The Royal Nanny

by Karen Harper

  “And today,” Mrs. Wentworth went on, with the keys on her waist chain jingling as we went downstairs, “her ladyship has asked that you be brought in with the children so that she can greet you, but don’t speak unless spoken to first, of course.”

  I was starting to lose track of all the of courses, though I knew things would be done differently here and I must learn new ways. She showed me how to use the back stairs when I fetched things from below. She introduced me to the servants, though their names didn’t all stick at first, and I thought I’d be taking my meals with the children anyway.

  But one of the servants, who all seemed eager to catch a glimpse of me too, gave me a sweet smile as her eyes swept over me, hat to shoes. I caught her name—Rose Milligrew, lady’s maid to the duchess—since she seemed so welcoming, even without saying a word. Rose, so blond and pale that it seemed she had no eyebrows or lashes, was sitting at a table in window light, mending a taffeta and net evening dress in a rich amber hue that shimmered and nearly took my breath away. Oh, I’d have to mention that garment in my first letter home.

  Upstairs again, but not the attic where the female servants—including myself when not on duty—would sleep, but this time at the back of the house, with a green baize swinging door shutting off their parents’ chambers, where two small rooms were set apart for the children. I found it hard to fathom that Dr. Lockwood’s daughters had far more room to play, sleep, and roam. I learned there were two newfangled bathrooms in the house, but both were for the use of Their Graces.

  “The children, you see,” Mrs. Wentworth added, “are bathed in their nursery each Saturday evening, and that is a lot of water for the nursemaids to tote up from the kitchen. There are two of them to help, at least, though Mrs. Peters has them down in the basement washroom, fetching and ironing right now, Martha Butcher and Jane Thatcher. They go by their given names as the duchess didn’t care to hear a Butcher and Thatcher were caring for her children.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was a jest or not, but she was off on another turn, both in the hall and in her talk. I tried to keep track of all the new names.

  At the second door, she whispered, “The day nursery.” Mrs. Wentworth opened the door a crack and “a-hemmed” without sticking her head in. Out came a square-jawed woman with her hair parted in the middle and pulled so hard back that it looked painted on beneath her lace and linen cap. Under her thick raven brows, her dark eyes looked me over.

  “You’ll be called by your first name, Charlotte, like my other workers,” she told me, “since I hardly need an undernurse called Bill. You and I shall talk after I tuck up the children tonight, about rules and regulations, timing, behaviors. I am the boys’ head nurse. Besides the nursery footman, Cranston, I have two nursemaids. But couldn’t see promoting the likes of them to undernurse, and Her Ladyship Mrs. Dugdale says you come recommended.”

  Though surprised by her cold manner, I knew I had to manage a proper reply. “I tended two girls for five years as head nurse and was nursemaid before that.”

  “Well, then, the demands will soon be much greater as we’re about to have a third child. The baby will need close watching by you, while I tend my boys, especially the heir, a delicate, darling child. Poor duchess,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, “doesn’t like pregnancies any more than, they say, the queen herself did, but that will be over soon, and you’ll be very busy. I’d best get back in to my boys, prepare them to meet their parents at tea, for which I hear you are to tag along. I usually take a nursemaid to keep an eye on Bertie, but you can do that now, and when the new baby arrives, you’ll carry him or her.”

  “I’m sure it will be a special time for the lads with their parents.”

  “We’ll see,” Mrs. Peters said and, without further ado, went back into the day nursery and closed the door.

  I felt crestfallen, and I’m sure Mrs. Wentworth knew it.

  “She becomes overtired,” she told me, patting my shoulder. “Poor thing works so hard and never agrees to take even a short holiday, so it’s good you are here. And she’s so protective and concerned that all goes well with the boys, especially David, but both lads have problems.”

  “Problems? Such as what, Mrs. Wentworth?”

  “I’d best let her tell you. How about you come down and have a spot of tea with me in my room to buck you up after your journey? Of course, you won’t take tea with Their Graces, just stand back to tend to the children lest they roil their father and have to be removed.”

  Removed? Presented and then removed? I had been so certain that royal children would be well behaved and that the nurse who tended them would at least be welcoming. Suddenly, I missed my Lockwood charges terribly and, for the first time in years, was homesick for my own family too.

  Chapter 2

  Teatime was fast approaching, and I was on pins and needles. Soon I would have my first real glimpse of royalty, because when I’d tried to see Queen Victoria during her Golden Jubilee ten years ago, the crowds were so huge near the Abbey that all I saw was her gilded carriage and six cream-colored horses. The press of people, that’s what I remember from that day. But to see members of the royal family close, to speak to them and hear their voices . . . well!

  At least I was to meet little David and Bertie before “being presented” to their parents in the queen’s boudoir, as was evidently customary before the elders dressed to dine each night. I knocked on the day nursery door. Would I ever learn the twists and turns of this place with all its corridors and corners? I’d lost my way twice between my attic chamber and this hall.

  “Enter,” came Mrs. Peters’s crisp voice. Of course, I was to call her Mrs. Peters or Nurse Peters, however closely we would work together, not by her given name of Mary.

  I went in to find two sweet-faced boys who greatly resembled each other, the youngest in a white dress with lots of flounces and lace, the older in a sailor suit. To my dismay, it appeared the little lads had been crying as she washed their faces none too gently. Both tried to flinch away, though she held their chins firmly and scrubbed at their already rosy cheeks.

  “My dears,” she told them, still not looking my way, “this is my new helper, Charlotte. Say hello to Charlotte, David and Bertie. Char-lotte.”

  “Miss or Mrs.?” David asked.

  “Just Charlotte,” Mrs. Peters said.

  “Good day, Charlotte,” he said with a nod but not a smile.

  “Lala,” said little Bertie. “She Lala.”

  “Well, we’ll have to work on that,” Mrs. Peters said, tossing her washcloth in the basin.

  Despite still wearing my walking suit, I went down on my knees to greet the boys.

  “You needn’t kneel to them—not here!”

  “I’m only making their acquaintance on their level,” I told her, smiling at them, for it seemed smiles were in short supply. “I know a new person can be daunting to little ones at first. Hello, David, and hello, Bertie. We’re are going to be friends and have lots of fun.”

  Mrs. Peters snorted so hard I thought she was going to sneeze. “You, just like me, had best follow orders here about, Their Graces’ wishes and mine, and that doesn’t mean games.”

  “Of course, I will follow orders and help you,” I promised as I shook hands with these two solemn, little boys, though I yearned to hug them. They kept looking nervously at each other and then up at their nurse, so I got to my feet and decided to bide my time for full introductions. The little poppets were blond beauties, and I was sure their parents would be even more handsome than the drawings I’d seen of them in the gazettes at the Lockwood house.

  “I always take the heir,” Mrs. Peters told me and lifted David into her sturdy arms. “You bring Bertie.” Strangely, David looked upset, when most little ones loved to be cuddled and petted. Nurse Peters was rubbing his back and arms, patting him on his bum.

  Though Bertie was walking well, even with his soft leather shoes, petticoats, and skirts—for he had edged away from me—I picked hi
m up, bounced him once and held him close. To my surprise, under all that fancy fabric, the boy seemed thin, almost bony. We went out, down the hall, and through the padded, green baize door. I followed Mrs. Peters with David looking back at Bertie and me. Bertie put his arms around my neck and clung close.

  David stretched one hand back toward us, probably trying to reach out to his younger brother. Or to me?

  “You wait right there ’til summoned,” Nurse Peters told me at a turn of the hall and carted a wide-eyed David around the corner where I couldn’t see them.

  “I hungry,” Bertie told me. “Lala, I hungry.”

  “I’m sure there will be something good when you see Mama and Papa,” I told him. He stayed solemn, even as he held harder to me, seeming to stiffen as if waiting for something.

  From down the hall came a high-pitched shriek. Good gracious, could she have dropped David? Though I’d been told to wait there, holding Bertie to me who clung so hard he almost cut off my air, I rushed around the corner and down the hall. David was crying and evidently Mrs. Peters was shaking him. I hurried to her and started making funny faces and meowing and chirping to distract the child, but he still cried. Oh, this was going to make a terrible impression on his parents and on my first meeting with them!

  I heard a loud male voice on the other side of the door bellow, in a voice that carried over David’s wails, “Not again! What is wrong with that boy? Must he always be caterwauling?”

  I was thankful that made David’s cries subside to sniffles. Whatever had set him off like that? Just being momentarily separated from Bertie? Fear of his father’s booming voice?

  A woman’s tense tones wafted through the door. “Let’s bring them in and feed them. After all, it’s their last meal of the day.”

  “At least my stamp collection doesn’t shriek. Even my hunt dogs don’t bark like that. We’ll never make a man of him.”

  “My dearest, he’s not even four. I can’t take it either, not with this wretched state I’m in. I just want it to be all over, this waiting, this birth.”

  I was tempted to take Bertie and flee, but Mrs. Peters rapped on the door, then opened it herself. In she swept with David starting to cry again. Could he indeed be afraid of his father? I did not know whether to wait until summoned, but I went in too, following Mrs. Peters’s lead to curtsy. When I tried to put Bertie down, he clung so hard I kept him in my arms.

  The room was exquisite with satin draperies in pale greens that matched the full, embroidered robe the duchess wore over her form in her delicate condition, en negligee, Dr. Lockwood’s new wife had called that style. No corsets, no petticoats beneath. All sorts of photographs and bric-a-brac clustered on tables. May of Teck, the Duchess of York, had dark hair swept up beautifully and a regal bearing despite her big belly.

  I was surprised that the duke was my height at five feet and a half. He had a brown beard clipped tight and stood ramrod straight with his teacup in one hand and cigar in the other. Could the strong smoke from that be something the children disliked, and so they protested these visits? It did rather sting one’s eyes.

  “If that boy can’t be quiet, take him out, Mrs. Peters,” the duke said over David’s renewed sobs. His voice cut right through one, as if he were speaking to an entire shipload of men, for I’d heard he still considered himself a Royal Navy man. “How you manage him, I don’t know. Her Grace doesn’t need to be upset now.”

  To my horror, Mrs. Peters curtsied and carried David right out, leaving me with Bertie facing my new royal employers. I bobbed another curtsy and put Bertie down, hoping he would go to his mother, which, thank the Lord on high, he did.

  With a weary smile, the duchess said, “My friend Lady Dugdale and her London doctor recommended you highly. We hope you will be happy here. As you must know, there will be a third child soon.” She had a unique way of pronouncing her words, sharp with rolled r’s, which I learned later were traces of her German accent.

  “Yes, Your Grace. I’m honored to serve here, and I love children.”

  “Well, good,” the duke chimed in, “because these two are hard to love at times. Not since they’ve been babies, when we doted on them. I will leave all this to you, dearest,” he said to his wife, “and be in my library with my stamps.”

  He made a hasty retreat. I didn’t hear David’s cries anymore so I hoped Mrs. Peters would bring him back in, but perhaps she had fled. To hear this had happened before was most unsettling.

  “Excuse me, milady,” I ventured, “but Bertie said he’s hungry.” The moment that was out of my mouth, I was appalled. I hadn’t been spoken to first. And had I just indirectly criticized Mrs. Peters or demanded something?

  “He’s always hungry yet doesn’t seem to grow. So what do we have for you here, eh, sweeting?” she asked the child, and his face lit. “Why don’t you sit on this stool and put him on your lap,” she said to me. “I don’t have a lap right now to hold him right, and he can have some grapes, muffins with jam, and milk. Ah—what is it you will be called by here, Miss Bill? Not Mrs. Bill, I’m sure since you aren’t the head nurse, and I believe Mrs. Peters didn’t want to use Bill at all. I recall that her husband who died years ago was Bill.”

  “Charlotte, she decided, milady.” I had been told by Lady Dugdale that after addressing the duchess the first time as “Your Grace,” I could switch to “milady,” so I hoped I was doing that proper.

  “Charlotte it is, then.”

  “Lala,” Bertie declared with his mouth full of grapes. “She Lala.”

  Feeling a bit softer toward Mrs. Peters for her being a widow, I sat on the stool and held Bertie while his mother fed him as if he were a little bird—a ruffed grouse with all his fancy baby garb. And he did seem starved.

  “I do hope you will be able to help Mrs. Peters deal with David,” the duchess said. “I do worry so for his delicate nature, since so much will be expected of him. And I must keep reminding myself that his father will someday be his king too.”

  I was so relieved to find the children’s mother a sweet and caring parent. And here I sat with her in intimate conversation.

  “I will do my very best, milady.”

  “As must we all, in any circumstance and station,” she whispered as if to herself. Her jaw set, and she blinked back tears. From that moment on, whatever might befall, I admired her.

  Chapter 3

  I soon came to understand how Nurse Peters could be so stern and possessive of the children, yet so well tolerated by the staff and the royal parents. Rose told me on the sly that she had actually saved the duchess’s mother, Mary Adelaide of Teck, from a dreadful fall on the front staircase. Quite a feat, since Rose said the woman was cruelly nicknamed “Fat Mary,” and must be three times the size of her pregnant daughter. So the Yorks felt they were beholden to Mrs. Peters.

  “I vow, Charlotte, poor ‘Fat Mary’ would have been a hard one to dress and care for her garments,” Rose had whispered with a roll of her light blue eyes.

  Though Rose was almost ten years older than me, she didn’t seem it. I liked her partly because she told me she had also gained her position here through a recommendation from Lady Dugdale. Rose longed to design fine ladies’ garments, though she knew her true lot in life was to care for them. I think she was lonely, caught between spending a lot of time with the duchess upstairs, traveling with her, but supposedly living downstairs with the servants. Anyhow, we got on splendidly.

  From Rose I learned there had been an even earlier nurse who had been dismissed before Mrs. Peters, for somehow insulting the duchess’s mother, who used to be much about before her current illness kept her confined to White Lodge at Richmond Park in London. That was the location of David’s birth, though Bertie had been born here.

  In short, the staff, including Rose, all felt they were skating on thin ice. As one of the footmen put it, no one wanted a “fall from grace” since the Yorks were quick to sack anyone who stepped out of line. And so, more than once, I saw the butler on down
to the nursery footman merely roll their eyes and keep their heads down, however brusque Mrs. Peters acted and however much David howled and Bertie cowered.

  I, who worked closer than anyone with the woman, felt ill at ease with her all the time, so what must her little charges feel? Both were tense and skittish. I’d been in service at York Cottage for twenty-three days to be exact, and I feared Mrs. Peters might get me sacked for my cheery and affectionate way with the boys—Bertie, at least, since David always seemed off limits. The fact I was appalled at David’s behavior more teatimes than not didn’t sit well with her either. She mostly kept me at bay and treated me more like another nursemaid than undernurse, but I hesitated to complain.

  Today was Sunday, April 25, and we’d been to St. Mary Magdalene Church on the grounds, though without the duchess in her usual place since the birth was so close. Day of rest or not, that afternoon I planned to store a pile of clean nappies in the day nursery in preparation for the birth of the new royal baby. Arms full, I walked right into the day nursery without the required knock.

  I thought Mrs. Peters had taken the boys outside in the spring air. Bertie wasn’t to be seen. But there she stood, leaning over David who was bent facedown over his bed. She was spanking his bare bum with the bristle side of a hairbrush!

  “You’ll learn, you bad, bad boy,” the woman muttered. “You are my boy, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

  The child’s hysterical cries were muffled by a pillow pressed against his face. In that moment, all the strange and horrid pieces of the puzzle flew together for me. She must have pinched and scratched the child before taking him in to see his parents each afternoon, then carried him out in triumph as if he were hers alone to comfort and cuddle. Bertie and David both feared her, yet were coerced and groomed—like this—to think she loved them and they must love her. Love demanded by pain—so wrong.

  “Stop it! Unhand that child!” I shouted, though I knew the moment I spoke that my time here was doomed. I dropped the nappies on the bed, ready to leap at her. I wanted to seize that brush and hit her, but she stopped and yanked the child, clad only in his shirt, to a sitting position on his bed.