The Royal Governess

by Wendy Holden

  “Good afternoon, Miss Crawford,” said the duchess. “Or should I say ‘rebonjour,’ like the French?” The blue eyes twinkled.

  Marion sidled out from behind her chair and gave a nod-jerk intended to cover all curtseying eventualities. “Your Royal Highnesses . . .”

  The duchess waved a white hand. “Oh, sir and ma’am will do, and Lilibet, of course. We must think of a nickname for you, Miss Crawford. We four are great ones for nicknames.”

  We four. It sounded close-knit and loving. And they wanted to include her too, with a nickname. Marion felt a warm glow of pleasure, then remembered. She was going. Not staying.

  The princess rushed to them, all excitement. “Mummy! Papa! Miss Crawford thinks we should get a dog!”

  The duchess looked surprised, then smiled. “Well, we must think about it, my darling.”

  Ainslie appeared. Champagne was poured but Marion declined. At the first lunch with her new employers, however short-term, alcohol seemed unwise.

  “Oh, do have some, Miss Crawford!” urged the duchess, and Marion could only watch as Ainslie filled up the glass at her place. She took a sip; it fizzed startlingly on her tongue and had a rich, yeasty taste. She felt instantly relaxed. It was like magic.

  The duke now addressed her directly for the first time, speaking in his slow, careful way. “And what do you think of the Royal Lodge, Miss C-Crawford?”

  “It’s beautiful, sir. I very much enjoyed seeing the Little House.” Marion smiled at Elizabeth. The child stopped spooning in her soup immediately.

  “Miss Crawford was surprised that it had electric light, Papa. She said that most Welsh people don’t have that!”

  Marion’s face flamed so violently she felt her cheeks might turn to ashes.

  There was silence for a few seconds, and then the duke said, “As a matter of fact, Lilibet, Miss C-Crawford is quite right. There are t-terrible problems in Wales, and we must do what we can to help.”

  The duchess beamed. “My husband is very interested in the condition of the working man, Miss Crawford. He is in fact the first member of the royal family to visit a trade union!”

  “The Amalgamated Engineering Union, P-Peckham, to be precise,” put in her husband. “It has 1,800 branches and 320,000 m-members.”

  The duchess now spotted Marion’s notes. “And what is in that impressive folder, Miss Crawford?”

  Marion gratefully passed it over. “Some ideas for what Princess Elizabeth and I might do in the schoolroom.”

  The duchess looked at it as if it might bite her. “Miss Crawford. You mustn’t work Lilibet too hard. We want her to enjoy her education. To have a normal, happy time!”

  Marion felt bemused. Even Lady Rose had taken more interest than this. “We will be doing quite a lot of reading,” she said, rather desperately. “Do you have any recommendations?”

  She was relieved to see the duchess’s wide, porcelain complexion split into a beaming smile. “As a matter of fact, I do! The very greatest writer in the English language!”

  Marion waited. Brontë? Dickens? Austen? She planned to introduce them all, in small, carefully selected excerpts.

  “P. G. Wodehouse! There’s simply no one better to cheer you up when you’re a bit flat!”

  Marion was scrabbling for a reply when the duke interrupted. “I don’t quite understand.” He was holding up “Letter from Bobs.” “Seems to be c-correspondence from a d-dog.”

  As a laughing Princess Elizabeth clapped her hand over her mouth, Marion hastily explained about Enid Blyton.

  “Thank you, Ainslie,” the duchess murmured faintly as the butler topped up her champagne from his linen-swathed bottle.

  Lunch continued, with the duke and duchess talking among themselves. Marion decided to return to the subject of books with the princess and asked whether she had read Peter Pan—for her money, one of the finest children’s books ever written.

  “No, but my Grandpapa Scotland knows Mr. Barrie very well. He often comes to Glamis.”

  Thanks to Cook at Rosyth, Marion knew this to be a great medieval fortress amid the golden fields of Angus. It was here, as the youngest daughter of the Earl of Strathmore, that the duchess had been brought up. It was so grand that, instead of a common or garden ghost, it had its own monster, which dragged itself about the passageways, groaning and clanking its chains.

  Her glance now fell onto the princess’s plate. Her eyes widened. Elizabeth had carefully cut her meat into neat little rectangles and arranged her vegetables into separate areas.

  It was obviously a highly developed ritual. The princess put her knife and fork absolutely straight on either side of her plate while she counted five chews of mutton. She then picked up her fork and ate five peas before cutting a carrot into five equal pieces and eating that. Then she would return to the mutton again. Every time she took a sip, from a silver christening mug with an engraved flower on the front, she replaced it in exactly the same position, with the engraved flower facing her.

  Shortly afterward, the door of the room pushed open and a small chubby face appeared round it, surrounded by a halo of golden hair. A tall, gloomy presence behind pushed the child gently into the room, then disappeared.

  “Margaret!” exclaimed the duke, grinding out his cigarette into a small silver ashtray.

  “Wan’ eat sugar!” announced the littlest princess, toddling over on her short chubby legs and holding out a plump hand. As he was clearly expected to, the duke took a spoon and dug it into the bowl of sugar crystals. Margaret unhesitatingly crammed the lot into her mouth.

  Elizabeth, on the other hand, sorted out her pieces in size order, lining them up precisely with the exact same space between each before eating them carefully, one by one. For the first time Marion noticed how very bitten her nails were. They were red raw, gnawed down to the quick.

  The duchess dabbed at her scarlet lips with a napkin and announced, “The king and queen are coming this afternoon for tea.”

  “Are they coming to spy on Miss Crawford?” asked Elizabeth. Her face was bright with interest now.

  Now Marion felt apprehensive. The idea of being examined by George V was uncomfortable, but also hardly imaginable. He was a profile on a stamp, or a poster on the wall. Not a person. And he always looked so grumpy.

  She was told to wait in the garden, where she walked nervously about, full of a restless energy. The lawns led to a small wood in which several venerable oak trees stood. They were of course the national tree, and on a whim she started rehearsing her curtseys to the broad trunks.

  They were such a stupid gesture, she thought, and difficult to perform in the grass without toppling. Satirically, she bowed her head and mouthed a respectful “Your Majesty” before sinking into the deepest swoop she could manage.

  Twittering birds hopped about the branches. They seemed to enjoy this ironic display of courtesy. But now Marion’s ear picked up a sound that no bird could make. She turned to see, descending the broad steps toward the lawns, the instantly recognizable figures of the Defender of the Faith and his consort. Had they seen her curtseying to the oak trees? She watched as, like photographs come to life, Queen Mary and King George made their slow, deliberate way toward her.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Queen Mary was enormous, as tall as Marion herself. She came to a halt and stood absolutely erect, radiating a freezing dignity. She wasn’t a photograph come to life, as Marion had first thought. She was something much stranger. In pictures, where all was monochrome, her preference for the fashions of last century seemed less obvious. But in real life her lavender outfit looked utterly bizarre.

  Her neckline met her chin and her sleeves were massive leg of muttons, tightly buttoned at the gloved wrist. Her long skirts fell to ankles welded with feet at ten and two. Her bosom was vast and featureless, as if a pillow had been stuffed there. Her huge toque hat was thick with mauve fl
owers and looked like a planter on her head. But what astonished Marion most was that the curly gray front of her hair was false, attached with pins.

  The king, in gray, looked more like someone from the here and now—although there was something of a former age about the white gardenia in his buttonhole and the fact that his trousers were pressed at the sides, not the front. Compared to his vast wife, he looked small and vulnerable. His eyes were big, blue and watery, like his son’s, although he lacked the duke’s graveyard pallor. Above his beard, whose gray was mixed with yellow, possibly from tobacco, his cheeks were a brilliant, fiery red.

  The queen leaned forward on her rolled mauve silk umbrella and watched with a critical air Marion’s wobbling curtsey. “You are Miss Crawford?” Her accent was strongly German. “You are ze governoss?”

  “I am, Your Majesty.”

  The queen’s face was powdery and whiskery. Her eyes were small, but very bright.

  “I remember my olt governess so well,” she declared, puckering her lips in a wistful smile. “Madame Bricka.”

  The name rang a bell. The fat one with the blasted primers. Marion remembered.

  The queen continued, her powdery face quite transformed with memory. “I was such a curious pupil! So eager to learn! I used to ply my dear Bricka with questions about everything under the sun! And keep her searching too, ja, until she found the answer.”

  Marion could just imagine the put-upon governess rummaging through reference books in some vast and shadowy library.

  The king, who had been standing at his wife’s side emitting the occasional grunt, now bashed the lawn with his stick. “FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE, TEACH MARGARET AND LILIBET TO WRITE A DECENT HAND, THAT’S ALL I ASK YOU,” he boomed, making Marion start violently. She had been wrong to think him vulnerable. He was terrifying. His voice was shattering, deafening, echoing round the garden like the aftermath of an explosion. He had been in the Navy, she remembered.

  “NOT ONE OF MY CHILDREN CAN WRITE PROPERLY!” the monarch roared next. He was clearly referring to the endless handwriting exercises beloved of Victorian schools, where small hands had been forced to learn perfect, painstaking copperplate. Teachers these days thought there were better ways of using classroom time. Pupils were encouraged not to labor over script or passively recite times tables but to find out things for themselves. They were taken out of the classroom to use the resources of nature. They climbed hills so that contours could be picked out and visited parks so plants and pond life could be studied.

  Marion wondered whether it was worth saying any of this, or whether the words would come out if she tried.

  “AND YOU’LL TEACH POETRY?” the king added suddenly. “ALWAYS LIKED THAT ONE ABOUT THE BLEAK MIDWINTER. VERY GOOD, THAT!”

  “A potent simile,” Marion politely agreed.

  The royal ear turned toward her. “DAMN SILLY? YOU THINK SO?”

  Actually, she did think so. Not Christina Rossetti, but certainly the outmoded educational straitjacket the king seemed to favor. Thank goodness he lived a safe distance away at Buckingham Palace and was unlikely to interfere in her program. As the king and queen abruptly turned their backs and stomped away, the duke and duchess now appeared on the terrace. It was like a play, Marion thought. One group of actors left, another came on.

  The Yorks seemed to be playing different parts now. They had changed their clothes. The duke wore a filthy blue boiler suit and the duchess rubber boots and an old tweed coat tied with string. They looked like a couple of tramps.

  Marion waited to be asked how the interview had gone, but the duchess had other priorities. “I do hope you’ve got green fingers!” she called merrily.

  As it dawned on her that she was expected to garden, Marion felt a mixture of indignation and despair. She hadn’t come to London to grub about in flower beds. She had come to see the high life, the galleries, the cultural opportunities.

  An hour later, her one good suit had been badly pulled about by brambles, as had her stockings. The latter were ruined, effectively, and everything stank of smoke from the duke’s ever-larger pyre of burning rubbish. Marion remembered, crossly, the vast wardrobes in the duchess’s bedroom, and the tiny cupboard in her own.

  “Eau de Bonfire!” cried the duchess, stomping past. “There’s no scent quite like it!”

  Especially not if you can’t get rid of it, Marion thought, staring at her hands in despair. She had broken all her nails in the effort to pull up dandelions, some of whose roots had parsnip-like proportions. Her initial impression that the Yorks were odd had become the conviction that they were insane. Delusional, at the very least. She thought of the newspaper reports she had read only that morning, which seemed like years ago. People all over the country were jobless and starving, and here was the king’s son, with his house full of footmen, parading around in Wellingtons like a latter-day male Marie Antoinette. Ridiculous.

  There was a soft laugh from behind her; the duchess again. “Robert Louis Stevenson once said that there was nothing so interesting as weeding!”

  Robert Louis Stevenson was wrong, Marion thought darkly. Or, more likely, joking. She sat back on the muddied heels of what had been well-polished court shoes and observed her colleagues, none of whom looked thrilled to be made to garden either.

  Ainslie the butler was piloting a wheelbarrow with all the dignity he could muster, and the chauffeur was raking leaves, his chipper manner considerably subdued. Not far from him the duke could be seen sawing like a man possessed. On the ground surrounding him lay huge branches he had already lopped off. Scattered about were his tools, an array of implements so sharp you could cut yourself looking at them. She thought of Marie Antoinette again. These people almost deserved an angry mob descending on them.

  “Play ball, Miss Crawford?”

  Princess Elizabeth was behind her, holding a red ball expectantly. Unlike her parents in their tramp garb, she still wore the fussy outfit from earlier. It now looked even fussier; a large white ribbon had been added, presumably in honor of her grandparents. Had she no outdoor clothes? Marion wondered. But then she remembered that Elizabeth had never climbed a tree, and was expected to stay on the paths and not get dirty. That was ridiculous too, and sad. Children needed to act like children, not prissy miniature grown-ups.

  She struggled up, wiping her hands on her skirt. It made little difference now, it was so muddy.

  The red sphere flew back and forth between them. The princess kept dropping it. “Butterfingers!” Marion teased.

  Elizabeth carefully inspected her hands, with their bitten nails. “There is no butter on my fingers, Miss Crawford.”

  Marion laughed. “No, I mean you’re not very good at catching.”

  They began to throw the ball again, but with hardly more success. Picking it up once more, Marion saw that Elizabeth was fixing her with a thoughtful blue stare.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m trying to think of a nickname for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Everyone has nicknames in our family.”

  “Can’t we stick to Miss Crawford?”

  The golden curls shook in disapproval. “You have to have a nickname. Alah is Alah, and my sister is called Bud because she’s too little to be a proper rose, really. What’s your Christian name?”

  Marion told her.

  “I suppose I could call you that,” Elizabeth mused. “I call Grandmama’s ladies-in-waiting Cynthia and Helen.”

  Marion felt strongly that she did not want to be grouped with whatever fearsome old bats attended Queen Mary. But nicknames seemed a waste of time to her. When the month was up, she would be gone.

  The princess dropped yet another ball. “Oh, Crawfie!” she wailed in despair. Then the little face brightened. “Crawfie! That’s what I’ll call you! Crawfie!”

  The day ended as it had begun, with a gigantic rumpus. F
irst there were violent card games in the sitting room, which wound both girls, especially baby Margaret, to a pitch of crazed hysteria just at the time they should be calming down for bed. Then came the high jinks in the bathroom. From her bedroom on the floor below, Marion, writing to her mother, could hear the Yorks and their daughters splashing and shrieking.

  My bedroom is small, and has a single bed with a white counterpane. The floor is lino, but there’s a rug, and a little wardrobe, which I opened to find, to my absolute amazement, that all my things had been hung up, and all my underwear put in the drawers! Given the state of some of it, I’d have rather done that myself, but apparently someone unpacking your bag is quite normal when you stay with royalty.

  I’ve got a little armchair and a fireplace with a three-barred electric fire. There’s a little desk at the back where I’m writing to you now. As there won’t be many chances for me to use this special Royal Lodge notepaper, I’m making the most of it.

  She paused and noticed that the yelling had stopped. Through the half-open door she saw the parents merrily go by, arm in arm. A soaked succession of housemaids followed, carrying sopping towels. Marion wondered how they dried their clothes and shoes, or whether, given they were on duty, they actually could.

  She tried to catch their eye as they passed, but none of them looked at her, let alone returned her smile. They did not seem to want her sympathy; still less her friendship. She had encountered this at Rosyth too. With the chatty exception of Cook, the others belowstairs seemed to shun her.

  She decided not to worry about it. She would be gone soon; what did it matter? And in the meantime, bathrooms, so much work for housemaids, were for her a blessing. She, who had never had one of her own, now had a private one across the landing.

  My very own little white-tiled bathroom has electric light and running hot water and—you’ll never guess, Mother, you’ll never, ever guess—my very own lavatory!!! No more going out in all weathers to shiver with the spiders and pull newspaper strips off a nail! Well, not for four weeks anyway!