Caroline gave her a polite smile before leaving. One thing was certain: she couldn’t have Miss Driscoll finding out about Angus. Who knew what the woman would do with that nugget of information?
Shaking herself out of her reverie, Caroline entered the dining hall.The smell of roast chicken filled the warm space, but Caroline found her appetite gone as she headed for the table in a daze.
She couldn’t stop the image of Angus reappearing in her mind, his rugged form, his piercing green eyes, his dark-auburn hair under her hands.
And that’s when it struck her, how very awful this could be.
Because if Angus came to Buckingham Palace, anyone who had ever seen Caroline’s daughter might guess that Annabel was his.
FOR THE NEXT WEEK, Caroline walked around the palace in trepidation.
‘When will they come?’ she whispered as she rubbed the soft ears of the old corgi.
The dog gazed back, her eyes big and sad, and Caroline ruffled her head. ‘If you could speak, you’d tell me to stop being so silly, wouldn’t you?’
But the dog just blinked at her as if to say,Feelings are very real. You can’t just wish them away.
How true that was, she thought as she got back to work, thanking heavens she had the coronation to keep her busy.
In the end, it was Betty who told her of the gardeners’ arrival.
‘They came yesterday evening, about twenty of them.’ The two women were sitting on the bus home from work. ‘Angus is now the head gardener at Balmoral, so he may well be among them. They’ll be working in the gardens, so you might not see him at all.’
A hot perspiration came over Caroline. ‘But what if I do?’
Her mind flitted back to those days when she’d just arrived in London at the beginning of the war. She’d been a lighthearted nineteen-year-old with a vibrant charm that was now all but gone. The electricity between her and the young Scots Guard had been immediate and dazzling. Caroline had never felt a rush of sensations like that before, her whole body charged with a force greater than she could control.
From that first moment, they’d plunged into a heady romance, spending all the hours they could together. The way he would look ather was disarming, as if he saw straight into the very core of her being, every ounce of hurt and pride and love that she’d ever felt. He cherished every part of her as if holding it delicately in his hands, as if she were the most precious thing on the planet.
She’d always held back from going all the way, worried about getting pregnant, but when he received orders to go to the front line, their boundaries broke down – like so many other couples at the time. Why save yourself if you could be killed? She wanted to know what it was like to give themselves to each other completely, and she wanted to make sure he remembered her when he was away.
Except he didn’t.
Betty broke into her reverie. ‘I never understood why you didn’t get married before he left.’
Regret swamped her. ‘How I wish we had! He asked me to marry him – begged me – but I wanted my father to perform the wedding in the church where I’d grown up. It was how I’d been raised, how I’d always dreamed it would be. But Yorkshire was too far, especially with the wartime train restrictions. So I let him go, promising him we’d do it as soon as he came back on leave.’ Her face crushed into tears. ‘But he never came back.’
With this, all the emotion of the past, the regrets, the guilt and the shame, burst to the surface. ‘I can’t bear to think about how different my life would have been if we’d have married. I would have been building a home for us. I wouldn’t have had to hide anything.’
‘But when he left for war, you couldn’t have known you were pregnant.’
‘It was a few months before I knew for sure. I wrote straightaway, then numerous times after that, but I never heard back.’ Her heart fell. ‘I checked his service number with the army, but because we weren’t married, they couldn’t tell me anything about him.’
‘Maybe your letters didn’t reach him?’
‘The army told me that the mail was usually efficient, and that undelivered letters were returned.’ She wrung her hands in frustration. ‘There were times I cursed the day I ever met him, but then there were times I just wanted to see him, to throw my arms around him. I waspregnant, unmarried, and would soon be booted out of my job and my room in the servants’ quarters. I couldn’t tell my father. He would have lost his position as vicar if anyone found out. I was at my wit’s end.’
‘And then Frank came along,’ Betty said with a groan.
‘I know you think he’s a waste of space, but Frank saved my life. He’d liked me since I arrived in the palace, and we’d become friends of sorts. When he worked out what was wrong, he asked me to marry him, said that a child of mine would be a child of his.’ She looked at her hands. ‘Of course I said yes. No matter what they say about how the war changed perceptions, without a husband, a pregnant woman would be out of a job, and she’d find it hard to get another – well, another honest one. And what about my child? Annabel would have grown up an outcast.’
Betty said gently, ‘Marrying Frank wasn’t really a choice, was it?’
‘No. I’d already waited months, and there was still no word from Angus. I had this one chance to grab respectability for my child, and I had to be grateful. Inside, it made me feel dead to marry a man I barely knew and definitely didn’t love, but I had to make it work.’
‘And you never heard from Angus again?’
Caroline shook her head. ‘He vanished. I only know he survived the war because I heard he was back working in Balmoral.’
