Даниэла Стил - Royal

“That sounds like a good idea to me,” the housekeeper said to Lucy in a matter-of-fact tone. “She’ll be safe and loved with you. She has no one else, and you’re the best mother she’ll ever have.” Lucy smiled at her praise, and the other two women agreed. Lucy was the obvious choice to take the child. She had cared for her almost since her birth, and was the only mother the child had ever known. Putting her in a public orphanage, or giving her to an old man in Ireland who didn’t want her, seemed wrong to all of them. And even if they had all guessed that Henry was her father, he wasn’t there to take responsibility for her. And she had no claim on the estate as heir, so Lucy acting as her mother seemed like the answer to a prayer for both of them. Lucy needed a family and Annie a mother.

“When are you thinking of leaving?” one of the two maids asked her.

“Soon,” Lucy said. She had her savings to tide her over, and she was going to look for a job where they would allow her to bring a child, perhaps as a nanny, or a nursery maid, or a housemaid on a large estate. She knew the kind of work that would be required of her, and she planned to say she was a war widow with a child when she applied for jobs. There would be plenty of them on the market now, widowed women with children, and no one was going to ask her for a marriage certificate or Anne Louise’s birth certificate. She could always say her papers had been lost in the bombing.

“I’ll give you a character if you like,” the housekeeper offered, and Lucy was delighted. It was all she needed to get a good job. With that in hand, she could take her pick of whatever was available. She had read in The Lady magazine about an agency in London that helped men and women find domestic jobs, and planned to go there.

That night, after everyone went to bed, Lucy went upstairs to the large guest room Charlotte had occupied in the last weeks of her life, before Anne Louise was born. Her things had been moved down from the attic room next to Lucy’s to the large guest bedroom, and Lucy knew that all her papers would be there. She wanted to take them with her, not to show to anyone, but in case she ever needed them. She had never known much about Charlotte’s history. She had always been vague about it whenever Lucy asked her, and Lucy had always sensed that there was a secret there somewhere, just as there was surrounding Anne Louise’s birth. A mystery of some kind.

When she got to the room, she had an eerie feeling, knowing that it was where Charlotte had died over a year before, the night of Annie’s birth. The room hadn’t been used since. The shades and curtains were drawn. She sat down at the desk, opened the drawers, and was relieved to find they weren’t locked. This was easier than she had thought it would be. The drawers were all full, and there was a large brown leather box on her desk. It had a crown embossed on it in gold. Before she examined its contents, Lucy went through each of the desk drawers. Two of them were filled with stacks of letters tied with thin blue ribbons. She removed the ribbons, and opened the letters, and saw the crown on the stationery. They were all signed “Mama,” the initials engraved at the top of the page were “AR,” and handwritten in the upper right-hand corner, under the date, in a neat elegant hand were the words “Buckingham Palace.” A few said “Sandringham,” some “Windsor,” and several others said “Balmoral.” Lucy frowned as she read the locations and wondered if it was a code of some kind. And then she read several of the letters, and suddenly her heart gave a jolt. “AR” could mean Anne Regina, Queen Anne, the crown was the crown of the Royal House of Windsor, and they had been written from all of the palaces that the current royal family used most often. But that wasn’t possible. How could it be? Charlotte had said that her father was a civil servant, and her mother was a secretary. Had she been lying? Or was her mother a secretary to the queen? It seemed unlikely she’d use so much of the queen’s stationery for letters to her daughter, unless she was the queen.

She began to read the letters more carefully and nowhere did Charlotte’s mother, the woman who had signed herself “Mama” in the letters to Charlotte, nowhere did she mention Henry, or the fact that Charlotte was expecting a baby. She obviously didn’t know. Charlotte had clearly kept the baby a secret from her mother, presumably because Anne Louise was illegitimate and she didn’t want to tell her mother of her disgrace. But the countess knew about the baby and had kept the secret for her.

Lucy vaguely remembered then hearing that the youngest royal princess had been sent to the country to escape the bombing in London. Maybe she had come here. But Charlotte’s last name was “White,” not “Windsor.” There was no doubt in Lucy’s mind that the letters signed “Mama” were from the queen, written from Buckingham Palace, and all the palaces where they lived. The envelopes showed that they were addressed to the countess, but the letters were to Charlotte.

She read the letters right to the last ones, and several from her sisters. She looked for mentions of a baby coming, and there were none. Lucy tied the letters up again, then found the packet of letters that Henry had written her shortly before he died, telling her how much he loved her, and mentioning the baby that was about to be born and how pleased he was. It made Lucy’s heart ache to read them, remembering how she had hoped that one day he would love her. But now she had Annie, and he was gone. There were several photographs of him in the desk, and one of him with Charlotte that his mother must have taken, in a small heart-shaped silver frame.

After Lucy finished reading the letters, she carefully opened the leather box with the crown embossed in gold on it. There was a key in the lock, but the box was open, and Lucy was astounded by what she found. Their marriage certificate, for the marriage by special license that they had kept secret as well. So Anne Louise wasn’t illegitimate after all, which came as a shock to Lucy. Everyone assumed she was. The queen apparently didn’t know about her, but Henry and Charlotte had gotten married before he left, not long before. Glorianna Hemmings had signed it as a witness, so she knew, and so had the earl, but they had waited to tell the queen, and must not have gotten around to it by the time Charlotte died, hours after the baby’s birth, because the queen’s letters never mentioned the marriage or the child. Perhaps they’d been waiting until Henry returned from the war to face the royal family with the news of a marriage and a baby conceived out of wedlock at seventeen. For whatever reason, the queen appeared to be entirely unaware of Anne Louise’s existence, or Charlotte’s hasty marriage, after she was pregnant, and before he left. So they had legitimized the child, but kept her a secret. And most shocking of all, Charlotte had been a royal princess. The king and queen’s youngest child. Lucy was sure of it now. Things had obviously taken an unexpected turn when she came to Yorkshire and she and Henry fell in love. She had kept that a secret from her family as well. He was never mentioned in a single one of the queen’s letters, until after his death when she said how sorry she felt for his mother, but she appeared to have no idea that Charlotte was mourning him as well.

Her travel papers were in the leather box, in the name of “Charlotte White.” There was nothing in the box to identify her as “Charlotte Windsor,” or as a royal princess, except the letters from the queen signed “Mama,” sent from Buckingham Palace and their other homes. There were letters in the letter box too, from Charlotte’s mother and both her sisters and a few signed “Papa.” The box was too full to contain all the letters. The rest were in the desk drawers. And when she took all the papers out to read them, she saw that there were initials inside the box at the bottom. They weren’t Charlotte’s initials, they began with “A,” presumably the queen’s. Charlotte had kept a multitude of secrets until her sudden death, and in the end, had taken them to her grave. The countess had known the whole story, but hadn’t told the queen either, since she didn’t seem to know. Perhaps she was afraid of the king’s and queen’s reactions to their seventeen-year-old daughter getting pregnant by the Hemmingses’ son, and married in secret without her parents’ permission, to prevent her child from being born illegitimate. Some of the mysteries remained unsolved and would be forever, but Lucy could guess. Charlotte was almost surely the youngest princess who had been sent away from London to escape the bombs, and the same one who had died, supposedly of “pneumonia,” on the same day that Charlotte White had died in Yorkshire, shortly after childbirth at seventeen. It wasn’t a coincidence. Lucy was certain now that she was the same girl.