Виктория Холт - The Widow of Windsor

* * *

At Windsor she was growing really anxious. Brown’s condition was not improving.

Each day she sent for Sir William and Dr Reid and demanded that she be given a full account.

‘It has somehow taken a hold of him, Your Majesty.’

‘But Brown is not old. He’s so strong.’

‘That’s true,’ said Sir William. ‘But it is often people who have never been ill who are suddenly stricken down. Illness bewilders them. They have never had it before. It seems to take them by surprise.’

‘I don’t think anything would take Brown by surprise.’

She herself was getting better. The rest had done her good and the pain and stiffness of her joints was disappearing.

And then on that dreadful March day the news was brought to her. John Brown was dead.

She was prostrate with grief. She could not believe it.

‘I have lost my best and truest friend,’ she protested. How could life be so cruel? It seemed that she only had to love and the loved one was taken from her. Perhaps love was the wrong word to use when speaking of a servant, but Brown was no ordinary servant. Dearest Albert, her great love, her reason for living, had been snatched from her at a comparatively early age; Lord Beaconsfield had been taken, true he was a very old man; and now John Brown … It was senseless. It was cruel.

She was desolate. It was no use the family’s trying to console her, for she was inconsolable.

‘He was part of my life,’ she said. ‘Now I have to start again. This is the second time. It is asking too much.’

She was oblivious to the comments her attitude set in motion.

The question was being asked everywhere. What had been the relationship between the Queen and John Brown? Had he been her lover? Had she been secretly married to him? Had he some peculiar psychic power over her? Was he the medium through whom she was in touch with Albert?

Nobody understood the Queen. She was a lonely woman; her children – though she loved them – could never mean to her what the strong figure of a man beside her could mean. She was essentially feminine; she needed a man to care for her, to look after her, to lean on; and although as Queen she would never give up one tiny bit of her sovereignty, even to Albert, as the woman she wished to exploit her frail femininity. Albert had supplied the perfect prop; and afterwards there had been Lord Beaconsfield to give her what she needed in her public life. But it was her private life that was most important and in that she had good faithful honest John Brown.

And now he had been taken from her.

What could she do? She must start again. It was almost as it had been in that dreadful desolate December more than twenty years ago.

Once more she was alone.

* * *

What could she do to show her sorrow? Of one thing she was certain, she would make no secret of it. The whole of England must mourn for the death of good faithful Brown.

She herself wrote an account of his virtues for the Court Circular. Her secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, trembled for what he called her indiscretions concerning John Brown. He was horrified when she decided that there should be a life of him. She had discovered that he had kept diaries. Sir Theodore Martin had, under her guidance, written what she called an excellent life of the Prince Consort which meant that Albert had been presented to the public as almost a saint. Now she would like him to do the same for that other man in her life. Sir Theodore was a little horrified as to what effect this would have and tactfully replied that because of his wife’s physical condition he feared that he must spend too much time with her to be able to do justice to the work, so the Queen decided she would find another biographer. Those about her trembled at what revelations this would bring forth, but the Queen gave herself up to considering memorials. There should be a statue which should be placed at Balmoral; and at Osborne she would have a granite seat set up in memory of him.

She became a little irritable with those about her.

‘How I miss John Brown’s strong arm!’ she was often heard to say.

She talked about him a great deal; his ‘bashfulness’; his quaint sayings; everything that he had been to her. Often she would lie on her sofa and think of those days when he had carried her to her room.

Then she would weep silently and think of the past and would be so lost in it that she would wake startled and think she heard a voice thick with bashfulness and yet lilting with his Highland accent demanding to know ‘Why ye’re sitting in the dark greeting, woman?’

Once more, she said to herself, I am left lonely.

In order to overcome her melancholy the Queen decided to prepare for publication another edition of her journal. She would call it More Leaves from a Journal of a Life in the Highlands; and it would cover the years 1862–1882. She would dedicate it: ‘To my loyal Highlanders and especially to the memory of my devoted personal attendant and faithful friend John Brown.’

It pleased her very much to go carefully through her accounts of those long ago days and recall them so clearly. She wept quietly because the early part brought back so vividly the utter desolation of the years following Albert’s death and how threatening and dour the mountains had seemed when he was no longer there to compare them with his beloved Thuringian forests.

She sent Bertie an advance copy of the Journal which brought him hurriedly to Windsor.

‘Mama,’ he cried, ‘I do beg of you not to have this generally circulated.’

‘What do you mean?’ she cried indignantly.

‘It is too personal.’

‘My dear Bertie, I know I am not an author of the standing of Mr Dickens or Mr Thackeray or Scott and Tennyson, but I venture to think that my account of my life in the Highlands will give pleasure to a great many people.’

‘I am sure it will, Mama, but it is exposing your private life to the world.’

‘My private life, Bertie, contains nothing of which I am ashamed.’

That shaft went home and Bertie had the grace to blush.

‘I am sorry, Mama, but I do feel strongly about it.’

‘Well, Bertie, I am prepared to admit that it would not be good for the family if every member of it exposed – as you say – his or her actions to the world. I can assure you that when dear Papa’s Life was published – and it was so beautifully and feelingly done by Sir Theodore Martin, I read it with the greatest pleasure and felt better than I had done since he had died. And I am sure my first Leaves did no harm and did me a great deal of good. I might tell you, Bertie, that Lord Beaconsfield complimented me on it and used to refer to us as fellow authors and I venture to think that Lord Beaconsfield’s assessment of literary merit must have been far greater than yours for I have heard it said that you rarely open a book.’

Bertie said he wasn’t thinking of literary merit, but the effect of making her private life known to the world.

‘Nonsense,’ said the Queen.

‘I seem not to be mentioned in it.’

‘Which shows how carefully you have read the book. You are mentioned five times.’

‘That does not seem much for your eldest son.’

‘My dear Bertie, had you come more often to Balmoral your name would naturally have appeared more frequently in the Journal. Now, let me hear no more of this matter.’

Bertie left Windsor as some described it ‘with his tail between his legs’ as he so often did after his encounters with his mama; but at least the Life of John Brown was not published, although the Queen had gone so far as to have his journals edited.

First there were delays – unavoidable, so the Queen was told; and it might have been that she too began to realise the lack of wisdom in publishing them. The matter was allowed to drop; but that did not mean she did not continue to mourn her faithful Highland servant.

* * *

Leopold’s married life was progressing favourably. Princess Helen was again pregnant which was remarkable, for his little daughter Alexandra was a healthy little creature. ‘Yet another grandchild!’ sighed the Queen. ‘So many, that I have to think hard to count them up.’

Then Leopold had another of his bouts and the doctors thought a spell at Cannes would be good for him. As the spring had come, the South of France would be delightful so he and his family took up residence at the Villa Nevada and letters reached the Queen, much to her gratification, that Leopold’s health had greatly improved.

A year had passed since the death of John Brown and the Queen, who always kept anniversaries, had a superstitious feeling about them. Because she had suffered acutely on such and such a day she would feel that there was some malevolent purpose at work and she would come to dread that day. She remembered that her beloved husband and daughter Alice had both died on the 14th of December and it was on that very date that Bertie had come right up to the gates of death and by a miracle been brought back to life.

Now it was the 27th of March; a year to that day when they had come to tell her that her dear faithful John Brown was dead. She had written in her Journal that she mourned him still. She supposed she would never cease to do that.

She awoke with a feeling of apprehension for she had been reading her Journal before she slept; and when a telegram arrived from Cannes she expected disaster.