The Royal Governess

by Wendy Holden

  There had been people on roofs everywhere, Marion knew. Window views along the route had been rented for unbelievable amounts of money.

  “And then we had to go out on the balcony with our crowns on, so many times. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. All those people looking at us and cheering wildly.” Margaret’s violet eyes gleamed at the memory.

  “People singing the national anthem in the dark and rain,” said Lilibet, softly.

  Margaret scrambled to her feet. “Give me the daisy chain,” she said to her sister. “I’m going to crown you. Because next time all this happens, it will be you. And then I’ll be the second lady in the land!”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  You’ve heard, I take it?” Tommy leaned closer and murmured to Marion at lunch.

  “Heard what?” She was instantly on high alert. It was a month since the coronation, which now felt like a huge party after which everyone had come down to earth with a bump.

  “The wedding.”

  The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Marion now learned, had married at the Château de Candé, in the Loire Valley. “On George V’s birthday, which was questionable timing,” Tommy commented. “No member of the family and only seven English friends. Not even Louis Mountbatten went, and he and the ex-king were inseparable at one stage. But Louis’ main loyalty is to himself, so no surprise there.”

  Marion thought of Wallis. What was she feeling? After all the sound and fury she had married her prince in obscurity. It now looked as if they would live in exile. Perhaps she preferred it that way. But it seemed a sorry ending to a momentous story.

  “They’ve flatly refused to give her a royal title,” Tommy murmured from beneath his mustache.

  “So she won’t be HRH?” Marion frowned. “Whyever not?” The king had left his throne; they both had left the country. What harm could it do?

  Tommy raised a dark eyebrow. “Someone up there doesn’t like her, shall we say.”

  He meant the queen, Marion knew. Wallis’s implacable enemy. The scene in the Piccadilly hall came back to her: the duchess kissing her brother-in-law so fondly. How he must hate her now.

  “He’s incandescent, of course.” Tommy seemed to read her thoughts. “She really wanted the title, apparently. But he’s going to have to make it up to her in other ways.”

  Marion doubted the wanting bit. But perhaps the other ways bit was true. Soon after came the shocking news that the duke and duchess had gone to Germany and met Hitler. Newspaper pictures showed the two of them looking charmed. “Though one may be in the lion’s den it is possible to eat with the lions if one is on good terms with them,” the duke was quoted as saying.

  Marion studied the images of the beaming Wallis. She remembered her denials about being friendly with Ribbentrop. They seemed less believable now. That same dazzling smile turned on Hitler in the photograph had been turned on her. The thought was sickening. The ex-king, consorting with an evil dictator who was now in a position to attack Western Europe. But would he?

  Apart from a maverick middle-aged Tory called Winston Churchill, no one seemed to seriously think so. Germany had, even so, signed agreements with Italy and Japan and actively backed the Fascist side in the increasingly bloody Spanish civil war.

  Marion wrote of her worries to her mother. But the letter was not answered or even opened. By the time it arrived, Mrs. Crawford was dead.

  Marion hurried to Scotland in a shell-shocked daze.

  She tried to rationalize the guilt and grief that threatened to overwhelm her. It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to come back—it was that she couldn’t. She had been steering the princesses through the coronation. Returning home had been out of the question. Now there was no home to which to return. The thought was heartbreaking, but also, she was aware, liberating. Her mother was free from illness and she herself had no other loyalties. The girls, especially Lilibet, could be the focus of everything.

  Back at the palace, she threw herself into her job. For all its rot and labyrinthine passages, Buckingham Palace had extraordinary resources with which to teach. Chief among these was the royal art collection. Kenneth Clark, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, was the man to ask for access.

  Far from the dusty, naysaying fuddy-duddy she had anticipated, Clark proved to be an energetic young man whose wit was as sharp as his suits and who was keenly enthusiastic. Every week, two brown-overalled, white-gloved men appeared in the schoolroom staggering under the weight of a Rembrandt or Canaletto. Marion couldn’t bring herself to tell Clark, who hated Landseer, that the painting most preferred by the girls was one of dogs entitled Dignity and Impudence.

  “I’m Dignity and Lilibet’s Impudence,” Margaret would claim, in a blatant reversal of the truth.

  But actually, both girls were Impudence these days. Having discovered that the palace guards had to salute her whenever she passed them, Margaret passed them at every opportunity, often running back once she’d passed in order to pass them all over again. Whenever she could not be found she was usually out in the palace courtyard, torturing whatever unfortunate regiment happened to be on duty that day.

  Even Lilibet, formerly the most unspoilt of children, was getting above herself. She was, for the first time ever, misbehaving in the classroom, and had recently upset an inkpot on her head to express frustration with a French lesson. The dark blue liquid, cascading down her golden curls, had dripped on her clothes and pooled on the schoolroom floor. Marion had been, as she rarely was, angry with Lilibet. She made her fetch a bucket and mop and clean the mess up herself.

  It did not seem to have had the required effect, however. A few days later the princess returned to the palace from a carriage ride with her grandmother.

  The footman extended a red-liveried arm. “Down you come, young lady.”

  From the open carriage door, Lilibet glared. “I am not,” she said haughtily, “a young lady. I am a princess.”

  From the carriage, Queen Mary harrumphed. “And one day,” she said sharply, “we hope you will be a lady too.”

  Only the king and queen ignored or failed to notice the recent deterioration in their daughters’ behavior. “Lilibet is my pride,” the king would blithely say, “and Margaret my joy.”

  This seemed to be the case even when, bored at a tea with her mother and a friend, his pride rang for a footman and announced, “Kindly call a taxi. Our guest is leaving.”

  Something had to be done. The abdication was over, the coronation had happened. The new reign was settling down. It was time to return to first principles. The princesses must meet the normal world again.

  But taking them out and doing ordinary things was not an option now that they were the daughters of the king. They could no longer travel about incognito. Security concerns meant that the ordinary things would have to come to them. But what things?

  * * *

  • • •

  IT WAS A breathless autumn. The heat pressed down on London like a lid. In the parks, the grass wilted and turned brown. On the streets, the pavements burned into the soles of her shoes. The sun glared off plate-glass windows right into her eyes. Waiting one afternoon to cross the road, Marion felt she might faint.

  During one such wait, she saw a girl in blue uniform on the opposite side of the road. She stood next to an old lady, whose arm she gently held, obviously intending to help her across the road when opportunity allowed. A Girl Guide, Marion realized. Waiting to do her good deed for the day.

  She felt something click in her brain. Here was the answer. The Girl Guides, whose motto was to be prepared for anything, whose mission was to empower young women, whose outlook was international and whose practice was to mix all classes in pursuit of mutual benefit and understanding. From a practical point of view, an organization that could be established anywhere, even within the walls of palaces. Most importantly of all, it would be fun.

 
Miss Violet Synge, chief commissioner of the Girl Guides, clearly felt otherwise. Walled in behind her desk, a solid figure in uniform, she stared at Marion disapprovingly through stern wire spectacles. “The princesses can never be Guides,” she said in an emphatic Manchester accent. “It would never work. Guides must all treat one another like sisters.”

  “But they are sisters.”

  Miss Synge leaned forward, her meaty hands folded, her expression baleful. “Indeed, Miss Crawford. But they’re princesses.” She rolled her mouth round the word as if it was something distasteful.

  “But they only want to be treated like any other girls of their own age.” Marion tried not to think about Lilibet and the footman and Margaret and the guardsmen.

  The broad Mancunian features radiated disbelief. “Miss Crawford. The Guide movement is intended to create opportunities for those rather lower down the social ladder. Many Guides come from the working classes. Princesses,” she went on, “surely have plenty of opportunities of their own.”

  “Not necessarily,” Marion began, then paused. This was not the place to reveal intimate details about restricted royal lives. Miss Synge’s lack of sympathy seemed almost inverted snobbery.

  Then something caught her eye and her spirits rose. She met the commissioner’s skeptical gaze with a steady one of her own. “Am I to understand, Miss Synge, that you feel royalty has no place in the Guide movement?”

  A pair of solid arms folded. The spectacles glinted suspiciously.

  She pointed at the framed photograph on the wall behind Miss Synge’s desk. It was of Princess Mary, the Princess Royal, sister of the king and the Guides’ patroness and benefactor. Miss Synge twisted round to look, the corsets beneath her uniform audibly creaking.

  Marion hastened to press her advantage. “I understand that when the Princess Royal got married, ‘The Marys of the Empire’—the British subjects who shared her name—all contributed to a fund. The princess presented it in its entirety to the Guides.”

  When Miss Synge creaked back round, her spectacles had lost some of their fierceness.

  “Come and meet them.” It was a gamble. Few were the people who could resist an invitation to Buckingham Palace. But Miss Violet Synge might well be one of them.

  In the event, she was not. Lilibet rose to the occasion, overseeing every aspect of the tea. She was completely determined that Miss Synge would be persuaded. The chief commissioner arrived, magnificent in her blue uniform, to find both ham and egg sandwiches as well as a cake and the jam pennies no royal tea was complete without.

  Miss Synge piled her plate high and munched through the lot while listening to a breathless running commentary from Lilibet and Margaret about how keen they were to join the Guide movement. No one, surely, could either doubt their sincerity or fail to be charmed.

  No one except Miss Synge, that was. Eventually, apparently replete, the commissioner wiped her bewhiskered mouth with a monogrammed napkin. Her three hostesses sat up expectantly. The audition was over; the verdict was at hand. But surely, after such hospitality, a refusal was out of the question.

  Miss Synge drew breath. Her navy-jacketed bosom inflated alarmingly. “I’m afraid,” she said in her flat Mancunian tones, “that it’s not possible.”

  “What?” gasped Lilibet, as Margaret’s eyes began to swim and her lower lip to wobble.

  Marion wanted to strangle the woman. Everything at the palace was beautifully ready. She and the girls had even cleared out George V’s old summer house to serve as a headquarters. She forced herself to sound calm. “May I ask why not?”

  Miss Synge eyed her beadily through the spectacles. “Because Princess Margaret is too young to be a Guide.”

  For someone heading an organization aimed at female empowerment, Miss Synge was one of the most contrary women she had ever met. It seemed that the females to be empowered were working-class only and preferably Northern. Perhaps she should just give up.

  Lilibet still had some fight left in her, though. “You don’t think we can get her in somehow?” Her blue eyes were turned persuasively on the recalcitrant commissioner.

  Miss Synge shook her head. “It’s out of the question. She is too young.”

  As two pairs of blue eyes now turned despairingly in her direction, Marion prepared to come to the rescue. “Forgive me, Commissioner, but don’t girls not old enough to be Guides join a Brownie pack instead?”

  Lilibet gasped. “Margaret could be a Brownie!”

  Miss Synge replaced her teacup heavily. “I came here to discuss a Guide pack.”

  But having spotted the flaw in the argument, Lilibet was now like a dog with a bone. “Margaret would make a wonderful Brownie. She’s very strong, you know,” she went on in a salesman-like patter recalling the days of the bread deliveries. She looked at her sister. “Pull up your skirt, Margaret, and show Miss Synge.”

  The younger princess yanked up her kilt, revealing her chubby knees.

  “You can’t say those aren’t a very fine pair of hiking legs, Miss Synge! And she loves getting dirty, don’t you, Margaret? And she would love to cook sausages on sticks!”

  Marion hid a smile. Lilibet’s charm at full wattage had an irresistible power and there wasn’t a person on earth who could withstand it. Even the commissioner was visibly melting now. “Can’t there be a Brownie group for the smaller children?” pleaded Lilibet.

  “Pack,” interrupted Miss Synge. “Not group.” But her tone had lost its sternness.

  “. . . attached to the older one for the Guides?” Lilibet finished.

  The commissioner looked at her, raised an eyebrow and reached for another jam penny. They held their breath as she bit on it and swilled it down with tea. Eventually she put down her napkin. “After due consideration . . .” she began weightily.

  They all gasped softly.

  “. . . I don’t see why not.”

  Marion and the two princesses looked at one another and cheered.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Nineteen thirty-eight began with the resignation of Anthony Eden. The dapper Old Etonian foreign secretary’s attempt to appease Hitler over the Rhineland had rebounded when his prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, adopted the same approach to Mussolini over his invasion of Abyssinia. And appeasing Hitler had not worked anyway. Once again the Führer marked the coming of spring by sending his troops into another country. This time it was Austria. A month later, his possible intentions toward the industrially depressed Sudetenland, the border with Czechoslovakia, began to emerge.

  The equerry who had praised Hitler at the Household dining table was silent on the matter this time.

  The debutante season began, a surreal counterpoint to all these events. The princesses hung excitedly over the balustrade, watching the girls in white arrive. “We have a fly’s eye view!” hissed Lilibet.

  A military band was playing popular hits. Beneath the huge chandeliers, the debutantes, graceful in white gowns, looked like a gaggle of exotic birds, ostrich plumes nodding, lace tails gathered up over arms in long white gloves. All the same, they seemed anachronistic to Marion. Advertising the fact that you wanted a rich man—how demeaning. She had not said so to the girls, though. To do so would undermine their parents, who were clearly hoping this old-fashioned ceremony would restore old-fashioned security to their beleaguered reign.

  “Tea for two,” sang Margaret, waltzing about the balcony in her dressing gown.

  “There’s Grandmama,” said Lilibet, leaning dangerously over the balustrade. “And the beeress.”

  Directly beneath them, Queen Mary stood with Mrs. Ronnie. In accordance with her belief that jewels were a competitive sport, the latter was wearing so many diamonds she looked like a chandelier herself. Queen Mary, not to be outdone, was wearing pearls the size of new potatoes.

  “There’s Aunt Marina!” breathed Margaret in awe. The Duchess of Kent l
ooked dazzlingly lovely in white brocade embossed with pink and silver flowers.

  The white-gowned procession made its slow way toward the red and gold thrones. The king’s torso was ablaze with more stars than the Milky Way, and the queen’s gown sparkled almost as brightly. Each debutante paused before Their Majesties, heard her name announced, stepped back and swept a low curtsey. Behind them, ushers with long rods picked up the endless lace trains of the debs and threw them skillfully over the arms of their owners as each curtsey finished. Relatives, sponsors and suitors crowded round to watch the debs’ big moment.

  “Is that it?” Lilibet asked, suddenly.

  Marion blinked. “It?”

  “They get all dressed up and sit in the traffic just to curtsey to Mummy and Papa?”

  “Exactly.”

  “How silly. When I’m queen I won’t have any of that.”

  A triumphant smile tugged at Marion’s mouth. She would make a feminist of Lilibet yet.

  * * *

  • • •

  LATER, HAVING HANDED the girls over to Alah, Marion headed for her own room. Her way back led her through the picture gallery, whose curved glass ceiling flooded the room with light during the day. She paused, as always, to admire the painting of the Old Masters, which glowed like jewels on the pink brocade walls.

  “Marion!” said someone. The voice—light, disdainful—was familiar. On one of the gold and white sofas that stretched beneath the paintings was a blonde girl in a white satin gown. White feathers rose from her golden hair.

  “Debo!”

  She looked stunning, Marion thought. She had the type of perfect skin all aristocratic women had, seemingly specially bred to show family diamonds at their best advantage. They winked round her neck and on the band round her perfect Marcel wave.