The next morning, Victoria and I went down to the beach with Dash. As usual we left the house with Adams in tow, and as usual he did not take much persuading from Victoria to wait for us in the teashop rather than follow in our exact footsteps.
I watched her running ahead, skipping almost into the foam and out again. I seated myself on a dry patch of sand and ran my fingers through it in search of shells. But I soon abandoned my quest because I fell, once more, to wondering about the future. This romping girl was to have such great power over everyone, myself included, when the old king died.
But then a shriek of pleasure from the sea’s edge made me look up, and I saw her picking up Dash and kissing him because the cold water had splattered his coat. And it struck me once again that at heart she was kind and true. Britain could do worse, I thought, far worse, than have my blood cousin as queen.
Victoria came running back towards me, her cheeks rosy with the wind and spray. She stood before me, laughing, and Dash almost seemed to be laughing too. I resolved that whatever my father might say, whatever schemes he might hatch to take her power, I was on her side.
‘Get away from me, you two!’ I said. ‘I know your tricks. You want to spray me, don’t you, Dash?’ His quivering fur was loaded with water and I knew that in an instant he could shake it off in a shower.
‘Frowning again, Miss V?’ said Victoria. ‘Your face will get stuck like that, you know!’
Then she suddenly leaned forward, ignoring Dash, and put her hands on her knees. She dropped her head, and the laughter turned to a kind of shrill gasp. I did something similar whenever I myself felt faint, but it was so bracing out here, below the cliffs, that I could not imagine how she could be feeling the vapours.
‘Victoria!’ I said. ‘What is it? Have you swallowed sand? It’s blowing right up off the beach – just look at it!’
‘Suddenly … feeling … a little weak,’ she said, straightening up slowly.
I saw that her face had gone dead white.
‘Oh, but you’re not well,’ I said, concerned, taking her arm and threading it through my own. I patted her hand as we strolled back. ‘Perhaps you ran too fast too soon after all those weeks in the carriage.’
We took a few paces, but then there was a strong pull on my arm. This time her knees had almost given way, and she staggered.
‘Oh, sweetheart!’
Her face seemed strangely sweaty as well as pallid, and I reached out to touch her cheek. Burning hot. ‘You have caught a cold,’ I said severely. ‘That’s what comes of not wearing enough clothes.’
She was dressed in a neat navy cloak, but she had smartly refused to bring the muff I’d laid upon on her bed before we set out upon our walk, calling me an old fusspot.
‘Fusspot!’ she said again now. ‘It’s nothing. I just need to catch my breath.’
As we stumbled together across the sand, I wondered that the System did not allow Victoria more frequent opportunity to concentrate on her health and strength. This was the first time in the years I had been part of it that the household had taken a holiday. But even my father had been forced to admit, after the tour, that Victoria was run-down and needed a change of air and a rest without the pressure of any princess-ing.
‘Home to tea!’ she shouted, attempting to push on ahead of me. ‘Buns! Scones! Hot milk!’
But again she stopped and dropped her head and seemed almost to be spitting something out upon the ground. When I caught up with her, she was trembling.
‘Come on,’ I said grimly. ‘For you it isn’t home to buns. It’s home to bed.’
It was late that evening and I was in Victoria’s boarding house bedroom. Her bed was narrow and made of iron, like a servant’s bed, but it stood near the tall window so that she could see – as she insisted, for she would not have the curtain drawn – the harbour lights twinkling below.
The doctor had gone some time before, and I had crept in to say goodnight. Lehzen sat in the shadows like a sentinel. In the quiet I could hear the rasping of Victoria’s breath.
‘Ah, it’s Miss Caution!’ she croaked, beckoning me in. ‘Have you brought me sherbet lemonade? Nothing else can save me.’ Victoria had been driving the boarding house cook mad with her demands for unseasonable and unfamiliar foodstuffs.
‘No, I have not. I’ve come to see that you’re behaving yourself.’
‘Pooh! I was naughty with that smelly old doctor.’
Lehzen cackled in the corner. ‘You were indeed,’ she said, not looking up from her darning. ‘You should not have asked him what he thought of the fine new hospital in London.’
‘But how could a doctor not have heard of it?’ asked Victoria plaintively.
‘A country doctor, is how,’ Lehzen said with a sniff. ‘You should not taunt people who live outside London and know less than yourself.’
‘But, Lehzen,’ Victoria said more earnestly. ‘He says I have just a cold. I am telling you, this is something … worse than a cold. I feel dreadful.’ She flopped back on the pillows, and it is true that she still looked like a pale, washed-out version of herself.
‘Lehzen!’ I said in alarm. ‘Does this doctor know what he is doing?’
‘Her Royal Highness and Sir John have approved him,’ Lehzen said grimly, snipping through a thread with her scissors. But this gave me no confidence.
‘Well, Victoria, do sleep well,’ I said. ‘Let me plump up your pillow.’
‘Oh, fusspot,’ she said, as she rolled over and refused to accept my help. But there was a smile in her voice. I dropped a small kiss on her shoulder, and I know from her wriggle that she’d felt it and was pleased.
Comforted, I crept quietly away to go to my own sleep.
The next day, the doctor was back in the house before breakfast was over. ‘Unnecessary expense!’ my father huffed, as he returned to his toast. ‘I really think the little minx is putting it on. You haven’t been encouraging her, have you, Miss V?’
At that he looked at me sternly over the top of his cup.
‘Encouraging her?’ I said drily. ‘It’s my duty to encourage her.’ The Lord knows, I added silently to myself, that she needs encouragement to get through these next few years. Whether she becomes queen sooner or later, she needs strength and help.
‘You know what I mean,’ he said sternly. ‘I hope you haven’t encouraged her in her disobedience to her mother and me. Which I fear takes the shape of this pretended illness.’
I stood up, so angry I was trembling a little. ‘If you had been on the beach with her yesterday,’ I said, ‘you would not be accusing anyone of falsehood. She was so weak she could hardly walk.’
At that I flounced out and banged the door. It gave me great satisfaction to think of that final glimpse of my father’s face, open-mouthed in wonder and horror.
I took care to hum a little tune as I ran downstairs, so as to discourage the boarding house staff from thinking that anything was amiss, but beneath my grey dress, my heart was beating rather fast. I was worried to hear that she was still ill.
I sought out Lehzen in her cramped, dark bedroom at the very back of the house. ‘Lehzen,’ I said breathlessly, having knocked on her door with less circumspection than was my usual habit. ‘I think that Victoria is really ill, but my father does not seem to agree.’
Lehzen looked up, surprised, from the mirror. She had a turban round her head, and it was quite shocking to see her without her usual frontage of corkscrew curls.
So Lehzen wears a wig! was my inconsequential thought.
But she did not seem to care that I had seen her without her hair. ‘She is certainly very sick,’ she said grimly. ‘I saw the evidence of it in the night. But the duchess is very frightened, and she does not want to believe it. And that local doctor only cares about his fee and wants to reassure her.’
I had known that Lehzen would give me the facts straight. I could almost have hugged her, but now she had her sharp elbow raised to fasten her locket round her neck.
‘But, Lehzen, what ought we to do?’
‘We must send for Dr Clark from London.’
‘Of course! I must speak to my father at once!’
‘Stay.’ She held up her hand before I had the chance to withdraw and spun around on her chair to face me directly. ‘Sir John,’ she said calmly and deliberately, ‘has already refused to call Dr Clark. You must consider your own position, Miss V. The System is not kind to those who cross Sir John.’
‘But the princess’s life could be in danger!’
‘So it could. But this morning she did look a little better, and she ate some chicken and some broth.’ Then she added quickly, ‘I, too, am in favour of calling Dr Clark, but you know that a victory against the System is dearly bought.’
I knew exactly what she meant, of course. She was thinking of Madame de Späth.
I crept back along the passage, discouraged. The boarding house was now alive with the sounds of maids doing the morning cleaning, the few other guests departing for their cliff-top walk and the cheerful clanging of the milk pails being washed downstairs.
Quiet as a mouse amid the bustle, I tiptoed to Victoria’s door and listened at it for a while.
Nothing. Perhaps she was resting.
Then there was a sharp whack on my back, right between the shoulder blades. It was the duchess, who had crept up behind me in uncharacteristic silence. It was so unexpected that I almost shrieked.
‘Go away,’ she hissed. ‘Vickelchen is sleeping. She does not want you.’
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.