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

by Karen Harper

  “Help me, Fergus!” I cried until I remembered my brother was dead. I heard the shrill scream of the bagpipes from his Black Watch regiment as they marched to save me.

  But no, it was my scream. Fergus could not help me, maybe no one could. And I remembered it all then in terrible detail: David pushed me down on the sofa where we had been sitting and kissing, and I had leaned my breasts into his upper arm. He had teased me, laughed with me. He had called me “my Scottish lass,” and I thought he cared.

  “This is your fault, you know, what you’ve wanted,” he said suddenly, as if turning into another person. He yanked my skirt up.

  “It isn’t, not like this,” I cried. “I haven’t before . . . done this. You’re hurting me.”

  He clapped his hand over my mouth and jammed a knee between my legs. “You have more extra flesh to offer than I usually favor,” he said with a sharp laugh. His eyes were glassy. I smelled liquor on his breath, but we all drank at his parties. I had been wrong to linger when the others trooped out, but I was staying upstairs as a guest, and—

  “Mmph,” I cried and tried to bite his hand.

  “You damn tease! You’ve been angling for me just like the hordes of hungry females, so pay up! You don’t want me, you want what I am, what I have, the hand that will hold the scepter, so I’ll give that to you right now! Bloody hell, I’m supposed to chase you, tart, not the other way round!”

  I gasped when he yanked my underpants down, ripping the cotton away. He raised his knee between my legs and thrust himself against me, though his trousers were still closed. “Fat, stupid pig, after me like the others, slopping from a trough of my future, my power and greatness! Give way! Pay up for the dances, the smiles, the attention you have demanded and flaunted!”

  He grabbed at my crotch, shaming me, hurting me. I gasped in double shame for it was my time of the month and I had a sanitary pad there, one stained. Panicked, I kneed him, and he screeched in shock and fell back, then to his knees beside the couch, doubled over. Horrified at what he—and I—had done, I scrambled up, stumbling to my hands and knees, then to my feet, and fleeing for the door like a drunken sot, dizzy and ill, leaving my underwear behind on the floor. I felt sick too with the crashing down of all I had hoped and believed.

  I looked back. He was bent over, retching, but he managed to look up and continue his verbal assault. “All show and no go! And if you tell anyone this—ever!—it will be the ruination of you, for I will claim you are as crazy as those two cousins your family hides or that phony monster of Glamis! Since I have learned incognito that your mother was a French cook, dear ‘Cookie,’ I swear if I hear one word of this, I will cook up such a story, you will never survive it!

  “And if you ever tell anyone about this,” he raged on, “I’ll ruin not only you but your whole damn family!”

  I feared at the time that those final words had silenced me, ruined me.

  I sat up in bed now, hugging myself hard. Best to do what he said, even now, never tell anyone, even if he had destroyed my trust and joy of the love act forever. More than once he had leered and laughed at me when I must be in his presence. Once when I had another beau—though I was trying to steer clear of David—he had taunted me by flashing a photograph at me of my stained menstrual pad and panties.

  I had never told Bertie nor anyone of what I knew now was a cruel assault, for I could never quite use that other word for it, for it hadn’t gone as far as rape, though it was the rape of my dignity, my sense of self, the love I’d thought I had for him. After all, I had pursued him, wanted him, but not like that. Like so many other stupid girls, I had wanted to be his Princess of Wales.

  I was certain David had not told Bertie. As brothers they, at least, still cared for each other, but I had hated David henceforth and had planned to steer clear of his family too. Until Bertie fell in love with me and pursued me, and look at me now: higher than mere Princess of Wales. I told myself I was doing well as queen, but was I not a miserable specimen of a wife?

  Had David joked about me to that slender, mocking woman he loved and gave up his kingdom for? What if Bertie ever learned David had tried to take me like that? Or what if David tried to use that to make me pay somehow, pay him now since he was evidently hard-pressed for funds?

  I curled up into a ball and, at least almost, wished I could trade places with someone like Bessie or Rowena with their simple, straightforward tasks and no man.

  * * *

  The day after Winston told us about the murder in Nassau, Bertie, evidently trying to buck himself up, proudly hauled out the dress uniform that had been ruined by the stains of geraniums the people in Malta had thrown at him in thanks and triumph during his visit there. He carried it into my sitting room, although he’d showed it to me twice before.

  “You still have that?” I asked, rising. “I would think the laundry could get those stains out.”

  “I shall wear them like a badge in my old age,” he insisted. “I was being pelted with their trust, gratitude, and love. I wish my father could have seen that. And who knew geraniums would stain like this? I don’t think that flower is special as a war memorial, not like poppies are to us.”

  “But you felt their love. Albert Frederick Arthur George Windsor, King George the sixth of England, if I had a geranium, I would throw it at you too for that very reason.”

  He pulled me to him, crushing the uniform between us. I embraced him with my chin resting on the shoulder of his day uniform. He could not see my tears. I so wanted to tell him all the secrets that plagued me, my French mother, how I had created and circulated the dossier to discredit that Simpson woman, even how I had hidden David’s attack on me years ago when I was but eighteen. How I hated him and his duchess yet.

  I should have told Bertie about all that when he proposed the first time, but I could not bear to ruin his affection for his older brother—and I was afraid of David’s threat, for a prince, powerful, beloved, would somehow cast the blame on me.

  But, again, I stopped myself from sharing such anger, those confessions. I saw again the red flower marks on this uniform and remembered the blood on my lingerie that day, the photo of it that he flaunted later. Surely that had been proof I had not meant to seduce him that night. Yet how the shame and horror of it had stained my life so that I barely got through lovemaking on my honeymoon before I had claimed a sore throat and managed to ask for separate bedrooms, even later conceiving Lilibet and Margot without the marriage act.

  But again, I did not tell him. How awful with his burdens this one would be, so I would continue to bear it alone and pray it did not fester and torment me more than it had—and that David would not dare to bring it to light.

  I told him instead, “We have a lot of public appearances coming up, and I agree with Winston that you should address the nation whenever the continental invasion occurs. I now believe it is the better choice that you not go in with or behind our troops. It would not be flowers the Nazis will be greeting our troops with.”

  “I admit, though I’d like to be with them, it’s best I hold back, but for how long? I shall pray about that in church.”

  And how long, I thought, would it be before I stepped forward to face my fears and admit—like in some church confessional booth—all my sins?

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Happy Christmas?

  Before our little family left London for our holiday retreat, Winston gave us some good news and bad about the recently completed murder trial in Nassau. The duke and duchess had managed to be out of town during the event, and it turned out the accused, Sir Harry Oakes’s son-in-law Alfred de Marigny, was acquitted, thanks in part to the shoddy, botched investigation the duke had hastily overseen.

  “I tell only the two of you this,” Winston said as we sat at our final business luncheon until the new year of 1944. “Thank God the former king abdicated. His part in this sordid murder situation stinks to high heaven.”

  Bertie jolted visibly. “You don’t think he could
have had a part in the murder?”

  “Only indirectly, getting in with the wrong investment bedfellows, trying to cover things up—and then there are his German friends, even there. But it’s evidently over, no more investigation. My main thought is that, for more than one reason, he—and she—would never have brought us through this war as the two of you have, at least so far, and I pray that Hitler doesn’t start bombing us again in desperation. We shall see how General Eisenhower’s so-called D-Day invasion goes, when he deems the time right. Lord knows, we have a big buildup of troops and machines to go in when he gives the word.”

  “I’d still like to go in with them!” Bertie said.

  I gasped. “But you know it will be a slog at first—hard going,” I protested. “As Winston says, your place has been and is here, inspiring and leading from here—with me.”

  Bertie reached over to take my hand, but I was not to be coddled or deterred. “Winston, talk some sense into the king of England, please.”

  “I must admit, ma’am, that I too would like to be there on that day.”

  * * *

  “I still think I should have worn my uniform,” Lilibet said for the third time today as we neared our Christmas retreat in snowy, windy Norfolk. “Going to Sandringham for the holidays is a formal occasion, however much Papa shoots and we ride and walk about. Wearing my uniform makes me feel I’m truly doing something for the war effort, and I would like to do more.”

  In a three-car caravan with a protective vehicle ahead and behind, we were motoring to the traditional royal estate for a much-needed escape from the capital. I was looking forward to it tremendously and hoping the change of scene and relative privacy might give me an opportunity to “keep calm and carry on” as numerous London signs urged, though another motto actually upset me: Loose Lips Sink Ships. I wanted to share my secrets with Bertie about my birth mother and David’s cruelty to me but kept telling myself it could destabilize our marriage and draw him from his necessary tasks. At least, thank God, he and Winston had been talked out of going in initially in the invasion of Europe, whenever that was.

  “Really, ‘Miss Colonel of the Grenadier Guards,’” Margot put in saucily, still staring out the motorcar window, “that uniform is a rather drab brown, and we all need some cheering up in these dreary times.”

  “It’s the uniform of our infantry in the field!” Lilibet shot back. “The guards’ ranks looked handsome and spiffy when I inspected their parade at Windsor.”

  Margot said, “I rather thought you preferred Royal Navy uniforms with that sharp black and white, especially on blond, Greek men—or man.”

  “Margot!” Elizabeth protested. “Daddy wears his dress Navy sometimes. At least I intend to wear mine when we visit the airfield near Sandringham. You are just wishing you had—”

  “Enough!” I cut into their chatter.

  They had been together entirely too much lately in these tense, terrible times. The tedious waiting for the continued Allied buildup of the invasion forces, which went under the still-covert names Operation Neptune and Operation Overlord, had made even them overwrought. Sometimes I thought the girls were affected by my nervousness and malaise too.

  But they knew not to argue or even chatter when we left behind the seemingly endless, windswept fens and motored through the gates of the Windsor family estate. Bertie loved it here however rough his father had been on him and David. His beloved, retired nanny, Charlotte Bill, still lived on the vast grounds in a grace-and-favor apartment he had arranged for her. Croplands and forests surrounded the central area of nearly five thousand acres, which were home to a village, a church, a railway station, and the royal mansion that the family called the Big House. Bertie and his siblings had been reared in a smaller home, the modest York Cottage, which our driver took us past.

  Beside me on the seat, Bertie heaved a huge sigh, and his eyes misted. I reached over to take his hand as we left York Cottage behind and passed the Big House. The sprawling three-hundred-room Victorian mansion was now surrounded by barbed wire and had been closed for wartime. The skeleton staff living in the village had moved some of the furnishings to the smaller building where we stayed, so Appleton House seemed a suitable escape—and another effort to cut back on royal luxuries during the war.

  Our abode here was charming, and we made do. Appleton had once been a farmhouse surrounded by large fields, but Queen Victoria’s wayward son Edward VII—so unlike my own Bertie—had insisted that hares and his precious pheasant and partridge, which he loved to kill with huge hunting parties, be given free rein in this area. That drove out the would-be farmer at Appleton. At least my Bertie used high-shooting skill to bring down game birds for our table instead of enclosing them and picking them off like . . . like Luftwaffe bombers had done to our dear people.

  Bertie was looking a bit gaunt and had an annoying cough, but I knew he would want to be out and about despite the cold and even the snow on the ground. I too would venture out, riding with the girls, hiking a bit.

  “Here we are!” I announced the obvious, trying to gild over Bertie’s sad nostalgia and the girls’ testiness. “No one is to look at what’s in the boot because surprises are afoot!”

  I had no idea as we climbed out, stretched, and went into Appleton House what this visit would bring, but I was hoping for the best here at dear old Sandringham.

  * * *

  We played board games with the girls the next windy afternoon, but left them both reading while Bertie and I walked to the area that housed the grace-and-favor flats of retired staff. He always popped in on his old nanny when we were here, and I had come to see how very much she had filled in emotionally for his rather distant mother, the opposite of mine.

  We had telephoned to say we would drop by and Bertie had a wrapped package for her, some chocolates that were so hard to buy these days. I was hoping he had also bought a box of those truffles for me to be opened under our candlelit tree tomorrow eve.

  He did not have to lift the knocker. She was watching from her window and opened the door wide, beaming. She curtsied to both of us. “What a blessing to see you, Your Majesties!” she cried—and did cry, blinking back tears.

  “Now, don’t you ‘Your Majesty’ me, Lala, or I shall call you Charlotte Bill,” Bertie teased, his voice already much lighter.

  She gestured us in, and we entered the small sitting room, so cozy and warm with its fire on the grated hearth. Her silver hair seemed to gleam, and I thought she looked good for her sixty-nine years.

  “You do know, my boy,” she said with a little laugh, taking our coats and wraps, “that you were the one who named me Lala because you could not say Charlotte.”

  She sat in a rocking chair while we took the sofa. I saw she had teacups and little cakes out for us. I was glad Bertie always gave her a ten-pound note for the holidays and her birthday. How lovely, and yet how sad that these women were sometimes more dearly beloved than the women who had borne Victorian and Edwardian children. I knew Winston had supported his dear nanny for years and had said he had her photograph by his bedside.

  The two of them were off to the races with their memories and laughs. At least they could joke over how strict the boys’ father had been.

  “He was forever haranguing you and David to keep your hands out of your pockets,” Charlotte said. “He told me once I was to sew your pockets shut if I saw one more hand thrust in, but I dared to disobey him on that one. Ah, memories past, just like Christmases past in the Charles Dickens story I was recently rereading, as I used to read it to all of you.”

  I entered the conversation, but it mostly belonged to them. Ah, memories. I believe one time I was with my birth mother Marguerite at our Walden Bury home when she plied me with candy and other sweets. Could that be why I loved them so?

  “I pray for you both daily,” Charlotte was saying. “I am so very proud of our Bertie and his loving and strong rule during these war times. Bless you both.”

  She poured us tea and poured he
r love over us. I could see why Bertie had turned out as he did with her on his side. Too bad that Bertie and David had suffered through a sadistic governess before Charlotte had “rescued” them. That cruel first nanny had seemed to dote on David, but had punished him overmuch, Bertie had said. Sad to think David had later found a woman to wed who was like that abusive, dreadful governess.

  So, I thought, as the two of them darted off on another chain of memories, here was a woman of the servant class who had been the second mother to Bertie. If given the chance would the French cook Marguerite have been a second mother to me too?

  * * *

  The cook at Appleton House mostly kept within the boundaries of rationed food for our Christmas Eve dinner that difficult year. We had saved some ration tickets for this special meal, and Bertie’s shooting foray with some local friends would give us stuffed partridge and roast pheasant instead of the traditional Christmas goose.

  Midafternoon, we four sang Christmas songs round the piano while Lilibet and Margot took turns playing and hardly argued about what to sing next. Later, under a much smaller tree than the ones we’d had in the Big House, we exchanged our gifts: some photographs, two board games, gramophone records, warm sweaters, new bright yellow Wellies for me to walk the grounds here, and chocolates—not at all the grand gifts we would have had before the war.

  The meal was leisurely and delicious. And then the traditional fruitcake and . . . and, I could not believe my eyes: a Yule log, the kind I had not seen since my early childhood days, a sponge cake frosted with chocolate icing and decorated with chestnuts to look like tree bark. That cake, I knew, had been one of the specialties of our French cook, Marguerite, who had called it la bûche de Noël.

  Strange, but the view of that, even the rich smell, hit me hard. I was back again at my girlhood country house of St. Paul’s Walden Bury, before I knew Marguerite had borne me. She had told the server that cake was for me to make a New Year’s wish on.