by Wendy Holden
A blush swept her cheeks. Had she sounded overexcited?
He raised an eyebrow and gave a hint of a smile. “How are you finding the palace, Miss Crawford?”
She had rallied now. She eyed him confidently. “Shall I be honest, Mr. Lascelles? My room is falling to pieces and there was a mouse in my bathroom this morning.”
An equerry a few places away leaned forward. “Just the one?” he called cheerfully. “I’ve had three in mine.”
Laughter ran round the table. Lascelles dabbed his mouth with his napkin. “The refurbishment program is somewhat behind schedule, certainly.”
This provoked more laughter, followed by the murmur of general conversation. Marion picked up her fork and prepared to address her smoked salmon. Her gloomy mood of earlier had lifted; she felt almost skittish. Was it Lascelles? She wanted his attention, she realized. “Actually,” she murmured, leaning close to him, “the mouse is not my only complaint. The last time we met you misinformed me.”
Beneath the craggy brows, the dark eyes narrowed. “Indeed, Miss Crawford? About what?”
The corner of her mouth tugged sideways. “You said, Mr. Lascelles, that the king had many years in him yet, and that the Prince of Wales would not marry Mrs. Simpson.”
Lascelles stared at her. She met his gaze. He was the first to drop his, and gave a rueful smile. “You are quite right, Miss Crawford. That was my information in the first instance, and my assumption in the second. But as you say, I was wrong.”
Marion guessed there were few people the lofty Lascelles ever admitted that to. She felt triumphant, and rather excited.
* * *
• • •
“I WISH I could see Papa,” Margaret started to say.
“You can’t. He’s busy kinging,” her sister would reply. It was true that the king was almost constantly occupied. He was learning the craft of monarchy on the job and from the bottom up. There was no spending the afternoon gardening anymore, or games of cards before bed. Touchingly, he had placed the girls’ rocking horses outside his study, so he could hear the thump of them riding and feel them nearby.
“He spends more time with Mr. Lascelles than with us,” Margaret complained. “I don’t like Mr. Lascelles. Do you?” She looked hard and suddenly at Marion, who, to her annoyance, felt her cheeks begin to burn.
“Ha!” crowed the youngest princess, triumphantly. “Crawfie is in love with Mr. Lascelles!”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Marion spluttered, furious. But the truth was, she liked Lascelles very much. He was an amusing and erudite conversationalist, albeit slightly pompous at times. She looked forward to seeing him at lunch and was disappointed if, out with the king on an engagement, he did not appear.
He never came into the schoolroom. So it was a surprise, one afternoon, to look up and see his tall, dark and evidently annoyed form in the doorway. She took a deep breath to still the sudden flutter in her chest. “Mr. Lascelles!”
His hooded eyes rolled suspiciously round the room. The girls, at their desks, looked up at their unexpected visitor. Margaret looked particularly angelic.
“I’m being constantly summoned to see His Majesty,” Lascelles ground out from under his mustache.
A high voice piped up. “But isn’t that your job, Mr. Lascelles?” It was Margaret who had spoken.
Lascelles gave her a flinty look. “Not necessarily. Especially when His Majesty is not expecting me.” He glanced at Marion. “According to the palace switchboard, the summonses were coming from the schoolroom telephone.”
The telephone was newly installed. Margaret especially loved playing on it. Marion stared at her, eyebrow raised. The youngest princess looked innocently back, batting her long black lashes.
Lascelles cast a final glance at Margaret, in which warning and suspicion seemed entwined. As he left, he caught Marion’s eye too. The wry friendliness of the lunch table was gone. His expression was all icy disdain. It seemed to convey his contempt not only for her poor control of her pupils but for herself as well. A kind of despair filled her, along with fury at Margaret, who had obviously done this on purpose, to embarrass her.
The door hadn’t quite closed before the royal culprit collapsed loudly into raucous giggles.
“Margaret!” thundered Marion.
The violet eyes blinked innocently. “It was Cousin Halifax!”
“Oh, Crawfie!” Lilibet looked at Marion in despair. “What are we going to do about her?”
Never mind that, Marion thought. What was she going to do about Alan Lascelles? He would make a dangerous enemy.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
It was the spring of 1936. As the blossoms appeared on the trees, Hitler’s troops reappeared in the Rhineland, goose-stepping through Essen, Dusseldorf and Cologne in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles. A furious France demanded action. But in the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden promised to help France only if it was attacked; Britain would otherwise pursue a policy of negotiation. Marion, following all these events, uneasily remembered the Rotherhithe Street assessment of Hitler: that he was unappeasable.
This view was not the majority one. Many in the Household Dining Room felt that anything was better than another war. There was even some sympathy for the German position. “Can’t say I blame Jerry really,” said one equerry. “He took a licking in the last show, after all.”
The coronation was now a year away. This was to give the Earl Marshal of England, the Duke of Norfolk, sufficient time to organize it, Marion gathered. She saw him occasionally, coming for meetings with her employers. For someone entrusted with such a vast feat of coordination, he looked to her surprisingly badly put together himself; almost scruffy, in fact.
The ceremony was to be on May 12, 1937, which had been set for Edward VIII. “Same date, different king,” said the Marquess of Cholmondley, whose magnificent name, Marion learned with amazement, was pronounced “Chumley.” As Lord Chamberlain, he was assisting the Earl Marshal with his duties, and Marion knew from her studies with the girls that his role in former times had been to bring the monarch his shirt on coronation morning, and put on his spurs. For rendering these services he had been allowed to keep the king’s night attire. “But surely not now,” Lilibet said. “Papa wears ordinary flannel pajamas. Whoever would want those?”
The new king, try as he might to hide it, was obviously dreading the crowning ceremony. The queen was just as obviously enjoying her fittings for her gown and train. She was often found pacing the palace corridors with a sheet pinned to her shoulders and a crown on her head. “To get used to the weight, you see, darlings,” she trilled to her awed daughters.
As the weather improved, Marion returned to the practice of outdoor lessons. Their favorite place in the palace gardens was not by the pristine borders, nor on the spotless terraces, but on the little hill by the wall alongside the road which offered a view over the street.
“I’d like to have a coat like that!” exclaimed Margaret, who loved commenting on clothes worn by passing children. She was developing a marked interest in fashion.
“Look, look! There’s Mummy!” Lilibet pointed at a polished black car sailing past, silver fittings gleaming, a familiar profile in the rear window.
“We hardly see her anymore.” Margaret sighed. The queen’s workload had quadrupled since coming to the palace. Every day there were ribbons to be cut and foundation stones to be laid.
Before a gloomy silence could take hold, Marion beamed at them both. “Let’s play If.”
“Ooh, yes!” Margaret, gloom forgotten, leaped up and began to prance about, chanting, “If I could be anything I liked, do you know what I would be?”
Marion, grinning, gave the customary reply. “A good girl!”
“I would be . . .” And Margaret paused, thought and then let forth a stream of fantastic professions. “Pirate! Film star! Dancer! Aviato
r!” She had been much impressed by the exploits of lady flyers such as Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart, as reported in The Children’s Newspaper.
Marion turned to Lilibet. “And you?”
The elder princess tended to take this game much more seriously and tried to connect it to the real world outside the palace walls. “A butcher’s boy,” she said, as one now rolled past on a bicycle, basket full of meat.
Margaret was appalled. “A butcher’s boy! But you’d be poor!”
“But I’d have a bicycle,” Lilibet pointed out. “And that would be useful. I could cycle along the corridors with our dinner. That way it wouldn’t be cold when it reaches our dining room.” It wasn’t just the staff that the palace’s size inconvenienced. The distance between the kitchen and the royal table was immense.
Marion rose to her feet. “Time to get back to our lessons.”
But someone dressed in black was now crossing the green lawn toward them. The stout figure marched up and took Margaret’s hand. “You’re wanted by Mr. Birley,” Alah announced.
Marion groaned. Mr. Birley was one of the artists, currently working on a portrait of the new royal family. He was very charming, but also very inconvenient.
Margaret was jumping up and down excitedly. She loved to be admired and looked at, so getting dressed up and having her picture painted was a wonderful new game to her.
Lilibet was less keen, but submitted to it obediently, as she did to everything. “Rather you than me,” she muttered, wandering off toward the lake.
A huge silver mirror in the midst of all the green, the lake was lined with graceful, full-skirted weeping willows. In the middle was an island, on which ducks built their nests. Lilibet was intensely interested in them, as she was in all animals.
Alah, who had interrupted, was complaining about the many interruptions. “They say it’ll all calm down after the coronation.” She was complaining now about Norman Hartnell, who was making the girls’ outfits for the ceremony. “A man like that in the palace!”
“Like what?” challenged Marion, even though Norman himself made a joke of Alah’s homophobia. He exaggerated his movements even more than usual when she was about.
He cared little for what she thought anyway. His star was rising. He was also making gowns for the queen’s maids of honor. “Quite the education,” he said. “I’ve had to find sarcenet and miniver. And learn how to make a tunicle, would you believe.”
“A what?”
“Type of tunic, dearie.” His eyes twinkled. “They’re going to be the next big thing. We’ll all be wearing one soon.”
The only fly in the Hartnell ointment was that the ultimate honor, that of making Her Majesty’s coronation gown, had gone to the same Madame Handley-Seymour who had, in Norman’s phrase, “committed” the queen’s wedding dress in 1923.
As Alah, still grumbling, went back inside, Marion hurried to the lake. Lilibet needed to be herded back to her studies.
The bank looked empty, no white-socked child in a kilt at the water’s edge staring at the ducks. Perhaps Lilibet, dutiful to a fault, had gone back to the classroom by herself.
Something, though, was in the water. Something that was surging and splashing. “Crawfie! I wanted to see the duck nests and I fell in!”
Marion groaned. Lilibet had taken her lifesaving certificate at the Bath Club. Her being in the water was safe enough. But Alah would have plenty to say about this. She hurried to the lake edge.
Something dark flashed past her, followed by a violent splash. Someone else had got there first.
Alan Lascelles looked completely different when he was soaked in water and covered in weeds.
“But I can swim!” the soaking-wet Lilibet was telling him indignantly. “I did my lifesaving certificate!”
“She did,” Marion confirmed. Part of her was horrified, part trying not to laugh. The horrified part imagined that, after the telephone incident, this would be the final straw. The other part noted that the aristocratic face now wore a sheepish expression, as well as a good deal of green slime.
“I saw her from my room,” the private secretary gasped. “I didn’t realize anyone else was there.”
She saw, suddenly, how his shoulders looked broad and lean in the clinging wet shirt, and when, suddenly, he took it off, screwing it up to squeeze out the water and wipe his face, how his chest was slim, but muscled. He was rubbing himself down, his wet flesh gleaming in the sunshine. Her eyes widened. Her heart rate quickened.
She forced herself to concentrate on the matter at hand. Lilibet was wet and Alah would no doubt go straight to the queen. “I’ve got to get her back inside before . . .” She stopped, reluctant to reveal the situation. He would hardly be sympathetic. Especially if he was still smarting about the telephone incident.
“Before that old dragon of a nanny finds out?” The water had soaked his hair to a liquid black. The ruler-straight side-parting had gone; it was rumpled and wild and made him look about fifteen.
“Something like that.”
“We can put her in my coat.” Lascelles indicated the jacket he had ripped off before diving into the water. “We’ll smuggle her in through my rooms. They lead straight into the garden. She can use my bath, and you can fetch her some dry things. The dragon would be none the wiser.”
She stared. Why was he being so helpful? He had no reason to; the opposite, if anything. Perhaps he had forgotten about the telephone; it was some weeks ago now, after all. “Thank you,” she said, grateful. Charmed.
Lascelles’ quarters were much more luxurious than her own. As Lilibet took a hot bath, Marion looked about her. There were carpets, sofas, silver cigarette boxes, polished wood, mirrors. Through an open door, she saw the end of a double bed, draped in blue. Something inside her turned over.
“You have good rooms, Mr. Lascelles.”
“Call me Tommy; everyone else does.” He was rubbing his head with a towel.
“And I’m Marion.”
On the marble mantelpiece was an imperious-looking blonde in a frame. “My wife,” he said. “Her father is the viceroy of India.”
She was disconcerted to feel a sudden, hot stab of jealousy. An awareness swelled within her grass-stained skirt, and she felt dismayed to think that her lipstick, applied this morning, no doubt had now worn away.
He was watching her, she saw. “What’s her name?” she asked boldly, aiming to sound unimpressed even as the heat rose up her neck.
“Joan.” He was standing close. His silk paisley dressing gown was loosely belted and hung off his lean frame. The scent of his bare skin rose in her nostrils. He was naked beneath the robe, she thought.
“She lives in the country.” His breath was warm on her ear.
Her nervous gaze now met his. The deep-set dark eyes seemed full of a warm, suggestive intent and quite suddenly she felt a great thrum of desire. It shot to her every nerve ending and set her head spinning. She tore her gaze away and looked hard out of the window, across the lawns, trying to regain control.
What was wrong with her? She had lost her head. An affair, especially with a married man, especially with this married man, was out of the question. Why was she even thinking about such a thing? “You have a fine view,” she said, not seeing it at all.
He seemed to step back at that and resume his former light, distant tone. “It is a good view. Less so on garden party days, of course. Palace garden parties are like the Day of Resurrection. One sees so many people one had thought dead.”
She snorted with laughter. But at the same time she was wondering whether she had imagined the deep, dark, warm look, and he had never meant anything at all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Summer ended. Autumn saw Oswald Mosley and his Fascist following trying to march through the East End; a pitched battle with police ensued. The morning after the battle of Cable Street, as it became kn
own, a group of unemployed shipbuilders set off from their hometown, Jarrow. Unlike the many other such marches that had taken place, this one had caught the popular imagination. It was being led by the fierily determined Ellen Wilkinson, the diminutive redheaded MP for Jarrow. The progress of the march was reported nightly on the BBC, and daily bulletins appeared in the papers.
Christmas approached. Back in Edinburgh, Marion was shocked at the change in her mother. The shakes were worse, and she had lost a lot of weight. “I’ll come back,” Marion promised, as she dusted and cleaned and ironed. Her mother hardly seemed to do any housework now. “Just as soon as the coronation is over.”
“Of course you will,” Mrs. Crawford said placidly from her armchair, which no longer had a sewing box beside it.
Marion shot her a sharp look. “Mother, I mean it.”
“Of course you do. By the way,” Mrs. Crawford said, adroitly changing the subject, “Peter’s moved school again. He’s gone to one in the south, near London. I forget which.”
Nineteen thirty-seven began. Lessons, especially history ones, were now bent toward the coronation, in which both princesses would take part. At eleven and six respectively, they were considered old enough.
For a lover of history like Marion, the coronation was a fascinating subject. The ceremony of crowning was as complex as it was colorful. Much of it dated back to medieval times. Past coronation processions had included the King’s Herb-Woman, who strew flowers before His Majesty. There had also been until recently a King’s Champion, who rode into Westminster Hall in full armor and flung down his gauntlet. They at least had been expunged from the list of offices. The process of modernizing royalty may be slow, but it wasn’t entirely nonexistent.
Margaret seemed determined not to take any of it seriously. She laughed heartily at ancient heraldic offices such as “Blue Pursuivant,” and her sister’s new title of “Heiress Presumptive.”
“I’ve looked it up,” Margaret said triumphantly. “It means ‘impertinently bold.’”
