Page 77 of The Heir
The princess would believe her. After all, it was very like how her father had died.
Lehzen could end this dangerous quest in five minutes.
Lehzen pressed her hand over her eyes. She sat there for a long moment, confused thoughts swirling darkly through her mind.
How does one become a good queen?Victoria’s voice rose up from the depths of memory.
The princess was ten years old. It had been a worrisome day. She had found a genealogy of English kings in her history book. It was a new one. Lehzen knew because she had placed it there the day before. The old king had just been laid to rest. It had been decided that it was time for the princess to know certain truths.
Victoria read the genealogy, one tiny finger tracing the lines that ran from name to name. She found herself, and she frowned.
“I am nearer to the throne than I thought,” she said.
Lehzen had long determined to treat this moment casually. It was simply another fact of the girl’s life—like how grown men bowed to her or how she must wear her tiara during formal occasions, even though it rubbed her forehead badly.
The princess seemed to take this new knowledge quietly enough. Indeed, during that day she seemed not only solemn but also sullen. Lehzen found herself wondering if Victoria was coming down with a fever.
Then the princess asked the question she had been brooding over.
“How does one become a good queen?”
Aware, as she must always be, of listening ears and speaking tongues, Lehzen answered, “One reads much, especially history. Queen Elizabeth, she was a great monarch and much loved by her people. One might study her example.”
The princess listened intently, her brows knitted together, as if by straining her body, she could hear better. She nodded rapidly. “Then that is what I will do. I will be good.”
And the princess turned back to her pencils and her puppy, and just like that, the moment passed. At least it did until later that night.
The duchess was still at dinner. Where the other ladies were, Lehzen could not recall. She had put the princess to bed and then sat beside her in the darkened room.
Victoria lay on her back, her face still pinched and serious even in sleep. Her dainty hand dangled over the side of the bed, as if she had just been petting her dog.
Gently, Lehzen lifted the girl’s hand and tucked it under her coverlet.
“Sweetness, you asked me, how does one become a good queen?” Lehzen whispered. “This is what I would tell you if I could. I would tell you it means understanding that you are the prize and they all want you—all your uncles, as well as your mama, the men of Parliament and, most of all, Sir John Conroy.” She felt tears prick behind her eyes. Cold crawled up the skin on her hands. “I would tell you that as queen, you must grow eyes in the back of your head.”
She touched the girl’s brow and the lace ruffle on her cap. “You must always pay attention, and you must always be wary, because the one who wins you will win the throne. And they will never stop trying to win you. They do not care that you are a child, and they will not care when you are a woman. They do not care for the good of the nation, and God knows they do not care for your happiness. You cannot change this, because you were born who you are, and the choice to be otherwise is not one you have. So you must watch, little one, and you must find ways to fight.”
Find ways to fight.Lehzen felt herself looking from the present day back at her earnest, worried self in the shadowed past.
“And all that time you must remember that you are a symbol,” said that past self to the sleeping girl. “And that you are an example. That the people look to you for comfort and certainty when it seems as though the world must fall apart around us all, and they have nothing to offer you in return. I will help. I will try, I promise. But in the end, the only one you will have is yourself, and I am sorry for that.”
Memory faded. The present returned. Lehzen knew she could not sit here drinking cold tea and feeling sorry for herself like some hausfrau when her man was away.
“I will help,” she had said. “I will try.”
With a sigh, Lehzen got to her feet. Her knees had begun creaking. It was too soon for that, but so much standing, so much walking across the hard floors . . . Well, it was no matter.
She had promised she would help the princess, had promised she would protect her, no matter what, or who, threatened her.
The problem was, she did not know how.
Chapter 34
Getting to the post office was easier than Jane had feared it might be. All she had to do was tell Father that she wanted to stop and purchase a volume on the “language of flowers” that she thought might amuse the princess, and he was happy to let her walk to the palace that morning rather than ride in the carriage with him.
Getting rid of Betty was just as easy. Jane suggested that Betty might not want to waste her morning lingering about a bookshop and gave her a few shillings to go buy herself some buns at the baker instead.
“Then just walk on ahead. I can meet you at the palace gates,” she said with an awkward wink. “And none the wiser.”
