The Heir Apparent

Chapter One 1 January 2023

CHAPTER ONE

I was about to kiss my best friend when the helicopter came.

It was New Year’s Day, and for the third year in a row, Jack and I woke before the sun.

I’d rolled up the rainfly on my tent during the night so I could look at the eruption of stars overhead.

Now I saw only the first bloom of dawn. When I crawled outside, Jack’s own tent was already unzipped, and he was sitting by the embers, rumpled and sleepy and smiling at me.

“Coffee?” he whispered.

Finn was still asleep in his dew-beaded tent, so we left him there and walked the sandy path from the campsite.

There’s nothing like morning in the Australian bush—it’s magical.

Those great beautiful gums were silhouetted against a pale sky.

The first birds started their call. Wombats ambled around us, unafraid, as we walked towards the water tank.

This tradition of ours was a bit of an accident.

The first time, the three of us had been at a New Year’s Eve party at a bar in Japan when we drunkenly agreed to a snowboard instructor’s invitation for a dawn run down the mountain.

The next morning, when the alarm went off in our room at the ryokan, Jack had flinched under his giant doona, and our hangovers walloped us over the back of our skulls.

It would have been so easy for the two of us to roll over and go back to sleep, but Finn was staying at a place down the road with his sisters.

He’d be standing at the ski lift waiting for us, looking fresh and miraculously sober, and he’d have been beyond pissed if we didn’t show.

So we had silently pushed back our blankets and put on our damp ski gear and trudged out into the inky snowfields to find him.

It wasn’t until the three of us reached the summit and the sun burst above the mountains that Jack and I looked at each other and smiled, our hangovers gone, the new day like a fresh sheet of paper.

We’d agreed to watch the sun rise together every New Year’s Day for the rest of our lives.

Probably a strange vow for two friends, if anyone had bothered to ask. We certainly hadn’t.

Last year I had been on call, and we’d watched the sun ascend over Hobart while we sat together on the roof of the hospital. This time, we were camping, a curious anticipation humming between us.

“We could probably still catch the sunrise if we head down to the beach now,” Jack said.

I left the bottle by the tap and we walked through the long grass in silence.

When my boot got caught under a log, I steadied myself on Jack’s down-covered wrist, my hand sliding into his.

I left it there. Such a curious feeling, holding your best friend’s hand, like edging your toes over a great precipice, or draining a champagne flute quickly.

Jack and I had been circling each other for weeks. A month earlier, soon after I’d broken up with Ben, he’d tickled me in the kitchen until I was breathless and hysterical and trying to pretend I didn’t enjoy feeling him pressed against me while I grabbed his strong forearms.

So I didn’t object when he squeezed my hand as we stood on the rocks above the beach, the sky blushing pink before us.

Sunlight travelled through particles in the air, refracting and scattering in the atmosphere.

It was simple science at work, but as the sun torched the sky it was hard not to believe it was just for us.

Now would be the time for Jack to ruin the moment, to say, “Pretty spectacular, ay?” or maybe, “Okay, I need that coffee.” This time he was silent as he wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me close. He smelled of campfire and down feathers.

I barely heard the distant drone of the chopper as he looked at me. He brushed a leaf from my hair, and I stared at his lovely full lips, his dark eyes. But the droning got louder, and the grass around us began to ripple, then whip against our legs.

We turned towards the roaring helicopter as it descended on a sloping field.

I hardly recognised Stewart when he emerged, crouching beneath the blades as if he weren’t five foot five.

When I realised it was him, I knew that someone had died.

His mouth was set, his shoulders were hunched and his fists were clenched, just as they had been twelve years before when he’d hopped off the Italian coastguard boat and said my mother was still out there somewhere.

This time, they’d sent Stewart all the way to Australia. And not just to Sydney. He’d taken a plane to Hobart and found Jack’s mum, who must have told him we were camping out east on Maria Island. Then he’d chartered a chopper at dawn to track me down.

Stewart had been the last one to give up on me.

Even when Louis’s texts dwindled from once a month to once a quarter and then to nothing, Stewart would still dutifully check in on me.

His suggestions would arrive by Signal—Unfortunate, this story about you putting a coffee cup in the recycling.

It’s best to assume the tabloids are always watching.

But I hadn’t heard from him in three years.

Now he was wheezing from the effort of crossing the field, though he remembered his protocol and managed a crisp bow.

“Is it the Queen?” I asked.

He was in a dark suit and tie. They all kept a black outfit for the day it finally happened.

I wondered whose idea it had been, this journey to the ends of the Earth to find me.

Probably Stewart suggested it and Papa outright rejected it.

“She can open up the bloody newspaper like everyone else,” he probably said.

And then Stewart would have tactfully remarked that the newspapers might be most sympathetic to a father who did everything in his power to find his wayward daughter and break this terrible news to her.

But there was a strange look on Stewart’s face as he stood before Jack and me, his breath shaky and deep. I realised, with alarm, that he was scared.

“I’m sorry, Your Royal Highness,” he breathed. “I’m so sorry, no. It’s not the Queen at all.”

It had been at least a decade since I’d flown private.

The family tried to avoid it where possible.

At first, it was because seeing us climb the little steps to a private jet reminded our subjects that we were like very expensive house cats: lazy, ungrateful and, perhaps, ultimately useless.

Then it was because the younger members of the family kept preaching about climate change before hopping on a rich friend’s Cessna to pump six thousand kilograms of carbon dioxide through the skies on the way to Mustique.

But my father had died in the snow.

My brother Louis was holding on for now, but it didn’t look good.

No one had bothered to tell me what was going on with Kris, our oldest friend in the world, but I heard whispers of “brain death.”

And so the Queen had accepted an offer from a telco billionaire to fly me back to England on his Dassault Falcon. There were six people on the plane I didn’t recognise, but they were all young and dressed in black suits. Junior aides, I assumed, from Papa’s office.

The moment I sat down, an aide slid into the seat beside me and took my hand.

I thought perhaps she was trying to console me, but she produced a bottle of acetone and started rubbing off my dark nail polish.

Even after all these years, it was still a thrill to pick out a shade with a ridiculous name like Barbaric Burgundy or Poison Ivy at the salon.

Even more intoxicating was to watch it chip at the edges and do nothing about it for weeks on end.

Now I was watching my month-old Courgette Coquette nails disappear.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Of course, Your Royal Highness,” she whispered. She looked around and then, when she was satisfied no one could hear us, she leaned forward. “I know it’s ridiculous, this rule about dark nail polish. It’s not very modern. If it were up to me, you’d wear what you wanted.”

I had got on the jet in Patagonia fleece and hiking boots, but I knew I’d come down the steps looking like the last eleven years had never happened.

I wondered if she’d start sewing in extensions next, to boost my curls to their pre-Australian levels.

They couldn’t get me back under fifty kilos in fourteen hours, though, I was pretty sure.

Stewart took the seat in front of me and began texting. It was odd to see him on an iPhone. The last time we were close, I was still trying to convince him to play Snake on his Nokia. He had been Granny’s private secretary for thirty years, but he seemed to have had a hand in all of our lives.

“Is there any more news about Louis?” I asked him.

He looked up from his phone and back down at the screen. “No, ma’am. I’m sorry. They’ll radio up to the pilot if they hear anything.”

We both knew we wouldn’t discuss what had happened back at the house.

After the chopper landed in Hobart, Stewart had taken me to the vineyard to pack a bag.

I sat under the grape-leaf arbour while he ransacked my room.

But then came a strange feeling, one I’d had before, like a black wave cresting and breaking over my head.

The edges of my vision began to dissolve and I remembered, in quick succession, the feeling of Mum’s fingers braiding my hair; the time I fell off my horse and Papa ran across the wide, green lawns of the Scottish estate with something like fear in his eyes; and how, if a window fogged up, Louis and I drew a star each with our fingertips, one for him and one for me.

Even after we’d stopped speaking, I still found myself smudging two stars on frosted glass on winter nights, wondering, as they clouded over, if he ever thought about me anymore.

By the time Stewart had come out of the cottage to ask where I kept my passport, I was doubled over in my chair. It was like hot claws had taken hold of my lungs, and I flinched when he put a hand on my shoulder.