Royal: A Novel by Danielle Steel

Author:Danielle Steel [Steel, Danielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

The weeks after Lucy’s funeral were like a fog which enveloped Jonathan and the children. He felt as though he was swimming underwater and everything around him felt surreal. He kept telling himself he had to put one foot after the other, go through the motions of his daily life, and be there for his children. But nothing made sense without Lucy. He felt now as though he was in a free fall through the sky with nothing to stop him, no parachute.

Annie was no better. She barely spoke, except to talk to her twin brothers. They argued with each other constantly, which was their fifteen-year-old way of coping with the loss of their mother. They took it out on each other. Annie took care of them as best she could. Jonathan’s mother came to cook for all of them. Their nightly meals were deadly silent. No one talked and they hardly ate. Jonathan was inconsolable and Annie looked shattered, although she pulled herself together for the twins.

All Annie felt able to do was exercise the horses. It was usually the stable hands’ job, but she was grateful to have something to do that she could cope with. Sometimes she walked them slowly through the fields and let them graze when they wanted, and sometimes she rode them at full speed. Jonathan saw her do it, but for once he didn’t say anything about it to her. He knew she needed the release.

It was weeks before he was able to focus again on what he had read in the leather box two days before Lucy died. He knew he had to do something about it. If he didn’t, Lucy’s secret, and the secret of Annie’s very existence, would die one day with him. He couldn’t let that happen, for Annie’s sake, and the Windsors’. Not knowing what else to do, he tried the simplest way first. He got the number from information for Buckingham Palace, which was ridiculously easy, like calling the White House in Washington. Getting the number wasn’t difficult. It was what happened after that that mattered.

He asked for the queen’s private secretary, and got the runaround from start to finish. The names they gave him were for inconsequential underlings who put a smokescreen around the queen’s secretary. His attempt to get through to the Queen Mother was equally fruitless. And after nearly an hour of waiting for half a dozen people, he got nowhere, and finally hung up. He should have known better, but it was worth a try. He realized now that he had to be more ingenious and find another way to gain access to the queen, or her personal secretary. He needed to be put in touch with her, on a deeply personal matter, like the fate of the sister she had lost more than twenty years before, and the niece she was entirely unaware of.

After thinking about it for several days, he decided to try channels he was more familiar with.

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