by Wendy Holden
“Alah!” Marion was right outside the nursery door now. She rattled the handle. “It’s Crawfie! Lord Wigram and Sir Hill and everyone else are waiting in the shelter and you must come down. What are you doing?”
The door opened to reveal the tall figure of Alah, her uniform pristine, her cap slightly askew. She had evidently been in the process of pinning it precisely into place. Her gas mask was nowhere to be seen and her expression, when she saw Marion, was predictably outraged.
Lilibet’s voice floated over. “We’re dressing, Crawfie,” she called. “Alah says we must dress.”
Peering round the nanny’s bulky side, Marion’s incredulous eye caught the end of a frilly frock and a pair of white socks, laid out neatly on the bed. Something snapped within her. “Come with me!” she yelled. “Now!”
A minute later, the girls, coats over their nightdresses, holding their Mickey Mouse gas masks with the red rubber noses, hurried down the stone passages. Alah followed, grumbling, at a distance.
The shelter was fuller than before. Other residents of the castle had arrived. Sir Hill was a nervous wreck, while Lord Wigram was pacing up and down. Their relief, as the little party filed in, was palpable.
Soon afterward, Margaret was asleep on Marion’s lap, while Lilibet lay calmly on one of the beds, reading. Sir Hill did The Times crossword in the lamplight while Lord Wigram sat close by absorbedly perusing a dahlia catalog.
Gerald Kelly, in the shadows at the back, was chatting quietly. A slight clink of glassware, as of port bottle against cut crystal, occasionally emanated from his direction. Alah, as always, was knitting. She was making seaboot stockings for sailors, and seemed intent on supplying the entire Royal Navy.
There was, Marion thought, a strange peace to this wartime scene. It was convivial; even cozy. She shifted the warm weight of the sleeping child against her, and heard the occasional slide of paper as the absorbed Lilibet turned a page. She buried her nose in Margaret’s soft hair, breathing in the soapy clean scent, and sent up a silent prayer that everyone would be safe, that they would all survive.
It was two in the morning before the all clear sounded. Hideous though it was, it struck the ear like beautiful music. Sir Hill bowed ceremoniously to Lilibet. “You may now go to bed, ma’am.”
* * *
• • •
NEXT MORNING, LILIBET was full of defiant fury. “I want to join the army!”
“You already have,” Margaret pointed out. “You’re colonel-in-chief of the Grenadier Guards.”
Marion hid a smile. Lilibet had recently been elevated to the honor and took her inspection duties typically seriously. After one parade when she had, in her high-pitched voice, taken several soldiers to task about their boots, the commanding officer had drawn Marion aside. “Miss Crawford. You might mention to Her Royal Highness that the first requisite of a really good officer is the ability to temper justice with mercy.”
Lilibet was as yet too young to join up properly, but the idea lingered in Marion’s mind. Incarceration in Windsor seemed increasingly stifling. No one seemed to know—or if they did, they were not saying—how long the war would go on.
Her unsettled feelings were further rattled by the sudden arrival at the castle of Antoinette de Bellaigue, an elegant young aristocrat who had escaped from her homeland just before the German invasion. As usual, nothing was directly explained, but Marion gathered, in piecemeal, imprecise fashion, that it had been decided that her own command of French had reached its limits and lessons from a native speaker were required.
While it was a secret relief to hand this particular instruction over, the lack of consultation was hurtful. Even if, as Marion reminded herself, the king and queen had the defense of an entire nation to think about.
It wasn’t long before Toni was the name constantly on the princesses’ lips. Margaret in particular was in ecstasies about Mademoiselle de Bellaigue’s perfect clothes and shiny dark hair. She had escaped, Marion noted gloomily, with her French sense of style intact at least. And Toni, for her part, seemed instantly at home with the girls. “Lilibet is très naturelle,” she exclaimed to Marion in her charming accent. “Such a sense of duty! And yet quelle joie de vivre!”
Soon came another unexpected innovation; drawing lessons in the company of Alathea Fitzalan-Howard, a child of the nobility slightly older than the girls who had moved to the Great Park for the duration of the war. Then Lilibet began learning to ride sidesaddle. It was starting to seem to Marion as if all the efforts she had made to keep the girls in the real world now counted for nothing.
Even the Buckingham Palace Guides and Brownies, once so important, no longer seemed to interest them. Admittedly, the venture had not quite worked out as planned.
Success had seemed certain after the facing down of the formidable chief commissioner. The venue chosen for meetings was a little summerhouse in the palace gardens, where once George V had worked when the weather was fine. The desk had been just as he left it, pens and paper still in position. The girls and Marion had cleared it out themselves. At the inaugural meeting, dressed up in their new uniforms, they were beside themselves with excitement. The king, too, had taken a keen interest in their appearance. “No black stockings,” he said. “They remind me of my childhood. Let’s have beige ones instead.” When Princess Mary came to officiate, he stood behind his sister, muttering things to try and make her laugh. It was a side of the king Marion hadn’t glimpsed since the old days at Piccadilly.
The problem, an unforeseen one, was the other recruits: the daughters of court officials and friends of the family. At the first meeting, Lilibet turned in horror to Marion. “Why have they all brought their nannies?” she hissed.
They had, all lined up behind and fussing over their charges. In the breezy, bright little summerhouse, they made a black gaggle of hats and dark coats.
“Some of them aren’t even in uniform,” Margaret snarled. “They’re in party clothes!”
“Let’s get started,” said Marion, picturing the whole thing fizzling out before it had even begun. She hadn’t gone through Miss Violet Synge for that to happen.
They started with a game designed to break the ice. Everyone had to take off their shoes and put them in a heap in the center of the floor. Then, at a signal, they would run for their shoes, put them on and return to their original place. The first to complete this exercise would be the winner.
“Go!” cried Marion as the girls all hurtled toward the heap. The happy anticipation drained from her face as it quickly became apparent, from the blank expressions, the puzzled rummaging and even, in some cases, the tears, that most of the Guides had no idea which shoes belonged to them—or, even if they did, no idea how to put them on. Girls in party dresses were hopping on one half-shod foot to Nanny, dangling the other shoe in one hand.
The frustration Marion had felt had only increased since. The exclusive nature of the recruits had become, if anything, worse since the onset of war and the move to Windsor, where the pack was supplemented by the offspring of military top brass. The original idea, to mix the princesses with children from other backgrounds, seemed further away than ever. Perhaps, now, it really was impossible. Perhaps she was fighting a losing battle.
So perhaps she should fight another one. The one everyone else was fighting. Plenty of young women like her were in the services. She had seen the posters in Windsor High Street. “Join the Wrens! It Is Far Better to Face the Bullets Than Be Killed at Home by a Bomb!”
Marion agreed. She didn’t seem to be needed by the family anymore. And surely it was more important to defend freedom and democracy than show life outside the palace to two young princesses. So why not join up and do her bit? Fight for king and country? In her case, of course, she would have to leave the king to fight for the country. But she doubted that would be difficult. They would hardly miss her.
* * *
• �
�� •
BUT AS EVER, when a truly big question presented itself, the queen proved elusive. And Windsor Castle was a vast place to look for someone; moreover, Her Majesty spent weekdays at Buckingham Palace. Marion took advantage of Toni’s presence to hurry to Windsor and Eton station and board the midmorning London train. It was full of servicemen, all cracking jokes and chaffing each other. Morale, despite everything, seemed to be high. Marion felt a swell of pride. Their Majesties had something to do with this.
The statue of Eros had gone from Piccadilly Circus. But it still seemed to be a popular place to meet; soldiers and their sweethearts milled cheerfully around.
She hurried down Piccadilly, noting the denuded shop displays. Fortnums was making a brave effort, but was a shadow of its former luxurious self. How could it be otherwise when, as official posters everywhere declared, “Extravagance in Wartime Is Bad Form and Unpatriotic”?
She cut through Green Park. There were trenches where once there had been deck chairs, and much of it was planted with vegetables. Even here, people were Digging for Victory.
The palace loomed in front of her, gray front gleaming in the September sunshine. As Marion hurried toward it, something swelled in her ears. The thrumming drone of something huge and heavy.
She looked up. The plane was coming from the east. She could barely register its presence before it was up the Mall and above her, blocking out the sun, German markings clearly visible on its fuselage. As Marion hit the ground she heard the unmistakable screaming noise of a falling bomb, then a deafening explosion. Then, only horrible silence.
Marion lay, face pressed in the mud, for a few seconds. She could not breathe. It had all happened so fast it was difficult to believe. She raised her head. People were gathering, talking in shocked tones. She scrambled to her feet and ran.
The palace frontage was mainly intact, except for the windows. Not a single one remained. Marion stared at them. The day was warm, but she felt cold all over. Despite all that had happened already, she wondered if she had really believed in the war until now.
She hurried through the anxious knots of people before the railings. “Is His Majesty all right? The queen?” The policemen were doing their best to answer the questions, but Marion could see from their faces that they had no idea, and wondered the same thing.
“Sorry, miss, you can’t go through there . . . oh. Miss Crawford, it’s you. Carry on.”
It was with a sense of unreality that she carried on, picking her way over the broken glass in the forecourt. People had started to emerge, white with shock, some clinging to one another, but none, it seemed, actually injured.
Beyond the central arch, in the quadrangle, she could see piles of earth and thickly billowing black smoke. Heaps of broken stone surrounded a huge and gaping hole from which, it seemed, some monster had recently emerged. It was the other way round, of course; it was here that the monster had gone in, and here that the damage was worst.
She crept closer, her heels crunching on the debris. It was hard to see properly in the swirling smoke, but part of the left-hand side of the building seemed missing, torn away like the open front of a doll’s house. Inside was wrecked magnificence: spars of gilded wood; torn, charred fabric; broken vases; smashed statues. A child-sized marble hand lay on the ground—some cherub’s. Marion’s eyes blurred; thank God the girls were at Windsor.
“Miss Crawford.”
Even in these dire circumstances, his voice held its tone of light irony. She could see, through the rags of smoke, that he looked as impeccable as ever. His cuffs were snowy, his glossy mustache immaculate, and even his bow tie was straight. She thought of the front of her suit, covered in the mud of Green Park.
“Mr. Lascelles! How . . . how are you?”
“Well, it blew my bath out,” he said dryly, “but on the plus side it got rid of that excrescence to the left of my window.”
She remembered, uncomfortably, his window and tried to picture what had been to the left of it. “You mean the swimming pool building?”
He inclined his head, not a single strand of thick, dark hair out of place. “Precisely.”
She felt herself warming to him again. He was a strange man, but an admirable one. His sangfroid was extraordinary. And uniquely British, like his understatement. Emblematic of the national fighting spirit. She should follow his example.
She raised her chin. “The king?” she asked. “The queen?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Ah.”
The fighting spirit was hard to maintain as she imagined them lying in the ruins, the queen’s famous misty blue spattered with blood. “Ah?”
Lascelles spoke into her panic. “They are perfectly well.”
Though weak with relief, she tried to sound businesslike. “I need to see Her Majesty. Do you know where she is?”
“You will find her in the garden with His Majesty. By the way, Miss Crawford,” Lascelles added lightly, as she unsteadily walked off.
She turned, glass grinding beneath her heel. “Yes, Mr. Lascelles?”
“Better not use the garden entrance. It no longer exists, as a matter of fact. My tip is to use one of the side doors.”
She stared at him. “Thank you, Mr. Lascelles.”
The glass in the door was shattered and the handle blown off. She had to tie her handkerchief round her hand to feel for the handle inside. The passage was full of thick, stinking smoke, the red carpet spattered with mud and dust. Marion glanced at it, remembering how the middle had once been reserved for members of the family only. It had been well and truly trodden on now.
In the distance, she could hear people coughing, and the shouting of the palace ARP wardens. She needed to find the queen before these notoriously officious personnel stopped her and sent her back.
A figure loomed. It wore pale clothing, and something tall and white on its head. Her heart contracted and for a second she wondered if she were seeing a freshly minted ghost. Then she realized the hat was a rather bent toque and this was the palace head chef.
“Monsieur.” Marion summoned up her best accent. It was a decent one, as even Toni acknowledged. “Ça va?” she asked, even though it was a ridiculous question.
The chef, whose whites were distinctly blackened, managed a nod. He was still clutching a wooden spoon. “Ça va, mademoiselle,” he said. “Un petit quelque chose dans le coin, c’est tout. Un petit bruit.”
A little something or other in the corner, that’s all. Marion translated to herself. A little noise.
Tears pricked her eyes. How brave. She had been wrong about Lascelles. The stiff upper lip was not confined to the British, nor was understatement. The French had courage too. She thought of Toni, not resentfully now, but sympathetically. Did her giggly manner disguise misery at the humiliation of her homeland?
She smiled at the chef and placed a hand across her breast.
“Vive la France!”
His head shot up. His shoulders went back. Even his toque looked straighter. “Vive la France!”
Lascelles was quite right; the garden entrance was now somewhere under a pile of debris. As the route onto the lawns was through a hole in a broken wall, there was no need to seek out a side door. Holding her breath so as not to inhale the thick dust, Marion made her way carefully through, glancing about constantly for falling masonry, timbers that might suddenly give way, a pane of glass that might decide to fall.
She went out to the lawn. If you did not look behind you, there was no indication that a bomb had just dropped. The grass stretched glossily away, the flower beds glowed with bright autumn color: frothing blue and white hydrangeas; dahlias from fuchsia to rust; the occasional late rose in pink or apricot. The big, blousy trees were turning, with glints of gold, copper and red amid the green. A lazy bee buzzed past.
The air here was fresh and clear and Marion could finally breathe deeply. She wondered
where the king and queen were. That they were out here at all seemed odd, considering what had just happened. They were surely not gardening. That would be taking the bulldog spirit a little too far.
She headed toward the lake, looking about her for a familiar smudge of misty blue. There was no sign of her employers, however. They could be anywhere, and the palace gardens were huge. She decided to call for them. “Ma’am? Sir?” Nothing.
Then, out of nowhere, the sharp crack of a single gunshot. It echoed in the air. A bird squawked and flew off. Then, silence again. From one of the nearby trees, two golden leaves detached and twirled gently down to the grass.
Marion realized both her hands were pressed hard against her mouth. They must have flown there instinctively, to stop a scream of terror. Her heart was hammering in her chest and she was shaking. She looked back toward the ruined palace; should she go there? Get help? But for what?
She pressed on in the direction from which the shot had come. Horrid imaginings crowded in, which she tried in vain to force away. The king and queen of England dead on the grass and a Nazi officer, in full uniform, standing over them. Anything, at this moment, seemed possible.
A great rhododendron bush reared up before her. She must be close to where the gun had been fired now. She forced herself forward, almost whimpering with fright.
“That’s it, d-d-darling,” she heard the king say.
In her rush of relief, Marion ran round the corner to find, to her horror, the queen standing directly in front of her, pointing a gun straight at her heart.
“Crawfie!” There was a blast, and Marion dropped to the ground.
* * *
• • •
“GOODNESS, CRAWFIE,” SAID the queen. “I almost shot you.”
“It was,” agreed the king, “a d-d-damned c-c-close r-r-run thing.” The war had brought his stammer back with a vengeance.
