by Tessa Arlen
“And who was this duchess, anyway, before she married?”
“Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.” I lapsed into the broad Highland dialect my grandmother had spoken, “Th’ duchess is as Scawts as ye ’n’ me, Ma, her fowk ur th’ Strathmores o’ Glamis.”
She gave me a knowing look. “Thun her gerls wull be Princess Elizubeth ’n’ Princess Margaret Rose tae ye, Marion—Their Ryle Highnessus. Ah hawp ye git that straecht.” She shook her head at my desire to work for southern royalty: soft from a life of privilege, and, if my description of the Duke of York was anything to go by, a man who wouldn’t say boo to a cow.
“I liked the way she put it, Ma, when she offered me the job; she said, ‘Why don’t you come down to us at Royal Lodge for a month?’ ” She made it sound like an invitation to visit, not an offer of employment as an interim governess. “ ‘And then you can see if you like us, and we like you. And if we get on, you can stay for the summer!’ ”
July 1, 1931
Royal Lodge, Home of the Duke of York
Windsor Great Park, Berkshire, England
I awoke to the cool, gray light of five o’clock in the morning leaking around the edges of the heavy curtains of my bedroom at Royal Lodge. I lay as I had gone to sleep, flat on my back with exhaustion and my arms by my sides. The only thing I could remember of my arrival was the car turning into the drive in the evening light and the large three-story house, as pretty as a bridal cake, glowing like a pink pearl in the last rays of the sun.
I watched the dark shadows in the room take on the commonplace shape of furniture as the light grew. A large wardrobe took up the wall by the door. Two small easy chairs with needlepoint cushions stood on either side of a fireplace. Books, organized by the height of their leather spines, were arranged in a library in the corner. Ebony-framed watercolors hung on green-and-white-striped papered walls. It was a comfortable and welcoming room, unlike the grand rose- and lily-scented apartments I had peered into as the butler escorted me up the graceful sweep of the marble staircase from the hall to the third floor on my arrival.
As the Daimler had drawn up in front of Royal Lodge, the Duke of York’s country house, I had sat forward, my cold hands clasped tightly across my knees to stop them from shaking. The pristine grand façade, with its windows streaming light in the darkening night, like an oceangoing passenger liner putting out to sea, was intimidating. I felt grubby and untidy. I hesitated, reluctant to leave my refuge, when the duke’s chauffeur opened the back door of the car. In our short journey the man who had rescued me from the confusing chaos of King’s Cross station had become my only ally in an alien world. “Here we are, now, Miss Crawford. Your long journey is finally over.” Mr. Hughes extended a large leather-clad hand to help me out of the car as a tall, gray-haired man came down the steps of the house to the drive. “Good evening, Miss Crawford, I am His Grace’s butler, Mr. Ainslie. Welcome to Royal Lodge.”
This sleek, well-pressed man with his quiet voice was nothing like the fat, patronizing majordomo, with soup stains on his tie, that the Elgins employed. “Such a long journey to make on your own. Your first visit to down south, isn’t it?” He commiserated with my long hours in a third-class carriage, with four changes on drafty station platforms, with an empathetic nod.
I turned to look for my suitcase. “Not to worry about your luggage, Miss Crawford. James will bring it up to you.” A young man emerged from the shadows of the portico and took my shabby suitcase from the chauffeur. I took three steps forward to stand blinking on the bright threshold as James disappeared through a door in the paneled wall.
A black-and-white marble-tiled hall stretched ahead of me. “The princesses are already in bed,” Mr. Ainslie reassured me. “The duke and duchess are out for the evening and will stay the night in their London house, so you will have a chance to relax and get your bearings. Perhaps you would care for some supper?” He half turned as we started up the stairs. All I could think of was getting out of my tweed suit; the house felt incredibly hot after our drafty cottage and the windswept country stations I had waited in.
“Thank you, I’m not hungry, Mr. Ainslie, but I would love a cup of tea,” I said as I stumbled on the top stair. I was too tired to eat and yearned to kick off my new shoes that pinched.
He opened a door in a wide corridor. “This is your room; there is a little sitting room through there.” He waved to a door in the opposite wall. “The bathroom is across the corridor. Please tell James if there is anything you need when he brings up your luggage. Your tea will be with you directly.” He twitched a curtain into place and looked around the room. “We are glad to have you with us, Miss Crawford. A good night’s rest to you.” He left me to the silence of my rooms, and I sank down onto the bed and kicked off my shoes. The door opened again: a maid brought in a tea tray, her eyes alert under lowered lids. She murmured something about bread and butter before she left.
I shed clothes as fast as I could, put on my nightgown, drank a cup of hot, sweet tea, and wolfed down the three slices of thinly cut bread and butter. I pulled back the coverlet and laid my tired body down between crisp linen sheets. Cramped limbs stretched out in gratitude. I pulled the blankets up around my ears and closed my eyes.
* * *
• • •
“Lilibet—she’s sleeping.” I awoke to full sunlight and a small, round-faced little girl in a white embroidered cotton nightgown standing at the side of my bed. She turned and lifted a finger to her lips.
A taller girl joined her as I struggled to sit up. “Hullo,” she said. Large, clear blue eyes gazed down at me from a serious face. “We did knock, but I don’t think you heard us. I’m Lilibet, and this is Margaret Rose. We are awfully sorry to wake you, but we really wanted to see you before anyone else did.” She frowned that she might have said the wrong thing. “What I really mean is, would you like to join us for breakfast?” Her gravity and self-assurance were endearing, as was the concern that she had intruded. The two sisters politely waited for my answer. They had their father’s large eyes, but their gaze was as steady and direct as their mother’s.
“Thank you, that would be lovely, and as I am sure you have already guessed, I’m Marion Crawford.” I looked at the clock on the mantel. Dear God, it was nearly eight! In order to avoid an undignified scramble for my dressing gown, I asked, “And where do you eat your breakfast?”
Lilibet looked up at the clock too. “At nine o’clock in our day nursery, but you should be there just before. It’s down the corridor to your right.” She smiled; it was a polite, rather tentative smile, and showed missing front teeth.
“It’s buttered eggs today, and they are slithery if they get cold.” Her sister’s candor widened Lilibet’s smile, and she took her by the hand. “Come on, Margaret, we have to go now. Alah gets cross if we aren’t dressed in time for breakfast.”
“Alah is your nanny?”
Lilibet nodded. “She is Mrs. Knight, but we call her Alah.”
Alah. In this orderly atmosphere of sunlit rooms and buttered eggs, I wasn’t surprised that someone akin to God would be annoyed about little things like impunctuality.
Chapter Two
August 1936
Royal Lodge, Windsor Great Park, Berkshire, England
I looked down at the curly head bobbing at my elbow. “Will you give me a boost, Crawfie? I can’t see anything!” At just-turned six, Margaret Rose was still a short, round dot of a girl.
“There is nothing much to see.” I put my hands on either side of her waist and lifted her up onto the base of the stone balustrade that ran along the front of the roof of Royal Lodge. “Better?” I took her hot hand in mine to steady her as she stood on tiptoe to peer down to the drive below. “Yes, a little bit, but it’s mostly all gravel.”
I inhaled the soft summer air: freshly cut grass with an undernote of summer flowers. “You can see the rose garden from here. Look, there’s Mr.
Carter cutting blooms for the dining room.” I never tired of this serene view from this exquisite house with its peaceful gardens surrounded by ancient cedars of Lebanon. Neither could I imagine my life without the Yorks’ little girls; they had become a part of me as much as I had become a part of their family.
The letter I had labored over to my mother at the end of that summer in 1931, informing her of my decision to stay on, had been the hardest one I had ever written. The immense distance between Dunfermline and Windsor had yawned greater with every line. Her swift reply, in return, had reassured me that she understood my decision. The York family offered great opportunities for me to experience a different and broader view of life—at least she had the grace to say so, but I knew that she was lonely for my company.
Margaret Rose scuffed the toes of her shoes against the stone as she levered herself up another inch, bringing me back to the present.
“Look, it’s Papa and Mummy. They’re coming out to wait for Uncle David and his girlfriend to arrive.” We both stared down at the tops of two heads below us, one bare in the dull afternoon sun, the other crowned by a pale blue hat covered in mauve silk roses, as the duke and duchess awaited the arrival of England’s new king for tea.
Now she had seen all there was to see, Margaret was ready to play. “Come on, Crawfie, Lilibet will be here in a minute—we’ve got to hide.”
I held her still for a moment longer, as the duchess’s light, clear voice lifted up to us, bell-like in the heavy August air. “He’s going to marry her, Bertie. He probably asked her months ago, and of course you know she said yes.”
I leaned forward to try to catch the hesitant, indistinct murmur of the duke’s reply.
“No, Bertie darling, I don’t think it is a passing thing,” the duchess said through trilling laughter. “He’s completely head over heels. It’s serious this time.”
The duke raised his voice. “She’s . . . a nov . . . novelty.”
“I only wish it were that simple.” The duchess’s voice had an edge to it, as if she found his hesitancy, his skepticism of what she was telling him, irritating. “But you know they’ll never let him stay if he marries her.”
I was eavesdropping, but I simply couldn’t help myself. I craned out farther, straining to catch his reply. But there was no need; his voice was strong with conviction. “He would never do that.” The duke was easily exasperated, but there was something else beneath his impatient and emphatic response. I watched the duchess reach out her hand to pat his forearm, the way I had seen her do countless times when her husband’s temper began to fray. She pats him as if he is a highly strung horse, I realized.
The duke cleared his throat. “He would not do that to me—we’ve talked about it.” Then, with the beginning of doubt: “H-h-he has given me h-h-his word.”
“Let’s pray that he keeps it; otherwise they’ll be looking to us to fill the post, and it will be goodbye to our cozy life here,” the duchess said. The blare of a horn, and long green car swooped up the drive toward the house. “Good heavens, what is he driving?”
The duke didn’t answer, but I watched his head droop forward and knew he was gazing at his feet.
“Is that his new car?” She touched his elbow, bringing him back to the arrival of his brother. “It’s green; what a strange idea!”
“Yes, he’s very prou . . . proud of it; it’s called a station wagon. It’s American.”
“Of course it is. Well, at least she will not be coming up to Balmoral next week!”
Margaret’s hand slipped out of mine to pull on my arm. “Come on, Crawfie, let’s hide behind the chimneys.” I turned away from the roof’s edge, but the duchess’s earlier words were still hanging in the still air, as heavy with warning as the clouds gathering on the eastern horizon: You know they’ll never let him stay if he marries her. What puzzled me most was that her tone had not expressed the anxiety and alarm I had heard in that of her husband. She spoke with the calm complacency of a woman who knew what the future held for her.
“Caught you, caught you both!” Lilibet’s head appeared through the schoolroom sash window. “You aren’t even hiding. Anyway, I always look here first because it’s Margaret’s favorite spot.”
“That’s not fair—you didn’t give us enough time!” Margaret jumped down from the balustrade ledge.
“Yes, I did—more than enough, because Alah made me tidy up the mess you made of the toy cupboard.”
Margaret Rose put her hands on her hips. “It was not a mess; you just like to tidy everything. And we’ve only just got here!”
Hair ribbon coming loose, my little urchin with her scuffed shoes and grubby hands lifted a chin at her freshly washed and brushed sister. Lilibet’s appraising stare was derisive. “Have you seen the state of your dress—how did you manage to tear it? You’ve had ages to find a hiding spot. Now it’s my turn.”
“No, Lilibet, no! It’s just not fair!” Margaret’s continual cry if life threatened to thwart her plans. “Uncle David has just arrived for tea, and I haven’t hidden yet!” Her lower lip jutted in protest.
Lilibet climbed out through the window onto the roof and sauntered past us to hang over the balustrade. “Papa and Mummy are getting into his new car. Where on earth are they going?”
Margaret stamped her foot, and tears rolled down her grubby cheeks. “And now he’s leaving, and I haven’t even said hullo or had tea!”
I crouched down in front of her and held out my handkerchief. “They are just off for a quick spin in His Majesty’s new car. Come now, blow your nose, Margaret. So, tell me”—I lifted her wrist—“what time is it on your new watch?”
“It’s five minutes to flippin’ four.” She giggled at the shocked gasp from Lilibet. Margaret had recently befriended a new page who muttered “flippin’ heck” under his breath in times of stress.
“Just five minutes to four o’clock will do quite nicely, thank you. And what time is tea?”
“Five o’clock.”
“Good girl, so you see we have time for one more round of hide-and-seek, and I do believe it’s my turn to hide. Come on, in you get!” I helped Margaret Rose in through the window and ran down the back stairs to the utility cupboard between the bottom of the back stairs and the house’s main staircase. I would have time for a private moment, or two, to ponder the scraps of conversation I had heard from the roof.
Surely the king has no intention of marrying Mrs. Simpson? All of his previous affairs were with women who had husbands, and he hadn’t wanted to marry them.
The duke’s stammered response to his wife’s determination that the king was head over heels came back to me: H-h-he has given me h-h-his word. My heart went out to a man who adored and trusted his urbane and confident elder brother. But his trust had begun to unravel about the edges at his wife’s insistence that the king intended to marry Mrs. Simpson. Her confident words made his own stick in his throat; he was incredulous that his beloved brother might let him down.
But it is time he married, now he’s king—he’s all of forty-two.
But to Mrs. Simpson? I tried to remember my constitutional history. Our monarch could not marry a Roman Catholic—of that I was quite clear. Britain’s monarch was the head of the Church of England, so marriage to a Catholic was out of the question.
Perhaps the disapproval I had heard in Mr. Ainslie’s and Alah’s voices when Mrs. Simpson’s name was mentioned was because she was a Catholic? No, it was because she was divorced, not from Mr. Simpson, who was very much alive, and apparently also singularly active in London’s hectic social scene. And didn’t Mrs. Simpson have an ex-husband tucked away somewhere in America? I pondered the American’s two husbands. It was unimaginable that our king, however progressive he thought he was, would even think of marrying a twice-divorced woman.
Divorce, such a tricky business in our country, might be legal, but it wasn’t respectable,
and the church would not sanction the king’s marriage to this American divorcée while both her husbands were still alive.
As I crouched under the low ceiling of the utility cupboard among the mops and buckets in the dark, the next thought plinked into my head with stunning clarity. If our playboy king of seven meager months, whose coronation was still in the planning stages, insisted on marrying Mrs. Simpson—my head came up so sharply that it hit the ceiling of my hiding place—wouldn’t it cause a crisis of such massive proportions that the only way he could marry would be to abdicate the throne? The fast-thinking Duchess of York obviously thought so. If I hadn’t heard her confident assurances, minutes earlier, I would have laughed off the idea of Bertie as King of England as an impossibility.
I was fond of the duke: the kindest and most generous of fathers, a devoted husband, and a thoughtful and considerate employer. But his drawbacks as monarch were considerable. His reticence and his standoffish addiction to privacy were one thing, but dislike of public occasions and his stumbling and often stopped speech were not the stuff of which kings are made. Poor man, he wouldn’t have the inclination or the stamina for that awful job.
Two pairs of feet thundered down the back stairs to my hiding place, and the crunch of car wheels on the gravel outside reminded me that the grown-ups had returned. Time to pull myself together.
It was a two-pronged attack: Lilibet threw open the door to my hiding place from the back stairs, and Margaret, with the flourish of a determined conjurer, opened the concealed door in the paneling of the main staircase, as the king, the duke and duchess, and Mrs. Simpson walked into the hall.
“Found you, I found you first!” Margaret yelled, fizzing excitement, as both Lilibet and I emerged from the between-stairs cupboard at a more dignified pace.