtsey right there on the pavement. After all these years of practice, I was secretly rather proud of my curtsey: deep, secure and elegant.

  ‘Ah, Miss V!’ He had taken up his family’s habit of addressing me in this unstuffy manner. His friendly familiarity, as much as his accent, reminded me that he was not born in Britain. ‘Pray don’t reveal my presence to the good people of Ramsgate with your court curtseys. You know,’ he went on, ‘I quite mistook you for my niece herself and was wondering why she was out unattended. But I am glad to see you.’

  Shyly, I returned his smile.

  ‘And I am happy to see you too, sir,’ I said politely.

  He reached out cordially to take my gloved hand and to draw me up into the vehicle, and I accepted gladly. On his previous visits, King Leopold had always asked sensible, useful questions about his niece’s health and security. Now that Victoria’s uncle King George the Fourth was dead, there was only one life – that of King William the Fourth – between her and the throne. We had to be more careful than ever.

  ‘Come up, come up!’ he was saying. ‘And your dog too. Sit down, I beg you, and do me the honour of riding with me back into the … conurbation.’ He produced the word with a flourish, as if proud to have remembered it, even though it was a little grandiose for the small seaside town of Ramsgate.

  He called to the driver to move us on. ‘And how is the Princess Victoria’s Miss V?’ he asked, turning back to me.

  ‘I am well, thank you,’ I said. ‘But you will find Her Royal Highness looking a little peaky, I’m afraid. We have only been here a few days to recover after the many public appearances the princess made on her tour.’

  Although she had at first enjoyed the late hours and new faces, the gaiety and the attention, Victoria of late had grown tense and snappish. Indeed, towards the end there had been tears and tantrums, and guests left waiting, disappointed, while the princess howled in rage or despair in her bedroom. We were here in Ramsgate, now that autumn had come, for the healthful sea breezes, before returning to the strict seclusion of Kensington Palace and the System.

  I saw a look of concern pass across his forehead.

  ‘The tour may have been tiring,’ I quickly added, ‘but it was worth every effort for the wonderful welcome she received. Such crowds! Even in the Midlands and the North, where we saw the great factories and the pottery works and the moors.’

  The frown was gone from his face. ‘I hear from my sister’s letters,’ he said, ‘that the tour more than achieved its aim of preparing her people for Queen Victoria’s reign.’

  I smiled. Of course he knew exactly how to go about the business of being a monarch. There was no tricking a reigning king into believing that the tour had been simply for Victoria’s education.

  ‘These are hard times for royalty,’ he went on. ‘Never was there a period in which real qualities have been called for in persons in high stations. The preparation, the dedication, are immense.’

  I bowed my head. I knew this all too well. Victoria often read her Uncle Leopold’s letters aloud to me, about service and dignity and self-control, and it seemed to me that they contained wise counsel for a future queen. Victoria might laugh out loud at them, and sometimes call her uncle a dry old stick, but I could see what he was driving at.

  Lehzen and my father, who were responsible for Victoria’s education, were hardly as experienced in government as this man who was himself a sovereign.

  As our sombre vehicle bowled past a long terrace of houses, I noticed through the window that a little girl was watching us solemnly from the pavement. Little did she know that she was seeing a monarch travelling incognito through her town.

  ‘And I know the dedication you yourself give to our family,’ he continued, cocking his head to the side in order to catch my distracted gaze. I smiled again, tightly, trying not to show just how very pleased I was. ‘My sister the duchess,’ he said delicately, ‘is not always good at expressing her appreciation. But she knows that you and her daughter the princess are most sincerely attached.’

  He could not have known that one of my chief duties, as Victoria’s companion, was listening to her complaints about her mother. But I did understand that my years of quiet attendance on the Kensington Palace household had won me a measure of confidence from the duchess.

  ‘You are sixteen years of age – that is right, yes?’

  I nodded, astonished that he would have taken the trouble to discover such a trivial fact. But Leopold overlooked nothing. Not even my stupefaction.

  ‘Yes, indeed, I keep a close eye on those near my niece,’ he added. ‘And, even though you are of age, you must think not of marriage, Miss V,’ he said in a mock-stern manner. ‘I know that young ladies begin to think of such things when they are past fifteen. But the household cannot do without you.’

  ‘Sir!’ I said. ‘I have no thought of … such things.’ I could feel a blush climbing my throat. Maybe one day I would marry, but until I was released from the System such thoughts must remain far away. Parties, visits, holidays were not for me. Until my work was done, until the System was no longer needed, my duty was to my father, and to Victoria. Or at least it was first to Victoria, and then to him.

  All at once, it struck me that Victoria, too, must inevitably marry.

  ‘Yes, yes, unlike you, she must marry soon,’ Uncle Leopold said, divining my thought and twisting a ring on his finger. ‘A spouse is, of course, a great comfort.’ Leopold’s own wife, Louise, was French, immensely pretty, and Victoria held her up as a heroine for her fashionable Paris gowns.

  ‘To be precise,’ he said, ‘I have it in mind that she should marry her cousin.’

  He could have said nothing to alarm me more. I almost leapt to my feet, hurting my head against the soft padding. ‘Oh, sir, please, no! He is …’ I felt unwilling to speak the words, but it was important that he should know, ‘… a cruel bully. And it is thought that he was behind the … ah, the security breach, you know, when a man got into Kensington Palace.’ I did not call it an assassination attempt. I wasn’t quite sure how much he knew.

  ‘Oh, not George Cumberland,’ he sa
id with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘One of her good German cousins. Albert, I think, my brother’s son. Albert has no happy home life. He lacks a mother. I think that he and Victoria, waifs both, could look after each other.’

  Now I began to determine his design in speaking to me so confidentially of the family’s business. He turned towards me and smiled slowly, and I knew that he had come to the meat of what he wanted to say. No king ever acted without thought, he had told me once, even in the smallest matters.

  ‘Miss V,’ he said, ‘you should encourage her, when she speaks of her cousins, to think fondly of Albert. He is good, and steady, and quite free from the tainted blood of the House of Hanover.’

  Yes, Uncle Leopold, I silently thought, and although he may be good, he will be your creature, just as Victoria is currently the creature of my own father. He meant well, of course, but he sought to control her.

  But I stayed quiet, restricting myself to a grave nod.

  ‘She listens to you, I know,’ he went on. ‘She must be married young, for stability. You understand how she requires a strong arm to lean on.’

  Oh, how I did! My heart heaved. My Victoria did not often speak of her future, because, as I knew, she was afraid of it.

  I turned to look at the sea, thinking of the days and years ahead. I saw a fishing boat coming in towards the shore, slowly but inexorably, just as time passed.

  ‘What do they catch here?’ King Leopold asked.

  ‘They served lemon sole at our hotel last night,’ I said, ‘but the princess is more interested in desserts and cakes.’

  I realised that we were looping back now towards the town and the boarding house. The journey would soon be over. It struck me that King Leopold hadn’t yet asked the inevitable question about my father. Surely the subject would come up soon. People always asked about him once the pleasantries were over. Now, Miss V, about your father, they would generally begin. Miss V, could you please ask your father for this? Beg your father not to do that? Give your father my excessively sincere compliments …

  ‘Now,’ said King Leopold. ‘About your father.’

  How predictable people were! I thought. I did not even turn my eyes back from the sea. But the king went on to surprise me.

  ‘Sir John Conroy,’ he continued decisively, ‘must be kept in check. That is what I want to say to you. He is very assiduous in his duties, very admirable, but his role is limited in scope. It is not quite as vast as he thinks it is.’

  Well, this made a very great change! It was quite astonishing to me to hear my father spoken of thus, and it made me catch my breath. I quickly bowed my head to hide my feelings.

  ‘What a strange man he is to devote himself so closely to the family,’ the king went on, interlacing his fingers and watching me closely, ‘although I can understand his reasons.’

  I could not think what to say. He had caught me quite by surprise. ‘He has given them many years of service,’ I muttered eventually, ‘and been true and honest to his mistress.’

  ‘More years than I like to think about!’ he said with a sudden bark of laughter. ‘Many more years than the sixteen that you have lived in the world. When your head was turned just now, I could clearly see the similarity between the duke and yourself. You have just the look of him around your forehead.’

  I looked up, startled. ‘Which duke?’

  ‘Why, the Duke of Kent, of course.’ He looked surprised. ‘My sister the duchess’s deceased husband. Did you not know? Your mother was his natural daughter from … oh, long ago, from when the duke led a riotous life, before he married my sister.’

  I had lost all control of my limbs. They felt leaden and immovable. I certainly had not known. He could tell by my fixed gaze at the floor and the intense stillness of my body.

  ‘Oh, my dear, I see I have spilled a family secret,’ he said remorsefully, placing an awkward hand on my shoulder. ‘But I thought that was why you serve the princess with such sincerity. I thought that was why you are content to live a … well, an abnormal life. Blood is thicker than water after all.’

  He was shaking his head now, as if in disbelief. ‘Why else would you be such a faithful friend to my niece, giving up your own life to serve her? I had always thought you knew that you are cousins.’

  ‘I had no …’ I began to stammer out some sort of response, but trailed off.

  Cousins! Was I really related to Victoria? I knew that such relationships were perfectly possible in the royal family: the Duke of Clarence, for example, having had nine natural children with his actress lady friend. Indeed, I had information from very close to home that even in ordinary families husbands did not always love their wives and looked elsewhere.

  But if so, my father’s involvement with the princess’s family was decades older than I had thought. Unpleasant ideas were whirring round in my head. It had been a long time since I had thought of my mother, lying comatose on her chaise, but she came into my mind now. So she too was part of this strange thing called the System.

  I scarcely noticed that we were up on the high cliffs once more, passing a row of smart terraced houses wreathed with winging gulls. I began to wish that Uncle Leopold had kept his beguiling, flattering sharing of plans and secrets to himself.

  ‘And now,’ he said, ‘we must return to the boarding house so that I can visit my niece.’ He spoke abruptly. I could tell he felt awkward at his blunder. ‘And maybe,’ he went on, ‘if the time is right, I will speak to her of Albert.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said quietly, bowing my head. ‘I see that it must be.’

  A little background beat of pain had started up in my temple, heralding the approach of a headache. It seemed that I was deeper in than I had thought. I stared out of the window with glassy eyes, but I hardly saw the fishing boats outside. Victoria was my … cousin? It seemed very strange. And yet I felt closer to her than my own sister. Perhaps I was part of the family of the Kents after all.

  ‘Miss V!’

  The carriage had stopped; we had arrived. King Leopold was tapping me on the arm and looking at me with concern. At the sight of his friendly face, my eyes filled with tears.

  I forced a smile and gathered myself to descend from the carriage. But my thoughts were still far away. Just how long ago had my father devised the System? And how deeply was it embedded?

  Chapter 20

  ‘Royalty These Days Is Debased’

  I had not been invited to the family reunion between the duchess, Leopold and Victoria, which took place in the first-floor drawing room of the boarding house, with its panoramic view of the harbour and the tide slipping slowly out over the smooth sand of the beach. But I had heard the gales of laughter and knew that the German family was together once more and happy to be so. My ear, though, was attuned particularly to Victoria’s voice, and I heard it less than I expected.

  I did not exactly have my ear pressed to the door, but I was sitting in the hallway with a book, just in case I might be called. I wanted sal volatile for my head, and tea to drink, and I had neither. I had spent so many hours in this fashion, and perhaps Victoria had grown too accustomed to being able to call me to fetch and carry, without even rising from her sofa.

  Were we really cousins? Is that why we looked so alike? My thoughts churned on. King Leopold had treated me to his confidence today; he took me seriously. I could not help noticing that Victoria, on the other hand, had been treating me rather like her dog. Or worse than her dog, as Dash had been invited into the tea party while I had been left to wait outside. I wasn’t her dog; I was her cousin! But did she even know? I dug my fingernails into my palms as I thought of how my father had thrust me into this life without having told me all its secrets. How many years would pass before I knew the whole truth?

  But before the tea party was over, my father came strutting in through the boarding house’s front door below and began to climb the curving stair. He stopped when he saw me sitting primly on my banquette next to the grandfather clock, and he smiled. In h
is long face any movement of his eyebrows was particularly striking. He raised them now in his quizzical fashion.

  ‘Patient and faithful as Dash himself!’ he said quietly. ‘Come up and give me my tea, Miss V.’ I was almost annoyed to realise that today, of all days, he had understood at once that my burden of service seemed painfully heavy. I stood up, smoothed down my skirt and led the way to our own sitting room at the top of the house.

  Although it was smaller than the drawing room where the duchess and her daughter sat laughing down below, our own sitting room was – in my father’s usual fashion – warmer, brighter and more conveniently furnished than theirs. In my angry mood, it once again struck me – as it did every so often – that this was odd. Why did the Conroys live so much better than the Kents? We had a little silver tea kettle, an embroidered fire screen and a velvet sausage to keep out the draughts from the sea wind. But then the duchess had always favoured grandeur over comfort, and had no eye for the domestic details that made life snug.

  We sat down to our cakes, and my father asked me how long King Leopold had been in the house, and what had been said. I looked down at my cup, reluctant to answer. I felt that earlier in the afternoon Leopold had been treating me, in the nicest possible way, as his spy. Now my father wanted to do the same thing. I sat, rebelliously silent, stirring my tea and thinking. I did not really want to be a spy for either of them.

  ‘So King Leopold has been nobbling you, has he?’ my father said, watching me carefully. ‘Did he mention his nephew Albert?’

  I gasped, annoyed. I’d had enough of being pumped for information. I decided to say, for once, what was really on my mind. I gathered my breath and spoke all in a rush.