He figured arrogant men of overweening ambition and insatiable greed would always manage to convince or coerce others into dying for them.
He watched Alexi nestle the small wooden box containing Damion Pelletan’s heart deep into the space that had been dug for it, then take a handful of dirt from the pile beside it and release it in a rush of falling earth.
Gibson nodded to the sexton, who began to fill the hole with heavy shovelfuls that quickly hid the box from their sight.
The heart of an uncrowned king or a simple physician’s son; did it matter which they buried? Gibson wondered. He thought not, although he knew that for questions such as this wars were fought and men died, and other men such as he limped through life on mangled limbs.
They stood together side by side until the last of the earth lay heaped upon the grave and the sexton walked away. And still they stood, her hand creeping out to take his, their gazes meeting as the wind snatched at her hair and her lips curved into a trembling smile.
Author’s Note
The district of St. Katharine’s and the evocatively named Cat’s Hole and Hangman’s Court were real places that have now disappeared. In 1827, the old church and monastic buildings, along with the surrounding streets, were knocked down to create what is now St. Katharine Docks. More than eleven thousand poor people were rendered homeless by this early urban renewal project. Most were not compensated.
For a look at childbirth practices in England during the regency, see Judith Schneid Lewis’s In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy, 1760–1860. Lewis’s account is slightly skewed in support of her premise that the rise of male accoucheurs was a good thing; thus, she ignores the harmful effects of the abandonment of the birthing stool in favor of more “modest” delivery positions, and downplays the lives lost to heavy bloodletting and the disastrously reduced diet advocated for expectant mothers (particularly deadly for those such as Princess Charlotte, who suffered from porphyria). However, she does an excellent job of showing the extent to which upper-class women continued doing things such as attending the opera and giving dinner parties up to within hours of labor, and explodes many myths and misconceptions. Sebastian’s presence at his son’s delivery was normal; Prince Leopold remained at Princess Charlotte’s side throughout her fifty-hour ordeal. It was also typical for various family members to await a birth in a nearby room, as Hendon and Lord and Lady Jarvis do here.
Richard Croft was indeed London’s most esteemed accoucheur at the time (he became “Sir Richard” in 1816 after the death of his elder brother). He attended Princess Charlotte’s botched childbirth and tragically committed suicide after her death.
The English distinction between surgeons and physicians dated back to the Middle Ages, when most physicians were clergymen and the church forbade churchmen from engaging in the kind of activities practiced by surgeons. Interestingly, that distinction was not common on the Continent, where the medieval clergy had never dominated the practice of medicine.
The invasion of Russia in 1812 was a disaster for the French forces, and there was a real coup attempt against Napoléon in December that year. But Vaundreuil’s peace delegation to London is my own invention.
The practice of burying the bodies of the French royal family at Saint-Denis and sending their internal organs to various other churches was well established. Most of these cardiotaphs were melted down during the Revolution, and their contents burned. However, some of the hearts were actually sold to artists. For example, the heart of Louis XIV was sold to the landscape painter Pau de Saint-Martin. Some speculate that the red coats of figures in the foreground of his View of Caen, now in the museum of Pontoise, owe their unusual pigmentation to the royal heart.
King Louis XVI of France, his Queen, Marie Antoinette, and their two surviving children, Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Charles, were in August of 1792 thrown into a tower of the Temple, a prison that was once the medieval stronghold of the Knights Templar (the building was later destroyed during the Restoration). Also incarcerated with them was Madame Elisabeth, Louis XVI’s young sister, although I have restricted references to her to avoid confusion. The King was sent to the guillotine on 21 January 1793, with the Queen following in October, and the Princess Elisabeth soon after. The summer before the Queen’s trial, the little Dauphin was separated from his mother, aunt, and sister and locked in a separate cell beneath theirs.