Royal - Danielle Steel Page 0,30

lawyer from York and inspect the estate. The heir was quite elderly, and was discouraged to see the condition of disrepair of the manor house itself, and to note how much work and expense it would take to modernize it, add central heating, redo the plumbing and electricity, which were old and rudimentary at best. The park was sadly run-down, the gardens in need of replanting, although the grounds were beautiful, and the tenant farms would spring back to life quickly when the men returned from the war. But he said he had neither the energy, nor the youth required to bring the Ainsleigh estate back to what it had been before the Great War. There were thirty years of deferred maintenance repairs to do, due to lack of funds, and he thought the most sensible solution was to sell the property, at the best price he could get. He had no desire to live in England, he and the attorney discussed it at length, settled on a price that seemed reasonable to them, and put it on the market, with realtors in London and York. It was Lord Ainsleigh’s hope that an American would buy it, or someone with enough money to restore it to what it had once been. It was a long way from that now. He went back to Ireland after that, and Peter Babcock, the attorney, promised to keep him informed.

Lord Ainsleigh’s visit and decision to sell had caused a stir among the remaining staff at Ainsleigh Hall. All of them were worried about what a new owner would mean for them.

“I guess that’s it for us,” one of the two maids said in her heavy Yorkshire accent, looking glum. She had worked there all her life, and been faithful to the earl and countess for the forty years of their marriage, and all of their son’s life. “The new owner will probably sack us all,” she said grimly, “and put young ones in our jobs,” she predicted. “They’ll be lucky if they can still find anyone willing to be in service. I don’t think any of the girls are going to be in a rush to give up their factory jobs with better conditions and better pay than we have here. They’d rather live in the cities now than in the country.”

Her colleague responded hopefully. “They’re going to need someone to clean the place. We might as well stay, and see who buys this place.” The housekeeper agreed and said she was staying until they fired her. She loved the house, and had grown up on one of the farms. “What about you?” she asked, turning to Lucy. She wasn’t an employee, but she wasn’t family either, and she would need a place to go too, now that the earl and countess were dead and the place was being sold. She had no living relatives anywhere now, with her parents dead. She had a small amount that had come to her when her parents died, after her parents’ apartment building was bombed, and their insurance paid her something. She couldn’t live on the money forever, but it would last her for a while. Her dream was to return to London and find her way. She liked the idea of working on an estate like this one, maybe in Sussex or Kent. Yorkshire was a little too remote for her. She had just turned nineteen, and had been there for four years. It was the only home she had now. The big question for her was about Anne Louise. They were both orphans now. Annie, as Lucy called her, was thirteen months old. Lucy loved her like her own, and had cared for her entirely ever since the nurse left when Anne Louise was four months old.

“I want to go back to London,” she said quietly, and they nodded. It made sense to them. It was where she was from, even if she had no family left there now. There would be better jobs there, and the surrounding countryside, than in Yorkshire. Others would be going back to their original cities once they got out of the army, or returned from the places where they had taken refuge from the bombs being showered on the cities for the past five years. A new era of renewal and reconstruction was about to dawn, and Lucy was energetic and young. “I thought I’d take Annie with me,” she said, to see what they’d say, if