The Royal Nanny (30 page)

“Thank you, Victor. I'll come down to see the inspector if you will sit with Johnnie here.”

“Oh, yes, miss. Johnnie and I get on smashing, don't we, sir?”

My heart was pounding. Was I to be interrogated, as Finch had suggested? I steadied myself by reviewing what he'd said, that Special Branch was working to protect David and, in a way, perhaps the king too.

As we sat across from each other—I did not call for tea—the red-haired, broad-shouldered man complimented the summer gardens and the well-kept estate. “But, of course,” he said at last, tugging at his shirt cuffs, “I'm here on official business. Mrs. Bill, I need to inquire if you still have the correspondence the Prince
of Wales has sent you over the years since he has lived away from Sandringham.”

“Letters to me, yes, but I consider them personal and private.”

“His Majesty's government would like to ask the greatest of favors, Mrs. Bill, that you allow me to take those letters into custody for the good of all. I'm sure the notes are sentimental to you, but as time goes on, we must be certain the private correspondence of the heir to the throne does not fall into the wrong hands—and I surely don't mean yours, for the prince trusts you implicitly and thinks of you with admiration.”

“Into the wrong hands, here, in this secluded area on the king's rural estate?” I asked, getting into even more of a fret. I must admit, I was ashamed and angry at myself that I had thought to use those careless comments if David ever tried to hide or harm Johnnie, so I understood what he meant. But if Special Branch shared those letters with the king, His Majesty would have a conniption.

“The Prince of Wales said you had grit, but this is wartime, Mrs. Bill, and I would
greatly
appreciate—as would the prince and the king—if you would entrust all of those missives to me.”

“Yes, I see,” I said and rose to fetch them. I was annoyed again. Never had I felt more like one of those suffragettes both my father and the king tried to dismiss and keep in their place. “But please tell David,” I added, “that this should be a nanny's lesson to him—not to put anything in writing or do anything in his life he will regret.”

Inspector Palmer rose too. “I will tell him. Good advice for all of us, especially for our Prince of Wales.”

C
HAD AND
I
were at sixes and sevens, waiting for Their Majesties to come to Sandringham for their twenty-fifth wedding anniver
sary on July 6, 1918. It had been over a year since we'd formally pledged to each other and, though being together was a joy, it was getting terribly difficult to wait. More than once we'd thought of writing the king, but Chad believed our chances were better to face him in person. I too feared his answer, for nannies were always single women—yet, was not Johnnie's situation, almost hidden from the outside world, different enough that an exception could be made?

But we grew bold as the war seemed to be winding down. The German navy had refused to fight, and it was rumored that the kaiser would flee to a neutral country. The royal family had dropped their German last name and formally had become the Windsors, named after that most British of castles. Enough things seemed to be going well that they had decided to risk a week away from London—and we would risk asking them as soon as we could.

It was very windy for July, and it had been raining, but I could have flown as high as the kite that Queen Alexandra had given Johnnie. Penny was visiting her mother's family over in the village today, but Chad had taken a few hours off to greet the king when he arrived—and to be with me.

Our boy had insisted on bringing Peep George, but the old bird was tethered by one leg and was pecking for insects in the slight depression where a Zeppelin bomb crater had been filled in and sodded, while Chad and Johnnie wrestled with the wind to keep the kite aloft.

Johnnie shouted to me, “The other George, my brother, would like to see this kite flying, Lala! I'll write him about it.”

“You are getting very good with your handwriting,” I called to him. Johnnie was ecstatic, and Chad was managing to keep himself upright and let the boy help to control the kite.

“Righto!” Chad told Johnnie. “But now tug on the string and run a bit with it when it starts to come down.”

“It's as high as the clouds, Lala!”

“Don't run too far!”

He screeched in his excitement, which made Peep George try to fly. Somehow the grouse's tether came off. Despite her clipped wings, she managed to get aloft for a few feet and flew right into the ravine where we'd sought shelter from the Zeppelin.

“Oh, no!” I cried.

Chad saw it too and started over. “Stay with him,” he called back to me, “and I'll see where she is. Maybe just down on that first ledge.”

Hoping Johnnie didn't notice Peep George was missing, I went over to him and helped him keep the kite from diving into the ground when he yanked it too hard. I looked back at Chad. The bird must have been reachable, because I didn't see him. He had managed to get to that ledge in the dark, no less, under attack with Johnnie and me that terrible night, so I just went back to watching Johnnie. Chad would be here with the bird soon.

But where was he? His crutches lay in the grass near the rim of the ravine. Surely, he hadn't gone down too far for that bird.

“Johnnie, leave the kite where it hits this time. Look, here comes Mabel, maybe to tell us your mama and papa are here or it's time for lunch. Go tell her about the kite, all right?”

“But . . . where is Peep George?” he demanded. “Did he fly away?”

“He's fine. He's with Chad. Go with Mabel now,” I ordered, gesturing to her. “Chad and I will bring Peep George into the house.”

I strode right for Chad's crutches. I looked down onto the first ledge—no. I held to a sturdy, young tree and leaned out, looking down—down to where Chad lay sprawled and unmoving far below by the little stream, down into the depths of my soul.

S
o we had a funeral instead of a wedding. Many local folk attended because so many had known and admired Chad. Despite my dazed state, I came to grasp that in burying him, a real body in an actual casket—a rather fine oak one the king purchased—for the villagers, it was like having one of their once strong fathers, brothers, and sons, who were buried in France, home again to lay in Sandringham soil.

At first, I could barely risk being with Johnnie, not that I blamed him, but I was so distraught that I upset him. I could not stand to look at Peep George, though she didn't live much longer from her injuries, which made Johnnie more difficult too. Bless her, Queen Alexandra and Toria kept him for a few days, with Mabel's help. But when I heard Alexandra's sister, Maria Feodorovna, the mother of Tsar Nicholas, was staying there, I knew I had to pull myself together and get Johnnie back.

Queen Mary and the king had attended Chad's funeral.
Also, they sent me a condolence note, so I guess they knew how much Chad had meant to me, though I never told them we had hoped to wed. My parents said I should come home for a visit, but this was home to me now.

Besides, it was more shocking deaths that made me go to the Big House to take Johnnie back again, for in that same July of 1918, word came that the tsar and all his family had been slaughtered by Bolshevik revolutionaries in some dreadful cellar in the dark of night.

“Everyone here is crying,” Johnnie said, when Mabel brought him down to me with his little satchel. “I guess it's for Chad and Peep George going away. Grannie knows they went away.”

I could tell Mabel had been crying too. I was not sure that I'd ever get over Chad's loss, but to think of the tsar's children, so full of life, those lovely, sweet girls—oh, but Margaretta would be devastated. She'd actually been able to exchange some letters with the girls during the first months of their exile. And I had a feeling she would never quite get over their fates. “I will explain to Johnnie,” I told Mabel, and we hugged each other.

“I overheard,” she whispered, “that the king blames himself for not taking them in, but that's to remain private. He and the queen are going to the London memorial service for the tsar, though the prime minister advises against it. So much loss . . .”

“I hope no one is mad at me for anything,” Johnnie told me as he carried his satchel and we started out for York Cottage, where Victor was waiting for me with a carriage, the same one in which Chad had driven us to see Wood Farm for the first time. I needed the walk to steel myself to explain things to Johnnie as best I could, to find the words not only about losing Chad but those beloved girls in cloud dresses. We walked a ways and sat
on the bench at the edge of the lake where Chad and I had sat, once angry with each other, while Johnnie threw stones in the water. Today, as if he sensed something, he did not speak or jump around, but looked up at the sky, a habit he'd never lost.

“I want you to know,” I told him, “that Chad did not want to leave us and did not want to leave Sandringham.”

“Where is he then? Out by Cat's Bottom or in the woods? Penny said he's gone and that's all she was supposed to say to me, but she was pretty sad.”

“You know that people die sometimes.”

“Grandpapa died. Grannie said so and said did I remember him.”

“And do you?”

“Did he put butter on his pant legs, Lala?”

I smiled. “Yes, to make you laugh. He liked to make you happy, and I do too.”

“Did he know about my falling fits?”

“No, he died before that. Johnnie, Chad fell down in the ravine and hit his head and died, but he didn't want to leave us. He went to heaven now, far, far up there, somewhere, but his body is buried—like we buried Peep George—in the ground. But we'll always remember him here with us, won't we?”

“I will and bet I can find him somewhere in the woods or by the Wash where he showed us birds that fly.”

I sighed, but his not really grasping all this was for the best. Should I even tell him about his girls in cloud dresses? No, that was beyond his understanding, and, frankly, beyond mine.

“Grannie said you were sick but you'd be better soon,” Johnnie said, putting his hand in mine. “You still look a little sick.”

I forced a smile and sniffed back tears, when I thought I'd
cried out all that I would ever have. To each his or her own way of grieving for those we love and those we lose, and God help us if that is the same person.

“And, Nanny Lala, I have a present for you,” he announced and opened his satchel to dig out a folded piece of paper. “To make you feel better, make you well, 'cause you taught me to write and lots of things.”

I opened the note. In pencil, in his best handwriting, though a bit on the slant, with the paper giving off the sweet lilac scent his grandmother often wore, I read,
NANNY
—
I
LOVE
YOU
.
JOHNNIE
.

T
HAT NOTE AND
that child kept me going, though his seizures were increasing in frequency and length. I treasured the visits from his grandmother and sometimes his mother, who loved him dearly and visited when she could. Penny came often too, to play with Johnnie, but it lifted my heart to see her getting on without her father. She lived with her aunt and two cousins, but we saw a great deal of her.

And through Penny as well as his grandmother, Johnnie played with many of the local lads, openly and easily, in a way David and Bertie never had. Johnnie was not lonely as they had been—as I still was for Chad. It pained me that I imagined him everywhere we went on the estate and hurt me too when Johnnie sometimes insisted he was looking for Chad. And when he stared up at the clouds and mentioned the pretty girls in cloud dresses . . .

I tried to buck myself up, despite wind and snow, that January 18, 1919. The Armistice bringing Europe peace, the Treaty of Versailles, was to be signed that day in France, though that would
bring no Sandringham boys home. I almost snapped at Johnnie for playing his favorite record of American war songs repeatedly that day: “Over There” with Enrico Caruso and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” because his name was in that song. How that reminded me of one of our last days together—as a family with Chad and me. Today my boy had been marching about and here we were cooped up, and I could have screamed.

“Johnnie, can we turn that off for now, or change the record?” I asked in my best I-mean-it nanny voice.

“I can put on ‘I'm Always Chasing Rainbows,'” he told me. “I like the words,
watching clouds drifting by.
Lala, are you still sick?”

J
ust heartsick,
I thought, but I said, “I'm fine. If you're fine, I'm fine.”

“Oh, I am,” he said, but he lifted the needle from the record and came over and sat next to me on the sofa. “Lala,” he said, so seriously, “the music has stopped.”

I nodded and took his hand. After these fourteen years we'd been together, once again he was trying to comfort me. I tried to look only at the bright side of things: I regretted nothing but, of course, Chad's loss—Johnnie's banishment from his family home and David's increasingly reckless behavior over the years.

“We are going to dance!” Johnnie declared, jumping up to put the music back on. It was another of his favorites, “After the Ball.”

“This is about a game bouncing a ball,” he told me as he pulled me to my feet, held my hands, and bounced around the room, pulling me after him.

M
any a heart is aching . . .
M
any the hopes . . . vanished . . .
The words on the record echoed in my heart.

I didn't tell him it wasn't about a game, not that kind of ball. I
never told him that I was going to go on even if I sometimes felt my life was over, but for him. Because right then, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he collapsed, and I screamed for Cook and Victor and we managed to get him upstairs before the worst of the seizure began.

“You can leave us now,” I told them as I scrambled for his mouthpiece and his pillow. “Just another one. He'll be better in the morning. Thank you both for being so loyal. Close his door, please.”

I was grateful he was in his own bed. The seizure was worse than usual, but when it ended, I managed to get some water with his bromide powder down him. At least Their Majesties had agreed that we should forgo the more brutal cures, and I wasn't even sure this helped.

Johnnie wasn't a bit chatty afterward as he often was. He just whispered, “I'll find Chad. Don't worry, Lala,” and fell into an exhausted sleep.

I sat by his chair, nodding off now and then as he slept, wishing my world was like his, that I had hopes of finding Chad and could see girls in cloud dresses in the sky.

Then, in the early evening, I jolted alert and realized my boy wasn't breathing. I jumped up, bent close over him, tried to shake him awake.

“Johnnie. Johnnie!”

I felt for his neck pulse, his wrist pulse. Nothing. No. No! But he felt cold, his eyes closed in sleep. Limp, unconscious, that was surely all. It had been a more violent seizure than the others, but he always woke up—he must talk to me again! He'd said he'd find Chad!

And perhaps he had.

I
TELEPHONED THE
queen, and she and the king motored to us straightaway from London. She came up to his bedroom where he lay, pale as a ghost on the bed.

“My dear boy,” she said, bending to take his limp hand. “And my dear Lala.” I had tried to stay strong to console her, but she embraced and comforted me. “Perhaps the Lord wanted to care for him now, despite the fine job you have done,” she told me.

It was only then I noticed the king had not come up, though I'd seen him get out of the motorcar and had heard his voice downstairs. “Does His Majesty wish time alone with—”

“He can't bear to see him . . . like this. He wants to remember him handing him stamps off the floor and jumping about when he was supposed to be quiet, that's all.”

“Yes,” I said, blotting at my tears that had dropped on the shoulder of her coat, “that's all.”

O
N
J
ANUARY 21,
1919, we buried Johnnie in the Sandringham churchyard where Chad lay. I had his
NANNY
—
I
LOVE
YO
U
note and the Fabergé grouse stuck in my muff and I held tight to them the entire church service and burial. Bertie and David were still away, but Mary stuck tight to her mother, Harry to the king, and dear George to me. But after everything, it was frail, old Queen Alexandra and I who lingered longest at the fresh grave, despite the bitter cold.

“Should I return the grouse statue, ma'am?” I asked her.

“You keep it, my dear. And you come here to live in the Big House with your friend Mabel until you are ready to . . . to get on with your life. I hear Mabel might go with you, and I will miss her too. Missing people we love—it is still better to have loved and lost than not to have loved, as they say, isn't it?”

“Yes, ma'am. Thank you for reminding me of that. So many losses here, but love means we wouldn't want to blot the memories out, even if they hurt.”

“Precisely. My sister says the same, and she's lost her son, his wife, and those lovely Russian children to those black-hearted Bolsheviks! I know my memory is not as good as it once was, dear Lala, but I won't forget our Johnnie. Now you're trembling from the cold. I'd best get back in my motor and go home—and you too—to Wood Farm. But if it is too empty and awful, you come to me.”

Erect, beautiful, despite her feeble frame, she patted my arm and turned toward her waiting motorcar. I blinked back tears at the array of fresh flowers left to freeze on the grave and hurried to take her arm so she wouldn't slip. I wanted to stay here at Sandringham, near Johnnie, near my beloved Chad forever, but they would both want me to go on—go on and keep looking up.