Victoria Confesses (9781442422469) Read Online Free PDF Page A

arranged a carriage trip, and in late summer we left Kensington to visit places he believed I would find informative, such as the manufactory where steam engines were made, and to meet interesting people, like the man who invented the gaslight.
    Victoire Conroy was my traveling companion. It was not that I disliked her, but I did wish there were other girls with whom to spend my time. Someone not so tedious! My favorite game was battledore and shuttlecock, played with a racket and a little feathered cork batted back and forth across a net. Victoire complained that it made her perspire to chase the shuttlecock. Victoire did not like to perspire, but I minded not at all. She did seem to enjoy card games, but one could endure only so much of that !
    Before returning to Kensington, we traveled by steamer from Brighton to visit the Isle of Wight. Every evening after dinner the ladies gathered in the parlor and played games. My favorite was The Hen and Her Chickens, in which I loved to play the role of the Fox, and Mamma or Daisy agreed to be the Hen. Fox sat down in the center of a circle, looking sly and hungry, and Hen and her Chickens gathered round. “What are you doing, Fox?” asked Hen, and I replied in a foxy voice, “I am making a fire.”
    â€œA fire?” Hen asked. “What for, Fox?”
    And Fox replied, “To boil some water, Hen.”
    â€œPray, what is the water for, Fox?”
    Fox, in his slyest manner: “To cook a chicken.”
    Whereupon all the Chickens gasped, and Hen asked, “And where will you get a chicken, Fox?”
    Fox cried, “Out of your flock, Hen!” and pounced on one of the hapless Chickens, creating a great deal of make-believe squawking and laughter.
    The game went on until someone observed that Sir John and the other gentlemen would soon rejoin the ladies. This was the signal that my bedtime had come and I must say good night to the company. Sir John was perfectly suited to play the role of Fox without any need to pretend to be sly and hungry, and I felt like Chicken, unable to squawk or run away.

    In February of 1831 I made my first public appearance at court. The occasion was the Queen’s Drawing Room, Aunt Adelaide’s reception for a very large number of people, held at St. James’s. I loved my gown, English blonde lace over white satin, and Mamma allowed me to wear a pearl necklace and a diamond ornament in my hair. Mamma’s gown had a pink velvet train trimmed with ermine and a headdress made of feathers and diamonds. Mamma and I rode in state in a carriage sent by the king; with us were the unavoidable Sir John and Lady Conroy and Miss Victoire Conroy, and my dearest Daisy. The gentlemen were all in black evening dress, and the ladies wore white satin gowns, all of British manufacture, with a profusion of feathered headdresses and glittering diamonds. Everyone said it was the most magnificent since the drawing-room presentation of Princess Charlotte when she married dear Uncle Leopold.
    Dear Aunt Adelaide was seated on her throne, and it wasmy duty to stand on her left. King William, on her right, spoke to me very kindly from time to time, but Mamma had advised me to remain quiet and dignified. We were present because we had to be. I knew that Mamma disliked the king because she felt he did not give her her due, and the king disliked Mamma for demanding more than her due. King William later complained that I had looked at him stonily, and I realized that my silence and my attempt to appear dignified had succeeded only in offending him.
    Matters grew especially tense when Mamma decided that I was not to attend Uncle William’s coronation in September. She forbade it, and for what I considered an utterly ridiculous reason: She had been informed that my other uncles—monstrously ugly Cumberland, eccentric Sussex, and harmless Cambridge—were to take precedence over me in the coronation procession through Westminster