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“Good night, Mama.”
The next morning, I woke to my mother’s empty room. I could hear the noises of a busy household and somewhere nearby, Jack and Henry squabbling about something.
The door burst open and Robin came running in, leaping onto the bed.
“You are not Mama!” he cried.
“No, I am not, you rascal!” I grabbed him and tickled him until he squealed, only relenting after he begged me to.
“Lizzy, why are you in Mama’s bed? Are you well?”
“Yes, I am perfectly well. Mama and I got caught in the rainstorm last night and were drenched through, so we slept together to keep warm.”
Robin was quite infamous for sneaking into his brother’s beds when he was cold, so I knew he would understand.
“Jack and Henry are quarreling.”
“What are they quarrelling about?” I asked as I rose from the bed and put on a warm wrapper.
“Soldiers.”
“Soldiers?”
“Jack does not want to share his tin soldiers with Henry, and he is mad about it.”
“I see. Why does Jack not wish to share?” I led him down the corridor to my chamber so I might prepare for the day.
“Because Henry will lose them!” he said, looking at me as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Perhaps if they played in the same room at the same time, the soldiers would not get lost,” I suggested.
“Perhaps. But Henry might hide them in the cracks in the floor.”
“Why would he do such a thing?”
“So he can have them later!” He rolled his eyes to the sky and I could not contain my laughter.
“What does Nanny say?”
“Nanny is ill.”
I stopped just inside my bedchamber, my hand on the doorframe. “What?”
“She said her throat hurts and her head aches and her nose is all wet.” He made a disgusted face.
“I hear breakfast being served. Get your brothers and go eat with Papa. And tell Mama to come see me, would you please?”
Excited at eating with the adults downstairs and not in the nursery as they usually did, Robin took off for the stairs at a sprint. I made my way to the nursery, stopping in my mother’s room to grab the bottle of Hill’s tonic that rested on the bureau.
My three youngest brothers thundered past me and I smiled at their exuberance, but I could not laugh just yet.
I tapped on the door next to the nursery. “Miss Millie? It is Elizabeth. May I come in?”
I heard a raspy cough, followed by a weak voice telling me to enter.
I pushed into the room and saw Millie, our nanny for the last eighteen years, pale and sweaty on the bed. “Oh, Nanny!”
I had not called her such since I was a little girl, but seeing her ill and suffering like that was a shock. Nanny had never been ill as long as I had known her.Likely because she was often touching you.
