Queen Victoria: A Private Life

1900, Osborne House

The light goes from these rooms earlier than I expect, even on clear days, and by late afternoon the windows turn the Solent into a flat sheet of dark metal that gives nothing back. Dispatch boxes are brought in, opened, removed again. Faces incline toward me with correct concern. They wait while I adjust my spectacles, wait while I ask for a line to be read twice, and in that waiting I can feel the alteration more plainly than in any physician’s report. The body is slower, yes, but it is not only the body. Business now arrives already half settled elsewhere. I am informed with exquisite tact. A fire has been laid up, though I am not cold, and the room smells faintly of coal, lavender water, and the leather of old portfolios. Somewhere below a carriage draws up and no one hurries to tell me who has come. That omission is small by any ordinary measure. In a reign it is not small at all, and it is increasing.