It was typhoid. Dr Clark said so at once. He administered strong drugs, and Victoria’s hair was shaved off from her head. Great hanks of it had fallen out anyway. A stern nurse was engaged, and the boarding-house maids forbidden from Victoria’s room. All the bedding was burned.
The duchess was a broken woman, full of fears and distress and remorse at not having called for Dr Clark sooner. Even my father had nothing to say about the breach of the System. For it was clear, during that long and terrible night before Dr Clark arrived, that our princess had been on the very brink of death.
The following morning, once Dr Clark had seen Victoria, I tried to raise the matter with my father. ‘I hope I did right,’ I said tentatively. ‘The princess’s health, you know, is always on my mind.’
‘As it should be,’ he muttered. But he turned back to his paper and refused to engage with me any further. I turned away too, in some disgust. We both knew, even if he wouldn’t admit it, that I had done the right thing.
Morning after morning, as the convalescence progressed, I went downstairs to relieve an ashen-faced Lehzen from her night watch. Our governess was usually coughing like an old tobacco-stained tar of the sea. I sat by Victoria’s bed all day, sometimes reading to her, sometimes just watching the waves through the window. I did not catch the fever. I could feel the strength ebbing from my legs, but that was from long periods of sitting and watching. I would not have left for the world.
The duchess would swoop in and out of the room, once clutching a bunch of unseasonal, hothouse roses and thrusting them into a vase on the mantelpiece and going into raptures about their colour and scent. But on the next occasion she was crying and wringing her hands, and asking God to curse her for being such a mad, bad mother.
The two of them seemed sometimes almost to forget my presence, and Victoria would sometimes berate her mother for getting through her ‘drops’ too fast, while the duchess would castigate her daughter for not showing her enough affection.
‘How I have suffered! What agonies a mother may experience I never knew until now!’ she would say, trying to clasp Victoria to her bosom. Victoria’s little shorn head made her look like an early Christian martyr cut down from a cross and being consoled by a buxom Mary Magdalene.
Victoria would groan out loud. As the days passed, though, as the medicine worked and as she grew stronger, I could tell that she was sometimes groaning just for show and for attention, as her mother would have done in the same situation. If Victoria spent less time with her mother and more with Lehzen and me, she might snap out of such antics. But it was not to be.
One day the duchess pushed her daughter too far, by marvelling at the generosity of my own father in procuring a little pony cart so that Victoria and I could take some gentle carriage exercise. ‘So kind!’ the duchess enthused. ‘So thoughtful of Sir John!’
‘He is only doing it for his own ends!’ Victoria cried crossly. ‘I will not ride in his cart. And neither will Miss V.’
‘Victoria!’ The duchess threw open her arms in a beseeching gesture. ‘How can you be so ungrateful to the man who has almost been a father to you?’
This enraged Victoria. With a toss of the head, she turned over to stare out of the window, presenting only a thin shoulder blade to the room. ‘He is nothing like a father to me,’ she hissed in a venomous whisper. ‘Every night I pray that my own father might still be alive, come back to protect me and look after me.’
This in turn enraged the duchess, and for the want of a better audience, she turned to me. ‘The Duke of Kent,’ she said tremulously, ‘is far, far better in his grave. Never compare Sir John, who is an angel, to the demon duke. No one knows this better than myself, who has lived under the same roof as both of them. The duke’s violent tempers, his extravagant ways … no one knows how I suffered. When my so-called husband realised that the government had voted us such a small living allowance, how he lashed out!’
She bowed her head and her chest heaved. I perceived that for once this was genuine grief on her part, and she was speaking of something that really had wounded her.
‘He thought that marriage to me would bring a bigger allowance; it was only for that that he cast aside his French actress lady friend and wooed me. And when he realised his mistake, he … hurt me.’
Victoria had turned back to us both, all agog. But then her features relaxed. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘You are exaggerating as usual, Mother.’
‘He was a violent man!’ The duchess was mopping her cheeks now with her handkerchief and breathing heavily. ‘The Duke of Kent was a violent man. Did you never wonder why he left the army? Where he had occupation and salary? Did you never wonder why we were left at Kensington Palace with no money and nothing to do?’
‘Well, surely it was beneath his dignity to have to … work.’ Victoria said the words with such scorn that I almost laughed. Of course leisure was a fine thing, but I knew that many, many people could not afford it. Victoria had never known such people.
‘He was ejected from the army,’ the duchess said, drawing herself up in sorrowful dignity. ‘He had to leave the garrison of Gibraltar. The men would no longer serve under him for his brutality. There was one whipping too many.’
Now I looked at her in horror. This was strong meat, and I felt that Victoria, in her weakened state, should not have to hear such things.
The duchess caught my worried gaze and took my hand imploringly. Since my calling in Dr Clark, there had been a new understanding between us. I might almost have called it affection. ‘That’s why Sir John, your own father, has been my saviour,’ she said, her voice almost breaking on the word as if she were an actress in a tragedy. ‘Where would I have been without him, with no English, no money and a baby girl?’
‘I cannot imagine how hard it must have been,’ I said quietly.
And I could see her point. If Victoria’s real father had been unsatisfactory – and given what we knew of his brothers, the royal dukes, this did unfortunately seem possible – then perhaps my own father had been her only hope. For certainly she could not negotiate life alone, and I knew for myself the power of my father’s solid, reassuring, determined presence. It’s just that I feared that he sometimes overstepped the mark.
I could see that Victoria, too, was thinking about her mother’s situation. I reached out for her hand, and for a moment all three of us were linked in a human chain. For once there was sympathy between us.
‘It is hard, my girls!’ the duchess said. ‘It is difficult being a woman in this world. We lack power; we lack strength; we lack intelligence.’
But Victoria broke the chain. She snatched her hand away and turned once more to the wall.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she muttered. ‘I will have power. I will have strength. And I will always, always hate Sir John.’
I had a deep, disturbing feeling that she meant it. That little, shaven, shrunken body housed a strong spirit. The princess was a good hater.