One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing Read Free Page A

entertained. They like Sammy Davis, Jr., Danny Kaye and Julie Andrews. Mr. Badenberg is glad he hired them. He knows that, otherwise, he wouldn’t have known how to entertain one child--let alone this lot. He is standing beside the french windows, anesthetizing his conscience with martinis. He is feeling guilty about his neglected business.
    Mrs. Badenberg flicks her teeth with an elegant fingernail. She’s worried. She’s wondering if the nannies’ champagne has been correctly chilled.
    The nannies are a social conundrum. Mrs. Badenberg often discusses them with her friends. The nannies are efficient, polite, perfectly mannered and correct, but diffident. They never mix with their employers--even when encouraged. They prefer their own, elite, company.
     
    While their charges giggled at Danny Kaye, the nannies sat and chatted in the lounge. They sipped the champagne, and nibbled cracker biscuits generously coated with caviar. They seemed relaxed, but Mrs. Badenberg knew their lynx-eyes missed nothing. She hoped she’d chosen the right year.
    Mrs. Badenberg popped her head round the door of the lounge and looked. As usual, they sat in small knots, chatting quietly. No matter how often the nannies met, the cliques remained unchanged. They weren’t grouped by ages or salaries. She could understand a social gap caused by nationality, but these nannies were all British. She whispered to her own nurse.
    “Everything satisfactory?”
    “Perfectly, ma’am,” nodded Nanny Hettie. Mrs. Badenberg left, pulled the door closed behind her, shrugged, and joined the children on the patio.
    “Terrible, terrible thing to happen,” said Hettie, resuming her interrupted narrative. The other nannies in her five-strong coterie nodded in sympathy. “Poor, dear wee Maister Quincey. And after all these years. Such wonderful people, too, the de Bapeau Charmaine- Botts.”
    “Very thad, Nanny Hettie,” lisped Susanne Martyn, the youngest nurse of her group, her blonde hair streaky from the reflected white of her uniform.
    “We brought him up. He had dreadful measles ... and mumps. But he was always very brave.”
    “He must have been. He passed on heroically,” said Melissa, the nanny who had made the countdown on the museum steps. “You could tell he’d had the right sort of training. Quite calm and collected. Really a credit to you, Nanny Hettie.”
    The old nanny shook her head. “Not really, lassie. It’s blood that matters. We do our best, but without the right blood ... nothing.”
    The other nannies nodded again.
    “Foreign Office, wasn’t he?” asked Emily Biddle, the oldest member of Hettie’s clique. Her hair stood out like porcupine quills. She blinked through a pair of pince-nez. “I can remember his grandfather. Victoria Cross--Zulu War, I think.”
    Melissa leant forward, confidentially. “The Earl said he was doing something very important when he died. He said ...” A sharp jab from Hettie’s elbow cut her in mid-sentence.
    “But, he ...”
    “Nothing,” said Hettie, firmly. “What he said was quite private.”
    Melissa bit her lip. The other nannies nodded in agreement with Hettie. What the 25th Earl had said at his moment of death was no one else’s business but his nanny’s.
     
    Nanny Hettie MacPhish had three layers of bags under her eyes. She hadn’t been sleeping. Every time she’d closed her eyelids, she could see the 25th Earl’s face. Every time she’d tried to rest, she could hear his voice giving her his last instructions.
    She walked her baby carriage in the morning sunlight. Master William, suffering from party stomach, was at school. His sister, two-year-old Simone, waved a fresh teddy-bear at passers-by. Mrs. Badenberg insisted there was nothing more unhygienic than a dirty teddy- bear. “Simone must have a new one every day,” she ordered. “Out of the plastic wrapper in the morning-- into the trashcan at night.”
    Hettie didn’t agree, of course. Who ever heard of anyone