Royal - Danielle Steel Page 0,65
Annie agreed that family meals were important.
The house seemed so dreary without her mother. And it was a rainy spring, which made it worse. They felt as though they hadn’t seen the sun in months.
There was no word from Sir Malcolm Harding, the queen’s secretary, for nearly two months. Jonathan wondered if that meant the documents had been discredited or rejected, but they heard nothing either way. It was almost as though nothing had happened, and they’d never been to see the queen. Annie began to suspect she wasn’t royal after all. It didn’t really matter. She was happy as she was, living with her father and brothers. She had more work to do than before, trying to step into her mother’s shoes, doing the laundry and the cooking, picking up after them. They tracked mud into the house, grumbled about doing homework. She felt like the mother of two teenage boys since her mother’s death. There were days when it all seemed like too much. Too much energy, too much work, too much complaining, too many men in the house who messed everything up as soon as she cleaned it. There was no woman she was close to. She saw only the grooms in the stables, who were her age, and her father and brothers at night.
They went to dinner at a local restaurant in Kent on her birthday, and the day after, Sir Malcolm called to tell them that all of the papers appeared to be authentic.
The handwriting on the Queen Mother’s letters had been verified. The letters from Henry Hemmings appeared to be all right. The town hall county record office near Ainsleigh had registered all the documents. Charlotte’s cause of death on her death certificate had been a discrepancy, and the doctor who had attended the birth was long dead, but a nurse who had worked for him remembered how distressed he’d been when Charlotte had hemorrhaged shortly after the delivery. She had died after childbirth, but the nurse recalled that the countess had asked the doctor to list the cause of death as pneumonia to spare her parents embarrassment, since neither the pregnancy nor her marriage were known to her parents at the time, so the doctor had agreed. The marriage certificate was genuine. The vicar was still alive and had verified it, and said they were lovely young people and very much in love on the eve of his going to war, and Henry died shortly after, so the vicar was glad that he had married them, and had therefore legitimized Annie’s birth. And Her Majesty the queen had instantly recognized the little gold bracelet Annie was wearing, that the queen had given to her sister Charlotte. Annie could have gotten it from someone else, which all of them thought unlikely. It was credible that she got it from Lucy, who probably found it among Charlotte’s things after she died, along with the papers and letters. And the Queen Mother had acknowledged the brown leather box as hers as well.
Everything was in order, so far, and MI5 was doing some further investigation, but Sir Malcolm did not explain it. He promised to stay in touch and call when the investigation was concluded.
Annie wondered after she hung up if Lucy would have felt betrayed by their trying to have Annie recognized as a member of the royal family, or if she would have been pleased. She had gone to such lengths to make Annie her own, that Annie felt guilty about it at times, but Jonathan kept telling her that it was her birthright, and encouraged her to see it through to the end. And Lucy had told him the story herself and wanted to right the wrong she’d done. Nothing had been leaked to the press about it. The royal family was keeping it quiet in case she turned out not to be related to them after all. None of them wanted the embarrassment of discovering that Princess Charlotte wasn’t her mother, in which case Annie didn’t know who was, maybe Lucy after all. It was hard to guess the truth after silence for so long. And if Annie wasn’t Charlotte’s daughter, what had happened to the infant born to Charlotte at Ainsleigh Hall, now that they knew the rest?
It was another two months before Sir Malcolm called again. None of the Ainsleigh Hall servants were still alive, but they had spoken to the daughter of one of the maids, a