Даниэла Стил - Royal

She seemed agitated when he put her to bed. She was having trouble breathing, and he was terrified that the cancer was spreading, and he could see that she had lost more weight.

“I have to talk to you,” she said in a whisper, as she looked intently at him. She seemed worked up about something, and he was afraid that she wouldn’t sleep. She was often anxious now, as the illness progressed at a rapid rate.

“We’ll talk tomorrow. You need to rest,” he said gently.

“No, I don’t. It’s important. We need to talk.” He could see that arguing with her would only make things worse. He couldn’t imagine what was so important that it couldn’t wait till morning, and he wanted to give her a morphine pill for the pain. “Listen to me,” she said sharply and then closed her eyes for an instant.

“I’m listening to you.” He didn’t want her to get upset, but he could sense that she already was. There was an urgency to everything now, as though she were fighting for more time. But he was afraid it was a fight she couldn’t win. “What is it, love?” he said gently, fighting back tears. She looked so ill.

“It’s about Annie. I’ve never told anyone, but now I think maybe I should have.” He suspected that she was about to tell him that she had never been married to Annie’s father during the war, and wasn’t a proper war widow, which was something he had wondered about anyway. So many women who had had babies during the war had never been married to their children’s fathers. And afterward, they just claimed to be widows. There were so many that no one ever questioned it. It didn’t matter now, and never had to him. He loved her whether she’d been married to Annie’s father or not.

“It’s not important,” he said kindly.

“Yes, it is.” She stopped talking for a long time, a full five minutes, and then whispered to him. “She’s not mine.” He hadn’t been prepared for that, and suspected that she was confused. The doctors had warned them the cancer might spread to her brain. He wondered now if it had.

“Of course she is,” he said gently.

“No, she isn’t. I didn’t give birth to her. Her mother died a few hours after she had her.” He wondered if it was true or some kind of delusion she was having. “Her name was Charlotte. She was staying at Ainsleigh Hall at the same time I was. I didn’t find out who she was until after she died,” she said, and he recognized the name from what she’d said the night the twins were born, and for an instant he wondered if it was true. “She was royal,” Lucy said with eyes like daggers staring into his. She seemed very intense and anxious to tell him. “Annie is royal too. Charlotte was the youngest sister of the new queen.” He vaguely remembered that one of the young princesses had died during the war, but he was convinced now that Lucy was hallucinating and confusing it with one of her TV shows. “Charlotte’s parents sent her to the Hemmingses, to get away from the air raids, the way mine did, and she fell in love with their son. She got pregnant, and they never told the king and queen. I read the queen’s letters to her after she died. The queen didn’t know about the baby, she never mentioned her existence. I think the countess was probably going to tell them later face-to-face, but with the war still on, she never got to it. I think they didn’t want to tell the queen in a letter. The Hemmings boy was Annie’s father, they were both seventeen. He turned eighteen and left for the army, and was killed before Annie was born. I thought they’d never married and she was illegitimate, so they hid the whole story. But after Charlotte and the countess died, I read all the letters from her mother and from Henry. I found their marriage certificate. So they were married in secret. But by then, everyone had died, Annie’s parents and the earl and countess, an old cousin had inherited the estate and was selling it. And the Windsors, Charlotte’s family, didn’t know about her, I thought they wouldn’t have wanted her, because she was born of a disgrace. And I loved her. I thought the Windsors would have sent her away. I was nineteen, and I took all the letters and documents, so they wouldn’t find out about her when they came for Charlotte’s things. I said the baby was mine and I was a war widow. She was only a year old when we left Yorkshire, and I came here. She’s mine now, Jon, as if I gave birth to her. But sometimes I wonder if I should have told her. She’s a Royal Highness, a princess, the queen’s niece. I’m not sorry I took her. She’s had a good life with us, and you’re a wonderful father. But she’s not really ours, she never was. Her mother was as horse mad as she is.” Lucy smiled and closed her eyes to catch her breath. “The Windsors never knew that she existed, that Charlotte had a baby, or that she married the Hemmings boy in secret once she was pregnant. So I took Annie and raised her as my own. They still don’t know that she exists. The Queen Mother is her grandmother, and was Charlotte’s mother. The death certificate says she died of complications from pneumonia, but she didn’t. She died after childbirth. Jonathan, Annie is a royal princess, and they know nothing about her. I think now that maybe what I did was wrong. I loved her, and I didn’t want to lose her. When they all died, I just took her. I talked to the housekeeper and the maids about it. They didn’t know she was royal or legitimate, but I did when I left. It’s all in the leather box with the crown on it. I want you to read it, and tell me what I should do. You have a right to know too. I don’t want to lose her, but she has the right to a life we can never give her. Read it. Read it all. The key to the box is in an envelope in my underwear drawer.” She was clearly out of her mind, and Jonathan spoke to her firmly, as he would have to a child.

“You need to rest. I want you to take a pill.”

“The leather box,” she said again, her voice fading. “You have to read the letters. I should have told you years ago. The box is in my closet, on the shelf.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” he insisted. “Annie is your daughter. Our daughter. I love her too.”

“They must have been heartbroken when they lost Charlotte. I read all the letters from her mother to her for the entire year. The queen loved her, and they don’t know she had a daughter. Maybe they deserve to know and so does Annie.” She was getting increasingly wound up, and Jonathan couldn’t distract her. “Promise me you’ll read what’s in the box.” She fixed her eyes on him almost fiercely and he nodded. Her eyes were sunken deep in their sockets with dark circles under them.

“I promise.” It killed him to see his wife in this condition, and now she was losing her mind either from the pain or from her illness. She suddenly looked like an old woman, and nothing she had told him made sense. He loved Annie too, and she was a wonderful girl, but she wasn’t royal. If she was, they would have known about her. Their daughter would have told them about her, or the countess would have. He was sure that she couldn’t have gotten married and had a child without her family knowing, particularly the royals. It just wasn’t possible. The royal family didn’t go around losing princesses. He knew his wife. Lucy would never have stolen someone else’s child, even at nineteen. She was the best mother he’d ever seen to Annie, whoever her father had been, and to their sons, who were devastated over their mother’s illness too.

He gave Lucy some of the drops for pain then, since she refused to take the morphine, and a few minutes later, her eyes closed and she drifted off to sleep.

He went to sit in the living room for a while to gather his thoughts. It broke his heart to see how mentally disordered she had become. She had never been irrational before, and now suddenly she was caught up in some kind of obsessive fantasy about Annie being royal, and the circumstances of an allegedly royal princess’s death, who probably wasn’t a princess at all, and just some young girl from London staying in the country to avoid the air raids, as Lucy had done. Nothing she had shared with him made any sense. He wondered if the box she was talking about was empty. He had seen it once, years before, when Lucy first moved in, and never since. To put his mind at ease, he went to look for the box, and found it where Lucy had said it would be. Then he looked for the key in the envelope in her underwear drawer, and found that too. He brought it back to the living room, took the key out of the envelope, and fitted it into the lock. He noticed the gold crown on the leather, as the key turned easily, and he lifted the lid and glanced inside. The box was crammed full of packets of letters tied with ribbon, and there was a sheaf of documents. He saw a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, a death certificate, and some photographs. For an instant, he stared at it, not wanting to read through the letters, but at least this much was true.