Unwashed female bodies, torn shifts, a tangle of arms on a single mattress, hair spread like matted fur across the worn boards of the floor—a public house in Cork City. The sweet rot of bodily fluids and spilled ale. His mother.
His gorge rose; he closed his eyes. The vision was so powerful that for an instant it eradicated the present and he could feel the earth crumble beneath his knees, as he knelt at the edge of her grave.
He’d been thirteen, the eldest of five, when she died. Fitzgerald was her name, none of them claiming a father to speak of. Cork City was one of Ireland’s finer seaports, and Ma enjoyed the custom of sailors from all over the world—though it never brought her riches. What she made, she spent on drink and her children’s bellies, in that order. When she died, the three girls were sent to an orphanage and the two boys cast out into the world. The innkeeper—whom the Fitzgeralds called Uncle Jack, though he was no relation of theirs—offered to keep young Liam, an open-hearted, grinning lad obsessed with the workings of the brewery. Patrick was good for nothing, being shy and bookish. Uncle Jack bluntly called him a penniless bastard not grand enough for making a priest, and suggested he join a mendicant order. Instead, Patrick stole the pub’s earnings one moonlit night and walked to Cobh, where the great ships left for the English coast.
He had lived in London for thirty-three years; he’d turned a trick of pure luck and made a life from absolutely nothing—but that grim spectre of the past, the want and the stink and the desperate cruelty of living, could still bring him to his knees.
The curtain of sleet thickened and lowered. He studied the narrow courtyard below—the buildings leaning on one another’s shoulders like drunkards, the stray mongrel carrying a rat between its teeth—and felt his breath catch in his throat. A man had appeared around the crumbling edge of the tenement opposite; a complete stranger in Fitzgerald’s eyes, but too well-dressed to belong to the rookery. Barrel-chested, heavy-limbed, with luxuriant muttonchop whiskers, he carried a heavy club known as a cosh. As Fitzgerald watched, he stopped in the centre of the courtyard, his eyes roving among the derelict entries. Was this one of Nancy’s regulars?
A regular would know where she lived.
Three other men materialised at the first’s back, obviously in support, and stood silently waiting. Then, in the space of a heartbeat, two more approached from a narrow passage at the courtyard’s far end.
Six men. Converging.
Fitzgerald could hear Georgie murmuring to her patient, who was waking now with wracking sobs. She would ask him to carry the girl back to her pallet, soon.
He opened the door to the hall. “Davey.”
The boy was minding the younger children on the stairs.
“Is there a back door out of the building?”
“Yes, sir.”
Fitzgerald tossed him a shilling. “Run down and see whether it’s all clear. Don’t talk to anybody—there’s a good lad.”
The child vanished with stealth and swiftness, the coin clenched between his teeth; Fitzgerald turned back inside, and lifted Lizzie in his arms.
“I might send to Covent Garden for some fresh linen,” Georgiana worried, as he set the girl down on her straw, “but all the shops are closed. I shall simply have to bring some things tomorrow from Russell Square—”
“You won’t be in Russell Square tomorrow.”
“Nonsense,” she retorted crisply. “This child must be examined daily. Would you consign her to her mother’s care? She might as well be left for dead.”
Fitzgerald glanced at Lizzie; she’d lost consciousness from the pain. “There’s a party of killers in the courtyard below. If they’ve found you here, Georgie, they’ve already been to Russell Square.”
Her face was suddenly, sharply, white.
“What?”
He grasped her shoulder, pulled her from the inner room to the window. “Look. There. On the paving. A man with a cosh. Probably still stained with Sep’s blood.”
She shook her head wildly. “I see nobody!”
Fitzgerald cursed. Heavy boots resounded through the lower entry; the men were already inside.
“Get your cloak and satchel. Quickly!”
She asked him nothing this time, though he could read the disbelief in her face. He seized her hand and pulled her after him, through the hallway.
Chapter Ten
There is nothing more trying to the affections of a mother than the caprice of a daughter. I say this with a rueful appreciation of Fate—having been daughter myself to Victoire, Princess of Leiningen and Duchess of Kent, and mother in turn to five girls of my own. I do not believe there is a woman now living who possesses a finer sense of the emotions that tremble between two such females: one in full-blown rebellion against the maternal efforts of the other to guide, to rear, to direct. I considered of this as I studied my second daughter around the hour of ten o’clock, as she sat with bowed head in St. George’s Chapel of a Sunday morning—the holiest place in Windsor. She was weeping for her Papa. The sight of such misery wrung my grieving heart.
“Alice.”
The name floated beneath the Gothic architraves, the leaded windows transmuting the wretched December day to a light more infinite and sublime.
Her head was cradled in her hands, her slight frame already swathed in black—a summer mourning gown she’d last worn for my mother. Alice looked crushed and frail, as though she had been whipped to submission by an overpowering master; it was brutal to disturb such suffering, even by whispering her name.
Alice is eighteen—a good and affectionate soul, although perhaps a little spoilt by dear Albert. She is engaged to marry Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, and will too soon escape my influence forever. In the short time that is left to me I must endeavour to correct those little flaws that might naturally result from a too-careless indulgence, lest her husband be appalled at her headstrong nature. Albert was undoubtedly appealing to the child, particularly after Vicky went off to her Prussian marriage—but I may say her father delighted perhaps too much in their conversations. Alice is clever, you see; and Albert encouraged her to put herself forward to an unbecoming degree.
“Alice!”
She straightened—her head lifted from her black-gloved hands—her crinoline swung, bell-like, as she rose from her knees—eyes trained on the altar. Albert was not yet there, although it seemed as though he ought to be—arranged on a pyre like a barbaric lord of old. My burnt offering.My Beloved’s body still lay in the Blue Room, where the Royal Valets—MacDonald and Löhlein—were bathing and dressing him like a doll. I would not think of the undertakers. Nor of funerals in general. I would make no arrangements. Bertie would, of course, handle everything.
Alice walked slowly by me, her expression blank, her arms stiff at her sides, to the chapel door. She hesitated at the threshold, but did not turn or glance back; she merely quitted the place without a word. Wonderingly, I followed.
“Alice!”
The black figure halted. “You wished to speak to me, Mama?”
“Indeed.”
I longed to take the dear child in my arms, to mourn with her over the loss of her Sainted Papa—but Alice looked as approachable as marble. Impossible to caress. Her fortitude was all that was admirable during the last days of Albert’s illness. She haunted his rooms, followed in his steps as he moved sleepless through the Castle at night—played beloved German airs upon the piano to ease his fevered brain. But for all her goodness, I sense in Alice an unfortunate tendency to obstinacy. When she might have served as prop and comfort to her Mama, she prefers to ally herself with the younger children—Leopold, for example, upon whom she foolishly dotes. And Louise. And Helena. They refer to me as “Eliza” behind my back; Alice is the prime mover in all my children’s conspiracies.