Ella nodded, watching as Alexandra rose and walked across the room, suddenly appearing agitated.
‘I was one of the first women to audition for the London Luminary Ensemble,’ Alexandra said, her eyes fixed on something outside the window. ‘This was the piece I chose to play, and even though I knew it by heart, I always carried it with me, just in case. Bernard knew that I would look at it, and whenever I did, I was reminded of just how much he believed in me.’
‘So you were a member of the orchestra?’
Ella waited for Alexandra to speak, about to repeat her question when she finally replied.
‘It wasn’t to be,’ Alexandra finally said. ‘But it was a very long time ago. If I’m honest I can barely remember how to read music these days.’
‘And Bernard?’ Ella asked. ‘He became your husband?’
Alexandra sighed and sat down heavily in the chair again. ‘Bernard and I were not meant to be either. At least not then, anyway.’
Ella wasn’t sure what that meant, but she didn’t want to push for more information than Alexandra was prepared to give.
‘You have his eyes, you know. There’s something about you that reminds me of him.’
‘I have my mother’s eyes,’ Ella said. ‘There’s not a lot similar about us, but I’ve always been told that I have her eyes, and the older I get, the more like hers they seem.’
They both smiled at each other then, and Ella laughed. ‘I can’t believe I’m sitting in a room with a biological grandmother that I had no idea even existed.’
‘It’s hard for me to believe too, Ella. After all this time, all those years of hoping, and then losing my Bernard…’ Her voice trailed away for a moment. ‘I’d all but given up hope.’
She wasn’t sure what Alexandra meant by that, since she’d already said that she and Bernard weren’t married.
‘I thought your mother would have received the box years ago, that was the agreement. She was supposed to receive it when she turned twenty-one.’
‘She was?’
‘Hope told me that she asked each mother who gave birth whether they’d like to leave something behind. Not everyone did, in fact many chose not to, but she said that when a child turned twenty-one, she would personally send their box to them.’
Ella hesitated. ‘Hope passed away some time ago, I don’t know how long it was, but perhaps something stopped her from following through with her promise? There were only seven boxes found before the house was scheduled for demolition.’
‘Demolition?’ Alexandra’s voice quavered. ‘If only those walls could talk, the tales they could have told. There were many, many boxes, I saw them all when Hope took me into her office.’
Ella didn’t have an answer as to why only these seven were left. She imagined the others had been sent out as planned, but something about these last remaining boxes had made Hope want to hide them. Maybe Mia was right, and these were the ones that for some reason weren’t supposed to be discovered.
‘How about I make us something to drink?’ Alexandra said, rising again and gesturing for Ella to follow her. ‘Would you stay for the afternoon, to tell me more about your mother? I’d very much like to hear about her.’
‘Of course I would,’ Ella said as she found herself in a large kitchen, watching as Alexandra took down two glasses. ‘But would you mind if I asked you about your connection to the monarchy? Someone mentioned you were forced to leave Greece?’
‘We did leave, many years ago, when I was just a girl,’ she said with a loud sigh. ‘It all seems like such a long time ago. A lifetime ago, in fact.’
‘You must have had an extraordinary life in your younger years. Were you in Athens before you fled?’
‘I was, and although I can look back and see that it was extraordinary now, back then it was just my life as I knew it. My mother was adored by many, the princess of the equine world, and my father was a man with huge ambition. An ambition that became more important to him than anything else.’
‘So then how did you end up in London?’
Alexandra took out a bottle of sparkling water and poured it into each glass, her hand shaking a little as she did so. Ella watched her curiously, wondering how this woman who wasn’t even the same nationality as her could possibly be her grandmother. She studied the graceful way she held herself, the elegant fingers glinting with diamonds, the whispering lines around her eyes and mouth. She was certainly youthful for a grandmother, although there was a sense that something had aged her, as if she was carrying a great pain, and Ella wondered if it went beyond having to give up her daughter.
‘What happened was that life as I knew it changed in an instant. Suddenly I was in another country, taken from everything I knew and loved, thrown into a new world that I felt a stranger in for so long.’ She passed Ella a glass, staring into her eyes as she spoke. ‘Until I met Bernard, that is. Then everything fell into place, and I was finally living the life I wanted to live, on my terms.’
Ella smiled at Alexandra. ‘Until?’ she asked.
‘Until my father walked back into my life and stole everything I loved from me,’ she murmured. ‘For the second time in six years, my father made a decision for me that changed my life forever.’
25
