“How delightful,” she breathed, clasping his hand between two of her mittened ones, “to hear a voice from home, even if you are only Irish! One grows so tired of French! Is that not so, Lord Rokeby?”
This gentleman had driven over from Nice to wish his compatriots a happy Christmas; a peer's younger son—elegant and distinguished. All that Fitzgerald was not.
“I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” Rokeby observed somewhat distantly, “—and may I add that the lady requires no introduction. What a pleasant surprise, Miss Armistead, to find you in the south of France! And Mr. Fitzgerald is by way of being . . . a relation of yours?”
“I call him my uncle,” Georgiana said simply, “as he has served as guardian since the untimely death of Dr. John Snow. But I might as fondly call him a father—for all the consideration he has shown, in recent years. It was anxiety for my poor health which urged Mr. Fitzgerald to bring me to Cannes.”
A father, Fitzgerald thought violently. A father, by all that's holy.
“Ah,” Rokeby murmured. “Exactly so. And how was London, when last you saw it?”
“Plunged in mourning, I need hardly say.”
They moved toward the hearth, engrossed in the kind of polite nothings which Fitzgerald found so difficult to master; Georgiana managed them effortlessly, an artifact of her breeding—or the finishing school she had abandoned as soon as she was decently able.
“Lord Rokeby is attached to the consulate in Nice,” Gunther supplied, “and was charged with breaking the news of the Consort's passing to young Prince Leopold. I believe he may take the child off Lady Bowater's hands, with time. In the meanwhile, his delightful manners and conversation are a great comfort to her ladyship—in being less foreign than my own.”
The German doctor gave no particular edge to the words, but Fitzgerald detected a circumstantial bitterness. He had worn Gunther's boots in his time. He would have liked to have drawn the man out—established a certain understanding—but Georgie had made her tactics plain. You had better leave Gunther to me, she had said. It is fortuitous that he was acquainted with Uncle John; and besides, I shall know what to ask him about young Leopold.
“Have you seen my fretsaw?” the boy asked Fitzgerald suddenly, holding out the tool. “I have all sorts of building things. Gunther gave them to me as a Christmas present. But Papa ordered them, he said. Papa thought of me. Though he was quite ill.”
The boy's fingers were clenched on the saw's handle. Fitzgerald took it from him: a well-balanced tool of wood and steel, proportioned for small hands. The blade was a marvel of precisely jagged teeth.
And they had given it to a child who bled at the slightest provocation.
He glanced at Leopold. “It's grand! Have ye tried it yet?”
“No.” He looked uncertain, half-scared. “I have some wood, though—on the terrace.”
“Then let's show your papa,” Fitzgerald suggested, smiling, “what his saw is made of. Come along, lad.”
There were other gifts as well, which Gunther had procured on instruction from Windsor, well before the seriousness of the Consort's illness was understood. Lead soldiers, a pocket compass. A battledore and shuttlecock. Numerous books, some in German. A fabulous kite, fanciful and clearly French, made of silk and covered in fleurs-de-lys. A miniature violin, perfect as the fretsaw, for an eight-year-old's hands.
“Ten pounds I was given!” Gunther exclaimed, clearly shocked. “Ten whole pounds, for a child's gifts!”
Princess Alice had sent a game of table croquet, all the way from London.
“She must have read Leo's letters,” Louisa explained, as though this were unusual among the Royal Family. “He has developed a positive mania for croquet. We play tournaments, in teams, when the weather is fine. You must join us tomorrow.”
“I've been winning,” Leopold observed. He looked up from the small wooden box he was crafting carefully with hammer and nails. “Gunther and I are allies. The French know nothing of the game. Fancy being ignorant of croquet!”
After dinner—beef and an approximation of Yorkshire pudding, which failed miserably to suit, owing, as Lady Bowater said, to the “stupidity of the servants, who insist upon cooking in the French style,”—there were charades, and tableaux vivants.
Lord Rokeby began, with an interpretation of The Sorrows of Young Werther, which the entire party comprehended almost at an instant. Louisa followed, animating the word belle, by alternately swinging her skirts vigourously and pretending to flirt with every gentleman in the room, to the visible disapproval of Lady Bowater. Leopold disappeared after this, and when the drawing room draperies were once more parted, materialised in a black cape and the heavy worsted cloth of a French peasant, stooping and shuffling about the room in search of alms.
“It is that beggar who followed us,” Louisa whispered soberly to Fitzgerald, “the whole of our first day in Cannes. Leo and I were quite alone, and this sinister figure—we knew not whether man or woman—dogged our footsteps, muttering scraps of French, hand held out all the while. It made quite an impression on Leo; he could not shake the idea that the figure was Death. And indeed—”
Her voice trailed away uncertainly.
And indeed, Fitzgerald thought, the boy's instincts were not far wrong.
“. . . made for the stage, Your Highness,” Georgiana was saying, on the far side of the room; and then she broke off in a fit of coughing that brought an expression of alarm to Lady Bowater's face.
Soon after, the two of them took their leave.
“He bleeds very often from his nose and gums, and must rub the latter with a sulfate of soda when they appear swollen and red. He takes mercury and chalk as an emetic—to avoid straining at the bowels. The least thing oversets him, Gunther says—he nearly died from an outbreak of measles last spring, and a sore throat is dreadful; if he coughs, he is likely to cough blood. Sometimes he passes it in his urine, which leads them to believe the internal tissues have frayed. I gather the poor child bumped his arm against a baggage rack when his train carriage lurched unexpectedly before Avignon, and was laid up for weeks upon his arrival here. What should be a bruise for another child, is an incapacitation for Prince Leopold.”
Georgie said all this in an urgent undertone, between bouts of coughing, as they walked back to their hotel. She was engrossed, Fitzgerald saw, in the symptoms of the case—many of which she must have heard long before, from the Consort, but which she was cataloguing in her mind now, as she talked to him.
“Gunther says that given the fragility of the boy's frame, it is a matter of conjecture whether he will reach adulthood; and, as such, he treats him much as he would any other little boy—encouraging him to move freely and gain strength by virtue of exercise out-of-doors, regardless of whether he might sustain an injury.”
“Surely he does not take undue risk,” Fitzgerald protested, “with the Queen's son in his keeping?”
“Not undue risk,” Georgie conceded, “but he certainly grants the child more liberty than his nurse or his mother should do. That is a very German view of childhood, is it not? —That all manner of ills might be cured by fresh air and exertion?”
“German, English—what does it matter?” Fitzgerald demanded. “The poor man's not from another planet!”
He was sharply tired, all of a sudden—of the endless travel, the incipient anxiety, and this constant emphasis on race. It was Theo and his social theorists all over again.