by Lucy Worsley
There was great feeling, even menace, in her voice.
The start she had given me, and the shame I felt at being caught spying, began to prick me in my armpits. I dropped my chin to my chest and curtseyed low and silently, effacing myself as much as I could. I felt the duchess’s eyes boring into my back as I retreated along the passage to the stairs, and heard the quiet click as she slipped into her daughter’s room and closed the door.
In an agony of doubt, I forced myself to go back upstairs and wait. A few minutes passed. Eventually I could bear it no longer. I sat down and quickly wrote a letter to my sister about our quiet doings in Ramsgate, describing the weather and the little fishing boats and the band that had played on the esplanade. As soon as it was finished – and it was very short – I sealed it up.
‘Off to post my letter!’ I called out unusually loudly to anyone who might be within earshot. Nobody replied. I almost ran down the hill to the post office.
‘Has this morning’s post left for London?’ I asked the clerk, breathless.
He shook his head. I quickly handed over two envelopes: one addressed to Jane, and the second to Dr Clark. It contained another letter I had written, begging him to come at once.
The remaining hours of that day seemed to last for centuries. I did not play the piano for fear of disturbing Victoria. I did not offer to accompany my father on his errands in the town, for I felt completely out of sympathy with him. I did not eat at luncheon, for my stomach was too tight and tense with worry to take any food.
As evening approached, storm clouds from the west flew over us and began to race out to sea. After tea, but before the lighting of the lamps, I heard a great commotion start up in the apartment below me. I heard the sound of furniture overturned, and Victoria’s voice shouting, ‘No! No! I won’t!’
I froze. The book I’d been reading slipped quietly from my hands, and I half rose from my seat. Fixing myself into this unnatural position seemed to help me to listen intently. What new drama was this? I longed yet feared to know. Plucking up all my courage, I stepped silently to the door and to the head of the stairs. But even as I placed my hand upon the banister, my father came surging up the stairs like a great, unstoppable wave breaking over the beach below. I could see at once that he was furiously, devilishly angry.
‘Papa! Is the princess worse?’
He looked at me like a madman, panting, his hair disarranged and his waistcoat gaping open. ‘The … little … monster!’ he said in a low and menacing tone. ‘She does not know what is good for her.’
I shrank back against the wall, clutching at my breast. ‘What has happened?’ I whispered.
But he charged on, like a bull, into our sitting room. Its door hammered home, and he had not said another word.
I had to see her. I had to. I went on boldly down the stairs and tapped at Victoria’s door. Fuelled now by fear, I did not wait one instant for a reply. This time I went straight in.
She was curled up in bed, weeping as if her heart would break. At once I wished I had come sooner. Who could deny that this girl was seriously ill? Her skin had a greenish tinge, and there was a heavy, unpleasant smell in the air.
‘Miss V!’ she said weakly. ‘Look what he tried to make me sign. And he threatened to … beat me, and worse.’
There was a pencil lying on the cabinet by her bed, but I could not see what she meant.
‘On the floor.’ She mouthed the words, seeming to lack the strength to say them properly.
I stooped. In the dim light I had missed it, but there was a sheet of paper lying half hidden under the cabinet, crumpled and partly ripped.
I tilted it to the window the better to read it. It was covered with writing, but my eyes were drawn to the final sentence, where a space had been left for a signature.
I, Victoria, consent to make Sir John Conroy my only private secretary upon my ascension to the throne, and to compensate him therefore, and to rely upon his judgement.
‘He tried to … make … you sign this?’ In my horror, I forgot for a moment her condition and sat on the edge of her bed. I was trembling, burning with rage.
‘Yes!’ she wailed, now covering her face with her hands. ‘I defied him, Miss V. I defied him. What will he do now?’
Be calm! a voice said inside me. Don’t let your rage out now. Think of Victoria. How can you best help her?
I took her hand. ‘Victoria, whatever happens, Lehzen and I will look after you, you know. You are not in danger while we are here.’
‘But you cannot always be here,’ she whimpered, ‘and he may send you away.’
‘What about …’ I tried to find a delicate way to ask. ‘What about your mother?’
‘She was with him!’ Now Victoria’s sobs wracked her body. ‘She wanted it too! She cannot withstand him; she does not know how. He wants to be a king without a name! And she lets him do it! She is too weak … too weak. Lehzen says –’ here she hiccupped – ‘that a queen may be wicked, but it is inexcusable to be weak.’
I looked down at her little body in the bed.
‘You may be feeling weak, Victoria,’ I said, ‘especially now when you are not well. But on the inside you are immensely strong. You are the strongest person I know.’
With that I wrapped my arms around her. Together we lay like that until I could hear the hammering of her heart slowly subside.
‘I’m not the strongest person,’ she whispered at last. ‘That’s you. You are stronger than me.’ I hushed her and calmed her, and gradually I believe she fell asleep.
Darkness fell and the wind rose, and the house began to stir with the sounds of dinner.
Eventually, the bedchamber door creaked open. A long yellow shaft of light from the passage fell upon the carpet, and outlined against it was a tall, dark figure.
‘Is that him come back?’ I had thought Victoria to be sleeping, but she was all too wide awake, and I could hear the fear in her voice.
‘No, no,’ I said, as if to a much smaller child. ‘It’s Lehzen. Lehzen loves you.’
She looked at us, but with her back to the light we could not see her expression.
‘An express messenger has arrived,’ she said. ‘Dr Clark is coming. He writes that he thinks it might be typhoid fever. Miss V, you are in danger of catching it. You must get up.’
There was silence. I did not move; I cared not for any fevers. My shoulders sagged in relief, and I also felt Victoria collapse a little deeper in my arms, tension leaving her body. But a little core of my heart remained anxious.
Yes, the doctor was coming. Yet it was for less than this that Madame de Späth had been sent away.
Chapter 22
A Revelation of Brutality
It was typhoid. Dr Clark said so at once. He administered strong drugs, and Victoria’s hair was shaved off from her head. Great hanks of it had fallen out anyway. A stern nurse was engaged, and the boarding-house maids forbidden from Victoria’s room. All the bedding was burned.
The duchess was a broken woman, full of fears and distress and remorse at not having called for Dr Clark sooner. Even my father had nothing to say about the breach of the System. For it was clear, during that long and terrible night before Dr Clark arrived, that our princess had been on the very brink of death.
The following morning, once Dr Clark had seen Victoria, I tried to raise the matter with my father. ‘I hope I did right,’ I said tentatively. ‘The princess’s health, you know, is always on my mind.’
‘As it should be,’ he muttered. But he turned back to his paper and refused to engage with me any further. I turned away too, in some disgust. We both knew, even if he wouldn’t admit it, that I had done the right thing.
Morning after morning, as the convalescence progressed, I went downstairs to relieve an ashen-faced Lehzen from her night watch. Our governess was usually coughing like an old tobacco-stained tar of the sea. I sat by Victoria’s bed all day, sometimes reading to her, sometimes just watching the waves through the window. I did
not catch the fever. I could feel the strength ebbing from my legs, but that was from long periods of sitting and watching. I would not have left for the world.
The duchess would swoop in and out of the room, once clutching a bunch of unseasonal, hothouse roses and thrusting them into a vase on the mantelpiece and going into raptures about their colour and scent. But on the next occasion she was crying and wringing her hands, and asking God to curse her for being such a mad, bad mother.
The two of them seemed sometimes almost to forget my presence, and Victoria would sometimes berate her mother for getting through her ‘drops’ too fast, while the duchess would castigate her daughter for not showing her enough affection.
‘How I have suffered! What agonies a mother may experience I never knew until now!’ she would say, trying to clasp Victoria to her bosom. Victoria’s little shorn head made her look like an early Christian martyr cut down from a cross and being consoled by a buxom Mary Magdalene.
Victoria would groan out loud. As the days passed, though, as the medicine worked and as she grew stronger, I could tell that she was sometimes groaning just for show and for attention, as her mother would have done in the same situation. If Victoria spent less time with her mother and more with Lehzen and me, she might snap out of such antics. But it was not to be.
One day the duchess pushed her daughter too far, by marvelling at the generosity of my own father in procuring a little pony cart so that Victoria and I could take some gentle carriage exercise. ‘So kind!’ the duchess enthused. ‘So thoughtful of Sir John!’
‘He is only doing it for his own ends!’ Victoria cried crossly. ‘I will not ride in his cart. And neither will Miss V.’
‘Victoria!’ The duchess threw open her arms in a beseeching gesture. ‘How can you be so ungrateful to the man who has almost been a father to you?’
This enraged Victoria. With a toss of the head, she turned over to stare out of the window, presenting only a thin shoulder blade to the room. ‘He is nothing like a father to me,’ she hissed in a venomous whisper. ‘Every night I pray that my own father might still be alive, come back to protect me and look after me.’
This in turn enraged the duchess, and for the want of a better audience, she turned to me. ‘The Duke of Kent,’ she said tremulously, ‘is far, far better in his grave. Never compare Sir John, who is an angel, to the demon duke. No one knows this better than myself, who has lived under the same roof as both of them. The duke’s violent tempers, his extravagant ways … no one knows how I suffered. When my so-called husband realised that the government had voted us such a small living allowance, how he lashed out!’
She bowed her head and her chest heaved. I perceived that for once this was genuine grief on her part, and she was speaking of something that really had wounded her.
‘He thought that marriage to me would bring a bigger allowance; it was only for that that he cast aside his French actress lady friend and wooed me. And when he realised his mistake, he … hurt me.’
Victoria had turned back to us both, all agog. But then her features relaxed. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘You are exaggerating as usual, Mother.’
‘He was a violent man!’ The duchess was mopping her cheeks now with her handkerchief and breathing heavily. ‘The Duke of Kent was a violent man. Did you never wonder why he left the army? Where he had occupation and salary? Did you never wonder why we were left at Kensington Palace with no money and nothing to do?’
‘Well, surely it was beneath his dignity to have to … work.’ Victoria said the words with such scorn that I almost laughed. Of course leisure was a fine thing, but I knew that many, many people could not afford it. Victoria had never known such people.
‘He was ejected from the army,’ the duchess said, drawing herself up in sorrowful dignity. ‘He had to leave the garrison of Gibraltar. The men would no longer serve under him for his brutality. There was one whipping too many.’
Now I looked at her in horror. This was strong meat, and I felt that Victoria, in her weakened state, should not have to hear such things.
The duchess caught my worried gaze and took my hand imploringly. Since my calling in Dr Clark, there had been a new understanding between us. I might almost have called it affection. ‘That’s why Sir John, your own father, has been my saviour,’ she said, her voice almost breaking on the word as if she were an actress in a tragedy. ‘Where would I have been without him, with no English, no money and a baby girl?’
‘I cannot imagine how hard it must have been,’ I said quietly.
And I could see her point. If Victoria’s real father had been unsatisfactory – and given what we knew of his brothers, the royal dukes, this did unfortunately seem possible – then perhaps my own father had been her only hope. For certainly she could not negotiate life alone, and I knew for myself the power of my father’s solid, reassuring, determined presence. It’s just that I feared that he sometimes overstepped the mark.
I could see that Victoria, too, was thinking about her mother’s situation. I reached out for her hand, and for a moment all three of us were linked in a human chain. For once there was sympathy between us.
‘It is hard, my girls!’ the duchess said. ‘It is difficult being a woman in this world. We lack power; we lack strength; we lack intelligence.’
But Victoria broke the chain. She snatched her hand away and turned once more to the wall.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she muttered. ‘I will have power. I will have strength. And I will always, always hate Sir John.’
I had a deep, disturbing feeling that she meant it. That little, shaven, shrunken body housed a strong spirit. The princess was a good hater.
Chapter 23
A Ride through the Woods
After some weeks, we did ride out together in my father’s pony cart, along the top of the cliff and through the terraces of houses at first, and then down on the hard sand of the beach when the tide was out. Once we trotted nearly all the way to Broadstairs.
‘Are you ready for the cart?’ I asked Victoria one day after luncheon. ‘Or would you rather hear a story?’ I had introduced my well-worn copies of the romances of Sir Walter Scott into the sickroom. Sometimes she spent the afternoon on the sofa, imploring me to go on reading aloud to her from one or another of his chivalrous, adventurous tales.
But this afternoon she ignored me and continued taking her dolls, one by one, from their trunk, laying them out on the carpet and putting one into the dress of another. ‘Surely sixteen years is too old for dolls!’ I scoffed. ‘Do come out for a run.’
‘My babies have been such good friends to me,’ she said in a dreamy voice, speaking to them, not to me. ‘I cannot abandon them now.’ She began to twist a new crown from gold foil for a third doll. She seemed to have reverted to a lesser, younger, weaker version of herself.
‘Are you feeling wobbly again this afternoon?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so, Miss V,’ she said gently. ‘I fear that I might never be strong again.’ But her attention remained firmly fixed on the floor. ‘You see this doll in the coronet here?’ she said, indicating a figure in red velvet and gold brocade. ‘I wish that was all a princess needed to do, to wear a pretty dress and go to parties. But I know that in real life I must also be despised and bullied and pulled apart. Perhaps it’s better to be a doll.’
She looked so young, so small and so sad that I knelt beside her and wrapped my arm round her shoulders.
She sighed and leaned back against me. ‘You and Lehzen,’ she said, with a smile of great sweetness, ‘must go without me. You spend too much of yourselves looking after me, and you need the exercise. Please, do go.’ The kind words brought tears to my eyes.
So, abandoning Victoria to her babies, Lehzen and I took the pony cart by ourselves. Lehzen and I had indeed occasionally stepped out of doors together of an afternoon to break our close attendance in the sickroom. Once we had been down to the town to look at hats in a shop, and another time we’d heard the piano
forte being played in the town hall. It was so long since I’d had time to practise, and I’d loved hearing music once again.
Now, as then, I felt myself almost overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of busy people on the street, ladies like Lehzen, young ladies like me, but oh, so different! They were going about their lives, unaware of the System, unaware of the princess living in their midst. The sight and sound of other people was so unexpectedly vivid after the quiet sickroom, enlivened only by the ticking of the clock and the sound of the sea far below.
Today we bowled through the upper part of the town towards the green lanes inland. They were not so green now that the year was on the turn, and there were drifts of leaves by the side of the road. Lehzen’s stern profile beside me looked as if carved in wood. As usual, no expression passed over her face as she flicked the whip and dexterously swerved our little vehicle round a slow-moving farm cart that was blocking our way. We were going at such a clip that the speed forced me to hold on to my hat.
It gave me quite a start when at last Lehzen spoke.
‘This countryside reminds me of the fields near Hanover,’ she said. It was unusual for her to mention her past, and Germany, so I sat quietly, still looking ahead, hoping that she would go on. I had a new respect for Lehzen since her diligent, devoted nights of nursing. ‘My father was a pastor there, you know,’ she continued.
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I didn’t know. Pray, is he still alive?’ Intrigued, I turned myself towards her just a little, to encourage further confidences. At the same time, I had to clutch on to the edge of my seat as our pony picked up speed round a corner.
‘Dead, long dead,’ she said. ‘But he was a good man. I was far from born a baroness.’ She spoke almost regretfully, as if being a baroness was a punishment, not a reward.
‘And how did you become one?’
‘The old king, King George the Fourth, had the idea to make me one. He thought it wasn’t right that the princess should be served by commoners. But underneath I am just Johanna Clara Louise Lehzen, as I was born. Like your father, I am not of these mad, aristocratic people by birth. I sometimes wish I had not begun working for the Duchess of Kent, you know. It is so … tiring.’ A feeling came over me, like a refreshing squeeze of lemon juice, that Lehzen would never have said such a thing before the incident of the typhoid. Before, she would have restrained herself, I was sure, in case I reported her words to my father.
