A Flaw in the Blood

by Стефани Баррон

  “Not long. Put that beast in his stable and walk with me. Please.”

  Theo eyed him, unsoftened. “Clive's too fresh—he needs a good run. I doubt anybody's loosed him since Michaelmas. I'll come to you later, in the library—after breakfast.”

  “Sure, and I'll be there,” Fitzgerald said. But Theo was already gone.

  When he did reappear, at half-past ten, he was in a towering rage: the library door thrust violently open, and slammed to with equal force.

  “I've just made that woman's acquaintance. What do you mean by bringing her here?” he demanded, as Fitzgerald rose from his chair by the fire.

  “If you mean Miss Armistead—”

  “I don't care what her name is! The insult, to Mama! Parading your mistress at Shurland with brazen disregard for everyone in the household—” Theo wheeled. “Do you know what they're saying in the servants' hall? Did you never stop to think how we might feel ? No! You simply suited yourself, with your usual appalling—”

  “Theo.” Fitzgerald set down the roll of charts he'd been scanning. “Lower your voice, for the love of Mary. Miss Armistead is not my mistress. She's in the way of being my ward.”

  “Your—”

  “Ward. Placed in my care on her guardian's deathbed.”

  Theo barked with laughter. “I don't believe it. She's thirty if she's a day!”

  Fitzgerald paced toward him in a sudden gust of anger. “She is six-and-twenty, look you, and I'll not have her insulted.”

  “Tell me another story, Father,” the boy said mockingly. “You always contrive so delightfully. But I suppose I should not be shocked. You've kept your light-skirts for years, haven't you? How else could Mama have come to the state she's in?”

  Fitzgerald stopped dead. “What in the bloody hell do you mean by that?”

  “I mean you gave her the pox that's ruined her life.”

  “Did she say that?”

  “She doesn't have to,” the boy retorted. “Do you think we're all stupid? All blind? How you have the gall to come here— Uncle Charles would take down his gun, did he know of it, and run you off the place—”

  Fitzgerald shook him savagely; Theo's teeth rattled together. “How old are you, boy?”

  “Se-seventeen,” he stuttered, pale but defiant. “Eighteen next summer. Old enough to—”

  “—Blister your parent with bitterness?” Fitzgerald released him. “Then you're old enough to know the truth. You've been sheltered too long.”

  “I. Sheltered.” Theo's lip curled in contempt. “Have you no idea how boys rag each other at school, Father? Of course not. You've never been near Harrow. You can't imagine the vicious things people say. I'm the half-bred whelp of an Irish bastard—didn't you know? Never mind that my grandfather's an earl; I'm the mongrel with a wild Celt's blood in his veins.”

  “Very well,” Fitzgerald said furiously. “If you want brutal, I'll give it to you. Your mother got syphilis from a stranger when you were a bit child, Theo. That's why you were packed off to Harrow at seven. Because she was bound for Paris, and her first trial of mercury. We thought it might kill her.”

  “Your fault!”

  “No. I've been spared her curse, God help me. I do not carry the disease, Theo. I shan't tell you how your mother contracted it; that's her story, the only one she has left. Perhaps she'll spin it for you one day.”

  “She's long past making sense,” the boy spat out. “Which means you can tear her reputation to shreds, without the slightest possibility of argument. You vile, unfeeling blackguard— If I weren't your son—”

  “What?” Fitzgerald reached for a decanter of brandy, poured himself a glass. His mouth was filled with bile and his stomach churning; for all he loved Theo body and soul, their meetings always ended like this. Dust and ashes and the two of them screaming at each other. “You'd put a bullet through my heart, like the noble lad you are? Watch the cur die and avenge your Mama? Don't be a fool.”

  He tossed down the brandy in one gulp, wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  “Talk to a doctor, Theo. Read a medical book, while you're idling away at university. You're safe from her illness—she was free of it when she had you—but you need to know what's coming. Maude looks to be in the last throes of the disease and I don't think her frame could stand another treatment. You'll have to cope with her dying in a very few weeks more.”

  There was an ugly silence. The rage had fled Theo's face, to be replaced by uncertainty; he looked suddenly too young for Oxford. As indeed he was. Theo had always rushed his fences.

  “Madame duFief—” he said.

  “Is paid to look after your Ma, but she's not a nurse. Get Thornton from London when Maude starts to rave. He's helped her in the past.”

  “You won't be here.” Theo's hands balled into fists. “You'd desert her at the end?”

  Fitzgerald sank down wearily by the fire, and put his head in his hands. Theo. She had named him for faith, after all, at a time when they both still had some; and the boy would be loyal to his mother to the death. He had to believe in something. It had never been his father.

  “When do we get the newspapers?” Fitzgerald asked.

  “Coultrip fetches them from Sheerness—they're sent across on the ferry. Why?”

  “You'll know already of the Consort's death?”

  “Of course.”

  “I'm forced to leave England on a matter of business,” he said slowly. “No telling when I'll get back.”

  “And your ward goes with you?” Theo taunted, his contempt on his face. “Where are you bound, Father—for Paris?”

  “That's why I spoke of your Ma as I did,” Fitzgerald persisted. “You'll need help.”

  “I shan't attempt to reach you, if I have news,” Theo said curtly. “I'm done with you. For good.”

  Fitzgerald started out of his chair. “Hate me or no, Theo, I'm your father forever, lad. When Maude goes—”

  “I'll have no reason to see you, ever again. Uncle Charles is naming me heir to the earldom—all he's turned out is girls—and as far as I'm concerned, you've nothing to do with my world.”

  Fitzgerald grinned derisively. “You'd need an Act of Parliament to follow Monteith, lad. You're descended on the distaff side.”

  “Uncle will get one,” Theo retorted, his lips white with anger. “He's already had me change my name.”

  “You're to be a Hastings?”

  “Fitzgerald-Hastings,” Theo corrected self-consciously. “Mama insisted.”

  “I shall have to thank her for that,” Fitzgerald said bitterly.

  “Don't,” Theo tossed over his shoulder. “Don't go near Mama. Just leave Shurland. We've never wanted you here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  . . . hope this letter finds you improved in health and spirits, relative to when I saw you last. You will know by now, my dear Septimus, that our chambers were exceedingly disordered by the rogues who saw fit to strike you down. I suspect that I was the unwitting cause of both the disorder and the attack upon your person, viz., that it was me they meant to strike—the violence due to my refusal, while at Windsor on the night of the fourteenth last, to sign a forced confession of willful deceit in the ancient and near-forgot matter of Edward Oxford. . . .

  Fitzgerald frowned, and set down his pen.

  He had no idea whether Septimus Taylor had regained consciousness—or ever would. His words, like prayer, traveled straight into a void.

  . . . Miss Armistead being encompassed in my troubles, I thought it best to quit London before further violence was done . . .

  There it was again: the sharp sense of his own bewilderment, his profound ignorance. Why, exactly, had all this happened? Why was he, Patrick Fitzgerald, a source of injury and death to his friends—even to complete strangers?

  He closed the letter abruptly, with a plea for any information Sep might consider significant, to be forwarded to Shurland; and then, in a fit of petulance and frustration and profound self-pity, went looking for Gi
bbon.

  He found him in Mrs. Coultrip's scullery, running a stiff boar brush over yesterday's trousers.

  “Will they do?”

  “Aye,” the valet said dubiously, “but only for second best, mind. Were you shoveling coal on your knees yesterday, afore you saw fit to take ship down the filthy Thames?”

  “I was set upon by ruffians. While attempting to scarper across a tenement roof. Sure and you found blood on the cloth. You'll have guessed, Gibbon, that life has taken a surprising turn.”

  “Miss Armistead did just mention the overturning of your carriage in Hampstead,” the valet conceded, “when I took up her breakfast tray—me having presumed to inquire after the nasty bruise on her temple. When considered together with Mr. Sep's unfortunate accident—”

  “As you say. We live in terror for our lives.”

  “Pity you didn't think to mention that in all your haste at quitting London,” Gibbon remarked matter-of-factly. “I might just have placed your pistols in your leather grip. As it is—”

  “Ask Coultrip for the keys to the gun room. Master Theo will have kept some pieces in working order, no doubt. We might borrow them for our—for the duration.”

  “Right you are, Mr. Fitz. And what is the duration, if I may be so bold?”

  “I hardly know.” Fitzgerald glanced at the letter still clutched in his hand. “I've asked too much of you already, my Gibbon, without so much as a by-your-leave. Better, maybe, if you took the Dauntless back to London and waited on my pleasure in Bedford Square?”

  “I'm not nearly so pigeon-hearted as you think me, seemingly,” Gibbon said with withering contempt. “Will you be wanting that letter posted in Sheerness?”

  “Yes.” Gibbon was intimate enough with Shurland's habits to know that there was no post in Eastchurch, the village on Shurland's edge, but that the ferry collected letters for the mainland at its dock in Sheerness, a good eight miles distant. “Mr. Theo might be willing to go—his mount is said to need a gallop; or perhaps I can roust Coultrip and his trap.”

  “Coultrip can drive me just as easy, and I might fetch a London paper while I'm about it. You bide where you are, Mr. Fitz—and look to Miss Georgie.”

  Something in the valet's tone brought Fitzpatrick's head around. He had not yet seen Georgiana that morning; he had been preoccupied with the letter. And Theo.

  “Is she ailing?”

  “Sickening for an inflammation of the lung, by my thinking,” Gibbon answered succinctly, “but you can't tell the ladies anything, bless them—particularly once they've been to school in Edinburgh.”

  Drawing room, library, billiards table were all deserted, and the fire dying to embers in the morning room. Her bedroom door was ajar, and the interior equally lifeless—although, he was relieved to see, presentable enough for Shurland. In her better days, Lady Maude had been a devotee of the fanciful—and though the Hall was indeed twelfth century in its foundations, she had plastered and painted the interiors in an exuberant riot of shades: burnt umber and Carrera gold and dusky peach, picked out with startling greens and blues. Fitzgerald could still recall the distant summer when a boatload of Maude's friends—theatre people, brought in from London—had set to painting scenery all over the walls; and now, a progression through Shurland's upper storey was a trip through Indian jungles and Oriental landscapes, across the Russian steppes and onto the shores of Tahiti. Georgiana's room was more restrained— the chamber offered Shakespeare's Globe to the wondering eye, with a quotation from As You Like It running in gold script about the perimeter of the ceiling. Mrs. Coultrip had placed a bowl of nuts, a clutch of apples, and a ewer of water on a side table as a hasty form of welcome. Georgie's bags still sat on the carpet—she had not fled from him entirely, then.

  He glanced through doorways, a kaleidoscope of set-pieces, all empty and sadder in this barren December than he had ever found them—and paused in the hallway to think.

  “You are in search of your chère amie, Monsieur Fitzgerald?”

  “She is not my chère amie. She is my ward.” He turned his head to stare down the corridor in the direction of the West Wing—where Lady Maude spent her hours of nightmare and waking. A figure stood there, quite still, the folds of her long green gown disappearing into the scenery against which she was arranged. “Madame duFief. Top o' the morning to ye. I trust you're flourishing?”

  She inclined her head. “I cannot complain—being a daily witness to the most frightful suffering in another. I do not need to inquire after your health, monsieur; you have never looked better.”

  She was a woman he could not like: fierce in a subtle and unforgiving way; avaricious in petty things; prone to the special hypocrisies of the paid companion. She remained at Shurland because she had little choice—the Hastings family trustees paid her too well for her service to Lady Maude. Odaline duFief preferred to pretend, however, that it was loyalty and love that kept her marooned at Maude's side; that she, alone of all the world, remained true as more exalted friends fell away. She regarded Fitzgerald with a special contempt for neglecting his wife.

  “Such a sweet creature as Miss Armistead looks,” she said now. “I conducted her myself to Lady Maude's apartments. She wished most earnestly to see her. I suppose she is conscious—as who could not be, that possesses a heart?—of the tragic genius confined and wasting in these rooms.”

  “I am sure she thinks her ladyship a fit subject for observation,” he returned impatiently. “The lass is trained in medicine, look you.”

  He uttered the words too harshly; Madame duFief drew a breath, on the verge of retort; but they had reached Maude's doorstep now, and all conversation was suspended.

  She lay on a divan, with a shawl about her shoulders and an expression of ecstasy on her ravaged features; Georgiana's look was alert and intent, the scientist collecting data.

  “ ‘. . . the drumbeat quickens, the deathless partners race/to meet that heartfelt orison/on hellish carapace . . .’ ”

  “Poetry,” Fitzgerald said quietly. “That'll be a new bit, surely, me darlin'?”

  “ ‘. . . until the dawn of . . .’ something . . . and something something face . . . Is that you, Patrick? I have been declaiming my odes. For the girl. But I cannot remember her name. Or what comes next. Perhaps there are no more words—”

  “Miss Armistead,” Georgie supplied; her expression was closed, unreachable, and she did not look at Fitzgerald.

  “Armistead! That was it!” Maude turned her head toward the voice, eager and reaching, once more on familiar terrain. “I knew a Robert once—I don't suppose he is any relation?—in Bath. He refused my invitation to take his clothes off; unaccountable behaviour.”

  “He cannot have understood the honour you did him,” Fitzgerald said.

  “Years ago. When I was a Beauty.” Her head swiveled once more, in Fitzgerald's direction, and she extended one claw of a hand. “Dear Patrick! How I longed to see you! How happy I am you are here! But I am tired now; you must all go away and leave me with my odalisque. That is what I call duFief, you know—my odalisque.”

  “And the honour, your ladyship, is always understood,” Madame duFief said quickly.

  She was kneeling at Maude's side, pressing a folded square of linen against her brow, when they left her.

  * * *

  “You know she has gone blind?” Georgiana asked.

  “I suspected it,” he answered. “The way she turns to follow a voice—”

  “Yes. She can barely make out shapes.” Georgie paused at the threshold of her room. “I should apologise for my presumption, I suppose—you didn't ask me to examine her.”

  “Did she?”

  “I don't think she had the slightest idea what I was doing. I didn't attempt to take her pulse or listen to her heart—just studied her. Patrick, your wife is in an advanced stage of decline. She should be admitted to hospital—or a private nursing home of some kind. She is so isolated here, and that companion—perhaps she means well, but—”

>   “Hardly.”

  She studied him soberly. “Did you hire Madame?”

  “Me?” He affected astonishment. “But no. I am forbidden to make any financial arrangements for my wife, of any kind. That cat was chosen by Maude's brother Monteith, the present Earl.”

  “Then tell him that his sister is slowly being poisoned with opium. I imagine Madame is the one who gives it to her.”

  “Did duFief spit at you? With her venom?”

  “She said some vile things, certainly—but all insinuation. I have hardly raised your credit by coming here. I do apologise, Patrick.”

  “You!” He reached for her hand. “To apologise—”

  “I think I will just lie down,” she hurried on, clutching at the doorknob with painful force. “The excitement of the past two days seems to have caught up with me.”

  He released her, stepped backwards. “Gibbon says you're sickening for something.”

  She smiled. “An inflammation of the lung. I happened to clear my throat too loudly in his hearing. Now, if only Lady Maude had a Gibbon to look after her—”

  He stood outside her door for several moments after she'd closed it, yearning for vanished warmth.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Palmerston assures me that I do very well—that I go through the forms of living, despite Albert's loss, with composure and dignity. My Prime Minister observes that regardless of the paroxysms of grief that sometimes overcome me (so that I am forced to retire for a period of solitary reflection), I have done my utmost to persevere for the sake of He who is Departed. How strange a force is national character! And how well the sovereign of the nation embodies it! Whereas in the princedoms of India I should be expected to immolate myself at my Beloved's death, in England I am to be commended for fortitude.

  It is difficult to like Palmerston, however much one may admire him. He is not the Prime Minister that Melbourne was. There is an arrogance to the man's manner that must disgust. In his early years he was infinitely charming—possessed of intelligence and wit—a handsome fellow who brightened a room merely by entering it—but now that he is gouty and walks only with the assistance of two canes, I cannot forget how he attempted to force his way into Lady ——'s bedchamber one night here at Windsor, years ago, when he was at least sixty, with the intent of seducing her—and when betrayed by the lady's indignant screams, offered as his excuse that he had often been in the habit of sleeping in that room in the past—presumably with its previous occupant!—and had mistaken his way in the dark!