He took the train to London the next day and asked Annie to cover for him. He said he’d be back that night.
“Where are you going?” she asked, curious.
“To London, to see the queen,” he said, sounding as though he was teasing her, but he wasn’t. “Just like the nursery rhyme says.”
“Very funny,” she said.
He caught the train on time, and arrived promptly for the appointment with Sir Malcolm Harding, shook hands with him, and handed him the package.
“These are all copies. I have the originals, but I don’t want them to get lost. I’ll be happy to turn them over to you, if it’s of interest to the queen, or the Queen Mother.” The secretary thanked him politely and set the bundle on his desk, and a moment later, Jonathan was back on the street, looking up at the palace where Annie’s mother had grown up.
He took the train back to Kent and arrived in time for dinner. He was very quiet, and Annie noticed that he had worn a suit to go to town, and he seemed very formally dressed for a simple errand, but Jonathan volunteered nothing about how he had spent the afternoon. He wasn’t ready to tell her yet.
The phone rang in his office in the stables, at nine o’clock the next morning. Jonathan was startled to hear from Sir Malcolm so soon. He went straight to the point.
“The queen would like to meet with you tomorrow, at eleven in the morning, and she would like you to bring the girl.” They weren’t dignifying her with her title yet, and weren’t sure if she was for real. Jonathan hesitated for only a fraction of an instant, thinking that he would have to tell Annie the whole story sooner than he was ready to, but now there was no choice. He had until eleven A.M. the next day to do it.
“Of course,” Jonathan responded about bringing Annie with him. He wondered if he was going to be arrested when he got there, and wind up in jail. Anything was possible, but he was too far down the road to back out now, and he didn’t want to. He had a bumpy stretch of road ahead of him, when he told Annie about her history, and tried to explain why Lucy had taken her in the first place, and never contacted the Windsors until now.
He waited until he saw Annie return from exercising one of the horses, and then asked her to have lunch with him as she walked the horse back to his stall.
“Something wrong?”
“Not at all. I just have something I want to discuss with you,” like the fact that you’re a royal princess and part of the royal family, just a little thing like that.
He made two sandwiches, put them on plates, and set them down on a picnic table near the barn, where they could talk.
“Something’s up,” she said, looking suspicious after they had both sat down. “Is it something to do with Mom?” she asked.
“Yes, and no. It’s actually old news, but your mom only told me about it two days before she died. I think you should know about it too.”
“She left each of us a million pounds,” she teased him, and he laughed.
“That would have been nice. Actually, it’s more complicated than that.” He wasn’t sure how to broach the subject with her, so he just plunged in and told her the story and the circumstances surrounding her birth. It got complicated here and there, but Annie followed, and at the end of his recital, she sat and stared at him, as though she’d seen a snake.
“Stop. Let me see if I got this right. Mom was not my real mother, she didn’t give birth to me, and the woman who did died a few hours after I was born. She was a royal princess, and her mother was the queen when I was born. And the woman who is the queen now is my mother’s sister, and my grandmother is now the Queen Mother. If any of that is true, it sounds totally crazy to me. And what does that make me, if it is true?” she asked, visibly confused and more than a little overwhelmed.
“It makes you a Royal Highness,” he said quietly. And it made Lucy, the woman Annie knew as her mother, an infant thief, a young girl who had stolen a baby and kept it a secret for more than twenty years. But Annie hadn’t absorbed that part of the story yet, and she loved the woman she knew as her mother, and the memory of her, no matter what. And Jonathan hoped she always would. Annie had been suffering terribly from her mother’s death.
“Wait a minute,” Annie said holding a hand up, as though to stop traffic. It was all coming at her too fast. “You’re telling me that I’m a princess, that I’m royal, and related to the queen and the royal family.” He nodded and then she stared at him in disbelief. “And how did Mom get away with that for so long?”