I, Victoria

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  On the night of the 6th he slept in his own room, if slept is the right word. Jenner was with him all night, and Clark came and went (his own wife was desperately ill, and he was much distracted, poor man). On the morning of the 7th I went in at eight o’clock while the doctors withdrew to discuss the case, and found him quiet for the moment, only looking so exhausted my heart wept for him. I sat down beside his bed, and leaned over to kiss his brow. The blue of his eyes seemed to have smudged into his eye sockets, and his cheeks were hollow; but he looked at me with recognition. It was like a window opening on to a prison: he gazed out at me hopelessly, and yet with appeal, as though I might bring him out into the sunlit land where I still lived.

  ‘How long will it go on?’ he said miserably.

  ‘Not much longer,’ I said. ‘A week perhaps, then you will be well.’

  ‘What made me ill? Where did it come from?’

  ‘It was overwork, as much as worry and annoyance.’

  He sighed, moving his head a little, as though to get away from something. ‘It is too much,’ he muttered. ‘You must speak to the ministers.’

  ‘I am doing so,’ I said. I had been discovering in the last few days how much work he had always saved me. ‘But it was not only that – it was your own concerns as well. All your societies and projects – the Horticultural Garden – it was all too much.’

  He seemed to have wandered away while I spoke. Now he said, ‘At dawn, when the birds started singing, I thought I was at the Rosenau. I kept my eyes shut, hoping to make it so.’

  ‘We’ll go there when you’re well,’ I said. ‘For a visit. We’ll arrange to see Vicky again, like last year.’

  He didn’t seem to have heard me. ‘When I was there last year, I knew I was seeing it for the last time. Ernst said to me, why are you crying, and I said, because I shall never see all this again.’ He blinked his eyes slowly, as though blinking away tears, but he had not enough moisture in him for crying. ‘What was I talking of?’ he said suddenly.

  I wanted to give his thoughts a better direction, so I said, ‘The birds singing.’

  He looked at me blankly. ‘When the window is open you can hear them quite plainly. And the fountain, too.’ He has gone back to the Rosenau again, I thought sickly. His childhood is all to him, and I am nothing. But then he smiled faintly and said, ‘I told you so, didn’t I, the very first night we slept there, that we would have a fountain on the terrace, and listen to it in bed.’

  ‘Yes, at Osborne,’ I said gladly. ‘Oh, darling one, get well quickly so that we can go there again, and sleep in our own dear bed in our own room!’

  ‘There, oh there, my beloved, would I with thee go,’ he whispered. His hand stirred on the cover, and I took it, and felt it press mine feebly. ‘Gutes Weibchen.’ He closed his eyes and sighed, and I stayed still for a while, my heart in a painful state of uncertainty as to whether these were good signs or bad. Then Clark and Jenner came in, and Jenner made a sign to me that he wanted to speak to me outside. I got up, but Albert did not seem to notice my leaving him; and as Clark bent over him again, I walked out into the passage, and along to my dressing-room, and Jenner came after and closed the door behind him.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ he said as I turned to face him, and I saw what was in his eyes, and wanted to scream, No! Get away from me with your executioner’s face! Take off your black cap! I won’t hear it! But no sound escaped me. ‘Your Majesty,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you that this morning a rash has appeared on the Prince’s person. It is an indication – it is the confirmation of what we have been on the watch for from the beginning.’ He scanned my face for comprehension but I gave him none, setting it stonily against the doom he wanted to pronounce. ‘His Highness has the low fever, or bowel fever as it is sometimes called.’

  ‘Typhoid,’ I said. The word came out of my mouth as though summoned, and I clapped my hand over my lips, but too late. It had been let loose.

  Jenner stared kindly at the rest of my face. ‘Your Majesty must not despair. We know all about this disease now. We know exactly how to treat it, and the symptoms are all favourable. Our judgement is that His Highness began the sickness on the 22nd of November, and since it takes a month to run its course, he should be well again in another fortnight.’

  He talked a little more, but I could not listen. The agony of hope and despair went on, romping about inside me, and how to contain or reconcile them I did not know.

  The next day Albert asked to be moved into the Blue Room (which was also known as the King’s Room, because it was the one in which Uncle King and Uncle William had both died). It was Sunday again. Löhlein moved his things and the bed was made up, and also a wheeled day-bed, since he sometimes preferred a sofa; but much of the time he would not lie down, only wandered as he had done before from room to room. I followed him with eau-de-Cologne and smelling salts, and sometimes he knew me and sometimes not. He had fits of irritability, when he would rattle a door-handle, or call for General Bruce, or shout that I had lost an important paper. Once he asked Alice to play for him, and she sat down at the piano and played Ein Feste Burg until he called enough; another time he asked for all the looking-glasses to be covered up, because the reflections frightened him: ‘It is like Holyrood Palace,’ he said. But the worst moments were when he came back to himself and looked at me, not unsmiling and unrecognising, but with those eyes of pleading from within his prison. ‘Frauchen,’ he would whisper, as if his gaoler had looked away just for long enough for him to speak that one word to me, to tell me he loved me still, to tell me he could not get back to me. I suffered for him in his torment, but if there had been a way for me to release him, I could not have done it. I could not wish death for him. I needed him so much, even blindly wandering. I needed so much to go on hoping he would get better.

  On Friday the 13th he did not wander, but lay gasping, eyes open and fixed. Jenner said there might be congestion of the lungs. I went out on to the Terrace for a breath of air, and walked up and down the pavement in the grey of a bitter December afternoon; bare black trees and dull grass stretching away, and wateriness of mist clinging to the distances. Will it ever be spring again? I wondered. I thought of primroses at Osborne, where they grew in the woods so thickly one could gather basketsful in just a few minutes. I remembered Lord M. saying that he looked forward in retirement to seeing the changing seasons again. It was on this very terrace I had said goodbye to him in the starlight, and he had held his head away so that his tears would not fall on my hands. He had been dead these thirteen years, died sad and neglected because I had my new love who was everything to me, and did not need him any more. And suddenly the tears came, and I wept for him, and for me, and for all who love, because there is nothing else you can do about love but to suffer it, and to cry.

  While I was walking, there was a crisis, a sinking, with such shiverings that Jenner thought it was the end, and advised Alice, who was with him (she was always there, good, gentle Alice) to send for Bertie. The telegraph was worded so carefully that Bertie and Bruce did not properly understand, and went to a dinner engagement before catching the last train. They arrived at three in the morning, smelling of fog and cigars and wine and full of cheerful, outside conversation – a sudden gust of normality, of the world beyond our prison, painful as nostalgia, like the smell of cloves and cinnamon when Christmas is two months past.

  By then Albert had rallied, and was warm and comfortable, rational but very weak; but Bertie had known nothing about the illness and was shocked to the core by what he found. Alice and I had been sitting by the bed, and I was holding his hands. They gave him brandy every half hour to stimulate him. Kind Jenner said that he had seen worse cases recover, that he never gave up hope in the case of fever; if the Prince lasted this crisis, all might yet be well. I went out to Bertie, and found the poor boy trembling and weeping. ‘I didn’t know, Mamma! I didn’t know! Why didn’t you tell me?’ And he flung himself into my arms and sobbed.

  I was t
rying to hold back my own tears. ‘We mustn’t despair. Jenner says there is ground to hope the crisis is over.’

  ‘He must get better, he must!’ Bertie cried, muffled, into my shoulder. ‘I can’t bear it if he dies.’

  He wanted me, like a child, to tell him all would be well; but I was more child than him, and had no reassurance in me. ‘However frightened we are, we won’t give up hope,’ I muttered. And then he lifted his head from my shoulder, and the feeling of his arms around me changed: he was no longer clinging to me, but holding me up.

  ‘I will help you, Mamma,’ he said bravely. ‘I will help you every way I can.’

  ‘My dear boy, I know you will,’ I said, very much touched, and I kissed him, and felt him shyly kiss me back. Poor little Bertie! Poor lost soul!

  I went to lie down in my own room for a while, and the messages that came every hour were increasingly hopeful. At seven I got up and went to the Blue Room. The watery greyness of yesterday was gone; it was a bright morning, and the sun was shining – a day for hope, for renewal. The door of the room was open, and I saw the sad look of night-watching, the candles burnt down to their sockets and the group of doctors gathered round the bed, with anxious faces and shadowed eyes. There were more of them now – Sir Henry Holland, Dr Watson and Dr Brown had swelled their ranks in the last two days. I walked past them to the bed, and saw my darling was awake, and my heart lifted. He’s better, I thought. His face was calm, serene, and lit by the morning sun his skin looked almost transparent, as it had done in his youth – like the delicate leaves of ivory the miniaturists paint on. He had never looked so beautiful; his eyes were softly bright, and seemed to gaze on objects unseen by me but which gave him pleasure. ‘Hertzliebste,’ I whispered, ‘wie geht es dir?’ But he didn’t seem to hear me, or see me, only watched those bright visions, and almost smiled.

  Through the calm, bright morning hope bloomed, a rose coaxed out by winter sunshine, beautiful but hopelessly fragile out of its season. The bed was wheeled through to the other room, which was warmer in the morning. Jenner and Clark both said it was a decided rally, but they remained anxious about his breathing, which was too rapid. But in the afternoon the fair sky clouded over, the sunshine disappeared, and it grew very cold. The winter rose was pinched and drooped. When the evening came and the lamps were lit, I knew he was sinking. My darling’s face grew dusky, his breathing heavy; I leaned over him and whispered, ‘Es ist kleines Frauchen,’ and saw he knew me. He turned his head towards me, and then laid it against my hand and sighed – oh, what a sigh! – drawn up shuddering out of the roots of him, not a sigh of pain, but as if he knew he was leaving me, and the leaving was hard, so very hard!

  I felt myself trembling on the brink of tears, and went into the next room to compose myself. I sat on the floor for a while, so sunk in despair I did not think I could ever get up again. How could he leave me? How could he? But it had been going on so long, I was numbed to it, I had begun to think the end would never arrive. It was hope of a kind, I suppose.

  A clock struck out in the corridor. I heard it too late to count the numbers. A shape moved on the edge of my vision and I lifted my head. It was Alice, standing in the doorway, slender as a wand, faithful as love itself, her neat head bent. ‘Mamma,’ she said, ‘come back. It is time.’

  No, oh no! Let it not be! Don’t take him from me, dear God! He is my life, I cannot live in the world without him!

  I went to the bed, I knelt down and took his hand; and it was already cold, smooth and limp as though the marks of his occupancy had been washed away by the ebbing tide. Oh, yes, this is death! I thought in agony. I had seen it before. The faint, quiet breaths drew in and out, like a quiet tide lapping, going farther out and farther out, so gently. How long did we kneel there, listening, counting out the last breaths? When I heard half past ten strike distantly he was still here, though far away from me. And then there were two long breaths close together, and no more. He had gone. All, all was over.

  11th December 1900

  THEY SAY Charles I walked and talked for an hour after his head was cut off. I have done better than that. I have done it for almost forty years.

  There is a numbness that invades one at first – a merciful sleeping of the senses, sent by God to quiet the pain of the amputation. For some days I walked and slept, tried to work, and did not know what I felt, beyond bewilderment. All my instincts kept trying to go back to him, and I went again and again to the Blue Room, like a lost dog returning to the last place it saw its master. But he was not there. I knew that quite clearly. Later, much later, I was able to feel that his spirit was near me and watching over me – I have felt it even more strongly of late – but in the beginning there was nothing of him at all, only the void where he had been. Perhaps newly freed spirits rush very far away to begin with, rejoicing in their release from the restraints of the body, and return close to earth only long afterwards when they have refreshed themselves.

  But when the numbness wore off, oh, then the anguish began! How could I be alive after what I had witnessed? I who prayed daily that we might die together and I not survive him? I who felt, when clasped in those blessed arms and held tight in the sacred hours of the night – when the world seemed to be only ourselves – that nothing could part us. I had felt so secure, and repeated so often, ‘God will protect us.’ I never dreamed of the physical possibility of being parted. Now I might weep or be calm, pray or rave, vow whatever future virtue or service to God I might, but it would change nothing. He was gone, and would never come back, and the awful, awful finality of it desolated me.

  I don’t remember by whose will it was that we went, five days later, to Osborne. Perhaps it was Alice’s idea – she did everything for me in those first weeks, tender little nurse. It was a long, dark journey, and I remember rain and storm and a wild crossing, but that may be what was inside me rather than outside me. But that night I was again in the great bed in our own bedroom in Osborne House, which he had designed, with all the little comforts he had thought of; and settling my head on the pillow I turned instinctively to put myself into his arms, just for an instant before I remembered again. That was the hardest thing of all, those continual tiny lapses of memory which caused me a thousand times a day to rediscover the agony of the truth!

  Now I would have to go to bed and get up alone – for ever. Oh, I was driven mad with desire and longing! I was as much in love with him as if we had married yesterday, and I wanted his warm body beside me; I wanted to touch him. I lay looking up at the polished headboard, and at the brass lever he had installed, to lock the door for our privacy when we made love. I should never need it now. I folded my arms across my breast and wept hopelessly – slept at last – woke in the morning from a brief oblivion to the vague, confused sensation that something bad had happened. And then the sickening, crushing weight of realisation rolled on to me like a stone. How many such wakings since? How can any human heart bear it?

  As the days passed, oh, so drearily, I began to think that perhaps God would not make me stay here without him; perhaps I should soon die and be with him again. The longing moulded itself into a conviction, and I set myself to put my affairs in order and ensure my darling’s last wishes were fulfilled before I left. Alice’s marriage to Louis – that had been Albert’s ardent desire: that should take place without delay. Tuesday the 1st of July was the date, and the dining-room at Osborne the place – just the immediate families, and the Archbishop reading the service most beautifully, standing below the Family Picture, as we always called it – Winterhalter’s group of 1847, in which Albert’s outstretched hand seemed to be offering its blessing to his darling child. I allowed the girls and the Household to go into half-mourning for the day; Alice wore white satin and gauze and my wedding lace; I wore black. She used Albert’s room to dress. I thought, She is putting on her wedding gown in her beloved papa’s room, while I am having my widow’s cap adjusted. It is a dreadful dream! I managed to keep myself from weeping until the service wa
s over, but Baby kept whispering loudly weren’t we going to wait for Papa? and Affie sobbed all through. Poor Alice, it was more like a funeral than a wedding; but she and Louis were happy together. And she is with him now.

  Then there was Bertie’s marriage to Alix to arrange – a sacred duty, I told Bertie, left to us by his father to perform; and he, grieving, believing he had helped to kill that beloved one, had no more resistance (which was fortunate, for I could not have forced him if he had been really unwilling). Vicky was charged to explain to Alix and her parents about my poor Boy’s temptation and fall: I would have all open and above-board. But we need not have worried about their scruples: the future King of England was a prize not to be passed up by a penniless princeling, even if he was heir to the throne of Denmark.

  In September of 1862 I went over to Belgium to inspect her for myself, and found a ravishingly pretty girl in a simple black dress, with her golden-brown hair taken back off her fine forehead and falling in curls over her shoulders. I have always been in love with beauty, and hers was angelic. She was besides a very good girl, not clever or well educated, but principled and dutiful, and with a sweet temper and warm affectionate heart. She told me how very sorry she was never to have met Albert, and that it had long been her dearest wish to become his daughter-in-law. I thought she would do very well, if she learned a little firmness and statecraft from me. Bertie came a few days later, and after four hours alone with her, he proposed and was accepted. Thank God! they fell in love with each other in those four hours, for I would not have wished to see a reluctant girl take on an indifferent boy. They were married in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on the 10th of March 1863, and both seemed radiantly happy. The Archbishop complained that we should not be having a wedding during Lent, but I told him sharply that in my young day there was no Lent! It’s a High Church thing, an invention of the Puseyites. Keeping Lent does not make you a better Christian: why, the Russians make a great fuss about it, and look at them!