“Just about.” Rupert had a feeling Will rather enjoyed seeing blown-apart bodies. He had caught him on the battlefield, pulling watches and rings off of severed hands; coins out of gaping, gory torsos. He suspected something had snapped in the lad at Vicksburg, if not before. Rupert patted him on the back. “Feels good, bein’ appreciated again, don’t it?”
“Sure does.”
“Just remember, once she blows, we’re up and over that hill back of us. No dawdlin’ to admire our handiwork. Let the foot soldiers grab her royalness.”
Because that was the plan—as daring as it might seem.
Kidnap the Queen of England.
Seven
Louise settled herself on the velvet cushion inside the coach beside Beatrice. Lorne sat on her sister’s other side, next to the far door. She was glad Bea hadn’t relinquished her customary position in the middle seat. As tender as Louise had felt toward Lorne during the days before their wedding, all of her hopes and every one of her dreams had been extinguished the moment he’d told her the facts of his life and what he saw as the ground rules of their marriage.
Although her anger had waned, she still felt wounded, callously betrayed. By him and by her mother.
Victoria sat directly across from Louise, preferring a window seat that faced forward. Her youngest sons, Leo and Arthur, filled in the rest of the seat, making a party of six in the grand coach. Lenchen was staying behind at Buckingham Palace, nursing a sniffly cold, which Brown deemed a safer place for her now that the others had left. Vicky and Fritz were already on their way back across the Continent to his beloved Germany. Others in the family were busy in their own ways, and the queen hadn’t objected to their not going along to Balmoral.
“I’m sure I shall be enough company for my darling newlyweds,” she’d cooed.
More than enough, Louise thought grimly.
Through the window on her left, Louise looked out on the rolling green countryside. Eventually the air completely cleared of the horrid mustard yellow smog and coal dust that drifted over and out from the city. Louise removed her handkerchief, covered in black specks from the sooty air, from over her nose and mouth. At last, she could breathe.
She heard John Brown barking out an order to the coachman. The Scot was sitting above them with the driver—where he preferred to be, in the open air. She suspected the arrangement suited him all the better for enabling him to take sips from his flask without her mother’s knowledge.
Louise turned to her sister. Bea still looked shaken by the rat ordeal. Louise whispered to her, “It’s a long drive, Baby. Might as well catch a nap.” She scooped an arm around her golden-haired younger sister. “I’ll wake you when we arrive.”
It wasn’t long before Bea dropped off to sleep, her head resting on Louise’s shoulder as they jolted and jostled down the rutted highway.
Louise glanced across the carriage at her mother, whose lap was piled with letters she’d planned to read as they drove. Her stationery box with pens and ink and sealing wax lay at her feet, although Louise couldn’t imagine trying to write while the carriage bumped over country roads. Victoria folded her hands on top of her correspondence, to keep the letters from sliding off her knees. Louise wished her mother had been willing to transport them all on Fairy, the royal yacht. Traveling up the coast by water to Scotland was the much pleasanter way to go, faster too.
Victoria had closed her eyes to nap, or else as a ploy to cut off conversation with her newlywed daughter. Louise didn’t care at the moment. They had spoken but a few words since the ceremony; no real opportunity for intimate conversation between mother and daughter having presented itself, with servants, staff, and relations always hovering around the queen. Louise longed to ask her mother if she’d knowingly arranged her marriage to a man who was incapable of pleasing her in bed or giving her children. It was unthinkably mean.
But then, hadn’t her mother already proven herself capable of unforgivable deeds?
They had never seen eye to eye. Her mother had once complained to Vicky in a letter, which Louise had snuck a peak at, that her fourth daughter was “difficile.” The one thing they’d ever shared, when Louise was a girl, was a love of drawing. Their mutual devotion to art was the reason the queen finally gave in to Louise’s pleas to be allowed to attend art school, even though this put her daughter in touch with commoners, a dreaded situation assiduously avoided by her family.
Unfortunately—Louise had to admit—her mother’s fears proved warranted. Although that one year in Kensington had been the most exciting, enlightening, and challenging of her young life, disaster ensued. Painful images flashed across her mind, even now, in the rumbling coach, so many years later. She brought a gloved fist to her mouth and pressed hard, holding back a sob of grief . . . and guilt.
With effort Louise pushed those memories out of her mind and fixed on the budding trees and early blossoming, white-petaled snowdrops speckling the grass alongside the road. And the pain slowly faded. In a few days they’d settle in at dear Balmoral, the castle built on an ancient site by her father. It sat close to where her husband had been born into the powerful Campbell clan, and where his family still lived. As always, the castle would offer shelter from the politics and intrigue of London.
Occasionally she caught a glimpse of her mother’s agent, Stephen Byrne, riding up and down the line of carriages, his black-brown duster flapping in the wind, that strange American plainsman’s hat with the high crown and wide brim tugged low over his brow, his piercing gaze flicking toward buildings, trees, people they passed. Watching for God-only-knew-what threat.
She had to give the man credit. He, and Brown, had acted swiftly and efficiently to get them on their way north. It was no small task, herding their entourage into the waiting carriages. She’d expected outraged arguments from courtiers. But something unpredictable and dangerous shadowed Byrne’s dark eyes, discouraging argument from even the highest ranking in her mother’s court.
She looked along the seat and over her sister’s sleeping head at Lorne. His gaze was fixed on a distant point outside the far window. His blond hair feathered in the chill spring breeze. They hadn’t said more than two words to each other this day. Or the one before it. In the presence of her mother, he’d kissed her on the cheek and wished her a cheerful good morning at family breakfast. But since then he’d touched her no more than was necessary to put on a show of affection and, later, to hand her up into the carriage.
She felt more alone than ever, shut inside this rattling ebony box with her nonhusband and her incomprehensible mother. How could she look forward to a life of celibacy, in the company of a man who could only love other men? What was she to do? If this had been a conscious plan on her mother’s part, had it been intended as punishment for her daughter’s past failings?
Louise’s head began to pound in rhythm with the horses’ hoofbeats. Her throat felt raw and tightened with the effort to fight back tears. She wouldn’t succumb to self-pity. Certainly not here in front of everyone.
The queen’s carriage set a rapid pace between towns, at Brown’s direction. Eventually they slowed down as they approached the industrial town of Leicester, more densely populated than others before it along the route. Smokestacks spewed gritty steam from the factories along the canal and the River Soar, but the air remained far less foul than the choking effluvium that hovered over London.
And then they stopped.
Victoria roused herself, opening her eyes. “What is it? Why are we not moving?”