“N-N-Nanny . . . S-S-Sorry . . . A-A-Accident . . . N-N-Nanny Hettie . . . b-but y-y-you . . . you . .
“Don’t stutter, laddie.”
“You really shouldn’t h-ha-have h-h-hit me, Nanny,” said the 25th Earl, his face pale. “You’ve just c-c-c- crushed my suicide pill.” He delicately felt his cheek, with his fingertips.
“Och! Nonsense,” exclaimed the nurse. “Away with your silly games, Maister Quincey.”
“I’ve got l-l-less than s-s-s-sixty seconds to live. P-P- Poison. Thank heaven I can rely on you to deliver a m-m-message. No, don’t interrupt me.” He turned to the young nurse accompanying the Scotswoman.
“You have a timepiece? Yes? Well, start a c-c-count- down, p-p-please. Start now ... at f-f-fifty ... forty- five.” He looked at his own watch, again. The young woman began.
“Forty-five . . . forty-four . . . forty-three . . .”
The Scots nanny’s face coloured. She looked at him, threateningly. “Maister Quincey. Now see here, laddie..
The 25th Earl took her arm, gently. “D-D-Don’t interrupt m-me, p-p-please, Nanny Hettie,” he begged. “Just listen. It’s vital. V-VERY important . . . it’s g-g- government work . .. d-d-d-don’t have much time . ..”
“Fifteen . . . fourteen . . . thirteen .. .” counted the young nanny.
“W-W-World security . . . avoid t-t-total destruction . . . m-m-museum ... the m-m-message . . . microdot . . . room th-thirteen . . . largest beast . . . don’t t-t-trust anyone . . .” The 25th Earl’s jaw stiffened. He struggled to speak. “Get it to ... to . . .”
“Three Two. One,” said the nurse-timekeeper. “Zero.”
The young Earl drew himself to attention. His eyes focused on the distance. He saluted. “G-G-God save the Q-Q-Queen,” he gasped, collapsing rigidly backwards.
“Good grief,” said Nanny Hettie. She looked down at him. “Maister Quincey. Maister Quincey. Stop playing games, THIS MINUTE,” she commanded. Had he been alive, the 25th Earl wouldn’t have dared to disobey.
“Maister Quincey . . The Scotswoman bent anxiously over the prostrate figure and lifted its wrist. She felt for the pulse. A small knot of visitors gathered around them.
“Is he?” asked the young nanny, her eyes wide.
Her companion clamped an ear to the Earl’s chest Then she squatted back on her heels.
“Oh, God, we’re afraid he is,” she said, quietly. “Oh, dearie us. Poor Maister Quincey, what have we done? He was such a bonnie bairn.”
An Oriental-looking spectator leant forward. He looked at the nannies. “Physician,” he said, running his hands swiftly over the corpse.
“Okay ... okay ... okay ... Break it up, now. Get moving . . .” A New York policeman shouldered his way through the growing crowd. “Okay, let me get to him. You, nurse,” he said, looking at the stout Scotswoman. “You go call a meat wagon.”
Nanny Hettie MacPhish, sixty-year-old ex-royal nanny, had assumed, throughout her working life, so many of her employers’ names that she frequently forgot her own. Currently, she was Nanny Badenberg, working for Walter Badenberg, the New York industrialist. Over the years she’d been Nanny Trent, nurse for the Nottinghamshire barons; Nanny Norfolk, when she nurtured the Duke’s offspring; Nanny Derby; then Nanny Hastings, with Master Quincey. But most glorious of all, she’d been Nanny Windsor--royal Nanny Windsor. Her close friends noticed that, ever since the glorious day of her appointment to the crowned family, she’d also adopted the royal plural in her speech. Now, she never referred to herself as “I”--it was always “We.”
“Watch the bairn a moment,” she told Melissa, her young companion. She kicked on the brake of young Simone’s push-chair and hurried to the telephone kiosk. After she’d phoned, she stood and listened to the siren as the long Plymouth wove through the traffic towards the museum. She watched the white-coated men jog up the steps and push their way through the persistent crowd around the 25th Earl. Seconds later, they carried his body into the ambulance. The policeman stood on the steps, jotting notes in his pocketbook. The crowd thinned and disappeared. After a minute, there was no sign of anything unusual having happened. She walked back towards Melissa. The policeman stopped her.
“I’d like your name, ma’am.”
She nodded, and told him.
“We might like a statement later,” said the policeman, writing down her address in his book. “Must have been a heart attack. Heat, perhaps. Thank you for your help, ma’am.” He saluted her, vaguely.
Hettie swallowed. Master Quincey had been one of her favourite children. She remembered his clumsy, comic first steps. She thought for a moment She could remember even earlier, when he’d been carried out of the delivery room, and handed into her arms. Now, he was dead. It wasn’t possible. She hadn’t even seen him for years, although he’d never forgotten to send her gifts at Christmas and on her birthdays.
Nannies aren’t emotional, she reminded herself. She took a deep breath and clenched her fists. “Steady, Hettie, old lass,” she said, quietly. “Chin up, chest out, firm step. There’s work to be done.” She was sure that a Charmaine-Bott would only be involved in something very necessary.
She looked up the steps to the museum. An important message, Master Quincey had said with his dying words. Hettie gulped. Of WORLD importance. It HAD to be delivered. It was in room thirteen.
The young nanny was sitting on the museum steps, very pale. Hettie thought of correcting her for getting dirt on her uniform, but she stopped herself. She rested a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Melissa,” she said softly. “Just sit quietly for a few minutes. Wait for us, we’re going inside the museum.” Melissa nodded.
Hettie adjusted the strap round baby Simone’s waist, and straightened the child’s sun bonnet, then she climbed the steps to the museum entrance. Room thirteen, Master Quincey had said. She looked for an attendant.
“Sure, lady, you mean the Early Dinosaur Hall,” said the uniformed man. “Everyone wants the Dinosaur Hall. You know, lady, that dinosaur’s nearly two hundred millions of years old. You get that? Millions. Take the elevator. Fourth floor.”
The Scots nanny took the lift to the fourth floor. Room thirteen, its number in gold paint, was easy to find. Hettie remembered more of the 25th Earl’s last words. “ ... Message ... microdot... In largest beast.”.She looked inside the room. “Lawks!” she exclaimed. “The dear laddie could hardly have chosen anything bigger.” She walked in. Dominating the centre of the hall, and flanked by two lesser giants, was the fossilized skeleton of one of the largest creatures ever to roam this earth--a brontosaurus.
Hettie made her way to the limestone plinth on which the three petrified monsters stood. She glanced about her. There were two visitors at the far end of the hall. She waited until they had gone, then she squeezed under the guard-rail and climbed on to the plinth, close to the head of the sixty-six-feet-long brontosaurus. She listened for a moment, to make sure no one was near. Then, gritting her teeth and holding back a shudder, she stuck her hand into the beast’s jaws and felt around. She found nothing. She was surprised. It seemed the obvious place to hide a message. She looked for another hiding place. Inside the rib cage, perhaps? She searched as carefully as she could, again with no success. Puzzled, she examined the tail bones. She tried to visualize the size of the message. She recalled the 25th Earl’s words. “A microdot,” he’d said. Would that be bigger than a pea? She decided it would probably be smaller. It must be pushed into one of the bones, then. There were hundreds. It could be anywhere. She made another fruitless search. Then came the sound of approaching footsteps.
Hettie sighed. Sadly, she left the hall
William Badenberg boasts that he is 2,922 today. Days, that is. Actually, he’s eight years old, and he’s enjoying himself. Birthdays are one of the few times when he sees his mother and father together. They’re not divorced. It’s just that Mr. Badenberg is always busy being successful.
“It’s William’s birthday on Tuesday,” Mrs. Badenberg cabled him in Zurich.
“Fine,” Mr. Badenberg cabled back. “Fix him a cocktail party. Buy him a new car.”
“At eight?” cabled Mrs. Badenberg.
“At any suitable time,” replied her husband.
A telephone call to his Swiss office ended the confusion. Mr. Badenberg cancelled forty-three appointments, took two days from work, and flew home.
William has twenty guests, suitably chosen from Mrs. Badenberg’s social blue book, and all children of the right sort of people to know.
They are enjoying a lobster barbecue on the Badenberg patio. They are being 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 throwing away a teddy-bear? How could a child grow to love a teddy this way? Still, every employer had her foible. Hettie partly obeyed Mrs. Badenberg, and placed a regular order at Macy’s store. But she didn’t throw away the used bears. By Christmas, she calculated, she’d have nearly two hundred to send to the children’s hospital.
Until the 25th Earl’s death, the bears, sitting in waiting regiments along the shelves lining her small apartment, had eyed her with affection. Now, she felt, their once-friendly faces showed mistrust.
Forty-three years a nanny, thought Hettie. Forty-three years since she was seventeen. Six satisfied families, including a period with the royal family. Five perfect references. She reached forward and checked the push-chair safety straps, tidied the coverlet and bunched the pillow behind Simone. The face of the 25th Earl stared up at her.
She aimed her push-chair at the park gates and along the path towards the seat where she would meet her friends. They were already there. They sat, like four white slats of picket fencing, on the long seat facing the Delacorte Alice-in-Wonderland monument.
Old Emily was knitting another waistcoat for Tarzan, her pet parrot. He was as eccentric as his owner, and nervous. He’d been reared in front of a television set. He was unable to speak, or whistle, but gave a convincing imitation of his jungle namesake--and he’d plucked his chest naked. Emily spent all her spare moments knitting him gay, miniature waistcoats to replace his colourful feathers and keep out the chill, while Tarzan dedicated his life to unknitting each new psychedelic garment. It was an endless competition for both of them. Emily daily devised intricate new stitches which she hoped were unravelable. But by bedtime each evening, Tarzan was naked again. He’d sidle along the perch and swing upside-down on the bars until Emily dressed him in his new woolly. He’d sleep warm and cosy on his swing, then, with his ape-man yodel, would begin his sartorial beakwork the following dawn.