Royal

by Danielle Steel

  “All I want to do is what you do, Papa. Train horses and work with you, unless I can be a jockey one day.”

  “You can’t,” he repeated. And Lucy wanted her to be more than a mere housekeeper. A teacher, a nurse, any respectable profession for a woman, and eventually a wife and mother. Annie told her that her aspirations were pathetic. And the only thing that interested her was anything involving horses. Nothing had changed.

  At eighteen the battle raged on, when Jonathan insisted she go away to school and further her education. She’d attended the village school. She’d never been interested in her studies, only in horses. But she lost the battle and went away to university to please him and her mother. Her grades were less than stellar and Jonathan eventually discovered that she had lied about her age and ridden in several minor amateur horse races as a jockey. He went to visit her at school to discuss it with her, and all she wanted was to drop out and come home to work with him in the Markhams’ stables. She’d been hanging around the local stables and the only friends she’d made were there, which her parents considered unsuitable. She had no interest in pursuing school.

  Despite mediocre grades, she managed to graduate in three years under duress, and in the end, came home to work as an apprentice stable master and trainer. John Markham commented frequently to Jonathan about how talented she was.

  “It doesn’t matter what we do, I can’t keep her away from horses,” Jonathan told his boss, sounding discouraged. Markham laughed at him. He had his own problems with six spoiled wild children by then, and an expensive wife.

  “Maybe you should stop trying to keep her away from horses,” John Markham said with a wry smile. “Give her her head and see what she does with it.”

  “She wants to be a female jockey, which isn’t even legal. She’ll break her neck and my heart one of these days.” He worried about her. In contrast, the twins, who were fifteen by then, had showed very little interest in horses. They took after their mother. Blake wanted to be a banker and Rupert wanted to go to vet school, which was at least closer to his father’s interests. Jonathan hadn’t been able to get Annie interested in veterinary school either. All she wanted was speed, although she admitted that one day she might be interested in horse breeding, though not yet. She followed the bloodlines of several stables, including the queen’s, which was her only interest in the royal family, unlike her mother, who was obsessed with everything about them, from what they wore to the kind of tea they drank.

  “Kids do what they want to in the end. So do wives,” John Markham said before he drove off to London in his new Ferrari. He was as obsessed with speed as Annie, but it was more appropriate for him than for a twenty-one-year-old girl.

  But a month later, they had other things on their minds. Lucy suddenly fell ill with severe stomach problems, and lost a shocking amount of weight. She lost fifteen pounds in a month, and Jonathan took her for tests at the local hospital, and then to see a specialist in London, at the Markhams’ suggestion. They were worried about her too.

  The tests were inconclusive at first, and the diagnosis vague. She lost another ten pounds, and looked like a shadow of her former self when the doctors finally told them she had stomach cancer. It had metastasized to her liver and her lymph system, and the prognosis was not good. Jonathan was in shock when they told them. They suggested exploratory surgery, but as soon as they opened her up, they closed her up again. The cancer had spread too far and too quickly. There was nothing they could do. It didn’t seem possible. She was thirty-nine years old, and the twins were only fifteen. What would they do without their mother, and Jonathan without his wife?

  They administered a round of chemotherapy followed by radiation to slow things down. And after the treatment, she seemed better for a while, and they gave her morphine for the pain. Jonathan wanted to cling to her to keep her with him. He had loved her for twenty years and couldn’t imagine his life without her. He was desperately in love with her. She was such a good person, and a decent woman, and her illness and suffering were so unfair. She still went to work, directed the Markhams’ housecleaning staff, and supervised household repairs. She could only manage a half-day now, and some days she couldn’t go to work at all. They had nurses come to the house when she needed them, and the nights were hard when she was in a lot of pain. Jonathan gave Annie more responsibility in the stables so he could spend more time at home with his wife, and nurse her himself. At other times, Annie stayed home with her so Jonathan could work. She sat with her mother for hours, watching TV with her, and prepared meals she thought she’d like. She didn’t want to lose her mother either and was afraid she would. She took care of her brothers, did the family laundry, and tried to do as much as she could. To thank her, Lucy took a small box out of a drawer one afternoon and put a gold bracelet on her wrist, with a gold heart dangling from it. Annie remembered her mother wearing it many years ago.

  “I want you to have it,” Lucy said in a tired voice, and Annie smiled.

  “I love it.” She kissed her mother and went to check on her brothers.

  The Markhams were very understanding, and heartbroken for them. Everyone on the estate was aware of how sick she was. Whenever Lucy was at home, she sat staring at the TV. She had her favorite shows, and particularly one about the royals. She watched it one night and Jonathan could see that she was in pain. He was tempted to have a drink himself to calm his nerves, but he wanted to be alert for her, in case she needed him in the night. She had trouble sleeping, and he often stayed awake all night to keep a watchful eye on her, and give her morphine when she needed it.

  She seemed agitated when he put her to bed. She was having trouble breathing, and he was terrified that the cancer was spreading, and he could see that she had lost more weight.

  “I have to talk to you,” she said in a whisper, as she looked intently at him. She seemed worked up about something, and he was afraid that she wouldn’t sleep. She was often anxious now, as the illness progressed at a rapid rate.

  “We’ll talk tomorrow. You need to rest,” he said gently.

  “No, I don’t. It’s important. We need to talk.” He could see that arguing with her would only make things worse. He couldn’t imagine what was so important that it couldn’t wait till morning, and he wanted to give her a morphine pill for the pain. “Listen to me,” she said sharply and then closed her eyes for an instant.

  “I’m listening to you.” He didn’t want her to get upset, but he could sense that she already was. There was an urgency to everything now, as though she were fighting for more time. But he was afraid it was a fight she couldn’t win. “What is it, love?” he said gently, fighting back tears. She looked so ill.

  “It’s about Annie. I’ve never told anyone, but now I think maybe I should have.” He suspected that she was about to tell him that she had never been married to Annie’s father during the war, and wasn’t a proper war widow, which was something he had wondered about anyway. So many women who had had babies during the war had never been married to their children’s fathers. And afterward, they just claimed to be widows. There were so many that no one ever questioned it. It didn’t matter now, and never had to him. He loved her whether she’d been married to Annie’s father or not.

  “It’s not important,” he said kindly.

  “Yes, it is.” She stopped talking for a long time, a full five minutes, and then whispered to him. “She’s not mine.” He hadn’t been prepared for that, and suspected that she was confused. The doctors had warned them the cancer might spread to her brain. He wondered now if it had.

  “Of course she is,” he said gently.

  “No, she isn’t. I didn’t give birth to her. Her mother died a few hours after she had her.” He wondered if it was true or some kind of delusion she was having. “Her name was Charlotte. She was staying at Ainsleigh Hall at the same time I was. I didn’t find out who she was until after she died,” she s
aid, and he recognized the name from what she’d said the night the twins were born, and for an instant he wondered if it was true. “She was royal,” Lucy said with eyes like daggers staring into his. She seemed very intense and anxious to tell him. “Annie is royal too. Charlotte was the youngest sister of the new queen.” He vaguely remembered that one of the young princesses had died during the war, but he was convinced now that Lucy was hallucinating and confusing it with one of her TV shows. “Charlotte’s parents sent her to the Hemmingses, to get away from the air raids, the way mine did, and she fell in love with their son. She got pregnant, and they never told the king and queen. I read the queen’s letters to her after she died. The queen didn’t know about the baby, she never mentioned her existence. I think the countess was probably going to tell them later face-to-face, but with the war still on, she never got to it. I think they didn’t want to tell the queen in a letter. The Hemmings boy was Annie’s father, they were both seventeen. He turned eighteen and left for the army, and was killed before Annie was born. I thought they’d never married and she was illegitimate, so they hid the whole story. But after Charlotte and the countess died, I read all the letters from her mother and from Henry. I found their marriage certificate. So they were married in secret. But by then, everyone had died, Annie’s parents and the earl and countess, an old cousin had inherited the estate and was selling it. And the Windsors, Charlotte’s family, didn’t know about her, I thought they wouldn’t have wanted her, because she was born of a disgrace. And I loved her. I thought the Windsors would have sent her away. I was nineteen, and I took all the letters and documents, so they wouldn’t find out about her when they came for Charlotte’s things. I said the baby was mine and I was a war widow. She was only a year old when we left Yorkshire, and I came here. She’s mine now, Jon, as if I gave birth to her. But sometimes I wonder if I should have told her. She’s a Royal Highness, a princess, the queen’s niece. I’m not sorry I took her. She’s had a good life with us, and you’re a wonderful father. But she’s not really ours, she never was. Her mother was as horse mad as she is.” Lucy smiled and closed her eyes to catch her breath. “The Windsors never knew that she existed, that Charlotte had a baby, or that she married the Hemmings boy in secret once she was pregnant. So I took Annie and raised her as my own. They still don’t know that she exists. The Queen Mother is her grandmother, and was Charlotte’s mother. The death certificate says she died of complications from pneumonia, but she didn’t. She died after childbirth. Jonathan, Annie is a royal princess, and they know nothing about her. I think now that maybe what I did was wrong. I loved her, and I didn’t want to lose her. When they all died, I just took her. I talked to the housekeeper and the maids about it. They didn’t know she was royal or legitimate, but I did when I left. It’s all in the leather box with the crown on it. I want you to read it, and tell me what I should do. You have a right to know too. I don’t want to lose her, but she has the right to a life we can never give her. Read it. Read it all. The key to the box is in an envelope in my underwear drawer.” She was clearly out of her mind, and Jonathan spoke to her firmly, as he would have to a child.

  “You need to rest. I want you to take a pill.”

  “The leather box,” she said again, her voice fading. “You have to read the letters. I should have told you years ago. The box is in my closet, on the shelf.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” he insisted. “Annie is your daughter. Our daughter. I love her too.”

  “They must have been heartbroken when they lost Charlotte. I read all the letters from her mother to her for the entire year. The queen loved her, and they don’t know she had a daughter. Maybe they deserve to know and so does Annie.” She was getting increasingly wound up, and Jonathan couldn’t distract her. “Promise me you’ll read what’s in the box.” She fixed her eyes on him almost fiercely and he nodded. Her eyes were sunken deep in their sockets with dark circles under them.

  “I promise.” It killed him to see his wife in this condition, and now she was losing her mind either from the pain or from her illness. She suddenly looked like an old woman, and nothing she had told him made sense. He loved Annie too, and she was a wonderful girl, but she wasn’t royal. If she was, they would have known about her. Their daughter would have told them about her, or the countess would have. He was sure that she couldn’t have gotten married and had a child without her family knowing, particularly the royals. It just wasn’t possible. The royal family didn’t go around losing princesses. He knew his wife. Lucy would never have stolen someone else’s child, even at nineteen. She was the best mother he’d ever seen to Annie, whoever her father had been, and to their sons, who were devastated over their mother’s illness too.

  He gave Lucy some of the drops for pain then, since she refused to take the morphine, and a few minutes later, her eyes closed and she drifted off to sleep.

  He went to sit in the living room for a while to gather his thoughts. It broke his heart to see how mentally disordered she had become. She had never been irrational before, and now suddenly she was caught up in some kind of obsessive fantasy about Annie being royal, and the circumstances of an allegedly royal princess’s death, who probably wasn’t a princess at all, and just some young girl from London staying in the country to avoid the air raids, as Lucy had done. Nothing she had shared with him made any sense. He wondered if the box she was talking about was empty. He had seen it once, years before, when Lucy first moved in, and never since. To put his mind at ease, he went to look for the box, and found it where Lucy had said it would be. Then he looked for the key in the envelope in her underwear drawer, and found that too. He brought it back to the living room, took the key out of the envelope, and fitted it into the lock. He noticed the gold crown on the leather, as the key turned easily, and he lifted the lid and glanced inside. The box was crammed full of packets of letters tied with ribbon, and there was a sheaf of documents. He saw a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, a death certificate, and some photographs. For an instant, he stared at it, not wanting to read through the letters, but at least this much was true.

  He picked up one packet of letters and untied the ribbon to get a sense of what they were, and immediately saw the Windsor crown, the queen’s initials, and her elegant hand, dating the letter, with the words “Buckingham Palace” under it, and he frowned. Maybe there was a kernel of truth to something Lucy had said, and the rest was hallucination from her illness. He wondered again if the cancer had gone to her brain. He read the first letter, saw that it was to someone named Charlotte, obviously her daughter, and the letter was signed “Mama.” And as he set it down in the box again, his heart was beating faster. Without meaning to, or wanting to, he had opened Pandora’s box, and he was afraid of what he would discover next.

  Chapter 8

  Jonathan went in to check on Lucy several times while he read through the contents of the box. It was late and everyone in the house was asleep. It was a quiet time for him. Lucy was sleeping soundly from the drops, and made an occasional noise. He would watch her for a minute, gently touch her or stroke her hair, and then he went back to the living room to continue reading.

  He had read all of the queen’s letters to her daughter, and, like Lucy, he had no doubt that they’d been written by the queen.

  He remembered now the royal family sending their youngest daughter to the country during the war, to set an example to others and get her away from the air raids in London. And her tragic death at seventeen a year later, of an illness, he thought. It was also remarkable that the princess and Lucy had ended up in the same place. War was the great equalizer. There was also no mention of a baby, a pregnancy, a marriage, or even a romance, so whatever had gone on in Yorkshire, Charlotte’s parents had apparently been unaware of it. Perhaps, as Lucy said, they were going to tell her all of it when they saw each other again, when Charlotte returned to London. But she seemed not to have shared any major news in the meantime. She also cou
ldn’t tell her mother anything shocking on the phone, since phone lines were not secure during the war, and the palace switchboard would have been equally unreliable, with others listening in on conversations and talking about it afterward. For government business and military intelligence, they had used scramblers and codes, but Charlotte wouldn’t have had any of that available to her. Her news would have been that of a seventeen-year-old girl. In this case, one who had gotten pregnant, and then secretly married. News that would not have been easy to share with her parents at a distance, particularly as a royal princess.

  Jonathan read Henry’s letters to Charlotte after that, which referred to both the baby before it was born, and their marriage in haste and secrecy before he left. They were obviously deeply in love with each other, and had gotten themselves into a very awkward spot.

  The official documents in the box told their own tale. Their marriage certificate by special license, signed by the countess and earl, which Charlotte’s parents knew nothing about, under the name she must have been using to guard the secret of her identity for a variety of reasons. But it seemed reasonable to believe that Charlotte Elizabeth White was in fact Charlotte Elizabeth Windsor. It was also reasonable to believe that they might not have been too upset about the Hemmings boy in other circumstances, but a marriage at seventeen due to an unwanted pregnancy was enough to upset any parent, royal or not. They sent her away for a year, for her safety, to respectable people, and she got both pregnant and married in that order. It would have been a lot for them to swallow.

  He could see why neither Charlotte nor the countess had told them, and were probably waiting for the right time to do so, but that time had come and gone, with the death of the baby’s father in wartime, the deaths of both the earl and later the countess, and Charlotte’s own death after the baby was born. The entire situation had gotten out of hand, which left an infant whom they knew nothing about an orphan of the royal family. The circumstances had been perfect for Lucy to simply sweep the baby up, tuck her under her wing, and take off with her, with no one more mature to reason with her and stop her. Her ill-judged though well-meant action at the time had resulted in a royal princess who had been deprived of her family and her birthright, and a royal family who had been deprived of their late daughter’s child. Knowing that Princess Charlotte had left a daughter behind when she died might have offered them some comfort in their grief at the time. It wasn’t too late to set things right, but it was going to be awkward now. Their suddenly coming forward with a lost princess was going to be highly suspect and not easy to pull off without causing a major uproar, or Lucy even being accused of a crime, child theft or something worse, on her deathbed. And there was no one left to corroborate the story.