May looked at him in concern, suddenly aware of how little he seemed to be enjoying himself. He was abnormally flushed, and she said with a frown, ‘Are you feeling all right, Eddy?’
‘No. Truth to tell, May, I feel damned peculiar. I think I’ve caught a chill.’
The second that luncheon was over, May sought out Georgie. ‘Eddy isn’t well,’ she said, ‘and I think he has a temperature. Would you help me walk him home? He needs putting to bed before he gets any worse.’
‘This is very kind of the two of you, but you’re both fussing far too much.’ Eddy’s words, as they walked him home, didn’t hold conviction, for he had a raging headache, was dizzy and his legs clearly felt like jelly.
‘Sodding influenza!’ Being a sailor, Georgie’s language was constantly peppered with swear words. ‘Why couldn’t it have waited another few days before laying you low? It’s going to bugger up tomorrow’s birthday party.’
‘As I feel at the moment, Georgie, I couldn’t care less about my birthday party. I’m just upset that the day will be spoilt for May.’
‘Then don’t be, for all that matters to me is you feeling better again.’ May was all brisk efficiency. ‘Georgie is going to put you to bed and I’m going to arrange for hot-water bottles and hot lemon barley-water to be sent to your room.’
As they stepped over Sandringham’s threshold, Eddy said, ‘I’m not in my own bedroom, May. There are so many people here this week that my room is being used as a guest room, and at the moment I’m in a little room next to the one Georgie and I once used as a study.’
As Georgie began steering Eddy in the direction of the main staircase, May headed off to the drawing room to ring for a maid. When that task was completed, she went in search of Manby, the local doctor who had been resident in the house ever since the first of the house guests had fallen ill.
Later, after Manby had seen Eddy, May went with Georgie to sit with Eddy for a little while. Her first reaction, on entering his temporary bedroom, was at how truly small and poky it was.
‘Goodness!’ She seated herself on the only chair the room possessed. ‘You weren’t exaggerating, Eddy. You couldn’t swing a cat in here.’
The idioms she used always amused him and, with a grin, he said, ‘I must admit it’s a bit cramped, sweetheart. If I stretch my arm out, I can touch the fireplace.’
Their eyes held. It was the first time she had ever seen him in his nightshirt and in bed, and her cheeks warmed at the thought that soon the sight would be one that would be as natural to her as breathing.
He took hold of her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘Sorry to be so out of sorts, May. It’s foul bad luck, but I’ll be up and about in no time. Manby says Toria and Maudie are already back on their feet.’
‘What’s Manby’s diagnosis?’ Georgie asked. ‘A chill or influenza?’
‘Influenza, and although it pains me say this, May, you mustn’t kiss me when you leave. I don’t want to infect you with it.’
Aware that he needed to rest, they didn’t stay with Eddy for long, and when they left May’s kiss was one that she lovingly blew from the room’s doorway.
The next morning Dr Manby informed the Prince and Princess of Wales that Eddy’s temperature had risen to one hundred and three degrees and that, even though it was Eddy’s birthday, he should remain in bed throughout the day.
When May visited him, in the company of Georgie, she was disturbed to find him much worse.
‘Sorry, May darling,’ he said croakily. ‘Not up to one of our companionable little chats, I’m afraid. I’m feeling very ropy indeed.’
‘But that’s the way of influenza.’ Dr Manby was reassuring when giving the Prince and Princess of Wales, and Georgie and May, his daily report. ‘It has to reach a peak before it begins to subside. As it’s his birthday, I don’t think any harm will be done if he spends an hour or so downstairs this evening.’
Supported by Georgie, Eddy manfully tottered downstairs long enough to open his birthday presents and thank everyone for them, before apologetically, and again with Georgie’s assistance, climbing back to the claustrophobic little cell that was serving as his bedroom.
Early the next day, after his morning visit to Eddy, Manby said he suspected that Eddy had pneumonia. The Prince of Wales summoned his own physician, Dr Laking, so that Laking could assist Manby. Then he telegraphed for Dr Broadbent, who had so recently and successfully treated Georgie for typhoid.
In the afternoon May sat by the side of Eddy’s bed and read to him. Propped up on pillows, he managed to talk to her about their wedding and how fortunate it was that he’d fallen ill now, and not nearer their wedding date, when the wedding might well have had to be postponed.
With Laking and Broadbent’s arrival, pneumonia was diagnosed and the following morning, when May went with Georgie to visit Eddy, it was to find that a screen had been erected around his bed and they could only see him by standing on their tiptoes and looking over the top of it.
For the first time it occurred to her that Eddy was not just out of sorts, but ill. The same thing had occurred to the rest of the birthday party and, wanting to give the family privacy at such a time, house guests began leaving discreetly, all saying that it wouldn’t be long before they would be meeting up again at the wedding.
Having fought off her cold, his mother was now also visiting Eddy for long periods throughout the day, and the room next to the bedroom, which had previously been used as a study, was now turned into a sitting room, so that his close family had no need to keep navigating the narrow corridors that led to his room from the main part of the house.
The doctors reported on Eddy’s condition regularly to the Prince of Wales, and when May asked her future father-in-law why, with the guests gone, Eddy couldn’t be returned to his own comfortable bedroom, he said, ‘The doctors don’t recommend such a move, May. Not yet, although maybe they will do so in a few days’ time when Eddy has turned a corner and is on the mend.’
May was now spending nearly all her time with Georgie, peeping over the barrier of the screen as Broadbent, Laking and Manby hurried in and out of the room; or taking short walks with him in the grounds to get a breath of fresh air.
‘I don’t know what I would have done without you,’ Georgie said to her on one of their walks. ‘Motherdear won’t believe Eddy is seriously ill. She sent a telegram to Granny Queen this morning that read: Thanks so much for best wishes. Poor Eddy has influenza. So tiresome. She simply won’t allow herself to believe in the pneumonia diagnosis. Toria is nearly as bad. Looloo is just the opposite. Every time I try and speak with her, she dissolves into floods of tears. Maudie isn’t so bad, but even she doesn’t have your inner strength, and I’m very grateful for that strength, May. Truly I am.’
Four days after first feeling unwell, Eddy’s temperature soared to one hundred and eight degrees, there was congestion in both lungs and he had developed a hacking cough.
What should have been a wonderfully happy and carefree week celebrating his birthday was fast turning into days of ever-increasing anxiety as, instead of ‘turning a corner’ as his father had put it, Eddy’s condition grew slowly worse. He began drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes recognizing May and sometimes staring through her with glazed eyes, as if she was someone he didn’t know.
Princess Mary Adelaide was in a state of near-collapse. ‘I do hope the wedding day isn’t going to have to be postponed,’ she said time and again. ‘If it is, it will take us into Lent, and how can a wedding that will be the cause of national celebration take place during Lent? It can’t. It simply can’t. And so that means the wedding will be delayed until Easter!’
‘And if it is, it won’t be the end of the world, Mama.’ May didn’t care how far in the future a new wedding date might be, as long as Eddy recovered his health. As Dolly kept reminding her, he would recover, for he was young and strong, and pneumonia was fatal only in those who were old and fragile.
By dawn the next
morning a second hard-backed chair had been squeezed into the room, so that the Princess of Wales could sit on one side of the bed, sponging Eddy’s brow, while the nurse who had been called in sat on the room’s original chair.
Whenever the nurse needed a break, May took over from her and, despite her inner distress and deep anxieties, did so in such a calm and competent way that all three doctors regarded her presence in the room an asset, not a hindrance.
The Prince of Wales came into the room for a few minutes every hour, on the hour, and May heard Laking say to him, ‘I think, sir, a public bulletin should be posted on the gates of Marlborough House.’
There was a taut silence and then Bertie said unsteadily, ‘And the wording?’
Laking’s voice was nearly as unsteady as Bertie’s. ‘Sandringham, nine-thirty a.m. Due to symptoms of great gravity, his Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence is critically ill.’
May felt as if all the air had been sucked from her lungs. There was no hint in Dr Laking’s summing-up of Eddy’s condition that, having reached a critical point, the next stage was slow, but certain recovery. She clenched her hands so tightly together that the knuckles were white. Eddy had to get better. He had to. Any other prospect was too horrific even to think about.
That afternoon he became delirious, shouting for Fuller, his childhood valet, as if he was in the room, and holding a conversation with his grandmother as if she, too, was with him.
Fuller was summoned urgently to Sandringham. Queen Victoria, who earlier had stated her wish to be at Sandringham at this time of great anxiety, and who had been persuaded not to make the long journey, was not there.
‘Dear God, no,’ Bertie had said when it had been suggested that the Queen should be sent for. ‘It would only ratchet up the distress levels even higher.’
With Toria and Maudie now having recovered from flu and, like their mother and Looloo, either sitting in the hastily fashioned sitting room or in the sickroom itself – and all constantly in floods of tears – May didn’t see how the distress levels could rise any higher.
Throughout that night she alternated two hours on and two hours off with the nurse. Toria, who felt she should now be the one to take on a nursing role with Eddy, gave vent to her feelings by saying waspishly that Hélène and her family should have been summoned to Sandringham, once it had been realized how dangerously ill Eddy was.
‘It isn’t,’ she said to anyone who would listen, ‘as if May loves Eddy as poor, dear Hélène loved him, and I’m sure it isn’t May of Teck whom Eddy wants to see at his bedside. I’m sure he wishes it was Hélène sitting there.’
No matter what Toria might say, May knew differently. For in the early hours of the following morning, Eddy turned his head on the pillow and, looking towards her, said without the least trace of delirium, ‘There you are, May. Sweet May. Lovely May.’
And then Manby and Broadbent bustled in, as did the nurse in order to take over from her. Exhausted after nights of broken sleep and certain that Eddy was at last on the road to recovery, May went into the sitting room. Curling up in one of the room’s easy chairs, she fell into the first restful sleep she’d had in days.
She was woken four hours later by Georgie, saying, ‘Eddy’s delirious again, May.’ His face was sheet-white. ‘He doesn’t recognize anyone – not even Papa and Motherdear.’
During the rest of the day Eddy, drenched in perspiration, tossed and turned, shouting orders at the top of his voice to his regiment, the Prime Minister, his horses. He shouted for Hélène; for his long-dead Grandpa Albert; for the Archbishop of Canterbury. Time and again he thought he was still aboard the Bacchante and climbing the rigging.
Throughout the entire nightmare his distressed mother remained at one side of the bed and May, dazed with horror, at the other. The screen was removed, so that Georgie, Toria, Looloo and Maudie could squeeze into the room without anyone first having to leave it.
That evening, flanked by Dr Manby and Dr Broadbent, Dr Laking informed the Prince of Wales that they feared the worst.
‘Are you,’ Bertie asked hoarsely, ‘telling me my son is dying?’
Laking, for years his personal physician, said with compassion in his eyes, ‘Yes, sir. There can no longer be any hope.’
It was the moment when the family’s sick-visiting turned into a vigil, as all through the long, agonizing night Eddy fought for life.
As the first rays of morning seeped into the room, he said in delirium, ‘Something terrible has happened! My darling brother Georgie is dead!’ And then, panic still in his voice, ‘Who is it? Who is it?’
Her voice thick with tears, May said gently, ‘It’s May, Eddy darling.’
A great calm came over him. Weakly he squeezed her hand and then, so faintly his mother claimed never to have heard it, he took his last breath and, with love in his voice, died with her name on his lips.
PART THREE
CHOICES
Chapter Twenty-Five
JULY 1892, WHITE LODGE
As she sat at a desk that looked out onto a garden thick with summer roses, May wrote:
Dearest Alicky,
Forgive the far-too-short notes I have been sending you so far this year. Until now I haven’t been able to bring myself to relive the morning of my darling’s death and the months that have passed since then. Now, however, I feel I can at last do so.
In the hours before he passed away I was seated at the side of his bed, holding his hand. Eddy had no awareness of my being there, or of anyone else – even of his mother and Georgie being there – but just before the end he squeezed my hand ever so weakly, and I know that he knew it was my hand that he was squeezing. Moments later he passed away and all that was left for me to do was to kiss him goodbye. As I kissed his dear brow, I was so crushed by all that I had lost I could scarcely comprehend the enormity of it. Even now, six months later, it is still difficult to do so.
At the funeral (which took place at Windsor), my father handed Uncle Bertie my bridal wreath of orange-blossom and Uncle Bertie laid it upon the coffin. How I lived through the service and the next few days and weeks, I do not know. To have been on the verge of having so much, and then to have lost not only Eddy, but everything that would have gone with marrying him – royal status, financial security for my family, the satisfying prospect of being a helpmate to Eddy – all to be snatched away and with nothing to replace it, has been an enormity too difficult to come to terms with. I have, however, slowly begun doing so.
Immediately after the funeral Uncle Bertie, Aunt Alix, Georgie and the girls stayed as guests of the Duke of Devonshire at Compton Place in Eastbourne, for none of them could face returning home without darling Eddy. From there they went to the South of France where, for several months, they stayed at Cap Martin.
Mama’s friend, Lady Wolverton, had leased a villa further along the Riviera at Cannes, and she kindly invited us to spend the spring and early summer with her. Although we were seventy miles or so distant from Cap Martin, Uncle Bertie and Georgie visited us on their yacht. I used to be very chary of Uncle Bertie, but I am so no longer, for despite his own terrible grief, he has been kindness itself to me and I now see him in a quite different light.
She paused and laid her pen down. Did she write and tell Alicky of how, at Cannes, a sense of embarrassing constraint had entered her relationship with Georgie – and the reason for it – or did she not? In the end she picked up her pen and wrote:
Ever since darling Eddy’s death, Georgie’s marriage has become a question of priority for Aunt Queen and, so the newspapers say, for the country as well. Do you remember the story behind Nicky’s parents’ marriage? How Aunt Minny had been engaged to Uncle Sasha’s brother, the Tsesarevich? And how, when his brother died, Uncle Sasha then became engaged to Aunt Minny and married her? Some people – my father, I’m sorry to say, being one of them – are saying that as I am in exactly the same position as Aunt Minny once was, it is a precedent that should be followed here, in England. As you c
an imagine, such a suggestion is desperately embarrassing for both me and Georgie. At Cannes we did our best to laugh it off, but weren’t very successful.
She paused once again, hot with remembered embarrassment, and then began a new paragraph:
We stayed in Cannes for two months and then went to Stuttgart for a lengthy stay with Papa’s Württemberg relations. While we were there, Aunt Queen conferred a dukedom on Georgie, just as she did on Eddy when he was second in line to the throne, and so Georgie is now His Royal Highness the Duke of York, Earl of Inverness and Baron Killarney.
Three days ago we finally returned to England – something I did reluctantly, owing to all the speculation about Georgie and me.
I now have to settle back into my former lifestyle, helping Mama with her many charities and caring for Papa who, since his stroke, is quite an invalid. It is, of course, nothing like the life I thought I was about to embark upon, or like the life that, immediately before Eddy’s proposal, I had been planning privately (which was a life for myself in Florence). Even before my engagement, that project would have been difficult to achieve, but as darling Eddy’s bereaved fiancée, it is now not even remotely possible.
So there you are. I have brought you quite up to date and I hope you will keep me up to date with all that is happening in your life and in dear little Darmstadt.
All my love, May
She put the pen down and reached for an envelope and then, before putting the letter inside it, reached for her pen once again and wrote:
PS: I forgot to tell you that in the days after Eddy’s death, Willy sent me a very tender letter of condolence, quite out of keeping with his usual bombastic and brash style. There are times when I don’t mind at all our once having regarded him as a Kindred Spirit. xxx
In September, Georgie received a letter from his grandmother saying she wished to see him before she left for her autumn stay at Balmoral. He didn’t need to speculate on what it was that she wanted to see him about. He knew what it would be about. It would be about how nice it would be if he were to ask May to marry him.
The Summer Queen Page 26
