The Royal Nanny by Karen Harper
But I think he too joined in the children’s joy, perhaps putting his war worries aside for a few moments. Things were not going well, and I knew from what Mary and George had said that he was quite upset that anti-German sentiment had turned against anyone who had a German last name. Spy mania, some called it, and here was the royal family with that heritage and name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
Johnnie kept cavorting with Mary and George to some sort of ragtime tune on Mary’s new gramophone. I knew their mother felt we should all be singing carols or even saying prayers, but I was glad she let the children spend their pent-up energy. However, I told myself, I would have to be sure my lad was careful with his new gramophone. Gently, now! was the motto I had to recite to Johnnie repeatedly as he had grown tall and didn’t know his own strength. Sometimes it seemed that Chad, Penny, and I were the only ones who could keep his high spirits reined in—even shortly after one of his spells.
“Look, Lala,” he told me as he buzzed past, circling the tree, making me almost dizzy. “The angel on top looks like the girls in cloud dresses high in the sky!”
Harry got into the fun, organizing the four of them to make a “choo, choo” railroad round and round the tree. Finally, it was too much for the king, who announced, “Enough! You are tiring your grandmother out, and I would appreciate some peace and quiet.”
The moment I popped up from my seat behind the royals to snatch Johnnie away, I sensed George was going to say something flip. I pointed at him in warning, but he was not to be denied. I prayed he wouldn’t sass his father. At least, he said only, “Peace on earth, good will to men. We would all like that, so we’ll quiet down. Too bad Hansell isn’t here to read us his A Christmas Carol story, right, lads?”
“And we all yelled ‘Bah! Humbug!’ right along with him,” Harry said, sobering too and lifting the needle off the record so the music stopped.
As I walked behind the tree to collect Johnnie, I gasped. My pulse pounded: he was wavering on his feet, his eyes rolling back, going to his knees. Oh, please, dear Lord, not here. Not now!
I could hardly carry him from the room or even drag him out. At least we were behind the tree from the adults, but—
“Lala,” Mary cried, “whatever is it? He looks— Oh, no!”
Someone said something else, but I shut it out, the sounds, the voices. I broke Johnnie’s fall as he pitched forward nearly into the tree and kept him from going facedown on the polished wooden floor. I rolled him on his back and put between his teeth the top of a velvet-lined gift box in which Mary had received a single strand of pearls. I seized a flat, unwrapped box labeled for David and thrust it between his head and the floor as his convulsions started.
Mary: “Can I help? Oh, dear! Mama, Johnnie’s sick—you know.”
I: “Mary, get back, all of you. It will pass. He will be all right. Go sit down.”
The king: “What? Here? All of you, come back here!”
Yet not only Queen Mary but Queen Alexandra joined me and helped to stop the endless thrashing of his legs and arms. I think the king took the others out into the hall—I don’t know what I thought.
Then, finally, it was over. He stopped shaking and opened his eyes.
“I wanted to bring my peep,” he said, looking up, dazed, at the high ceiling.
“We’ll take you back to your bed and you can see your peep,” I promised.
Queen Mary helped her mother-in-law rise. I saw both of them were crying, then realized I was too.
“I have a nice peep for you,” the old queen said, “one that won’t get too big so you have to get a new one like all those times before.” She tottered off, and I paid her no heed, for she could say things as far afield as Johnnie.
But when the king sent in two footmen to help Johnnie get back to York Cottage “from his fall,” the dear old woman came over and pressed the Fabergé grouse into the boy’s trembling hands.
“I know you want real peeps, my dear, but you keep this one too, all right? Your brother David liked it, and I know you do too.”
“Thank you, Grannie. If Lala says I can keep it—only one peep at a time.”
“My, he seemed lucid,” his mother said from behind me when I thought she’d walked away.
“For a few minutes—then exhaustion—sleepy time, right, Johnnie?”
“But what about my gramophone?”
“They will bring it to you, but now, off to York Cottage, off to bed,” I told him.
I did not realize until the king appeared to supervise the footmen putting Johnnie and me in a motorcar outside that I was both sweating and chilled. I was terrified that this epileptic seizure of the many I had tended in private was going to upset my world just as surely as had that first fit on the royal yacht nearly seven years ago.
I WAS SURPRISED the next week when Lady Eva Dugdale arrived at York Cottage and asked to see me in the queen’s boudoir. The king and queen were in London, and Lady Dugdale usually attended Her Majesty. I went down the hall, nervous, even fearful, for I’d been waiting for the other shoe to fall—a talk from the king about not letting Johnnie get so excited at best—perhaps a real scolding for me—though my being dismissed would be the worst.
I curtsied to her and tried to buck myself up. Twice this kindly woman had done me a service, in hiring me to tend the royal children and in helping me rid David and Bertie of Mrs. Peters. I saw that she had ordered tea for two, and she let me pour. I was usually more adept at that, but my hands were shaking.
“Is Her Majesty quite well, milady?” I asked.
“Exhausted from visiting hospitals and waving the troops off to France. But I hear Johnnie is still not well. As large as he is now, are his seizures not more—noticeable? More dramatic?”
I tried to keep my teacup from rattling in its saucer. “As you may have heard, but for a single incident, we are handling it well. He is happy here at Sandringham, and he’s even learned to write his parents letters in a large, but very legible script. He loves it here and knows no other life, so it would be wrong to change anything.”
“Charlotte,” she said, leaning closer and reaching out one hand to cover mine, “you have been the best thing in the world for these children, from the first, with that terrible woman I mistakenly sent here. But you must know how distressed the other children were by Johnnie’s seizure on Christmas Day, other times too, though they didn’t see his problem full face until then.”
I could have shattered the thin bone china in my hand. The queen—no doubt, the king made her do it—had sent this woman to tell me Johnnie was to be sent away. Perhaps that I was to be let go after all these years.
Trying not to shout, I told her, “Johnnie would be greatly set back should he lose his family. Forgive me for speaking true, milady—if he would lose me. The king knows that. He cannot mean that his youngest son should be hidden, be sent away from his family and all he knows.”
“His Majesty greatly admires your stalwart service to Johnnie and would like to reward it.”
“The only reward I want is for Their Majesties’ youngest son not to be sent away.” I nearly burst into tears. I knew the king had a war to fight, but could he not tell me this in person, so that I could deal directly with him? Would he not grant me a favor for taking good care of his children for all these many years? He gave me no medal when the Zeppelin attacked, but he’d said he owed me much.
“Charlotte,” Lady Dugdale said again, pulling her hand back from mine and sitting up even straighter, “have you heard of or seen Wood Farm on the estate? It has a nice cottage, brick, two stories, I hear, quite snug with fields and forests nearby.”
Her words barely punctured my fear and fury. “Wh-What? Nearer Wolferton?”
“Yes, before the marshes and bogs begin, closer to the railway but in a secluded spot on the estate.”
“This estate. Nearby.”
“Three miles, I believe, or so Chad Reaver told me when he brought me here in a carriage from the station today.” Wood Farm but thre
“Now,” she said, taking what was her first sip of tea, “I’ve arranged for Mr. Reaver to take you, me, and Johnnie there to have a look at the house straightaway. The wind’s a bit nippy, and snow is on the ground, but we’ll manage.”
“But it’s still exile from his family . . . from his parents.” I gripped my hands tightly together around my teacup. “Milady, I want to understand what you are saying. The king—and the queen, of course—are suggesting—I mean they have decided—that Johnnie and I would live at Wood Farm?”
“With some staff, a house maid, cook, and one of the few footmen—of course, the last nursemaid you have here, if you wish, as I understand rooms have been readied for them in the spacious attic and there is a good-sized kitchen at the back.”
“But York Cottage, his family, and this staff are all he knows. Would he be banished there or able to visit and have visits from the family?”
“As I said, the other children suffer when they see him the way he is. But of course, they could visit.”
“But would they, if their parents didn’t approve such? And if Johnnie was not to be hidden—”
“Hidden? He’s to have freedom to move about the entire estate.”
“But his family are gone so much already. And would it not help others who have children in the nation with such problems if the royal family did not banish him?”
“Best not protest, even though you argue like a clever lawyer. Charlotte, these are terrible times for European rulers. Monarchies are endangered or going down. Our royal family needs to look and be strong, united, capable in all ways.”
I just stared at her but I was seeing Johnnie’s parents, the stern king and pliable but loving queen. They were banishing my boy so they could present a perfect picture, and Johnnie did not fit that.
“Besides,” Milady Dugdale went on, “this place has always been a bit crowded, hasn’t it, and you’d be absolutely knocking round in the Big House. Queen Mary says she and the boy’s grandmother will visit. You see, Their Majesties could not get away right now to explain all this, nor did they want to just write or telephone.”
I knew how busy and bereft Johnnie’s father was, fighting a war, and yet I considered him a coward not to tell me this himself. And for not keeping Johnnie with the family. His mother, at least, should have fought for him—or written a damned note to her husband—to have the boy stay at York Cottage, which had been his home.
But a strange little voice in my head said quite clearly, But you are his mother, except by blood. You have reared him, helped him, protected and loved him. And they are letting him, thank God, stay in your care . . .
“Charlotte,” another voice, perhaps a real one, broke into my head. “Are you quite all right? You look . . . well, dazed. Do you understand what I’ve said?” Lady Dugdale asked, leaning close and shaking my wrist as if she needed to wake me up.
“Yes. Yes, all right,” I managed, as I told myself this could have been worse. I steeled myself to be calm when I wanted to scream and break things for this was wrong, wrong, wrong. And cruel, though I would fight to keep Johnnie from thinking so. At least it would not be for me like poor Margaretta Eager who had been sent away from her royal Russian girls. And Chad was waiting to take us there.
“I am glad they sent you,” I told Lady Dugdale, shaking myself back to reality. “It’s best their Royal Majesties didn’t do it, for I fear what I might have said. You have ever been a friend to me, if you don’t mind my saying so, milady.”
“I not only don’t mind, but I am honored,” she said, looking much relieved at my change of tone.
I let out a big breath, and my shoulders slumped. My heartbeat quieted a bit. I’d seen Wood Farm once from afar, years ago, riding round the estate with Chad, but I could picture none of it now. Perhaps it would be almost like a house of my own.
I WANTED TO hate Wood Farm but I could not. The farmhouse was much smaller than even York Cottage, of course, but it was broad enough across the front that twelve windows could be opened to the breezes from the fields and forests in fine weather. It was all sturdy, muted redbrick with a covered doorway and a small garden in front surrounded by a low, square wall, though right now snow lay on it all like vanilla frosting, including the two chimneys and slanted roof. In truth, it was a charming house.
“We can keep peeps in the yard,” Johnnie announced, for I’d spent the way over here explaining to him that, now that he was growing up, he could live away from York Cottage just like his brothers did.
“Only one peep at a time, remember?” Chad told him as we got down. “Peep George would be unhappy if you got more right now, but I know he’ll like this new place.”
Chad winked at me over Johnnie’s head and behind Lady Dugdale’s back as he opened the gate for us. Yes, I thought, with Johnnie here and Chad but three miles away, this house could be a home. Already I could imagine Penny swinging on the gate with Johnnie.
The rooms were comfortably furnished and spic and span. The scent of lemon oil and—could that be?—baked bread filled the air. It was a bit chilly but we could soon build up the hearth fire in this main room and the kitchen. It had electric lights and a telephone on the wall.
“Of course,” Her Ladyship said as we walked from room to room on the ground floor, “you can bring Johnnie’s furniture and things he likes.”
Johnnie chimed in, “Especially my new gramophone and Peep George—and Lala too. But where will Papa and Mama sleep when they come here? Don’t they want to live with me anymore?”
My gaze slammed into Lady Dugdale’s, but we turned away from each other. I had much work to do, far more than just packing and arranging.
“We’ll talk about all that later, my dear,” I told him. “And Chad and Penny will visit and I’m sure your family will too.”
Chad waited below while the three of us went upstairs and even looked into the attic with its single hall and four small rooms for servants. The views out the upstairs windows were good. We could watch the seasons change the trees from here and even see the smoke from the railway station on a clear day. The bedrooms upstairs were spacious compared to the nursery and rooms at York Cottage. In a way, it seemed to me a step up, but I would have lived in a mud hut to keep Johnnie with me.
Chad was waiting downstairs, turned sideways so that, despite his crutches, it looked as if he had two legs and was whole again. But he would always be whole to me, all I ever needed, if I had Johnnie near to protect and tend.
“Well,” I whispered to Chad, “at least Their Majesties have bought me off at a pretty price—and place.”
“I was hoping you would accept the inevitable,” he told me as he held my arm and I stepped up into the carriage. “Including expecting a caller at the door, one Mrs. Wentworth will not give the eagle eye to when I appear with another peep.”
“I can have another peep?” Johnnie asked as he piled in next to Lady Dugdale.
“I’m afraid peeps don’t like the gramophone played as loud as you do,” Chad said, climbing up into the driver’s seat and putting his crutches under his leg. “Except Peep George doesn’t seem to mind, so I think he’s it for now.”
“Lala said it’s not a boy but I’m not changing its name!”
“Not a boy?” Lady Dugdale said with a laugh. “But how do you know, if I dare ask?”
“Peep George laid an egg,” Johnnie told her. “Only girls do that, like when I was born, right, Lala?”
“More or less,” I told him, patting his shoulder, “but we’ll work on all that too.”
Johnnie bounced in his seat, Her Ladyship smiled, and Chad nodded before he turned back toward the horses. So, instead of total desolation and defeat, I felt I had won a little war to get to stay with Johnnie. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t still going to fight for my little prince.
Whenever we could steal away from our duties, Chad, Penny, Johnnie, and I spent time together, as we did one spring day in 1917, on a Sunday picnic to a wooded area called Cat’s Bottom. I’d already explained to Johnnie that there would be no cat to see.
“I do feel a bit guilty sometimes for being so content,” I told Chad as we sat together on our blanket and watched the children pick flowers and then, laughing, throw them at each other.
“That’s how it’s been for me, not being able to fight the Huns. I know you understand. It’s amazing the war has gone so bad for Russia that the tsar has been forced to abdicate. Another big blow to His Majesty. One royal cousin causing all this mess and the others the victims of that.”
I sighed. “Uneasy is the head that wears the crown, as I’ve heard said. But with all their appearances among their people and their bravery during the war so far, I think Their Majesties will weather this storm. But I . . . I can’t believe it either about Tsar Nicholas. I’ve never seen a ruler so protected and so powerful. Even on holiday, nothing but guards, guards, guards. But maybe that means he was never really free. I’m hoping England grants asylum to the Romanovs. Johnnie’s never forgotten the tsar’s four daughters and the poor little tsarevich . . .”
“Poor because he won’t ever rule now? They’ll probably leave Russia with enough wealth to build themselves a palace right here on these grounds and one near London. But you have seen enough rulers to know more about them than most, haven’t you, my love?” he asked and pelted me with some purple columbine Penny had brought him before she was off again.
“Including an American president,” I said. “It’s been a more amazing life than I could ever have dreamed, and yet—despite seeing all the glamour, the food and fashion, yachts and travel and important people—it’s being someplace simple like this with you, Johnnie, and Penny that means the most to me. I do feel I’ve succeeded with the children—except David.”
My big, stalwart man reached over and squeezed my hand. “Any more letters from him?” he asked as he stroked my arm, wrist to elbow. His merest touch was enough to electrify me, and he knew it.