The Queen summoned Lady de Clifford and said that in the circumstances she believed that the Princess Charlotte might go back to Bognor for the rest of the summer while she herself and the Princesses, her daughters, would return to Windsor.
What joy! Bognor again and freedom! No more lectures from the Begum! No more boring sessions with the Old Girls! Instead long rambles on the seashore and conversation with Mr Richardson while she munched his buns.
‘Now,’ said Lady de Clifford, ‘you must get plenty of fresh air. There is nothing like fresh air, Your Highness.’
‘Nothing like fresh Bognor air, my lady,’ cried Charlotte hilariously.
Her health began to improve and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Bognor was the spot best suited to the Princess.
The days were full of interest for her. She liked to mingle with people, to talk to them, to discover how they lived. For this, she told Lady de Clifford, is the duty of one who is to be their Sovereign.
Lady de Clifford was always nervous of such talk. It was in any case bad taste and she was not sure that it was not treason. But Charlotte always laughed at her. Her familiarity with the ordinary people was alarming but her father could behave in the same way and like her father she could at a moment’s notice become imperious.
On one occasion she was driving her four greys along a country road with Lady de Clifford beside her when she saw a woman, poorly dressed, with nine children trailing behind her.
Charlotte pulled up with a jerk which almost sent Lady de Clifford out of her seat.
‘What a large family!’ cried Charlotte. ‘Are they all your own?’
‘Yes, sweet lady, they are all my own and a terrible task I have to try to feed them!’
‘So many!’ cried Charlotte.
‘But all the children of my own wedded husband,’ the woman assured her.
Charlotte studied the children and said: ‘How did you manage to have so many of an age? Now, come, I want the truth. I always want to hear the truth and I cannot abide lies. I will give you a shilling if you tell me the truth.’
Charlotte felt in her purse which she always carried with her in case she met any deserving poor person whom she thought she should help.
The woman looked at the shilling. ‘I have lied to you, my-lady. Two of these children are mine. One by my husband and the other by another man. The rest of them are borrowed.’
‘To arouse pity, I daresay,’ said the Princess severely. ‘I was going to give you a guinea if you had told me the truth at first. But you lied and although you have told a plausible tale now which I accept as truth, you only told it because I offered you a shilling. You shall have two shillings because I believe at last you told me the truth.’
The woman accepted the two shillings with many thanks, but her lips were trembling and Charlotte knew she was thinking of the lost guinea.
She drove on and after a while she stopped.
‘Poor woman,’ she said. ‘I suppose when one must beg for a living it is easy to lie.’
She waited until the woman came up.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘Here is your guinea. But remember that you will prosper more by telling the truth than lies.’
She did not wait to hear the woman’s thanks but whipped up the greys.
‘I do not think it proper for Your Highness to bandy words with these people,’ admonished Lady de Clifford.
‘Bandy words! I was advising her always to tell the truth. Is that not a good thing? My lord Bish-Up tells me it is.’
‘I do not think it wise to hold these conversations with beggars.’
‘Jesus did. So why not the Princess Charlotte?’
‘You blaspheme.’
‘I don’t see it. My lady, I don’t indeed. According to you, it is at some times good to follow Jesus … at others not. No, I think that was just how He would have behaved to that poor woman.’
Lady de Clifford put her hands over her ears. Sometimes she wondered with great trepidation what the Princess would do and say next.
What she did on this occasion was to whip up the greys and they galloped along at great speed while Lady de Clifford clutched the side of the carriage in terror and exclaimed in dismay as they turned into a field.
‘Where are you going? This is Sir Thomas Troubridge’s field.’
‘I don’t deny it.’
‘I pray you, turn back.’
‘Too late, my lady, too late. Hold tight. That was a good one!’
The carriage went bouncing over the ruts.
‘Heaven save us,’ cried Lady de Clifford.
‘Nothing like exercise, my lady,’ Charlotte told her. ‘Nothing like exercise!’
The shells on Bognor beach were numerous and of the most exquisite colours; the seaweed was of a kind Charlotte had never seen before; it had extraordinary, hard black berries. She decided to add to the excitement of her rambles by collecting them and when she took them back to Mr Wilson’s mansion she made them into necklaces and painted some of them.
Mrs Gagarin and Louisa declared they were lovely and that she was a true artist.
She made necklaces for both of them and one for herself, and promised that she would make one for Lady de Clifford. One day when searching for seaweed along the beach she found in one of the banks a layer of what looked like gold in its raw state. It had formed itself into strange patterns and while she was examining it three young ladies came along with their governess and excitedly she called to them to come and see what she had found. They all thought it was a great discovery and she told the girls and their governess that she was going to send two labourers along to get the metal out of the rock so that she might have it tested to see if it were gold.
‘I will let you know the result,’ she told them.
Meanwhile some of her attendants had come up and she excitedly explained to them.
She turned to the girls. ‘You must come and see me tomorrow and I will tell you then the result of this discovery.’ She nodded at the governess. ‘Pray bring them at three of the afternoon. We might play some games together. Do you like games?’
The girls said they did and listened attentively while she told them of the games she had played in Tilney Street with George Keppel, George Fitzclarence and Minney Seymour.
‘So … tomorrow,’ she cried as she went off.
Her attendants looked on with disapproval but she snapped her fingers at them and returning to the town she insisted on going to the house of a labourer whose wife she had talked with. The woman was heavily pregnant and Charlotte had been very interested in her condition, so she visited her often. The result of this visit was that the woman’s husband should find a fellow worker and they would go down to the shore to see what it was the Princess had discovered.
Charlotte, pleased with the afternoon’s work, returned to the house.
When Lady de Clifford heard what she had done she clicked and clucked and said it would not do.
‘You forget your dignity.’
‘Not entirely,’ argued Charlotte. ‘Now and then perhaps I throw it aside but I make sure it is never out of reach so that I can bring it back at a moment’s notice if the need should arise.’
‘I do not know what Her Majesty the Queen would say if she were to hear of this.’
‘Nor shall you ever, my lady, for she will never know, because neither of us would dare tell her.’ Charlotte laughed aloud at her own cleverness and Lady de Clifford thought anxiously: Is she growing more like her mother every day?
‘I gather that you have asked these girls to visit you. Who are they? You do not know. How can we be sure whom you are inviting into the house?’