Виктория Холт - The Widow of Windsor

So Alice and her family went to Eastbourne and when they visited the Queen she was still concerned about Alice’s health. Alice was so devoted to her family; she was always engaged in good works. Alice and Arthur were the two who took most after their father.

The Queen lectured Alice on taking greater care of her health and spoke sternly to Louis. Alice had always taken her duties seriously. She was the one who had nursed her dearest Papa and later Bertie; and had worked so hard during the dreadful Franco–Prussian war. She was so clever; she had translated into German some of Octavia Hill’s essays about the London poor; and her reason for doing so was that she hoped the German authorities might take some notice of what had been done in London to alleviate suffering and follow the example in Germany.

Dear Alice! Yes, she and Arthur were the good ones, and apt to be overlooked when compared with the more forceful Vicky and gay and fascinating Bertie.

The sad season was approaching. December must always be a month of mourning, when she shut herself away with her journals and went over her past life, reading what she had written at the time and trying to recapture some of that rapture which she assured herself living with Albert had been. It was so long ago. Seventeen years ago since that dreadful December day when she had sat by his bed and known that he had left her for ever.

November came and with it a telegram from Alice to say that her daughter Victoria had caught diphtheria and was very ill.

The Queen was disturbed; she immediately wrote pages of advice to Alice. She must not wear herself out with nursing. She knew her daughter and she, the Queen, was not pleased with the wan looks which she had noticed during the summer. The Queen implored, no commanded, Alice to take great care and as diphtheria was catching, she must not expose herself to infection.

After the tragic death of the child who had fallen from the window, Alice had only six children left – five daughters and one son. There was Victoria, who had diphtheria; Alice known as Alicky, Irene, Ella and baby May; Ernie was now the only son.

Every day the Queen waited impatiently for news; she found it difficult to concentrate on anything else. How she wished the family were still in England for she was certain that with dear Jenner at hand they would have been much safer.

The telegrams came and the news was not good. Alice’s husband, Duke Louis, had caught it; Alicky had it; in a very short time all of the family with the exception of Alice had succumbed to the terrible disease.

What could she do? Did Mama think that she would stand by and see her family ill? She was certainly going to nurse them.

‘The doctors have told me that I must be careful and of course I will. I must on no account kiss them or embrace them.’

‘My dearest child,’ wrote the Queen, ‘I beg of you take the greatest care of yourself.’

Poor Alice! She was doomed to be a martyr. It had always been the same in the nursery. Vicky had bullied her; even Bertie who had championed her had occasionally teased her, but she had always taken it stoically and without protest, never telling tales.

Five-year-old May, the baby and pet of the household, was now dangerously ill.

‘How I wish that I could be there with her,’ said the Queen.

It was terrible when little May had died. But there was worse to come. They were a devoted family and the death of baby May shocked them all and filled them with grief. They were all sick, with the exception of Alice, who had miraculously kept free of the dreaded disease.

When she had looked at that small beloved face and known that her youngest child was dead she had stared speechlessly before her. How could she tell them what had happened, they who were so sick themselves?

But the truth could not be kept from them. ‘Baby is dead.’ The news seeped out, a terrible melancholy fell upon the palace.

Ernie, who had loved his baby sister dearly and was himself very ill with the disease which had killed her, was nearly demented with grief.

‘It is not true, Mama,’ he said. ‘Tell me it is not true.’

Alice could say nothing. She could only gaze sorrowfully at her son.

‘She is dead …? Baby May dead …?’ he cried.

‘She is suffering no more, Ernie, my darling.’

‘Dead!’ said Ernie blankly. Then he looked up at his mother. ‘Am I going to die, Mama? Are we all going to die?’

He had flung himself into her arms and what could she do, but hold him against her. She kissed him; she tried to comfort him.

‘I am here, my son, Mama is here to nurse you, so you will get well.’

He held up his face to hers. How could she refuse to kiss her own son at such a moment?

* * *

Alice had caught the infection. When the Queen heard this news she was alarmed.

She sent for Bertie and Alix. ‘She looked so frail when she was here in the summer. I warned her. I should have commanded her to come here. That house of sickness was no place for her.’

‘She wouldn’t have come, Mama,’ pointed out Alix.

‘I trust my daughter would have obeyed me.’

Alix shook her head. ‘She would never have left her family.’

The Queen was silent; then she said suddenly: ‘Do you know what the date is?’ And she began to shiver.

‘Why, Mama,’ said Bertie, ‘it is the twelfth of December.’

‘In two days’ time,’ she said, ‘it will be the fourteenth – the anniversary of your father’s death. It was on the fourteenth of December that we feared so for you, Bertie. Your crisis came then when we had all but given you up. And in two days’ time it will be the fourteenth again and Alice lies close to death.’

‘Mama, it can’t be. How could it be?’ said Bertie.

But the Queen was sure. There was something malignant for her about the 14th of December. That day had been the most wretched of her life; on it she had lost the Beloved Being; life had ended for her on that day, she had often said. And wasn’t it true that on the 14th she had nearly lost her eldest son? A miracle had happened then. And now … Alice!

‘Mama,’ said Bertie, very tender as he knew how to be on such occasions, ‘a miracle will happen again.’

* * *

The Queen sat in her room, praying, waiting for the miracle. She read her journals of that dreadful day seventeen years ago – the first fateful 14th of December. She had sat by his bedside, refusing to believe it; turning away from the blank misery which opened at her feet like a deep yawning pit.

‘Please, God,’ she prayed, ‘please, Albert, you saved Bertie. Leave me Alice.’

On the 13th there was no news from Hesse Darmstadt. The Queen went to the Blue Room in which Albert had died and she lived it all again and instead of that dearly beloved face on the pillows she saw that of Alice.

She had looked so ill even in the summer after the good air of Eastbourne. How would she have the strength to get through the illness? Only a miracle could save her. There must be a miracle.

She could not sleep that night. She kept saying: ‘Tomorrow will be the fourteenth.’ She could not stay in bed. She knelt by the bed in the Blue Room and prayed.

She must make a pretence of eating breakfast. Brown would scold her if she did not.

Brown came to her holding a telegram.

She snatched it.

‘I see by your face it’s nae good news,’ he grumbled and even at such a time she noticed the deep concern on his good honest face.

‘Ye’ll be ill yerself, woman,’ he said, ‘if you don’t give over grieving. Let me get you a cup of tea.’

And he got her what he called his special tea and in spite of everything she remembered how she had once complimented him on the best tea she had ever tasted. It was during one of their trips when they had boiled the water by the wayside. ‘It should be good,’ he had said with a grin, ‘it’s laced wi’ good Scotch whisky.’

And that was the sort of tea that Brown always made for her.

He made it now and she drank and felt a little comforted. But not for long.

There was another telegram.

At half past seven on the 14th of December, the seventeenth anniversary of her father’s passing, Alice had died.

* * *

The Queen called the family together and told them the terrible news. Leopold sobbed unashamedly, so did Alix, who could never bear tragedy in the family. Poor Bertie was heartbroken; Alice had always been a special favourite of his.

The story of how she had caught the infection was told and the Queen said how typical it was of her. Alice had always sacrificed herself.

How comforting was Lord Beaconsfield who lost no time in hurrying to the Queen to offer his condolences. They wept together and she told him of the virtues of Alice, so very much her father’s daughter. They had shared that quality of saint-liness, so rare in human beings. And they had both died young.

‘Alas, it is often so,’ said Lord Beaconsfield.

‘But fortunately not always,’ she assured him, gazing up into his wrinkled old face.

The speech he made in the House of Lords was so touching that she had a copy of it sent to her that she might read it again and again.

‘My lords, there is something wonderfully piteous in the immediate cause of her death. The physicians who permitted her to watch over her suffering family enjoined her under no circumstances to be tempted into an embrace. Her admirable self-constraint guarded her through the crisis of this terrible complaint into safety … She remembered and observed the injunctions of her physicians. But it became her lot to break to her son, quite a youth, the death of his youngest sister, to whom he was devotedly attached. The boy was so overcome with misery that the agitated mother clasped him in her arms, and thus she received the kiss of death.’

‘How beautiful,’ said the Queen. ‘Only Lord Beaconsfield could write so movingly.’

She thanked him and they talked at great length about the strangeness of the date. Lord Beaconsfield felt that there was some hand of fate in it. The Prince Consort, he was sure, was watching over her.

‘I like to believe that,’ she told him.

‘You may be assured of it, Madam.’

‘As Mary Anne is watching over you.’

He nodded solemnly. ‘He left you the Prince of Wales,’ he went on. ‘He escaped the fateful day; but for some reason the Princess Alice was taken from you.’

‘She is so young to die,’ protested the Queen.

‘As that beloved saint her father was.’

‘And on the same day,’ said the Queen in an awed whisper.

‘The fourteenth of December,’ murmured Lord Beaconsfield.

The Queen held out her hand to him; he took it and kissed it.

‘You are a great comfort to me, Lord Beaconsfield,’ she told him.

‘Life will only be important to me,’ he said earnestly, ‘while I can be so.’

Dear Lord Beaconsfield! When the time came she would send a very special message with the primroses which always went to him from Osborne – the first of the season, picked by her own hands.

She would never forget that beautiful speech of his about the kiss of death.

The Queen tried not to brood on the death of Alice. She died as she would have wished, she said, serving her family. It was what one would have expected of Alice.

Lord Beaconsfield suggested that Lord Lorne would be a good Governor-General of Canada which would mean that he and Louise would leave the country. She was a little dubious. She had just lost one daughter to death and she did not like to think of another being so far away; but that was the fate of royal children. Daughters were always taken from their parents.

There was a great deal in the country’s affairs to cause her anxiety. A war had broken out with the Zulu rising; and the Prince Imperial, son of the widowed Empress Eugénie, was slain in a very distressing way – he was hacked to pieces by the knives of savages. She hated war but Lord Beaconsfield pointed out that it was impossible to maintain a position as the leading world power possessed of an Indian Empire and colonies without being continually engaged in minor wars of this nature.

She saw the point of that and Lord Beaconsfield had made her fully aware of the growing Empire. Victoria Regina et Imperatrix was not mistress of a small state, she must remember; she was the mighty Queen and Empress who ruled a large proportion of the world. Lord Beaconsfield would like to see those boundaries grow wider and of course he was right.