Royal - Danielle Steel Page 0,49

the leather box that had belonged to Charlotte, and Lucy had taken from her room before she left Yorkshire with Annie when she was a year old. All the pomp and ceremony in Westminster Abbey, the golden coach, the fabulous horses and gowns and glittering crowns were all part of Annie’s heritage. She was a Royal Highness too, just as her mother had been. Lucy never allowed herself to think that she had deprived her of it. She had given her love instead. The thought that the royal family might have loved her too, although they knew nothing of her existence, never occurred to her. She had never regretted her decision, or doubted her judgment, even once.

Annie headed for the stables to find her father while her mother was still watching the coronation on television.

“What’s your mom up to?” he asked Annie when she climbed under the fence. She was still noticeably small for her age, having just turned nine, and looked more like a six-year-old, but she rode like a man, her father liked to say. Her riding skill was as much part of her birthright as the ceremony in Westminster Abbey, but no one except Lucy knew that either. Lucy had kept her dark secrets for nine years now, ever since she had left Yorkshire and Ainsleigh Hall with Annie as a baby, and had pretended that she was her own, and had erased all trace of Annie’s existence so the royal family would never find her.

“She’s watching that thing on TV,” Annie said with a roll of the eyes. “The coach was pretty cool though. And the horses are gorgeous.”

“I think your mom is more interested in the crowns and gowns.” They both laughed, but Jonathan was happy for Lucy that she was enjoying it, and was sure she would talk about it for days. Televising the coronation had been a stroke of brilliance and had brought it into the common man’s living room. Women like Lucy could have a front row seat, on the couch, with a cup of tea.

* * *

—

By the time Annie was twelve, she had won ribbons at every horse show Jonathan entered her in. She was much more interested in speed than in the precise maneuvers of dressage or jumping competitions.

And at thirteen, she and her father had several serious arguments, and he had banned her from the stables for a week, after she snuck out with John Markham’s wildest new stallion, not even fully broken yet, and rode him hell for leather across the fields. Her father noticed the horse was missing a short time after she’d taken him, and he’d gone looking for her. What he’d seen was heart-stopping. He was sure she’d broken some kind of speed record, but she could easily have broken her neck or lamed a horse who over his lifetime might prove to be worth millions. He had brought her back looking chastened and mollified. She begged every day to be allowed to come back to the stables, and he had stuck to the week restriction to teach her a lesson. To his knowledge, she never did it again, but he wasn’t entirely sure. Annie was smart as a whip, and in love with horses, the faster the better.

At fifteen, to complicate matters further, she saw a horse race on television. Instead of aspiring to be a horse trainer or a stable hand, she announced that she wanted to be a jockey when she grew up. The televised horse race had convinced her. She was the right size, but the wrong gender, her stepfather informed her. Women were not allowed to be jockeys. Horseracing was a man’s sport, and he told her it was much too dangerous. It was 1959, and the idea of women jockeys was unheard of. Jonathan told her that females were allowed to compete in some amateur events, but in his opinion they would never be allowed to race in professional ones.

“I want you to grow up to be a lady,” her father told her, “not an amateur jockey at sleazy, second-rate events. I love what I do, but you have to aspire to more than just being master of the stables, a job no one is ever going to give a woman anyway. Your mother wants more for you too.” Lucy had been a housemaid, and more recently housekeeper for the Markhams, but she had greater ambitions for the daughter she always referred to as her “princess.”