Royal(22)

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.



“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.