The next few weeks passed smoothly and quietly, and I revelled in the new understanding between the princess and myself. Perhaps I deferred to her even more often in our games, and now I never refused the nasty German tea but stoically shared it with her. I stayed longer and longer each evening at her insistence that she could not bear to be alone. I even refused to go with my father when he returned to Arborfield Hall for a few days to see that all was well there and to check that the servants were looking after my mother. The truth, I was surprised to discover, was that I did not want to go.
‘I cannot leave, as the princess requires me to be with her,’ I explained to him. It seemed rather a rash and self-important thing to say, and certainly my father thought it so.
‘What! The little minx needs you every single day, for ever?’
I bowed my head.
‘I believe so, Papa,’ I said meekly. It did sound rather astonishing that anyone would depend upon my presence. But then I saw his smile and his slow nod of understanding.
‘Well, of course I have noticed that you’ve been spending more and more time over there,’ he said, rubbing his chin.
I pulled myself up proudly.
‘And that’s quite as it should be,’ he said, turning decisively towards me and even going so far as to clap his hands together. ‘You have made yourself indispensable. You can count upon a Conroy for that. A royal personage must always have a stout shoulder, a companion, someone upon whom to depend. You must stay here at the palace. Your mother will have to make do without you.’
I was reminded how deeply the princess misunderstood his purpose, and it troubled me. But I did nothing but smile shyly, fixing my stare upon the ground.
‘And naturally,’ he added, ‘I will expect a full report on my return. You must be my eyes and ears, Miss V. Watchful eyes and listening ears – never forget.’
So my father took Edward (who was no longer the ‘new’ Edward) away to Arborfield with him, leaving me behind with Mrs Keen to keep an eye on me. I enjoyed discussing with her what we should eat and when, and what firewood and candles we required. ‘Quite the little housekeeper, you are, Miss V!’ she said approvingly. ‘I can see why everybody relies upon you so much.’
By that significant ‘everybody’, I knew that she meant the German household across the courtyard, and the princess herself, and it delighted my heart that my special status was recognised.
One day during his absence I came into our sitting room – well, I suppose it was now my own sitting room – to find a strange black cat curled up on the hearthrug. I called for Mrs Keen, who told me that he belonged to the Princess Sophia and that she would take him home at once.
‘Oh no,’ I said quickly. ‘Let me. I shall enjoy being of service.’
I crept up slowly upon the intruder so as not to scare him into running off. He opened his green, glowing eyes and hissed at me for disturbing him. But gradually, after a suitable period of respectful admiration, he consented to my taking him into my arms.
I hurried along the cloister towards the Princess Sophia’s doorstep, only to find the old lady standing upon it and looking distractedly in the other direction. When she turned and saw me, she became wreathed in smiles. ‘Tiddles!’ she gasped, hands outstretched. The powerful black creature hurled himself from my arms and began winding himself round and round his mistress’s skirts.
‘Thank you for bringing him back, my dear,’ the old lady said. ‘He is such a good companion to me, and I feared he was lost. Or worse, trying to get into the Kent household to wage war on the parrot once again.’
‘I am glad to be of service, Your Royal Highness,’ I said, speaking to her for the first time. ‘I am afraid we have not been introduced, although I know that you are acquainted with my father.’
‘Ah yes, Sir John is a good friend of mine,’ she said, bent over to stroke the cat’s head. ‘And you are a most elegant young lady. It gives me pleasure to see you passing through the palace.’
I could feel a blush rising into my cheeks, and bobbed down into the curtsey that had become second nature.
But now that the courtesies had been executed, I could not let her earlier words pass without comment. ‘Did Your Royal Highness imply that Tiddles has already met the palace parrot?’ I asked, intrigued.
‘Tried to eat him,’ said the princess in her loud voice. I believe she was a little deaf. ‘Those two animals hate each other. An odd, ugly bird it is. I cannot believe it is a nice pet for a little girl.’
‘I believe,’ I said, careful of the honour of the German household to which I belonged, ‘the parrot belongs to the princess’s mother, the Duchess of Kent.’
‘Exactly,’ the princess said. ‘Most unsuitable. And I believe she hardly cares for the bird at all, leaving it all to her attendants. Neglectful, I say, shamefully neglectful.’
I left with the impression that the old lady did not approve of the Duchess of Kent. But I liked her love of animals and was glad to have seen a little more of the inner workings of the palace.
On the day of my father’s return to us at Kensington Palace, I quietly rejoiced, for I longed to see him again. We expected him after dinner. I made careful arrangements for a tea tray, and laid out his slippers and his tobacco pouch. I hoped he would not be too tired to talk once again about the responsibility we both had to the nation to make sure that the princess grew up healthy and happy. I wanted to share the burden.
As the evening wore on, I flitted about constantly, stirring the fire, setting out the teacups, folding the newspaper just so, running upstairs and down for a book and a handkerchief. Eventually, just for fun, I concealed myself with my book on the window seat behind the curtains, exactly as I had done in the old days in the library at home at Arborfield. Perhaps he would come in to find the room all prepared, and then I could surprise him by slipping out. ‘Miss V!’ I imagined him saying, in mock alarm. ‘Have you done all this for me? Where have you been hiding?’
The thought made me smile. Looking out of the window and through the trees I could just see the lights of the carriages passing along the distant road. The twilit gardens were very beautiful, and for once the reminder of the world beyond seemed almost romantic to me.
Very soon I heard the door opening, a heavy walk and a heavy sigh. He must be here! I hugged myself in delight. Now he was ringing the bell for tea, but I had asked Mrs Keen not to answer, saying I would get him anything he wanted for myself. Just a second more, I told myself. Let him sit down on the sofa.
I heard the familiar creak of its springs.
But suddenly, before I could move, the calm of the evening was broken by a violent hammering at our door.
The door gave on to the brick-arched cloister within the palace rather than a street, and I don’t believe I had ever heard a caller knocking upon it before.
‘Damnation!’
From behind my curtain, I heard my father stumble to his feet. My limbs were curiously slow to move, and a chill passed over the nape of my neck. It had all gone wrong, I concluded with chagrin. Everything always went wrong when I tried to be spontaneous. I tried to overcome my instinct to stillness and silence, but the hammering had disconcerted me, and I could not gather myself to stand or speak.
In a moment or two, I heard the door creak open and my father’s muffled exclamation, ‘Your Royal Highness!’
Was the princess here? My heart started into my mouth, and I frantically began to pull on my slippers in order to swing my feet down from the window seat. Too late! The visitor was already in our drawing room. I was trapped.
‘Where is it, Sir John?’ But this was not Victoria. It was a woman’s voice, low, gruff, German-accented. But nor was it Späth nor Lehzen.
‘Come, come, Your Royal Highness!’ I could tell that my father had been caught off guard. A false tone had crept into his voice, that note I recognised from when he told my mother that of course he never took tobacco.
‘Where is it? You promised me!’ She was moving round the room, almost trotting, opening drawers and banging them shut. There was the rustle of silk and the clash of bangles or bracelets.
‘Indeed I did, indeed I did. It slipped my mind. Here, I have been to the chemist’s shop today. Here’s the package.’
‘Sir John! Be quick! My heart is so faint!’ There was a rustle of paper, a drink being poured and a chink that might have been the stopper knocking against a glass bottle. Medicine of some kind, clearly.
There was silence, in which I could just hear breathing and the small sucky sounds of drinking. The breathing slowed. It became inaudible. There was a final rustle, as if the lady had sat down upon the sofa.
‘There, my dear!’
I thought that my father must have spotted me behind the curtain and wanted me to come out. I steeled myself, fearing ridicule and embarrassment. But no! He wasn’t speaking to me.
‘Has it been a bad time, my dear heart? Have the hours been long and the princess noisy?’
Who was it that he was calling his ‘dear’? Suddenly it came to me. This was the Princess Victoria’s mother, the unseen Duchess of Kent, and my father’s employer and benefactor. He seemed very casual in talking to her. Was this really the voice of the mysterious duchess? The surprise made my mouth pop open, and I tightened my arms around my bent knees. What on earth did she look like? Was she as grim and spiteful as her grey parrot?
‘Ah, so long, Sir John!’ She seemed almost to sob the words out, and I heard writhing about, as if she were uncomfortable on our sofa. Yet it was a far better piece of furniture, stuffed with horsehair and upholstered in pink satin, than the decayed old heap in the German sitting room.
‘My head kept me in bed today,’ she said confidentially. ‘Lehzen sat with me while Späth had the girl, but I could not bear the sound of her crunching those terrible caraway seeds.’ I waited, hardly daring to breathe. It would be awful to be discovered now.
‘Come, come, Lehzen is devoted to you!’ My father was speaking to her soothingly, almost as if she were a girl herself. His voice sounded as if he too were on, or very near, the sofa.
‘And that other girl, your daughter, she is not nice.’
Now a jolt ran through my body, and I almost banged my head against the panelling of the window embrasure.
‘She slides around the place all silent, like a shadow. My daughter says she has been poking around and spying and looking at things.’
I waited, astonished, for my father to defend me. Did she mean the business of the sham diary? But surely Victoria would not have told anybody about that: she wanted her mother to think it was real. How dare she accuse me of poking around when I was forced to spend all day in what was effectively a lumber room containing a dangerous parrot! And why did my father not spring to my aid?
‘Now, now, Victoire.’ I remembered that the Duchess of Kent shared the same Christian name as her daughter.
‘Now, now,’ he said again, his voice swelling and growing into what I thought of as his ‘public meeting’ voice: oratorical, reassuring. ‘You know our fears. My daughter Miss V is sensible, quiet, a little dull, yes, but very solid, very calm. We’ve talked very often about the … unfortunate illness, what one might call “the madness”, of the princess’s late grandfather, King George the Third, have we not?’
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘Quite true. He would have been in the madhouse had he not been the king.’
‘We know the risk.’ He went straight on, as if she had not spoken. ‘God forbid, but it’s possible that this madness may have transmitted itself through the blood to your daughter. You have seen how she sometimes behaves. But, as you know, we take precautions to guard against this … malady, madness, call it what you like. We must be constantly vigilant. A quiet life, the conscientious company of a trusted companion, that’s the best thing for her.’
My jaw dropped open even further than it had before. Of course! The old king had been quite mad; everyone knew that. I knew that, but I had forgotten it, or at least had never thought of what it might mean for his family. Towards the end, the king had lived at Windsor Castle, talking endlessly to his dead wife, asking for the door to be opened so that he could fly up to the stars, riding his valet like a horse and beating him with a crop.
So madness was … inherited? Hereditary was the word, wasn’t it? And Victoria was at risk?
‘Oh, Sir John.’ The duchess was speaking again, more quietly. ‘Of course I’m just a silly old goose. Of course you’re right. I sometimes look at her and the way she stamps her foot and refuses to put on her stockings, and I think I see in her a little of … the old king. Those same blue eyes that seem to pop out of the head. Those rages!’
Her voice rose once again into a wail.
‘Mm, mm. But I think we’re safe for now.’ I heard the flicking of pages. ‘Miss V is very dependable.’ It didn’t sound as if he were paying much heed to her words, explosive though they seemed to be. Perhaps he had heard them before, many times. Whatever the crisis had been, it appeared to have passed, and my father had returned to his newspaper.
‘I’ll go, then,’ she said. ‘I can see you have no time for me.’ She sighed heartily.
I could almost imagine her daughter Victoria sighing in exactly the same put-upon manner, with the sulky downward tilt of her little mouth. I could see now where Victoria had learned some of her wayward habits.
‘Goodnight!’ he said.
I heard the rustling once more.
‘Yes, Your Royal Highness?’
‘The bottle, Sir John.’
‘Ah yes. Here it is, my dear. And let me escort you back.’ He rose too, putting the paper down, and presumably handing her this precious bottle. They both moved slowly out of the room. I could hear them talking in the cloister passage beyond. Once the voices had faded, I finally uncrossed my arms and legs, realising that I had been clenching them painfully tight in the anxiety of being discovered and of what I had heard.
So there was something my father had neglected to tell me! He had told me that Victoria was kept under the System for fear of an assault by rival candidates for the throne. But he had not mentioned this second reason: the fear that she might lose her sanity.
I hared upstairs to my room before my father could return and catch me in my eavesdropper’s bolthole. But only slowly did my breath return to normal.
I sat looking out into the garden below, thinking it over, trying to prepare myself to go down and greet my father upon his return from Arborfield coolly and normally. Could this explain my friend’s unreasonable insistence that my father was evil and that her friends and relatives were spying on her?
Could she, in short, be as mad as the old king her grandfather? My friend, my sister, was she ill? My heart ached. If Victoria had indeed inherited a tendency to madness, it would explain so much. And yet it was unutterably frightening and sad.