Philip. Alamayou. His head swam with it all.
The change purse he carried felt heavy. He still had much of the money he’d brought from Paris.
I could leave, he thought.
It stunned him, how simple a thought it was, how easy to hold and just look at, as if it meant nothing. He had enough to cross the Channel and return to the Marais. By now his congregation was no doubt wondering what had happened to him. He could go home, make tea, and then close the wooden sign that directed his congregants to other synagogues. The sign Philip made for him, a simple and lovely piece of carved wood. That was a kindness.
Then he could preside over services, retire to his appartamente, and cry for Devorah.
Everything he thought he knew, he realized he didn’t. As he stood at the gate in the very spot where they’d stood together just a week before, he wondered whether he’d ever had the friend he thought. Who was he? What was he?
His Torah had a name for it. Mishkav zachar. It was forbidden. It was punishable by death.
There was another word, ahavah. Love, spoken as “give.” In the years he’d known the man as Philip, that’s all he’d seen: Philip giving medical services and comfort to Jews he owed nothing to. He’d given friendship to an old rebbe. Now, for wanting to give a dying queen comfort and peace, he sat in a cold cell, awaiting a fate he couldn’t escape because of who he loved as a son and who he loved as a companion. All of them, now lost.
Devorah. You miss her.
You understand me, rebbe.
He took the letter from his coat pocket.
There was a boy racing across the grounds. Eleven or twelve, Rabbi Ariel guessed, and too shabbily dressed to be a royal. The offspring of a servant, more likely. There was no shine on the boy’s shoe buckles and his clothes were out of date.
He’d do. He was on the right side of the gate. “Won’t you come see what I have for you?” he called out.
The boy eyed him suspiciously. Good lad, the rabbi thought. “There’s a servant of Her Majesty, the Lord Steward. You’d know him by the scabs on his head. Yes?”
The boy hesitated. Rabbi Ariel shook his purse, letting him hear the chime of coins.
“Simon,” the boy said warily.
“Well done! Simon, yes, that’s it. If you deliver this to him,” and he held the envelope for the boy to see, “then you may have this.” The purse.
The boy extended his hands, expecting both to be handed over.
“You seem a trustworthy sort. To be sure, that’s important. You understand, I need some proof you’ve done as I ask. Tell Simon to come to this gate with the envelope. When I see such a thing, the money is yours to spend as you like. Do we have an agreement?”
He let the boy peek inside the purse. It held more than enough for a good meal of meat, broth, and beer at an Irish ordinary.
The boy took the envelope and left Rabbi Ariel at the gate. It didn’t take long for Simon to come, in the company of three yeomen.
Simon thrust the letter back to Rabbi Ariel, but he refused it and kept his hands warm in the folds of his meager topcoat.
“You’ve got the time it takes to walk away,” Simon told him, “unless you’re eager to sit with your friend in Newgate.”
“Would you just let the princess read it for herself?”
“Why should I do that? So you can carry on your companion’s work upsetting the royals? Isn’t it enough they’re on a bloody deathwatch? Now she’s got the likes of you and him, trying to force your way inside? No, old man. I’ll not show this to her. Take it and go.”
“I don’t know how long he has. I suppose they’ll send him back, or hang him. But between now and then, I’ll come back every day if I have to.”
“For what? What do you want?”
“A word. That’s all. He mattered to her once, didn’t he?”
“Bloody crazy, the Jews are.”
Simon stuffed the letter into his pocket. He and the yeomen left the rabbi huddled against the cold stone.
The wintry winds picked up, and before long a dark pall stretched across the sky, bathing Windsor in deep gray. Behind the rabbi, as far as his eyes could see, fog wrapped everything in clouds. He felt the bitter, unforgiving cold overtake him and despair that he’d failed.
Hours passed. He shivered uncontrollably but he refused to leave. Servants passed through the grounds, glancing at him and shaking their heads.
Finally he saw a light rise in a doorway. Simon came out, followed by Princess Louise. She was veiled in ermine against the cold and held a steaming mug of tea. At the gate, she gave it to him.
He took the mug gratefully and let its warmth burrow into his palms. He couldn’t feel where his skin ended and the porcelain began.
“If you remain any longer, you’ll freeze to death.” The princess stepped back from the bars. “You must go.”
“Did you read it?”
“Yes. I don’t know that it’s true, or not true. It’s just words on a page.”
“He’s risked everything, Your Highness. Given up everything, simply to say those words to you and to your mother.”
She unfolded the letter and stared at it as if it were on fire. “Are you a part of this? This extraordinary claim?”
“For thirty years, no. As of a week ago, I suppose I am.”
“Do you believe him?”
Rabbi Ariel sipped his tea. The winter had leeched it of its warmth. “I believe him, Your Highness.”
“Why?”
“I suppose it’s because it’s insane, what he’s done. Who ever put so much at risk for a lie? Only the truth does this to men. At least to the man I’ve known.”
“Then I suppose it’s to me. Wait here.”
She turned and went back. “My carriage,” she told Simon as she walked briskly. “I need to bring a few items. And find a suitable coat for the stubborn old man who won’t leave our gate.”
§
“We wish to be alone with the prisoner,” Princess Louise said.
At her command, the prison guards stepped away from Alamayou’s cell to be replaced by her yeomen. They took up positions all along the corridor, which had been plunged into darkness at Simon’s insistence. Only when every last torchière was snuffed out did the princess slip inside Newgate unseen, followed by a regiment of armed men.
She sat on the other side of the bars from Alamayou. A small table had been set before her. A large case rested on the floor at her feet.
Rabbi Ariel and Lord Grant stood to either side of her, watching intently.
“Is it really you?” she asked. “In the courtyard, when the guards took you, I saw your hand.”
Alamayou held up his right palm for her to examine up close. “It’s not enough proof for you, Your Highness. I can see it.”
“No. It isn’t. But your eyes are familiar to me.”
“As are yours. You were so kind to me, Your Highness. To us.”
“You and Philip.”
“I still remember it was you who opened the door to my being able to paint. Do you recall? Action, consequence. A word for a brush, an easel.”
“I do.”
“It was while I was painting in Villefranche that I saw you and the queen after all this time. A funny thing.”
“What you claim is hard to understand. Your death was confirmed. But what you ask, to speak to the queen after all these years, and especially at this dark hour, is to upend everything she’s learned to live with. And that is impossible.”
“I’d give anything for someone to say those words to me.” He rose and took hold of the bars. “I would die for the chance to hear, ‘You don’t have to live with it anymore. He’s not dead.’ Happily so. Don’t you think she might feel the same?”
“You presume to know how she feels? The queen?”
“No, Your Highness
. But I knew her heart, once. I listened as she told me what it was to see a bright hot star, and then see it go out.”
She fell silent.
“Your Highness,” Rabbi Ariel said, “what can be done?”
Princess Louise opened the case. “You may be who you say you are. You may be Philip Layard. Or no one at all. Just an insane man who wants to see the queen.”
“Why would he do that?” the rabbi asked.
“There was a man, Edward Oxford. He fired two pistol shots at the queen sixty years ago, while she was pregnant with my sister. He did it because he was insane. There was the Boy Jones, who wanted to be near her. Fenian separatists in Ireland want to blow her to hell and back to be rid of her. There are as many reasons as men to act on them. Now, why would you? Because you hate her. You feel colonized. You hate her skin and her wealth. You feel poverty crushing you each time you think of where we live and how we live. Or you feel nothing. Just a whim. It doesn’t matter why.”
She removed the contents of the case and placed them on the table, one at a time.
“Do you know what these are?” she asked.
“Forgive me, Your Highness,” Rabbi Ariel said. “Is this some sort of test? His life is at stake.”
“It’s all right, rebbe,” Alamayou said. “She should know in her heart that what I’m saying is the truth before she allows me anywhere near her mother.”
He gazed at his palm, at the old fire scars there. “These wounds aren’t enough. Philip had one too, in the end. Though you wouldn’t have known that, Your Highness.”
He pulled his cot close to the bars. Were it any other setting—a private tea, perhaps, and a fire built by the princess’s service against the insistent winter outside—they might have shared a smile at the old memories stirred by the items arrayed on the table.
An orange, studded with cloves of cinnamon. A stethescope. An antique gun, smashed to uselessness.
“At least you didn’t bring the whip,” he said, taking a moment to watch the shock register in her eyes. “I see you remember that, once, there was a table very much like this one set out before your mother and me. There was a whip. Evidently, your family finds value in these challenges. Very well, then. Let me tell you of our time at Windsor. You, me, the queen, Philip. The memories are all I have of him. Soon, the same will be true of the queen, for both of us.”
He studied her. She was listening intently, and remembering just as fiercely.
“Shall I begin with the orange?” he asked.
Chapter Eight
29 October 1868
On a morning of low mist and rain, Alamayou and Philip sat beneath a canopy, eating breakfast on the covered veranda overlooking the Round Tower and the surrounding land. A deep chill settled over them despite the fire burning in a nearby brass pit. Light flurries of the coming winter’s first snow had fallen overnight, and the grounds were dusted with a thin powder cover that the morning sun melted. Pinpoints of reflected sunlight burst from the damp grass.
Alamayou watched as a maidservant peeled the last orange in a generous bowl of fruit, then disappeared inside the ward. After her departure, he took up the fruit and drew on it with a stick of pitch coal.
“That’s rude,” Philip said. “People here don’t act like that.”
He tried to take it away but Alamayou was too fast. He held the finished product up for Philip to see. “Why?” he asked.
The cloves, Philip realized. Alamayou was trying to make the orange look like the one they’d seen in Her Majesty’s Blue Room, atop a tray and studded with fresh cloves of cinnamon.
“I don’t know,” Philip said, “and she’s not around to ask, is she?”
In the weeks since their night in the portrait room, they hadn’t glimpsed the queen again, though they did see the army of servants attending her. Her court employed personal physicians from all fields, as well as a secretary, innumerable ladies-in-waiting and of the bedchamber, chefs who prepared her meals from a menu years in the planning, and young maids-of-all-work who swept, mopped, hauled water, and carried out slops, all while the scullery girls stood three bodies thick around the kitchen maids and cooks, hoping to learn and move up in rank. The housemaids could at least leave the lower floors of the castle to strip and make up beds, light fires, open windows, and prepare rooms for meals.
Philip begged pardon of a passing maid. “Alamayou wants to know why Her Majesty’s got an orange with cloves in it.”
“It’s not for me to ask,” she said curtly. “Nor for either of you.”
She picked up their dishes and took them away.
They left the veranda for their apartment and some coats, then met Corbould for Alamayou’s painting session. After setting up an easel and helping him choose a range of colors, Corbould tried to encourage Alamayou’s study of an oak leaf, the veins and the way the light made them appear translucent, in preparation for a still life. Alamayou complied at first, but soon it was obvious that he wasn’t painting the leaf at all. He coated the canvas in black, and on top of it brushed out a circle of orange.
“What is this?” Corbould asked.
“Her Majesty’s odd orange,” Philip said.
“I’ve heard of no such thing.”
“It’s on a tray, just a piece of fruit by itself, as if for decoration. The rind’s dotted with cloves. She keeps it in the Blue Room.”
“Something to do with him, I suppose.”
“Prince Albert? What’s an orange to do with him?”
“That room’s a museum to him. I’m sure you’ve noticed if you saw it, and if you did, you’re among a select few. Nothing’s been touched since his death. The princess told me about it once. The prince’s clothes are lain out as if he stepped away for a stroll. It’s been that way since eighteen sixty-one. If she’s ever seen in public, it’s only on travels to Balmoral for extended stays, or maybe the walk from one ward to another here at Windsor. Nothing more, really. She clings to what she knows.”
“I heard tell, but didn’t understand how bad it is until I came here. Everything’s black or gray or purple. Curtains all closed, the women in their weeps. All these years, you say? We saw her once, at night. It was a bloody shock to the senses… I mean, it was surprising.”
“Don’t worry yourself with grammar. You’re not among royalty at the moment. I’m a rank commoner. You should consider yourselves fortunate, both to glimpse her and to not glimpse her again. She’s a difficult one, as I hear no shortage of from the princess. A distant and troubled soul even before Albert died, and ever since she’s plunged into mourning, it’s as if the sun went out around here. All the time. At least she’s a prolific writer. Notes are all that her children know of her. Imagine an entire life together, built more on quiet, soundless words than spoken ones.”
“You make her sound like a cousin to Alamayou.”
“Perhaps they’re not so different, though I’ll deny ever speaking such a thing aloud if asked.”
“I did ask one of the maids about the orange. She was short with me.”
“They learn not to speak of her,” Corbould said, “or else find themselves place-hunting. Never again in their lives should they see such as Windsor.”
“I suppose it’s difficult to leave this place once you’ve been inside.”
“For many, I suppose that’s true.”
“But not for you?”
Corbould sat on the grass. Spreading a cloth, he opened jars of paints and poured them into dishes. He dipped a spoon into each, washing it in between, and built a palette of hues.
“It’s not life here,” he said.
He set up a canvas of his own next to Alamayou’s. “What I paint, it exists in the world, does it not? Yet it’s different. It’s done. If I paint a tree, that tree will remain forever as I made it, while the real life subject is free to grow lush or wither and die. That’s what it’s lik
e to be among them. It’s as if you’re made by them. All the possibilities are theirs. Yours are done.”
Alamayou added another dab of color to his canvas. It was riddled through with black. The color of mourning, like everything at Windsor.
“My words,” Corbould said. “They lack. Why I paint, I suppose.”
He added to the painting of the Round Tower. A bit of yellow that brightened the sun.
“For the princess.” He smiled wistfully.
“It makes her happy to see you painting it. I remember the look on her face the day we met you.”
“It does, doesn’t it? I’m glad others can see it, even fleetingly. Makes it real, you see.”
The same sense Philip had that first day returned. Listening to Corbould speak of Princess Louise, even watching him paint the vista she loved, carried echoes of other, quieter conversations, and of wants not spoken.
“How long have you been among them?” Philip asked.
“These last three years. And I’m only now learning my way around without having to think. But what of you? How long will you remain here?”
“I don’t know. This is all unexpected, to say the least.”
“May it stay that way,” Corbould said. “Makes for a far more interesting life, don’t you think?”
“But I don’t know anything about royalty, let alone how to live with them.”
“It seems to me you’re doing well with the prince right next to you.” Corbould smiled at Alamayou. “The care and feeding of royalty is, in the end, relatively simple. Give them what they want.”
§
“Your Highnesses, I present at your request, the Abyssinian and his valet.”
“Bastard,” Philip muttered under his breath. He and Alamayou waited in the open doorway of an enormous room filled with light. Over Simon’s shoulder he saw Princess Louise and Prince Leopold at a long wooden table. They stood close to each other, intently studying the papers strewn before them.
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