by Wendy Holden
The blue searchlight swung round again. “Crawfie, you must see that people in positions of confidence with us must be utterly oyster.”
This, clearly, was the final word. The page had reentered the room. The door stood open. She rose and curtseyed deeply.
“Perhaps—” the queen added, suddenly.
Marion whirled back round, hope tearing through her. “Ma’am?”
“Perhaps you had better leave that box with me. For safekeeping?” The queen gave her a dazzling smile.
Marion swallowed, gripping the chest to her so hard she felt it might break her rib cage. “It’s quite safe with me, ma’am.” Her eyes locked with her former employer’s in a mixture of defiance and desperation. Don’t take it from me. Please. It’s all I have left of them.
The queen looked irritated, but did not press the point. As Marion hurried out, from under the sofa, Crackers growled.
George returned almost immediately after she did. There was only just time to replace the box.
“You should write your own story anyway,” he raged, when she told him about the queen’s response. She agreed that it was outrageous and unfair that a courtier was allowed to do what she herself was not. But the queen had said no and that was that. There was no point dwelling on it. She must try to put the whole episode behind her. See it as a spur to leave London and finally start a new life elsewhere.
“What else can I do?” she asked George. “Where would I take my own version, even if I wrote it?”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
The champagne hit the bowl of the crystal glass in a shimmering golden stream. Marion watched it swirl round the sugar cube and drown the lemon peel shaving. A bright red cherry spun amid the bubbles.
Around the glass and through it, the lights of the room shone brilliantly. The focal point was a central chandelier whose blaze bounced off the gilded plasterwork. There were cherubs, molding and friezes, just as in Buckingham Palace, and a dark-haired diminutive woman sat enthroned in the center of the room. This was not the palace, however, but a suite at the Ritz. And the woman was not the queen, but Beatrice Gould.
Standing in the center of a carpet rippling with ribbons and swags of flowers, Beatrice had greeted Marion with the warmth of someone who had seen her last week, not seven long years ago. Time had been kind to her; her figure was as trim, her face as vivid and her dark eyes as bright and keen as Marion remembered. The woman last seen crashing a royal tea party had acquired some extra polish since then, though.
Possibly too much polish, applied with too free a hand. Her shining lipstick was of a brilliant red and matched the gleaming scarlet tips of her nails. Her white two-piece, meanwhile, looked almost risibly over-smart, edged with black and overlaid with ropes of pearls.
“Your good health, Marion.” The rich Iowa tones of Bruce Gould boomed above her. He was a cartoon American, broad, genial and tall as the sky, his cocktail lurching from side to side as he raised it. “It’s great to see you, and to be back in England, where we have so many good friends. Lady Astor, the Marchioness of Reading and Baroness Elliot to mention but a few.”
“Not to mention our many good friends in the government,” Beatrice added swiftly. “And the Foreign Office, and of course the Royal Household.”
“So.” Bruce beamed. “How are you, Marion? If I may call you Marion?”
George, in the corner, nodded an urgent “yes.” “Marion is fine. Are you well, Mrs. Gould?”
“Beatrice, please! And I’m great, thank you. More than great. The Ladies’ Home Journal is going from strength to strength.”
“Beatrice and I have really turned it around,” Bruce put in. “It’s got the biggest circulation in the world.”
“For a magazine of its type,” Beatrice modified.
“One and a half million devoted Ladies of America! That’s what we call our readers,” Bruce went on.
“Wanna know what our secret is?” Beatrice had leaned forward. Her scarlet-nailed hand lay on Marion’s red velvet knee, the same suit she had worn to Lilibet’s wedding. “We give our Ladies what they want to read about. We commission a lot of top literary figures.”
“And you could be one of them,” Bruce chimed in. “Have your articles about bringing up the little princesses read by one and a half million Ladies of America.” The champagne hissed into her glass as he refilled it.
Marion looked at him. “But Her Majesty doesn’t want me to write them for you. She wants Dermot Morrah to.”
“And that, frankly, is just nuts!” Beatrice exclaimed. “Nuts! Dermot’s a terrible writer. And he doesn’t know the princesses like you do. It makes much more sense for you to do it.”
“And much, much more money,” Bruce added, with a wink at George.
Beatrice’s hand squeezed her own. “Honey, it must hurt to be treated this way. You looked after those princesses for sixteen years, right?”
“She did,” put in George, from the back.
Beatrice ignored him. She kept her eyes fixed on Marion. “You did everything for those girls. You were by their side when their parents were not. Through the war, through everything. Right?”
“Right,” said George.
“Honey, you were their mother, not Queen Elizabeth. It was you that brought them up. And this is what the Ladies of America want to know about. Princess Elizabeth is going to be a humdinger of a queen, make a difference to the world. Thanks to you, honey.”
Marion, a lump in her throat, did not trust herself to speak. It was true—all true. She took refuge in her cocktail.
“International relations,” Bruce continued, “are a big part of our work on the Ladies’ Home Journal. We believe in forging links across the sea. We want to bring America and Britain closer together. You’ll remember that Beatrice came over with Mrs. Roosevelt during the war.”
“We believe passionately in the power of the written word to unite nations,” his wife said, deftly taking over. “And it is our strong conviction, Marion, our absolute belief, that your story will do an incredible amount to bring Britain and the United States closer in real friendship and understanding.”
Marion stared at the ribbons on the carpet. They seemed to be moving. She took a deep breath. “But I can’t, that’s the problem. When I asked the queen for permission, she refused it. Then she sent a letter repeating what she’d said. It was pretty stern, I have to say.”
“And written two months after she saw you,” Beatrice swiftly pointed out. “So hardly her top priority.”
Marion glanced at George. There were no prizes for guessing how Beatrice had gotten this information. In return, he gave her a blithe thumbs-up.
“Honey.” Beatrice leaned persuasively forward. “The queen is mad keen that these articles come out, believe me. The Foreign Office too, and the Royal Household. Everyone’s behind them. Lady Astor too. Your friend Tommy came to see you, right?”
“But I’ve explained. I can’t . . .”
It was no use, though. Beatrice was like a runaway train. Once she got up momentum, she was unstoppable. “Our one and a half million Ladies of America will thrill to your account of how you took a young girl and made her into the finest English monarch since Elizabeth the First. She’ll be Elizabeth the Third, right?”
“The Second,” Marion put in hastily.
“But her mother’s called Elizabeth, and she’s the queen?” Bruce’s heavy face creased with puzzlement. Then, as Marion explained about the consort system, it cleared. “You’re kidding me. Two different types of queen? That’s crazy. And just the kind of thing that would fascinate our Ladies!”
Marion felt herself weakening. The cocktail, her fury, the idea of writing on the subject she knew more about than anyone else, it was all powerfully attractive. “But Her Majesty has told me not to.”
There was a silence. Finally, it seemed, she had got through to them.
>
“Honey,” said Beatrice. “You don’t need her permission. You can do it anyway.”
“She can’t stop you,” Bruce added. “And she’ll come around in the end, you’ll see. This is gonna do so much to increase understanding and friendship between the women of our two nations. The Foreign Office is gonna be thrilled. The Royal Household, the whole darn lot. She’ll be grateful too, believe me.”
“It’s a patriotic act,” Beatrice pressed. “You’ll be making a fortune and doing your duty to king and country both at the same time.”
“Even if,” Beatrice added, with a look at George, “they haven’t exactly done their duty to you.”
Something flashed in Marion’s mind. There was no doubt she had been treated badly, particularly of late. The queen’s manipulations, Margaret’s arrogance, Lilibet’s coolness, even if inspired by Philip. She had been taken for granted, disregarded, ignored. She had seen Lilibet only once since baby Charles had been born. Yet her personal life had been sacrificed for this girl and her sister. She had given them everything. In trying to free them from their prison, she had incarcerated herself. She thought of Alah’s lonely coffin, and nausea went through her. She deserved better than that. Certainly, she deserved something.
Beatrice squeezed her hand again. “We want you to write your story about the education of the princesses. Under your own name, and with the queen’s full approval. That’s what the Ladies of America want. We’re actually hoping Her Majesty will write a preface for us.”
“We’re sure she will,” Bruce corrected, “which is why we went to the trouble of preparing this.” He placed something white on top of the newspapers in front of her.
Marion peered. “What is it?”
“A contract!” Beatrice said brightly.
Bruce hurried through the clauses. There were a great many of them. Every eventuality seemed to be covered. “Happy?” he asked, extending in his huge hand a fat black shiny pen.
Marion looked at the three of them. She looked around the room, the palatial imitation, and felt doubtful again.
Beatrice leaned eagerly forward. “You owe it to yourself!” she declared. “People should know the amazing story you have to tell.”
“And just think,” Bruce echoed. “If those behind the scenes were never to put pen to paper, history would lose some of its most valuable documents.”
In Marion’s whirling mind, something jumped clear of the fray. Had not Tommy said this exact same thing, one sunny night in Windsor during the war? If those behind the scenes were never to put pen to paper, history would lose some of its most informative documents. I don’t see how history can arrive at the truth if contemporaries aren’t allowed to write it.
And Tommy, of course, with his visit to Nottingham Cottage, had been the instigator of this whole business.
She smiled and took the shiny black pen proffered by Bruce. The gold nib hesitated over the white sheet below.
Gold and white. The color of the molding at Buckingham Palace. Of a pearl mounted in a crown. Of Lilibet at six.
The nib descended. She signed.
Beatrice whooped, leaped out of her chair and flung her arms around Marion. The hug was unexpectedly strong, like being clamped in a vise. George rose and shook hands vociferously with Bruce before giving Marion a kiss that left her breathless. Happiness rose inside her like a big red balloon.
EPILOGUE
Aberdeen, Scotland
JULY 1987
The gleaming limousines continued steadily onward, along the main road. Soon they were gone. The woman stopped waving and let her hand slowly drop.
Now she seemed to shrivel. Her form slumped and her face sank into creases. She looked her age; even older. Her heavy, drooping eyes looked tired and hopeless, their light extinguished.
Yet still she stood there at the window. The hours passed. The sun moved across the walls. The people in the photos on the mantelpiece grew indistinct in the fading light. The box in the corner was lost in the dusk.
In the dining room, the flowers had closed. The polished silverware caught the last of a pink sunset. In the shadows of the kitchen, the edges of the sandwiches dried and curled.
Finally, the old woman moved. Her hands were numb and her legs felt painfully stiff. In her specially bought new shoes she moved slowly across the carpet and left the room without pulling the curtains. From the mantelpiece, over the coroneted heads of her daughters, the queen stared impassively after her.
In a velvet-black sky, a cold silver moon had risen. Its light spread over the sleeping city, drawing the mica glitter out of the granite as the sun had done during the day. The prosperous road was silent. Moonlight fell on the neat gardens, touched the broad-branched trees, lit the backs of drawn curtains in the big detached houses.
Only the curtains in the old woman’s bedroom remained open. The moonlight fell through the window and across the bed. She lay in the center, in the pink dress, apparently still. But underneath the white cross-shaped brooch pinned over her heart, faint movement could yet be seen. She was still breathing; dreaming still.
A memory surfaced. Lilibet’s coronation. She had been in Aberdeen for two years by then, but no invitation to the Abbey had dropped through the door. Invitations rarely did; Marion kept herself to herself. No one must know who she had been, or where. And soon, in this street whose residents had the luxury of distance and privacy, people stopped wondering.
Another memory. Margaret and Peter Townsend. Alone of everyone she had seen it coming. The old woman, in her dream, felt the sharp pain of guessing what the girl was going through. But her sympathy was unwanted. All her letters to the palace had been returned unopened. Following the publication of The Little Princesses, the only correspondence she ever got was her own.
They had all rejected her—those for whom she had given up her youth. She had never had children of her own. The marriage to George had been miserable. After his death, her later life had been lonely. And now the end was coming. It was, some might say, a tragic one.
But the old woman on the bed was smiling. She felt a light was shining within her. Bright and dazzling, it banished recent shadows and revealed the glittering past.
What a past it had been. Exciting, extraordinary, epic in scale. She had lived, really lived, as few people ever lived. She had seen history unfold. Known kings and made a queen.
She had been needed. She had been happy and fulfilled. She had loved, passionately. Whether it had been reciprocated or deserved no longer mattered. The loving had been the thing. She had loved as few people ever loved. She had been lucky; gloriously so.
Her life was not a tragedy. It was a triumph. She had chosen her own path, followed her star. By anyone’s standards, her career had been astonishing. And when, finally, it was over, she had her memories. Wonderful memories, which would outlast her because of the book. Now, at the end, she could not regret even that.
Outside, in the black sky, the moon rose and brightened. The radiance within her seemed outside her too. It was pressing on her lids like the sun of late summer, a summer from the past before all the trouble began. There was warmth and color, now sharpening into pictures in her mind. She was in a Scottish garden on an August morning. The air was spicy with woodsmoke and sweet with the scent of sun-warmed gorse. Behind were the moors, wine-red, stretching to distant purple mountains.
And before her, coming over the green lawn, were three figures all dressed in blue. They were smiling at her, the duchess and her daughters, as she had first known them, long ago.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I had wanted to write a novel about the Windsors for years when the story of Marion Crawford literally fell at my feet. The Little Princesses—the autobiography about her seventeen years with the royal family, which landed her in so much trouble—came tumbling from the shelf of a secondhand bookshop on a rainy half-term day in the north of England. Pi
cking it up and flicking through, I slowly realized that this was the perfect way into a milieu that had fascinated me since childhood.
As a young girl, I had devoured my grandmother’s small collection of royal souvenir books, particularly a large gold volume about the 1937 coronation. The sepia photographs showed what was, to me, an obvious cast of larger-than-life personalities. The ever-thunderous-looking Queen Mary; King George V with his huge tired eyes; the golden-haired, glamorous Prince of Wales and the woman for whom he gave up his throne, the enigmatic Mrs. Simpson, holding a terrier and displaying an emerald the size of a floor tile (or so it seemed to me). And of course the York family: fragile Prince Albert (later George VI); the sweet but steely Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth); and their daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, with whose childhood this novel is centrally concerned.
None of my grandmother’s books had a picture or even a reference to Marion Crawford. The lively young Scottish teacher whose role in the princesses’ upbringing was as crucial as it was lengthy has largely been eradicated from history. References to her in even the scholarly biographies dealing with the period are few and brief. Mostly they subscribe to the orthodoxy that she made a foolish mistake writing a silly book and her subsequent rejection by those she spent her best years caring for was her own fault. Hugo Vickers, in his brilliant Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (Arrow), is rare in trying to unravel what actually went on and suggesting that Marion might have been badly treated. More recently, Robert Lacey, in his excellent The Crown: The Inside History (companion to the TV series), makes many similar points. Perhaps Marion is finally due a reappraisal.
What initially drew me to her story is there on the very first page of The Little Princesses, when she tells us that she had intended to teach in the Edinburgh slums. How the heck, I wondered, did someone with a vocation among the poor end up teaching some of the wealthiest people in the world? I read on. She was very young, I realized, only twenty-two; moreover, she was modern; one of the first-ever generation of women who saw an education and a profession as their right. So why had this sassy trailblazer with her liberal views gone to work for the most patriarchal institution imaginable?