A Flaw in the Blood Read Online Free PDF

head. The first journal was delivered up to my dear governess, Lehzen, at the close of every day—a compilation of doings, pallid emotions, pious sentiments on the subject of Family and Duty. Lehzen corrected my expressions in English or German or French, guided my conduct with a thorough review of my motives, reproved me when necessary—and supported me during times of trial.
    The other journal I kept hidden under a loose floorboard beneath my high four-poster bed, in my apartment at Kensington Palace; the space was never dusted, so nobody liked to venture there. Precious were the stolen hours when I tucked my skirts under my legs and sat with a candle stub in that subterranean world, writing for all I was worth; such periods of unattended leisure were rare, so the secret volume is by no means as encyclopedic as the official one. Its contents are far more compelling, however. Mama insisted upon sleeping in an adjoining room with the connecting door propped wide; I was left to my own devices only when she had gone out, on the arm of the Demon Incarnate—or when I was in disgrace, and not even Lehzen was allowed to come near me. Raw necessity drove me to the secret journal's pages; indignation and fury and a desire for revenge are what it principally records. It is a compilation of screed—and loneliness. Even now, as I write to myself in the solitude of this Windsor apartment, the necessity remains the same.
    I do not think I exaggerate when I say that I witnessed a surfeit of unpleasant episodes when I was young. Only a courage native to my breeding stood between me and a despairing death. When I recounted for dear Melbourne the sort of perfidy to which I was subjected, and all at the hands of those I ought to have been able to trust, he could barely credit the tale! But the truth of it is set down, day by day, in my private journal—the one dear Lehzen never saw. Indeed, she did not even
suspect
its existence.
    When I removed to Buckingham Palace some three weeks after my accession to the throne, the builders still in residence, the rooms not even done up, I saw my private volumes safely stowed where nobody should find them. I shall instruct the undertakers to place the entire collection in my coffin before it is nailed down. I would not have these words exposed to another human being—not even
He Whom I Loved with All My Heart
—for all the empires on the globe. It is
essential
to the peace of mind of a monarch that some part of her soul remain hidden.
    It was near dawn when I emerged from the painful doze to which Albert's death consigned me, and drawing back the heavy green velvet hangings at my window, recollected his private cabinet. How feeble was the light of this Sunday morn, my first without my Beloved! The hour must be barely past six, and if my private attendants were as yet abroad, none had seen fit to disturb the sacred quiet of my bedchamber—which must, today and every day henceforth, be as
devoid
of
animation
as the tomb. No fire burned in the grate, no tea was waiting on a tray, and it was with the weakness of a very old woman that I attempted to draw back the seven layers of draperies that shrouded the outer world from my own.
Albert's cabinet,
I thought; it was
his
term for the private study where he spent so many happy hours. And so many painful ones, too—the room to which he retreated when our relations were unsettled, so that he might write to me in the quiet so vital to his studious, inward-looking mind. There he kept his essential correspondence—of a kind never permitted to fall under the view of his secretaries. It was as though he had spoken to me as the draperies parted, and the feeble December morning graced my brow with benediction; it was as though a whisper of the Hereafter instructed me:
Go, my little one, and burn them.
    I tarried only to don one of the sad black gowns I have worn ever since Mama's passing last spring—how dreadful to find oneself a belated survivor of those one