A Flaw in the Blood

by Стефани Баррон

  “An overturned carriage.” Smythe’s fingers were delicate as a bit of jewelry on her arm. “A Royal carriage? That would be the fog, no doubt.”

  “Not only fog, I’m thinking. A thicket of spikes, set down to maim the horses. I saw them, look you.”

  In Fitzgerald’s trouble and despair, his Irish was back in force, obliterating three decades of life in London; it did not win him any friends in Hampstead.

  “Spikes? To maim your horses? Is it possible, Mr. Fitzgerald, that you also received a knock on the head?”

  Smythe did not turn from his patient, but the doctor’s mild disbelief sparked Fitzgerald’s fury. He had already said too much. Anxiety had made him foolish. He reached for the bottle of brandy and took a long draught. His hands were shaking.

  “Happily I did not, sir. Or this lady would still be lying in a ditch with a broken-necked coachman.”

  “As you say,” Smythe replied mildly, “Torning will have looked to the matter of the coachman, I expect.”

  Torning was the innkeeper. Fitzgerald’s jabbered tale had sent a party of men and boys out onto the Heath in the bleary night, searching for the wreckage. Fitzgerald was an event in Hampstead, a throwback to the bad old days of highwaymen, a Paddy in the guise of Quality. The fact that he had survived the attack only added to the sensation.

  “You are not this lady’s father, I understand?”

  Fitzgerald winced. “No.”

  “Does she have one?”

  “Miss Armistead is alone in the world,” he retorted. “I am a family friend of long standing—an acquaintance of her uncle’s. Being a medical man yourself, you may have heard of him—Dr. John Snow.”

  “Ah.” Smythe released Georgie’s arm and looked at him at last. “What a loss to the world when that genius was taken! Such a man would wish to be with this lady now—and would send me speedily about my business!”

  The name had done what Fitzgerald’s could not: blotted out in an instant all questions and doubt. John Snow, child of a lowly Yorkshire carter, who had revolutionized medicine in his day; Snow, who had declared that the great London cholera epidemic of ’54 was a disease born of fouled water, and proved it with a map; Snow, who had advocated the use of chloroform in labour, despite the outcry of the clergy—who insisted that Woman must bring forth her babes in suffering and pain. Snow, who administered that twilight sleep to no less a personage than Queen Victoria herself, at the birth of her eighth child, Leopold. . . .

  “Her Majesty must sorely miss Dr. Snow,” Smythe observed casually, “with the Prince so ill.”

  Fitzgerald might have replied that yes, in her trouble the Queen had summoned Snow’s niece, for the comfort of former association; or he might have told Smythe the Prince Consort was dead. But the bells were tolling throughout the boroughs of London now and Smythe did not require Fitzgerald’s information. He took another drink of whiskey and let the doctor pack up his bag in silence.

  John Snow would not have thanked his old friend for taking Georgie anywhere near Windsor. He’d hated his ward’s unwomanly skill with the scalpel, her passion for science—though he had taught her most of what she knew.

  “Summon me if she wakes,” Smythe said.

  If.

  He showed himself out.

  Fitzgerald settled down to pray for life.

  What in God’s name were you thinking, man, to tangle her with the Queen?

  She won’t sit quiet at home, John, when there’s a sick man at the end of the road.

  Bollocks.

  Snow had a right to be angry. He had commended Georgie to Fitzgerald’s care on his deathbed some three years ago—gone at forty-five, all his brilliance snuffed out like a candle. She was not really his niece and Fitzgerald was the last man to stand as guardian, being already enslaved to Georgiana Armistead and dangerous with it. Perhaps Snow expected him to carry the lass off somewhere. Perhaps he ought to have moved heaven and earth to snatch her from London, his careful years of ambition gone over the bridge and into the river, the past tossed like dirt in John Snow’s grave. Fitzgerald did not know. He knew only that never, on the day of Snow’s death or any day thereafter, did Georgie give the least hint of desiring a conventional life. She had lived a singular one for too long.

  The daughter of Charles Armistead, a military doctor attached to an Indian regiment, she was fretting herself in a finishing school when Snow rescued her—Armistead dead of a fever in Calcutta. Snow took Georgie back to Sackville Street and put his housekeeper in charge of the girl. But Georgiana demanded a different kind of education.

  From the very first, she haunted Snow’s surgery. When he set out on his wanderings through the back slums of London, she had insisted on riding in the coach. He refused to teach her medicine, but when the cook complained of dissections of poultry and the odd hoarding of beef organs—a heart, a liver carefully saved—he began to lend Georgie books from his own library. A satisfaction of curiosity, he thought, however improper for a woman. The girl talked so intelligently that before long she was observing his anatomizations at the College of Surgeons—suitably veiled, of course, and always accompanied by her maid. After the first maid swooned, she went alone.

  Snow blamed himself. He knew he had ruined her—for what gentleman would marry such a girl? Georgiana was Eve, all apples and dangerous knowledge. No London medical board would certify a woman, so Snow sent her to school in Edinburgh. He shared his guilt with Patrick Fitzgerald—whose peculiar loneliness and unfortunate circumstances made him an eligible confidant, an expert at sorrow. Fitzgerald absolved John Snow of all sin.

  Georgiana was singular among females, to be sure; the lass was what the fearful and the envious termed a bluestocking. But she was also magnificent. The full bloom of her mind animated her every word. If this was the terror of the Garden, Fitzgerald was already seduced, a worshipper of apples.

  Then take her away. Take her anywhere. You did not keep her safe, Patrick.

  She didn’t want me to, John.

  It was John Snow who made the acquaintance of the Prince Consort.

  That would have been in connexion with the Great Exhibition, ten years ago now. Albert, with his German love of science, had seized on this rising man, this ambitious doctor who kept meticulous records, who believed that statistics held the key to the spread of disease. Snow’s orderly method, his emphasis on fact rather than God or superstition, appealed to Albert’s clockwork mind. The Prince had never been a great one for Society; where an English peer might cultivate the Ancients, or turn a compliment for a lady, Albert preferred to analyze machines. He loved steam and turbines, factories and shipping; he worshipped gasworks and railways and guns. John Snow was one of the few who might be said to have understood him. It was probably Albert who urged the Queen to try Snow’s chloroform at the birth of Prince Leopold. The year was 1853. What Snow witnessed at Windsor then was to change all their lives.

  Georgie’s head turned on the pillow; she gasped in pain. Fitzgerald had not prayed much—but perhaps he had gotten Snow’s attention, wherever he was.

  “I’m going to be sick,” she said. And reached for the washbasin.

  They brought in the dead coachman at twenty minutes past four.

  “Neck’s broke,” the innkeeper said with satisfaction. “Wrung clean as a chicken’s. You were lucky to crawl away from that smash— but then, the Irish are born with the Devil’s own luck.”

  Fitzgerald was leaning over the corpse, laid out on a scrubbed oak table in the public room—a man younger than himself, hatless but clothed in the scarlet livery of Windsor. The brown eyes were still staring; he closed them gently. “You found the spikes?”

  “What spikes?”

  The voice came from a tall figure looming behind the innkeeper, a deeper shadow in the darkness beyond the candle flame.

  “A palisade of lashed poles, set out in the road to snare the horses.” Fitzgerald straightened. “And you, sir, would be . . . ?”

  “Wolfgang, Graf von St�
�hlen.” He stepped into the light.

  He was dressed for riding, in the polished boots and hacking jacket of a gentleman, a cloak flung carelessly over one shoulder. Gloves and a top hat under his arm, a luxuriant moustache and side-whiskers on an otherwise clean-shaven face. Had Fitzgerald never heard the name, he still would have known von Stühlen instantly: Wolfgang von Stühlen was one of the Prince Consort’s cronies, famous for the black canvas patch that covered his right eye. A duelist had winged him there, before dying. He was roughly Fitzgerald’s age—but looked younger, fitter. And far better bred. So much elegance at four o’clock in the morning made Fitzgerald feel like a peasant.

  “I set off immediately when news was received of this . . . accident.” Coburg in his tone; a faint Oxonian drawl. “The Queen will be most displeased. Two horses dead. And a coachman.”

  “Not to mention the shock to her guests,” Fitzgerald retorted. “You astonish me, Count. Such an errand’s beneath you, surely?”

  A flash of white teeth, with no mirth behind it. “Nothing the Queen desires is beneath her loyal subjects. Particularly at such a time. You will have heard of the Consort’s passing?”

  “Aye, that we have.”

  Von Stühlen bowed; the Count’s gesture had the force of an insult. He said to the innkeeper: “You will see that the body is kept in order until the inquest. It must be held here. Send word when the panel is done.”

  “Yes, yer honour.”

  “But I saw the palisade myself,” Fitzgerald persisted, “when I quitted the wreckage. You’ll find the wounds from the spikes on the dead horses.”

  “I found nothing,” the German returned, “but the evidence of my nose. The corpse reeks of whiskey. As, I must say, do you. If you will excuse me, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Fitzgerald.”

  “Ah. An Irish name, I collect?”

  Fitzgerald’s fist clenched. “And what is that to the purpose?”

  Von Stühlen’s lips pursed in amusement. “The Irish are a race known for wild imagination. No doubt you conjured up this . . . palisade. A phantasm of shock. Or deep drinking.”

  He reached in his purse and tossed Fitzgerald a shilling. “Buy yourself another, by all means. And then may I suggest you leave Hampstead?”

  “Von Stühlen! What are you doing here?”

  Georgiana’s voice. She was poised on the stairs, swaying as though she might faint, a bandage tied round her head.

  The German Count’s face flushed red, then drained white. “Miss Armistead,” he said with a sweeping bow, nothing of insult in it this time; “I might ask the same of you.”

  Chapter Five

  I formed the habit of keeping a diary from a very little child. Or rather, two such volumes. Like most solitary children who are forced to protect themselves, I lived one life for public view and another entirely inside my head. The first journal was delivered up to my dear governess, Lehzen, at the close of every day—a compilation of doings, pallid emotions, pious sentiments on the subject of Family and Duty. Lehzen corrected my expressions in English or German or French, guided my conduct with a thorough review of my motives, reproved me when necessary—and supported me during times of trial.

  The other journal I kept hidden under a loose floorboard beneath my high four-poster bed, in my apartment at Kensington Palace; the space was never dusted, so nobody liked to venture there. Precious were the stolen hours when I tucked my skirts under my legs and sat with a candle stub in that subterranean world, writing for all I was worth; such periods of unattended leisure were rare, so the secret volume is by no means as encyclopedic as the official one. Its contents are far more compelling, however. Mama insisted upon sleeping in an adjoining room with the connecting door propped wide; I was left to my own devices only when she had gone out, on the arm of the Demon Incarnate—or when I was in disgrace, and not even Lehzen was allowed to come near me. Raw necessity drove me to the secret journal’s pages; indignation and fury and a desire for revenge are what it principally records. It is a compilation of screed—and loneliness. Even now, as I write to myself in the solitude of this Windsor apartment, the necessity remains the same.

  I do not think I exaggerate when I say that I witnessed a surfeit of unpleasant episodes when I was young. Only a courage native to my breeding stood between me and a despairing death. When I recounted for dear Melbourne the sort of perfidy to which I was subjected, and all at the hands of those I ought to have been able to trust, he could barely credit the tale! But the truth of it is set down, day by day, in my private journal—the one dear Lehzen never saw. Indeed, she did not even suspect its existence.

  When I removed to Buckingham Palace some three weeks after my accession to the throne, the builders still in residence, the rooms not even done up, I saw my private volumes safely stowed where nobody should find them. I shall instruct the undertakers to place the entire collection in my coffin before it is nailed down. I would not have these words exposed to another human being—not even He Whom I Loved with All My Heart —for all the empires on the globe. It is essential to the peace of mind of a monarch that some part of her soul remain hidden.

  It was near dawn when I emerged from the painful doze to which Albert’s death consigned me, and drawing back the heavy green velvet hangings at my window, recollected his private cabinet. How feeble was the light of this Sunday morn, my first without my Beloved! The hour must be barely past six, and if my private attendants were as yet abroad, none had seen fit to disturb the sacred quiet of my bedchamber—which must, today and every day henceforth, be as devoid of animation as the tomb. No fire burned in the grate, no tea was waiting on a tray, and it was with the weakness of a very old woman that I attempted to draw back the seven layers of draperies that shrouded the outer world from my own. Albert’s cabinet, I thought; it was his term for the private study where he spent so many happy hours. And so many painful ones, too—the room to which he retreated when our relations were unsettled, so that he might write to me in the quiet so vital to his studious, inward-looking mind. There he kept his essential correspondence—of a kind never permitted to fall under the view of his secretaries. It was as though he had spoken to me as the draperies parted, and the feeble December morning graced my brow with benediction; it was as though a whisper of the Hereafter instructed me: Go, my little one, and burn them.

  I tarried only to don one of the sad black gowns I have worn ever since Mama’s passing last spring—how dreadful to find oneself a belated survivor of those one has cherished, utterly unloved by another human soul!—and moved in rustling agitation through the hallways. Below me and at every side, Windsor slept—as though that Perfect Being had never suffered, and struggled, and breathed his last in the Blue Room but a few hours before! I shuddered to consider of the coming day—the counsels that must be held, over the Departed’s body; the morbid attentions of Bunting’s, the undertakers; the officious pieties of the Master of Household. Bertie should be left to manage the business; it should be his penance, for having broken his father’s heart and soul so completely, that the Grave was the last comfort remaining in the world!

  A turning in the corridor brought me to Albert’s room—quite dark, and chill, and desolate. A very brief search revealed to my grateful eyes the letters I sought: bound up with ribbon and secured in a japanned box. He had left it, quite carelessly, among his books. Some of the letters were from that woman—and the rest from Baron Stockmar, a man whom once I had believed my friend. I did not pause to read them. I had a fair idea already of what they contained—the seeds of my Beloved’s destruction. The horrid fodder of his final madness.

  I flew back along the corridor and lit the match with my own hands. It was necessary to unfold the letters, in order to crumple them. One only I saved—from Stockmar, written in the first weeks after our return from Coburg last autumn. Of the woman’s, I kept nothing. Her handwriting, sloping across the cream-coloured laid; her extraordinary confidence, as she shattered my Darling’s world—I felt much better for wa
tching them go up in flames.

  By the time von Stühlen rode in from Hampstead, I was having my breakfast on a tray.

  He told me what he could of the ruin of poor Fyfe, our coachman, and of Fitzgerald’s escape. It will be best to avoid all scandal for the present—the Metropolitan Police are not to be informed—dear von Stühlen is to manage everything. I endeavoured to convey to the Count the depth of my gratitude, tears standing in my eyes. How fortunate I am that Albert’s beloved friend has not deserted me in Death! Indeed, I feel even his Divine Presence hovering near, just beyond the range of sight, gone the very instant I turn to look for him. I move, now, in an extraordinary kind of peace—his guidance consoles me.

  Not even the intelligence von Stühlen could supply—that Miss Georgiana Armistead was injured last night in Fitzgerald’s company—could overset that peace. Clearly, Providence has ordered events according to Its will—I am but an instrument.

  If only dear Albert had accepted as much, while he yet lived—

  Chapter Six

  The German count had spoken the truth, as far as it went, Fitzgerald thought: no evidence of the deadly palisade was to be found on Hampstead Heath.

  He had seen Georgiana safely into a carriage bound for Russell Square, then set out on foot to view the wreckage himself. It was easy enough to find—perhaps a half mile back along the rutted carriageway meandering toward the village from the north. In the darkness of the previous hours his breathless struggle to carry an insensible woman had felt endless; in daylight, he’d managed the short distance in a few minutes.

  A welter of churned mud announced the place. The carriage still lay where it had overturned, down the side of a ditch half-buried in the Heath; its shafts were shattered like straws. Fragments of wood and glass littered the bracken, and two of the four-horse team lay dead on the slope, legs splayed and eyes staring. The remaining pair, presumably, had broken free of the traces and run off into the night fog, suffering God knew what fate.