Jonathan read Henry’s letters to Charlotte after that, which referred to both the baby before it was born, and their marriage in haste and secrecy before he left. They were obviously deeply in love with each other, and had gotten themselves into a very awkward spot.
The official documents in the box told their own tale. Their marriage certificate by special license, signed by the countess and earl, which Charlotte’s parents knew nothing about, under the name she must have been using to guard the secret of her identity for a variety of reasons. But it seemed reasonable to believe that Charlotte Elizabeth White was in fact Charlotte Elizabeth Windsor. It was also reasonable to believe that they might not have been too upset about the Hemmings boy in other circumstances, but a marriage at seventeen due to an unwanted pregnancy was enough to upset any parent, royal or not. They sent her away for a year, for her safety, to respectable people, and she got both pregnant and married in that order. It would have been a lot for them to swallow.
He could see why neither Charlotte nor the countess had told them, and were probably waiting for the right time to do so, but that time had come and gone, with the death of the baby’s father in wartime, the deaths of both the earl and later the countess, and Charlotte’s own death after the baby was born. The entire situation had gotten out of hand, which left an infant whom they knew nothing about an orphan of the royal family. The circumstances had been perfect for Lucy to simply sweep the baby up, tuck her under her wing, and take off with her, with no one more mature to reason with her and stop her. Her ill-judged though well-meant action at the time had resulted in a royal princess who had been deprived of her family and her birthright, and a royal family who had been deprived of their late daughter’s child. Knowing that Princess Charlotte had left a daughter behind when she died might have offered them some comfort in their grief at the time. It wasn’t too late to set things right, but it was going to be awkward now. Their suddenly coming forward with a lost princess was going to be highly suspect and not easy to pull off without causing a major uproar, or Lucy even being accused of a crime, child theft or something worse, on her deathbed. And there was no one left to corroborate the story.
Jonathan suspected that Lucy no longer knew where the Hemmingses’ servants were, since the property had been sold, or even if they were still alive since more than twenty years had passed. Also, who knew if the doctor who had delivered Annie was still alive, or the vicar who had married them? Twenty-one years was a long time, and Henry Hemmings and his family were all dead. The entire mess was not going to be easy to unravel, but Jonathan was convinced it had to be, for the Windsors’ sake, and also for Annie’s. She had a right to know who she was, and what had happened, and that Lucy loved her, but was in fact not her mother. Jonathan had no idea how Annie would react to the news, not to mention the Windsors’ reaction. And he wanted to clear Lucy’s name and protect her. What she had done was very wrong, but also na?ve, and she had been suffering from the loss of her own family, and clinging to the infant for love and comfort, however misguided.
It was a most unusual story. Lucy was not delusional, she was trying to repair the mistakes of the past at the eleventh hour. They were not small mistakes. Whether she meant to or not, Lucy had stolen Annie from the Windsors for more than two decades, her entire life so far, and had deprived Annie of the life she had been born to and had a right to, with her royal family, in a palace, not the life of the child of a housemaid and a stable master in Kent. The biggest question of all was how to get the information to the queen now, without causing a scandal, and catching the attention of the press, and then leaving the royal family to handle it as they wished. Jonathan didn’t want Lucy to be punished for an enormous error of judgment she had committed at nineteen. And what would Annie think of Lucy once she knew, and found out that the mother she loved in fact wasn’t? She had lived with a lie all her life, and was someone else entirely than she thought she was.
One thing was certain in Jonathan’s mind. The Windsors would want to see Annie. And the other thing he felt sure of was that Lucy had made a terrible mistake, and taken it too far. He was grateful she had told him, and he lay awake thinking about it all night. He was sitting next to her on their bed, when she woke up the next morning. In spite of the drops that had made her sleep, she remembered immediately what she had asked him to do, and she searched his eyes as soon as she woke up.
“Did you read it all?”
He nodded, with a serious look. “I did. That’s quite a story. You got in over your head through a series of unusual circumstances, and some bad decisions on your part, made from the heart.”