A Flaw in the Blood

by Стефани Баррон

  Torning’s party of men—three labourers from the village—were busy collecting rubbish; one of them was securing canvas tackle to the chest of a dead horse, preparatory to dragging it away.

  “Poor beast,” Fitzgerald said.

  The man glanced up. Sandy hair, a face indeterminately middle-aged, the nose blunt and veined. A drinker in Torning’s pub; a man of solid substance, with the neatly-mended clothes of a family prop.

  “Terrible accident, it was. Coachman was drunk as a lord—broke his neck. And the Queen’s coachman, at that. As if they hadn’t enough of death, last night, at Windsor.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Ran up against summat in the fog.” The fellow looked back to his straps, securing a buckle with thickened fingers.

  “That’s quite a wound in the horse’s chest,” Fitzgerald observed, crouching down to stare at a deep and ugly puncture. A vision of the spiked stockade rose in his mind. “Bled to death. I suppose this was one of the leaders?”

  “Reckon. Took the impact full-on, and spared the others. They’ll be trotting down Islington High Street by this time, I wouldn’t wonder.”

  “But what did it?”

  “Sorry, sir?”

  “What killed these horses? Overturned this carriage?”

  The man glanced around vaguely. “There’s all kinds of rubbish out here in the dark, sir. It don’t pay to cross the Heath on a night without a moon.”

  Fitzgerald pursed his lips. “I shouldn’t relish this job of work. How long have you been at it?”

  “A good while now. Helped old Torning bring the corpus back to Well Walk, then the foreign gentleman paid us all to tidy up the mess, like.”

  “The foreign gentleman?”

  “German toff. From Windsor, Torning said he was.”

  Fitzgerald abandoned the slope and walked back up to the carriageway, studying the trampled earth. A light rain had begun to fall, but it was still possible to discern the marks of a heavy object, dragged across the packed stone surface. While he’d beseeched the shade of John Snow at Georgiana’s bedside, the engine of their destruction had been carted away. That was natural; murder had been done, and murder must at all costs be concealed. But the swiftness of its execution suggested an efficiency—and the command of resources—far beyond a simple highwayman. The Queen’s carriage had not been attacked by a random thief. It had been the target of a conspiracy. Because Fitzgerald rode in it? —Or for reasons having nothing to do with him?

  Like the barrister he was, he considered the evidence. They’d followed no predictable path last night, and they’d traveled at anything but a routine hour. Whoever overturned the carriage and tidied up the mess had done so with foreknowledge and a clear purpose. It was Fitzgerald who groped in the dark. He felt suddenly chilled. The unknown hand had taken such care—surely it would strike again...

  “Are you a stranger here yourself, sir?”

  He looked at the labourer. “From London. I was in that carriage last night.”

  The man’s eyes widened.

  Bedford Square sat in the heart of Bloomsbury: staid, respectable, and so anxious lest it be thought less fashionable than Mayfair, that shops and taverns were discouraged and the square itself pompously gated. Fitzgerald kept a set of lodgings on the north side, in one of the sedate row houses dating to the last century; his man, Gibbon, opened the door before he’d found his latchkey.

  “Good morning, Mr. Fitz. Bath’s waiting and breakfast’s in twenty minutes.”

  “The Lord knows I could do with both.” The rain had increased in force, and the world outside was wet and raw. He stepped into the narrow passage, pulling his hat from his head and leaving a trail of water all over the floorboards.

  Gibbon surveyed him with dismay: mud-spattered coat and boots, collar wilted and cravat untied. “Aren’t you a sorry sight. Long night?”

  Fitzgerald closed the door behind him. “Very. Have the morning papers arrived?”

  “Already ironed and set out by the bath. Sad news about the Consort, in’t it? And him only forty-two. I don’t suppose the Queen had anything particular to say? Strange, you being called to Windsor at just the moment the Consort should be passing—you wouldn’t have happened to see anything, Mr. Fitz?”

  Gibbon had little in common with the usual breed of superior servant. He had never learned the art of concealing all independent thought behind a correct façade. He was twenty-eight, with a curly mop of hair and a snub nose; he’d been in Fitzgerald’s service nearly seven years. They had met before a magistrate—Gibbon, a footman at the time, having been dismissed by his previous employer with an accusation of thievery. A valuable necklace had disappeared from the noble household. In the usual way, a servant would never merit representation; he would have little recourse but to protest his innocence, suffer the unequal course of justice, and be transported to Botany Bay. But Gibbon’s mother knew Septimus Taylor, Fitzgerald’s partner—and Sep thought the lad was owed a defence.

  Fitzgerald was too little accustomed to the ways of gentlemen himself to mind the footman’s outbursts, his unbridled curiosity, his inadequate respect for station. He had taken an immediate liking to Gibbon. The footman’s despair at the ruin of his prospects had been little allayed by the discovery of the true culprit, the noble household’s fifteen-year-old son. Exposed as a thief, the young gentleman hanged himself in the gardener’s shed. When Fitzgerald told him the news, Gibbon had wept.

  He’d proved a loyal man: coping with Fitzgerald’s temper, his sudden plunges into despair, his bouts of stunned drunkenness. Gibbon had fought off armies of duns when Fitzgerald was short of cash, and silently tightened his belt when Fitzgerald forgot to pay him. He never gossiped. He kept the lodgings tidy and food on the table.

  “Gibbon, I have no anecdotes to share, no glimpses of Royalty to offer you. Have any messages come while I was gone?”

  “No, sir. Excepting Mr. Taylor—his compliments, and would you step round to chambers when it’s convenient; but I reckon he didn’t intend for you to do it of a Sunday, and not when the whole world’s in mourning for Prince Albert.”

  Fitzgerald stopped at the foot of the stairs. “Did Septimus call? Or send round a messenger?”

  “Came himself, after you’d gone to King’s Cross last night. I told him you’d been summoned to Windsor. You’d have thought I’d said you’d gone to your hanging. But then, we all know Mr. Sep’s politics.”

  Taylor liked to call himself a Radical, and publicly urged the end of the monarchy; he’d joined the Reform Club on the strength of his views, though Fitzgerald suspected the barrister’s allegiance was really to Alexis Soyer, the Reform’s celebrated chef.

  He glanced at his watch as he mounted the stairs: half-past eight. “Thank you, Gibbon. I’ll be wanting a cab in an hour.”

  “But you haven’t slept! Nor eaten!”

  “Send up some coffee. I’ll breakfast with Mr. Taylor.”

  He closed the bathroom door on his man’s protests, and slid into the water. With all the conversation, it was already cooling.

  He did not find Taylor at the Reform Club, and a brief cab ride to his partner’s home in Great Ormond Street failed equally to produce him. Perplexed, Fitzgerald debated whether Taylor was likely to be at church, in respect of the universal mourning that had swept the City—or to have visited chambers on this dark and stormy Sunday, when any sane man would be established before the fire. He decided against church, and directed his cabbie to Temple Bar.

  The Outer Temple was deserted; his footsteps resounded in the desertion of Middle Temple Lane; and when he reached the entry of his chambers at the Inner Temple, Fitzgerald felt a sharp upsurge of unease: No light shone through the mullioned windows, but the outer door was unlatched, and swinging gently in the gusty rain.

  He entered as quietly as he knew, even his breathing suspended, and paused on the inner threshold.

  The clerks’ room, empty of life, was a chaos of paper, strewn over floor
s and desks; smashed bottles of ink trailed black smears on the floorboards; an entire ledger had been tossed in the cold grate. “Sweet Mary and Jesus,” he muttered, and crossed to Taylor’s room.

  He was lying on his stomach, one arm trapped beneath him, the other flung over his head; he had been struck a hideous blow from behind, probably as he rose from his chair. The ooze of blood through Sep’s sparse grey hair testified to a cracked skull. Fitzgerald’s stomach lurched with sick despair as he probed the wound; the bone beneath his fingers was fragile as eggshells, the scalp spongy with blood. He bit off a curse and rolled Sep carefully on his side. His friend gave no sign of consciousness; not even pain could recall him to the world.

  Fear, sharp and jagged, knifed through Fitzgerald. Had Sep surprised the searchers when he entered the chambers? Or had they surprised him? Probably the latter, given that he’d never gotten farther than a yard from his own desk.

  “Sep,” Fitzgerald called urgently, searching for a pulse in the neck, “for the love of Christ, who did this to you?”

  His friend did not reply. But he was still warm, and there was a flutter of life in his veins. For the second time in the space of eight hours, Fitzgerald ran in search of aid.

  Chapter Seven

  My darling did not enjoy an easy night’s sleep for weeks before he died. He was haunted, I believe, by a conviction of unworthiness—which must always be Duty’s sneak thief, robbing us of the pleasure we ought to derive from sacrifice. It was Albert’s habit to answer every call, no matter how humble: he directed Boards, governed Universities, patronised Science; effected economies in the household accounts, set limits on the use of candles, decided the servants’ quarrels; drafted architectural plans for each of our homes, and oversaw the design of gardens; averted war, or made it, throughout Europe, and brokered entire Cabinets here at home; mended dolls and shoveled the moats of toy fortifications— in short, he made himself indispensable to me, to his children, to the English nation—only to discover, in middle-age, that there was no one in the world who could replace him.

  If he lay sleepless of nights, it was in agony at his inevitable failure: He would die, and the son that must follow him was not one-hundredth of Albert’s quality.

  You will think me harsh, and utterly lacking in the sentiment proper to a mother—but I am a monarch first, and mother as well to all the Kingdom.

  “Dashed bad luck,” Bertie stammered, as he stood before me in that dreadful room, with his father’s body cooling beside me. “Never thought the Governor would take off—the most trifling cold! All the betting in the clubs was odds-on for the Old Man’s rallying! Assure you!”

  Even in the face of death, my son and heir was incapable of frankness. No word of the tortures his father suffered at the knowledge of Bertie’s affaire with that sordid Irish trollop. No remorse at the disgusting headlines that have surfaced throughout the Continent, or the damage to his reputation. Bertie is incorrigible. He cultivates excuses. Although the entire world knows that Albert contracted typhoid through walking in the rain with his son at Cambridge a month ago—anxiety having driven him to confront Bertie about the debauchery with Miss Clifden, the dire consequences that must result, the possibility of a disease or bastardy, etcetra, etcetra, all of which was to have been kept from me, and all of which Albert shared—Bertie insists his father died of a trifling cold.

  He was mortified, I suppose, at his father giving him a trimming before his schoolfellows, and suggested a walk through country lanes in an attempt to snatch at privacy. It is a scene so entirely typical of Bertie: a November storm coming on, his utter confusion in the landscape, Albert steadily more morose, the silence and misery growing between them. Bertie never learned his way around Cambridge, it would seem, never having spent much time at his studies—and the betrayal of his ignorance could only sink him further in Albert’s estimation. It was ever thus. When Albert sent him to Curragh to be trained as an officer, Bertie could hardly meet his superiors’ requirements, and failed miserably to attain his expected rank. His tutors, from the time he was a little child, despaired of his mastering anything. In one field alone does Bertie excel: He dresses to admiration. His style and appearance are the envy of his set. In such frivolous distinction he takes inordinate pride, and will suffer any expense to meet it. I need not observe how little Albert found to approve in his son’s dissipation—or the fondness for Society, and gambling, and low entertainments, that inevitably followed on its heels. Even as my Darling’s death-hour approached last night, Bertie was summoned from a party at Natty Rothschild’s. He arrived at Windsor in evening dress, the odour of cigar smoke clinging to his hair.

  When Albert’s last breath was drawn, and I lay upon the sopha in the Red Room in the most bitter agony, incapable of tears or speech, Bertie simply stood like a stone with the other children, mute and unmoved as they sobbed. Perhaps at that moment he felt how much he was to blame. I cannot say. His failure to betray the slightest suffering has utterly closed my heart to him. I do not think I can bear to be in the same room with my son.

  The betting in the clubs was odds-on for the Old Man’s rallying. Dear God—and the Old Man was all of forty-two...

  Chapter Eight

  “Assaulted? in your chambers?”

  He had run Georgiana to earth at last, after a fruitless interval at her home in Russell Square, spent pacing before the drawing room fire and fingering the calling cards he found there. None of the servants could tell him where she had gone; in rising anxiety, he resorted to the cab stand.

  The fifth man in the queue admitted he’d driven Miss Armistead to Covent Garden that morning. Twenty minutes later, he deposited Fitzgerald before a tenement dwelling in the rookery known as St. Giles.

  It being winter and early in the day, the females of the district were within doors; but Fitzgerald had known them to stand in front of their dwellings, naked to the waist, with a bottle of gin in their hands. Most of them were Irish. What could Georgie possibly find to occupy her in this wretched place?

  He entered a narrow hall stinking of urine and cooked pork. There was no light, and he cursed as a cat twined itself sinuously between his legs. A blasted staircase led upwards, past a group of children disposed on the treads, playing at skittles with bleached bones. They told him where to find the lady.

  A cramped set of rooms, notable for a smoking coal fire and four young faces that turned to him expectantly as he hesitated in the doorway. A boy he judged to be no more than ten was toasting a hunk of bread on a poker thrust near the coals; the others huddled at his knees. The straw pallets on which they had slept lay tousled by the fire.

  “Is Sep conscious?” Georgie asked now as she closed the door behind him. “Patrick? Have you summoned a doctor?”

  “He was insensible when I left—a severe concussion of the brain, so the sawbones says. I asked that I be sent word, when he wakes. But I’ve not been home since—”

  She took his hand, squeezed it briefly. “You believe the attack not unconnected to our adventure of last night?”

  “How could it be else?” he burst out, pacing across the dirty floor. “—Though as God is my witness, Georgie, I’ve no idea why. It must be papers they wanted—and Sep got in their way. Our chambers were turned topsy-turvy. I’d no time to learn which documents were taken—though I’d wager a guess—”

  “You need a drink,” Georgie interrupted quietly. “You’re all to pieces.”

  He broke off, his eyes following the progress of a filthy child, possibly a girl, who stole up to Georgie’s skirts and hid her face in the French twilled silk. Georgie swayed slightly, and touched the child’s head; he noticed then how dreadful her pallor was, how the exhaustion of last night, and her own accident, had never left her. She still wore a bandage about her head, disguising the ugly bruise at her temple.

  “Did you sleep at all?” he demanded.

  “Perhaps an hour.”

  “You shouldn’t be here. You should be tucked up on a sopha with a no
vel and a pot of tea.”

  “I have a patient within.”

  “A patient!”

  “The poor have as much need of doctors as the rich, Patrick,” she flashed.

  “I’m the last man to argue that, Georgie—but need the doctor be you?”

  “I’m fortunate to win the custom! The rich prefer their doctors male—these women have no choice but to accept my services. In return they give me experience—and so we each barter what we can.”

  He glanced around the slovenly room. “Snow would hate to see you here, lass.”

  “It was Uncle John who introduced me to the neighbourhood,” she retorted. “Do you think his cholera researches were conducted in Mayfair? He was often in far worse places than this—Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Although these women die of syphilis far more than cholera, of course.”

  Syphilis. Her casual use of the word rocked him. To another man—a true English gentleman, reared with all the prejudices and ignorance of his willful class—Georgiana’s worldliness must ruin her. Fitzgerald suspected she betrayed it less to the circles she usually frequented; but to him she always spoke her mind. They argued constantly and Fitzgerald invariably lost.

  “Why have you come, Patrick?”

  “I want you to leave London. Immediately.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “You’re in danger.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Georgie, my chambers have been ransacked, my partner nearly killed, and my carriage overturned—for what do you wait, a pistol to the head?”

  “I have nothing to do with your affairs!” she cried. “Even if we accept that these events are linked—and that they are animated by some power at Windsor—no one there could possibly know that I rode in your carriage last night!”

  “Your friend von Stühlen does.”