The Royal Nanny

by Karen Harper

  “Actually, Miss Margaretta Eager,” she said with a nervous nod at the card I still held in my hand. “Thank you for seeing me, Miss Bill—or I hear they call you Mrs. Lala here.”

  Probably in her mid- to late thirties, she had a round, flushed face. The walk from the train station had put pink in her cheeks, and she was perspiring through the dark blue jacket of her walking suit. Her handbag and parasol lay on the floor. Her fading reddish hair was speckled with gray, and her blue eyes looked faded or sad. Though she had said little, I picked up a slight lilt to her speech—Scottish or Irish, I thought. So whatever could this stranger want from me?

  She clutched her crocheted gloved hands tightly in her lap and, keeping her voice low as if we shared a secret, said, “You see, Mrs. Lala, I was royal nanny to Tsar Nicholas’s children in Russia before I had to leave, sent away, I was. Today I spent the fare to take a railway carriage clear out here because I hear you will be seeing them soon and I am desperate for your help.”

  Chapter 21

  Then we have much in common as head nurses to royal children,” I said, as Mrs. Eager shared her identity and her past. “Russia—what an adventure! But then, why are you here?”

  “To ask a favor,” she said, leaning forward. “Small, but so important to me.” She glanced down at a square piece of metal that just filled her palm. It looked to be silver, perhaps a facedown picture frame. “But, if you have a few minutes,” she went on in a rush, “for I know how busy you must be, I would like to explain a bit first.”

  “Yes, of course. The favor you mean, because I and my charges will see the Romanovs soon? I know it’s been in the London papers that Prince George and his family are going to meet with them on the Isle of Wight.”

  She nodded. She understood. It was so comforting to meet a stranger with whom I had much quickly in common.

  “Oh, the tsar’s visit has been in the London papers, all right,” she said with a disdainful toss of her head and slight frown.

  I told myself, that despite my instant sympathy for her, the woman was obviously of Irish background and that England always had an “Irish problem.” She seemed not to like the tsar, so should I trust her or did she have some bone to pick with that royal family?

  “I tell you,” she went on, “Parliament and the press have been screeching like banshees that the tsar is a brutal dictator. They’ve never yet let up about Bloody Sunday five years ago, no they have not. I was there when it happened, and it shouldn’t have, and I don’t forget what those in power do to the ones who prop up their thrones, for certain I don’t. Why, some don’t think Prince George should even meet with his cousin, but then, doesn’t family count for something? But Bloody Sunday . . . I can see why the Russian people are angry about that. Nearly a hundred dead and a thousand injured! I’m Irish, you see, so I can understand that, at least.”

  I knew Bloody Sunday was the day that the tsar’s Imperial Guard had fired on a march of unarmed Russian protestors in Moscow. Many, I’d heard, were displaced peasants and urban workers, who had come to present a petition to the tsar for better wages.

  “As I said, I was in Russia then,” she said, lowering her voice again and leaning closer across the small table. “It was the year little Alexey was born, the son the royal family and the nation had waited such a long time for, through four female babies.” She sniffed and fumbled for a handkerchief in her handbag. “My little girls,” she said and blew her nose. “And how blessed you are that you will see them, how they’ve grown and how they are getting on.”

  There was a knock on the door, which opened on Tessa, a kitchen maid, with a tray of tea and some biscuits with jam. “Please thank Mrs. Wentworth, Tessa,” I told her as I made room on the table between us. I could tell the girl was hoping to overhear something about my mystery guest, for she lingered a bit, eyeing Mrs. Eager.

  “Shall I pour then, Mrs. Lala?” she asked.

  “Thank you again, but I will manage.”

  When the door closed behind her, my guest went on as if we had not been interrupted. “The grand duchesses were my charges for nearly five years.”

  “You miss them, then? Do you have something for them?”

  She didn’t answer my question, but plunged on, “I’d go back in a heartbeat, though I was fearful at first. Even though it was lonely in Russia—well, I could hardly mingle with non-royal family nannies there. It’s always hard for the likes of us—you and me—caught between the royals we serve and the other servants. The imperial family is quite secluded for their protection, you see, protected by the Imperial Guard, by the tsar’s own security police and plainclothes men within and without. My dear girls were lonely too, but we got on so well, and then, finally, the heir came along while I was still there, the boy everyone had prayed for.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” I said as I poured her tea and put two spoonfuls of sugar in hers, which she indicated, “why did you leave? Did the girls grow too old for a head nurse—a nanny?”

  “Oh, no. I was their companion too, chaperoning them on walks or rides. But their parents sent me away just when their precious heir needed a nanny. He was given into the care of a woman named Mariya when it should have been me, it surely should have been. After all, English nannies are all the rage in Russia among the rich. But Mariya wasn’t opinionated like me, that’s what I overheard once. Oh, no, she’d never dare to so much as ask a question.”

  I looked up from my teacup. “So you were asked to leave?”

  She nodded as tears filled her eyes. Her teacup rattled in its saucer in her lap. I prayed she would not faint.

  “Dismissed, after all those years,” she whispered, “with no warning . . . because I was curious.” Again, she could not go on.

  “Don’t speak for a moment. Can you drink some tea?” I urged her.

  She managed that. “It’s not that I was replaced exactly. I think the tsar decided and Tsaritsa Alexandra said no more nannies. She did bring in another Russian woman to watch them too, a Sofya something or other, I heard, a sort of governess. And that woman stopped the girls’ letters and gifts to me. Sofya, I hear, is a stickler for discipline and is like a spy on the girls. Oh, yes, their parents dote on them, but now they have to protect Alexey. He is their only hope that the Romanovs can keep the throne, that is, with the unrest and rumors flying about all the time—the bad, dangerous feelings against the tsar. And the tsaritsa never was well liked with her German and English ties. She is often ill,” she said, whispering again as if the walls had ears. Finally, looking angry now instead of stricken, she took a sip of tea, then another. She downed the rest, and I poured her more.

  “Sad to have to live that way,” I said, “so isolated from and hated by one’s own people.”

  “The children surely can’t play with those lower than themselves—which is everyone.”

  “I do understand that,” I admitted, remembering poor David and Bertie at that football game with the village lads that was a disaster until Chad came along.

  “I tell you, Mrs. Lala, they are wonderful girls, spoiled, I suppose, but not snobbish. They sleep two to a room in narrow beds and wash with cold water in the mornings. They always teased me that they were starting to pick up my Irish brogue. Oh, they can be a handful, even boisterous, that they can.”

  My heart went out to her, a sister under the skin. I thought of poor David with his iron bed and cold baths at naval college and how I had been teased that David and Bertie had picked up some of my Cockney accent. And I thought of my boisterous, little Johnnie.

  “So, the favor you would ask?” I said to her in the lull as we both seemed steeped in our own memories.

  “Two, really. If, when you return, I might visit you again so you could tell me what you saw, what they said. The girls, I mean, since Alexey was never really mine and is severely guarded to keep his secret.”

  “You have hinted at such before. What secret?”

  “I wager your employers know it, but it is so sad, and I only
guessed it. That may be why they dismissed me so summarily, despite the pleadings of their dear daughters. The rumors fly about that the tsar’s heir may be anemic, but that’s not true. It’s worse,” she said so low that it sounded like a hiss. “He has the bleeder’s disease that is in the royal families descended from Queen Victoria. King Edward’s brother Leopold had it, I heard. Hemophilia, but no one is to know. I only tell you so that you will be aware what you see, why they coddle him outrageously, not just that he is their only son and heir. I swear, however much they love their girls, because I guessed that about Alexey—it’s why they let me go.”

  “I can see why they don’t want word on that out. After all those years waiting for a son, like our own King Henry VIII who went through all those wives and got a boy who didn’t live long.”

  “Don’t even say such! But, oh, yes, I even feared for a while, and the tsaritsa did too, I could tell, that Tsar Nicholas would have to divorce her to get an heir—like Napoleon divorced his love Josephine, they said.”

  I sat still, balancing my teacup on my knees, not drinking, my mind racing. “And besides telling you what I see of your precious, lost girls, what else then?” I asked her. “You mentioned a second thing.”

  Without breaking my steady gaze, she put her teacup back on the tray and fumbled for the silver square in her lap. She extended it to me. It was a framed photograph, one of her with the young grand duchesses, such pretty girls. They wore hats that looked like half moons and sashes over what appeared to be white, ruffled chiffon dresses. Pearls round their graceful necks—and Mrs. Eager in a plain dark dress. All so happy, arms entwined around each other. And most amazing, they were all smiling when it seemed no one, royals and commoners alike, ever smiled for photographs. She pointed each one out to me by name and told me of their personalities and preferences.

  “Mrs. Lala,” she said, “I have few treasures where I run a boardinghouse in Holland Park in London, just making ends meet now, no stipends or allotments from my days of service or my medical nursing days in Belfast. I know I could get a pretty penny for this silver frame. But—and I wish to be honest with you about what I’m asking you to do—it’s the only one I have that has a place to hide a note behind the picture. I am asking you to give this to the girls as a remembrance of me—Olga or Tatiana, the older two—and tell them I love them all and miss them. And whisper to them I have written a note secreted here, since I fear the ones I wrote them lately have been destroyed before they were read—or else they aren’t allowed to answer. Please.”

  I reached over to touch her gloved hand. “If I can. I will try. Surely, their guardians won’t mind that.”

  “No, you must do it in secret! You may have to outwit their watchdog Sofya, and don’t let Mariya see you either. And please, tell no one what I’ve shared with you about their heir. That, I think, is dangerous knowledge, so maybe I should not have told you. But I so wanted you to understand that I wasn’t let go for something bad I did. I think it was because I knew too much and—well, like my four Russian girls, I chatter too much. And so, in a kinder way, they have silenced them too with even more isolation, spies, and guards. I swear, you will see guards all about, and so you must be wary. If this is impossible, I will surely understand.”

  We held hands a moment in a silent pact, then drank our tea. She suddenly seemed hungry, so I let her eat most of the biscuits and take the rest for her trip back to London. I probably overstepped myself to ask the footman who sometimes drove the children’s pony cart to take her to the train station in it.

  I hid the picture of Margaretta Eager and Russia’s beautiful grand duchesses until I was ready to pack it—then decided to wrap it in a handkerchief and keep it in my handbag with me at all times. I wondered what the note secreted within said, but I didn’t look. I had no way of knowing if I would have the chance to give it to Her Highness Olga or Tatiana, or what would happen if my passing it to them would be discovered. I only knew how desperately I understood and sympathized with this other royal nanny, for I knew not what risks I would take if they sent me away and cut me off from my dear children.

  I WAS SOON to learn that security for the tsar’s arrival on English soil was so difficult that the two related royal families would first greet each other at sea from a distance to give the tsar’s forces time to establish themselves on the island. In the Channel off the Isle of Wight, the tsar’s favorite yacht, the Shtandart, was protected by two Russian cruisers, three destroyers, and ships of the British Fleet. Besides all that, it was the week of the race at Cowes leading up to this second day of August 1909, and the sea was peppered with small English racing and pleasure craft of all kinds.

  I stood on the deck of the royal British yacht Victoria and Albert, with a firm hold on Johnnie, who was also roped to me, while the rest of the family waved to the Russian royals from the railing. That is, the rest of the family minus Bertie, poor boy, who had the whooping cough and was in sick bay at the naval college, which he too now attended, and David, whom we would meet up with on shore.

  Even the king’s white-coated, long-haired terrier named Caesar barked a welcome. How Johnnie loved that dog with the stubby tail that flicked back and forth at the mere sight of the boy. Although he liked to watch the queen’s thirty or so elegant-looking borzoi dogs be fed off silver plates, he adored little Caesar. One of the first things he had learned to read were the words engraved on the dog’s Fabergé collar: I am Caesar, the King’s dog. Johnnie talked to Caesar sometimes and, I swear, the dog understood his roundabout logic better than I did!

  I squinted in the sun and stiff breeze to pick out Tsar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra with their four daughters, the beloved girls Margaretta Eager had not been eager to leave. I fought to shove aside the nightmare I’d had last night about her, for it was pure foolishness.

  I’d dreamed the former Russian nanny had handed me a photograph of myself standing and smiling amidst the six Wales children. It was all I had left, because they had been sent far away from me. It was dark, but I searched for them everywhere at Sandringham House in the places David and Bertie had liked to hide, and in the glasshouse amidst dying flowers, inside a cage with little chicks running hither and yon, and beneath the white, linen-covered tables under the huge marquee at the hunting party. I wandered through the cemetery of St. Mary Magdalene, calling for them amidst the graves.

  Then I found all six of their names on white crosses, each with the inscription, Suffer the little children . . .

  I jerked alert as a welcoming cannon boomed and crowds cheered.

  Johnnie was cheering too, jumping up and down. “Big noise, Lala, big noise!” he cried. “Papa shooting guns at Chad’s birds. They all fall down dead, but not my peeps! Not me neither!”

  I knelt and hugged him. He clung to me, and I was so grateful to God to be here and to have my boy healthy, unlike the little heir to the Russian throne, a secret I was willing to take to my grave for poor Mrs. Eager. The silver frame with her photograph and note felt heavy in my handbag until I could safely slip it—I hoped—to her dear, lost girls.

  Chapter 22

  Waves crashed on the beach and seagulls screeched overhead. Harry, George, and the “Tsarevich Alexey” shouted as they chased plovers and ran from the reach of the breakers. Mary, though I knew she’d just as soon dive into the waves as watch them, followed the lead of the four grand duchesses and kept her feet dry in her high-button shoes. David, nattily attired in his cadet naval uniform, escorted the five girls.

  He did so proudly, which warmed my heart. He was in a fine mood, not only to have escaped the naval school he detested for a day or two, but to have been able to see his grandfather, though the king and queen stayed mostly on the Victoria and Albert and let some of the activities come to them. After all, it was Prince George and Tsar Nicholas who were heading up this royal visit.

  I kept Johnnie on a tether, for I wasn’t sure what he would do and I was not in the mood to fight the surf to retrieve him. At least, I
thought, little Alexey could run about a bit, though followed closely by his personal one-man guard. I noted that the entire Russian retinue had been so protective of him when they first came ashore.

  Despite all that worry, Johnnie lifted my spirits. I was happy to see him so entranced by the many shells scattered on the sand.

  “If these she shells, Lala, where the he shells, the boy ones?” he asked me, turning each one over, evidently searching for its private parts. Well, I’d had no answer for that one, not now at least.

  He was also fascinated by the Brownie box cameras the Romanov sisters carried, snapping pictures of each other, even of us. Soon Johnnie picked up a piece of driftwood and aimed it at me, then at the others, chattering, “Click, click, click.” The grand duchesses even posed for his imaginary camera, so sweet and kind of them, but then they were used to obeying their brother, barely a year older than Johnnie. For one moment, when the oldest two girls, Olga and Tatiana, posed, flashing lovely smiles, I almost dared to slip the photograph in my handbag to them. But their guards stood too close, and we were quite exposed to view.

  “Our dyadkis,” Olga explained to Johnnie when he aimed the driftwood at the men with a click, click. If any of the Russians had been told Johnnie was a different sort of boy, they were not acting like it. “It means uncles, but they are just our companions, our own private shepherds of the flock, yes, Tati?” she asked her sister, and they shared a little laugh before moving on again.

  There was one opportunity missed, I thought, and clutched my handbag closer, praying I’d get a chance to secretly pass them the picture. I could see how Margaretta Eager had loved these girls, so full of life.

  The entire beach was cordoned off and patrolled by the tsar’s many security men, just like the whole island, as far as I could tell. Some of the guards rode bicycles, so wait until I told that to poor quarantined Bertie. Margaretta had been right that Tsar Nicholas—the adult British royals called him “Nickie”—was guarded like no one else I had ever seen.