The Royal Nanny

by Karen Harper

  I jumped as I heard footsteps behind me. I spun around—Chad. Close. So near . . . We’d been together but always with the children and now to be so suddenly alone . . .

  “Charlotte, I thought it was you. Why are you here? Isn’t the new boy better?” Stopping two tombstones away, he snatched off his cap and turned it in his hands as he spoke.

  “Yes, a bit better each day, though he struggles to breathe sometimes. They named him John, and I wish that they had not. It is good to honor those we’ve lost, but clinging to memories can make things worse,” I said and pointed at the name on the tombstone.

  “Ah,” he said, frowning as his eyes went swiftly over me. When he looked at me that way, I always felt his gaze as if it were a physical caress. I hoped he didn’t think my words referred to us—our loss of each other. “Yes, I’ve seen a baby fight for breath,” he added, his voice breaking.

  I realized he must mean that his own child—a son, I’d heard—had struggled that way too. I confided, “I thought I’d come here for a few minutes, grieve for this lost lamb, grateful my new, little charge is holding his own.”

  “I often walk here. At first, I didn’t think it right to approach you so that we would be alone again—even without a net.” One corner of his firm mouth lifted, but in a grimace or a smile? “I’m here also to . . . to remember my son,” he said, his voice rough.

  He gestured back the way he must have come, toward the simply marked graves with the low, crudely cut headstones, compared to these large, ornate ones that were tied to the royal family.

  “Oh,” I whispered, and tears burned my eyes. “I should have known he would be here somewhere.”

  He walked away from the church with a simple gesture that I should follow him. We stopped over a nearly flat stone, facing each other, looking down at it. The grass over the little grave seemed to be worn at the edges by footsteps. Chad’s? His wife’s?

  The gravestone read BOY REAVER. “His name is—was—Matthew,” Chad whispered.

  I know it was foolhardy here in the open to take his hand, but I did. “I’m sure you will have another child,” I told him.

  “Would that I had you to tend him or her,” he whispered. He sniffed hard, squeezed my hand, loosed it and walked away.

  I stood there a moment, listening to a ruffed male grouse in the nearby woodlot make its distinctive drumming sound with its wings to attract a mate. Chad had told me of that the very day I first arrived at Sandringham, and I’d heard it many a time since these last nine years. I remembered too Queen Alexandra’s agate grouse David had pilfered the first time I’d visited the Big House. He’d claimed it was to give to Chad. Poor David, wanting to please Chad as if he were almost a foster father at times, as was Finch to him.

  I could only hope and pray that David and Bertie would get over their frustrations and fears, just the way I hoped and prayed that someday I would get past my hopeless love for Chad Reaver.

  Chapter 17

  In August of 1905, when Johnnie was a month old and fully in my care, all of us were told we would be summoned to Princess May’s boudoir at midafternoon. That, of course, was not unusual, but the timing for it was—earlier than our usual promptly-at-four. I knew something was afoot, though she was much recovered, quite her old self. She went about during the day, corseted as tight as ever, though Rose said not with the same waistline. She held Johnnie from time to time, but treated him as if he were fragile. She would pass him back to me quickly, sometimes right after he settled into her arms.

  I had a policy of always telling the princess the truth about her children when she asked. That Mary did not like to study, unless it was about horses. David still fidgeted and Bertie still stuttered. The prince and princess were dismayed that little Harry, now five years old, lisped, switching his w’s and r’s, so that he said his own name as Hawee. I had worked with him but felt as helpless as I did with Bertie’s sad stammering. But most unsettling of all to me was that Johnnie still had rough breathing spells.

  “Well, whatever will it be next with these children, who are given every benefit?” the prince had shouted one day at Finch, Mr. Hansell, Madame Bricka, Mary’s governess, and me. I found him and the princess both short with me, despite their earlier appreciation, but then we all understood outside pressures as well as those within.

  Despite the king’s increasing popularity here at home and even in finicky France, Britain was wracked with unrest. Rural folk of my class had dared to organize a so-called March for Unemployed People to London, but the king had refused to meet with them. At least, thank God, he had not ordered the crowd to be fired upon as had his cousin Tsar Nicholas in a similar situation this January in Russia, an event that had been dubbed Bloody Sunday in the British press.

  Also, women called suffragettes were demanding the vote, though most of the royals and nobles, I had heard, called them “New Women.” I rather liked that title, for I had lately come to think of myself as a “new woman,” one whose vocation was to be her life, one who would not marry and have children of her own. I thought it strange, though, that the word “suffrage” sounded as if it had to do with suffering, but meant having the vote. And hadn’t women, even in these modern times, always suffered?

  Sadly, Chad’s wife, Millie, had miscarried again, and I’d only seen him from afar. I guess the prince had decided Chad’s field trips and nature lectures to his eldest children were over. At age thirty, I knew I had best be my own woman, if not exactly a new one.

  Here at Sandringham, Princess May and Queen Alexandra were still not getting on. Mabel, Rose, and I were among the few to realize this had all come to a head in a sort of unspoken contest over which woman could collect the most Fabergé agate animals. It was a sort of joke between Mabel and me to keep count of our respective mistresses’ new birds and beasts.

  I’d learned much about the little carvings in these last years, such as Fabergé was not a Frenchman but a jeweler and artist who lived in Russia and was mostly patronized by the Waleses’ cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, and his Romanov family. But what the queen and princess coveted now was something called Fabergé eggs. Mabel and I had a bet on which of our mistresses would come up with one of those first, and then a new competition would be on.

  One day Mabel and I sat on the bench by the lake in our few hours off that we could coordinate. Mabel told me, “Agate animal number twenty-one, a rooster, no less, has appeared right on the table next to the piano. When someone plays it loud, the rooster scoots across, and I’m afraid it will fall off. Well, I tell the maids when they dust there, like I did for years, move it back away from the edge. I heard Her Majesty tell Milady Knollys that Princess May doesn’t have a rooster or a tally of statues that comes even close to hers.”

  I didn’t say it, even to Mabel, but with so much upheaval in the country, didn’t the queen have more to worry about than besting her daughter-in-law’s stone animal collection? But I did confide to Mabel, “I heard the princess is getting things she fancies from homes she visits. She admires something so fervently that they can’t help but offer it to her. Lady Dugdale had the pluck to tell her that her hostesses will start hiding things soon. Princess May lived in Italy once, you know, and learned all about great art and such.”

  “Which the queen finds boring. Not that those agate animals aren’t fine art. Char, why do you keep looking up at the window of York House?”

  “I made your sister promise that she’d wave a handkerchief at the window if Johnnie has a spell, that’s all.”

  “That’s all? You worry about him all the time. He’s better, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. Difficulties fewer and farther between. It’s just he expects to see me when he wakes. He’s . . . he’s different from the others, even the ones I tended as babies. A bit more sensitive. Well, I’ve got to run, my dear. And will Sandringham House still be standing without you? There’s something big coming at the little house, I can smell it in the wind.”

  “Big, like what, Char?” she asked, stoppi
ng to turn to me. “Come on, tell true!”

  “Some sort of announcement from the prince and princess. I only pray the king is not ill with all this national ado, because—just like little David doesn’t want to be king, so he says—I don’t think the prince ever wants to be king either. And don’t you dare even tell one of the queen’s agate animals I said so!”

  We hugged and were on our ways, Mabel cheekily humming “Rule Britannia” and I, glancing up at the window again. It was the one from which I used to watch for Chad down by the lake, the one now where little Johnnie slept.

  “YOUR MOTHER AND I have something to tell you,” the prince announced to his children and their staff as we stood behind the five of them and I held Johnnie in my arms.

  To my surprise, rather than letting him do the talking, the princess spoke. “We had such a triumphant tour of the empire the year your grandfather became king, that we are being sent to India in mid-October, and will be away until April.”

  Mary said, “But that’s—why, that’s nearly half a year!”

  “My dearest ones, I know you will miss us, and we shall miss you all greatly, but this is very important for your grandfather, for Britannia, and us too.”

  Princess May beamed as she explained it all with a smile and sweeping gestures as if showing them exotic India itself. I recalled how the previous tour had given her a lift, more self-confidence, to be so welcomed and cheered—and how the children had hardly known her when she returned home.

  She went on explaining the places they would visit, “Indore, Benares, Bombay—we’ll send you wonderful postcards, of course.”

  All that meant little to any of them, though David and Bertie would soon have Hansell making them memorize details about those sites. These two oldest would run rampant again, with the blessing and abetting of their royal grandparents. I could read Bertie’s face and demeanor: He was happy to escape his father’s correcting and scolding him for his stuttering. David would be even harder to control, but it would give me more time to work with Harry’s lisp. And in those six months of Johnnie’s delicate infancy, the precious child would be more mine that ever.

  FEW COULD PRY me away from Johnnie while the Waleses were gone, but one glorious late autumn day while they were in India, Hansell and Finch dragged me outside, though I protested that I didn’t want to ride a bicycle. If they did their lessons well, David and Bertie with Mary right behind, were allowed to go flying down the slant of road toward Wolferton Station on the two-wheeled wonders of freedom.

  David had told me it made him feel the “very, very best ever,” so I was all for it. Bertie stammered less these days, especially when he came in from rides. Like Mary, the boys rode horses, but not with the love she did. It was their bicycles that were their escape from lessons and worries, and, at time, loneliness.

  “Come on, then, Mrs. Lala,” Finch insisted, hustling me outside before I even had time to pin on a hat. The cool wind lifted my skirts, and the sun felt like a warm caress on my pale face. I did manage to untie my apron, so it wouldn’t be soiled. It was a new one with fine trim, sent to me by Dr. Williams to replace the one that had held Johnnie—which I wish I hadn’t discarded now. That baby on my lap was perhaps the closest I would ever come to childbirth.

  Finch went on, “There will be a good lot of us, and you won’t have to fret for the children. We’ll do that, eh, Mr. Hansell?” he asked with a wink at his coworker.

  “But I don’t really ride,” I protested. “I’ve watched it often enough, but I never had a bike of my own, and Finch has only given me two lessons on Bertie’s bike, and that was months ago.”

  “We’ll get you started. No fretting,” Hansell insisted in his best tutor’s voice. “And someone will be with you.”

  We walked out to the cluster of bicycles, leaned against the side wall of York Cottage. I believe the king had purchased every one of them though he never rode himself. David and Bertie grabbed theirs and began riding in circles, impatient to be off. Mary held on to her handlebars strangely, as if they were a horse’s reins. I saw one bike was built for two. Were Mr. Hansell or Finch planning to ride with me? Was that why I had nothing to worry about?

  I hesitated only a moment longer, thinking the children deserved this fun while their parents were off cutting ribbons in faraway India. I was just enough in the “new woman” mood to give this a try. Dr. Williams had said I had grit and go, and I supposed I was out to prove it today.

  Hansell steadied me as I climbed onto the backseat of the bicycle built for two. The seat seemed oh so small, but I managed it despite my skirts. Balance was the hardest thing. I remembered that from my maiden voyage and another attempt on one of these contraptions. Truly, I had the hang of it but was yet a bit afraid to ride downhill as the others always did. I feared the so-called brakes wouldn’t break my headlong hurtle clear to the railway station.

  “You ready, Chad?” Finch bellowed, looking behind me. “We got her out, and she’s set to go!”

  “What?” I said, twisting to see Chad jogging around the corner of the cottage. “They didn’t tell me you would be here. I heard you helped Bertie when he fell off near the woods but I’m not sure . . .”

  “I am,” Chad interrupted and mounted the same bike on the seat ahead of me. “You need to get out now and again, and today’s the day.”

  I leaned forward and said to his broad back, “Are you certain this is wise?”

  “No. But life is even shorter than I ever realized, Charlotte Bill, so here we go!”

  David, Bertie, and Mary were long gone, with Finch and Mr. Hansell riding after them. “Finch owed me a favor,” Chad threw back over his shoulder as—I’m sure without much help from me—he righted the bike and started off, while I struggled to stay upright. Had I just been abducted? And by the man I’d adored for years? It seemed wrong and yet so right.

  “Hang on!” he called back and pedaled even harder as we started downhill.

  I had no choice. I hung on for dear life. And it was fine with me.

  Chapter 18

  The wind ripped long strands of my hair loose behind me. Pine trees lining the road whizzed by. I found my pedaling had to match Chad’s, and he set a fast pace. This ride downhill was foolhardy, outrageous, and quite grand.

  He began to sing, which I’d never heard him do before, from that song about Daisy, written about King Edward’s previous mistress, no less: “I’m half crazy all for the love of you . . .”

  Peering around his shoulder, I could see the others ahead of us, racing toward the station. We passed some village workers on the road, trimming trees. Chad shouted a halloo to them. I would have waved, but my hands were gripping the handlebars for dear life. Had this solid, reliable man taken leave of his senses? Wouldn’t it spread like wildfire that Chad Reaver, the head gamekeeper, a married man, was riding madly with a woman not his wife? It was my duty to guard my reputation too.

  “Chad, this is a lark, but we should turn round and go back,” I called over his shoulder.

  “You and I can’t go back, my love. Too late.”

  “Don’t call me that. Your duty—”

  “Yes, I know. Duty calls, but I’m not listening.”

  Despite the fact we were hurtling downhill, he somehow applied the brakes and we came to a slow stop. He put one foot down to steady us as we tipped a bit.

  “Get off,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Charlotte, get off the bicycle and stand beside it. I need to speak to you and we can stand here, looking at the bike as if there’s a problem with it.”

  “There is a problem with it. We shouldn’t be together like this, in private at night or in broad daylight with half the estate folk watching.”

  “Get off the bicycle.”

  I did while he held it steady. As I stood beside it on the side of the road nearly to the station, he bent over it, looking at it, not me. I should have waited for him to speak, but I blurted, “I wanted to write a condolence message for the loss
of your second child, but I thought it unwise, that Millie might take it amiss. I see you buried the baby next to her brother.”

  Not looking at me, he nodded. “Did you leave the bouquet of flowers there about a week after?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked up, frowning. For one moment I feared he was angry with me for interfering. “Thank you,” he said. “That was kind. And like some silly, love-struck swain, I kept one of the roses, dried and dead as it is now.”

  “Oh. And, how is she—Millie?”

  “Hell-bent on being a mother, while I fear for her—and us. The doctor said it could kill her, so our . . . our relationship is difficult. I’m finding it hard to take the bad with the good.”

  Tears prickled behind my eyes, but I didn’t cry. “Like Princess May and Prince George now. No more children, I think, but perhaps it isn’t even possible after Johnnie’s difficult birth.”

  “And how is your newest charge?” he asked, going back to fussing with the bike.

  “Better at breathing. Growing some, but not as he should. Slow to roll over. He should have done that about a month ago.”

  “Well, you would know about those things. You’re more mother to him than Princess May,” he said, straightening and clapping his hands as if ridding himself of dirt.

  “You mustn’t say that.”

  “Only to you. I just wanted to talk, though I admit I’d rather kiss and caress you.”

  My cheeks flamed with heat, and my lower belly began to flutter. “Talking like that doesn’t help.”

  “I know, but I dare hope you feel somewhat the same. It helps me to be honest with you. No more rolling around on the ground together, but I didn’t want you to think I was angry with you. Life is precious and short—too short for some,” he added, his voice bitter. “Whatever happens, I just wanted you to know. And now, we shall say the bicycle is fixed, and we’d best catch up with your three eldest children before David and Bertie come charging up here to help us. Here,” he said, taking my elbow and helping me to get back on. “You’ll have to really work hard, sweetheart, when we pedal back uphill. Milady Lala, you have a man who shall always love you from afar. No, don’t say a thing. Here, your skirt is going to be caught.” He pulled my hem from the pedal and mounted ahead of me.