Стефани Баррон: A Flaw in the Blood

Dedicated to the strongest women I know—

Jo, Pat, Liz, and Cathy.

Love you.

I have long been seduced by the possibilities of the past: the secrets buried there, the personalities lost to time. The support of an editor equally bewitched by these things is of immeasurable importance, and I am grateful for the keen mind and exacting standards of Kate Miciak, Executive Editor, Bantam Books. Kate is the sort of person who will devour an entire library of reference works merely to edit a manuscript, and our conversations about Victoria’s life and world shaped this book.

Thanks are also due to my copyeditor at Bantam, Lorie Young, whose thoroughness and patience are endless; and to Molly Boyle, assistant editor, who ensured that every i was doted and every t crossed. Sharon Propson shepherds my work through the slings and arrows of publicity’s fortune, and I am grateful for her unquenchable enthusiasm.

Rafe Sagalyn, of the Sagalyn Literary Agency, has borne with me for more than fourteen years. Rafe and his dedicated team make it possible for me to write—and for that, I owe them the world.

My family endured endless lectures on sewer systems, nineteenth-century prostitution, medical ignorance, and the state of the Irish in Victorian England—without committing periodic acts of violence or moving out. Thanks, Mark, for putting up with the madwoman in the attic; and to Sam and Steve, for loving words as much as I do.

Coburg, 1 October 1860

When the agony of the state dinner was over and his wife was preoccupied with the other women, he ceased to talk quite so feverishly before the crowd of people who’d come to the Rosenau to see them. He knew his bright chatter had fooled nobody. They were all frightened by his brush with death. The telegrams had been pouring in all day, from Paris and London and North America. He’d fallen when he’d jumped from the run-away carriage and his nose and chin were bruised. The others ignored his bandages, just as they ignored his near-hysteria, his desperate grasping at normalcy.

He abandoned his brother and the others as soon as he decently could and avoided the noise of the grand saloon altogether, taking a side passage away from the public rooms toward the rear of the palace. He had grown up in the Rosenau and he loved it better than any place on earth; it was here he’d been happiest, despite his father’s rages and his brother’s reckless pursuit of pleasure,the serving maids thrust up against the ancient walls, their skirts fanning around Ernest’s thighs. Ernest was the duke now, and the old people were buried with their secrets; he, Albert, was forty-one and king of England in all but name.

He mounted a back staircase and without hesitation made for the nursery wing. The noise of the chosen world receding behind him.

As he hurried along the corridor, a phrase recurred in his jangling brain: Mein letztes Stündlein gekommen wäre. My last hour had come. He would write it to his daughter, Vicky, who’d already gone back to Berlin and thus would have been spared the horror of his death; it was what he’d felt overwhelmingly as the carriage swayed toward the railroad crossing, the horses maddened by his whip. Death waited beyond the crossing bar.

At the schoolroom door he hesitated. There was no fire in the grate, but a single candle burned in a sconce on the far wall. Too late to step back or move on; too late to pretend, as he had for most of his life, to be someone else. A dim silhouette in candlelight; the man turned.

“My dear boy. I thought you might come.”

Stockmar; of course it was Stockmar. Of all the teachers in Albert’s life,he was the least official and the most trusted. The baron was seventy, now, and refused to travel to England even for Albert; but if any man was responsible for the Consort’s fate, it was he.

Albert slumped down in one of the hard schoolroom chairs and waited.

“You’ve had a narrow escape.”

“Yes.”

The old man shuffled to the door, closed it with a palsied hand. “You know what they’re saying? Not to your face, of course—but in the back rooms and alleyways of Coburg? How could as fine a whip as the Consort lose control of his horses ?”

“Perhaps I’m less of a whip than they thought.”

“That’s what we’ll tell them, of course.” Stockmar nodded. “We’ll put it down to too many years in England, where nobody at all understands horseflesh. Even a lie as implausible as that is preferable to admitting suicide.”

Albert said nothing. He gingerly touched the bandages on his nose. Stockmar sank heavily into another chair. The two of them faced each other as they had thirty years ago, when the subjects at issue were also duty and character.

“Well? Are you going to tell me about it? Or do you want the old man to go away and leave you alone with your demons?”

Albert shrugged. “What is there to tell? I had a stupid accident. I’m thankful to be alive.”

“I’ve never known you to drive four-in-hand without so much as a groom up behind you.That’s another thing people will talk about. Why did he go out alone ?”

“Precisely to be alone! And I don’t give a damn what people say!”

The outburst was uncharacteristic; Albert was never uncontrolled. He cultivated self-restraint the way other men pursued God. Stockmar raised one eyebrow and sat stiffly, arms folded.

“There was ... a waggon at the crossing bar,” the younger man relented. “A farmer, waiting for the train to go by. I couldn’t avoid hitting him, so—”

“—So you jumped, rather than kill the man outright. That’s like your kindness. Even in the depths of despair you’d think of the poor fool you might take with you. Jump, and the horses would be bound to veer of. But it must have been disappointing, all the same. You were so close, weren’t you? The train. The impact. The blessed release.”

He was right; as always, Stockmar was right—and Albert felt himself sway with sudden dizziness and relief, as he had when some childhood peccadillo was discovered and all that remained was atonement. He had wanted death. He had gone out that morning hunting for it. And the bitterness as he plummeted through the air, the impact of the ground, had been as brutal as a public flogging. Disappointment didn’t even begin to describe it.

He rose and paced before the cold hearth. “Christian, what am I to do?”

“Consider the farmer and his waggon to be signs from Providence,” Stockmar suggested. “—Who, in Its infinite wisdom, prefers you alive to burning in Hell.”

“And if I already burn, here on earth?”

“Endure it for your wife’s sake. And that of England. They both need you.”

“My wife!” Albert barked with sudden laughter. “Victoria!”

“You’ve always loved her.” Stockmar stared at him, the beginning of a frown creasing his brow. “My dear boy—what has broken your heart so completely?”

Albert turned. “That Hell you spoke of, old friend. It comes to men like me in the form of a paradox: the lie you cannot accept, versus the truth you cannot utter. In that kind of world, Death is the only honourable choice.”

“I was wrong,” Stockmar said. “You have been in England too long.”

Albert drew his chair close to the baron’s ear. He began to talk. And late into the Coburg night, Stockmar listened.