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.
But there was no chance. The very next day, Späth went away on a visit, Lehzen had a cough and the duchess had one of her nameless illnesses. Instead of asking for his usual report at teatime, my father told me that because of these three things combined I should go across to sleep that night with the Princess Victoria in her bedchamber. Because, of course, she could not be left alone.
It felt very strange, as evening drew down, to gather my hairbrush and my nightdress from my own bedroom, and then, instead of climbing into bed, to walk in carpet slippers behind my father across the cloister and courtyard. Odd, but a tiny bit exciting too. Victoria and I would be unsupervised! What games might we get up to? What dresses might we try on? If she hadn’t been so out of spirits recently, I would have predicted a marvellous time.
Adams silently let us in, and I said ‘good evening’ instead of our usual ‘good morning’. The cavernous staircase was illuminated by streaks of light from the setting sun that were almost green in hue. I felt I could have been in the abandoned marble temple of some long-lost civilisation, like that of the Romans, which had been deserted by human beings for many hundreds of years.
In the corridor of the drawing room we continued along another few feet to a door I’d never opened before: that of Victoria’s bedroom. My father rapped.
‘Your Royal Highness?’ he said.
Silence.
‘Your Royal Highness, Miss V. Conroy is here.’
More silence.
All of a sudden, the door flew open abruptly, sending my heart into my mouth. Victoria must have been waiting, silently, with her hand on the knob, boiling perhaps with rage or fear, intending to surprise and distress us.
Wordlessly, she looked at us, and I saw the distaste in her eyes.
My father stood back to let me enter, and I padded forward. With an ironic, courteous bow, and a twirling, doffing movement of his hand, as if removing an imaginary hat in the most elaborate manner possible, he backed out and closed the door.
‘Good Lord, I hate him!’ Victoria seated herself on one of two beds in the room. ‘I’m sorry, Miss V, but I really do despise him.’
For once, I did not listen. I was fairly captivated by the room itself, and prowled round inspecting it. Its ceiling was high, like the drawing room next door, and again it was luridly furnished with mirrors in heavy frames, an overflowing needlework box, plumes of feathers arranged in vases and a loudly ticking clock. The two beds with their white quilts looked very small and clean amid the junk and the murk. I noticed that one of the beds had a couple of the dolls tucked into it. We had not played with them in a long time, and I thought she had given them up.
‘That’s your bed,’ she said in a dull voice, nodding at the other. ‘I wish you joy of it. I’m sorry that you have to be here with me.’
I thought sadly of the night she had come to my room and told me we were sisters. Were we still sisters? I did not know. But then I gathered myself together. Silly! I said to myself. It’s not her fault. It’s the System’s fault. Perhaps she’ll feel better soon.
‘That’s really quite all right,’ I said out loud, stepping this way and that, putting down my things. After all, I was genuinely glad and interested to see this inner sanctum. ‘I’m happy to be here. It’s nice to see your room. Where are they?’
Victoria had no need to ask whom I meant. ‘My mother is in the dressing room,’ she said, nodding towards a door in the corner. ‘I think she has had too many drops today. And Lehzen has her own room along the corridor. She’s been hacking away all evening.’ Right on cue, a distant, muffled bark told us that Lehzen’s cough had failed to improve.
I lit a candle, the chink of the flint sounding unnaturally loud, and quickly put on my dressing gown. ‘Come on,’ I said, jumping on to my own bed and squirming about to see if it was comfortable. ‘Let’s talk about ballgowns. Which do you prefer: rose-coloured or gold?’ At that, Victoria also threw herself back on to her quilted bed without bothering to remove its cover, or even her slippers. I had hopes that my ploy might work. This was a favourite topic of conversation, and Victoria had many times described in the tiniest detail to me the first ballgown she intended to wear just as soon as she was sixteen. Every time we talked, its colour, cut and decoration underwent revision.
‘Well, I’ve had a new idea,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘Lace. Did you see Späth’s Illustrated London News? And the picture of the dresses at the ball at Marlborough House?’
We lay back on our beds and began comfortably to chat. As the discussion of the merits of lace continued, the shadows inside the room clotted in its corners until the glow of the candle was the only light. The sky outside the two tall windows darkened to navy blue, and the clock sounded very loud in the silence. We’d left the windows and curtains open, for it was rather hot and heavy.
I hardly remember at what point I fell asleep, but I believe we were midway through a discussion of the best trimming for fans. Suddenly I awoke, and I could tell at once that it was much, much later. The candle had burned out, and the room was still.
Except for a tiny sound. It must have been a repetition of the sound that awakened me.
It was the creak of a floorboard.
I tensed up at once. The linen sheet had slipped away, the air was cooler now, and I felt all the little hairs on my arms stand up on end. Was it the duchess, awoken from her trance and come in to see us? But Victoria told me that the drops from the green bottle made her mother stupid and sleepy. It was yet another thing she held against my father, for, as I knew, he brought them from the chemist himself.
And in any case, it sounded like a heavier tread than a woman’s, shifting the floorboards beneath the flowered carpet. I could see the window from where I lay, and through it the gleam of the moon. Suddenly, the moon was blotted out of my vision and a dark shape crossed it. I saw to my horror that it was a man in a black coat, a man with his two hands outstretched …
I felt such terror as I had never before experienced in my whole life. It took all my wits and energy to act and move. But move I did, leaping from my bed and screaming like a maniac.
‘Help!’ I shrieked. ‘Help us! Help!’
It seemed to me, as best as I could see in the darkness, that the figure froze mid-motion, almost like a dancer.
‘Help! Lord preserve us! Help!’
I flailed about blindly in the dark, feeling for something, anything with which to protect myself. With a crash a glass of water fell from the bedside table.
It was commotion enough. Along the corridor I heard a door open, while Victoria in her corner of the room was saying, ‘What? What?’ Her voice was still full of sleep. I heard, rather than saw, the dark-clad figure retreating to the window, and out, out across the roof.
I was standing dumbly by my bed, still trembling, when the door crashed open and Lehzen appeared. I gathered my wits as well as I could. ‘It was … it was a man, Lehzen!’ I just about managed to gasp out the words.
‘Has he gone? Has he gone?’
As she spoke, Lehzen was peering out of the window, and then she was back by my bedside, holding the brass candlestick to my blinking face and examining me. ‘You frightened him, Miss V!’ she said triumphantly. ‘You did very well.’
I found that I was brandishing my hairbrush as if it were a weapon and, feeling rather sheepish, I hid it behind my body.
Now Adams was in the room too, bringing an oil lamp and searching behind and under every piece of furniture. A minute later, my father too had made an appearance, wearing his dressing gown and closing the sash window with an angry bang. I wondered how he had got here so quickly.
In the middle of it all sat the princess, bemused rather than frightened.
‘What happened, Sir John?’ she asked.
‘It was an assassin, sent to kill you, Your Highness.’ He spoke in a matter-of-fact voice, but he made no attempt to hide the gravity of the situation. ‘This is what we had feared. They must have kept a watch and discovered – I don’t know how – that your mother and governess had left you tonight.’
Lehzen and he exchanged a long, hard glance. But she was the first to lower her gaze.
I could tell that beneath his sombre manner there was something exultant about my father. Oh, of course! He had predicted exactly this eventuality, and by sending me into the princess’s room he had successfully avoided the danger.
‘But all is safe,’ he said. ‘Our security arrangements have held firm. If you had been alone, Your Royal Highness, who knows what would have happened?’
Victoria’s eyes had grown very big and round, and she wrapped her arms around her knees beneath the sheets.
‘But who could have sent such an … assassin?’ she asked in a very small voice.
‘Why,’ said Lehzen slowly, ‘the obvious candidate is the Duke of Cumberland. Your cousin George’s father. I wonder if it was him? Or someone else?’ Lehzen, oddly, had looked again at my father. She was really staring hard at him.
There was a strange silence. Then she dropped her eyes.
‘But …’ It was Victoria’s voice. It trailed off, then began again. ‘Would he kill me just so that George could be ahead of me in the line of succession? George’s father was here just the other day, and you all had tea with him!’
‘At a tea party!’ Lehzen snorted. ‘He may be nice enough at a tea party, but this is the man who killed his valet.’
‘There was no definitive evidence of that,’ said my father in a lofty manner, ‘but I think you’ll agree – all of you – that what I have told you about security has been right and proper and true.’
All three of us looked back at him, and then at each other. It seemed undeniable. I felt ashamed that I had doubted, only recently, whether the System was good for Victoria. He came over and patted me on the head. ‘There is great danger,’ he said solemnly. ‘Great danger. But you, Miss V, have averted it. God bless you.’
‘Oh!’ Victoria cried. ‘God bless you, Miss V! But Miss V cannot be here always, Sir John. What might happen next time?’
We sat looking at each other in silence. Not one of us had the answer to that. How could we keep the princess safe?
As one, we turned towards my father. Only he seemed to know.
‘Your Royal Highness,’ he said with a bow. ‘Miss V. Conroy will stay with you always. She will never leave you. She will live here, not at Arborfield Hall, and she will keep you safe.’
I felt a deep trembling going right through my body. My doubts about the System had been misplaced; of course it was necessary. But could I really keep Victoria safe and sane? I wasn’t sure.