‘But, Mama, you would not wish to leave yet. You will want to see dear Papa laid to rest.’
‘I don’t think I could bear it, my child.’
‘But …’
The Queen silenced her by laying a hand on her arm. Yes, she would leave Windsor. Uncle Leopold was right. She would die or go mad if she stayed here. She did not wish to tell Alice that she had before her marriage sometimes thought of going mad. It was due to the fact that her grandfather, George III, had lived out the last years of his life in that clouded state and there had been rumours that some of the uncles had taken after their father in this respect. Albert’s guiding hand had led her into a calmer state of mind; but now that was no longer there and the fear returned.
Yes, she would go to Osborne.
Osborne in December was grey and gloomy. What place on earth would not be grey and gloomy in that December? There were memories everywhere. Together they had come to the old Osborne and his genius had created the charming place it was today. Here he had played his games with the children; making sure that there was always a lesson to be learned from play. What a wonderful father he had been – an example to all as both father and husband!
Why had Uncle Leopold thought she could feel better at Osborne than anywhere else? As if she could feel better anywhere!
And in the room at Osborne, their room, she must go to bed all alone. How cold, how dreary! She smiled fleetingly, thinking of how he was often asleep when she came up because she had stayed up for some reason. He had always been so ready to sleep. They should have taken greater care of him; but because his mind was so great they had forgotten his physical weakness.
She took a portrait of him and laid it on the pillow where his head used to be.
‘Darling Albert,’ she whispered, ‘I could almost believe now that you are near me.’
She crowned it with a laurel wreath and sat by the bed looking down at it and weeping.
‘I have wept so much, dearest Albert,’ she said, ‘that I would seem to have no tears left.’
She could not sleep; she put out her hand and touched the portrait; then she rose, and finding one of his nightshirts in the drawer, she took it to bed with her and holding it in her arms was comforted.
It was midnight at Osborne, with the wild sea shrieking as though it knew what a tragedy had taken place. The Queen liked to hear it. She could not have borne it if it had been calm, blue and smiling. But she was shivering; she could not keep warm, which was strange really for in the past she had been so eager for fresh air and had enjoyed the cool keen winds. Her attendants had, she knew, continually complained of draughts from the windows she had insisted should remain open. Albert had been so much better in the spring and autumn than in the heat of summer; although he had so many colds in the winter.
How the days dragged! Could it really be only a week since that terrible day?
There was a commotion without, indicating that someone had arrived. She rose and went to the top of the stairs. Her brother-in-law Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, was below. He and his servants were dishevelled; they had just landed and the night was wild.
He saw her standing there and ran up the stairs to embrace her. They wept together.
‘Oh, Ernest,’ she cried. ‘He has gone. We have lost him!’
Ernest could only murmur brokenly. But it helped her a little to see that the visitors were well received and looked after. She became for a moment the ordinary little housewife she had sometimes told Albert she would have liked to be; and when living in small houses like Osborne she had been able to play at being.
Ernest sat with her, talking. He was a year older than Albert and he might so easily have been her husband. She shuddered at the thought. How different he was from that incomparable angel. One could hardly believe they were brothers. Ernest so dark and saturnine – Albert fair and angelic. Ernest resembled his father the late Duke, not only in looks but in his ways. There had been a horrible rumour about Albert’s birth and malicious people had tried to spread the story that he was not his father’s son, because his mother had been involved in a scandal with a member of her husband’s household, had been divorced and Albert had not seen her after he was four years old. What wicked stories people concocted about good people of whom they could only be envious. Albert certainly was different from his father and brother; she had become aware how different at the time of her marriage when Ernest had stayed with them and confessed that he was suffering from a horrible disease which was a result of his conduct in Berlin.
Dear Albert, how shocked he had been! He loved his brother, though, and had done everything to help him. That was years ago and now Ernest was married and had stepped into his father’s shoes and become Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha; he had no children. Albert had told her that this was sometimes a result of this terrible disease which she reminded herself severely he had brought on himself. She very much doubted that Ernest had mended his ways. In any case this childlessness raised a problem because if he had no heir one of Albert’s sons would inherit the Dukedom – Alfred possibly. This was hardly a matter to be discussed at this time, though.
They sat up late talking of Albert. Victoria told Ernest of the happiness she had known with him, of the thousands of joys now lost to her, Ernest talked of the old days when they had been boys together, fencing, riding, hunting, roaming the forests and finding specimens for their museum. ‘The Ernest and Albert Museum, we called it. We were as one. We had never been separated in our lives until the time came for Albert to prepare for his marriage.’
They wept together and talked of lovely Rosenau where the boys had spent so many happy days and where Albert had delighted in showing Victoria the room he and Ernest had shared, the fencing marks in the wall, the trophies of their childhood, the mountains, rivers and pine forests.
When Ernest left for Windsor where he would attend the funeral she remained at a window waving until he could no longer be seen; and she shuddered to think how fortunate she had been to have chosen Albert.
That brought her back to the recriminations. I should have taken greater care of him. I should never have allowed him to go to Cambridge.
Oh, Bertie, Bertie, what have you done!
The Prince of Wales was dreading the ordeal. He was relieved, though, that his mother was not present. He knew what those reproachful looks implied. Papa should never have come to Cambridge on that wet and blustery day. Of what use had it been? The affair was over and he had promised not to behave in such a way again; but Papa need not have come tearing down to Cambridge on such a day to extract the promise.
Bertie was full of remorse naturally, but he could not help feeling that life might be a good deal more tolerable without his father’s supervision. Everything he had ever done had been criticised; even his recent success in Canada and the United States had been attributed by his parents to General Bruce, his governor.
But life had become easier in the last year or so and this was entirely due to the fact that he was growing up. They could not treat him as a child for ever – much as they would like to. And Bertie knew that he had some quality which that dead saint had lacked. The people saw it – those in the streets, those he had met on his tour. They warmed to him. He smiled readily; he could not remember seeing his father smile. Bertie had a way of saying something to people which amused them or endeared him to them in some way. He had a sneaking feeling that those who knew of the Curragh Camp escapade thought it ‘only natural’ and liked him none the less for it – perhaps a bit more. Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, for instance, had refused to give General Bruce the honour Bertie’s parents had asked for him to have. ‘It was the success of the Prince of Wales,’ Palmerston had replied, ‘not that of General Bruce, and Your Majesty’s Government would never agree to give honours where it did not consider them due.’ Good old Palmerston! He had winked once at Bertie when he was leaving the Queen’s presence after, Bertie was sure, having heard a diatribe on the reprehensible behaviour of the Prince of Wales. Palmerston had been a rake himself in his youth – and later. He understood that a young man had to break out sometimes.