Royal - Danielle Steel Page 0,38
the good ones. I can teach you about them.”
“I doubt that I’ll have time for riding lessons. It looks pretty busy to me around here. And I have a daughter. I’ll need to spend my time off with her. She’s thirteen months old. I’ll be leaving her at Whistlers’ farm while I work.”
“War widow?” he asked her, “or do you have a husband tucked away somewhere?”
“He died right before she was born, three months after he joined the army.”
“There are too many stories like that one. I was in France myself on D-Day. They died like flies all around me, the poor devils. I got lucky, I guess. I just got back a month ago. I grew up here. My grandfather was a tenant farmer to the previous owner, and my father was the blacksmith. We’ve been here longer than the current owners. They bought the place seven years ago, right before the war. The previous ones went broke, after the last war. They hung on as long as they could, and finally sold. All three of their sons were killed in the Great War. I like working in the stables. I want to run them one day.” The horse he’d been leading started to get restless then, and they both had other things to do. “It’s been nice talking to you. I’ll keep a lookout for you. The stable hands don’t eat in the servants’ hall. We have our own kitchen here, and cook our own food.”
“See you again sometime.” She smiled at him again. He led the horse back to the barn, and she went to pick up Annie after work. She was crying and fussy when Lucy got there in her uniform, and she walked all the way back, holding her, thinking about what a good place this was going to be for Annie when she got a little older. The Markhams’ estate in Kent was a perfect place for a child and anyone who didn’t mind being in service, which didn’t bother Lucy. She had a roof over her head, plentiful meals three times a day. The Markhams treated their servants well, and everyone said that the wages were better than they had been before the war. There were forty or fifty employees in various positions around the estate, gardeners, chauffeurs, stable hands, as well as those who worked in the house. The newcomers had more staff than most of the original owners, except in the days before the Great War. It had changed everything on the big estates, as money began to run out and the order of things changed.
The new owners could afford to maintain the properties the way the old owners no longer could. It was new money, which the aristocrats looked down on. They had no titles unless they bought them, which some did. Some of the more desperate landowners sold their titles along with their estates, but the Markhams were commoners and didn’t mind it. They made up in wealth what they lacked in blood and ancestry. But Lucy knew she trumped them all. She had a royal princess as a daughter, and her grandparents were the King and Queen of England. It didn’t get better than that, even if no one knew it. Lucy did, which was all that mattered to her. It always thrilled her when she thought about it. It was so surreal, and an enormous secret. Her baby was a Royal Highness, and Lucy was going to give her the best life she could, worthy of any princess, to the best of her ability. Working for the Markhams was the first step. Maybe she’d rise to housekeeper one day, with a ring of keys on her belt like Mrs. Finch, who ran the Markhams’ home with an iron hand, but despite her odd, stiff ways and stern face, Lucy liked her. She was from the northern border of Yorkshire, and had the accent that had become familiar to Lucy while she stayed with the Hemmingses at Ainsleigh.
She settled into her job, determined to work hard, and had a letter from the housekeeper at Ainsleigh a few months later. She had let her know where she was, and told her she’d found a good job. The housekeeper from Ainsleigh reported that the estate had been sold to an American. The old servants had all been let go. The new owner was going to spend a year or two remodeling everything and modernizing the place, and would