Royal - Danielle Steel Page 0,50
Oddly enough, Annie looked like one when she wasn’t riding at full speed. She had a natural grace and elegance and a strangely aristocratic look to her in spite of her small size.
“All I want to do is what you do, Papa. Train horses and work with you, unless I can be a jockey one day.”
“You can’t,” he repeated. And Lucy wanted her to be more than a mere housekeeper. A teacher, a nurse, any respectable profession for a woman, and eventually a wife and mother. Annie told her that her aspirations were pathetic. And the only thing that interested her was anything involving horses. Nothing had changed.
At eighteen the battle raged on, when Jonathan insisted she go away to school and further her education. She’d attended the village school. She’d never been interested in her studies, only in horses. But she lost the battle and went away to university to please him and her mother. Her grades were less than stellar and Jonathan eventually discovered that she had lied about her age and ridden in several minor amateur horse races as a jockey. He went to visit her at school to discuss it with her, and all she wanted was to drop out and come home to work with him in the Markhams’ stables. She’d been hanging around the local stables and the only friends she’d made were there, which her parents considered unsuitable. She had no interest in pursuing school.
Despite mediocre grades, she managed to graduate in three years under duress, and in the end, came home to work as an apprentice stable master and trainer. John Markham commented frequently to Jonathan about how talented she was.
“It doesn’t matter what we do, I can’t keep her away from horses,” Jonathan told his boss, sounding discouraged. Markham laughed at him. He had his own problems with six spoiled wild children by then, and an expensive wife.
“Maybe you should stop trying to keep her away from horses,” John Markham said with a wry smile. “Give her her head and see what she does with it.”
“She wants to be a female jockey, which isn’t even legal. She’ll break her neck and my heart one of these days.” He worried about her. In contrast, the twins, who were fifteen by then, had showed very little interest in horses. They took after their mother. Blake wanted to be a banker and Rupert wanted to go to vet school, which was at least closer to his father’s interests. Jonathan hadn’t been able to get Annie interested in veterinary school either. All she wanted was speed, although she admitted that one day she might be interested in horse breeding, though not yet. She followed the bloodlines of several stables, including the queen’s, which was her only interest in the royal family, unlike her mother, who was obsessed with everything about them, from what they wore to the kind of tea they drank.
“Kids do what they want to in the end. So do wives,” John Markham said before he drove off to London in his new Ferrari. He was as obsessed with speed as Annie, but it was more appropriate for him than for a twenty-one-year-old girl.
But a month later, they had other things on their minds. Lucy suddenly fell ill with severe stomach problems, and lost a shocking amount of weight. She lost fifteen pounds in a month, and Jonathan took her for tests at the local hospital, and then to see a specialist in London, at the Markhams’ suggestion. They were worried about her too.
The tests were inconclusive at first, and the diagnosis vague. She lost another ten pounds, and looked like a shadow of her former self when the doctors finally told them she had stomach cancer. It had metastasized to her liver and her lymph system, and the prognosis was not good. Jonathan was in shock when they told them. They suggested exploratory surgery, but as soon as they opened her up, they closed her up again. The cancer had spread too far and too quickly. There was nothing they could do. It didn’t seem possible. She was thirty-nine years old, and the twins were only fifteen. What would they do without their mother, and Jonathan without his wife?
They administered a round of chemotherapy followed by radiation to slow things down. And after the treatment, she seemed better for a while, and they gave her morphine for the pain. Jonathan wanted to cling to her to keep her with