Jonathan and Lucy had no time for long, lazy mornings, or romantic nights. The twins were like a tornado that hit the cottage every day, as soon as they got up. Jonathan thoroughly enjoyed them, and Lucy loved them too, although Jonathan had more patience with them. They wore Lucy out and she told Jonathan that the twins and Annie were enough for her. He would have liked one more, but she said he’d need another wife to pursue that plan, and he graciously conceded, and settled for three children. In his opinion, Annie and the twins were the best things that had ever happened to him. He was a happy man. He loved his wife, his family, and his job. He loved working on the estate where he’d grown up, even with new owners. He had never hungered for distant shores or great adventures. He had exactly the life he wanted and was content.
Three months after the twins turned two, he gave Lucy a Christmas present that she said was the best one she’d ever had. He bought her a television, one of the big fancy floor models with the widest screen they made. It came in a piece of furniture, and was the pride of their living room, even though the images were black and white. They hadn’t invented color TV yet, but he promised to get Lucy one whenever they came out with it.
Lucy had favorite programs she turned on every night when she came home from work. Jonathan watched sports matches on the weekends, and there were even suitable shows for Annie early in the evening. She was eight years old. Whenever there was a horse show on TV, she ran to see it. It really was the best gift he’d given the entire family. The boys were still too young for it, but soon they’d be able to watch it too. The gift was particularly meaningful that year because King Frederick had died in February, and his oldest daughter, Alexandra, had become queen. Her coronation had been postponed for sixteen months, for assorted political reasons the public wasn’t privy to, and her coronation had been set for June of the coming year. For the first time in history, it was going to be televised, so millions of people could watch it in their homes around the world. Lucy was going to be one of them. She had been saying for months that she was going to take the day off from work to watch it, wherever she had to go to find a television, and now, thanks to her generous husband, she had her own.
It had always amused Jonathan that Lucy was obsessed with royalty, and in particular the British monarchy. She subscribed to The Queen magazine, and any publication that wrote about the royals. She read every news report about them. The coronation of Queen Alexandra was going to be the high point of her obsession with the monarchy. Jonathan’s well-timed Christmas gift would allow Lucy to watch Queen Alexandra’s coronation at home in June.
The new queen was a young woman, the youngest to ascend the throne since Queen Victoria had become queen at eighteen in the nineteenth century. Queen Alexandra was twenty-nine years old when she became queen, had been married for five years, and was expecting her third child when her father died. She gave birth to her third son the week after her father’s funeral. So the succession was now assured with an “heir and two spares” as the British liked to say. Queen Alexandra’s three sons were in line for the throne after her, with her oldest son first in line. Fourth in line to the throne was Queen Alexandra’s younger sister Victoria, a year younger than the new monarch, and unmarried. She had always been somewhat wild in her romantic choices, and had the personality to go with her flaming red hair. Alexandra and Victoria had had a younger sister who had died tragically at seventeen during the war, in 1944. She’d died of complications from pneumonia. Queen Alexandra’s mother, Anne, was now the Queen Mother since the death of her husband, King Frederick.
Jonathan had always been ignorant about the royals, and somewhat indifferent to them, until Lucy filled him in on all the details. She seemed to know everything about them and read up on them constantly. Queen Alexandra had a German husband who was prince consort, His Royal Highness Prince Edward, just as her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria had had in her husband, Prince Albert. Although allegedly very much in love with their husbands, neither queen had ever requested the government to make her husband king, and both men had remained with the more limited status of prince consort. But as both were German-born, it was unlikely that the cabinet would have approved of their being made king. So both queens reigned alone. Queen Alexandra’s coronation in June promised to be a dazzling affair, complete with the legendary historic golden coach in which she would travel to the ceremony, while wearing an ermine robe over her coronation gown, and her heavily jeweled crown was said to weigh forty pounds.