Royal - Danielle Steel Page 0,48

and any publication that wrote about the royals. She read every news report about them. The coronation of Queen Alexandra was going to be the high point of her obsession with the monarchy. Jonathan’s well-timed Christmas gift would allow Lucy to watch Queen Alexandra’s coronation at home in June.

The new queen was a young woman, the youngest to ascend the throne since Queen Victoria had become queen at eighteen in the nineteenth century. Queen Alexandra was twenty-nine years old when she became queen, had been married for five years, and was expecting her third child when her father died. She gave birth to her third son the week after her father’s funeral. So the succession was now assured with an “heir and two spares” as the British liked to say. Queen Alexandra’s three sons were in line for the throne after her, with her oldest son first in line. Fourth in line to the throne was Queen Alexandra’s younger sister Victoria, a year younger than the new monarch, and unmarried. She had always been somewhat wild in her romantic choices, and had the personality to go with her flaming red hair. Alexandra and Victoria had had a younger sister who had died tragically at seventeen during the war, in 1944. She’d died of complications from pneumonia. Queen Alexandra’s mother, Anne, was now the Queen Mother since the death of her husband, King Frederick.

Jonathan had always been ignorant about the royals, and somewhat indifferent to them, until Lucy filled him in on all the details. She seemed to know everything about them and read up on them constantly. Queen Alexandra had a German husband who was prince consort, His Royal Highness Prince Edward, just as her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria had had in her husband, Prince Albert. Although allegedly very much in love with their husbands, neither queen had ever requested the government to make her husband king, and both men had remained with the more limited status of prince consort. But as both were German-born, it was unlikely that the cabinet would have approved of their being made king. So both queens reigned alone. Queen Alexandra’s coronation in June promised to be a dazzling affair, complete with the legendary historic golden coach in which she would travel to the ceremony, while wearing an ermine robe over her coronation gown, and her heavily jeweled crown was said to weigh forty pounds.

Monarchs from all over Europe and dignitaries from every country would be in Westminster Abbey, by highly coveted invitation, to see her crowned. And now Lucy could see every last detail of the ceremony too, sitting on her couch in her own home.

Jonathan had often teased her about her fascination with the monarchy, and now he had made her dreams come true. Her new television was her proudest possession.

Annie didn’t share her mother’s obsession with the royals, and at eight years of age, she was still much more interested in horses than Royal Highnesses. She would turn nine in a few weeks before the coronation and Lucy correctly suspected that her daughter wouldn’t bother watching it, although she was slightly intrigued by the horses that would be part of the ceremony, and those that would be drawing the golden coach. Other than the horses, Annie had no interest in it.

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In June, the coronation, which Lucy watched on TV for several hours, from beginning to end, lived up to all her expectations. It was the high point of her passion for all things royal.

It was not lost on Lucy, although no one else in the world knew it, that Annie was now fifth in line to the throne, though it was unlikely the succession would ever get that far down the list. The young woman who had just been crowned Queen of England was Annie’s aunt, and the late Charlotte’s oldest sister. The young queen’s three sons were Annie’s cousins, and the Queen Mother, Anne, was her grandmother. They were Annie’s family by blood and birth, although she didn’t know it, and they had no knowledge of her existence. But it was a thrill for Lucy to know it, as she watched them on her television screen. The child she considered her daughter, and always would, was part of the royal family because of her mother, the late Royal Highness Princess Charlotte, who had died hours after giving birth to Annie. And the only person who knew was Lucy herself. The proof of it was still locked in