Royal(21)

A few days before Christmas, one of the maids went to wake her ladyship, as she always did, and bring her her breakfast. She threw back the curtains on a bleak December day. There was snow on the ground, and most of the house was bitter cold. The maid made a comment about it, as she turned to smile at her employer, and saw her lying peaceful and gray in her bed. She had died during the night of a heart attack that killed her in her sleep. The past year had been too much for her. The vicar and funeral home were called, and after some consternation, the housekeeper called Peter Babcock, the Hemmingses’ attorney in York. She remembered his name from when the earl was alive. It was a dilemma knowing what to do next, since no one knew of any living relatives, but they assumed that the attorney would know who was the heir to the Ainsleigh estate. Henry had been when he was alive, but he was their only child. Neither the earl nor the countess had siblings, so presumably it would fall into the hands of distant cousins now, as often happened with old estates. They often passed on to relatives they’d never even met.



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.”