The end of the weekend came too quickly. The others were staying on for a few more days, although Princess Victoria was leaving for London the next day, and the queen was planning to spend another week there. She urged Annie to come again, now that she had met everyone in the family, other than distant cousins who were scattered all over Europe, many of them on other thrones.
“You’re a true Windsor,” she said to Annie when she left. They all hugged her and hoped to see her again soon. She had another month of work ahead of her at the queen’s stables, and Prince George and Prince Albert promised to come and see her before they went back to university, and Prince William before he started the new term at Eton.
The queen touched on the subject of where Annie would live after she finished her internship at the stables. There were apartments available at Kensington Palace, if that appealed to her. Annie had been planning to go back to Jonathan to help him with the twins. She said she’d like to think about the queen’s offer of an apartment. It hadn’t occurred to her that they would do that and she was pleasantly surprised.
She was far more relaxed on the trip back on the train than she had been on the way to Scotland. She had managed to stretch her meager wardrobe to its limits. She had been impressed by how fashionable Princess Victoria was, and she was so lively and stylish at everything she did. She lightened the mood wherever she was, but unlike the queen, she had few responsibilities, not even a husband and children. She had been very warm and welcoming to her newest cousin and gave her little snippets of advice throughout the weekend. Publicly, she had a reputation for being flighty and a party girl, but Annie could tell that she was intelligent and much less superficial than she pretended to be. It was simply the style she had chosen for herself when she didn’t marry. She jokingly referred to herself as the family spinster, which was not the image Annie had of her at all. She was a very glamorous, beautiful woman.
In contrast, the queen was actually more lighthearted than she seemed publicly. She was a warm wife and mother, and enjoyed the time she spent with her family at Balmoral. She was already regretting that the summer was almost over. From Annie’s perspective it had been a very successful weekend, and she had gotten to know a little bit about all of them, and genuinely liked her new family.
She didn’t see Anthony until the following evening, when he came back from the South of France a day late, and looked a little worse for wear but said he had had a fabulous time. He had stayed on his friend’s yacht, had lunch at the Club 55, danced at all the discotheques, picked up numerous women of assorted nationalities, which he didn’t tell Annie, but she could guess. When he asked about her weekend at Balmoral, she said she’d had a fantastic time. He smiled at her enthusiasm.
“It’s more your cup of tea than mine,” he said. “My father loves it too. I always find it incredibly boring. It’s a little too rural and family for me. Did Princess Victoria sing?”
“Every night,” Annie said as she smiled at him, “and we had a barbecue.” He didn’t tell her the details of what he’d been doing in Saint Tropez, but a family barbecue with teenage boys present had not been on their agenda, much to his relief. But Annie had loved it. She was at a very different point in her life than he was and family-style weekends didn’t thrill him, even with the royal family. He wanted racier diversions and couldn’t see himself ever content with a life like that. And he knew that Princess Victoria was far more like him. But Annie’s innocent enthusiasm seemed sweet to him.
She was already busy with the horses by the time he got there. His father was annoyed with him for returning a day late, but Anthony was used to it, and the lecture he got didn’t impress him or bother him at all. He’d had a lifetime of them, about responsibility, his least favorite word.
Annie hardly saw Anthony all week, and the following weekend she went home to Kent for the twins’ birthday. She had promised to be there, and wouldn’t miss it. It was a very different weekend from the previous one at Balmoral. They went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant, and bowling afterward, and the Markhams let them use their pool because they were away. Annie spent hours in the pool with her brothers, and had given one a camera, and the other a stereo for their birthday. She was happy spending the weekend with them, with their father looking on. She had two families now, one royal, and the other, the one she had grown up with, as the daughter of employees on a big estate. The two lives were entirely different, and yet she was at home in both of them. She had adapted surprisingly well to the new one, as the niece of the queen, and the cousin of the future King of England. She was both people now, the simple girl she’d grown up as and a royal princess by birth. The boys teased her about it when she went bowling with them, and they asked if the queen had her own bowling alley at Buckingham Palace. Annie said she didn’t, and Jonathan laughed.