“Her daughter's youngest, and very delicate,” Georgiana told Patrick, her brows knitting. “He has just had a bruising fall. It is best that we leave . . .”
Fitzgerald rose and bowed. “Je vous remercie, madame,” he said haltingly. “Now ask her, for the love of God, how her husband died.”
Georgie hesitated, her eyes on the child. His trousers, wet with blood, were torn above the right knee. She reached into her coat for a handkerchief and began to tear it into strips, then knelt and bound it around the boy's knee. Immediately, red stains soaked through the linen.
Frau Schindler murmured something. Fitzgerald noticed her hands were shaking as they smoothed her grandson's hair.
“It was the same with Richard,” Georgiana translated for him. “The bleeding. One day he fell on the marble steps at Schloss Leiningen—and bled to death.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Neither of them spoke as they left the widow Schindler's house. Georgiana had blood on her hands; Fitzgerald stopped in the street and searched for his handkerchief.
“You know, love,” he said as he rubbed at her palms, “we can prove nothing. Nothing a'tall.”
“But we know,”
Georgiana insisted. “We know what Prince Albert must have discovered. He came back to the Rosenau last September and delved deep into the records, studying his family line. He learned what we learned. There are no bleeders among his Coburg ancestors. There are no bleeders in the House of Hanover. The disease must have come from elsewhere.”
“D'ye think he met the widow Schindler?”
“Something made him desperate enough to attempt suicide, in that runaway carriage.”
“But why?” Fitzgerald demanded. “He never caused this!”
“No,” she said quietly. “But neither was he the man to profit from a lie.”
They stood for an instant, in silence.
“He probably didn't want to believe it.” Fitzgerald balled up his handkerchief. “He talked to yon lady. Thought about her grandson. Read up on the science. Asked for John's notes—”
“And then, in the middle of November, he accepted the truth. To his utter despair. I am fearfully in want of a true friend and counsellor . . .”
“The Duchess of Kent had a cuckoo in her nest—and put her right on the throne of England. The Saxe-Coburg fortunes were made forever! Albert went from being the second son of a minor duke, to running the show in England—and his children after him. . . . I wonder if he told his wife what he suspected?” Fitzgerald said thoughtfully.
“She's terrified of something.” Georgiana stopped short near the entrance to the inn. “Why hunt for you otherwise? Why attempt to silence me? Why send poor Leopold into exile in France?”
“The boy's hardly pining away,” Fitzgerald objected. “He's having a rare adventure, look you. Imagine the scene when he's summoned home.”
“That's beside the point. Patrick—what are we going to do?”
“We're going back to England,” he said, “and have a talk with the Queen. We must buy our freedom, Georgie—with a promise of silence. In writing.”
“You would do that? Suppress the truth—swallow the murders of Sep and Lizzie and Theo—to save your own skin?”
She was staring at him accusingly: a pert young boy in shabby clothing, her hands thrust into her pockets for warmth. He yearned to pull her to him and cover her face with kisses; but he simply said, “To save yours, my darling, I'd deny the resurrection of the good Lord Himself. Now pack your things. I'll fetch tickets for Mainz. Be ready in an hour.”
The Mainz train left Amorbach twelve times a day. From there, the line ran directly to Cologne—and from Cologne, it was possible to reach London in thirty hours. Lacking a watch, Fitzgerald glanced at the station clock: nearly noon on Thursday, the second of January. They could make the two o'clock train and be back in London, barring a major mishap, by Saturday night at the latest.
He spared a thought for Gibbon—not the first during the long ordeal of German travel—and hoped he'd managed to find his way from Cannes to Dover. A letter to Bedford Square would reach Gibbon only when they did; and if the Metropolitan Police intended to charge Fitzgerald with murder, he must avoid Bedford Square above all else. There would be difficulties re-entering the country—the ports were probably watched. He would have to avoid the usual Channel packets and hire a private boatman, who might put them off discreetly somewhere along the English coast. Was the Queen at Windsor? —Or had she left, as was her custom, to spend January at Osborne House? An English newspaper could tell him. The Isle of Wight was directly accessible by boat, and London could be entirely avoided—if only he still had the Dauntless. . . .
Theo.
The thought of Sheppey flared within him, and burned.
He bought two tickets and turned back to the inn. Feverishly calculating expenses. It was possible he would have to sell something else in Mainz. His coat?
Taking the stairs two at a time, he dashed up to his room.
The door stood open, his few belongings exactly as he'd left them. Georgiana's medical bag. The gown she'd worn to call upon Stockmar. The rumpled pallet where he'd slept, which the maid had yet to tidy. But the single straight-backed chair was overturned, and at the sight of it, Fitzgerald was dizzy with nausea.
“Georgie,” he said aloud, knowing she would not answer.
Georgiana was gone.
Chapter Forty-Five
He was waiting for her when she entered the bed-chamber: hidden in the shadow between door and wall. She had no time to cry out—he thrust a wad of cotton, dipped in chloroform from her own supplies, against her nose and mouth. In his other hand he held her neck.
She might have kicked him—might have toppled the chair Patrick found on the floor—but the struggle was short and utterly silent. Von Stühlen won.
Later, she understood that they'd been careless: too driven by the scent of their elusive trail to have a thought for their own safety. Von Stühlen had arrived in Amorbach the previous night and learned immediately from the innkeeper—whom he'd known for years—that an Englishman and his manservant were lodged upstairs. He'd watched them leave for the Otterbachtal that morning. He'd watched them return. When Patrick made for the station and she chatted with the innkeeper's wife as she settled their bill, he'd prepared his strike.
When she regained consciousness, he was slapping her.
She tried to struggle upright, but her hands were bound behind her back. Her mouth was gagged. She was lying prone, on the bench seat of a traveling coach. She stared at von Stühlen, whose head loomed over her, his face expressionless; his hand clenched, and he slapped her again, deliberately. Her gorge rose—chloroform always made her sick—and she knew that she would choke.
She rolled sideways, head hanging over the seat, gagging wretchedly. He tore at the knot he'd made at the base of her skull and she puked all over his boots.
She cleaned them with a shaving towel herself, while von Stühlen held his dueling pistol to her head. When he was satisfied with her work, he handed the boots to his valet—a broad-shouldered prizefighter of a man, who sat beside him in the coach, grinning at her stupidly.
“We'll have to change carriages,” von Stühlen observed, rolling down the side windows. “The place stinks like an abattoir. Tell me, Miss Armistead—why did you come all the way to Amorbach in a servant's clothes? You're an insult to womanhood.”
Georgiana said nothing. She was bent slightly forward on the seat, her hands tied once more behind her back.