The Royal Nanny Read Free

long nose. Her black skirts rustled when she walked.
    â€œâ€™Twas called Bachelor’s Cottage until the Yorks came here for their honeymoon and made it their country home. It’s small enough that everyone can get underfoot,” she told me with a lift of her silver eyebrows that matched her hair. “But His Lordship likes small rooms, from his navy days, you know, like on a ship.”
    â€œOh, yes. I’m used to small rooms and lots of people from my own home.”
    â€œI warrant we’ll see a large family from the lord and lady. Why, three children close together, if you count the one coming soon,” she said, her eyebrows rising even higher. “So you are used to a large family?”
    â€œMy sister Annie is two years older than me. She was in service but is now married to a river man. Then my brother Ernest, three years younger than me, and last Edith, three years after Ernest.”
    â€œYears apart at least, instead of a bit over a year. I’ll soon introduce you to the children’s nurse, Mrs. Peters, as I believe she’ll have the lads down for a nap now. Of course, in this small a place, it’s a challenge for the young ones to be seen and not heard—not even seen sometimes. But they are presented to their parents at teatime each afternoon promptly at four when the duke and duchess are here.”
    Presented to their parents? I thought. Well, I guess people were presented to royalty, evidently even their own flesh and blood.
    â€œAnd today,” Mrs. Wentworth went on, with the keys on her waist chain jingling as we went downstairs, “her ladyship has asked that you be brought in with the children so that she can greet you, but don’t speak unless spoken to first, of course.”
    I was starting to lose track of all the of courses, though I knew things would be done differently here and I must learn new ways.She showed me how to use the back stairs when I fetched things from below. She introduced me to the servants, though their names didn’t all stick at first, and I thought I’d be taking my meals with the children anyway.
    But one of the servants, who all seemed eager to catch a glimpse of me too, gave me a sweet smile as her eyes swept over me, hat to shoes. I caught her name—Rose Milligrew, lady’s maid to the duchess—since she seemed so welcoming, even without saying a word. Rose, so blond and pale that it seemed she had no eyebrows or lashes, was sitting at a table in window light, mending a taffeta and net evening dress in a rich amber hue that shimmered and nearly took my breath away. Oh, I’d have to mention that garment in my first letter home.
    Upstairs again, but not the attic where the female servants—including myself when not on duty—would sleep, but this time at the back of the house, with a green baize swinging door shutting off their parents’ chambers, where two small rooms were set apart for the children. I found it hard to fathom that Dr. Lockwood’s daughters had far more room to play, sleep, and roam. I learned there were two newfangled bathrooms in the house, but both were for the use of Their Graces.
    â€œThe children, you see,” Mrs. Wentworth added, “are bathed in their nursery each Saturday evening, and that is a lot of water for the nursemaids to tote up from the kitchen. There are two of them to help, at least, though Mrs. Peters has them down in the basement washroom, fetching and ironing right now, Martha Butcher and Jane Thatcher. They go by their given names as the duchess didn’t care to hear a Butcher and Thatcher were caring for her children.”
    I wasn’t sure if that was a jest or not, but she was off on another turn, both in the hall and in her talk. I tried to keep track of all the new names.
    At the second door, she whispered, “The day nursery.” Mrs. Wentworth opened the door a crack and “a-hemmed” without sticking her head in.