Стефани Баррон - A Flaw in the Blood

She won’t sit quiet at home, John, when there’s a sick man at the end of the road.

Bollocks.

Snow had a right to be angry. He had commended Georgie to Fitzgerald’s care on his deathbed some three years ago—gone at forty-five, all his brilliance snuffed out like a candle. She was not really his niece and Fitzgerald was the last man to stand as guardian, being already enslaved to Georgiana Armistead and dangerous with it. Perhaps Snow expected him to carry the lass off somewhere. Perhaps he ought to have moved heaven and earth to snatch her from London, his careful years of ambition gone over the bridge and into the river, the past tossed like dirt in John Snow’s grave. Fitzgerald did not know. He knew only that never, on the day of Snow’s death or any day thereafter, did Georgie give the least hint of desiring a conventional life. She had lived a singular one for too long.

The daughter of Charles Armistead, a military doctor attached to an Indian regiment, she was fretting herself in a finishing school when Snow rescued her—Armistead dead of a fever in Calcutta. Snow took Georgie back to Sackville Street and put his housekeeper in charge of the girl. But Georgiana demanded a different kind of education.

From the very first, she haunted Snow’s surgery. When he set out on his wanderings through the back slums of London, she had insisted on riding in the coach. He refused to teach her medicine, but when the cook complained of dissections of poultry and the odd hoarding of beef organs—a heart, a liver carefully saved—he began to lend Georgie books from his own library. A satisfaction of curiosity, he thought, however improper for a woman. The girl talked so intelligently that before long she was observing his anatomizations at the College of Surgeons—suitably veiled, of course, and always accompanied by her maid. After the first maid swooned, she went alone.

Snow blamed himself. He knew he had ruined her—for what gentleman would marry such a girl? Georgiana was Eve, all apples and dangerous knowledge. No London medical board would certify a woman, so Snow sent her to school in Edinburgh. He shared his guilt with Patrick Fitzgerald—whose peculiar loneliness and unfortunate circumstances made him an eligible confidant, an expert at sorrow. Fitzgerald absolved John Snow of all sin.

Georgiana was singular among females, to be sure; the lass was what the fearful and the envious termed a bluestocking. But she was also magnificent. The full bloom of her mind animated her every word. If this was the terror of the Garden, Fitzgerald was already seduced, a worshipper of apples.

Then take her away. Take her anywhere. You did not keep her safe, Patrick.

She didn’t want me to, John.

It was John Snow who made the acquaintance of the Prince Consort.

That would have been in connexion with the Great Exhibition, ten years ago now. Albert, with his German love of science, had seized on this rising man, this ambitious doctor who kept meticulous records, who believed that statistics held the key to the spread of disease. Snow’s orderly method, his emphasis on fact rather than God or superstition, appealed to Albert’s clockwork mind. The Prince had never been a great one for Society; where an English peer might cultivate the Ancients, or turn a compliment for a lady, Albert preferred to analyze machines. He loved steam and turbines, factories and shipping; he worshipped gasworks and railways and guns. John Snow was one of the few who might be said to have understood him. It was probably Albert who urged the Queen to try Snow’s chloroform at the birth of Prince Leopold. The year was 1853. What Snow witnessed at Windsor then was to change all their lives.

Georgie’s head turned on the pillow; she gasped in pain. Fitzgerald had not prayed much—but perhaps he had gotten Snow’s attention, wherever he was.

“I’m going to be sick,” she said. And reached for the washbasin.

They brought in the dead coachman at twenty minutes past four.

“Neck’s broke,” the innkeeper said with satisfaction. “Wrung clean as a chicken’s. You were lucky to crawl away from that smash— but then, the Irish are born with the Devil’s own luck.”

Fitzgerald was leaning over the corpse, laid out on a scrubbed oak table in the public room—a man younger than himself, hatless but clothed in the scarlet livery of Windsor. The brown eyes were still staring; he closed them gently. “You found the spikes?”

“What spikes?”

The voice came from a tall figure looming behind the innkeeper, a deeper shadow in the darkness beyond the candle flame.

“A palisade of lashed poles, set out in the road to snare the horses.” Fitzgerald straightened. “And you, sir, would be . . . ?”

“Wolfgang, Graf von Stühlen.” He stepped into the light.

He was dressed for riding, in the polished boots and hacking jacket of a gentleman, a cloak flung carelessly over one shoulder. Gloves and a top hat under his arm, a luxuriant moustache and side-whiskers on an otherwise clean-shaven face. Had Fitzgerald never heard the name, he still would have known von Stühlen instantly: Wolfgang von Stühlen was one of the Prince Consort’s cronies, famous for the black canvas patch that covered his right eye. A duelist had winged him there, before dying. He was roughly Fitzgerald’s age—but looked younger, fitter. And far better bred. So much elegance at four o’clock in the morning made Fitzgerald feel like a peasant.

“I set off immediately when news was received of this . . . accident.” Coburg in his tone; a faint Oxonian drawl. “The Queen will be most displeased. Two horses dead. And a coachman.”

“Not to mention the shock to her guests,” Fitzgerald retorted. “You astonish me, Count. Such an errand’s beneath you, surely?”

A flash of white teeth, with no mirth behind it. “Nothing the Queen desires is beneath her loyal subjects. Particularly at such a time. You will have heard of the Consort’s passing?”

“Aye, that we have.”

Von Stühlen bowed; the Count’s gesture had the force of an insult. He said to the innkeeper: “You will see that the body is kept in order until the inquest. It must be held here. Send word when the panel is done.”

“Yes, yer honour.”

“But I saw the palisade myself,” Fitzgerald persisted, “when I quitted the wreckage. You’ll find the wounds from the spikes on the dead horses.”

“I found nothing,” the German returned, “but the evidence of my nose. The corpse reeks of whiskey. As, I must say, do you. If you will excuse me, Mr. . . . ?”

“Fitzgerald.”

“Ah. An Irish name, I collect?”

Fitzgerald’s fist clenched. “And what is that to the purpose?”

Von Stühlen’s lips pursed in amusement. “The Irish are a race known for wild imagination. No doubt you conjured up this . . . palisade. A phantasm of shock. Or deep drinking.”

He reached in his purse and tossed Fitzgerald a shilling. “Buy yourself another, by all means. And then may I suggest you leave Hampstead?”

“Von Stühlen! What are you doing here?”

Georgiana’s voice. She was poised on the stairs, swaying as though she might faint, a bandage tied round her head.

The German Count’s face flushed red, then drained white. “Miss Armistead,” he said with a sweeping bow, nothing of insult in it this time; “I might ask the same of you .”

I formed the habit of keeping a diary from a very little child. Or rather, two such volumes. Like most solitary children who are forced to protect themselves, I lived one life for public view and another entirely inside my head. The first journal was delivered up to my dear governess, Lehzen, at the close of every day—a compilation of doings, pallid emotions, pious sentiments on the subject of Family and Duty. Lehzen corrected my expressions in English or German or French, guided my conduct with a thorough review of my motives, reproved me when necessary—and supported me during times of trial.