The Queen's Secret: A Novel of England's World War II Queen

by Karen Harper

  I got up slowly, watching Bertie’s expression because I could not hear the other end of the conversation this time.

  “What? In Scotland?” Bertie shouted, then dropped his voice and nearly dropped the phone. “Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy Führer, flew there himself and parachuted in? Is that what you said? And we have him prisoner?”

  My attention had snagged on the mention of Scotland. Surely, the Germans with their deadly Luftwaffe were not going to surprise us by invading my beloved Scotland!

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Fixer

  I’ll wager Winston wishes he were in his London bunker instead of at Ditchley,” I told Bertie. “Safe but close to the seat of power—which may have been pounded to bits in these terrible attacks.”

  He kept his hand on the telephone receiver in its cradle, leaning stiff-armed on it, as if it were holding him up or would ring straightaway again.

  He told me, “Winston says the House of Commons—so dear to him over the years—is . . . is rubble. He— I think, despite this good news about Rudolf Hess supposedly defecting, he was c-crying.”

  I blinked back tears and brushed a single one from Bertie’s cheek. He looked devastated, weak and hollow just for one moment before he stood erect again. But he said nothing more, staring into space. I feared for him, for London, for us all.

  “Tell me what this is about the high-and-mighty Hess landing in Scotland,” I said. “Where and why? And Winston thought that was good news? But did Hess drop bombs there or will there be an invasion? Bertie, I fear for Scotland too!”

  His knees shaking, he tugged me over to the sofa with our mussed blankets still there, shoved them onto the floor, and pulled me down to sit beside him. I remembered his tales of how his father had called him knock-kneed and forced him to wear painful leg braces, and he’d told me his knees had always trembled back then.

  “If it’s not a trick and Hess is not some sort of Trojan horse, it is a break for us. It seems Hess has deserted Hitler in some demented attempt to negotiate a private peace treaty. They must think they’ve beaten us so we’ll at least bargain if not surrender. He is alone, parachuted out over the Duke of Hamilton’s estate, whom he’d met at the Olympics in ’36, and thought would help him—get him to Winston and me to plead his case.”

  “Oh, Douglas-Hamilton. So Hess bailed out south of Glasgow,” I said with a huge sigh, grateful it was not near Glamis. “And alone? But it must be a trap.”

  “No, it’s too daft, the number-three Nazi defecting or thinking he can broker a surrender. He was taken into custody by one of the duke’s farmers with a pitchfork, no less, and his Messerschmitt crashed in a field. He was spouting something to the duke about the astrological signs being right for him to act.”

  “He sounds demented. Remember Winston said that Hitler consulted astrologers? And he told us not to pass on that he himself had consulted one too, just to try to learn what Hitler might be hearing and planning. Poppycock astrologers, Winston said.”

  “I’d forgotten that. What would I do without you?”

  “I shall answer that another time, my love.”

  He threw an arm—then both arms—around me so fast and hard I gasped. He held me tight to him, and I hugged him back.

  “I need you, Elizabeth, my queen, my best self, my comforter and strength. By the way, Winston said he will send an armored vehicle for me today so that on the way back into the city I can see the damage for myself and meet briefly with him in his Cabinet War Room bunker in Whitehall. I’ve never seen his lair built under the Treasury building. He’s sending his minister of information, that clever Irish aide, Brendan Bracken, as a guide.”

  “The behind-the-scenes man people whisper is his ‘fixer’ for things that go wrong, whatever befalls.”

  “Exactly. I did not realize you knew that. Bracken makes many people nervous, but if Winston says he’s the man for the job, I warrant he is indeed. But it is your decision whether to stay here with the children or come with me, take that terrible tour of the devastation, then head back to Buck House.”

  “The girls will be safe here,” I told him, turning my lips against his cheek and kissing him. “I will go with you. Besides, I understand Clementine has actually decorated the bunker, so perhaps little me—the little woman—can learn some style tips from her, another little woman in this big war.”

  He set me back and forced a tight-lipped smile at my sardonic tone. “Ha! You two ‘little women’—I imagine quite like Eleanor Roosevelt in the States—are more than the powers behind your thrones. I swear, you all prop up the men on them.”

  Although Winston and a few other men I admired had said somewhat the same, those words from Bertie, king and husband, made me want to soar.

  * * *

  Brendan Bracken even had a bit of a brogue, which, I knew, most up-and-coming Irish moving in powerful British governmental circles would try to subdue or erase. He had a good head of reddish hair he parted in the middle and wore wire-rimmed spectacles that made him look like a pedant.

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Bracken was telling Bertie when I walked into the room, ready to leave with them, “I have had a snifter or two of that old Napoleon brandy with the P.M., and even been given a goose or two to get going with that gold-topped walking stick he uses.”

  Given a goose or two by Winston? I thought until I realized what he meant. He looked quite nonplussed when he saw me and bowed as Bertie made introductions.

  “Quite brave of you to go with us, ma’am,” Bracken said. “The sights are soul-shaking, considering how the enemy struck at the very heart of the Empire last night. But then, let’s away, if you are ready.”

  As we went out and saw the vehicle—not a tank but a heavily armored automobile with a two-vehicle escort—I was glad I had decided to ask Crawfie to keep the girls away from the windows. I did not want them to think we were in dire danger or that their mother was going off to war.

  The late-Sunday-afternoon countryside looked peaceful and even charming, but then we headed into the city. A pall of smoke still rose above it; lorries and omnibuses clogged the motorways. We were stopped at a checkpoint before driving in, taking a roundabout way because of potholes and rubble. Here and there, firemen were still fighting flames by pouring water and foam onto smoking ruins.

  “Brace yourselves, Your Majesties,” Bracken warned, “though I’ll bet you don’t curse the way the P.M. did when I accompanied him into town earlier.”

  Bertie said, “Was Downing Street hit?”

  “Number 10 had taken some close hits, sir, but the place he calls ‘The Hole’ in Whitehall is still accessible. The slab—five feet of protective concrete for a roof—has let us expand the rooms and staff there. Ah, but here we go for a quick view of the worst of the damage. Stephen,” he called up to our Army driver, “be sure that sign’s propped up in the windscreen, so we can get through the barriers.”

  As we drove up Millbank and crossed Horseferry Road, Bertie and I gasped and craned our necks to look out. Ahead lay the heart of London: Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Hall, and Big Ben. All had been bombed last night.

  If this man was Winston’s so-called fixer, I thought, would that he could fix the devastation we saw here. He began to point out landmarks as if we were tourists first seeing the town, but the details he shared were as dreadful as the horrid scenes.

  “Sadly, hundreds of citizens are still missing. No gas and water for those buildings standing. But the word is that Hess’s capture will lift morale. Perhaps the only other good news is that St. Paul’s was threatened by fires, but still stands intact, a symbol, the P.M. says, for us all. By the way, the Tower of London was hit with incendiaries but still stands strong—but here . . .”

  His voice trailed off. If even a stoic, businesslike man could barely speak, I feared what was coming.

  “We won’t pass near it, but venerable old St. Clement Danes has burned,” he began his dreadful recital again. “Even the ghost
s of the Danish Vikings and the spirit of Sir Christopher Wren could not save it if they were still here.” He sniffed hard and went on, pointing now.

  “As for this area, the firemen tried desperately to save the structures. They say the Thames looked orange from the flames. It was low tide and that choked some of the fire hoses. The House of Lords escaped with but a hole in the roof and melted lead gutters from the heat. The Commons members just moved back into their chamber in Parliament a few days ago, thinking it was safe to meet here in the day when the bombing was at night. It took a terrible, direct hit. That shook the P.M. more than if Number 10 had been blasted.”

  “If St. Clement Danes was hit,” I spoke up, surprised I still had a voice, “does that mean the newspapers on Fleet Street were also bombed? At least it was at night when few of their staff would be at work.”

  “Bad hit, ma’am. Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn too.”

  I thought of the young woman, Rowena Fitzgerald, who was striving to do a good job taking war photographs and writing heartfelt stories. Her face and voice stayed with me—that is, until we went way round on Great Smith Street to avoid the fire hoses and vehicles still fighting smoky blazes at Westminster Abbey.

  I gasped, and Bertie swore under his breath as Bracken began his narrative again: “Yes, as you can perhaps see, the sanctuary of the Abbey was hit by incendiary bombs.”

  “That’s where we were married,” I cried—and did begin to cry again. “Even the altar?”

  “Regretfully so,” Bracken said. “Not only was your wedding there but, of course, the coronation of kings and queens for centuries. The last time I was there was to pay homage to your father, King George, as his coffin lay there, sir.”

  “Yes,” Bertie choked out, then added quietly, “I t-t-too.”

  “As you can see, this entire area was beaten to bits. At three a.m., the shelter in Westminster took the direct hit of two bombs, and the Westminster mayor died instantly, we heard. We will have a tally of fatalities in time.”

  “We must remember,” I said, my voice choked with emotion, “that the grand buildings are not all that was lost, but our dear people, human lives.”

  “Well said, ma’am,” Bracken added after a little silence. “As for the sanctuary, about two-thirds of the contents were damaged by fire, and most of the roof is gone. In the palace per se, the Ministry of Works was hit. Major roof damage also. In the Royal Court, heat and smoke and water damage . . .”

  His voice droned on. I tried to listen but my mind just stopped until Bertie interrupted to ask, “And Big Ben?”

  “A blast on the south façade rained down giant shards of glass, sir, but the old mechanism kept on, chiming bravely until they turned it off for later repairs.”

  “And, despite all this, we will keep on, we will fight and win,” Bertie insisted, his voice strong now, nor had he stumbled over one word.

  I gripped his hand hard. He did not flinch. Bracken, perhaps at a loss for words for once, just nodded.

  “Well,” said my dear, beleaguered husband, king of England, “onward to Whitehall to call on my friend and cohort in all this, Winston Spencer Churchill. If we all have to move underground for the duration, to keep fighting the Nazi bastards, we shall do just that.”

  Bracken nodded. “You know, Your Majesties, the newspapers like to call me the P.M.’s fixer, but I believe both of you are the nation’s fixers too.”

  From that moment on, I trusted Brendan Bracken. After all, it took one fixer to recognize another, and if anyone could pick up the pieces when Bertie took hard hits, it was I.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Night Radar

  When we emerged from our vehicle at the doorway to the Treasury building, the air was sharp with a strange smell and I coughed. I raised my hand to my nose, and my eyes watered.

  Ever observant and attentive, Bracken said, “A strange brew of odors, ma’am. Even here, it hangs over the city, dust, of course, ash and wet stone, but that unique smell is cordite, an explosive used in ammunition.”

  “And,” Bertie put in, “I dare say, raw sewage from broken pipes.”

  Bracken indicated our direction into the building, down a hall, down two flights of stairs. We entered past a sign that read, Mind Your Head.

  I was surprised to see the so-called Churchill War Rooms were quite extensive. Bracken said there were many tunnels and offices we would not see, so even some of it was restricted from the king, I thought.

  Winston greeted us, his face solemn, and I noted he slid a half-finished glass of what was, no doubt, his usual whiskey and soda, behind a typewriter.

  “Such as it is on a dire day, I wanted you to know we are all here at work,” he said, and led us on a tour with Bracken bringing up the rear.

  I had expected a single secretary crammed in, perhaps a few guards and desks for Winston and Bracken. Instead I saw a huge Map Room, manned around the clock, we were told, by officers of the three armed services and their support staff. Everywhere we went, deeper in, surprised people popped up when they recognized us to bow and curtsy, but Winston just nodded as if that were his due and herded us and Bracken on, farther into the labyrinth.

  I also quickly learned that this bunker was all business, without any touches of décor from Clementine Churchill or anyone else. It must be the Annex to Number 10 Downing Street, their other bunker, that I had heard she had decorated to make people more at ease. So Winston’s “Clemmie” was a female fixer too, and quite the woman if she could put up with his eccentricities and outbursts.

  “The moment I saw this cabinet room Neville Chamberlain had hardly used,” Winston told us, “I said, ‘This is the room from which I will direct the war.’ I won’t show you my Spartan office-bedroom, but I have a code-scrambling encrypted telephone that will replace the transatlantic one I have now, so I can call President Roosevelt. There’s even BBC broadcasting equipment there in case I need that.

  “Come, sit down here, if you don’t mind,” he said gesturing to a corner of a large, cluttered table where an area had been cleared off. Some sweets on a tray, a pot of tea and three cups, saucers, and some dearly rationed sugar cubes were waiting. “Brendan, I thank you for escorting Their Majesties, and I’ll have you back to get them to the palace shortly,” he told the hovering man.

  The king nodded at Bracken, and I said, “Thank you for the tour, however terrible the viewing.”

  With a nod and a snap of his heels, Bracken backed a few steps away and disappeared.

  “Good man, can make anything better, except this damned war, pardon my French, ma’am,” Winston told me. “But I realize you speak beautiful French. Your addresses to the women of Britain and France were powerful, and I have in mind a speech you might make to the women of America, if you are willing.”

  “Yes, of course. Anything to help in all this tragedy.”

  “We must jolt their citizenry and Congress to back us in this war. As for your war efforts, ma’am, the hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world—and rocks its stubborn men, eh, Your Majesty?”

  “Just so.”

  “Now, let me say,” Winston went on while I took off my gloves and poured three cups of tea, “that we have hopes that Hitler cannot sustain attacks on our isle and on Russia at the same time. With his German Wehrmacht troops, he seems to be heading for combat with Stalin. The brutality and scope of last night’s attack on London could have been what the German Satan thinks is the coup de grâce for us, the final blow, by air, at least.”

  “A blessing in disguise,” Bertie said, “if the night bombings stop. It would do wonders for morale—almost as good as the Americans getting in. Do you think our captive guest, Herr Hess, can give us any answers to Hitler’s demented thinking?”

  “Perhaps so, but let me give you another piece of hopeful news in all this grief and mayhem. We now have very serviceable airborne radar, day or night, entirely classified information. You have heard we have been bringing down more Luftwaffe planes even at night, even last
night, and the enemy can’t figure out why. When asked by our press, our RAF boys just say they are eating more carrots, so they can see in the dark.”

  Bertie simply nodded at that, and I bit back a grin. Humor in this horror took bravado.

  “I tell you,” Winston went on in lecture mode while he took his cup and saucer from me, “that Luftwaffe commander-in-chief Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring made a big mistake not to destroy our war industry factories, but to turn on our people to destroy their resolve. Can’t be done. Cannot be done!”

  “Here! Here!” Bertie said, as if he were supporting Churchill in the Commons.

  Lowering his voice, Winston said, “Bracken is working now on propaganda we shall simply call ‘information’ to assure and rally our people and those stubborn, isolationist Americans. Patriotic, inspiring movies, newspaper stories—you’ll see.”

  “Winston,” I said as the idea hit me, “I know a woman who has just the eye and brain for that sort of thing. She brings out the emotions, the best in people.” I explained to him about how Rowena had staged the baby in the lap of his crippled mother reaching for my pearls.

  “Bully. I’ll tell Bracken and you might too, as he’s building a staff he can trust. Aren’t we all? Like night radar, I feel we can see into the darkness of this war, bring down the enemy, fly yet with courage. But as for building a trustworthy staff, ma’am, that reminds me that your brother David appears to be getting on well with President Roosevelt, just as I intend to when we meet secretly soon in Newfoundland. I hope our Anglo-American partnership will be forged soon and include men and arms. Roosevelt’s been bucking his Congress, you know. I cannot wait to meet him, especially since you have both said how well you all got on. And, oh, yes, Eleanor Roosevelt has accepted our invitation, but the timing is yet to be decided.”

  That bucked me up. I raised my teacup, and Bertie and Winston clinked our china rims together in a solemn toast. Yet despite that and our enclosed area, Winston soon lit a cigar, and Bertie followed with a cigarette. I swear, if things weren’t so dire, I would have protested. I would have become a fixer by putting both of those smoking sticks out in the ashtray sitting right next to some scones that were surely hard to get with sugar rations.