That night I lay sadly in bed, looking out between my curtains at the clouds hurrying across the moon. Although I’d tried hard to retain my composure, my father had noticed that I was upset.
‘What’s up, my little owl?’ he’d asked me as we drank tea after supper, he at the table with a pile of papers, me on the sofa. ‘No piano tonight?’
I had shaken my head silently at him, not lifting it from my book.
‘Are you quite sure that the princess is happy and well?’ he asked. I could tell that he was looking searchingly at me, narrowing his eyes. Earlier I had reported that nothing at all had happened that day, the very first time I could remember deliberately telling him a lie.
‘Are you quite sure,’ he said again, ‘that there is nothing you need to tell me?’
If I’d told him that Victoria was suspicious of me, he would certainly have been angry. He might even have sent me away back to Arborfield.
He held the silence, pen raised, listening and waiting. I felt like wolves were tearing my insides apart as I forced myself to lift my chin, meet his gaze and silently shake my head. It was a breach of the System not to tell him, but what she’d written wasn’t true. I wasn’t a spy! I hadn’t let him down! It was best forgotten.
All this was passing through my head when a new horrible thought occurred to me. If Victoria were sitting with us now in our drawing room, watching and listening to my father questioning me, she might well think that she was being spied upon.
What was the truth of it? I did not know.
At very long last, my father had got tired of waiting for an answer.
‘Well, have it your own way!’ he’d said huffily. ‘Sometimes I think I’d get more conversation out of a statue.’ And he’d turned back to his book of accounts.
I knew that the duchess’s unpaid bills were on his mind once again, as Lehzen had mentioned them earlier that afternoon.
At the evening’s end I had trudged wearily upstairs, allowing a tear or two to flow again once I was alone in the dark of the passage. I blew out my candle almost immediately and tried to sleep. Of course I could not. As I pummelled my pillow, I went over in my mind all the times Victoria had smiled or laughed. What a little actress she was!
My father had sent me to care for her, and care for her I had.
Perhaps, I now thought, I’d cared too much.
I sighed and turned over. The wind really was very high tonight, and the branches of the trees in the garden gave out great groans as they rubbed together.
But that sharp sound, surely, was not the wind. It was the clatter of a slate or tile falling from the roof and hitting the ground below. This was not an unusual occurrence at Kensington Palace, where time and decay were doing their best to take the building down.
All of a sudden, though, the moon was blotted out by a dark shape. My windowpane was being rapped upon imperiously. Someone was there!
‘Let me in!’
I froze in my bed. Could this be robbers, or spies? But would robbers or spies speak with such a girlish voice?
‘Come on, Miss V, let me in!’
More rapping. I grew anxious that my father would hear. He had been unutterably furious about the day in the gardens when the crowd had glimpsed Victoria through the gap in the hedge. And now she was breaching the System again, with my father sleeping only just down the passage.
As quietly as possible, I glided across the room and tried to unfasten the catch.
‘Shh!’ I said in some desperation. But Victoria was incapable of doing anything quietly, especially not climbing in through a window at night. Her teeth were chattering, as she had come in her white nightgown along the leaded roof hidden behind the parapet of the palace.
I had often looked out at the roofscape to each side of my window, wondering if it were possible to get along that gutter to the other peaks and gables and troughs of the palace’s many roofs. But I would never have had the courage to attempt it for myself.
‘How did you escape?’ I whispered in some amazement, for I knew that Lehzen or Späth or Victoria’s mother, the duchess, always slept with her in her room.
‘Oh, mother is out cold,’ she said. ‘She has taken her drops. And Lehzen has a sick headache and has gone to the water closet.’
‘Victoria, you’re so cold you’re shaking! And it was so dangerous! Have you been on the roof before?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She said it with an offhand boldness that I had to admire. ‘But not often,’ she went on, ‘for you know how carefully they watch me.’
Silently I handed her the flowered eiderdown from my bed, and she wrapped it round her. ‘Yes, I know that my gown is dirty,’ she said mockingly. Of course I had noticed a great black streak down her nightgown, produced by some obstacle she must have encountered upon the roof. She had evidently read the disapproval on my face. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she explained. ‘It’s an old one. I put it on specially.’
But having wrapped her up warm, I could not think what next to do. My mind was fully occupied in wondering why she had come. For her part, Victoria was looking round my room in interested silence. She was taking in the neat pincushion, the stack of novels, my framed print of Christ washing the feet of beggars. For once, she seemed lost for words. And I still said nothing, although the diary and the pain it had caused me was vivid in my head.
When she did begin to speak, it was characteristically abrupt.
‘I know,’ she said suddenly, ‘that you read my Behaviour Book.’
At that my heart convulsed, and I groped behind me for the mahogany washstand to give me some support. I felt so guilty and mean for having read it. I knew I should not have read a private diary. I had known it even as I picked it up.
‘But … how?’ I whispered the words, not daring to look at Victoria. Shame pulsed through me; I could feel it thumping in the veins of my forehead. At the same time I clenched my fists with another, more unfamiliar feeling. Then I realised. I was angry! Yes, angry! She had deceived me.
‘Easy!’ she said scornfully. ‘It was out of its place on the shelf, someone had got it all wet, and you were missing at teatime. You left me all alone, you know. It was like having tea in a tomb. So that’s how I know you read it.’
I could not deny it, and she could see it in my crimson face.
I was expecting rage on her part, or maybe cold anger, the type my father showed when something had gone very badly wrong. I found that my hands, all by themselves, had relaxed their clench and raised themselves up to hide and shield my face.
But then there was a gentle tap on my shoulder. She had stepped forward and was holding out half of the eiderdown, as if to put it round my shoulders too. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I accepted it, and together we sank to the bed.
‘I wanted to say …’ she began, but stopped.
‘It’s all right,’ I whispered quickly. ‘It’s true my father sent me to you, and I know you don’t like him. I’m sorry.’
‘No!’ she said fiercely. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. All wrong! I mean, I did write nasty things about you in the book, but only because they read it. Every day, Lehzen or my mother, one of them or the other or even both, reads the Behaviour Book. It’s part of the System.’
I could feel my eyes popping out of my head with surprise. If I knew it was wrong to read a diary, surely these grown-ups must know it too?
‘It’s a sham diary,’ Victoria explained. ‘I have to put down something that they will swallow. And I have to convince them that we are not friends. If they think that I have a friend or a new sister …’
Here she shuddered, and I felt the pressure of her shoulder against mine.
‘… they will take you away.’
‘Take me away! But where? And why?’
‘Because the System requires it. The System means I must have no friends, be left all alone.’ She was angry now. I could feel her fists closing and grasping on the soft eiderdown.
‘Victoria, Victoria, don’t upset yourself!’ I was stroking her hair as I might have done to Dash. But she was gone from me, in one of her strange, passionate fits when no words could reach her. Her eyes were staring at something beyond the patterned paper of the wall opposite the bed.
‘Did you know I had a sister once?’ Victoria asked suddenly. ‘Feodora. My half-sister. Our mother had Feodora with her first husband, before she married my father.’
‘And what happened to Feodora?’ My hand fell still on her hair. I was on guard once more, for I clearly remembered Victoria telling me that she had no brothers or sisters.
‘Taken,’ she said glumly. ‘She’s as good as dead to me. Feodora was my friend. She cared for me and loved me much more than my mother does.’
‘Did she live with you here at Kensington Palace?’ I asked in wonder. I had never heard of any of this.
‘Yes,’ Victoria said bitterly, ‘until they sent her away. It was ages ago, more than two years. They got rid of her by making her marry a penniless German prince so that she’d have to stay at home with him. She’s in Germany now. She writes, but she doesn’t love me any more. She has forgotten me.’
I pondered this. It didn’t seem particularly likely, but then nothing about this girl’s life seemed normal. Victoria’s grief was undoubtedly genuine, and I started to stroke her hair once again. Still, I couldn’t believe that my father would have done such a thing as to send away Victoria’s sister.
Perhaps she sensed this.
‘You don’t believe me,’ she suddenly hissed, with powerful force, ‘but it’s true. That’s why your father is an evil man. He got rid of Feodora, who loved me. He drugs my mother – that’s why she sleeps all day.’ Twisting herself free from my grasp, she was sobbing and panting.
‘No, Victoria,’ I said. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. He, he cares for your safety, you must believe that.’
But she wasn’t listening and continued to talk over me. ‘I don’t know how you can worship him like you do.’ Here I could tell that she was rolling her eyes as well as shaking her head.
Eventually she became still. When next she spoke, it was in a much calmer voice.
‘But you are not like him, Miss V,’ she said. ‘I do know that.’
She laid a hand theatrically upon her heart and turned to look at me. Then she lifted her fingers to place her palms near my ears, each side of my head, and slowly turned me to face her. Gently, but inescapably, she pulled me nearer until our foreheads touched.
‘You are my sister now,’ she said quietly and solemnly. ‘Never forget it. I love you like my sister, and you are my only friend in all the world.’
I could hardly look back at her because my eyes were so full of tears. A great flower had just opened up inside me.
Despite the strangeness of what she was saying, and my grief at her bitter misunderstanding of my father, a glow spread through my entire body. She had used the word ‘sister’. We were sisters! It was as if a gaping hole in my heart was filled up at last.
I could hardly begin to take it in.
I raised my own palms and placed them on top of her hands, pressing them against my head. It was so warm, so delicious to be comforted by four hands instead of two.
Trembling, I opened my mouth to stammer out some sort of reply.
But I was too late. She had broken her grip and was turning away.
‘Well, better get back,’ she said with a sigh, heaving herself to her feet and leaving my eiderdown trailing across the floor. There was a squawk from the window seat which made my heart jump, but it was only Victoria stamping upon it as she made her ungainly way out of the window once more.
The icy wind was making its way in through the open panes, and the tips of my fingers were still cold, but once I snatched up the eiderdown and wrapped it round me again, I felt warm as toast. Unlike Victoria, who had loved, even if she had lost, this half-sister Feodora, I had never had a friend before.