Royal - Danielle Steel Page 0,39

hire a new staff after they did, probably some of them American. They had bought the place for very little.

Her big news was that two palace secretaries and the queen’s equerry had come from London shortly after Lucy left. They had exhumed Charlotte’s casket and taken her remains back to London for a service there, and it turned out that Charlotte had been a royal princess. It had all been arranged very quietly, and the palace emissaries hadn’t said much about it. No one at Ainsleigh had suspected that Charlotte had apparently been a member of the royal family. It made what they thought was her illegitimate love child even more shocking. And out of respect for the Hemmingses, sympathy for Charlotte, and loyalty to Lucy, no one had breathed a word about Annie. The housekeeper wrote that they hadn’t asked about the baby, and she had the strong feeling they didn’t know about her, which was probably just as well. Henry and Charlotte were both dead. Annie was illegitimate and she was in good hands. The whole matter was better left buried and forgotten. There was no point maligning the dead and causing a scandal. She also mentioned that they had taken her big horse back to London with them.

Lucy still believed she had done the right thing, taking her because she loved her, particularly since they didn’t know about Charlotte’s clandestine marriage to Henry Hemmings. It would all be forgotten now, and she and Annie could go on with their lives. She had left just in time, which was providential. She didn’t write back to the housekeeper, and didn’t want to pursue a friendship with them and maintain a connection. She wanted to put Ainsleigh behind her. It was history now. And they could have exposed her. Fortunately they didn’t know about the marriage, which would have changed things if they did, Lucy had turned the page and started a new life where no one knew her. At the Markhams’, she was just another war widow with a child. There were thousands of them all over England, some of whom had truly been married, and some not and only claimed to be. There were too many of them to ask questions or garner much interest. The Ainsleigh servants were happy for Lucy and Annie.

And no one at the Markham estate had questioned Lucy about Annie. They just thought she was a pretty little thing, and they never commented that she looked nothing like her mother. Lucy was a tall girl with a big frame, and despite her size at birth, Annie already had the delicate frame and features of her natural mother. Lucy could already see how much she looked like Charlotte. She had the face of an angel and white blond hair, with sky blue eyes. She was going to be a beauty one day, and she was already small for her age, which Lucy blamed on rationing and how little food they’d had in Yorkshire at the end of the war. The restrictions of rationing hadn’t been lifted yet, but they ate well at the Markhams’, who managed to feed their employees plentifully. And Lucy gave whatever treats she had to Annie. She never minded depriving herself for her baby. Lucy had convinced herself by then that Charlotte’s family would have rejected her because of how her birth came about, and everyone at Ainsleigh believed it too. Annie would have been the child of a regrettable mistake, a disgrace they would have buried and probably put her somewhere with people who didn’t love her as Lucy did. Lucy had no trouble justifying what she’d done by taking her. Her love for the child made it seem right to her. In her mind, love was stronger than blood or ancestry. She might not have a royal life, or live in a palace, but little Annie had a mother who loved her deeply. What more could she want or need? Lucy had no regrets. She never let herself think about it now. Annie was her baby. And anything she’d had to do to become her mother seemed right to her. And like Charlotte, she would go to her grave with her secrets.

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The service for Princess Charlotte was a private one with only her sisters and parents present. They buried her at Sandringham because she had loved it. The queen was devastated when they brought her home, and Victoria mourned her even more deeply than