“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.
He picked up one packet of letters and untied the ribbon to get a sense of what they were, and immediately saw the Windsor crown, the queen’s initials, and her elegant hand, dating the letter, with the words “Buckingham Palace” under it, and he frowned. Maybe there was a kernel of truth to something Lucy had said, and the rest was hallucination from her illness. He wondered again if the cancer had gone to her brain. He read the first letter, saw that it was to someone named Charlotte, obviously her daughter, and the letter was signed “Mama.” And as he set it down in the box again, his heart was beating faster. Without meaning to, or wanting to, he had opened Pandora’s box, and he was afraid of what he would discover next.
Chapter 8
Jonathan went in to check on Lucy several times while he read through the contents of the box. It was late and everyone in the house was asleep. It was a quiet time for him. Lucy was sleeping soundly from the drops, and made an occasional noise. He would watch her for a minute, gently touch her or stroke her hair, and then he went back to the living room to continue reading.
He had read all of the queen’s letters to her daughter, and, like Lucy, he had no doubt that they’d been written by the queen.
He remembered now the royal family sending their youngest daughter to the country during the war, to set an example to others and get her away from the air raids in London. And her tragic death at seventeen a year later, of an illness, he thought. It was also remarkable that the princess and Lucy had ended up in the same place. War was the great equalizer. There was also no mention of a baby, a pregnancy, a marriage, or even a romance, so whatever had gone on in Yorkshire, Charlotte’s parents had apparently been unaware of it. Perhaps, as Lucy said, they were going to tell her all of it when they saw each other again, when Charlotte returned to London. But she seemed not to have shared any major news in the meantime. She also couldn’t tell her mother anything shocking on the phone, since phone lines were not secure during the war, and the palace switchboard would have been equally unreliable, with others listening in on conversations and talking about it afterward. For government business and military intelligence, they had used scramblers and codes, but Charlotte wouldn’t have had any of that available to her. Her news would have been that of a seventeen-year-old girl. In this case, one who had gotten pregnant, and then secretly married. News that would not have been easy to share with her parents at a distance, particularly as a royal princess.