Page 1 of The Heir
Prologue
SIDMOUTH
1820
He’s dying.
Victoire, Duchess of Kent, sat on a hard stool at her husband’s bedside and willed him to keep breathing.
The room was dark, except for the fire that sputtered fitfully in the hearth, trying in vain to match the roar of wind and surf outside, trying also to warm the room and bring some small chance of life to the man who lay so still in the narrow bed.
The doctor—William Maton—was speaking. Dr. Maton was a fussy, fat, pale, bald man. He had spent the past four days swearing as to the unfailing efficacy of his knives, cups, and leeches. Now he was saying something far different. Victoire’s mind was too dulled by exhaustion to fully translate his English into her native German, but she understood his tone. “We have done all we can,” he was saying, or something like it. “Now we must wait.” Or something like it. Perhaps there was also something about trusting in a merciful God.
Victoire ground her teeth to shut in the sob that threatened to escape her.
The doctor fell silent, but a fresh noise insinuated itself into the room’s chill—a thin, insistent bawling. The baby, tucked up in her cot in the adjoining room, was crying. She was cold, or she was hungry. Or she simply wished to protest that she was alone in a dark cottage, surrounded by a foul winter storm, while the man who loved her most in the world was dying.
Drafts curled around Victoire’s neck. She imagined them like the fingers of a ghostly hand. She imagined that hand dragging itself up the quilts to caress her husband’s cheek. To cover his mouth. To stop his breath.
Dr. Maton was speaking again. A second voice answered. That was Conroy, her husband’s equerry and assistant. Victoire had forgotten he was even in the room. Their English whispers fluttered around her ears. Victoire made outhopeandstrongandhour. She tried to understand the rest, but it was no good.
She turned her face toward the window, but there was nothing to see. The shutter had been closed. For all the good it did in keeping out the cold or the sound of the storm.
The baby was still crying. Where was the nurse? Where was Lehzen? Or even Feodora? She would have to do something. Give an order. Make herself understood.
She could not even make herself move.
“Victoire.”
The sound of her name was less than a whisper, but she still heard it. Her heart thumped. Edward’s eyes were open and searching for her.
“Yes, my heart, I am here,” Victoire said in German. She seized his hand. It was hot and light, as if his bones had already burnt to ash. Or perhaps it was because he had been drained dry of blood. Dr. Maton said he’d taken only a pint this time. It looked to her as if it had been a gallon.
“Victoire,” Edward said again.
“Rest, my heart. You must regain your strength.” She spoke lightly, praying that he would not notice the tears slipping down her hollow cheeks.
Edward had always been so strong, and so proud of that strength. Let all his royal brothers drink and debauch themselves. Let them carouse with their wastrel friends and squander their fortunes. Edward would not follow their examples. He would keep to strict, simple habits, eat a plain diet, and get plenty of exercise. Oh, the sight of him on horseback or on the driver’s box of a carriage! It was enough to stop any woman’s heart.
Even her heart, which had been withered by her first marriage, her two children, her poverty, her fear for her future.
The future Edward saved me from.
He had driven her out of her tiny, trampled German kingdom all the way to England. She had protested that she was too far gone in her pregnancy to make the journey, but he had insisted. Their child must be born on English soil. He hadn’t wanted anyone to be able to question whether the babe really belonged to him or whether it could very well be the future of English crown.
He had installed them in Kensington Palace and dared his brothers to protest his right to rooms in the royal residence, especially once the baby—their pocket Hercules of a princess—was born.
But now where are we?
Fat George squatted in Windsor and rubbed his greedy hands at the bedside of his blind, mad father. He debauched his mistresses, railed against his legal wife, swilled his wines, and gambled away England’s treasury. But Fat George lived and, to all appearances, would continue to live.
Freddy, the grand old Duke of York, had grubbed under his mistress’s skirts with one hand and stolen from the public treasury with the other.
Silly Billy, Duke of Clarence, walked the streets without remembering to put on his hat, heartsore for the whore-actress he’d thrown over so he could marry a princess even poorer than Victoire and get himself at least one legitimate heir.
Augustus, the Duke of Sussex, had decided to stick a thumb in the eye of the entire family by refusing to marry anyone acceptable, but that marriage had failed. Now he puttered uselessly about the ruin that was Kensington Palace with his collections of clocks and Bibles.
And all the while, Ernest—the lecherous, damnable, scarred, half-blind Duke of Cumberland—leered at his brothers from his wife’s palace in Germany and waited to see which of them fell first.
