…the woman who saved the princesses’ lives.”
The letter was written in French, on palace stationery, dated 1944. The dealer translated it slowly. It was from a queen in exile, addressed to my grandmother, Anna.
In 1940, when the war reached their country, Anna was a nineteen-year-old maid at the palace. When soldiers came, she hid the queen’s two young daughters in the servants’ laundry cart, wrapped them in sheets and pushed them out through the kitchens. She walked with them for two days to a farmhouse near the border and kept them hidden there for three weeks, until the royal family could get them out.
“To Anna, who carried my children in her arms when no one else would,” the letter said. “This music box played their lullaby every night. Now it belongs to your children. We will never forget what we owe you.”
My grandmother never told anyone. She emigrated after the war, married a carpenter and raised five children in a small house. When I asked her about the music box once, she only said it was a gift from “a kind lady.”
The dealer contacted a royal historian. The letter and the music box were authenticated within a month. The historian told me the two princesses had spent their lives trying to find “Anna the maid” and had both died without knowing what happened to her.
Then the story came out in the newspaper.
My daughter-in-law, Vanessa, called me the next day. She said she’d made a “mistake” at Christmas and that the music box should go back to her daughter, “where it belongs.” She mentioned the $300,000 twice.
I told her the music box belonged to my granddaughter. And it would stay with me, in a trust, until she turned eighteen. Not one day earlier.
Vanessa hung up.
My granddaughter, Lily, comes over every Saturday now. We wind the music box together, and I tell her about Anna, the brave nineteen-year-old maid who pushed two little girls to safety in a laundry cart. Lily always asks the same question at the end: “Grandma, would you have been brave too?” I tell her the truth: I hope so. And I hope she will be too.
