The Royal Governess

by Wendy Holden

“Her daughters Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret?”

  “The Princess Margaret Rose, yes,” corrected Lady Rose. “My sister thinks you would be perfect.” The diamonds in her ears glittered in the sunlight coming through the windows. “What do you say, Miss Crawford?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Marion took a deep, stiffening breath and tried to gather her whirling thoughts. There was no question, obviously. She had other plans, entirely different ones. “I’m very honored to be asked—”

  “Obviously!”

  “—but I’ll have to turn the duchess’s offer down.”

  “What?” All color drained from Lady Rose’s face. “Turn it . . . down?” Her tone was one of absolute disbelief.

  “I have other commitments,” Marion said, steadily. “My college course. After which I intend to work with the poor.”

  It was Lady Rose’s turn to look amazed. “The . . . ?” The word wouldn’t come out. She tried again. “The . . . ?” Her eyes bulged and she swallowed.

  “In the slums,” Marion added, for good measure.

  A silence followed, interrupted with occasional snaps from the fire. Lady Rose stared into it. Then she turned her head to Marion. Her expression was calm again, even if her eyes held traces of shock.

  “Miss Crawford. You clearly feel you have a vocation, but what higher vocation could there be than serving your king and his family? What greater honor or more important task than to be shaping the young minds of the next generation of imperial rulers?”

  Marion stared at her. This was an unexpectedly skillful move. She had played the commitment card, but Lady Rose had played it back, acing it with flattery. Her words also held echoes of Miss Golspie. You should teach the wealthy. But she had spent the summer doing that. She had done her duty.

  “You would enjoy living in London,” Lady Rose added, moving to secure her advantage. “A pretty young girl like you would have a wonderful time there.”

  Marion suppressed a pang of longing. The fact that Valentine came from the capital made her wish she knew it better. But there would be time to travel later, in the vague future. For now, her plans did not include working with royalty. Her vocation was with society’s exact opposite extreme.

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” she said, firmly.

  Lady Rose stood up. The violet eyes were resigned. “Very well, Miss Crawford. I will let my sister know.”

  * * *

  • • •

  AS SHE WALKED back through the trees, Marion reran the amazing conversation through her mind. Had she done the right thing? From her own point of view, definitely yes. As for Lady Rose and the Yorks, the inconvenience of her refusal would surely be tempered by the knowledge that every other governess on the planet would jump at the chance.

  Her mother, on the other hand, would be devastated. A cold dread slithered through Marion’s stomach at the thought.

  Mrs. Crawford’s interest in the royal family had recently become a mania. She had hung portraits of them in the sitting room and filled several scrapbooks—large, homemade brown-paper affairs held together with string—with pictures cut from newspapers. The little princesses had a scrapbook all to themselves.

  No, she could not go home yet. Her mother would sense her guilt and cross-examine her with a barrister’s ruthlessness. She needed time to compose herself.

  On the edge of the woods Marion hesitated. The weather was hot and close, with a thunderous weight to the air. Between the rasping, restless leaves, the light was a dirty yellow.

  She would, she decided, go and see Valentine. He was not expecting her, but it would be a surprise. She would not tell him about the Yorks; not yet, anyway. There was no need: lacking her mother’s perception, he was unlikely to suspect anything, while volunteering the information would only invite his triumphal glee.

  By the time she reached the city, great black towers of cloud had gathered in the sky. All hell was clearly about to break loose. She hurried down Princes Street. She needed to get inside with all speed. The same thought had obviously occurred to everyone else. People were casting doubtful looks upward before redoubling their pace.

  The rain fell faster and faster. In no time at all it was a heavy gray curtain, drumming on the pavements and gurgling down the gutters. Marion’s hat, soaked through, hung over her face, irredeemably ruined, with soggy flowers hanging off the end. Her hair stuck to her neck and her skirts clung to her legs. The water in her shoes bubbled and squelched and her heels skidded on the slippery stones.

  Few other people were in the streets now. The rain had made it so dark that the few passing vehicles had switched on their headlights. They shone like yellow eyes through the hissing rain. Above, the thunder rolled and crashed.

  Eventually, the university came into view, its outlines gray and vague in the downpour. Still holding on to her ruined hat, Marion ran across the wet grass, feet squelching, heels sinking in the mud. The great steps of the central building poured like a waterfall.

  She ran down the passage and up the wooden stairs. His door loomed before her. She twisted the knob and threw it open.

  Her merry salutation died in her throat. Two people lay on the bed amid the familiar twisted sheets. One was Valentine, eyes closed in ecstasy as he ground his body between a pair of white thighs.

  She stared, frozen to the spot. But something moved on her face, something warm. A hot tear was slowly threading down her cheek.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was like falling into a void. Like drowning, over and over again. Then, after the black despair, came a fiery ache in her heart, which hurt when she moved. It was, she realized, anger. It was there last thing at night, when finally, briefly, she went to sleep, and back in the morning when, heavy-eyed, she woke up.

  The anger was largely directed at herself. She was a fool. And Valentine was a fraud. He cared nothing for the masses, only himself. She never wanted to see him again. Let him rot along with all the other entitled, pretentious pseudo-socialists. So much for tearing down the citadels of the bourgeoisie. What he really wanted to do was tear off their knickers.

  Her mother, to whom an edited version of events had been given, did not help. “I told you so,” Mrs. Crawford said, rubbing great handfuls of salt in Marion’s wounds. “I never trusted him.”

  Her indignation was given added vehemence by the discovery of the job her daughter had turned down. She blamed Valentine for this too, and there was no reason not to let her.

  Marion buried herself in her books, preparing for the new term. But it was hard to concentrate. Her mother’s criticisms and Valentine’s betrayal made Edinburgh a difficult place to live. Out in the city, every street reminded her of her shame and humiliation, while home, formerly a haven, was full of frozen silences and martyrish sighs. The portraits of the royal family did not help matters. They looked down from the walls with blue eyes full of rebuke. Her shattered spirits meant that visiting Annie, and Grassmarket, was out of the question. She simply did not have the strength.

  The urge to escape, temporarily at least, grew within her. In her desperation, she was even thinking about Peter; perhaps his offer of marriage was still open. But, quite apart from the romantic aspects, was a boarding school in the Highlands really the answer?

  The job with the Yorks, so easily refused, now seemed to have had distinct possibilities. She could have gone to London, at least for a while. And it would have been exactly the sort of job Miss Golspie had recommended at the beginning of the summer. You should teach the wealthy. Lady Rose had reiterated it. What greater honor or more important task than to be shaping the young minds of the next generation of imperial rulers?

  A missed opportunity, then. But it was too late now. Someone else would have been appointed. As her mother never tired of saying, the whole world would want to look after the famous little princesses.

  Marion was mulling miserably, o
nce again, on these gloomy reflections when, to her utter amazement, Valentine appeared one afternoon, letting himself into their house as if nothing had happened. He had, through deliberate management or more likely good luck, chosen a time when her mother was out.

  She was sitting with her teaching manuals at the little foldout table. The sitting room was too small to have one up all the time. When Valentine flopped down in Mrs. Crawford’s fireside armchair and lit a cigarette, she was too surprised to stop him. He regarded her with a wide, earnest gaze. “I don’t want to lose you,” he said.

  The wild urge to laugh gripped her, mixed with a longing to hit him with a vase. “It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?” she said, as calmly as she could. “I caught you with someone else.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t affect anything.”

  She blinked, disbelieving. “Doesn’t affect anything?”

  “It’s possible to love two people at the same time.”

  “What!”

  “I call it ‘rethinking conventional relationships.’” His smile was bright and eager. “A new way of loving, for the modern age.”

  She felt her mouth fall open.

  “I can love both of you,” he went on, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “Why not?”

  Marion was lost for words. Someone else, however, was anything but.

  “Get out!” It was her mother who had spoken. Neither of them had heard her come in. Mrs. Crawford, radiating fury in the doorway, appeared like some vengeful creature from legend. She glared at Valentine with glittering eyes. “You’ve done enough damage,” she snarled.

  Valentine did not need telling twice. He fled, taking his new ways of loving with him.

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish!” Mrs. Crawford yelled after him, not caring, for once, what the neighbors might say. The door slammed. A picture slid sideways on the wall. It was one of the new ones, of the queen.

  “This was on the mat. Must just have arrived in the post.” Her mother pushed something into her hand. “Looks important. Apart from the mud, that is. Your friend managed to stomp all over it as he came.”

  “He’s not my friend.” She took the envelope crossly. As well as the advertised black boot-print, it bore an embossed coronet. Marion opened it and pulled out two thick, smooth pages covered in large, looping handwriting. The address was in embossed capitals: “The Royal Lodge, Windsor Great Park.”

  She read it, and her sense of unreality deepened. “It’s from the Duchess of York,” she said slowly.

  Mrs. Crawford’s fury became violent excitement. “What does she want? What does it say?”

  Why not come to us for a month, and see how you like us, and we like you? the duchess had written.

  She was being given a second chance after all.

  PART TWO

  145 Piccadilly

  CHAPTER NINE

  Marion stared out the window as the train thundered south through the countryside. Dark shaggy hedges and heavy green trees bordered the rolling gold meadows of late summer. The trackside was gay with yellow ragwort and purple berberis, overlaid with the rags of engine steam. Marion wondered if she would know when they crossed the border. Would she feel a tug within? A sign to the true-bred Scotswoman that she had left her native land and was in alien territory, the country of the English?

  Above, on the rack, sat her suitcase. It contained mostly old clothes. Her pale blue coat was worn as well. New things had been beyond their budget; the royal family were not paying much either. Her mother had wanted to buy patterns for ball gowns. “I’ll be working, Mother,” Marion had teased her. “Not dancing. And for only four weeks, it’s not worth making anything new. Besides, if they wanted me in smart clothes they should have paid me smart money.”

  They were in fact paying even less than Lady Rose had, as Marion was living in. She would have a room in the Yorks’ weekend home—Royal Lodge at Windsor—and in their house in Piccadilly during the week.

  “Two houses!” she had said to her mother.

  “They’re royalty,” said Mrs. Crawford, as if this explained it.

  “They’re royalty,” Miss Golspie had agreed, when Marion went to see her. The principal’s eyes gleamed over her colored reading glasses.

  “So you don’t mind if I delay returning to Moray House?” Marion had almost been hoping that she would. Now that arrangements were well underway, she was wondering if she was doing the right thing after all.

  Beneath the portrait of the founder of Girton College, the principal linked her fingers and rested her chin on them. “Not at all. On the contrary, I regard it as secondment. An extension of your duty to bring everyday life to those whose lives are, shall we say, a little remote from it.” Miss Golspie smiled.

  Marion replied with an uncertain nod. “Remote” was not exactly the word. As the most cursory examination of Mrs. Crawford’s scrapbooks showed, the distance between Princess Elizabeth and ordinary life was that between Earth and a particularly remote planet. She did not even look like a little girl, but like a gold-and-white doll, neatly brushed, in a fussy ruffled frock.

  Her full name was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary. She was born in London in April 1926, the third in line to the throne, and her arrival was greeted by a twenty-one-gun salute from the Tower of London and congratulatory telegrams from nine reigning kings, a reigning queen and an emperor. At the age of one, she had received three tons of toys from the people of the Antipodes. The people of France, not to be outdone, later gave her two dolls whose 150 accessories included pairs of gloves, jewel cases, beaded bags, fans, sunshades, tortoiseshell hairbrushes and their own monogrammed writing paper. All over the Empire, her image was on flags, stamps and toffee tins. There was a figure of her in Madame Tussaud’s, children’s hospital wards bore her name and a flag had recently risen above Princess Elizabeth Land in northern Canada. None of this seemed to encourage a well-balanced view of either herself or anyone else.

  “But what can I do with her?” Marion asked Miss Golspie in panic. “How can I show someone like that what is normal?”

  The principal waved a hand with a large blue Bakelite ring. A row of wooden bracelets rattled. “Use your imagination, my dear!”

  “But.” Marion blinked at her.

  “Take her out! London is one big outdoor classroom! Take her on the bus. Into the parks! To Woolworths!”

  “Woolworths?”

  Miss Golspie’s eyes gleamed impishly. “And why not? You can be sure she has never been there. It would be a royal first!”

  Marion considered. Once the surprise and panic had faded, she could see what was meant. A very different curriculum; a set of lessons that no royal child had ever received before.

  * * *

  • • •

  EVEN WITH THESE intentions, saying goodbye to Annie was difficult. In the weeks since she had last visited, Grassmarket seemed, if it were possible, to have got even more decrepit.

  “Sit doon, Miss Crawford, do,” said Annie’s mother, attempting a wincing smile in which her lack of teeth was sadly evident. The flannel was still tied around her head. Perching on the one bed, which doubled as a sofa, Marion glanced round the room for Mrs. McGinty’s tailor’s dummy. Usually it stood by the window, to catch what dim light struggled into the courtyard. The family had sold it, she now discovered.

  “Ma’s eyes are too bad noo,” Annie explained sadly. “She canna do the fancy sewing nae more. So she lost her situation.”

  Marion felt anguished for them. How would they manage?

  “I can do rough sewing.” Annie’s mother gave a brave smile. “Mending dresses for neighbors.”

  “And I’ve been charring,” her daughter added proudly. “Takin’ in washing. Standing at the alley end with mae dolly tub.”

  A child of six, charring and doing laundry! As a great wave of guilt and doubt crashed through her, Marion bat
tled to control herself. She must remember what Miss Golspie had said. She was tackling all this from the other end.

  She had decided not to say where she was going. The contrast was too cruel; the explanation too complicated. And the parting would, anyway, only be temporary. “I won’t be away long,” she had promised.

  Annie had leaned close. The smell of her unwashed little body nipped Marion’s nostrils. “Miss Crawford, can I chum ye?”

  “Come with you,” in Edinburgh dialect. Marion had placed her clean forehead against the child’s dirty hair. “Oh, Annie,” she said softly. “How I wish you could.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE TRAIN RATTLED down the country, stopping and starting, always in the worst areas of every town. Durham. York. Leeds. Doncaster. The factory chimneys and rows of blackened terraces all looked the same. So many poor people, Marion thought. And here she was, off to serve the richest. It was crazy, really.

  But she gritted her teeth, remembered Miss Golspie and channeled her doubts into planning her alternative curriculum. It would include a bus ride and shopping at Woolworths, as Miss Golspie had suggested. And, perhaps, to give some insight into how the nation was run and protected, they would visit Parliament—but strictly the public gallery—and a police station. The London docks, for trade. The Bank of England, so Elizabeth might learn about how it worked, that substance of which her family had so much and most people so little.

  Having made her notes, Marion reached for the Teacher’s World she had bought at the station. It was her favorite of the professional magazines because of the columnist Enid Blyton. While its purpose was to interest children in animals, her weekly “Letter from Bobs,” supposedly written by her pet fox terrier, was one of Marion’s guilty pleasures. Bobs this week had been chasing the postman and causing ructions in Enid’s flower beds. It made Marion smile in spite of herself. Blyton was a talented writer. She would be wonderful at children’s books.