A Flaw in the Blood

by Стефани Баррон

  In the end, they put very few questions to the equerry's wife. Not many were necessary.

  They found their way to her daughter's house, a handsome and substantial home belonging to an Amorbach burgher, on a morning of uncertain sunshine. The widow Schindler received them in the morning room, which overlooked a snowy garden; a fire burned brightly in the hearth. She was a faded beauty of perhaps sixty, purposeful and calm. To their relief, she spoke French; and again, in the guise of manservant, Georgiana served as translator.

  She had married Captain Schindler forty years before, long after the Princess of Leiningen left Amorbach for England. “My husband was in his late twenties, then. When the Princess married Kent, Richard was made head of the schloss's household guard by the Royal Wards—the council that served as Regent for the young Prince Charles, until he came of age. Prince Charles spent a good deal of his youth with his mother in England, you know, when he was not in Amorbach; and the Duchess of Kent—as she became—was exceedingly worried that his throne would be usurped. Old Prince Emich, Charles's father, had a number of bastards—all pretending to the crown. But with my husband at the castle, the Duchess could be easy.”

  “He was devoted to her interests?”

  “Of course,” Frau Schindler said simply. “Richard adored the Princess. He told me once that he would have died for her. And she rewarded him for it. Even after she went to England and married Kent, she sent him a yearly draft on her bank. Coutts, I think it was. I saw the letters come, year after year. When he died, of course, they stopped.”

  Georgiana glanced at Fitzgerald.

  “Did you ever meet the Duchess of Kent, ma'am?”

  Frau Schindler shook her head. “I married Richard four or five years after she left Amorbach. Even Richard did not see her once she removed to England. He did not like her husband, the Duke. He thought the man much too old for Victoire—lacking in vitality. A mariage de convenance. The Duke came to Amorbach once after their marriage, before the child was born. Et voilà! It was as my Richard said: The Duke was dead before Victoria was a year old. Richard did not see the Duchess again after that. He began a new life. Later, we were married, when I was just sixteen.”

  A visit to Coburg, before Victoria was born. Yearly payments, from an account at Coutts. Had the Duchess bought her lover's silence?

  Fitzgerald calculated rapidly. The Kents were married in London in July 1818. Their child was born at the end of the following May. Victoria must have been conceived in late August or early September.

  “Ask her when the Kents visited Coburg,” he told Georgiana. “Sometime in the autumn of 1818?”

  Frau Schindler shrugged. She could not remember something she had heard about only once or twice, four decades ago.

  “How did she lose her husband?”

  The door to the morning room was thrust open, and a little boy of about six limped carefully across to his grandmother. He held a tin soldier in one grubby fist; tears stained his cheeks. Frau Schindler went to him, and held him close—then spoke hurriedly in French.

  “Her daughter's youngest, and very delicate,” Georgiana told Patrick, her brows knitting. “He has just had a bruising fall. It is best that we leave . . .”

  Fitzgerald rose and bowed. “Je vous remercie, madame,” he said haltingly. “Now ask her, for the love of God, how her husband died.”

  Georgie hesitated, her eyes on the child. His trousers, wet with blood, were torn above the right knee. She reached into her coat for a handkerchief and began to tear it into strips, then knelt and bound it around the boy's knee. Immediately, red stains soaked through the linen.

  Frau Schindler murmured something. Fitzgerald noticed her hands were shaking as they smoothed her grandson's hair.

  “It was the same with Richard,” Georgiana translated for him. “The bleeding. One day he fell on the marble steps at Schloss Leiningen—and bled to death.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Neither of them spoke as they left the widow Schindler's house. Georgiana had blood on her hands; Fitzgerald stopped in the street and searched for his handkerchief.

  “You know, love,” he said as he rubbed at her palms, “we can prove nothing. Nothing a'tall.”

  “But we know,”

  Georgiana insisted. “We know what Prince Albert must have discovered. He came back to the Rosenau last September and delved deep into the records, studying his family line. He learned what we learned. There are no bleeders among his Coburg ancestors. There are no bleeders in the House of Hanover. The disease must have come from elsewhere.”

  “D'ye think he met the widow Schindler?”

  “Something made him desperate enough to attempt suicide, in that runaway carriage.”

  “But why?” Fitzgerald demanded. “He never caused this!”

  “No,” she said quietly. “But neither was he the man to profit from a lie.”

  They stood for an instant, in silence.

  “He probably didn't want to believe it.” Fitzgerald balled up his handkerchief. “He talked to yon lady. Thought about her grandson. Read up on the science. Asked for John's notes—”

  “And then, in the middle of November, he accepted the truth. To his utter despair. I am fearfully in want of a true friend and counsellor . . .”

  “The Duchess of Kent had a cuckoo in her nest—and put her right on the throne of England. The Saxe-Coburg fortunes were made forever! Albert went from being the second son of a minor duke, to running the show in England—and his children after him. . . . I wonder if he told his wife what he suspected?” Fitzgerald said thoughtfully.

  “She's terrified of something.” Georgiana stopped short near the entrance to the inn. “Why hunt for you otherwise? Why attempt to silence me? Why send poor Leopold into exile in France?”

  “The boy's hardly pining away,” Fitzgerald objected. “He's having a rare adventure, look you. Imagine the scene when he's summoned home.”

  “That's beside the point. Patrick—what are we going to do?”

  “We're going back to England,” he said, “and have a talk with the Queen. We must buy our freedom, Georgie—with a promise of silence. In writing.”

  “You would do that? Suppress the truth—swallow the murders of Sep and Lizzie and Theo—to save your own skin?”

  She was staring at him accusingly: a pert young boy in shabby clothing, her hands thrust into her pockets for warmth. He yearned to pull her to him and cover her face with kisses; but he simply said, “To save yours, my darling, I'd deny the resurrection of the good Lord Himself. Now pack your things. I'll fetch tickets for Mainz. Be ready in an hour.”

  The Mainz train left Amorbach twelve times a day. From there, the line ran directly to Cologne—and from Cologne, it was possible to reach London in thirty hours. Lacking a watch, Fitzgerald glanced at the station clock: nearly noon on Thursday, the second of January. They could make the two o'clock train and be back in London, barring a major mishap, by Saturday night at the latest.

  He spared a thought for Gibbon—not the first during the long ordeal of German travel—and hoped he'd managed to find his way from Cannes to Dover. A letter to Bedford Square would reach Gibbon only when they did; and if the Metropolitan Police intended to charge Fitzgerald with murder, he must avoid Bedford Square above all else. There would be difficulties re-entering the country—the ports were probably watched. He would have to avoid the usual Channel packets and hire a private boatman, who might put them off discreetly somewhere along the English coast. Was the Queen at Windsor? —Or had she left, as was her custom, to spend January at Osborne House? An English newspaper could tell him. The Isle of Wight was directly accessible by boat, and London could be entirely avoided—if only he still had the Dauntless. . . .

  Theo.

  The thought of Sheppey flared within him, and burned.

  He bought two tickets and turned back to the inn. Feverishly calculating expenses. It was possible he would have to sell something else in Mainz. His coat?

  T
aking the stairs two at a time, he dashed up to his room.

  The door stood open, his few belongings exactly as he'd left them. Georgiana's medical bag. The gown she'd worn to call upon Stockmar. The rumpled pallet where he'd slept, which the maid had yet to tidy. But the single straight-backed chair was overturned, and at the sight of it, Fitzgerald was dizzy with nausea.

  “Georgie,” he said aloud, knowing she would not answer.

  Georgiana was gone.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  He was waiting for her when she entered the bed-chamber: hidden in the shadow between door and wall. She had no time to cry out—he thrust a wad of cotton, dipped in chloroform from her own supplies, against her nose and mouth. In his other hand he held her neck.

  She might have kicked him—might have toppled the chair Patrick found on the floor—but the struggle was short and utterly silent. Von Stühlen won.

  Later, she understood that they'd been careless: too driven by the scent of their elusive trail to have a thought for their own safety. Von Stühlen had arrived in Amorbach the previous night and learned immediately from the innkeeper—whom he'd known for years—that an Englishman and his manservant were lodged upstairs. He'd watched them leave for the Otterbachtal that morning. He'd watched them return. When Patrick made for the station and she chatted with the innkeeper's wife as she settled their bill, he'd prepared his strike.

  When she regained consciousness, he was slapping her.

  She tried to struggle upright, but her hands were bound behind her back. Her mouth was gagged. She was lying prone, on the bench seat of a traveling coach. She stared at von Stühlen, whose head loomed over her, his face expressionless; his hand clenched, and he slapped her again, deliberately. Her gorge rose—chloroform always made her sick—and she knew that she would choke.

  She rolled sideways, head hanging over the seat, gagging wretchedly. He tore at the knot he'd made at the base of her skull and she puked all over his boots.

  She cleaned them with a shaving towel herself, while von Stühlen held his dueling pistol to her head. When he was satisfied with her work, he handed the boots to his valet—a broad-shouldered prizefighter of a man, who sat beside him in the coach, grinning at her stupidly.

  “We'll have to change carriages,” von Stühlen observed, rolling down the side windows. “The place stinks like an abattoir. Tell me, Miss Armistead—why did you come all the way to Amorbach in a servant's clothes? You're an insult to womanhood.”

  Georgiana said nothing. She was bent slightly forward on the seat, her hands tied once more behind her back.

  “Heinrich, I can't stand to look at her,” von Stühlen said conversationally. “Something must be done. Take off her clothes, there's a good chap.”

  She definitely kicked him this time—viciously, on the shin—but with a deft movement von Stühlen clasped her knees together and put all his weight on them. The valet started with her coat—dragging it down over her shoulders until it snarled on her bonds—and then ripped her shirt from neck to waist. She had bound her breasts flat with strips of cloth.

  The two men stared at her bandaged chest. Then von Stühlen reached for his knife.

  It took Fitzgerald a good quarter-hour to decipher what the innkeeper's wife had seen. Her French was heavily accented and he didn't speak the language anyway; it was mostly guesswork, with her husband interjecting a word or two of German unhelpfully along the way. His manservant George had been carried, drunk as a lord, from the inn after settling their bill—and gone off with his new friends in a carriage, rather than a train.

  However vague the details, von Stühlen's name was unmistakable.

  “Direction?” Fitzgerald demanded.

  “À l'ouest,” said the innkeeper's wife. “À Mayence, peut-être.”

  Mainz. He had a railway ticket in his pocket, but von Stühlen was traveling fast, perhaps a half-hour ahead of him; he could not lose time on the agonising local train. Not when Georgiana was in the Count's hands. How had she said he earned his dreadful reputation? —For raping the unwilling.

  “I need a horse,” he told the innkeeper's wife. “Un cheval. Vite!”

  It was another twenty minutes before he clattered out of the stable on a nag he'd promised to leave in Mainz—and his purse was almost empty.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Georgiana demanded. “Because I laughed in your face at Ascot? Are you so thin-skinned?”

  He had chloroformed her again at dusk when they pulled into the yard behind the small woodside tavern. The handkerchief terrified her, because von Stühlen had no medical knowledge at all; he thought of the drug as a means of control, while she recognised it as a source of death.

  She did awake, however, in a tavern bedchamber—her wrists and ankles tied to the bedposts, her legs spread-eagled on the frame. She was completely naked, and the world outside the single narrow window had gone completely dark. The German Count was sitting in a chair in the corner, smoking one of his cigars. She felt the familiar nausea rise and willed herself not to be sick, to steady her whirling head.

  Imagine he's a doctor, she told herself. Imagine this is a medical examination.

  “Thin-skinned?” he repeated. “You exaggerate your individual importance, I'm afraid. Women, you know, will always be interchangeable; like horses, some of you boast better blood or better lines—but you're fundamentally there to be ridden. When you, Miss Armistead, chose to ridicule me in the face of the world—the equation changed.” He withdrew his cigar and examined it. “A horse that tosses his rider is first broken to bridle—then sold.”

  Georgiana stared fixedly at the ceiling, her teeth clenched against her fear. It was possible Patrick was following them. It was possible she would be saved.

  The door to the room opened a crack, and von Stühlen's valet slipped inside. The Count asked him something in German; the man replied in the negative.

  They're watching for him, she thought. I'm the trap. And willed Patrick not to come.

  “Heinrich has never enjoyed a woman of your quality,” von Stühlen observed. “I've told him you're no virgin, of course, but he's pathetically eager to experience your charms.”

  The valet was already kicking off his boots.

  “What do you want to know?” Georgiana asked desperately. Trying to buy time. “Why have you come all the way across Europe, after me? Not because of Ascot. Even I don't believe that.”

  “It hardly matters.” Von Stühlen studied the end of his cigar with his good eye; he was smiling faintly. “You're an abortionist, my dear. And your last patient died at your hands. Lizzie, her name was.”

  “That's a lie!” she spat. “Lizzie was murdered—but not by me. The poor girl was smothered with a pillow. Did you order it?”

  “That's a double murder charge under the Offences Against the Person Act,” he continued, as though she hadn't spoken. “—An Act just passed by Parliament this year. Abortion is noted in section fifty-eight. But perhaps you don't follow legislation as closely as you do your prostitutes.”

  Heinrich clambered into the bed, and straddled her pinioned body.

  “What do you want to know?” she gasped.

  “Don't worry,” von Stühlen said soothingly. “You'll tell me everything you can think of. Heinrich will make sure of that.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The man shaking out the drugget on the area steps moved with a certain painful hesitation, as though his muscles were sore from overuse. He winced slightly as his hands rose and fell, a cloud of dust billowing from the length of carpet; and then, abruptly, his arms dropped and he turned away from the January morning, the fog that flowed down the steps like a predatory snake. The carpet hung disconsolately at his side; he kept his eyes fixed on the ground. There was a fire in the kitchen hearth, and he was in a hurry to get back to it.

  He'd been a cheerful enough fellow before his master turned murderer, the Bobby thought as he strode past Patrick Fitzgerald's doorstep. Bedford Square was the Bobby's route, and
often were the times he'd traded gibes with Gibbon. But guilt could do that to a man—rob him of all the joy of living. The valet knew more'n he would say. A prisoner in his own few rooms, he was; a goat tethered for the kill. He knew the police were watching him. Never went out anymore, for all he lived so lonesome, except to buy the odd egg and rashers. Never talked to the neighbours, though some said he'd been sweet on the housemaid four doors down, before everything happened. Waiting, that's what he was—waiting for Fitzgerald to show himself. They were all waiting. Gibbon's return had got the Law's hopes right up. But the man had been back four days now, and no sign of the master.

  The Bobby sighed as he went his monotonous way, longing for a sit-down by the fire himself.

  The men at the Nice gendarmerie were content to let him die. Rokeby had said that was nonsense, and sent a military surgeon of his acquaintance to salve and bind Gibbon's wounds. The pain, at first, made him faint every time he moved, and a fever set in; but by the second morning, when Rokeby reappeared in his prison cell, he was able to sit up unaided.

  “I've told the gendarmes to let you go,” the consul said. “Whatever your master may have done, it's clear you had no part in it—if you had, you'd have screamed it to the heavens when von Stühlen whipped you. There's no shame in that,” he added hurriedly. “You were served with excessive violence—I may even say, out of all proportion to the cause. Have you enough money for your journey home?”

  Perhaps it was guilt that motivated the consul's kindness, or a desire to be rid of an embarrassing episode. Whatever the cause, Gibbon's clothes were returned and his seat purchased on the public stage to Toulon.

  He landed at Dover on the first day of the New Year.

  The Bobby was right: Gibbon knew the Law was watching him. He'd been met at the packet by a pair of detectives Rokeby had wired from Nice, who escorted him to what they called Scotland Yard—the Metropolitan Police headquarters. There, the same old ground was gone over at the direction of a detective chief inspector. Gibbon told them how his master had found Septimus Taylor attacked in chambers, the day after the Consort's death, and called for a doctor to save him. He explained how he, Gibbon, had watched young Theo escort Lady Maude on the road to Sheerness, as Fitzgerald turned for a boat in the opposite direction. He told them, moreover, how Wolfgang, Graf von Stühlen—who claimed to have discovered Theo's body—had pursued them all the way to Cannes. A zeal for justice, the detective chief inspector murmured. In answer, Gibbon showed him the wounds on his back.