An Old Betrayal

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Thirty-five minutes later they were in the Blue Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace. A grim-looking lieutenant stood watch over them. The Queen was on her way.

Jenkins paced the room nervously; they had left a passel of constables behind at Wintering’s, to take care of the body and search the rooms, but he would have preferred to do the job himself. Meanwhile Dallington and Lenox sat on two uncomfortable chairs near the door. Despite its name, the color of the Blue Drawing Room was almost entirely gold — too sumptuous for Lenox’s taste, though undeniably spectacular, with its long rows of high columns and its vast acreage of glossy royal portraiture.

“Have you met the Queen?” asked Lenox in a quiet voice.

“Several times as a child.”

It was sometimes easy to forget that Dallington was the son of a duke. “Of course. You must have been a page.”

“Yes, I still have the costume. Fearful bore.”

“Come now, be respectful.”

Dallington grinned, but when the door opened a moment later, he was just as quick to his feet as Lenox.

What was one supposed to feel, meeting one’s monarch? She came in with a rollicking bustle of spaniels around her feet, four or five of them, tan, white, and black in coloring. (Lenox still remembered Dash, her first and favorite, who had been memorialized in the newspapers as if he were an officer in the Guards.) The most striking thing was her size, always — she stood just under five feet, a crumb of person. There was a reason the people called her “our little queen.”

In public and social life Lenox had occasion to see Victoria relatively often, sometimes as many as six or seven times a year. He always felt the same complex blend of emotions. There was reverence, first, then incredulity that so much power and meaning resided in one rather inconsequential-looking person. There was even something comic, faintly disappointing, in her plain, rather portly personage, but this recognition was always succeeded by a great wave of affection and wish to protect her.

Perhaps this was because of Albert. On the day in her eighteenth year when she took the crown, she had once said, she watched two of the greatest men in the realm — her two ancient uncles — bow before her, and at that moment it had been borne in upon her that she would never again have a true equal. She had been wrong, however. In Prince Albert she had found both love and mutual respect. When he had died, fourteen years before, it was widely acknowledged that the world had grown dark for her — that even now she only went on out of a sense of duty, without any pleasure in life, even, somewhat shockingly, in her children.

Albert had been something of a laughingstock, in truth, a derision encouraged in part by Victoria’s overfondness for him. When he had arrived she had been less kind: She had banished his childhood friends from his retinue, back to the Continent, permitting him to keep only his beloved dog, Eon, for whom she bought a silver collar, which in itself seemed a gesture of proprietorship.

Albert had handled his submission gallantly. He was exceedingly gentle and loving with the Queen from the start, until soon she came to depend on him utterly. She had made him a consort when the public took against him — they feared a war with the continent — and would have made him a king, if she could have.

After his death, nobody in London had seen her face for three years.

She emerged a statelier woman, her own sorrow close to death itself. She had strength, certainly. Often Lenox remembered the story, much whispered in his childhood, of her first days as Queen. During all of her adolescence she had shared a bed with her arrogant, domineering mother, but upon taking up residence here at Buckingham she had banished that woman, furious, to a distant suite of rooms. Yet she had kept through an adjoining door her childhood governess, who, until the day of her death, brushed Victoria’s hair every night.

As she entered the room now, gray of hair and lined of face, that arrogant, vulnerable child-queen seemed both unreachably gone and at the same time visible in her lineaments, her expressions. Time had shaped her. It took no courage to be a nobleman, or even a prince, but to be a monarch for thirty-eight years, as she had been, took mettle. Privilege was no bulwark.

“Gentlemen,” she said, as all four men in the room bowed, “I am told that someone may mean to make mischief here this evening.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Jenkins, who was the official presence of their trio.

She had insisted upon seeing them herself, apparently. “You are Charles Lenox,” she said now, reaching down to scratch a dog’s ear. “And you are James Dallington.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they both said, Dallington apparently willing to let her slip pass unremarked.

“Lady Jane Lenox is pregnant, Grete tells me,” said the Queen. “It is the hazard of being a wife, unfortunately.”

“She has had the child, Your Majesty,” said Lenox and then, though the lieutenant had warned them to be as brief as possible, could not help himself from adding, “a girl named Sophia.”

A flicker of a smile passed across the Queen’s face. “I’ll tell Grete she was wrong — she won’t like it. Sophia, then. I don’t dislike babies, though I think very young ones rather disgusting.” There was virtually no appropriate response to this, but she didn’t seem to mind the ensuing silence. She walked toward a window and pulled back the diaphanous curtain, looking out at the black of evening. “Our gathering begins in thirty minutes, gentlemen. Is that correct, Shackleton?”

The lieutenant — who had a thin martial mustache, a strong jawline, and hair slicked into a neat mold — consulted his watch. “Thirty-one minutes, Your Majesty.”

“What a pointless correction.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“I am surrounded by lawyers everywhere, making minor corrections. Such exactitude — everyone wishes the Queen to know the exact facts. Shackleton, it is foolish.”

“Certainly, Your Majesty.”

“You have my permission to approximate the time by half a minute, if it will save me a further line of dialogue with you.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Mr. Jenkins,” she said, “we are using four rooms this evening: this one, the State Dining Room, the Music Room, and the Ballroom. We will also walk down the East Gallery together, the King of Portugal and I. Will I be in any danger?”

“There are already dozens of constables from the yard around the perimeter of the palace, ma’am.”

“You think this thief means to mingle with the crowds?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

She was still looking out through the window. “What does he hope to steal?”

“We don’t know, Your Majesty. There are no doubt a great many objects of value here.”

She smiled again, as if acknowledging a certain dry wit to be found in such a trifling assessment of her possessions. “Yes, a few. Would he have gotten in, were all these constables not at their posts, Mr. Jenkins?”

“I cannot say, ma’am.”

“Yet I insist.”

“Then yes, ma’am, I believe he would have.”

“Do you agree, Mr. Lenox?”

“I do, Your Majesty.”

She looked back at them and inclined her head imperceptibly. “Then I thank you. Shackleton, let me know when he is caught, unless I am speaking to the King himself.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good evening, gentlemen,” she said, and, the dogs responding to some invisible tether they must have felt pulling them toward her — one that Lenox felt, too, and that he could see Dallington felt, Shackleton, Jenkins, every one of her subjects — she left.

There was a moment’s silence. “She is very calm,” said Jenkins at last.

“There is little enough that can surprise her after all this time,” Shackleton responded. “At any rate you know her famous quotation. ‘Great events make me quiet and calm — it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.’”

“One does feel — well, something,” said Dallington.

Indeed there was electricity still hovering in the air of the room, or perhaps being communicated between the four men, including Shackleton, who must have seen her every day. “She was uncommonly obliging,” said Lenox.

“Yes, I thought so,” said Jenkins.

This was by her own standards, of course. In most people her behavior would have seemed inexcusably haughty, but such haughtiness, Lenox reflected, contained some measure of self-protection. He thought of the black crepe she still wore upon her shoulders, and then of the inexhaustible line of people who wished a word with her, a moment, beginning with the King of Portugal.

As in every occasion of life, Shakespeare had said it best. “I would not be a queen,” he had written in Henry the Eighth, “for all the world.”