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

by Karen Harper

  I was aching to ask Winston in private how the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were getting on in exile in Nassau, Bahamas. I hoped I could get him alone soon to ask if he had been told by them or someone else that I had tried to ruin Wallis Simpson’s status in Britain with that dossier. And, since he often alluded to my speaking excellent French, had the duke or duchess even told him of my French mother, for I recalled all too well that they had both delighted in tormenting me by calling me “Cookie” in private.

  But for now, it was best I fly with my own night radar and pray others—like Bertie—never knew my secrets. So I bit my tongue, as they say, and did bite into one of those lovely looking scones.

  * * *

  My broadcast to the women of America was scheduled for the tenth of August in that fateful year of 1941. I explained that “hardship has only steeled our hearts and strengthened our resolution.” I ended with my fervent hope that there would be a “day when we shall go forward hand in hand to build a better, a kinder, and a happier world for our children. May God bless you all.”

  Granted, Winston had helped me write the speech, but those final words were mine and from the heart. That same, momentous month, Churchill met with Roosevelt as they had planned, ironically with the P.M. going to Newfoundland on a battleship named Prince of Wales, for there was no such prince since David had deserted his kingship and his country. I was tempted to ask Bertie to change the name of the ship, but there were many things more important. Yes, much more important than my continued resentment of David, the onetime prince and king, for deserting his country for a twice-wed divorcée with a cruel, selfish heart. She would have made a dreadful queen.

  * * *

  Also that August, I turned forty-one years of age and took the girls to beautiful Balmoral Castle for a—hopefully—happy getaway. Bertie did not join us at first, for it was easier for him to keep in touch with Winston in Newfoundland from London.

  “Mummy, wait until you play this new game called Monopoly!” Lilibet told me, bringing a box with rattling game pieces outside and plopping it onto our lunch table. “You can pretend to own houses and motels and make lots of money of your own.”

  Trailing her, Margot rolled her eyes. “I’d rather have some sort of game about parties, though I wouldn’t mind the money to have one—besides your birthday party when Papa gets here, I mean.” Lilibet just shook her head at such silliness. The imp crossed her eyes again and made a face.

  “Margot! Both your father and I have told you not to do that because your eyes can get stuck, and where would you be then?”

  “But they come unstuck—see? We have to have some silly fun here, don’t we? In that game, it takes a lot of time just sitting still and counting money and paying fines, and one can go broke!”

  We played for a while anyway, then took a walk round the grounds. Not so much because of the war, but because even Margot was sounding too adult sometimes, I recalled the tearful scene this morning when Bessie had helped me dress and do my ablutions. I had brought her along to Balmoral just to get her out of London, for when she went home on day trips to visit her family—who no longer had a family home—she always came back morose and depressed. I had so loved her inherent buoyant personality and hoped to restore it.

  “Did something else come up when you saw your family last week, Bessie?” I had asked before she could leave my bedroom.

  She hesitated. “Don’t like to tell sad things when you have so much on your mind, ma’am, for the whole country, I mean, and not just one little family.”

  I turned toward her on my seat in front of the dressing table and looking glass. Since Winston had mentioned night radar, I now thought of my ability to read other’s dark emotions like that. “If you can, tell me,” I said gently.

  She nodded, opened her mouth, then burst into tears. I stood, pushed away my seat, took her tray from her, and put my arm around her. She stood stiffly in my embrace, her shoulders heaving. I steered her over to the divan and sat beside her.

  When she had quieted a bit and used the handkerchief I gave her, I said again, “If you can, tell me. If not, that is fine too, but sometimes it helps to share.”

  “To share. Yes,” she said with a hiccough. “Thanks to you, I have money to share with them. But my sister Prudence—she’s preggers, and her boyfriend is dead. She only found out when she wrote him and had the letter returned and stamped deceased. I mean, she didn’t know him long, and they weren’t wed. I met him once, so handsome and a lot of fun in these times.”

  “Preggers—pregnant? So she wrote to him, now she’s mourning him, poor girl.”

  She nodded wildly and finally gripped my hand that I had put over hers clenched in her lap. I thought of Lilibet writing to Philip.

  “It means shame on my family, though it’s a sign of the times,” she went on in a rush of words and emotion. “I mean, fast romances, broken betrothals, blackouts at night so it’s easy to sneak off together, fathers off to war and all and women left behind. You know, people sleeping and meeting in the shelters what might never see each other again. Came upon a couple huddled in a bombed-out doorway—you know, down the servants’ entrance. Oh, ma’am, didn’t mean to say all that and not to you.”

  “It’s all right that you tell me. Wartime makes everything topsy-turvy, doesn’t it?”

  “Mum says higgledy-piggledy morals, and I better not get caught up in it all.”

  “Of course you won’t. You’ll be here, serving with me, helping me to keep my chin up too.”

  I insisted she take a ten-pound bill to give to her sister to save for when the baby came. It shamed me that she evidently thought ten pounds was a fortune. But she was wrong, so wrong about something: I did understand falling hard for someone handsome who was a lot of fun. For I had been through an earlier war of my own, that terrible so-called war to end all wars. And I had made a foolish decision to love someone who was to me as good as dead.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tossed Salad

  We had a lovely birthday dinner at Balmoral when Bertie joined us. But life was still pleasure mingled with business. A few days later we hosted Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King, a handsome but solemn man in his upper sixties, a Victorian by birth with a receding hairline topped by silver hair. He had never married and was somewhat stiff with us, or with me, I wasn’t sure. But I could tell he was of a serious bent, even when Bertie teased him about being another “king.”

  After that, Bertie—with his own talents for being a fixer and flying with night radar—quickly changed his tone.

  “Britain and our other allies are so grateful for your leadership to bring so much of Canada’s strength to our struggles,” he told King. “The funding, supplies, and volunteers for the cause—as well as keeping up home front morale—has been invaluable for our mutual cause.”

  “We shall stand with you all the way, sir. Same as I told Prime Minister Churchill in London, same as I shall tell my Parliament and people.”

  He spoke quite plainly and bluntly. When one was tuned to Winston’s high-flying rhetoric, it was a change. Too late, I realized I’d told Lilibet and Margot to join us to give our guest a tour of the Victory Garden here that they had been tending lately. But perhaps their energy, charm, and even high jinks would lift the solemn mood when they joined us for luncheon too. I was worried now their presence would not suit—but here they came.

  Bertie introduced the girls and that went well, so I began to relax. Lilibet and Margot led the three of us out into the gardens where a late-summer array of vegetables clung to neatly placed wooden poles. A wire fence kept out rabbits, though we’d seen deer vault it with no problem. Lettuce, chard, and other greens had been replanted numerous times. Carrots and beets still displayed their tops, and potatoes grew in neat rows.

  “We adore salads,” Margot said. “The French chef at the palace in London likes to toss them all together, so we do too.”

  “But neatly,” Lilibet put in. “More or less arranged too,
with a mix of greens and color. We have already picked greens for our luncheon today with you.”

  “Very good, young ladies. But it is rather getting on in the growing season for northern climes like Canada and Scotland, is it not?” our guest asked, eyeing the past-prime garden.

  Lilibet said, “That may be so, sir, but we are very honored you have visited us here, and very grateful for all you and your nation do to help us in these difficult times.”

  I saw Bertie startle, and my eyes widened too. It was as if our eldest, our heir, had suddenly grown into womanhood—and international tact.

  “I thank you very much for that, Princess Elizabeth,” he replied with a little bow.

  It wasn’t like lunching with witty Winston, but Lilibet helped out and Margot managed to behave. And before our time together was ended, Mackenzie King was telling the girls that his boyhood motto had been “We must help those who cannot help themselves.”

  “I like that very much indeed,” Lilibet said, sitting at his right hand while Margot fidgeted on my left side. “Of course, as terrible as times are—and we do so appreciate your help and wish the Americans would get in too—we Brits certainly plan on still helping ourselves.”

  * * *

  Winston, I could tell, was running himself ragged. He was disappointed that the capture of Rudolf Hess had given us no solid information. He had decided Hess was a mental mess, though he had ordered him safely stowed, guarded, and further interrogated in the Tower of London.

  “The only good I can see out of that,” Winston said and coughed into his handkerchief again at our weekly meeting, “is that Hitler will go even crazier wondering what his once third-in-command is telling us. I’m letting our newspapers have a good run with that. By the way,” he added, his eyes watering, “our mutual friend Brendan Bracken has hired the young woman you mentioned as an aide. You were right, ma’am, as she’s quite good with ideas for photographs for the cause.”

  Bertie and I looked at each other as Winston coughed into his handkerchief again.

  “Winston,” Bertie said, “you simply must get more rest. We—this nation and this war effort—cannot afford to have you ill.”

  He shrugged. “I ignore the health challenges and call it my ‘black dog of despair’ that follows me about, depresses me and makes me ill at times. Ever hear of psychosomatics, Your Majesties? That is, that the worries of the mind and heart can make the body ill? Now, I suppose my enemies here and abroad would say all sorts of Freudian claptrap such as old Winston has too big an ego, eh? I just pray the Americans get in somehow soon, and that’s nothing to ah . . . ah . . . sneeze at.”

  He exploded in a handkerchief-covered sneeze to punctuate that, then added, “The best medicine I’ve had lately is our RAF boys bombing Berlin! Talk about giving that madman Hitler a taste of his own medicine!”

  “Winston,” I said, rising, “you simply must go home and go to bed. I shall call Clementine to be certain you do!”

  “Ah, wives, eh, Your Majesty?” he said to Bertie. “Especially wives in wartime. Dear heavens, what would we do without them? Yes, ma’am, I shall hightail myself home to Number 10 and off to bed with a good stiff shot of medicine.”

  “I hope,” I said, “you do not mean whiskey and soda.”

  “For a cold? Certainly not. Just straight whiskey, and if we didn’t have this dratted rationing of everything—which I am being blamed for—I’d recommend that for all my generals. And with that, I shall take my leave.”

  I held Bertie’s arm as we watched him toddle out, leaning a bit on his gold-headed cane. What, I thought, were we to do with this stubborn man? But, of course, what would we ever do without him?

  * * *

  Besides Winston’s bout with pneumonia, which was kept strictly out of the newspapers, more bad news was soon on my doorstep. My favorite footman, Mervin Weaver, who had asked permission to join the RAF, went missing in his Wellington aeroplane. I cried for him and sent condolences to his widow, for he had been happily married. I also sent his grieving wife the rest of his salary for that year.

  But even worse, even closer to home and family, my nephew John, the master of Glamis Castle now, the son of my eldest brother Patrick, was killed in action on the nineteenth of September this terrible year of 1941. He had been serving with the Scots Guards in Egypt, a country so important to the cause of fighting Hitler and his ally Mussolini.

  “I’m so sorry, my darling,” Bertie comforted me when we were preparing to head back to London after our quick run to Scotland for John’s memorial service.

  I hugged him back hard. We were in the suite they had given us at Glamis, once my parents’, though Bertie had slept in his dressing room near the phone.

  “Losing him just brought back all the other losses—being here,” I told him, my face pressed to his coat lapel as we prepared to go out to our motorcar, then take the train back to London. “I can almost hear my mother’s voice here, Papa’s laughter. And, of course, see Fergus, as if he is still young, chasing David and me through the halls for a romp or tickle game.”

  “All these losses, people we don’t know and ones we do. It all just makes me worry about George more.”

  I nodded. I knew he fretted so about his younger brother, the Duke of Kent, however much it hurt him that his mother had favored George. Nor had I ever felt close to George, perhaps because his pretty, vivacious Greek princess Marina had, for a time, supplanted me in the public eye when she came into the family.

  “My mother would never get over his loss,” he added and heaved a sigh that I felt too. “She supports me, of course, does her duty. David’s let her down awfully, and she’ll never forgive him, though she yet adores him.”

  I said, “We’d best go out, my dear, as the motorcar and train will be waiting.”

  But I wanted to say, David has let all of us—me too—down awfully, and I’ll never forgive him either.

  * * *

  I was listening to the wireless in my sitting room at Windsor on the evening of Sunday, 7 December, nearly at the end of that tumultuous year. I was glad to see 1941 go but feared what lay ahead. I knew full well what Winston meant when he talked about being followed round by the black dog of despair. Things were still not going well for the Empire and her allies.

  “And now a bulletin from New York City,” the announcer’s voice intoned. “We have just received a report that the American fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, has been wantonly attacked by Japanese planes. Many ships are burning, and the number of casualties is reported to be high.”

  The announcer’s voice droned on, but his words became a blur. The Japanese had attacked the Americans! And the Japanese were in league with the evil empires that were doing us harm.

  I rushed out into the hall, nearly colliding with a maid with a tea tray, evidently heading for Bertie’s room. “Not now, Emily,” I told her and sprinted past.

  I was quickly out of breath. All the walkabouts I’d done to visit stricken citizens . . . too many sweets and chocs . . . I knew that . . . but this . . .

  I flung open his door. Bertie was sitting at the small desk he kept here, frowning at some report.

  His head jerked up. “My dearest, what—”

  “I’ve just heard the most amazing thing on the wireless! Can it be true that the Japanese have bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii?”

  “If they have, the Japanese have made a stupid move to bring them in. Roosevelt will declare war straightaway!” he cried, leaping up to come around his desk. “And war on their ally Germany too! Surely, Winston has heard, so why doesn’t he call?”

  Alan Lascelles, Bertie’s assistant private secretary, popped his head in the door. He was a veteran round here, for Bertie was the third king he had served after Bertie’s father and, briefly, his brother too. “Oh, sorry. Didn’t know the queen was here, Your Majesty.”

  “Have you heard the news about Pearl Harbor?” Bertie demanded.

  “Let me just say
, sir, that the prime minister is on your secure phone line with some sort of momentous news.”

  He disappeared as fast as he had come in. Bertie had kept Lascelles on for his vast knowledge and the fact he had turned against David when he went so haywire, wed that woman, and deserted his country. I liked him for that too.

  Bertie seized the receiver from its cradle. “Winston? Yes. Yes!”

  A long pause. Winston speaking. I began to pace, but then shamelessly leaned over Bertie’s shoulder so I could hear Winston, who must be nearly shouting into the telephone.

  “Yes, the queen heard it on the wireless,” Bertie was saying. “Surely they will get in now. Will you call President Roosevelt? I am certain he will contact you.”

  “I’ve already talked to him and am going over to see him,” I heard Winston say.

  “To the States now? To Washington?”

  “Immediately. He tried to talk me out of that, but now is our time, Your Majesty! I will offer him our help in all regards.”

  “And pray that he will return that promise.”

  “Exactly. By the way, I know you will send him our condolences for their losses. Surely, he and his stubborn Congress will declare war on Germany now too, and then we’ll have the Yanks over here again, thank God.”

  “But is there something else?” Bertie asked as I moved away, both stunned and yet relieved.

  I saw Bertie suddenly wilt against the edge of his desk when he had seemed so energetic and animated. Surely this tragic but good news was not to be mingled with the tragic or the bad, like some—well, like some tossed salad the girls had been complaining just today they had not seen in their rations since late autumn.

  “B-b-both of them lost?” Bertie asked. “Those damned Japs, as Roosevelt calls them! Pearl Harbor for them, these horrible losses for us. Now it’s full-out war with Japan for us too!”