by Karen Harper
I was so stunned that I just stared at him. I sensed what was coming, but it could not be. Oh, yes, I longed for a family of my own and, God knows, I cared for him, but he knew I couldn’t leave the children and marry him . . . didn’t he? Doing both would never work, wouldn’t be allowed. I had thought that was unspoken between us. I’d even told him my parents needed the small amount of money I sent them twice a year.
“Charlotte, tell me you’ll think about it when they’re away. Chad and Charlotte Reaver—sounds right, doesn’t it? Mayhap for a while, before we have our own family, you could still work at Sandringham House or York Cottage, with the new head nurse in some way, and—”
“Wait . . . wait. I— This is all too fast. I’ve only met your father once, and you’ve never met mine—my family. And, I— You know I can’t . . . we can’t! The children still need me.”
“But we’re not children, my love. I’m twenty-six, and you soon will be too. Getting on, both of us, and you’d be such a good mother. I said, don’t you want children of your own?”
“Yes, yes, I would love that, but I have them in a way. I couldn’t just leave, even to live elsewhere on the estate. I’ve promised to tend them—duty, as I said.”
“It’s that new, handsome footman Finch, isn’t it?” he demanded, dropping my hands. “Better taught, proper ways, more to your liking.”
“No, it isn’t Finch. I’d be out of there on my ear if I took up with one of the staff.”
“Oh, I don’t know. The duke and duchess think the world of you, and you told me you thought Finch and you could work together.”
“Yes, I hope so, but I didn’t mean aught else by it. I said the children still need me, Finch or not, and however much the duchess doesn’t like childbearing, there may be others to come.”
“Are you afraid to have children of your own, because it’s been hard for her and she detests birthing?”
“No, no, it isn’t that. It’s just that—”
“Duty is fine, but you are throwing your life away on children that are not yours, when you could have your own . . . with me!”
Tears blinded me. I swiped away a sheen of them from my cheeks when I hadn’t realized I was crying. “Please understand, Chad. My whole life has led up to—”
“To leading me on! To want you. To hope for you. You’ll regret this.”
“Of course, I’ll regret it, but I didn’t mean to lead you on. You know your position—and you know mine.”
“Damn it, you’re choosing wealthy, coddled children—who have all the benefits in the world already—over me and the children we could have!”
“No, I’m choosing them over myself! Over what I want, would love to do, to be your wife and bear your babies. I must choose the children, at least for now, for today with all they’ve been through and have yet to face with their father the way he is. He’s going to put braces on Bertie and force him to write right-handed. David has problems, and Mary would be so alone without me. Can’t we talk about this tomorrow, and—”
“There won’t be a tomorrow for us. What about all I’ve been through, waiting, biding my time, curse it . . . and curse you!”
He seized my shoulder in an iron grip and shook me once. “Charlotte Bill, one more time. Here’s my asking you to wed with me. I love you, have since I first laid eyes on you, standing on the Wolferton railway platform, looking round for me to fetch you. That’s what I meant to say at first just now before we argued. But if you don’t see things like me, won’t even give it a chance, there’s a girl I’ve been putting off in the village, and I won’t waste more time.”
“A great honor but please understand, though I love you too—”
“That’s a lie! I get the picture—and,” he said, shoving me back, then lifting the feather picture and pressing it against my breasts so I had to take it, “you get this one. I waited nearly four years to speak, and that’s long enough. I swear, you’ll mourn this too, and it will come back to haunt you! I wish you well, then, Mrs. Lala.”
I stood stunned as he turned around and stalked out. The words “Chad! Wait!” died in my throat. So there I stood in the jungle of flowering, fragrant plants with sleet tapping on the glass ceiling above me, sobbing.
Chapter 9
After that, I felt fragile—and haunted by his yelling at me and cursing me. I wrapped and put the feather picture away because I couldn’t bear to look at it. I couldn’t sleep and was short with the children as if I blamed them. Funny how controlled, calm Chad was really as deep and strong as the sea, and I hadn’t known it.
For days, after Queen Victoria was memorialized and buried, until the new king and queen sent for us to come to Buckingham Palace, nothing moved me, mired as I was in private despair no one knew about but Mabel. I think the others believed I was mourning the queen or sad to have the older boys soon leaving my care. Oh, how I wished Rose was here, but she would have probably just tried to distract me by carrying on about how Duchess May had ordered black mourning lingerie for herself and little Mary.
But blast that man, Chadwick Reaver! I felt guilty each time Finch and I put our heads together about the boys. It had been decided—not by me—that when we returned from London, Finch would take over the care of David and Bertie. The perfect time, Chad had said, to make a break, but what was broken was my heart. Why had I not seen that friendly, proper Chad would want me for his wife? And had I made the wrong choice, the mistake of my life? I doubted myself, hated myself at times.
“THIS IS A great place to run around in,” David told us as our carriage pulled into the central quadrangle of the London palace the family called Buck House. “Now that he’s king, Grandpapa will let us run in our stockings and slide on the long floors, I’ll bet. Lala, why is he to be called King Edward when he was Prince Albert and called Bertie his whole life?”
Finch, sitting across the carriage with Bertie answered for me. That would have annoyed me before, but now he might as well assert himself with them. It was going to be an emotional separation and transition even though the boys would be just down the hall and I could see them daily. But it horrified me that my separation from Chad—and the way we’d parted—was much, much harder. Yet I kept telling myself, these children need me more—in a different way at least, of course, they did.
“Because,” Finch answered David, “a new king is allowed to choose the name he wants, and that’s the one he likes.”
“So he likes it better than his own father’s name, Queen Victoria’s Prince Albert, who died a long time ago?” David pursued.
“Let’s just say this,” Finch said. “So listen to me, you lads, and Lady Mary too. When a new king comes in, there are bound to be lots of changes. That’s it.”
I was glad Finch hadn’t told the boys how much the new king resented his father’s bullying and scolding. Too close to home for them.
On the ground floor of the palace, I tried to herd the children toward the large room we’d been given as a nursery on our other visits, but the boys—with Mary right behind—headed straight for the sweeping, wing-shaped grand staircase I so admired, with its ornate, interlocking patterns of oak and laurel leaves. It gleamed gold, though it was made of polished bronze. Oh, yes, I knew their plan, even if Finch didn’t.
I explained it fast to him. We let our helpers take little Harry and the luggage upstairs and tore after the children.
I heard David shout to his younger siblings, “The Big House at home has only three hundred sixty-five rooms, but this place has almost eight hundred. Grandpapa said so, and now he’s king. Let’s go!”
His voice echoed. The times I’d been here, I’d tried to give the children an attitude of respect toward the place, though I had obviously failed at that miserably. Well, how could I expect them to look at these vast rooms and priceless treasures the same way a Cockney girl would?
The staircase had always looked like a golden, glorious bird ready to take flight. But I didn’t want David and Bertie to be hurt—or caught—slidi
ng down the steep, twisting banister, and I had forbidden that before. With the old queen gone, they must think things had changed—and so, no doubt, they had.
“Will you look at that?” Finch called back to me when he caught sight of the ornate, two-sided, two-floored staircase. “And those huge paintings of people as if guarding it.”
“Queen Victoria’s relatives,” I told him, out of breath.
“All right,” Finch bellowed to the boys, “no horsing around on that, not today.”
“Grandpapa will say it’s all right!” David challenged.
“Then you may ask him later,” I argued, getting into the fray. With his splints on, poor Bertie couldn’t even keep up with David on the crimson-carpeted staircase, so I seized Mary’s hand and Finch ran to scoop up Bertie. We hustled all three of them up the stairs, for I knew another way to the nursery from there.
“Well, then,” David said as we turned away from the balcony to head toward our rooms, “let’s go run through the Marble Hall or visit the throne room. Bertie and I sat on and hid under the thrones before.”
But as we heard the new king’s voice boom out below, Finch put Bertie down and quieted David with a hand over his mouth. Holding Bertie’s hand tightly and with an arm around Mary, I edged toward the banister overlooking the entryway below. Finch kept a hard hold of both of the boys’ shoulders, I made sure of that, before we all looked over, expecting, I think, to wave at their grandpapa.
But the new king was addressing a group of twenty or so servants, maids, butlers, footmen, who had quickly assembled and stood at attention like soldiers in their mourning black. I noted Queen Victoria’s silk-clad, exotic-looking, beloved servants from India, who, I’d heard, had often attended her, were nowhere in sight.
“I want this morgue cleaned up,” the new king told them in a crisp voice that echoed to the ceiling under which we stood. David and Bertie both seemed to stiffen. Ah, I thought, this was a grandfather they didn’t really know. Mary was wide-eyed, peeking over, listening to every word.
“I want everything out of that closed-up room of Prince Albert’s the queen kept like a mausoleum,” King Edward ordered. He might be yet uncrowned, I thought, but he was ruling indeed.
“Cartloads of photographs and bric-a-brac, his clothes, away! For heaven’s sake, the man’s been dead for forty years! We’ll soon have more modern plumbing and an extended telephone system in here and storage for motorcars as well as those old carriages, but we need to start from the bottom up. The seepage of coal smoke in here over the years makes this entire place look like it’s in mourning! The queen and I will be entertaining over the years, have guests in, and I don’t mean for afternoon teas or garden parties. Formal dinners, card playing, dances. We may all be in deep mourning now, but we are going to live in the present for the future, not in the past. That’s all. Get busy with it, then.”
He disappeared, and the staff scurried away in a flutter of footfalls and whispers that echoed. Finally, Finch loosed his hold on David.
“Lala,” the boy whispered, “is there a mausoleum here? But that’s where they buried Gangan at Frogmore.”
“It means a place the living must not live in,” I told him. “Finch will explain. Come on boys, Mary.”
I led them to the Buck House nursery suite, which—who knew?—might yet see more royal children. Amidst the grandeur of the palace as I had at modest York Cottage, I told myself for the hundredth time that I’d done the right thing to turn Chad down. After all, he had blindsided me with his declaration of love and proposal of marriage. I was Mrs. Lala, and blessed to be so . . . wasn’t I? And the times were indeed new with King Edward VII and the children’s father next in line to the throne and David moved up even closer to that honor—that challenge and burden.
Oh, yes, new times were here, and I must embrace them instead of a man and children of my own.
Part Two
1901–1905
York Cottage to Scotland
Chapter 10
Thursday, June 6, 1901
York Cottage, Sandringham Estate
Finch’s distinctive warning knock sounded on the door of the day nursery. We had several we used, and this one usually spelled trouble. It meant Queen Alexandra was on her way from Sandringham House to York Cottage again to take over, and the staff who tended her grandchildren were at her mercy.
With the wet, squirming, six-month-old Harry in my arms, wrapped in a towel and fresh from his bath, I hurried to the door, even as extra raps resounded. I opened the door to find not only a frowning Finch but an irate Helene Bricka, the boys’ new French and German tutor who had been their mother’s longtime governess and friend.
“Who is with her?” I whispered to them with a glance back into the room at four-year-old Mary. She still madly rode David’s old rocking horse, which he had finally outgrown.
“Her friend Lady Knollys,” Helene told me, stepping in front of Finch, “but the king’s coming too. For once I’m glad David keeps bobbing up from reciting his verbs because he spotted them coming across the lawn.”
“So there goes any discipline and lessons,” Finch added grimly.
“My problem is she’ll want to bathe the baby,” I said, bouncing little Harry whose blue eyes darted from one of us to the other, “and I’ve just done that. He’ll get all puckered, and the water’s dirty. I’ll send Martha for more. I can’t fathom five more months of this, but I do understand their loving these children. And I know they like to escape London to entertain here. His Majesty still refers to Buck House as a mausoleum.”
“Hmph,” the elderly woman sniffed. “Her Majesty simply could not wait to convince the king to ship our dear duke and duchess off on a world colonial tour so they could cause chaos with these children, and you know who gets blamed for that then! And, I tell you, it’s the queen who talked the king out of naming my dear May and the duke as Prince and Princess of Wales yet. Meanwhile, we’ll just see about those rowdy boys getting off from their lessons again. I would like to personally tell Their Majesties that David and Bertie are occupied.”
Off the petite, stout woman went with her rolling gait that made her old-fashioned curls bounce and sway. I had not liked her at first, as she was so opinionated with liberal leanings, but her devotion to the children’s mother was so strong that we were soon allies. From their steamship called the Ophir, Duchess May had promised to write her dear friend letters from most of the places they were scheduled to visit: Gibraltar, Australia, Malta, Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada.
But to be so long away from the children! Still, I think it was perhaps good for David and Bertie in a way. With their father gone, they did not have to face his dressing downs, and Bertie’s stuttering was not as bad. Ever since his leg braces and his writing with his right hand—well, no time for that now. An invasion by the king and queen always took some doing.
Already I could hear David and Bertie whooping it up down the hall that Grandpapa had arrived. I rushed back into the nursery and dressed Harry so that the queen could get him undressed again. I had tried to tell her the first time she did this that the child had just had a bath, but she was not to be deterred. At least, why could she not warn us when one of her whims to visit was in the offing? I could hardly leave this baby unwashed each day just in case.
Martha came running in with two buckets to take the used water downstairs. “Are they heating more in the kitchen?” I asked her.
“Yes, Mrs. Lala. We saw them coming too. Cook’s upset as she needs the stovetop for lunch, but we’ll manage.”
“Mary, off that horse for now,” I told the girl. “Your grandmother is coming while your grandfather visits the boys.”
“What if they have another doll for me?” Mary asked with a sigh.
“Then thank them very sincerely for it and add it to your collection. Do not say you would rather have a horse. And please straighten your bed a bit. I asked you not to bounce on it because of that time you hi
t your head on the wall.”
She pouted but did as she was bid. In swept the assault of Queen Alexandra, looking as lovely as ever, followed by four of her pet pug dogs, which Duchess May could not abide for all their yipping. Behind her also came her loyal friend and bedchamber woman, Lady Knollys, who had the same first name I bore, Charlotte, though, like the others here, I had begun to think of myself as Lala these last years.
Chad had been the only one who had called me Charlotte, and he was lost—that is, lost to me. He had quickly wed a village woman named Millie Chambers. When the bells of St. Mary Magdalene tolled for their union, I walked alone to the glasshouse where Chad and I had parted and cried. It did no real good, to get all red-eyed and nasal, but I guess it helped a bit. I felt haunted by the soul-rending regret that his bride might have been me.
As for now, I knew Her Majesty did not like me hovering, so I stepped away, just as fresh, warm water arrived. For a few moments, I watched as she and Milady Knollys fussed over giving Harry his second bath. Thank heavens he loved to play in the water. When I saw the child was not upset, I stepped out and went down the hall into the room where the boys were tutored. I found the schoolroom empty but for a sputtering mad Helene Bricka and a pile of French and German primers on the table. Her students’ chairs were thrown back in disarray, evidently from when the boys bolted for the door.
She frowned at me across the table. Poor woman. She had preferred to tutor girls like Duchess May when she was young, then children at a girls’ school. Though Mlle. Bricka was much more European in her experiences and thinking than I would ever be, as our friendship had developed, I had begun to call her by her given name.
