A Flaw in the Blood (16 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I
 
AM TIRED, AND THE HOUR
is late; but I must not sleep: I must not drink the sedative dear Jenner has sent to me. In the silence of an Osborne Christmas Eve, I may compose myself, and write, as I must, to the precious ones who are far away. Vicky, of course, in whom it is as natural as breathing to impart the most sacred thoughts of the hidden soul, and to Affie at sea, and to Leopold.

My wretched, miserable existence is not one to write about,
I began—and then set down my pen.

Poor orphaned boy! To be left fatherless, at such a season and at such an age—when one is far from home and lodged among strangers, however kindly disposed toward one—however well paid! What to say to little Leo, of the
awful stillness
of the Blue Room, when once that dear soul had departed? He is unlikely to comprehend very much, after all.

You are an affectionate little Boy—& you will remember how happy we all were—you will therefore sorrow when you know & think that poor Mama is more wretched, more miserable—than any being in this World can be!

Impossible to write the truth. I have never regarded Leo as particularly intelligent. His temper is so
very bad;
he is unlikely to feel his loss as he ought. He is the least dear to me of all my children—being so delicate, and giving rise to such anxiety and trouble in his father's breast
and
in mine, he has never been anything other than tiresome.

I pine & long for your dearly beloved precious Papa so dreadfully . . .

I do not think poor Leo ceased crying in rage from the first hour of his existence until the close of his first twelvemonth; and even at two, he was so frequently given to fits of screaming that I once remarked he ought to be soundly whipped. He resembles a frog in his features, and his posture is generally stooped, so that I have never been moved to sketch him in any manner other than the grotesque— Indeed, I avoid the necessity of drawing him
at all.
I find better subjects in Arthur, who is so charming and well-favoured that everyone adores him; and in the pretty ways of Louise and Beatrice.

Leo's frequent clumsinesses and the resultant confinements to bed—here with bruised knees, there with an oozing lip, yet again with a swollen elbow—make him a pitiable object; but one cannot help feeling exasperation at his endless demands for attention. Not even the best of governesses could make him more like other children—by the time he reached the age of five, I had despaired of any improvement in looks, bearing, manners, or disposition. His speech was marked by an impediment, and his tantrums not to be endured. These past several months in which he has been absent, in the south of France, should have been the most restorative of my life—but I am doomed to find the prospect of peace and happiness forever set at a remove. They are not for me; or at least, not this side of the grave.

I shall enclose in Leo's letter
2 photographs of beloved Papa, wh you can have framed—but not in black,—a Locket with beloved Papa's hair & a photograph—wh I wish you to wear
attached
to a string or chain round your neck . . .

Leopold is flawed—dreadfully flawed, in every aspect of body and soul. My darling Albert searched, to the very hour of his last breath, for causes he could name—enemies he could accuse—demons he could exorcise. My heart whispers that in pursuing the Truth—in daring to question the goodness of Providence—Albert tasted a bitterness that broke his heart. But for Leopold, we should all have gone on as before—innocent in our happiness.

Is it any wonder I quite detest the child?

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

H
AVE YOU EVER SEEN A
sea so glorious?” Georgiana exulted as they walked up the Toulon road together at noon the next day. Her voice was still husky with disease, and she had certainly grown thinner; the bones of her face looked fragile as porcelain beneath the tissue-wrap of her skin. Illness had honed her beauty so that it became almost terrible. Fitzgerald could not stare at her enough.

“Never,” he said, “though I will always prefer the view from Cobh.”

“You miss Ireland so much?”

“The view was precious, because I was looking
away
.”

She grasped his hand and shook it slightly; the warmth ignited his fingertips, and for an instant, he could hardly breathe. The need to take her in his arms—potent and ravaging—had been growing in Fitzgerald for most of the past week, when Georgiana had never been out of his thoughts and only rarely out of his company.

We'll tell people I'm your niece,
she had suggested when they landed at Calais,
so that no one makes a fuss about arrangements.

Arrangements. Train compartments and carriages. Tandem hotel rooms. Fitzgerald lying awake during the long hours of the night in the hope of hearing her movement through the wall.

“That's how I feel right now,” she said. “That I've escaped.
Everything
. I'd no idea life in London had grown so dreary.”

He tried to smile at her, tried to catch her lightness of tone; but most of him was still on guard, for von Stühlen and the men who did his killing.

They had taken ship by night in Sheerness—a private vessel, the skipper quite willing to cross the Channel once Fitzgerald showed him his purse. No papers were required to enter seaports, which were open to all for purposes of trade; but once in Calais they had to stop at the town hall, and list the villages they intended to visit—an internal passport being necessary for travel through France. Fitzgerald hated this unavoidable disclosure of their plans: It left a calling card, he thought, for anyone who might follow them.

He had been to Paris a few times before—but in Maude's company, Maude's circle: buffered from want and responsibility. He avoided the capital altogether this time, heading south from Calais, feeling his way toward Cannes, with Georgie persistently sick, unable to travel swiftly. In this Gibbon was invaluable: He struck up conversations in back rooms, accepted the wisdom of potboys and ostlers. Gibbon found them good inns at modest cost, in Orléans and Avignon and Vidauban. He chose horses when they needed them. Fitzgerald guessed that he also watched their backs—he, too, was tensed for the first sign of pursuit. None had come.

The absence of threat made Fitzgerald's skin crawl.

“My deepest sympathy, Lady Bowater, on the loss of your husband,” he said, as he bowed over the hand of the faded woman in the Château Leader's drawing room. In her black silk dress and crinoline, hastily procured from an establishment in Nice, she would not have looked out of place in a great English country house—a dark paneled room with heavy red hangings, fussy with ferns. Here, awash in strong sunlight, marooned in the midst of a marble floor, she was as anomalous as a bat among butterflies.

“How delightful,” she breathed, clasping his hand between two of her mittened ones, “to hear a voice from home, even if you
are
only Irish! One grows so tired of French! Is that not so, Lord Rokeby?”

This gentleman had driven over from Nice to wish his compatriots a happy Christmas; a peer's younger son—elegant and distinguished. All that Fitzgerald was not.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” Rokeby observed somewhat distantly, “—and may I add that the
lady
requires no introduction. What a pleasant surprise, Miss Armistead, to find you in the south of France! And Mr. Fitzgerald is by way of being . . . a
relation
of yours?”

“I call him my uncle,” Georgiana said simply, “as he has served as guardian since the untimely death of Dr. John Snow. But I might as fondly call him a father—for all the consideration he has shown, in recent years. It was anxiety for my poor health which urged Mr. Fitzgerald to bring me to Cannes.”

A father,
Fitzgerald thought violently.
A father, by all that's holy.

“Ah,” Rokeby murmured. “Exactly so. And how was London, when last you saw it?”

“Plunged in mourning, I need hardly say.”

They moved toward the hearth, engrossed in the kind of polite nothings which Fitzgerald found so difficult to master; Georgiana managed them effortlessly, an artifact of her breeding—or the finishing school she had abandoned as soon as she was decently able.

“Lord Rokeby is attached to the consulate in Nice,” Gunther supplied, “and was charged with breaking the news of the Consort's passing to young Prince Leopold. I believe he may take the child off Lady Bowater's hands, with time. In the meanwhile, his delightful manners and conversation are a great comfort to her ladyship—in being less foreign than my own.”

The German doctor gave no particular edge to the words, but Fitzgerald detected a circumstantial bitterness. He had worn Gunther's boots in his time. He would have liked to have drawn the man out—established a certain understanding—but Georgie had made her tactics plain.
You had better leave Gunther to me,
she had said.
It is fortuitous that he was acquainted with Uncle John; and besides, I shall know what to ask him about young Leopold.

“Have you seen my fretsaw?” the boy asked Fitzgerald suddenly, holding out the tool. “I have all sorts of building things. Gunther gave them to me as a Christmas present. But Papa ordered them, he said. Papa thought of me. Though he was quite ill.”

The boy's fingers were clenched on the saw's handle. Fitzgerald took it from him: a well-balanced tool of wood and steel, proportioned for small hands. The blade was a marvel of precisely jagged teeth.

And they had given it to a child who bled at the slightest provocation.

He glanced at Leopold. “It's grand! Have ye tried it yet?”

“No.” He looked uncertain, half-scared. “I have some wood, though—on the terrace.”

“Then let's show your papa,” Fitzgerald suggested, smiling, “what his saw is made of. Come along, lad.”

There were other gifts as well, which Gunther had procured on instruction from Windsor, well before the seriousness of the Consort's illness was understood. Lead soldiers, a pocket compass. A battledore and shuttlecock. Numerous books, some in German. A fabulous kite, fanciful and clearly French, made of silk and covered in fleurs-de-lys. A miniature violin, perfect as the fretsaw, for an eight-year-old's hands.

“Ten pounds I was given!” Gunther exclaimed, clearly shocked. “Ten whole pounds, for a child's gifts!”

Princess Alice had sent a game of table croquet, all the way from London.

“She must have read Leo's letters,” Louisa explained, as though this were unusual among the Royal Family. “He has developed a positive
mania
for croquet. We play tournaments, in teams, when the weather is fine. You must join us tomorrow.”

“I've been winning,” Leopold observed. He looked up from the small wooden box he was crafting carefully with hammer and nails. “Gunther and I are allies. The French know nothing of the game. Fancy being ignorant of
croquet
!”

After dinner—beef and an approximation of Yorkshire pudding, which failed miserably to suit, owing, as Lady Bowater said, to the “
stupidity
of the servants, who
insist
upon cooking in the French style,”—there were charades, and
tableaux vivants.

Lord Rokeby began, with an interpretation of
The Sorrows of Young Werther,
which the entire party comprehended almost at an instant. Louisa followed, animating the word
belle,
by alternately swinging her skirts vigourously and pretending to flirt with every gentleman in the room, to the visible disapproval of Lady Bowater. Leopold disappeared after this, and when the drawing room draperies were once more parted, materialised in a black cape and the heavy worsted cloth of a French peasant, stooping and shuffling about the room in search of alms.

“It is that beggar who followed us,” Louisa whispered soberly to Fitzgerald, “the whole of our first day in Cannes. Leo and I were quite alone, and this sinister figure—we knew not whether man or woman—dogged our footsteps, muttering scraps of French, hand held out all the while. It made quite an impression on Leo; he could not shake the idea that the figure was Death. And indeed—”

Her voice trailed away uncertainly.

And indeed,
Fitzgerald thought,
the boy's instincts were not far wrong.

“. . . made for the stage, Your Highness,” Georgiana was saying, on the far side of the room; and then she broke off in a fit of coughing that brought an expression of alarm to Lady Bowater's face.

Soon after, the two of them took their leave.

“He bleeds very often from his nose and gums, and must rub the latter with a sulfate of soda when they appear swollen and red. He takes mercury and chalk as an emetic—to avoid straining at the bowels. The least thing oversets him, Gunther says—he nearly died from an outbreak of measles last spring, and a sore throat is dreadful; if he coughs, he is likely to cough blood. Sometimes he passes it in his urine, which leads them to believe the internal tissues have frayed. I gather the poor child bumped his arm against a baggage rack when his train carriage lurched unexpectedly before Avignon, and was laid up for weeks upon his arrival here. What should be a bruise for another child, is an incapacitation for Prince Leopold.”

Georgie said all this in an urgent undertone, between bouts of coughing, as they walked back to their hotel. She was engrossed, Fitzgerald saw, in the symptoms of the case—many of which she must have heard long before, from the Consort, but which she was cataloguing in her mind now, as she talked to him.

“Gunther says that given the fragility of the boy's frame, it is a matter of conjecture whether he will reach adulthood; and, as such, he treats him much as he would any other little boy—encouraging him to move freely and gain strength by virtue of exercise out-of-doors, regardless of whether he might sustain an injury.”

“Surely he does not take undue risk,” Fitzgerald protested, “with the Queen's son in his keeping?”

“Not undue risk,” Georgie conceded, “but he certainly grants the child more liberty than his nurse or his mother should do. That is a very
German
view of childhood, is it not? —That all manner of ills might be cured by fresh air and exertion?”

“German, English—what does it matter?” Fitzgerald demanded. “The poor man's not from another planet!”

He was sharply tired, all of a sudden—of the endless travel, the incipient anxiety, and this constant emphasis on race. It was Theo and his social theorists all over again.

“Well,” Georgie said mildly, “in a manner of speaking, he
is.
Gunther's twenty-six years old, and up-to-date on all the newest theories. He's not an old woman, like Jenner and the rest of them at Windsor. He'll do Leo good.”

Twenty-six. Exactly Georgie's age. Had she enjoyed talking to Gunther, Fitzgerald wondered—someone equally conversant with science? As opposed to the middle-aged Irishman who understood nothing?

“How long have you known Rokeby?” he demanded. Another fellow with taking manners and an easy competence; his eyes had followed Georgiana throughout the evening, and he had studiously avoided Fitzgerald whenever possible.

“Some years. His brother will be a duke.” She shrugged. “One met him everywhere before he joined the diplomatic service. A pleasant enough fellow—and not at all dissipated, which is a relief among his kind. Gunther tells me he has behaved most intelligently toward young Leopold.”

“How so?”

“—By leaving him in the Bowaters' charge, of course. There was some concern that the loss of Sir Edward would throw all their plans into disarray, but I gather the entire household is to remain at Château Leader through February, as originally planned.”

“Does Gunther know his trade?”

“He did admit that he observed several similar sufferers during his studies at the medical college in Bonn.”

“And? Is he likely to save the child?”

Her footsteps slowed. “I hardly know. He talked a good deal of theory. That illnesses are more or less common because certain populations remain isolated—that is to say, they have limited contact with the broader world, and circulate their disorders among themselves, through social intercourse and even intermarriage. In some cases, Gunther says, such populations are less susceptible to disease—they appear to grow accustomed to it, and resist it better than those who are not. In other cases, parochial societies
encourage
disorders to flourish. Entire towns in the Bavarian Alps, he tells me, will manifest certain maladies that cannot be found elsewhere. As though they could be passed among generations, much as the Duke of Wellington's children got his nose—or your Theo got Lady Maude's hair.”

“But he might not have done,” Fitzgerald countered. “He might have got mine.”

“Exactly. Not everyone inherits every aspect of their parents, Patrick. Otherwise, we should all look and act exactly the same—whereas in nature, variety is infinite.” She studied him measuringly. “To mention Theo, again—appearances can be deceiving. He
looks
like Lady Maude to an extraordinary degree. But his inner nature—his intellect, proclivities, even his emotions—may owe just as much to you. It is often the case that conflicts arise between father and son when they are
too much
alike.”

Fitzgerald was speechless. He felt raw, exposed—all his vulnerabilities tossed at his feet. She had seen, then, how strained was his bond to Theo; had seen as well how much the boy mattered. How he yearned for an expression of love from his son.

“I confess that I find Gunther's theories quite intriguing,” she continued serenely.

“Lord, they seem dead obvious.” Her knowledge of him was too shaming. “Families resemble each other. And so?”