by Karen Harper
“Chad? What in the wor—”
“Curse it, woman! Keep your voice down. What are you doing out here in the dark? I was sure poachers were coming in this way tonight, even though the big gate is closed. Sorry. Lie still, and I’ll fish you out.”
“You’re still after poachers?” I muttered as he struggled to find the edge of the net to unwrap me. “I’ve been out for a constitutional several nights and saw no one.”
“You’ll have to stop that. It’s not safe.”
“I very well see it isn’t, because of Sandringham’s own head gamekeeper on the loose.”
“There,” he said, lifting the heavy webbing from me and casting it to the side. “I said I’m sorry. They’ve been taking more birds this year than others, and I swear it’s that rabble from Wolferton Wood, not West Newton. For all I can prove, it’s the same brigands who stopped you on the road last year.”
I tried to get up but had the heel of one wellie still caught in the snare and I fell again. He caught me partway down and sat on the ground with me. I vow, I don’t know how it happened but we were suddenly in each other’s arms, holding tight, kissing with open mouths, lying on the cold, wet grass. He rolled over me then pressed me down with his hard body. I could feel his muscles right through both of our winter coats. My petticoats smashed flat and my stays bit into my ribs to take my breath away.
I’d been snagged again and not just by a net. Oh, heaven help me, I’d never gotten over him, and now he’d know it. Nor had I ever kissed and held a man with passion as I did now. He clamped me to him, his strong arms hard around my waist while mine clung to his neck to keep his lips close. I could imagine we were back in the glasshouse again and it was so warm and humid and—and I hugged him back, my tongue touching his, out of breath until one of us, not sure who, came up for air.
“Curse it!” he said and pulled us to a sitting position. “I didn’t mean that—I mean, I did, but should not have. Forgive me.”
“For that, then, but never for springing a marriage proposal on me the way you did once. I was too dense to know how you felt—back then, I mean. It all happened so fast that—”
“Fast? I’d been courting you for years.”
“You had not! You had taken me here and there about the estate and were good to the boys!”
“I don’t give a two-penny damn for that excuse! I didn’t expect you to be so . . . so naive with a one-track mind!” He hauled me to a standing position, then bent down to pick my foot out of the net again.
“Chadwick Reaver! I had never been courted before, even though I had daydreams I would wed my previous employer, but that was only a girl’s dream because I did not want to leave his children.”
“But you managed to switch your affections to other children. You would have certainly come to love ours. And how close were you to him?”
“It was all wishful thinking on my part while he searched for a woman fit to marry!”
“I’ll bet. And now you’ve even won over the Prince of Wales. Any dreams and wishes about him?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You knew from the first my loyalty to my children here—you helped with that, encouraged that. Loyalty and duty— Chad, what is it?” I cried as I saw a tear track down his cheek. I would never have noticed, but it shimmered in the light from the Big House.
He gripped my upper arms hard as if I’d run away. “Let’s not argue,” he said. “I’ve done enough of that these last years with myself over you. And with tenant farmers here, who can’t understand the passion the royals have for game on the estate. Nor can I control my passion for you, Miss Charlotte Bill. I’m caught between the king and prince and my own people—and caught between what’s right and wrong about you.”
We stood, steadying each other, breathing hard, not speaking for a moment. My lips burned from his hard touch, and my cheeks flamed from his beard stubble. The winter wind was mild, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been a howling North Sea gale. Finally, I found words I had wanted to say for so long. “Chad, I’m sorry I hurt you when you proposed. I . . . I hurt myself too. I know you will be a fine father, and I’m sorry you lost your child.”
He sucked back a sob. “Not one, but two. She lost another not so far along, though it’s something she doesn’t want anyone to know. I told her we should not try again for it endangers her health, and the doctor agrees, but she seems desperate to show me we can—she can.”
I thought of her words and that triumphant look she gave me in the glasshouse when I’d stumbled on her that June day. She’d thrown her boast at me: I know who you are, but I’ll make up for it now. But to have lost two as if they were cursed . . .
“I’m so sorry, truly,” I told him. “I know of no one, including the king and prince of all England and the Empire, who would be a better father than you.”
“And you the best of mothers,” he whispered, but he didn’t sound bitter this time.
“I want to give the feather picture back for your family,” I said in a rush. “I adore it, but its place is not with me.”
“If you gave it back now and Millie learned where it has been, she would break it, break herself in two.”
I didn’t say I was sorry again. I was, but it seemed so sad and hopeless to repeat it. “I’d best go back inside,” I said. “I hope you catch your poachers.”
A light flickered in his eyes, but it seemed to illumine his handsome face. Was a poacher on the grounds with a torch? I turned my head, thinking I would just kiss him a quick good-bye on the cheek and flee, when a shifting light in a window of the Big House caught my eye.
“Chad,” I cried, “look there! That bright light in the window. Is it just a light?”
“Dear God, it looks like a fire! I think in the queen’s chambers where Millie takes flowers!” he shouted and was off on a run toward the Big House with me right behind him.
Already out of breath from arguing with and kissing Chad, I was panting like a dog when we reached the side door of Sandringham House. It was a fire for certain, for we saw not only flames one floor above us but smelled smoke.
Mabel had said there had been a terrible fire in the Big House years before I came, but only the tapestries and treasures had needed saving then. All I could think of now was, God save the queen!
Chad pounded on the door while I yanked the bell cord. It was Mabel who answered, still in her day clothes. If the king were not in London, more rooms would have been lighted this time of night, more people on duty.
“Fire upstairs!” Chad shouted and pushed past her.
“The queen’s rooms!” I cried and followed him in. “Get help!”
I could hear Mabel setting up a hue and cry for the servants, who never went to sleep as early as their betters. Soon we heard others, pounding up the stairs behind us, coughing in the acrid, spreading smoke.
As Chad and I reached the hall outside the private rooms, we saw that the queen’s lady-of-the-bedchamber, Charlotte Knollys, had Her Majesty out in the hall, coughing, crying, with a robe wrapped around her nightgown.
“Oh, my picture,” the queen cried. “My only picture of poor Eddie on my bedside table.”
Eddie, her firstborn, I thought. The one who would have been Prince of Wales had he not died here at Sandringham. Once betrothed to Princess May, he had been the roué son no one but his mother ever mentioned.
Chad took off his coat, wrapped it around his right arm, pressed it to his face and plunged into the room through belching smoke. “Chad, no!” I shouted, but my words went unheeded in the growing hubbub.
“Don’t go in,” Lady Knollys shouted, as if Chad had not done so already. The smoke was thickening, and perhaps she had not seen him. “My room was just above, and the ceiling could fall in! I think it started in the chimneys.”
My eyes streaming tears, I went to the bedroom doorway and peered into the gray cloud of blinding smoke. “Chad, come out!” I shrieked. “The ceiling might fall!”
That was all I could manage befor
e I fell to coughing. The house butler and housekeeper tried to shoo us all down the hall and the stairs. “The volunteer firemen from the village have been called,” the butler announced calmly as if he were just summoning us to dinner. “They’re bringing the hand pumps. Everyone downstairs, if you please!”
I was ready to run in after Chad but I kept seeing the children’s faces. I lagged behind the exiting crowd, led by the intrepid queen who had evidently slept through the first of the smoke, heat, and flames. With her deafness, perhaps she had not heard the crackling fire or first shouts from Lady Knollys.
Thank God, Chad came bursting out of the bedroom, though soot- and smoke-blackened and holding his breath. His hair looked singed, his eyebrows too, but he held in his hands a large, ornately framed photograph of a royal I had never seen but had heard scuttlebutt about for years, whispers that he had been a homosexual. That gossips had even suggested he might be Jack the Ripper, but that was utter nonsense, Mrs. Wentworth had said.
I rushed to Chad and put an arm around his waist to support him. The metal picture frame was hot to the touch. Chad held tight to me, an arm thrown over my shoulder, hacking, gasping for air before I tugged him away after the others.
Downstairs, when he gave Queen Alexandra the photograph, her tears matched those streaming gray soot from his eyes. “You,” she told him, choking on her words, “are a dear, dear man for this, and shall be rewarded.”
“My reward is that you are safe, Your Majesty,” he barely got out before we heard a rumble from upstairs as the ceiling of her bedroom evidently collapsed.
“Outside,” the butler’s polite tones resounded again. “Outside until the firemen arrive and declare the rest of the house safe.”
As we straggled onto the lawn, Prince George came running up out of the darkness, looking quite dazed and, for once, unkempt, for someone must have roused him and he’d dressed hastily. “Mrs. Lala,” he said in passing, “you beat me here.”
“It was the queen’s bedroom, but she is fine,” I called after him, not planning to tell him I’d been mistook for a poacher.
Chad and I stood aside, leaning against the sturdy tree trunk as the firemen’s long wagon rushed in, pulled by six horses, loaded with two large hand pumps and a bell clanging. To draw water from the lake, the eight men tugged the hose like a long snake, putting one end in the water, and rushed inside.
In the dark, Chad put his arm around my waist, pulled me to him and kissed my cheek. He smelled like an ashy fireplace. He wasn’t coughing quite as badly, but his voice was rough. I supposed my clothes and cheeks were soot-smeared too.
“So, we both have had thanks from the rulers of the realm, and offers of rewards, eh?” he said.
“Shall we ask them for the moon?” I tried to keep my voice light.
He ignored that and, with a huge sigh as we gazed back at the Big House, he said, “So those flames will soon be out, but I don’t know about ours. Good night, sweetheart. And despite my mistaking you for a poacher and this near tragedy, some things did make this a good night.”
He squeezed my waist and walked off into the darkness toward the village. And I—so relieved we had made some sort of peace with each other, but knowing it made things just as hard—pressed my shaking legs back against the tree so I would not fall down.
Chapter 15
The next summer we were all invited to the Big House for the celebration the king hosted for David’s tenth birthday. Bicycles and ponies were in the offing for the three oldest children. Even Harry and little George were allowed to attend, so the king and queen could show off all their grandchildren to their friends. On the day of the great party, I could be found sitting against a wall in the Grand Saloon of Sandringham House, tending the youngest boys until they were summoned.
Although I had been in the Grand Saloon before, most recently when I was trying to find David and Bertie during a game of hide-and-seek with their grandfather, I had never seen it ablaze with lights and filled with gorgeously attired people.
Tears blurred my vision of the dancers rotating past. The entire room seemed to glitter. The jewels, silks, even feathers in the ladies’ hair, were like nothing I’d ever seen before. The chatter, the background music of Gottlieb’s German orchestra—brought in from London for the dancing—was overwhelming.
When I’d first entered the room with Princess Mary, we’d both gasped in awe. I’d handed Mary over to her grandmother, Queen Alexandra, who was not in the swirl of dancing with her bad knee and limp. But she presided over the glittering head table.
I’d promised to describe as many gowns to Rose as I could. The queen wore a rose-hued, gossamer chiffon gown with a flowing back and streaming gold ribbons. Then a mint green satin gown with a beaded bodice and gold cords from a gold lamé waistband swept by. I think those long ones were called bugle beads, but my head spun with trying to remember so much.
At the other end of the room from the orchestra, square, four-person, linen-draped bridge tables awaited players for after the meal, as this massive, high-ceilinged room served many purposes when King Edward entertained. I kept to a padded bench where I held George and put Harry right next to me. After their grandparents or parents showed them off, I would take both back to the York Cottage nursery, where Martha would watch them while I returned to wait for Mary, who, unlike her older brothers, was destined for an early bedtime.
Finch hovered too, though Hansell was on holiday. That, in a way, was another birthday gift to David, because their tutor drilled both boys mercilessly on things they hated such as historical dates and battles and places. But he had helped David write a speech of thanks to memorize for this evening. I’d heard it four times and found it sounded quite stiff—even pompous, hopefully just a reflection of Hansell and not David, for the boy was still insufferably selfish and willful, still resenting my attentions to the younger children at times.
David came over with Bertie in tow. “Lala,” David said, “I think I shall have to shout to be heard when I give my thank-you speech.”
“Everyone will be quiet to hear you. Do not shout, or you will sound angry. You will do just fine. And do not hang around your wrapped presents, ogling them.”
“You were a good present to me once,” he said flippantly and darted off.
I had to admit David’s comment was one of the dearest, most clever things the boy had ever said to me. Perhaps he would someday be suave with the ladies. His compliment almost—but not quite—made up for the fact that I was sometimes as lonely as the children. I lived among the adults but was not part of them, just as I felt suspended between the upstairs and most of the downstairs staff.
Despite the noise in the Grand Saloon, my mind went back to my adventures of the day before. Chad had driven myself, the children, and Finch clear out to the fens near the bogs and the shore of the Wash, where he had shown us a sand plover nest with its speckled, grayish eggs, then pointed out the nesting pair themselves sitting in the grass nearby.
“Take a look at their short bills,” he’d told the children. “That’s how you can tell them from longer-billed waders like snipes.”
“Why aren’t they sitting on this nest with the eggs?” Mary had asked.
Chad had explained, “You see, here’s something interesting about plovers. They are very clever birds and sometime sit on places not their nests so other birds—people too, I suppose—can’t find where their eggs are. But I knew where to look, that’s all.”
David said, “Good idea, since some ladies like to take eggs, blow them out, and put them under glass domes just as if they were the real thing. I think that’s as bad as if we blew babies out of mother’s stomachs before they hatch and come out. Mama says she doesn’t want any more in hers to worry about.”
“Righto, my boy, but we won’t go into all that right now,” Chad said with a stern look at me. “Just remember, if you want to hide something precious, you have to stay away from it sometimes, so others won’t know.”
While Finch w
as staring off toward the distant sea, Chad had looked only at me, tipped his head a bit and narrowed his eyes. Sometimes it was like that between us—unspoken things that screamed so loud.
My mind was pulled back to the present as Little George fidgeted and started singing “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” over the tune the orchestra was playing. I shushed him but I could not quiet my unsettling memories.
DAVID’S CELEBRATION HAD been a great success, and that summer my life was so busy that I could shut out memories of Chad for a few hours when things got chaotic—like right now on this hot, humid night, the twelfth of July 1905, soon to be a momentous date to me.
Princess May become pregnant with her sixth child, but she was having a hard time “hatching it,” at David liked to say. Now she had gone into labor, here at York Cottage, where she’d borne her other children—except David—and this time it seemed prolonged and difficult. The doctor had been upstairs with her for hours, while the prince smoked cigar after cigar and paced up and down the hall. Eva Dugdale, who was usually with her friend for her lying in and labor, had a sick child she could not leave, so was not here.
My voice wavered when I sang to little Harry and George to get them to sleep. The entire house seemed tense, waiting for a new infant’s cry, when the entire staff felt like wailing.
I tried to tell myself that this baby’s birth would assure that I could stay here longer, at least as long as it took this sixth child to leave the nursery. The princess had vowed that each of the last two pregnancies would be her final one. And this one surely had to be, for Rose had whispered to me that her monthly courses were quite erratic now.
I’d tried to buck myself up with the knowledge that I’d have another little one to tend, because Chad had told Finch and me that his wife was expecting again, and he’d seemed happy about that, so I tried to be too. I reckoned Chad thought Millie’s losing their first child—and a second he’d mentioned the night of the fire—were far enough in the past that they could try again and all would be well.
I lay down in just a petticoat and chemise because my high-necked nightgown was too warm. As the hours of the night dragged on, I tossed and turned on my narrow bed, thinking of what must be going on down the hall. A feeling of darkest dread overtook me. I heard Prince George’s feet pass by in the hall again, pacing—at least I thought I did. I remembered the tales of poor Scottish Kittie Rankie, the ghost of the witch who walked the Abergeldie tower stairs. I had told no one of the gray, swirling mist I’d seen when I’d peeked through the keyhole that day we were trapped there. David and Bertie were convinced she’d slammed the door on us, but I’d pooh-poohed it all and kept the vision to myself. But now, I even smelled the prince’s cigar smoke through the door, so that was not my imagination, surely not a half-waking memory of the fire at Sandringham.