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though settling a dispute between provinces of her Empire. Durdon backs away, terrified of tripping over one of the dogs and sprawling down in a vulgar flurry of petticoats, but at the same time content to see Vicky’s back bent to coddle her living doll …
    The time-drift quivers and for a hideous few instants Miss Durdon is standing in a vaguely seen corridor and hearing a voice screaming “Durdy! Durdy! Where’s Durdy!” That is Vicky dying of cancer at the age of fifty-two, a convert to Christian Science, refusing drugs but shouting in the delirium of pain for an older comfort. It happened in America and Miss Durdon hadn’t been there, but they’d told her about it. Now she uses her strong will to push the imagined scene from her mind and coax the drift back to that earlier time, the time of her first babies …
    Abergeldie, the Prince of Wales’s Scottish home, a few miles down the road from Balmoral. (However often the drift takes her back to this scene, Miss Durdon can never remember why the Prince should have been up there at Christmas, when he’d normally have been at Sand­ringham, nor why his grandchildren should have been visiting him without their parents. All that is vague, but the details of the actual event are as sharp-edged as a photograph.)
    Bathtime in the nursery suite, Two brown hip-baths on the floor. Small bright-pink bodies nestling into vast white towels. Steam, and the smell of talcum and Wright’s Coal Tar Soap, and the drift and hiss of a Highland storm against the shutters, and the new electric light very yellow. Nurse Bignall rigid by the fire with the hairbrush in her lap. Princess Rosie, nearly four now, turning away from the fire already wise enough to hide her grin of relief as the torture ends; her new-brushed hair floats with no weight above her shoulders, glinting in glistening waves, Durdon gives Vicky a last reassuring surreptitious hug, then makes her slip from her lap and go to let Bignall tug at the tangles of her coarse, intractable hair. Sober, Bignall does this with energetic pleasure, like a minister rooting out sin; tonight she has made herself a pot of “tea” before bath-time, a brown liquid which she drinks cold, without milk. Catriona is drying Princess Louise. Durdon can’t stop glancing at the new under-nursemaid; she is extraordinarily striking with her pointy-chinned small face pinkened by steam and nervousness, her red-gold hair piled under her cap, her full bust and tiny waist accentuated by the starched white apron of her uniform. Vicky’s first suppressed whimper is followed by the slap of the back of the brush on flesh.
    â€œStand still!” growls Bignall. Durdon feels herself stiffen. Three times more, she says to herself, and I’ll take the brush out of that witch’s hands and face the consequences Oh, if only …
    As the door opens the whole room seems struck into stillness, as though they were all posing for a photographer.
    â€œCurtseys, girls,” says Bignall in her soldierly voice. Rosie does a beauty in her nightdress—grace will out—Vicky a gawky one, Louise a mere token in her towel. But Bignall, trying to lead the dance, stumbles and only saves herself by grabbing the fender. The tubby, bald, slab-faced, bearded gentleman in the doorway appears not to notice.
    â€œDon’t let me interrupt you,” he says. “I felt like a change of company, my dears. You’re lucky. I wish I had pretty ladies to bathe me.”
    Rosie laughs. She loves Granpapa—but then she loves everybody. The Prince of Wales closes the door and strolls to the fire, where he rests his cigar on the mantelpiece. The wild, foreign reek of it joins the plainer nursery smells. The ice tinkles faintly in the top of his tall glass of hock and seltzer. Bath-time proceeds, but only to the next whimper. No slap, but the brush was poised until Bignall remembered that there was a stronger