Стефани Баррон: A Flaw in the Blood

The state of the Irish in London in 1861 is taken up in such works as Exiles of Erin: Irish Immigrants in Victorian London, by Lynn Hollen Lees (Cornell University Press, 1979), A Survey of the Irish in England, 1872, edited by Alan O'Day (The Hambledon Press, 1990), and Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England, by Martin J. Weiner (Cambridge University Press, 2004). As always Leon Radzinowicz's multivolume History of English Criminal Law also proved invaluable (Stevens & Sons Ltd., 1948).

Prince Leopold grew up under the obsessive shadow of his mother, who attempted throughout his short life to prevent him from entering society or the world for which his intelligence and charm clearly fitted him. Her most telling comment about the boy was expressed in a letter to his sister Vicky—that even the death of a good child who suffered illness was preferable to the healthy life of a son (like Bertie, the Prince of Wales), whose morals and character must always disappoint. Leopold died at age twenty-eight in the town of Cannes he loved so well, of a cerebral hemorrhage caused by falling on a flight of stone stairs. Something of his life and personality may be gleaned from Louisa Bowater's account of her time with the young prince, The Journals of Lady Knightley of Fawsley, edited by Julia Cartwright (John Murray, 1915), and in Prince Leopold: The Untold Story of Queen Victoria's Youngest Son, by Charlotte Zeepvat (Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1998).

Princess Alice did indeed marry Louis of Hesse, in a July, 1862, ceremony at Osborne House—and died at the age of thirty-five from diphtheria. Her son Fritzie—godson to her brother Leopold—died of hemophilia as a toddler in 1873. Her daughter, Alicky, married Tsar Nicholas II of Russia—and passed hemophilia to her son, the tsarevitch Alexis. The Tsar and his entire family were executed by firing squad at Ekaterinburg in 1918.

Hemophilia is carried in a recessive gene, and it appears to have passed out of the British royal family as of the twenty-first century. The questions and mysteries of the past—including the source of Victoria's untraceable disease—remain.

Stephanie Barron

Denver, Colorado, 2007

Stephanie Barron is the author of nine bestselling Jane Austen mysteries. She lives in Colorado, where she is at work on her next novel of historical suspense, The White Garden, which Bantam will publish in 2009.