Chapter 3 #3
She smiled at him. “What’s your name?”
“Willie, miss,” he whispered. “Willie Abbott.” He tried to raise his head. “My little sister, Minnie …”
“Minnie isn’t here, Willie, but we’ll try to find out where she is. You lie back now. We’ll move you to a bed, and Nurse Emily will look after you.”
“Careful now, lads,” O’Malley said to the stretcher-bearers as they shifted the boy to the cot.
Julia asked him, “Why are children among the injured? I thought this was a prison explosion.”
“A barrel of gunpowder blew a fifty-foot hole in the Clerkenwell Prison wall, destroying the house opposite and damaging others on Corporation Row.”
“Good God. Do we know who was responsible?”
“Not yet,” O’Malley said grimly. “I’m hearing the Irish brotherhood was behind it. But I’m praying it isn’t so.”
Amen to that, Julia thought, moving to a female patient’s bedside.
Kate caught the doctor by her elbow. “What can I do after the beds?”
Julia looked around the waiting room, where anxious family members had started to arrive. “Can you greet the visitors as they come in? Take their names, seat them, and try to calm them with cups of tea.”
An hour later, Julia emerged from the women’s ward and greeted her grandfather in the hallway. “Thank goodness,” she said, and brushed his cheek with a kiss. “Can you assist Clemmie in the fever room? We put the men in there.”
“Of course.” He stopped at the door and looked at his granddaughter. “I passed a newsstand and saw an early headline. It said, ‘Fenian Outrage at Clerkenwell Prison,’ although it’s soon to be certain who is behind it.”
She thought, Just what this neighborhood doesn’t need.
Julia jumped when the front door’s handle cracked against the wall. A man entered, dressed in gaiters, heavy hob-nailed boots, and a soot-smeared canvas smock. He dragged off his dustman’s cap and looked around wildly.
Kate approached him. “Begging your pardon, sir. Can you tell me your name and who you’re seeking?”
His head whipped around. “Irish, is it?” He prodded her shoulder with a stubby finger and followed her as she backed away. “Another of those murdering bogtrotters. You and your kind are halfway to making orphans of my sister’s children.” His last words came out with a sob, and he shoved Kate aside.
Julia called, “Sergeant O’Malley?” He appeared at the men’s ward door. “Can you help me with this gentleman?”
The dustman ignored Julia. “Oh, so it’s Sergeant O’Malley, is it?”
The man was a head shorter and two stones lighter than the policeman, but he tried to bump chests with the sergeant, glaring up at O’Malley’s face. The sergeant put his hand on the man’s shoulder, forcing him back a pace.
“How can we help you?”
“O’Malley.” The man shrugged out of the sergeant’s grip. “They’re sending the likes of you after the bleeding bombers?” The dustman snorted. “No wonder the Irish bastards who killed that Manchester copper are still in the wind.”
The man tried to shove past the sergeant, but O’Malley’s bulk blocked the dustman. “Who are you looking for, sir?”
The man jutted his chin. “My sister.”
“If she’s here, you can rest easy,” O’Malley said gently. “They sent the less injured to this clinic. What’s your poor sister’s name?”
The man’s belligerence collapsed. “Alice Jennings. A nurse at the hospital, she … she told me they brought Alice here.”
“We’ll be making allowance for your troubles, but that lass at the front door had nothing to do with them. Now, follow me, and we’ll find your sister.”
Julia blessed the sergeant, thinking, We’ll need an army of O’Malleys to keep us from each other’s throats.
Hours later, an exhausted Julia finally opened Tennant’s first letter.
Lady Styles circled Marlborough House’s front lawn twice, thinking about a letter she intended to write.
Then the clouds rolled across the sun, and a chilly December wind sent her indoors.
Susan walked through the Blenheim Saloon, her favorite room.
She loved the ceiling fresco, an appreciation she shared with Princess Louise.
She found the princess looking at An Allegory of Peace and the Arts Under the English Crown.
Her finger pointed up, and she was counting.
“I make it twenty-five, Susan. That’s twenty-five female personifications of everything imaginable. “Look.” The princess gestured. “Do you see ‘Sculpture’ in that corner, carving a head?” She sighed. “Think of that.”
Poor Louise, Susan thought. It’s what she imagines for herself.
A string of tutors had told her she was talented enough for professional training.
Painting flowers or portraits was one thing; the queen herself was an accomplished watercolorist. But chiseling in marble?
The queen thought it had “something of the stonemason about it” and was inappropriate for a female royal.
“Princess Alexandra is resting,” Susan said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Louise shook her head, still gazing at the ceiling.
“I’ll be in my room for the next hour, writing letters for the Princess of Wales.”
In theory, “waiting” on the royal sisters-in-law was twice the work they’d hired Susan to perform.
If by “work,” one meant waiting for Princess Alexandra or Princess Louise to decide if the day was fine enough for a walk, waiting to be summoned for a carriage ride, or waiting hours for a request that never came.
By her second day of employment, Susan understood that “lady-in-waiting” described her job perfectly.
But Lady Styles hid her amusement at the occasional absurdity and boredom of it all, aware that London’s toiling women would laugh at the word work.
With all that waiting and little to do, Susan had feared her royal service would throw Peter FitzGerald into her company. But their paths seldom crossed. Peter was the queen’s equerry, and the Prince of Wales gave his mother a wide berth. Besides, eight years was a long time. A lifetime.
They had married others. Peter wed the heiress of Josiah Cuthbert, “the Marmalade King.” Harriet’s money had rescued him, a second cousin of the Duke of Leinster.
The fortunes of Peter’s family branch had faded two generations earlier.
His wife’s settlement allowed the major to live like “an officer and a gentleman” of the Royal Irish Dragoons.
And in a neat bargain, her father added his son-in-law’s silver-and-red coat of arms to the company’s jam jars.
Susan had married a baronet but paid a price for the title “Lady Styles.”
She realized her mistake on the wedding trip.
And after four years that passed like four decades, the marriage ended suddenly and violently.
Sir Augustus Styles spent his last night on earth whoring, gambling, and drinking to excess.
In the morning, he’d roused himself for a foxhunt, downed two glasses of champagne, and broke his neck when his horse hesitated at a hedge, throwing him to his death.
My third year of widowhood. Susan had spent the time wearing hypocrisy literally on her sleeve.
She dressed in deep black for the first two years, transitioning to “half-mourning” gray and mauve in the third.
But the queen, still bereft six years after her husband’s death, was a stickler about the formalities of sorrow.
So, Lady Styles swallowed her self-disgust and performed a charade of grief.
That afternoon, Susan sat at her writing table and set to work. That word again, she thought with a shake of her head. She had four letters to write: one to Alix’s dressmaker, another to the milliner, and a third “duty” missive to her brother.
Susan pulled a fourth piece of stationery toward her. But over the last letter, she hesitated. Then she penned a few swift lines to confirm an appointment for Monday, addressed the envelope, and sealed it. Done.
A servant tapped on her door and entered at Susan’s invitation. “Pardon me, my lady, but the Princess of Wales asks if you would wait on her. She is in her sitting room.”
Susan hid a smile. “Please tell Her Royal Highness I will attend her in ten minutes.”
Lady Styles pinned her mourning brooch in place and checked her hair and dress in the mirror.
Then she gathered her letters to carry downstairs for a servant to post. But as soon as Susan handed them to the footman, she regretted the last one she’d written.
She nearly called him back to retrieve the note she’d written to Dr. Julia Lewis, confirming an appointment.
Was it Susan’s business to interfere? And what if her worst fears were true? If so, there is nothing to be done. In the end, she let the letter go out with the afternoon post. Monday it is.
Susan stopped on the stairs at the sound of insistent knocking. The footman opened the front door to a pair of constables and a captain in the Queen’s Guards. He asked for the Prince of Wales.
“He’s not in,” Susan called, descending the staircase.
The captain said, “I have urgent orders to locate His Royal Highness.”
Susan glanced at the clock. “I expect he’s … making a late-afternoon call.” Almost certainly, the prince was pursuing his latest conquest. They would find him with the twenty-year-old wife of an aging baronet. “His private secretary will help you. If you’ll follow me.”
The secretary scribbled the London address of Sir Charles and Lady Mordaunt and said, “Number six Chesham Place is just off Belgrave Square.”
“Thank you.” The captain handed the paper to one of the two constables. “Escort His Royal Highness back to Marlborough House.”
Susan asked the officer, “Can you tell us what has happened?”
“A bombing at Clerkenwell Prison, probably by the Irish Brotherhood. It destroyed half a block of houses.”
“Good God. Are there many injuries?”
“Hospitals are filling. We’re mounting additional guards at all government buildings and royal residences. I must inspect all doors and windows on the ground floor.”
“Of course,” she said.
“First, may I see the Princess of Wales?”
They made their way up the staircase. From the landing’s window, Susan spotted soldiers fanning across the front lawn, rifles at the ready.
Just after seven, Nurse Clemmie shifted an empty plate, teacup, and saucer from Julia’s desk to a tray. Her head nurse insisted that she eat something before her last round.
“All quiet and resting more or less comfortably,” Julia said, returning to her office. She deposited some soiled bandages in the bin by her door.
Clemmie nodded to Julia’s coat rack. “Then there’s no need to stay any longer. I’ll send Jackie to the corner to whistle up a cab.”
Julia, bone-weary, nodded. She stretched and flexed her fingers. “Thank goodness my grandfather and Kate pitched in.” Then Julia groaned at a rumbling commotion outside the clinic. “So much for quiet.” She called to their orderly, “Jackie, see what’s happening.”
Jackie Archer parked a rolling cart of bedding by the wall and tossed the daily paper he’d tucked under his arm onto a bench.
Before he reached the door, a constable opened it and stood back.
Two men staggered through the entrance, supporting an unconscious man whose heels scraped across the stone floor.
There were no free beds, so Nurse Clemmie grabbed a blanket from the cart and unfurled it with a snap.
“Lay him down here.”
“My bag, Clemmie,” Julia said, sinking to her knees.
She folded back the man’s ragged corduroy jacket, uncovering a shirt saturated in blood.
He made no sound, and his fixed, blue-green eyes looked lifeless.
Julia felt for a pulse in his neck. Clemmie handed her the stethoscope from her medical bag.
She listened. Then she sat back on her heels, looked up at her nurse, and shook her head.
A man in a white barman’s apron said, “There was some high talk in the pub about the bombing. Someone spotted two Irishmen walking by the window, and the room emptied.”
The second man dragged off his rough tweed cap. “I knew him. Kevin Leary was a warehouseman and a Paddy, all right. But a good fellow and all.”
“‘An eye for an eye for Clerkenwell,’ some bloke shouted,” the barman said.
“And we all end up blind.” Clemmie closed the dead man’s lids, brushed his cheek with the back of her fingers, and pulled a sheet over his body.
Jackie extended his hand, and Julia hauled herself up.
She dropped onto the bench where the young orderly had tossed his newspaper.
The Whitechapel Evening Chronicle had rushed to print with a one-word headline in two-inch type: OUTRAGE!
A short editorial set in a box called for “utmost measures to protect the British public from Irish murderers.”
Julia looked at the spreading stain where the sheet covered Kevin Leary’s once-beating heart. She thought, Who will protect the Irish from us?