The Royal Governess

by Wendy Holden

  Conversation, somewhat inevitably, turned to Hitler. “I wonder what he’s like as a person,” someone mused.

  The king, who could be puckish, darted a wicked glance at Marion’s neighbor. “Ask Mrs. R-Ronnie. She’s met him.”

  “It was years and years ago. Before he became what he is now,” blustered the collector of social lions, whose collecting in that particular case had been wide of the mark. The powdered jowls were purple with embarrassment.

  Afterward, Marion went with the princesses and Philip back up the long steep steps from the harbor. At the college tennis courts, he leaped over the nets in an obvious attempt to impress them. Lilibet was transfixed. “Look how high he can jump, Crawfie! Isn’t he good?”

  Marion wondered how high Philip might want to jump in quite another direction. There was something focused about his nonchalance, as if he knew that the way to impress Lilibet was to treat her in an offhand manner while making a big fuss of her sister.

  Later, when the Victoria and Albert’s engines started up, its departure was accompanied by a flotilla of Dartmouth cadets in any craft they could lay their hands on. Lilibet and Margaret stood on deck, watching them in delight and waving back quite as madly as their cheering young escorts, who, undeterred by weather and a strong sea, insisted on a grand patriotic send-off.

  The heavy yacht cut effortlessly through the choppy waters. As it approached the entrance to the Channel, the accompanying scatter of rowboats, motorboats and excited boys was still with it. The wind on the deck was getting up, blowing hair about, teasing scarves and carrying conversations from one end of the ship to the other. The king, his lunchtime gaiety quite gone now that London and officialdom beckoned, was barking at the captain about the boys. “It’s ridiculous, and very unsafe! You must signal them to go back.”

  Margaret and Marion watched the sailor run to the flag deck and fetch the appropriate colors. The message, in that mysterious naval language, was run up the mast in minutes. Lilibet, who had grasped the railing and stared out to sea all this while, seemed to be in another, separate world. As the boys began to fall back, turn round, and return to Dartmouth, her eyes remained fixed on the one boat that still followed, a rowboat manned by a Viking god, sculling with all his might over the muscles of the sea.

  “The young f-fool!” expostulated the king, standing behind his daughter with his binoculars rammed to his eyes. “He m-must go back! Or we’ll have to h-h-heave to and send him back!”

  Lilibet said nothing, just turned and removed the glasses from her father’s hand. She put them to her own eyes and looked at Philip for a long time. Meanwhile, around her, there was shouting through the megaphone at the audacious prince in the boat, until even he got the message and turned round to row back.

  Only when he was a very small speck in the distance did Lilibet take the binoculars from her eyes and sigh.

  “Lilibet loves Philip!” said Margaret mockingly.

  The queen looked at her eldest daughter. “You can’t fall in love with the first boy you meet, darling. Love at first sight is just a myth.”

  Lilibet did not reply.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Do you really think there will be a war, Crawfie?” Lilibet asked. The three of them were sitting on the little hill in the Buckingham Palace garden. The September sun was warm on their faces, and above them, in the blue sky, birds wheeled and swooped.

  Almost certainly, Marion thought. You could feel it in the air—a grim expectation. You could see it all around. Across the road, in Hyde Park, trenches had been dug. Sandbags had been put outside Whitehall offices where arrangements were being made to send London children to the countryside.

  She looked at Lilibet. Thanks to her newspaper reading, she was well-informed. She would not be fobbed off. Honesty was usually the best policy. “Depends on Russia,” she said. “Stalin hasn’t joined the Axis yet.”

  “But if he comes down on Hitler’s side, the Nazis will take Poland,” Lilibet pointed out. “And you know what will happen then.”

  “Horrid Hitler!” Margaret was tearing daisies from the grass. “Spoiling our trip to Balmoral!”

  Lilibet looked at her sister. “Well, at least we’re not going to Canada.”

  There had initially been suggestions that the royal family leave the country. The queen had firmly refused. “The children would never leave without me. I would never leave without the king. And the king would never leave” had been her much-quoted response.

  Her transformation from socialite to state figurehead continued apace. When she discovered that Hitler had called her “the most dangerous woman in Europe,” she had been thrilled. “What can the most dangerous woman in Europe do for you, Crawfie?” she would crow whenever Marion went to consult her. “The most dangerous woman in Europe calling!” she would cackle when she rang up her friends.

  But she had been careful never to do this in earshot of her daughters, who, she believed, had remained largely ignorant of both the war and who had caused it. She was wrong, of course, especially about Lilibet, who was currently trying to explain Hitler to her sister.

  “He’s the leader of Germany,” she began. “They call him the chancellor.”

  “We’ve got one of those,” Margaret put in, confidently. “He’s in charge of all the money.”

  “Not that sort of chancellor. Hitler is like a prime minister and a president rolled into one. He is all-powerful and has no legal opposition.”

  “So king of absolutely everything?” Margaret looked impressed.

  “It’s called a dictator.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of him.” Margaret clasped her arms round her legs. “He never takes his coat off. Not even when it’s hot. I bet it’s smelly.” She ruffled the nearest corgi. “I wonder if Hitler has any pets.”

  “He has a cat called Schnitzel, I believe.”

  Marion stared at Lilibet. Her memory for details was astonishing. Wherever had she picked this one up?

  “How did he become so powerful?” Margaret wanted to know. This, of course, was the difficult bit. Lilibet looked at Marion, stumped.

  She took a deep breath. “He’s very good at speeches. People believe what he says.”

  “But what does he say?”

  Marion hesitated. “He tells the Germans that they were born to rule over other people.”

  “Papa was born to rule over other people!” exclaimed Margaret.

  “Yes, but not that way.”

  Four challenging blue eyes were turned on her. “Why not?”

  “Well, because we are a democracy. Our monarchy is constitutional and derives its power by permission of Parliament and people. It can’t act alone.”

  The princesses looked puzzled.

  “Hitler also tells the Germans that he’ll give them all jobs. A lot of Germans lost their jobs and were unhappy about it.”

  Lilibet was alarmed. “But people here don’t have jobs and are unhappy.”

  “Well, yes. But it’s not quite the same.”

  “But why not?” demanded logical Lilibet. Her mind was clearly bounding ahead, linking things together. “What if we get a dictator here? What will happen to Mummy and Papa and Margaret and I?” She glanced at the dogs chasing each other through the heather. “And Dookie and Jane?”

  Margaret shook her fist. “Don’t worry, Lilibet! We’re going to give those beastly Germans absolute hell!”

  * * *

  • • •

  “OUR LAST LESSONS in peace,” chanted Margaret on the morning of September 3. Hitler had, as expected, invaded Poland, and the Germans, also as expected, had ignored the British request for a withdrawal of troops. Unless they did so by 11 a.m., Britain would declare war.

  “Shut up,” said Lilibet, throwing an exercise book at her.

  “Beast!”

  “Brute!”

  �
�It doesn’t look much like peace to me,” said Marion.

  Both girls kept looking at the clock on the wall above her desk. “Half past ten!” exclaimed Margaret. Then, fifteen minutes later, “A quarter to eleven!”

  While she fought to seem unruffled, Marion found that her knees, under the table, were shaking.

  “Eleven!” shouted Margaret. She started dancing around the classroom.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” yelled Lilibet. “Tell her to stop, Crawfie!”

  Marion switched on the schoolroom radio. The sad, quiet voice of the prime minister floated into the room. “I’m afraid I have to tell you,” the former champion of appeasement was saying, “that no such undertaking has been received and as a consequence this country is at war with Germany.”

  Margaret stopped shouting. She turned to Marion, her violet eyes full of fear. “Crawfie! What’s going to happen now?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  As the car slid into the ancient stone maw of Windsor Castle’s Henry VIII Gate, it felt like entering a prison.

  “It’s so dark,” Margaret whimpered, looking round the lightless courtyard. “I don’t like it.”

  “You mustn’t complain,” Alah said severely. “You’re very fortunate. Think of all those little evacuees who are having to leave their families and go goodness knows where. They might never see their mummies and daddies again.”

  This had the inevitable result. The smallest princess burst into floods of tears.

  “How long will we be at Windsor?” Lilibet asked. She was sitting quietly next to Marion in the car.

  “Only for the rest of the week,” Alah said firmly.

  While these had been the queen’s instructions when she called Royal Lodge earlier that day, something in her voice had stirred Marion’s suspicions. She had immediately packed everything she had.

  What people called the Phony War had been going on for months. But things were now beginning to change. Reports from Europe were universally depressing, with Norway and the Netherlands falling to the Nazis and the Allies being pushed back toward the Normandy coast. Would France be next? The Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, had only days ago arrived at Buckingham Palace with nothing but the clothes she stood in. Marion had heard the story from Norman, who had been summoned to supply the refugee royal with an outfit. “We showed her any number of hats,” he reported, rolling his eyes. “But Her Majesty didn’t like any of them, oh no. Then she saw Gladys’ hat—my assistant, you remember . . .”

  Marion recalled the little old woman overburdened with silk and tulle who had come with Norman for the American tour fittings.

  “. . . and pointed at it and said, ‘I want that one!’”

  Chamberlain had been forced to resign as prime minister, and the Hitler-hating Churchill, for so long the maverick out on a limb, had now replaced him. Marion admired what he had said to Parliament when he had taken up the job. “Blood, toil, tears and sweat”; “victory at all costs”; and vowing to “wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime.” She liked his stirring language, his air of indefatigable resolve and, especially, his growling, contemptuous pronunciation of Hitler’s followers as “Naarzis”—English-style, without the Germanic “t.”

  “Why do Mummy and Papa have to stay in London?” Margaret piped up. “Do you think the Germans will come and get them?”

  “Not a chance,” Marion asserted, before Alah could make one of her doomy predictions.

  “I hope Hitler won’t come over here,” Lilibet said nervously.

  “Well, if he does, he’ll be dealt with,” said Alah, as if she were going to put him over her knee and spank him with a hairbrush.

  The great medieval gates of Windsor slammed behind them.

  The Master of the Household was waiting to receive them and walked them down passages whose paneling looked black in the shadows.

  “We dress for dinner,” the Master announced in his plummy tones. His name, Sir Hill Child, was as improbable as this instruction. Apart from anything else there were hardly any lights; all chandeliers had been dismantled and all bright bulbs swapped for dim ones.

  “We dine in the nursery with Their Royal Highnesses,” Alah announced back. She was employing the royal plural, talking about herself.

  “But we don’t,” Marion put in, hurriedly. Whatever the circumstances, dinner with grown-ups was not to be sniffed at.

  “Eight o’clock in the Octagon Room,” Sir Hill instructed, before disappearing into the gloom. It was, Marion realized, a good job she had brought her evening gown, crushed in her hastily packed luggage. But was it brave or crazy that in a medieval castle in wartime people were acting as if they were at a country house party? Of course, in one sense they were. A paragraph had gone to all British and American papers saying that the princesses had been evacuated to “a house in the country.”

  Lilibet, Margaret and Alah were in the Lancaster Tower, in the comfortable pink and fawn nursery suite with its roaring fire that they usually stayed in when visiting Windsor. But for reasons unknown Marion had been billeted in a distant corner of the fortress, alone at the top of a tower and reached by a winding stair. The stone steps were worn down in the center by centuries of feet. The walls, rough elsewhere, were marble-smooth at elbow level from centuries of passing arms.

  Her bedroom was dark red, huge and as cold as the grave. It smelled musty, as if no one had occupied it for some time. There was a big, gloomy, dark green sitting room hung with small, dim oils. Both rooms had tiny fireplaces, and though fires had been lit, the warmth made little impression. What limited light might creep in through the pointed medieval lancet window was firmly repelled by a blackout curtain. Her bathroom, such as it was, was in a hut out on the roof. “But you do have it all to yourself, madam,” said the footman who had shown her there.

  Marion forced a smile as she examined it. It was freezing, and lacked even the comforts of the one at Buckingham Palace. There wasn’t even a mouse. Just a tiny bar of soap, strips of newspaper on a nail by the lavatory and a black line painted round the inside of the bath, indicating the level above which water was not to rise. About three inches, it seemed. The king, keen not to waste resources, had introduced the initiative. A small animal might manage a good soak. But not a full-sized person, particularly a tall one like her.

  The tower, the winding stair, the castle of darkness; it was like being in a frightening fairy tale. Rapunzel perhaps, except that her hair was too short. Jack and the Beanstalk, then—but no, all the bold young men were far away at the moment. There was an ogre, though, and everyone knew who he was.

  Later, Marion’s heart thumped as she hurried through rooms full of furniture in dustcovers. Glass-fronted cabinets were turned ominously to the walls. The castle had so many windows to black out, she had been told, that by the time they finished for the night, it was morning again.

  Down the unlit passages, the castle’s thousand-year history seemed to press close. She listened hard; was that a footstep? A distant wail from long ago? Her every turn seemed to lead her farther away from the possible location of the Octagon Room.

  Her footsteps were closely followed by the eerie slither of velvet on stone; once or twice she had turned, expecting a terrifying phantom. But there had been only gaping darkness. She realized it was her own dress she was hearing. Her mother had sewn the gown from blue tapestry curtain material once intended for her bedroom. It had a low-cut front which Mrs. Crawford had had doubts about; they had argued about it, Marion remembered with a stab of regret.

  Suddenly, round a corner, came the sign that she had arrived. A half-open door revealed a dark cavern of a room with a carved Gothic ceiling and a fire roaring in a black marble fireplace. It was indeed, she saw as she hesitated on the threshold, octagon-shaped.

  Beneath the light of a single dim bulb, three men in immaculate black tie sat around a t
able set with silver and crystal. It looked like dinner in the underworld.

  The surreal tableau broke up as Sir Hill rose to his feet. “Miss Crawford. May I introduce Sir Dudley Colles. And Mr. Gerald Kelly, whom I believe you have met before.”

  Marion nodded at the small, ebullient Irishman. Kerald Jelly, as the princesses called him, was a familiar sight around the palace. He had, for the past few years, been painting coronation portraits of the king and queen, neither of which ever seemed to be finished. It was said that he enjoyed life in the royal circle so much he scrubbed out part of what he had painted every day to prolong his employment.

  Footsteps could be heard coming up the stone passage. The table was set for five, she now noticed. The one next to her was empty, but the last guest was about to appear. She felt a stir in the air, a sudden tightening of her muscles. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end.

  “Tommy! Good to see you, old chap.” A scrape of chair as Sir Hill stood up again, extending a long white hand.

  And there he suddenly was, dashing in his dinner jacket, the candlelight gleaming on his thick black hair. She felt the familiar shooting longing but composedly shook his hand. His touch seemed to scald her skin, and from the depths of his brows, his dark gaze flicked across her breasts like a riding crop. She felt it and her blood raced.

  As they sat down, he looked at her briefly, expressionlessly, but placed his leg hard against hers. Shock barreled through her. It was, she sensed, no accident; he was asking an unspoken question.

  It was as if a switch had been flicked, one long untouched. She felt suddenly, thrummingly alive. She did not move. His thigh pressed against her once more, as if in confirmation, then edged away. He settled into his seat.