My Name is Victoria

by Lucy Worsley

  ‘What do you mean, sir? … I’m afraid I do not know your name.’

  ‘His Royal Highness,’ he said insolently, ‘George of Cumberland.’

  I bowed.

  ‘Miss V. Conroy.’

  ‘Oh, you must be the daughter of that old dog, Sir John! I think I met your sister at some crush the other day. Pretty filly.’

  ‘Sir John Conroy is indeed my father,’ I said in a clipped voice, bowing my head again. I did not want to encourage him, but nor did I quite know how to extricate myself from his conversation. What with the hazy heat of the afternoon, and the weakness of my legs, he seemed to have some hypnotic power.

  ‘Well, no need to freeze me to Hell for it,’ he said more jovially. ‘A gal cannot help her own father, eh, even if he is a dirty old devil. Did they tell you why you couldn’t ride in the carriage with the king, and what happened to the last young lady?’

  ‘The last …?’ Disconcerted, I glanced around us, afraid that this crude and disrespectful talk would be overheard.

  ‘The last … girl they brought with them from Kensington Palace. It was Victoria’s sister, Feodora. A tasty piece she was. Half an hour in the carriage with the old king and Sir John was having kittens! He thought the king wanted to marry her, you see. And we all knew what palpitations THAT would cause.’

  His conversation seemed both obscure and yet strangely familiar. Victoria had mentioned Feodora to me. Was this a chance to find out more? My curiosity overcame my natural inclination to stay silent.

  ‘What … palpitations, sir?’ I asked in a whisper.

  ‘Well, if my uncle the king had married that Princess Feodora – and perfectly legitimate and royal she was too, no problem there – then old Uncle King Georgy-Porgy might have had a son, and that would have put Sir John Conroy’s nose quite out of joint. It wasn’t Sir John’s plan to have the king marry and produce an heir, no fear of that. If that happened, his plaything, the Princess Victoria, would be displaced from the throne!’

  ‘Sir … pray … you speak of my father.’ This was awful. I now felt almost desperate to make him stop with his torrent of slangy, scary information.

  ‘Well, my girl, you should know what sort of a man your father is,’ he said with a grunt. To my horror, he leaned in close to me, and I could see the blond hair rising and arching from his forehead, and the creasing of the smooth and lustrous skin round his eyes. He smiled. I realised, with a lurch to my stomach, that he reminded me of a dashing villain in a novel, someone who occupied a hinterland between brutish and handsome.

  ‘He wants his little pet on the throne and will stop at nothing to achieve it. Got rid of Feodora, Sir John did. Married her off to some German princeling, sent her away. She was a risk to the System.’

  I gasped.

  ‘Oh, it’s no secret, you know. Everyone in the family knows about the Kensington System. Your father’s machinations are common knowledge.’

  I sat frozen with horror, unable to collect myself or excuse myself, although I wanted to scream.

  He smiled. He had obviously noticed my discomfort at last. ‘Just calling a spade a spade, old girl,’ he said. ‘We go in for plain speaking in the House of Hanover, you know. Always have, always will.’

  I turned my face aside, for I could not bear to feel his eyes hot upon me. I knew that despite his crude attempts to shock and discomfort me, he was drinking in the sight of me. It was an uncomfortable, horrible feeling. My legs began to tremor under the pressure of resisting his gaze.

  I was saved by the clutch of a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Miss V!’ It was Madame de Späth. ‘I’ve brought you some lemonade. That carriage ride disagreed with you, did it not? Your Royal Highness, pray excuse me – you remember Madame de Späth from the household of the Duchess of Kent?’

  George failed to reply to her, just looked at her dumbly, stood up and swaggered off across the lawn.

  ‘Are you all right, Miss V?’ Späth asked solicitously, taking the seat he had vacated and whipping out a fan to waft welcome air on to my face as I panted and gasped like a fish. ‘He is not such a nice young man,’ she continued, squinting after my tormentor without waiting for my answer. ‘Very good-looking, but very stupid too. I know that you are not accustomed to the ways of young men. And I distrust both him and his father, Her Royal Highness’s uncle the Duke of Cumberland. Princess Victoria stands between them both and the throne. Our mistress the duchess takes these things a little too much to heart, but I have heard her say that the Cumberlands wish the Princess Victoria had not lived.’

  I leaned forward and put my head between my hands.

  ‘Oh, my dear, he has distressed you!’ she went on, turning her attention back to me. ‘I run on about politics, while you are not well! What can it be that he has said? Do tell me, my dear. I am old and wise.’

  I did not want to speak, but her currant-like eyes invited it so earnestly. ‘He questioned the Kensington Palace rules,’ I said, ‘for the princess’s … management.’

  ‘Ach, Sir John is so heavy-handed,’ Späth said grimly, almost as cross as I had ever heard her. ‘I wish he would remember …’ Her words petered out. A guilty look came on to her face, telling me she’d recalled that Sir John was in fact my own father.

  She could tell that she had made matters worse.

  ‘Oh, my dear, it is nothing,’ Späth said, drawing me close to her solid, motherly shape. ‘The king and his brothers hate the duchess, our mistress – and her comptroller, your father – quite unfairly, as she is only a defenceless widow in a foreign country with no family to care for her. They attack and seek to wound her, and those who care for her.’

  At this, I managed to look up at her and even to squeeze out a wan smile.

  ‘Us poor Germans!’ Späth sighed. ‘My mistress the duchess, Baroness Lehzen and I – no Britishers care for us or understand us. They say we are full of vice when we are as good as gold. It is our foreignness they hate. Us, they do not really know. They have never taken the trouble.’

  I placed my hand on my chest as if to show that I believed her words and intended to pat them into my heart. ‘The young man,’ I whispered, ‘merely sought to distress me with an unpleasant lie. I know that you and Lehzen and my father serve the duchess and the princess faithfully and well.’

  I believed that despite the corners he had to cut and the risks he had to take for the good of the princess, my father had her best interests at heart. Well, I wanted to believe it.

  Chapter 14

  A Dumpy, Plain Puss

  On the drive back Victoria was full of jubilation, full of chatter about what she had seen and done. She had driven with the king around the lake in the park, and he had given her a diamond bracelet. She showed it to me on her wrist, and I wondered if she would ever take it off.

  ‘He asked me to choose what the band should play,’ she said, a hectic red still suffusing her cheeks. ‘There were musicians all ready and waiting in the bandstand, you know, for when we should drive past. And quick as a flash I said I’d like to hear “God Save the King”! It was clever, was it not? And then he gave me the bracelet.’

  The ladies Späth and Lehzen greeted this with enthusiastic cries. But the duchess, who had been full of life on the way out, sat silent and chagrined. I suspected that she had not quite recovered from the king’s refusal to take her along for the carriage ride. I was glad that Victoria was in her bumptious mood, for no one noticed that my own silence was even deeper than usual.

  My head told me to set aside what Victoria’s handsome but cruel cousin had said, but my heart was not convinced. And he had indeed confirmed some part at least of what Victoria had said about the mysterious Feodora.

  The next day I asked Victoria to tell me more about her cousin. ‘Oh, old George!’ she said. ‘He’s quite bonkers. But then all my relations are. His father is the Duke of Cumberland, you know, and a very dark and sinister man.’ For a moment Victoria sat silent, and shivered. ‘But George is all right, if
he can forget for a minute or two that I am ahead of him in line for the throne. I wish I could just give it to him and have done with it.’

  ‘But did you not like being with your relatives yesterday in Windsor Park? One day you will be there, with them, the whole time.’

  She turned to me, and I saw her eyelashes flutter down over her cheek. She was thinking, and looking down at her hands.

  ‘Of course, I like it at the time,’ she said. ‘I like people noticing me and praising me. But then afterwards I feel so … fevered. I cannot sleep. In the end, Mother gave me some of her drops last night. I hate those drops.’

  She said it so simply and so sadly that I felt my own shoulders droop as if under a great weight of sorrow.

  Since the dreadful day when Lehzen had revealed Victoria’s position in line of succession, I had never heard her say anything positive about her future. I could see that she feared what was to come.

  ‘Anyway, you shall meet George again for yourself tomorrow,’ Victoria said, with new energy. ‘Apparently my mother invited him to tea when she saw him yesterday.’

  The news filled me with foreboding, and Victoria noticed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘He’s a great chump. He hasn’t been chumpish with you, has he, Miss V? Why are you set against him?’

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘I know!’ Victoria crowed. ‘Perhaps he’s fallen in love. Is he in love with you, Miss V?’

  It was such a ludicrous suggestion that I rolled my eyes. I managed to gather up enough spirits to biff her playfully over the head, and soon we were cheerfully arguing about whether we should pick our own flowers for tomorrow’s tea table for George Cumberland and his father, or whether Späth would decree that we could afford to have some bought.

  The next day, the shutters were opened for once in the big upstairs drawing room, the one we never normally used except for hide and seek. The covers were drawn off the red silk furniture, and the vast cavernous space lost its usual appearance of a junk shop. It almost looked like a drawing room in a palace – albeit a shabby and cobwebby one.

  Strong, blond George was accompanied on his visit by his father. The Duke of Cumberland turned out to be a distinguished-looking old gentleman. He stalked into the room like an elderly vulture. The hair was sparse around the sides of the dome of his head, but he had enormous mutton chop whiskers along the edges of his jaw.

  ‘Miss V. Conroy,’ murmured Lehzen, as she presented me, ‘companion to the young Princess Victoria.’

  He merely glanced at me and grunted. In his desultory look I saw no kindness, no interest. Instead, I glimpsed something buttoned-up and fierce. I was glad when he soon became ensconced with the German ladies and the duchess, telling them some long and boring story in a booming voice, while George wandered over to the window seat where I sat with Victoria and Dash.

  ‘Hello, Vicky,’ he said absently to the princess, swinging Dash up into the air. This gave me pause for thought, for I did not trust this young man, and I did not like to see Dash in his hands.

  ‘Fine little puppy!’ he said, seeming to examine Dash, though once again I felt his eyes passing over my face and figure. I looked down, trying to avoid his gaze.

  ‘I see you enjoyed your ride with the king the other day, you hussy!’ He spoke to Victoria in a loud, jesting tone, but she seemed not to mind. She twisted her diamond bracelet on her wrist. I could sense that she was blossoming in the warmth of some male attention.

  ‘Would have done you good to walk and lose a bit of fat,’ he muttered into Dash’s ears, so low that only I could hear. He did have half a point. We were now both exactly equal in height, but Victoria had also been putting on weight prodigiously. I think it was because they rationed her food so severely that she would wolf up anything she could get, including mountains of bread and butter. I darted a quick look at Victoria, but she seemed serene. She had not heard, or had not guessed his meaning.

  ‘George!’ she said. ‘I have had a fine idea. Have you ever looked at the chart showing how we are related? Lehzen showed it to us once.’

  ‘Oh, the old stud book, you mean?’ He was nonchalant. ‘What of it?’

  Now he was twisting Dash’s ears, and I could see that my darling was not happy with this, although he was too well behaved to complain.

  ‘Well, it shows that our fathers were brothers.’

  ‘Yes, of course I know that. Good God, it is almost like talking to the royal librarian. Your information is astonishingly full and accurate.’

  But she was smiling up at him, laughing at herself and showing pretty little dimples that were rarely to be seen on a normal day.

  ‘Well, you know that I am to be queen, as things stand, after Uncle William. And you could be king, you know, if you married me!’

  He came and stood close to us, Dash still in his arms, and he looked down at her. He was not smiling now, not even looking politely blank. I remembered what Madame de Späth had said about his wish to be king himself. Now I could see a dull red mount up the flesh of his throat, and the sickening-looking white of the knuckles that grasped Dash.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t imagine that I would ever marry such a dumpy, plain puss as you are. You are mad as a hatter to suggest it. I know why they keep you locked up here in this grim old prison of a palace. Madness, you know. It’ll come and get you soon enough.’

  He spoke quietly enough for our chaperones not to hear him, but precisely and clearly enough for both of us to be quite sure, this time, of his meaning. He wished to humiliate and to wound. I saw the tears start in Victoria’s eyes, and again she shrank back like a whipped dog.

  If I could not be brave on my own account, I could do it for my friend.

  ‘Sir!’ I said sharply. ‘Remember to whom you speak!’ And with that, Dash dug his sharp little teeth into our persecutor’s hand.

  Instantly there was rage and confusion, George shouting, Dash barking and the duchess demanding to know what was happening. I was on the floor, my arms wrapped around Dash, and Victoria was clinging to George’s arms, pulling him back while he attempted to aim at Dash a sharp and deliberate kick.

  ‘Sir!’

  It was a voice of doom, strong, deep and loud. With a single step, it seemed, my father had swooped forward and almost picked George up by the slack in the back of his coat between his shoulder blades. George’s great hammy hands hung, almost uselessly, by his sides, while his face got redder and redder, his eyes popped and his lips moved soundlessly, emitting only a faint pop-pop-pop of saliva.

  From where had my father come? We did not know. But I did know I had never been more grateful to see him in my life.

  The duchess was all flap and flutter, and came bustling over to see what had happened. But I think that all three of us realised simultaneously that the scene was not to our credit, and we subsided, each of us studiously avoiding the gaze of the others. My heart was thudding almost as loud as thunder. I felt full of mortification, but there was … something else there too, a sensation in my heart that was hard to identify.

  I got it at last. I had been brave! I had spoken up for my friend. I felt a righteous glow and looked up with the intention of speaking, of denouncing Cumberland once again.

  But at that very moment, my eye met my father’s, and what I read there instantly quelled any final thoughts of self-justification.

  George found himself dragged to the tea table, while Victoria and I were told to take Dash outside to run off his energy.

  ‘He is a liar, a liar!’ Victoria said to me under her breath as we walked too fast through the garden. Her fists were once again clenching and unclenching by her side, and her gaze was fixed on the path ahead. ‘I know I am not mad. I know it.’

  Neither of us had before dared to mention the word ‘madness’. It was too deep, too dangerous.

  ‘Believe nothing that he says,’ I said, linking my arm through hers and bringing her to a halt so that she would listen to me
. ‘And you are not plain,’ I said, loyally. ‘You are as pretty as a picture. I give him no credence whatsoever.’ It was true, for more reasons than Victoria knew, and it gave me great relief to say it out loud.

  Chapter 15

  A Night with the Princess

  Well, we had longed and prayed for something exciting to happen, and now it had. What foolish rashness!

  I missed our old peaceful life, and I also missed my friend. It seemed that Victoria’s spirit had ebbed away after our foray out from Kensington Palace into the world and its consequences. She had once again become the lonely little ghost that I had known upon my first arrival at the palace. Life returned to its familiar rhythm, but our circle felt smaller, the prison seemed tighter, the passage of time ever slower.

  ‘It is so stupid, the System!’ Victoria whispered to me one day, while Lehzen was taking stray seeds from our seedcake and feeding them one by one to the parrot. ‘Nobody wishes me ill. You saw that yourself when we rode to Windsor Castle. The people were pleased to see me. I’m not in any danger. I am locked up here for nothing.’

  I saw the nervous, strained look in her eyes and the anxious, repetitive movements of her hands.

  ‘Locked up,’ she muttered again, ‘locked up, locked up.’ She drew her knees up upon the sofa and hugged them. I sat down next to her, reaching out a hand towards her arm, but she whipped her head away. ‘Lehzen,’ she screeched suddenly and shrilly. ‘Put the cover on. He’s looking at me again.’

  Lehzen turned from the parrot in some surprise, and we both stared at the miserable figure bent almost double on the sofa.

  ‘That was not a ladylike way to speak,’ Lehzen said, after a pause, in her measured tones. I expected a retort from Victoria, but this time none came.

  Not for the first time, I wondered if the risk to Victoria’s mental health came not from her grandfather, but from the System itself. I wondered how I could ever find the strength to raise such a concern with my father. But then, I was beginning to feel that it was my duty to do so. The words that expressed my fears fought their way up my throat each night when I made my report, but still I swallowed them down again. Perhaps tomorrow, I told myself.