by Tessa Arlen
Had she seen me as I had walked across the drive from the gardens? Apparently not. She thanked Mr. Hughes, adjusted her handbag on her arm, and started toward the steps to the house.
“Ma’am?” I walked forward, my mouth as dry as parchment. “Your Majesty?”
Her head swiveled round. It had been well over a year since I had seen her. Her round, flat face held no expression. She continued on toward the steps of the palace.
“Please, ma’am.” She was two steps ahead of me. “Please let me explain. They were not supposed to use my name . . . I had no . . .”
She hesitated, her right foot on the top step. She would listen to me! “It was absolutely agreed that Mr. and Mrs. Gould would not . . .” Her left arm came up and for a terrible moment I thought she was going to push me away.
“I thought I made myself clear.” She tilted her head back toward me without actually looking at me. I could see the side of her face; her jaw was clenched. “You are not to approach anyone in my family again . . . ever.” Her head turned to me: skin pale and powdery in the winter light, eyes as cold as glass. Her malevolence so palpable that I nearly tripped up as I backed away. “Now that you have heard this from me, would you do me the courtesy of obeying?” And then on she continued, as if she had all the time in the world, toward the open door and the footman holding it, leaving me there: a thoroughly chastised dog who had misbehaved so badly that it must be sent away.
The bare branches of the trees, the tidy flower beds planted with winter aconite and hellebore, the gravel of the drive, and the black Daimler with a blue uniform standing next to it blurred together. I groped in my pocket for my handkerchief. It was empty. I blinked, hard. As hard as I could. Not here, hold it together. Not here.
I started to walk back past the Daimler to the sanctuary of the cottage. My nose was running, and a corner of my scarf that had worked free of my collar in my anxiety trembled in the draft of my desperate breath.
A hand at my elbow and I froze. Now what could she possibly want? Was I to be arrested?
“Come along, now.” The gentle voice of the man I had known since my arrival at Royal Lodge nearly nineteen years ago. Mr. Hughes had been so much younger then, with thick, wavy dark hair, carefully trimmed and combed. He had chauffeured us on that momentous drive from Windsor Castle back to London through the thousands of flag-waving, cheering crowds on VE Day. He had driven me down from Scotland along icy roads to Sandringham so I could comfort Lilibet and Margaret Rose when Alah died and had met me at the station countless times on my return to the palace from Scotland.
“Come along, now, Mrs. Buthlay. Best foot forward. It happens to all of us in time. We work for them all our lives, and then we outlive our usefulness. It was just a job.” His quiet sympathy as he pressed a clean handkerchief into my hand was my undoing. The tears began to pour down my face.
He patted my hand. “They have a lot to be thankful for.” He steered me down the path and back through the gardens to the cottages. “There, lass, no need for tears. I read your articles in the wife’s Woman’s Own. I think you did them a great service. It was nothing but the good you shared with the world.”
He opened the door to Nottingham Cottage. “Major Buthlay?” he called out. “Put on the kettle, would you, sir? I think your missus needs a cuppa.” He delivered me into George’s arms. “And if you have a drop of Glen Avon, it wouldn’t do nothing but good.”
* * *
• • •
Dusty and disheveled, we faced each other across the empty drawing room with its bare walls and empty windows. “There now, sweetheart; that’s the last of it. The men will be here any minute. Got to feel sorry for them; they have to carry this lot all the way down to the service road, must be nearly half a mile.”
I looked around our first home. The furniture we had bought and refurbished would be on its way to Scotland, to Dunfermline and my mother’s cottage, as we looked for a house to buy in Aberdeen.
I put the cottage door key down on the draining board of the sink. “I’ve been thinking, George. When we get to Aberdeen, would you please write to Macmillan and accept their offer to publish The Little Princesses?”
He ran his hand back over his head. “You are sure now, are you?”
“Yes, I am quite sure. It was a wonderful job: I loved every minute of it, but that part of my life is over now. I wish it had ended differently, but it didn’t.”
“You don’t regret the Ladies’ Home Journal?”
I stood on the threshold of Nottingham Cottage and looked out at the serried ranks of winter cabbage and brussels sprouts that we would never prepare in the little kitchen with its leaky sink. “No, not now. Everything I wrote was true. I betrayed no secrets. I told the world what kind, good little girls they were.” A group of men were walking toward us, pushing a handcart. “And please make sure when you write to Macmillan that they are clear that my name and that I was the princesses’s governess appear on the front cover.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
August 1977
The Road to Balmoral Castle, Scotland
Only a madwoman would go out on an afternoon like this. A thick, heavy rain had set in as I washed the breakfast dishes and had continued all day. Summer in Scotland was unpredictable and brief—even in August—but I had promised myself I would go to the castle, and I never let myself off lightly from a thing promised. I pulled on my Wellington boots, took my mackintosh from the hall closet, and searched for George’s old golf umbrella.
It took twenty-three minutes to drive from Ballater station to the gates of the castle. I’d done it often enough in the old days to know the exact time of their arrival, which gave me six to be there on time. I opened the front door and almost closed it again.
The rain bounced up off the lane and seethed in a muddy puddle around an overwhelmed drain. “It’s only rain,” I said to my saturated front garden. “It’s bound to be over soon.” A cold north wind blew up the garden path. “Why am I doing this?” I hesitated on the doorstep. “Her mother will never forgive me . . .” But it was not Lilibet’s mother I wanted a reconciliation with. I stepped out into a wall of water and walked down the garden path into the narrow road that led to the castle. And, just like that, the downpour eased to a thin drizzle as I reached the castle gates. I took it as a good omen: I straightened my back and lifted my chin as I turned my head to look back the way I had come.
There they were! I could see headlights on the road coming toward me. I was so intent on watching their approach that I didn’t at first see Mr. Frazer come out of his cottage to open the gates. The gates to the castle were beautiful: tall, elegantly wrought in iron, they swung open without a sound.
The lead car slowed to take the turn. I put down my umbrella and raised my hand in greeting. A head turned, and the round, flat face of the queen mother gazed implacably at and through me before turning away. She pretended she hadn’t seen me, but I didn’t care. The queen mother had always been an uncompromising woman, never mind her celebrated charm. She was always ready with a snub for those who had displeased her.
“I didn’t come here to . . .” I bit down on hot words: there was no need to behave like a Glaswegian fishwife. The car splashed through a deep puddle, sending a wash of muddy water back over my feet. “You were always an unforgiving soul,” I said to my swamped boots and stepped farther out into the road.
My heart pounded with the belief that the second Daimler would slow to a halt and a well-known and much-loved voice would call out: “Crawfie? Is that you?” The driver would be out of his seat in a second, parade-ground straight as he opened the back door of the car for me. “Be quick and jump in,” Lilibet’s bell-like voice sounded in my head. “It’s far too wet to be out on a day like this!” A trickle of rain ran down my neck; it might have been sweat.
The car came into the turn, and I took another step forward. The driver saw me and slowed. I
was so close I could have reached out and touched the side window. A face looked up at me, the expression startled. For a brief second, our eyes met, and I saw recognition in hers, a half smile as a hand raised in acknowledgment. Lilibet leaned forward, the Daimler accelerated, and the tall outline of the duke turned to look out at me through the back window as the car swept on through the open gates.
“Lilibet?” I said to the empty road. She couldn’t have recognized me after all. Was I that changed?
I was left alone and wet through to the skin as the cars disappeared under the dripping trees that lined the drive to Balmoral. It was the first time I had seen her in years, except of course on the television at Christmas. I tried to remember our last conversation, but my memory, usually so reliable, refused to cooperate. I could see her standing in the drawing room at Nottingham Cottage quite clearly: her headscarf clasped in her hand, her eyes troubled as she struggled to understand what had happened, what her mother had told her that I had done. I had replayed what she had said so often it had become a meaningless string of words. I shook my head to clear it. “Not forgiven, then,” I said. “Not even after all these years.”
“Miss Crawford?” A touch on my arm. Mr. Frazer peered out at me from under his black umbrella. Tall, spare, slightly stooped, and lifting his right finger to his cap with the courteous concern that we Scots extended to those who were born here. “Surely it cannae be ye efter aw these years?”
“It is Mr. Frazer, isn’t it?”
“Th’ same. Will nae ye come in out ay th’ wet?” His face was concerned as he lifted his hand and pointed to his cottage. The rain picked up: I could barely see him.
“Thank you, but I must be getting back.” He nodded; his right finger touched his cap again in salute. He turned to go back to his cottage, to his tea and the warmth of his fireside. I imagined him shaking the rain off his jacket and patiently answering his inquisitive wife’s questions.
“Who was tha?” Mrs. Frazer was younger than her husband, and she probably took more of an interest in the world outside Balmoral than he did.
“Miss Crawford.” Like all Scots of his generation, he was a man of few words.
“Her that used to be their governess. An’ they dinna stop?”
“Nay, they did not.”
“Not tha’ I’m surprised. Not after wha’ she did.” And she would bustle off to get his tea.
All the resolve I had felt that had driven me out into this wet afternoon evaporated. I was tired through and through. My mother would have scolded me. “What are you thinking, Marion? It’s too wet to go for a walk. Come on, let’s make a start on that new jigsaw puzzle.” And I would have put away my raincoat, made a pot of tea as she banked up the fire, and we would have settled ourselves in the parlor for the afternoon.
But my mother had been dead these past twenty years, long before I came here to this lonely house on Balmoral Road with George. When I went home, it would be to an empty house. I stopped to gather my resolve to go forward through the rain. George had gone too. He had died in December. I had held his hand as he had faded away from me. The panic and pain I had felt still waited for me every morning that I woke alone in our bed.
“How old is she now? Elizabeth,” I asked the slick tarmac as I trudged back down the road. “Fifty? Fifty-one?” Lilibet, Elizabeth—both beautiful names—was still a lovely woman: skin as smooth as cream, marvelously clear blue eyes.
I opened the front door and dripped water all over the hall carpet. I was shivering. My head felt hot, and my fingers trembled as I pried open the buttons on my mackintosh.
The fire had gone out in the parlor. “Tea!” I said to the empty kitchen, anything to break the silence in the house. We Scots drank good, strong tea as an antidote to shock. I put on the kettle and rubbed my wet hair dry with a tea towel.
“I am cold,” I said in surprise as I backed through the parlor door from the kitchen with a tray laid with the Crown Derby tea service, a gift from Dowager Queen Mary, arranged on starched cutwork linen. I did all my own washing and ironing. No one in the royal household at Balmoral, Sandringham, Windsor, or even the palace would turn their nose up at my arrangements for teatime.
I coaxed the fire back to life and sat as close to it as I could get; it was comfort I needed more than warmth. My arms and legs felt as if they were made of wood, fingers so stiff I clumsily spilled milk into the saucer as I poured my tea. I hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast, hours ago. I took a bite of shortbread. It felt like chalk in my mouth, but the tea slid down my grateful throat in two long swallows.
Cup after cup I gulped down, until my nerves quietened and my hands were steady. I reached out and took down onto my lap a large, morocco leather–bound album. I carefully dusted away crumbs from my fingers and opened it.
The photographs, as I turned the pages, greeted me like the old friends they were. The rigid muscles in my neck and shoulders began to lose their tension. So silly of me to have gone out like that in this weather. They probably hadn’t even seen me standing there in that heavy downpour. So much better to enjoy the comfort of the fireside in the company of pleasant memories. Wasn’t that what old women did? Enjoy the mementos of happier times? I turned another page.
Princess Elizabeth, Lilibet, smiled up at me out of an old black-and-white photograph as if it were yesterday. Eighteen she had been then, wearing an evening gown that Bobo had made for her out of some silk they had found in a storage trunk. She was smiling: a smile that shone out of the old photograph with youthful joy. Christmas 1944. Windsor Castle, my even copperplate hand informed me.
“That was when he fell in love with her,” I said as I stroked the film of the photo with my thumb. “When he came for Christmas in the last year of the war. He couldn’t take his eyes off her—not for a moment.”
Author’s Note
Two issues were at the back of my mind when I made the decision to write In Royal Service to the Queen.
One was that of time and place: Britain from 1931 to 1950, which saw the end of the Great Depression, the start and the end of the Second World War, and the landslide victory of the Labour government in Britain, which was to bring about many laws and reforms for the benefit of the British working people. The other was the monarchy, which provided the backdrop to Marion Crawford’s story as the royal governess who was the first servant to the Windsor family to kiss and tell. As I plowed through biographies of the Windsor family and the British aristocracy, I felt at times as if they had been living two hundred years earlier—separated from the reality of a world that was striding forward toward the end of a century of intense change and hopeful progress.
The upheaval in 1936, when King Edward VIII decided to choose love over duty so that he might marry Wallis Simpson, must have added to the immense burden Queen Elizabeth endured as she sought to establish herself as King George VI’s queen consort and help rescue the monarchy from the shame of the abdication. Exiled to Paris, the ex-king left the monarchy and the British people tottering.
It was unfathomable in the Britain of that time that a king would abandon his country to marry a twice-divorced woman. And it was deeply disappointing that his younger brother Bertie, crowned King George VI, was hardly what kings were made of: small in stature, timid, with a speech impediment, the new king inspired pity rather than reverence—a man who would infinitely prefer to fade into the landscape and spend a quiet life with his family. But during the war years and particularly during the London Blitz, King George redeemed himself and displayed courage and endurance, remaining in London with his queen beside him during those dark and dangerous times.
They toured bomb sites together, offering encouragement and compassion to their fellow Londoners; observed strict rationing at the palace; and raised money for charity. Who would have guessed that this shy, stuttering man possessed such pluck and courage? And who would have known that his overdressed and apparently frivolous que
en possessed such strength of character and a natural talent for public relations? Queen Elizabeth worked extraordinarily hard to put the monarchy she revered back on the path to respectability after the abdication crisis, so it is understandable that she was horrified by Lilibet’s determination to marry a man she referred to as “the Hun,” even if his royal lineage was far more elevated than her own.
Into the life of the overprivileged ruling class came Marion Crawford: a Presbyterian Scots girl of twenty-two, educated enough to teach the then Duke of York’s two little girls: Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. Crawfie, as the girls called her, was woefully underpaid and extraordinarily impressionable, but she had a strong practical streak and was an enduring presence in the Windsor family through the worst of times. Her loyalty was unquestioning until fate in the shape of two American journalists intervened, and she became the first royal servant to lift the veil and reveal what life was like if you were born to privilege, wealth, and royal tradition.
When Crawfie retired on a meager pension after years of service, she accepted the Goulds’ offer to write articles for the American publication the Ladies’ Home Journal and followed the articles up with her book: The Little Princesses. The queen was so incensed at what she called Crawfie’s disloyalty for this devotedly loving account of the princesses’s childhood that Crawfie’s grace-and-favor cottage was taken from her, and she was ostracized by the family for the rest of her life.
