He started forward. “You've never touched it, Your Highness? That's a bit of ratsbane I set out for them voles. Ravaging the rootstock, they are. I won't have that, in my gardens.”
“But what makes it green?”
“The arsenic,” he explained. “Grey in the packet, but green in the earth. Scheele's Green, they call it. Used for all manner of things, I reckon.”
Alice crouched down once more, her black silk skirts pooling around her boots, and studied the bright green smear from a distance. It was vivid enough to colour paint, or dye fabric. Or shade the leaves of an artificial flower, for the trimming of hats . . .
“Where do you get your ratsbane, Crawford?” she asked him idly.
“From the chemist's shop, in Cowes.”
“Very well. I'll write to Leo about the voles.”
That evening, after she had read Bertie's letter from Cambridge a second time—a brief two paragraphs recounting the essentials of Papa's funeral, and a longer passage about Natty Rothschild's latest party, and a prank he and Natty had got up among the regius professors—she sat in contemplation by the fire.
Lacking Violet, Alice had been thrown back on her own resources. She had pled a headache at teatime, and slipped away in the dog cart to Cowes.
It never occurred to Mr. Daggett, the chemist, that a princess might wander into the village entirely by herself. He had talked to her in complete ignorance of her identity—and been most informative.
“Well, naturally, miss, if your flowers were in water the whole vase was tainted,” he'd scolded her. “I'm not surprised your kitty died. Wonderful prone to lapping water from vases, cats are . . .”
Alice was explicit about her Snowball's demise: the low fever, the gastric distress, the vomiting and loss of appetite.
Cupric hydrogen arsenite, Mr. Daggett said. A common pigment, known as Scheele's Green, from the Swede who invented it a hundred years ago. Used to colour wallpaper. Paint. Fabric. Even decorative sugars, for use in pastry . . .
She understood, now, what Mama had tried to tell her—with cryptic utterances and frigid contempt. Baron Stockmar's letter—and a quarter-hour with Mr. Daggett—had made it all quite plain. Papa had leached the poison quite deliberately from her bright green leaves, and drunk it down neat.
Why? she demanded of the blue flames at her feet. If you chose to end your life, Papa, I want to know why.
But there was no one at Osborne who could tell her.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Dear God,” Georgiana said, sinking down on a settee, “you must be mistaken. We all saw Theo leave on horseback, Patrick—he escorted your wife to Sheerness!”
“Tell me everything you heard.” Fitzgerald crouched to Leo's height. “Everything you know.”
“There's not much.” The boy was too pale, but he spoke as firmly as though delivering an oration to an exacting tutor. “Rokeby received a telegram from the embassy in Paris. He'd told them about our Christmas, you see—that we'd all spent the day together; it's Rokeby's job to report my doings in Cannes. And the embassy wired back that you had shot your son, and escaped to France. Rokeby is to fetch you back. But he stopped first to place a guard at Château Leader. You scraped our acquaintance, he said, in order to do us some harm. But that's nonsense, isn't it? Because we just stumbled onto you, on the Fréjus road, and you can't have known we'd be there; and anyway, Dr. Armistead is a friend of Papa's. So I told Louisa that Rokeby's got it all muddled and we have to help. Papa would never swerve from his Duty to a Friend.”
“I knew there must be some mistake,” Louisa added. “Shouldn't you tell Lord Rokeby what happened, Mr. Fitzgerald, and clear matters up—so that we all may be quite comfortable again?”
Fitzgerald stood like a stone in the middle of the room, his expression closed, as though he heard and saw nothing of the scene before him. “Von Stühlen,” he muttered. “Or one of his rogues. They crushed my boy when they couldn't find me.”
“I'm so sorry,” Georgie said brokenly.
“I'll kill the man.” He glanced wildly around, as though von Stühlen were lurking in the shadows. “That's what I've got to do, Georgie—kill the bloody villain with my own bare hands! Oh, God—my boy, my boy . . .”
He turned his back, head buried in his fingers.
From beyond the reception room doorway, there was a sudden bustle of arrival—the sound of men's voices calling, some of them in French.
“Rokeby,” Louisa said. “Oughtn't you to explain?”
“You'll gain nothing by talking, Patrick,” Georgiana warned. “We'll be carried back to London and thrown in Newgate. She'll have us exactly where she wants us.”
“Who shall?” Leo demanded alertly.
Heavy footsteps clattered across the stone floor of the hotel.
Fitzgerald seemed unable to move.
Leopold tugged his hand. “You must take the donkeys, sir. They're tethered out front. We've put the peasant things from the Christmas charades in the panniers. You may wear them, as a disguise.”
He had clearly planned this in the haste of stealing from the Château Leader—and Fitzgerald, despite his strange paralysis, recognised the boy's selfless courage. That blood of kings, he thought.
“Quickly, through the French window,” Louisa urged. “We shall detain Lord Rokeby for a moment. But only a moment.”
“Gibbon,” Fitzgerald attempted.
“If you will be so good as to ask Mr. Fitzgerald's manservant to settle his bill, and return with our traps to London,” Georgie suggested. “And thank you both. We are exceedingly in your debt.”
“Sir.” Leopold looked beseechingly up into Fitzgerald's wooden face, then dragged him by the hand to the window.
“Lord Rokeby!” Louisa cried from the doorway. “We did not think to meet you here! Leopold and I have been enjoying a bit of a lark!”
They lost themselves among the twisting streets and white houses of Cannes, which glowed faintly in the December darkness as though they had absorbed the phosphorescence of the neighbouring sea. At first Fitzgerald was capable only of giving his donkey its head, and made no effort to guide it, haste being paramount; and Georgiana followed. But at length she thought it wise to say gently, “Patrick—this beast is making straight for its stall at the Château Leader,” and Fitzgerald roused himself from the black thoughts in which his soul had sunk, and looked around him.
“We'll make for the Fréjus road,” he said, “through the pines. There's a bridle path the donkeys use.”
Fréjus lay west, over a mountain pass toward Toulon, while Rokeby and Nice lay east. From Toulon, perhaps, they could find a train north.
They rode in silence for some time. No one pursued them.
Emerging at the summit of the road where they had encountered Gunther and his party two days before, Georgiana pulled her donkey to a halt and dismounted.
She walked a little way into the trees.
When she reappeared a few moments later, she was dressed as a peasant boy.
“I shall sell these in Toulon,” she declared, thrusting her petticoats and gown into one of Catherine's panniers. “We'll need the funds if we're to reach Coburg swiftly.”
They stopped that night beneath a farmer's haystack, just past Fréjus. There were thirty miles to travel the next day; they would have to sell the donkeys in Grimaud, Fitzgerald decided, and purchase seats on a public stage. Alone, he would have pressed on through the darkness, forgoing sleep—but the chill night air had settled in Georgiana's lungs. She was coughing again.