The Royal Governess

by Wendy Holden

  The Duchess of York stood in the doorway. “You can’t sit there! It’s Queen Victoria’s favorite chair. No one’s ever allowed to sit there, ever!”

  From this unpromising start, things went from bad to worse. Ivy, Marion discovered, had not been joking about any of it. At dinner, in the vast paneled dining room, six earsplitting pipers really did circle the table, one of them, as advertised, clearly drunk. The wizened creature who preceded them, wrapped in what looked like a huge brown rug, really was the head butler whose predecessor had stood in for Prince Albert when he was being painted as a Highland shepherd by Landseer.

  Marion’s disbelief had been suspended so often she had decided just to leave it hanging. Her neighbors were an elderly man called Canon Dalton, and Sister Agnes, an old woman in an orange wig. Neither spoke a word to her.

  Few people spoke at all; the royal circle seemed to be a small one, which was perhaps why she had been asked to the meal, to swell numbers. The diners huddled in the middle of the long table. After the deafening pipes, the silence was profound. Fork clattered against plate. An expression of agonized boredom transfixed the Prince of Wales’ face.

  “DINNER AT BALMORAL DOESN’T COST MUCH!” boomed the king suddenly as he helped himself to salmon from the shepherd-butler’s silver platter. “SALMON FROM THE RIVER! VENISON FROM THE HILL! RASPBERRIES FROM THE GARDEN! ALL MOST ECONOMICAL!” His voice ricocheted off the paneled walls.

  “Quite so, sire,” said Canon Dalton hurriedly.

  Marion stared at her plate, which, along with the cutlery and glassware, bore Queen Victoria’s monogram. It depended on what was meant by economical, she thought. If you didn’t count the astronomical fixed costs of estate and servants, perhaps it was.

  The Prince of Wales sighed loudly. His father rounded on him immediately. “WILL YOU GO OUT WITH THE GUNS TOMORROW?”

  Reluctance rippled the delicate features. “If you don’t mind, Papa, I’d rather stay here and work on my needlepoint.”

  “NEEDLEPOINT?” the king almost screamed. “NOT GO OUT AND SHOOT THE GROUSE, THE GREATEST SPORTING BIRD IN THE WORLD!”

  The prince rose, evidently wearied of the turn the conversation had taken. The monarch continued to glare at him. Now that he was standing it could be seen that the prince had changed from the kilt of earlier. His new outfit was as strikingly fashionable as his previous had been quaint: a suit of exuberant check over a jersey of peacock blue. His colorful striped silk tie was fastened with an unusually broad knot. His trousers were baggy and had wide, modish turnups, American style.

  “IS IT RAINING IN HERE?” his father yelled.

  The prince was lighting a cigarette. He jumped, and it dropped from his mouth. “Raining, Papa?”

  “WHY TURN UP ONE’S TROUSERS EXCEPT TO CROSS PUDDLES? TWEED SUITS ARE ONLY SUITABLE FOR RAT CATCHERS!”

  Marion glanced at Queen Mary. Surely she would intervene? She sat expressionless and unmoving apart from the glitter of her diamonds in the candlelight.

  The king resumed his attack. “YOU’RE THE WORST-DRESSED MAN IN LONDON! NOT A SINGLE ONE OF YOUR FRIENDS IS A GENTLEMAN!”

  With this damning indictment ringing through the air, the king turned back to his dinner. He shoved some lettuce through his beard with a force bordering on savagery. “Papa—” began the Prince of Wales. He had found another cigarette and was lighting that one now. His hand shook.

  “KEEP QUIET!” The infuriated monarch rammed in more salad.

  The Prince of Wales took a drag of his cigarette, sending a plume of smoke high into the air. “It’s too late now.”

  “YOU’RE DAMNED RIGHT IT IS! MORE’S THE PITY!”

  “You misunderstand me, Papa. I was just trying to tell you that there was a caterpillar on your lettuce. But you’ve eaten it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It was obvious, given this state of hostility between the king and his heir, that Mrs. Simpson was unlikely to make an appearance. Any fun that was to be had they would have to make themselves. As the atmosphere in the castle could be cut with a ceremonial sword, it seemed wisest to look outside it.

  Marion scoured the surroundings in the hope of finding ordinary distraction for Lilibet. But if this was tough in the London of 1932, the Balmoral estate, where everything had ground to a halt in 1851, made it almost impossible. There was, for a start, a lot of blood to avoid. Ivy had warned her about the daily return of wagons heaped with the corpses of the greatest sporting bird in the world, the ponies bearing huge dead stags, their flanks running with blood and their eyes rolling upward. Marion took Lilibet’s shoulders and deftly steered her away.

  At night, in her chilly, cheerless room at the end of the nursery corridor, Marion listened to the rain beat on the roof.

  * * *

  • • •

  “LET’S HAVE A golden-syrup-bread-eating competition!”

  Lilibet stared. “A what?”

  Marion feigned amazement. “You mean you’ve never tried to eat so many slices of bread and syrup that you’ve almost burst? Just to beat another person?”

  The golden curls shook in a negative.

  “Think you can beat me?”

  The princess’s eyes gleamed. “Yes!”

  In the middle of a nearby stream was an island that proved to be the perfect spot. Lilibet proved a champion syrup-eater. Her unbeaten record was twelve.

  “I don’t know what’s happened to her appetite,” Mrs. Knight huffed, when it was time for nursery tea. Marion avoided Lilibet’s laughing eye and felt slightly guilty. Mrs. Knight, of late, was showing dangerous signs of reasonableness. Contrary to expectation, she had accepted the playclothes without murmur. Perhaps she was just sick of all the washing, or had left her goffering irons in London.

  Down by the railway line, they waited, breathless with anticipation, for the Aberdeen Fish Express. As it was heard in the distance, Lilibet stared excitedly at the coins on the rails. Marion had shown her how to place them so that the train’s weight would flatten them out as it passed. After the locomotive roared through with its load of North Sea cod, they scrambled down the bank. “It worked!” shrieked Lilibet, holding out a palm on which a squashed penny, shiny with the impact, reposed. “And just look what it’s done to Grandpapa’s face!”

  They went up into the hills. The princess was a good walker, willing to go out in all weathers, which they often encountered in a single day. It was while looking for shelter that they first discovered the bothies—small stone houses hidden in remote wood clearings or alongside high secret lochs. While some retained their original appearance, of simple shelters for hunters and shepherds, some had been considerably enlarged and aggrandized, for excursionists from the castle, presumably. One such, the highest and remotest of all, even had a piano in it, and a chaise longue.

  It was their favorite and they often visited it. They made toast before the fire, Lilibet holding it on the fork in the flames until it was practically black before tipping it onto VR-monogrammed plates.

  They would eat on the bench outside the door and watch the wildlife, which up here was especially magnificent. Wide-wingspanned birds swooped over the lonely lochs, and the ptarmigan—the snow grouse—rose silently up the sheer, dark cliff face of Lochnagar.

  One day their route up took them past the cairns: eleven enormous piles of gray stone in a variety of shapes, from tall triangles to stubby circular towers. Set dramatically among enormous bright green ferns, they looked incongruously exotic, like some lost Incan village or other relic of a once-mighty civilization. In actual fact, the civilization they dated from was the no-means-unmighty mid-nineteenth century. Mainly, they commemorated the marriages of Queen Victoria’s children, but the biggest was a memorial to a death.

  It was a vast gray pyramid dedicated to “The Beloved Memory of Prince Albert, the Great and Good Prince Consort” by “His Broken-Hearted Widow, VICTORI
A RI.” They stood before it, Lilibet’s kilt and red jersey glowing against the bracken.

  “Do hearts literally get broken?” she asked, frowning. “Do they actually smash in pieces?”

  “It means she was upset because she loved him very much.”

  The princess looked at her curiously. “When people fall in love, Crawfie, do they actually fall, on the floor?”

  Marion swallowed. “Of course not,” she said, her voice muffled. “It just means it can be very sudden.”

  Lilibet continued to fix her with questioning blue eyes. “Has that happened to you, Crawfie?”

  Marion forced a smile. “That’s a very personal question.”

  “Will it happen to me?”

  “Probably.”

  The little brow knotted. “How will I know?”

  Marion felt a sudden rush in her chest. “Oh, you’ll know.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ONE DAY AFTER lessons she took Lilibet into Ballater. It wasn’t an especially down-to-earth place, with great lions and unicorns over every other frontage proclaiming the establishment to be By Royal Appointment. But it did have a sweetshop, which was something.

  Lilibet was thrilled. She gasped at the array on offer. Rows of glass jars on shelves at the back glowed yellow with lemon drops, green with limes, red with aniseed balls and black-and-white with bull’s-eyes. On the counter in front were glistening heaps of toffees in shiny wrappers, chocolate bars, licorice bootlaces, many-colored lollipops and Gobstoppers plain white on the outside but a rainbow of succeeding shades within. “I don’t know what to choose, Crawfie!” Lilibet gasped, clutching in her hot little hand the shilling that Marion had given her.

  As befitted a proper sweetshop visit, they had stood outside for several minutes, discussing the jars in the window. “Do you think they’ll do the weighing scale thing, Crawfie?” Lilibet asked.

  She knew from their London adventures that the sign of a really good sweetshop was if the proprietor popped an extra one on top after weighing them out. But the Ballater sweetshop had something even better in store.

  “Would you like to try any before you buy them, Your Royal Highness?” the shopkeeper said with a smile.

  “Ooh! May I?”

  Half turning away to let the princess handle the transaction independently, Marion spotted a figure at the rear, ostensibly consulting the newspapers spread out for sale. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with wavy fair hair.

  Her surprise was so great it was like being hit by a train. He seemed to sense it, and turned. Walking up to her, the camera winking round his neck, he smiled. “Hello, Marion,” he said lightly.

  She stared at him, then at Lilibet, who, thankfully, was completely absorbed in watching the shopkeeper weighing out Jelly Babies. She grabbed his tweed-jacketed arm and dragged him toward the back of the shop. “What are you doing here?”

  How had he found them? Now he no longer had his private source of information.

  He raised a laconic eyebrow. “How about the Court Circular?”

  Of course. News of the royal family’s exodus to Scotland would be reported in the official gazette, which went to every newspaper. Anyone with a map could work out where they were likely to be. And Tom, aware of her habits with Lilibet, would immediately spot the potential of the sweetshop.

  “Go. Or I’ll tell the detective.” Marion’s heart was thundering. She could see Cameron from here, peering suspiciously from beneath his hat brim up and down the near-empty street, yet seemingly unaware of the presence of a man within the shop.

  “The royal Sherlock Holmes, you mean.” Tom knew about Cameron too, of course. His grin was unpleasant; she hadn’t seen it before. She could see that something had changed in him, but now was not the time to wonder about that.

  “You have to go!” she hissed.

  Lilibet, meanwhile, watched with satisfaction as the shopkeeper popped one extra Jelly Baby on the pile.

  “Please!” she begged, feeling suddenly helpless and desperate. Around his neck, the camera looked back, like a malevolent third eye. “Please don’t do this to me, Tom.”

  He sighed. “Marion, I’m sorry.” His wide eyes now held something of their old expression. She felt a leap of hope.

  “Can’t we talk?” she asked. Purchase completed, the little figure in red wool and tartan was now fumbling in her purse. But she would turn round any minute. He must go. Now.

  His lips twisted. “What is there to talk about? I’m not here to chat. I’m here to take pictures.”

  Panic raced through her. “But you’ll lose me my job.”

  “Well, you lost me mine,” he flipped back.

  “What?”

  “Mr. Adams sacked me.” His face was hard, accusing.

  Marion’s heart thundered. So the duchess had known after all? “Why? Because of the photographs?”

  “He never said so. Said it was time for me to move on, that was all. But someone must have said something.”

  She felt sick. “Not me. I never said a word.”

  He snorted. “Can I believe that?”

  “I swear, Tom.”

  He looked at her for a few moments, his fingers playing on the camera. “Okay,” he said. “But we obviously can’t talk here. So where?”

  Her mind went blank for a moment with sheer relief. When everything reloaded, she realized she knew the perfect place. She gave him the directions.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT WAS A calm evening, full of birdsong. The way up the hillside zigzagged through scented heather and between gray boulders. Above the dark trees, a huge yellow moon lit up a landscape that widened as she climbed. Crags and gullies appeared, then sweeping glens in which lochs glinted.

  At the top of the hill, the bothy showed between the tree trunks. Marion paused, heart thudding in her chest. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to say. Seeing him again had released something in her, a longing, that she had kept shut up since their last, angry encounter. Despite all he had done, she still felt for him, she realized, and that was not exactly going to help matters.

  She was in the clearing before the building now. It was shadowy inside, but the chaise longue was visible, the white-painted fireplace.

  The door opened almost before she knocked. His mouth was on hers. Need ignited within her, and blazed, but she pushed him away. “Not now. We have to talk.”

  “Afterward.” He pulled her back to him fervently. “I’ve missed you, Marion.”

  And I you, she almost said, feeling herself almost surrendering. She steeled herself, however, and glared at him. “How could you? Betray my trust like that? Take pictures of Lilibet.”

  When he said nothing she added, furiously, “What about your photojournalism? You were going to record all that was wrong with the world!”

  He gave her a satirical smile. “The three million out of work. Mosley and his racist thugs. The thousands of policemen, some mounted, beating up the hunger marchers in Hyde Park.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Read about that at the Balmoral breakfast table, did you?”

  In fact, she had. As the king’s parrot picked its way through the silver flatware, pecked off the top of His Majesty’s egg and laid a large gray turd next to the royal butterpat, Marion had read, hot-eyed, about how Ramsay MacDonald’s national government had used force against its own people. “The most extensive public order precaution since 1848,” The Times had said.

  He gave her a rueful smile. “Actually, a picture of Princess Elizabeth playing is worth more than a picture of policemen bashing miners.”

  “You’ve sold out,” she accused, contemptuously. He laughed.

  “What about you? You’re a fine one to talk! What happened to the slums? To Grassmarket?” His tone was taunting.

  S
he felt a hot, defensive fury. “How dare you?” she snarled. “I’ll be going back to Grassmarket . . . eventually.”

  “Really?” His smile was wry—mocking, even. His wide, broad shoulders filled her with a brief, powerful longing but she forced it furiously away. How could she hate him and desire him at the same time?

  “Who are you to judge me?” she demanded.

  “I might ask the same of you. As for the pictures, I’m the thin end of the wedge, Marion, believe me. One day the royal family won’t be able to move for people like me recording their every move.”

  The thought was too horrible to contemplate. “And you think that’s justified?”

  “What about the way they live?” he shot back. “Is that justified?”

  There was no easy answer to this, of course. She sidestepped it. “What’s absolutely not justified,” she snarled, “is what you did to me. You used me.”

  He sat down heavily on the chaise longue. It wasn’t just that he had hardened, she could see now. Something within him had broken. She saw for the first time how tired he looked. His formerly clear gray eyes were bloodshot, and there were dark shadows beneath them. She felt the self-righteous fury drain out of her and concern take its place. She dropped to her knees beside him and looked into his face. He seemed on the brink of tears.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, softly, feeling at that moment that she could forgive him anything. “Is it Kate?” She had forgotten about his sister.

  He screwed his eyes up; nodded.

  Horror bowled through Marion. “She’s not.”

  The fair head shook. “No, but she’s very ill. That’s why I did it, Marion.” His eyes opened and locked on hers, as if willing her to understand. “To pay for her care. A good hospital, where she could be comfortable.”

  Marion hung her head. He was a villain to her and the duchess, but a hero to his family. It all depended on your point of view. Life was complicated; people were contradictory. They were not absolutes; either one thing or the other. Look at her, an egalitarian feminist, working for the most patriarchal and conservative of institutions.