A Flaw in the Blood

by Стефани Баррон

  “You did your best, Georgie; the girl didn't die at your hands.”

  “No. She died for lack of them.”

  He could feel her seething beside him as the horse put its head down into the sleet, and turned toward Seven Dials.

  “Tell me about the Prince's boy,” he commanded. “Must be full young; I've never seen so much as a picture of the lad.”

  “Yes . . .” She marshaled her thoughts, recalled from some distant place. “He is perhaps eight years old—the youngest but one of the Royal children.”

  “Very well. And the Consort consulted you because . . . ?”

  “Uncle John was present at Leopold's birth.”

  Memory dawned. “The famous anaesthesia! John did set the cat among the pigeons when he exposed the Queen to mortal risk, and all for the sake of a trifling bout of labour.”

  “Yes. There were those who maintained that an eighth lying-in could never be so troublesome as to warrant the attendance of even a doctor, let alone such extraordinary measures as Prince Albert employed. Anaesthesia! When the monarch might die under its influence! The Consort—and Uncle John—should have been accused of murder, if Victoria had slipped away. But she did not: and was indeed so bewitched by the effects of chloroform that she demanded its use in her final accouchement—with Princess Beatrice.”

  “And the Consort thought of you—?”

  “Perhaps a year since. More—eighteen months, I should guess. He wished to know whether Prince Leopold would ever outgrow his present indisposition.”

  “What's wrong with the child, then?”

  “A frailty in the tissues of the skin, which causes them to fray and bleed, almost without ceasing. The poor little fellow is as delicate as a piece of china.”

  Fitzgerald frowned. “That's right ghastly. Why have I never heard word of it?”

  “The boy's condition is not generally known.”

  “Then how were you expected to offer an opinion? You've not seen the lad?”

  “Indeed I have. Prince Albert sent Leopold to Russell Square in the care of his governor, the day after I had his letter.” Georgiana glanced sideways at Fitzgerald in the darkness; her words were visible as chilled smoke. “Highly singular behaviour on the Consort's part, I admit. The boy has been in the care of a stable's worth of doctors from the time he was born. I must impute the Prince's decision to the degree of anxiety concerning the boy's health.”

  “And what did you conclude?”

  “Nothing very extraordinary. When I examined the child, his knees were swollen and discoloured from the blood that seeps into his joints. He cannot often walk without the aid of a cane—and the usual romping of an eight-year-old is entirely forbidden to him. The slightest bruise or fall may send him to bed for weeks. I gather that the pain at times is excruciating.”

  Fitzgerald pulled his hat from his head and rubbed ineffectually at his temples. “But why did the Prince consult you, Georgie? You've no authority on such stuff, surely?”

  She hesitated, unwilling to admit incompetence. “Because of Uncle John. The Prince was a great believer in science—and you know that Uncle regarded statistics, the data associated with all manner of disease, as the key to its explication. The Prince assumed that I am blessed with a similar genius.”

  The hansom clattered over the paving stones of Tottenham Court Road, heading south. “And what did you tell His Royal Highness?”

  “—That statistically speaking, such illnesses are quite often found among multiple members of families. There may be a record of the progression of disease through generations. I suggested the Consort might wish to consult the Royal genealogies, in order to apprehend the progression of Leopold's illness. I then informed him that Uncle John had taken certain notes—conducted private researches—after having witnessed the child's birth in '53 . . .”

  That was Snow's habit. The man scribbled lectures to himself during the course of every day—essays on future endeavours, a lifetime of possible projects carefully collated in a series of notebooks. Until he ran out of time to live.

  “Prince Albert asked to see Uncle's notes,” Georgie said.

  “He's a braver man than I. John's fist was impossible to read.”

  “I sent them by messenger to Buckingham Palace. They were not returned. A letter, excessive in its politeness, informed me that the Prince had thought it advisable the notes be burnt.”

  “The rogue! Infernal cheek!”

  “He then departed with the Queen for an extended visit to the Princess Royal in Berlin, and his brother in Coburg. You will recall the period—he had an unfortunate accident there, much publicised in the newspapers.”

  September 1860, Fitzgerald remembered: an overturned carriage—the Royal Family abroad. “But, Georgie, love—to burn John's private notations? What right—”

  “I have a copy of them, somewhere in the ruin of my library.”

  Fitzgerald gave a bark of laughter. “So you expected the Prince to destroy the originals?”

  “No. Over the past several years I undertook to set in order all of Uncle's writings, with a view to eventual publication—I thought it only proper, for the future of science. But there is a great number of notebooks still to be got through, I'm afraid. I have not had sufficient time—”

  “Never mind that, now. What did himself observe at Prince Leo's birth?”

  She clasped her gloved hands together. “He wrote about the chloroform first. The Queen's spirits and health are profoundly deranged by pregnancy, Patrick, and the Consort wished to spare her as much distress as possible—that was why Uncle was called in. April 7, 1853. A year before the Great Cholera Epidemic; five years before Uncle's death.”

  “And the labour went well. But the child?”

  “There were any number of doctors and personages in attendance—but Uncle John was the first to notice Leopold's peculiarity. When the umbilical cord was severed, it would not stop bleeding.”

  “And that is unusual?”

  “It is potentially fatal, Patrick! Perhaps two minutes should have sufficed for the flow to cease. The cord withers over a matter of days, and the stump falls off. But from Uncle's notes, it appears that Leopold oozed blood from the abdomen—that the wound refused to heal—for nearly a month. His christening was postponed. The registration of his birth was delayed. The Queen—who is always wretchedly despondent after her confinements—kept to her rooms. And the Royal Physician—Sir James Clark, who has served Victoria from the first day of her ascension—privately declared Uncle John's chloroform to be the cause.”

  “Men have committed suicide for less,” he observed.

  She laughed; they both knew John Snow would never have killed himself over a rival's rumour. “Uncle told Prince Albert that some flaw in the child's blood vessels, perhaps, produced the painful result. He embarked on research—but so little has been published in this country regarding the malady. He learned of German families where it recurs from generation to generation—and solely, it seems, among males. Indeed, Leopold's disorder is sometimes called ‘the German disease.’ ”

  “Then the Consort's to blame for his son's illness? Poor wretch.”

  “There's no lack of German blood in the Royal line,” Georgie said impatiently. “Indeed, there is little else. But Uncle John could not discover a disorder similar to Leopold's in any of his Hanoverian ancestors—nor among the Saxe-Coburgs, either.”

  “But if Leopold has been ill from birth, why should his father demand John's notes then—and destroy them?”

  “He must have regarded them as dangerous,” Georgie said simply. “To the child, or . . . others.”

  She did not need to say Victoria. Fitzgerald was silent a moment. “What did you tell your Prince, once you knew he'd burned John's papers?”

  “That if Leopold could not be cured, the boy would certainly die. I said it was imperative that the Consort make inquiries in Germany, if need be—that he canvass his relations in Saxe-Coburg—that he move heaven and earth to learn
more of his son's illness. That was a year ago. This September, the Prince hired a young German doctor by the name of Gunther—and sent him to the south of France, with Leopold, for the boy's health.”

  “You think he'd heard of a cure there?”

  “Perhaps. Patrick—” She reached for his hand and clasped it. “Having told you everything, I still understand nothing.”

  “Not to worry, me darlin',” he said, with a conviction he did not feel. “We'll work it out together.”

  They had arrived in St. Giles.

  Button Nance's rooms were cold, and the little girls were curled together near the dead hearth. They stared at Georgiana when she opened the unlatched door, but did not speak a word, their great eyes shining faintly in the gaslight from the street below. The acrid odour of wet charcoal lingered in the closed air of the room, a gutter perfume. There was no sign, Fitzgerald noticed, of Davey.

  “It is all right,” Georgie said carefully as she entered. “I've come to see Lizzie.”

  “A deal of folk've come to see Lizzie,” one of the girls said in a paper-thin whisper. “But Lizzie's dead.”

  “Where is your mother?”

  “Gone t'pub.”

  Georgie hesitated, then moved softly toward the inner room.

  The cold in the bedroom was bitter as a tomb. One of the windows had been left open, and a sulfurous fog wafted about the head of the dead girl like an emissary from Hell, waiting to snatch what remained of her. The delicate hands were raised on either side of her head, fists clenched as though in agony; but Lizzie's face, Fitzgerald saw, was wiped clean of both pain and hope, and the eyes stared blankly at the grimy ceiling.

  A pillow lay beside the bed, on the bare floor. Without thinking, he picked it up.

  Georgiana examined the body, and finally, with a sigh, closed Lizzie's eyes.

  “I don't understand it,” she said. “There is no visible sign on the face or limbs of what killed her. But look at her hands! It is as though she died in a convulsive fit.”

  “Perhaps she did. You said she suffered from a poisoning of the blood.”

  “Yes—but you can see from the clarity of the tissues around the nose and mouth that the fever had subsided at the last. She did not die in delirium. Indeed, I should have said she was improving—but for the fact that her heart has stopped.”

  “I'm that sorry, Georgie.” Fitzgerald's fingers kneaded the goose-down pillow uselessly. “Do you trust this Button Nance with a certificate? Or should we knock up the coroner and trust it to him?”

  “Where did you find that?” she demanded suddenly.

  “Find what?”

  “That pillow!”

  Fitzgerald glanced down. “Sure, and it was on the floor.”

  “Not this morning.”

  There was a quality to Georgie's voice that raised the hair on his neck. “What would you mean?”

  “I mean,” she replied deliberately, “that nothing clean or fine has ever been found in these rooms.”

  “So it was brought here by someone else? And what of that? The child said they've had a deal of folk in to see Lizzie.”

  “After she died—or while she was yet living?” With an expression of distaste, Georgiana reached for the pillow. “Patrick—look at her hands.”

  As he watched, Georgie lowered the thing gently over Lizzie's head. It rested perfectly on her balled fists.

  “She fought him as he smothered her,” she whispered, “but he was too strong—”

  “Do you accept, finally, that you're as much at risk as I am?” he asked as they climbed back into the waiting cab.

  “What of that?” she demanded contemptuously. “It is Lizzie, poor child, who has paid for my sins—whatever they might be. Can you explain, Patrick, why it is invariably the innocent poor who suffer in this world of ours?”

  “Because they've nobody to protect them. Will you leave London with me now, Georgie?”

  “I must.”

  Fitzgerald rapped on the hansom's roof. “Paul's Wharf. And quickly.”

  “A boat, Patrick? At this hour of the night?”

  “We shan't go far. Just down the Thames, past Sheerness.”

  “Sheerness!”

  He glanced at her, his expression curiously closed. “I'm taking you to the Isle of Sheppey. It's a lonely place, but safe with it. You did promise to trust me.”

  “But we shan't reach it until midnight! Who will receive us at such an hour?”

  “My wife,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty

  After Bertie left her, Alice spent an hour in the nursery reading to her little sisters. Louise, who was thirteen and considered artistic, looked drawn and frightened; she held her sketch book in her lap, staring at the blank pages. Helena, two years older, could not stop crying. But Beatrice was unquenchable—at four, the utter absolutes of loss escaped her. She was unlikely to miss Papa for long; there had been periods in her brief life when their paths crossed only once in three months. The Consort's duties had been that consuming.

  Now Alice was undressing before bed. She had spent a dreary evening perusing one of Mama's volumes of sacred sermons, her usual duty on Sunday, and sought her bedchamber early, from a deep desire to end the hideous day. Violet, her maid, was respectfully silent as she removed the pins from Alice's hair—a girl who chattered thoughtlessly at most times, on every subject appropriate or scandalous. The maid's eyes were red from sympathetic weeping.

  Alice studied her own reflection in the mirror. Black clothes brought out the sallowness of her skin. They deepened the charcoal shadows beneath her eyes; deep lines ran from her nose to the corners of her mouth, as though she had endured starvation or terror. Bertie had probably ascribed her dreadful looks to the sleepless nights she'd devoted to Papa's final illness. She hoped Mama would do the same. She did not want anyone to suspect she harboured a guilty secret. She was unequal to the forms of torture that might be applied to win the truth.

  “Violet,” she said slowly. “May I trust you with a particular service? One that is quite private—that you must not breathe to anyone?”

  The maid's warm brown eyes widened avidly. “Of course, Your Highness! I shan't breathe a word—cross my heart and hope to be struck dead if I'm a liar!”

  “See that this letter is collected with tomorrow's post.” She slipped a common white envelope into Violet's hand. “I do not wish it to be known as mine. If anyone chances to observe you—destroy it.”

  They made landfall south of Eastchurch, on the Isle of Sheppey, at twenty minutes past eleven o'clock by Gibbon's watch.

  It was a tedious journey down the Thames, in a trim little steamer Fitzgerald kept moored at Paul's Wharf: past the looming ships of Her Majesty's fleet anchored off Greenwich, past Gravesend and through the mouth of the Thames Estuary, Fitzgerald shoveling coal into the raging gullet of the boiler while Gibbon steered and Georgiana shivered and dozed.

  “Why a steamer, Patrick?” she murmured.

  “Because the trains'll be watched.”

  “You regard von Stühlen as clairvoyant, then?”

  “I regard him, love, as deadly.”

  From the estuary they might have turned north, toward Sheerness, the great naval port that sat at the northwestern end of Sheppey; but Gibbon knew his master's mind, and pulled the Dauntless's wheel hard to starboard, sending the little boat into the Swale, a brackish channel that ran between the island and the northern coast of Kent. A slight chop, and sand banks numerous—Sheppey being famous for its wrecks—so that Fitzgerald sent Gibbon aft and took the wheel himself. He had known the Swale well in happier times.

  Five miles along the winding coast they turned to port. They entered a creek that cut through the marshes, moving so slowly now they might as well have cut the engine entirely. Georgiana woke and took up a position on the starboard side, alert to snagging weeds and the narrowing of the creek bed.

  “Black as Satan's bottom,” Gibbon snorted, “and miasmic as only the sheep marshes can be. Yo
u'll have to walk a bit, miss, and the ground's boggy underfoot. But there will be a fire at the end of it, and hot soup if we're blessed.”

  “I must look dreadful,” she said wearily. “To think that I should be presented to Mrs. Fitzgerald in such a case! And how will I explain—?”

  Gibbon glanced at her, then at the governor's back. Unlikely that Fitzgerald could hear them over the throb of the engine, and his attention was claimed entirely by the black water in front of him. “It's not likely she'll be awake at this hour,” he answered, “so don't give it no mind. The companion as lives with her is French—with no cause to look askance at any lady's dress or manner, if you take my meaning.”

  Hard to judge from Georgiana's expression whether she was comforted or not. Gibbon was uneasy. He disliked the Isle of Sheppey and everyone on it. He would have shielded Miss if he could—urged Mr. Fitz to seek an inn at Queenborough, or turn toward Margate and avoid the island altogether. But worse trials than Shurland Hall lay before them in the coming days, and Lady Maude would hardly betray them. Shurland was the one place on the Channel coast they could be certain of refuge.

  Except for young Theo, Gibbon thought grimly. He wondered if Mr. Fitz had considered that sprig of fashion when he made his plans. Then the boat squelched on the marshy bottom and the chug of the engine died. Fitzgerald drew a shuddering sigh—whether from relief or dread of the coming encounter, Gibbon could not say. In either case, it was time to abandon the Dauntless.

  More ruts had settled in the gravel drive in the past six months, Fitzgerald noted, and the dilapidation of the Hall—which could be charming in high summer, raffish and open-handed—was rudely apparent in mid-December. Broken, sightless windows in the unused wing where Anne Boleyn once slept; and the encircling walls in such poor repair that Gibbon stumbled over a chunk of granite. It was Maude who leased Shurland, not Fitzgerald; but he determined now that he must find a way to shift funds to her agent—undertake to order repairs, though she would fight his meddling if she learned of it.