Authors: Karen Harper
I
held the princess's limp hand as the nurse steadied her hips and the doctor inserted the forceps. He was sweating now too, great drops off his chin and mustache, as he bent over, concentrating on delivering the child. The room was like an oven this July day with the windows barely ajar. If this went wrong for the baby or Her Highness, what would it mean for Dr. Williams? For Prince George and the children he was so hard on at times? And for the nation, all of our futures, should the Waleses ever be king and queen?
I saw now why Princess May dreaded childbirth. Oh, I'd heard my mother scream now and again through it, but it seemed to quickly end. Surely, this would be over soon and worth the agony and danger. Could I do this myself to bear a child? Chad was lost to me, couldn't ever stay with me . . .
“Stay with us!” Dr. Williams kept muttering. “This baby, nurse . . . I just don't know . . .”
So did he mean the baby was lost and he could only hope for Princess May? Sweat stung my eyes as I blinked back tears.
And then, a sucking sound. The princess's body shuddered. I leaned closer as a head appeared first, one shoulder, two, then the rest of a little body. Another boy, her fifth! Wet and messy, yet the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. But not moving. Not crying. Notânot anything and turning blue.
I started to cry as the doctor bent over the baby and suctioned his nostrils and throat with a tube that had a rubber bulb on its end. Dr. Williams dropped that apparatus and, as slippery as the child was, draped him over one arm and patted, then smacked his back and bottom. No cry. No gasp for air.
“Nurse, see to the afterbirth,” he said, then to my amazement, brought the little boyâbirthing cord still attachedâto me and lay the baby facedown over the apron that covered my knees. With both hands free he lifted the baby's hips and smacked his back smartly once, twice, while I stared aghast.
The little boy sucked in a big breath. He moved against my thighs and cried. Though I didn't know if I dare touch him, I did, rubbing his wet, little back, his neck up to his sticky, short blond hair until the doctor tended briefly to the princess, then came back with scissors and turned the baby upright in my lap to cut and tie the cord.
“Never would have dared that on Lady Dugdale's lap,” he muttered. “Keep him warm with these.” He gave me several towels, and I gently covered him, then cleaned as much of the little boy as I could. He looked as if he'd been through a battle, and indeed he had. I murmured low to him, soothing baby talk, calling him “poppet, sweetums, my little one.” Well, indeed, in a way, he was to be mine.
With a glance at Princess May, who looked unconscious yet, I spoke up at last. “Will Her Highness be all right?”
“And will he?” the doctor said as he bent down to stitch up the princess as if she were a sock that needed mending. “Like you, Mrs. Lala, Princess May has grit and go, and that lad had better too. Nurse can take him from you in a moment, clean him up properly, then we'll have a look at him, but I daresay you're getting on famously already.”
“Thank God, he's breathing, but he looks a bit the worse for wear. I can even see the marks from the forceps.”
“Necessity, or we'd have lost them both. It's best if you tell no one what a struggle this was. I'll inform the prince, of course. As soon as we have things set to rights here, I'll bring him in.”
“The baby's trembling now, but no longer blue,” I told him. I sounded breathless, as if I'd done all the work. “He's breathing but shallow. Despite these towels, we'll need a blanket even before he's all washed up to keep him warm.”
For the first time since the birth, the nurse left the princess and brought me a blanket to wrap the little mite around the damp towels. But under it all, I kept my hand on his chest to be sure it rose and fell as he breathed. His tiny mouth was puckered, his brow creased, his nostrils flared as if this world was a shock and a struggle. I'd promised the princess I would take care of this child, as was my duty, but it was from that very first moment I held him, so helpless in my lap, that I loved him fiercely.
When the nurse took the child, my apron was such a mess that I removed it and left it with the pile of rags. I stood by as the nurse bathed the baby, put some sort of oil on his limbs, even washed his hair. He was so new, so wrinkled. He fretted and wailed as he was bundled, so I knew he was indeed kin to his siblings.
“Let Mrs. Lala hold him,” Dr. Williams said, after he had put packing between the princess's legs. “I need you here.”
I
need you here.
This child, even more than the others, needed me. He was special, and if I never bore a baby of my own, this one was mine.
T
HREE DAYS LATER,
Finch and I escorted the five children down the upstairs hall, summoned to the queen's bedroom since she was more herself now. I would not say she was much recovered, though she usually bounced back quickly after a birth. I had seen her several times, and she had thanked me for my help and vow to tend the child, but I almost thought she resented the little one for giving her such a hard time. I would not feel she was really well again until the doctor and nurse, still here, left Sandringham.
Today would be the first time the other children would see their new brother, who took extra watching because of occasional breathing concerns. My nursemaids and I had the two younger boys all scrubbed up to meet the latest family addition and to hear their parents announce his name, or string of them, if the pattern held true. Unfortunately, Mary was pouting because her governess had scolded her for shoddy work, but Finch had David and Bertie in firm tow. Harry and George were still so young that all they knew was that they had another playmate.
I chided myself over how not only protective but possessive I felt toward the new Wales baby. So I gave extra cuddles to his siblings, lecturing myself that Mary Peters, the demented nurse I had replaced at Sandringham, had been overly possessive of David. I vowed I would not be that with this new child. Still, as I helped tend him on those first few days he was yet officially unnamed, I hardly saw the other children. On the way to visit their parents and new brother, David clung to me.
“Remember, I was first and I'll be king someday, even if I don't want to!” he whispered to me as if in warning.
“I love all of you very much,” I assured him while Finch rolled his eyes and shook his head. He'd evidently been hearing much the same from David, maybe from Bertie too. “You are all different, and I love you in different ways.”
“Well, Mary's different, since she's a girl,” David said, seizing my elbow and bouncing my arm. I was carrying little George. “But now we have five boys, and I am still number one.”
As we went in, I curtsied to Their Highnesses, for the prince stood near the bed where the princess lay, propped up on a pile of satin and lace pillows. The room looked so different from a birthing room, without the medical supplies but decked with flowers, letters, and cards. The familiar crib with its organza skirting and ruffled hood stood near the queen's bed. I had been helping the doctor and medical nurse off and on in the next room, which they had requisitioned to keep a watch over the baby, but, of course, they would have brought the new child here now.
I saw they were not in the room, perhaps resting after what had, no doubt, been an ordeal for them too. I was still weak-kneed at all that had happened. I edged a bit closer to the crib to glance in andâ Dear God, it was empty! Had we been summoned for an announcement of another kind?
The prince must have heard me gasp. He looked so sharply at me that I feared a telling off, but he said, “The child is still with the doctor. As you know, some slight respiratory problems hanging on.”
“What is res-pra-tory, Lala?” Mary asked, turning toward me instead of her father.
He nodded that I could answer. “It means it's a little hard to breathe sometimes,” I tried to assure her, though my heartbeat
had kicked up. I longed to rush next door to see if the baby was all right. “Like when you have a cold and your nose is stuffy and you have to breathe through your mouth.”
“Precisely,” the prince said. “But you will all see him soon, and your mother and I want to tell you before it is announced far and wide that his name is to be John.” He stepped to the side of the bed and took Princess May's hand as she managed a wan smile. “To be exact,” the prince said, “his name is John Charles Francis in honor of my brother, who was lost.”
“Lost?” little Harry piped up. “Like in the woods?”
“No,” their father said. “Such as who never lived to grow up like all of you will, including baby John, who we will call Johnnie, right, my dear?”
Princess May agreed, and the children peppered them with questions about the uncle they didn't know they had, though the prince mostly put them off. As he prepared to shoo them out, each of the children went to their mother's bedside and kissed her cheek, I holding the two youngest in turn so they could reach her.
But I was as upsetâeven annoyedâas were the children, who were let down because the baby wasn't there and their questions weren't answered. I thought it was a terrible omen that a baby who had a difficult birth and was having trouble breathing should be named for a baby who had died. I'd seen the grave of Prince George's younger brother, John, out in the churchyard of St. Mary Magdalene a half-mile walk from here. It bore a white cross with the engraved words,
S
uffer the little children to come unto
M
e.
Good gracious, I thought, though I loved and honored the Lord, I surely hoped He'd let us have Johnnie longer than he'd let Queen Alexandra keep her little boy named John.
T
HE NEXT EVENING,
and I suppose it was a strange thing to do, when the princess insisted I needed a break from helping to care for Johnnie, I made a beeline for the deceased John's grave. Dr. Williams and his nurse were still with us, though he'd pronounced that the baby was getting stronger every day. Blessedly, I had seen that was true.
Daylight lingered in the sky, and the July evening was warm. Yet coolness wafted from the grass as I headed for the gray, rough-stone building with the white trim that stood out ahead. The Gothic windows lost the last rays of sun, and the face of the clock on the tower went dim. I cut across the rows of old tombstones straight for the white cross over the first John's little grave.
Remembering what I had heard from Mabel about this early death the last time I had visited her at the Big House, I stopped to read the carved words on the tombstone.
JOHN CHARLES ALBERT
had been born at
SANDRINGHAM ON APRIL 6, 1871
and had died the very next day. Poor Alexandra to lose her sixth and last child, just as our Johnnie would, I had no doubt, be the Waleses' sixth and last. And she'd lost her firstborn Eddie, whose portrait Chad had rescued during the fire. Too many deaths here, but I vowed anew that our Johnnie would live and thrive.
I wished the biblical quotation the white cross bore didn't say
S
uffer the little children
on it. Oh, I knew that word “suffer” meant “allow,” but that didn't help
.
Queen Alexandra's lost sonsâdid they suffer? Our Johnnie seemed to sometimes when he struggled for a breath. If I was there, especially if I was holding him, I would shift him to lie upright against my shoulder, cradle the back of his head, and gently wind him as if he'd just been nursed because it seemed to help him breathe.
I jumped as I heard footsteps behind me. I spun aroundâ
Chad. Close. So near . . . We'd been together but always with the children and now to be so suddenly alone . . .
“Charlotte, I thought it was you. Why are you here? Isn't the new boy better?” Stopping two tombstones away, he snatched off his cap and turned it in his hands as he spoke.
“Yes, a bit better each day, though he struggles to breathe sometimes. They named him John, and I wish that they had not. It is good to honor those we've lost, but clinging to memories can make things worse,” I said and pointed at the name on the tombstone.
“Ah,” he said, frowning as his eyes went swiftly over me. When he looked at me that way, I always felt his gaze as if it were a physical caress. I hoped he didn't think my words referred to usâour loss of each other. “Yes, I've seen a baby fight for breath,” he added, his voice breaking.
I realized he must mean that his own childâa son, I'd heardâhad struggled that way too. I confided, “I thought I'd come here for a few minutes, grieve for this lost lamb, grateful my new, little charge is holding his own.”
“I often walk here. At first, I didn't think it right to approach you so that we would be alone againâeven without a net.” One corner of his firm mouth lifted, but in a grimace or a smile? “I'm here also to . . . to remember my son,” he said, his voice rough.
He gestured back the way he must have come, toward the simply marked graves with the low, crudely cut headstones, compared to these large, ornate ones that were tied to the royal family.
“Oh,” I whispered, and tears burned my eyes. “I should have known he would be here somewhere.”
He walked away from the church with a simple gesture that I should follow him. We stopped over a nearly flat stone, facing each
other, looking down at it. The grass over the little grave seemed to be worn at the edges by footsteps. Chad's? His wife's?
The gravestone read
BOY REAVER
. “His name isâwasâMatthew,” Chad whispered.
I know it was foolhardy here in the open to take his hand, but I did. “I'm sure you will have another child,” I told him.
“Would that I had you to tend him or her,” he whispered. He sniffed hard, squeezed my hand, loosed it and walked away.
I stood there a moment, listening to a ruffed male grouse in the nearby woodlot make its distinctive drumming sound with its wings to attract a mate. Chad had told me of that the very day I first arrived at Sandringham, and I'd heard it many a time since these last nine years. I remembered too Queen Alexandra's agate grouse David had pilfered the first time I'd visited the Big House. He'd claimed it was to give to Chad. Poor David, wanting to please Chad as if he were almost a foster father at times, as was Finch to him.