The Royal Governess

by Wendy Holden

  “Oh, it’s not what you think.” Valentine grinned. “Decca’s with Esmond.”

  Marion glared at him, annoyed by his casual assumption that she gave a hoot about his romances. She also now remembered, with a speed that amazed her, the schoolboy editor, japester and iconoclast whom Valentine had hero-worshipped. Here he was, in the flesh. His solid, rather square head had appeared beside Decca’s. He waved his placard. “Hellair.”

  “And I’m Philip.” A gaunt young man with glasses and bad skin, as well as the inevitable placard, popped his head round the other side.

  Marion nodded. “Hellair. I mean, hello.”

  She felt suddenly confused, as if what had been certain a minute ago no longer was. Here she was in a crowd of London’s poorest who were cheering London’s richest. And in the middle of that, a pocket of privileged upper-class youth disguised as left-wing egalitarians—one of whom had betrayed her in the past. It felt too much to cope with. “I’d better go.” She turned to head into the crowd.

  “No, stay!” insisted Valentine. “Or let me take you for a cup of tea.”

  “No,” she muttered, pulling away from his hand, which held her shoulder in a way her body seemed to remember fondly.

  She expected him to pull her back, but instead he began to sing, raising his fist in the air. “Arise, ye workers, from your slumbers!”

  People in the crowd were looking at him suspiciously. She twisted back. “Stop it!”

  He was still singing. There was a teasing look in his eye. Around him eyes were narrowing. She pictured dirty fists curling, toes flexing in steel-toed boots, ready to kick. The narrow Edinburgh passage of long ago flashed into her memory, Valentine slumped on the ground.

  He shook his placard. “Workers of the world unite! Join the revolution!”

  “Stop it,” Marion pleaded. Two thuggish men had exchanged glances before looking back meaningfully at Valentine.

  She grasped his wrist in terror. “They’ll . . .”

  “Tear me limb from limb?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And you’d care?” A dark flame danced in the back of his eyes. She felt the old rush of longing, and pushed it back, fiercely.

  “No. Of course not.” But as he raised his placard yet again, she grabbed his wrist.

  He shook his head. A hank of hair flopped into one eye, quite in the old way, and made her melt, quite in the old way. “If you want me to stop,” he warned, “you’ll have to come for a cuppa.”

  She groaned. “Just one.”

  Because everyone was watching the procession, the nearest Lyons Corner House was practically empty. They sat by the bow window. “Are you married?” It was his first question. Men always asked her that, she thought. Although for different reasons. Peter had asked it to discover if he yet had a chance of being her husband, while Valentine, she had no doubt, was asking it to see if there was a husband in the way.

  “None of your business,” she told him.

  He had left Edinburgh, he told her, soon after she had gone. “It was no fun without you.” He pulled a mock-mournful face.

  She eyed him disbelievingly. “And that was really the reason, was it?”

  “Well, that and the university throwing me out for failing my exams. So now I’m down here, fomenting international proletarian revolution and the end of imperialism.”

  “And it’s going really well, I can see.” Marion snorted, gesturing toward the windows, where passing crowds were waving pictures of the king-emperor.

  He spoke through a mouthful of Victoria sandwich. “They just need their consciousness raised. The triumph of the workers over the ruling classes is historically inevitable.” He waved the cake in his hand. “On the glorious day, this will be Stalin sandwich.”

  She shook her head. She was surprised how little rancor she felt. Now she had come to terms with what he had done, weighed it against her gains, she could appreciate once again his stupid jokes, his ridiculous Communist rhetoric. “And just where in London are you plotting the defeat of capitalism?”

  “Rotherhithe. By the river. It’s a blast. Our house belongs to a friend of Esmond and Decca’s.”

  “They live there too?”

  Cake bulged in his cheek as he nodded. “She’s run away from her family. Her father’s an earl,” he added proudly.

  “How strange,” said Marion. It sounded complicated and intriguing, but she was resolved not to seem over-interested in Decca.

  “‘Strange’ is the word,” Valentine enthusiastically agreed. “Her sisters are all completely different. Ideologically, I mean. Diana’s a Fascist, Unity’s a Hitler fan and Debo just wants to be a duchess.” He spoke as if he knew them all intimately.

  “Hitler? Fascist?” Marion gasped, her resolve vanished.

  “And Decca is a Communist, obviously. Crazy mixed-up bunch,” Valentine concluded fondly.

  Marion stared at him. “I don’t believe you. No one has a family as mad as that.”

  He laughed. “What about the one you work for?”

  She scowled at him. He took an unrepentant swig of tea. “Why don’t you come round? We have amazing parties. We’re having one tomorrow, as a matter of fact.” He shoved in the last of the cake. “You should swing by.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Later, at the Jubilee lunch, in the palace’s State Dining Room under an ornate gold and white ceiling, Marion sat at a long table. It was draped in white, heaped with silver and lined with facing rows of royals and eminences. Her seat right at the end meant she was so close to the red-jacketed military band she could see the title on their music sheets. They were performing “The Departure of the Troopship”—a royal favorite.

  Her neighbor was the king’s new private secretary, Alan Lascelles. She had not met him before. He was a tall, lean, upright man with chiseled, aristocratic features and sharp dark eyes set deeply under a craggy brow. His center-parted hair was thick and black and his manner almost ridiculously grand.

  They discussed the success of the Jubilee, Marion attempting to conceal her surprise. It was no surprise to Lascelles. “Any human system demands a visible figure of God’s majesty,” he declared pompously. “In offering a connection to the past and the future, kings and queens belong to the world of poetry.”

  Marion suppressed a snort. She did not think George V belonged to the world of poetry. Or of art in general. She had once heard him yelling that he could “MAKE BETTER MUSIC THAN WAGNER BY SLAMMING MY BEDROOM DOOR!”

  “Kings are like a church spire you see across a river valley,” Lascelles went on. “The expression of age-old beliefs.”

  Marion did not answer. She was watching Margaret across the table, who was staring hard at a particular footman. Her intent surveillance was clearly making him nervous. His tray was shaking, and now, as a fork plunged from a tray to the carpet, Margaret bounced in her chair triumphantly and gave a little gurgle of delight.

  Marion leaned forward. “Margaret!”

  A pair of wicked violet eyes met hers. “Yes, Crawfie?”

  “You did that on purpose!”

  A pair of long lashes batted innocently. “I don’t know what you mean, Crawfie. It wasn’t me, it was Cousin Halifax.” This imaginary figure was behind most of Margaret’s transgressions.

  She sighed and turned back to Lascelles, who was still pontificating on the monarchy. It was obviously his favorite subject. “The phenomenon can be explained in secular ways too. One man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him.”

  Marion knew the quote. “They, on the other hand, imagine they are subjects because he is king,” she finished. “Karl Marx.”

  Lascelles now seemed to look at her properly for the first time. “You are acquainted with the works of Karl Marx, Miss Crawley?”

  She remembered Dr. Stone, who had also calle
d her this, and felt her dislike of this man harden. “Crawford. And yes, I am interested in Marx, as all intelligent people should be. Communism is a powerful force in the world.” It felt rather daring to be talking of such things in Buckingham Palace.

  In the recesses of the craggy brows, the black eyes glinted. “Indeed. But not a force that will ever find favor here. We Britons are a free people, detesting violence and hysteria. It is only slaves who go in for bloody uprisings.”

  While Marion felt this a good thing, she kept her face neutral. “And Britons never never never shall be slaves.”

  A wintry smile lit the gaunt features. “Never never never. You know what King Farouk said, of course.”

  “Actually, I think I missed that.”

  “By the end of the twentieth century there will only be five monarchies left in the world. The kings of hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades—and England.”

  The Prince of Wales now stumbled in, late and apparently unrepentant. The table fell silent and his father cast him a glance of loathing. Unable to resist a tease, Marion leaned toward Lascelles. “I wonder if His Majesty shares your confidence in the monarchy’s future. In the person of his son and heir, I mean.”

  “Yes to the former, but almost certainly not to the latter. And I have to say I share his views.”

  “You don’t like the Prince of Wales?”

  “I left his service some years ago,” was the unexpected response. “The circumstances were slightly difficult.”

  Marion was riveted. “Difficult?”

  “Forgive me if I don’t go into the details. Suffice to say I always felt that I was working, not for the son of the king of England, but for the son of the latest American millionaire.”

  Marion was amazed. “But the prince is very popular.”

  “He has magic,” Lascelles agreed. “He’s one of the most attractive men I have ever met. No one else in the family comes near to him for glamour. But are magic and glamour what the Throne requires?”

  “I don’t know,” said Marion. “Are they?”

  Her neighbor sipped his wine. “A certain middle-class ordinariness is now an important element of what the British people demand in their monarchs.”

  She felt she had never met anyone quite so pompous. She wanted to say something to rattle him. “Really? How does Mrs. Simpson fit into that?”

  Her neighbor, not rattled in the least, merely dabbed his lips with his napkin. “There are certain things,” he remarked, “that the nation expects their royal family to do, and certain things which it expects them not to do. That includes marrying a certain type of woman. The British people will not tolerate their monarch taking as his wife and their queen a shop-soiled American with two living husbands and a voice like a rusty saw.”

  Marion sat back. It was a harsh description of the woman she had met, but it also seemed to settle the question once and for all: Lilibet really did have nothing to worry about. She now had it on the highest, most official authority that when the Prince of Wales became king, marriage to Mrs. Simpson was out of the question.

  The table drank to the king’s health. “You think he’s healthy?” Marion asked her neighbor. They both looked at the monarch, now haranguing the conductor for a repeat of “Troopship.”

  Lascelles gave a lofty smile. “I was assured when I took this job that His Majesty was in excellent health with several more years ahead of him.”

  She had said no to Valentine’s party and meant to stick to it. But perhaps it was the lingering memory of pompous Alan Lascelles that sent her, the next evening, walking down the street he had named, to the address he had given her.

  Why not? It wasn’t just rebellion against a supercilious courtier. She was lonely. Without Ivy, the evenings at 145 Piccadilly dragged terribly. She could walk around the streets, staring into the windows of the local art galleries, but this only made her feel more isolated as laughing couples, arm in arm, hurried by on their way to the West End’s pubs, clubs and restaurants.

  A party, with other young people—she was still a young person, just, at twenty-six—would be something. And, after the first shock, it had been fun to see Valentine again. They had both moved on; they could at least be friends. They were both grown-ups now. Well, thought Marion, with a wry twist of the lips, she was, in any case.

  The river smell was close and dank and hung in the foggy, cobbled streets. Dim figures went past in the gloom. It was a poor neighborhood, evidently, but it had an energy about it, a spirit. She could hear people laughing and shouting in nearby streets.

  As she dithered outside the battered door with its peeling paint, a wraithlike young man with a cadaverous face came drifting out of the fog. “Can I help you?”

  “You’re Philip,” she said.

  Behind the round glasses, his eyes widened. “Gosh, yes, and you’re . . .”

  “Marion.”

  “Come to the bottle party?”

  She nodded.

  “Brought a bottle?”

  She rummaged under her coat and produced one. It had been one of several on the dining room sideboard. The duke would not miss it, she felt. After all, he had plenty more.

  Philip took it and whistled. “Pol Roger 1927. Cripes. That’s going to raise the tone a bit.”

  She followed him into a hallway crowded with rusted bicycles. Laughter and music could be heard from upstairs. She felt a swell of excitement. It felt like a long time since she had been with people her own age.

  Philip’s heels crashed on the uncarpeted stairs. He went up, waving the bottle. “Look, everyone! We really are champagne socialists now!”

  Marion followed shyly. The landing was full of people: young men in turtlenecks and women with bobs and cigarettes. They were all laughing. Decca, head thrown back, was laughing the loudest.

  “You came!” Suddenly, Valentine was beside her, hair flopping in his eyes. “You look wonderful.”

  Her frock was black and fitted. It had been ordinary enough but now had the indefinable something Norman brought to everything he touched.

  She felt sophisticated, but not grand. Just right, in fact. Suddenly, everything felt just right. Her heart seemed to swell and flower and pulse a warm happiness right to the ends of her fingers.

  “Have a drink.” He pushed something into her hand. It was a jam jar, half-full of red wine.

  She looked at it, then back at him. “But I brought champagne!”

  “Oh!” He looked round. “Philip! Over here with that bottle!”

  One hand now clutching a jam jar half-full of Pol Roger, Marion allowed herself to be pulled round with the other.

  “Marion!” Decca was dipping by. She was wearing a yellow print dress and red lipstick and looked exquisitely pretty. “This is my sister Debo.”

  Debo was a smaller, younger version of Decca and was wearing jodhpurs and a tweed jacket. She was perched on an open windowsill. “Here,” said Valentine, sloshing champagne into her jam jar.

  Debo looked glumly at the dancing bubbles. “I hate champagne. Makes your breath smell.”

  “Oh, do shut up, Debo,” Decca responded robustly. “No one made you come.”

  “Actually, Muv did. After that story about you this morning. And straight from my riding lesson, too.” Debo gestured down at the jodhpurs. “Really, Decca,” she added peevishly. “You might be more considerate. I’m trying to marry a duke but it’s a bit tricky if your sisters are in the papers all the time. Muv says that whenever she sees the headline ‘Peer’s Daughter blah blah blah’ her heart sinks because she knows it’s one of us.” She swung out a polished riding boot. “Sometimes I really hate being a Mitford.” She got up and disappeared into the throng, thrusting angrily through the crowd with her narrow tweed-jacketed shoulders. Marion sipped her champagne from her jam jar. The bubbles danced on her tongue and went straight to her head.

 
The house was a mess, she thought, but she liked it. On the walls were unframed canvases rendered in thickly daubed oils. The furniture seemed entirely composed of Daily Workers, in piles serving as seats and tables. The light came from candles stuck in bottles. The effect was chaotic, but romantic.

  “Let me introduce you to some people.” Valentine had reappeared and was pulling her up from the window seat. “Meet Eric, he’s a writer. Back in a sec.”

  Eric was gaunt and lugubrious. In the dim candlelight, he looked worn, as if he had had a hard life. “What are you writing about?” she asked, politely.

  Eric pulled hard on his roll-up. “It’s called The Road to Wigan Pier.”

  “It’s about the seaside?”

  He looked at her scornfully. “Not exactly.”

  Decca sidled up, smiling her toothy smile. “Actually,” she said in her cut-glass accent, “it’s about the working classes in the north struggling with the Means Test. It’s a right ripping read, isn’t it, Eric?”

  “Bugger off, Decca,” growled Eric, not unaffectionately.

  “Working on a sequel?” Decca prodded.

  “Of a sort. Matter of fact, you can tell me what you think. How’s this for a first line? It was a bright cold day in April and all the clocks were striking thirteen.”

  “Thirteen! But no clock strikes thirteen!”

  Within his deeply recessed brows, Eric’s eyes rolled. “Precisely. That’s the point.”

  Marion liked these intense, laughing people. They interacted so easily, and so equally. Everyone talked to everyone else. She realized that she wasn’t used to that anymore.

  She could see Esmond at the other side of the room, an admiring crowd about him. His rather square face was alight with conviction and he was talking with big, gesticulating movements. It wasn’t just Valentine who hero-worshipped him, it seemed. They were an argumentative lot, but excitingly so, she thought. Opinions flew from every direction. Unemployment. Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia. German rearmament. Stanley Baldwin, widely expected to replace Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister. People seemed to have strong views about all of them.