Даниэла Стил - Royal

The attorney came to see who was staying at the house, and found two maids and a housekeeper, and a young girl from London living there, and an infant he assumed was her child. No one had told him otherwise. They weren’t sure what to say, since Charlotte was dead, and no one had ever confirmed to them for certain who the father was, although they could guess, but they weren’t sure and it had never been openly said.

So the attorney attributed the infant to Lucy. No one told him that the baby was the countess’s grandchild, since she had taken none of them into her confidence. They had no idea who would take responsibility for the child now. It appeared no one would. The whispers were that Charlotte’s family knew nothing about the baby, or didn’t approve, since none of them showed up when the baby was born, or even when she died.

There were two men in the stables, one old, and one barely more than a boy. The tenant farms were well occupied. The countess had enough money left to pay their wages for quite some time. She’d been running the estate on a pittance, without extravagance. Once the lawyer knew that all was in good order, he agreed to pay the wages from the estate account, until the lawful heir could be found, which could take time.

It took the attorney two months to locate a distant cousin, by running ads in the York and London papers. He finally received a letter responding to one of his ads. It was from a third cousin of the earl, who had moved to Ireland during the war, since it was neutral. He seemed most surprised to learn that he had inherited the estate. He hadn’t seen the earl since he was a boy, and the heir was even older, had never married, and had no children. He wrote that he wasn’t eager to return to England while the war was on, but said that he would come to inspect the property as soon as the war ended, or earlier if possible. In the meantime, he authorized the Hemmingses’ attorney to continue paying the meager wages to the staff who remained. He said he was sorry to hear that the entire family had died. He seemed unsure about keeping the estate, and said he might put it up for sale, once he’d seen it. He had purchased a large estate in Ireland, a castle, and intended to stay there after the war. He had no real use for Ainsleigh, particularly once he was told it was in need of repairs and required a larger staff to maintain it properly.

It was another three months before the war in Europe ended in May, much to everyone’s relief. It had been an agonizing five years and eight months, with such crushing loss of life in England and all over Europe, as well as in the Pacific. Europe in particular was battle-scarred after the bombings on both sides. Anne Louise turned a year old a week after Germany surrendered.

It was June, a month after the surrender, when Lord Alfred Ainsleigh arrived from Ireland to meet with the lawyer from York and inspect the estate. The heir was quite elderly, and was discouraged to see the condition of disrepair of the manor house itself, and to note how much work and expense it would take to modernize it, add central heating, redo the plumbing and electricity, which were old and rudimentary at best. The park was sadly run-down, the gardens in need of replanting, although the grounds were beautiful, and the tenant farms would spring back to life quickly when the men returned from the war. But he said he had neither the energy, nor the youth required to bring the Ainsleigh estate back to what it had been before the Great War. There were thirty years of deferred maintenance repairs to do, due to lack of funds, and he thought the most sensible solution was to sell the property, at the best price he could get. He had no desire to live in England, he and the attorney discussed it at length, settled on a price that seemed reasonable to them, and put it on the market, with realtors in London and York. It was Lord Ainsleigh’s hope that an American would buy it, or someone with enough money to restore it to what it had once been. It was a long way from that now. He went back to Ireland after that, and Peter Babcock, the attorney, promised to keep him informed.

Lord Ainsleigh’s visit and decision to sell had caused a stir among the remaining staff at Ainsleigh Hall. All of them were worried about what a new owner would mean for them.

“I guess that’s it for us,” one of the two maids said in her heavy Yorkshire accent, looking glum. She had worked there all her life, and been faithful to the earl and countess for the forty years of their marriage, and all of their son’s life. “The new owner will probably sack us all,” she said grimly, “and put young ones in our jobs,” she predicted. “They’ll be lucky if they can still find anyone willing to be in service. I don’t think any of the girls are going to be in a rush to give up their factory jobs with better conditions and better pay than we have here. They’d rather live in the cities now than in the country.”

Her colleague responded hopefully. “They’re going to need someone to clean the place. We might as well stay, and see who buys this place.” The housekeeper agreed and said she was staying until they fired her. She loved the house, and had grown up on one of the farms. “What about you?” she asked, turning to Lucy. She wasn’t an employee, but she wasn’t family either, and she would need a place to go too, now that the earl and countess were dead and the place was being sold. She had no living relatives anywhere now, with her parents dead. She had a small amount that had come to her when her parents died, after her parents’ apartment building was bombed, and their insurance paid her something. She couldn’t live on the money forever, but it would last her for a while. Her dream was to return to London and find her way. She liked the idea of working on an estate like this one, maybe in Sussex or Kent. Yorkshire was a little too remote for her. She had just turned nineteen, and had been there for four years. It was the only home she had now. The big question for her was about Anne Louise. They were both orphans now. Annie, as Lucy called her, was thirteen months old. Lucy loved her like her own, and had cared for her entirely ever since the nurse left when Anne Louise was four months old.

“I want to go back to London,” she said quietly, and they nodded. It made sense to them. It was where she was from, even if she had no family left there now. There would be better jobs there, and the surrounding countryside, than in Yorkshire. Others would be going back to their original cities once they got out of the army, or returned from the places where they had taken refuge from the bombs being showered on the cities for the past five years. A new era of renewal and reconstruction was about to dawn, and Lucy was energetic and young. “I thought I’d take Annie with me,” she said, to see what they’d say, if they’d object or be shocked, or say she needed someone’s permission. But the countess was gone, and an elderly distant cousin was the heir. He didn’t want the place, and none of them could imagine him accepting a baby, whose parents and grandparents were dead, and whose parents hadn’t even been married, as far as they knew. She was an orphan, and presumably a love child, or a bastard, even if the countess had protected her. And illegitimate, she couldn’t inherit the estate one day. There was no member of the family to take her now, and if they spoke up to the new Lord Ainsleigh, they were all sure the baby would wind up in an orphanage. They all agreed that she was better off with Lucy, who loved her and took such good care of her, than among the thousands of orphans all over England, who would be struggling for a place to live and on public benefits. Whatever happened, Lucy would take care of her, and it was obvious how much she loved her. She didn’t care that she was illegitimate.