Chapter Six 3 January 2023 #2
He probably never bothered to learn her name, but likely erupted in her general direction when he didn’t approve of the exact temperature on the office thermostat. I looked sideways at her. “Was he really?”
She glanced at me over her glasses and gave me an impish grin. I decided I liked her.
“I couldn’t possibly comment, except to say he was nicer than your stepmother.”
I refused to follow Annabelle’s Instagram account, though I would sometimes look at it when I was feeling particularly self-destructive. I had noticed a drastic improvement in her grid in recent months. I wondered if that was Mary’s influence.
“Annabelle hates you? Welcome to the club. We should get jackets or something.”
She laughed, then covered her mouth, remembering that we were supposed to be in mourning. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one was behind us and leaned in.
“All I can say is everyone at Wolseley is looking forward to working for you instead of her.”
Before I had a chance to respond, we’d arrived at the door of the drawing room. She knocked, waited a moment and then let us in.
“Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandrina, Your Majesty,” she said as she commenced a slow descent. Her curtsy had impressive depth.
Granny sat on a great gold brocade couch with Amira perched at the other end.
The sheer size of it dwarfed them both. I had forgotten what it was like to be in rooms like this, cavernous and gilded and stuffed with mirrors and chandeliers.
Everywhere you looked, faces lurked. There were lions carved into the mouldings, cherubs in the chair legs, disapproving ancestors in the paintings.
As a child, I had felt as though a thousand eyes watched me constantly in these rooms. A cluster of aides including Stewart and Mary stood by a marble column and waited while we dispensed with family pleasantries.
I dropped into a curtsy and smiled. “So sorry I’m late, just a bit jet-lagged.”
“Quite alright, dear girl,” Granny said.
“Lexi’s always loved a sleep-in, hasn’t she?” a booming voice said behind me.
I turned to see my father’s brother standing there, picking at a lavish spread of pastries and fruit laid out on the table.
Richard was in a flawlessly cut Savile Row suit, though there was nothing a skilled tailor could do about the cascade of neck skin over the collar of his ￡500 Tom Ford shirt.
The “Villiers droop” was an affliction no man in the family could avoid, no matter how handsome they had once been.
When he and Papa were young, Richard was the beautiful one.
He was blond and dashing, where Papa was dark and shy.
He got the magazine covers and the polo cup trophies and all the girls.
In his twenties, Richard briefly worked as a search and rescue pilot in the Royal Air Force, once finding a little girl who had been missing on the North York Moors for over a week.
The photos of him walking with the child gathered up in his biceps to return her to her weeping parents had earned him a lifetime of good will from a grateful kingdom.
But there was a public Richard and a private Richard. His pale eyes were as cold as ever, and I recalled that once, on a hunt, he had pushed my face into damp heather and hissed at me to be bloody quiet when I accidentally sneezed and disturbed the grouse.
“Uncle Richard,” I said.
He came towards me with his laden plate held aloft and kissed me on both cheeks. “My poor little niece, what a tragedy. Gosh, you look more like Isla every day, don’t you? Though better fed than your poor old mum, I suppose.”
He breezed past me to the chair next to Granny’s elbow. Amira, clutching a teacup on her knee, barely contained her disdain. In the old days Richard and Papa would fight over this prime position by their mother’s side, as if they were still boys and not middle-aged men.
“Perhaps, ma’am, we should get started?” said Stewart.
“Is Annabelle not here?” I asked.
The others exchanged glances. The aides busied themselves with papers or stared at their shoes. No one had said a word about my stepmother since I’d landed in London.
“The Dowager Duchess has elected to stay at Elton Park until the funeral. Her children are with her,” Stewart said.
“May as well enjoy it while she can,” Richard muttered.
In excruciating detail, Stewart began outlining the plans for the funeral.
My father’s and brother’s coffins were to be placed side by side in Westminster Hall for four days so the public could say goodbye.
After lying in state, they would be taken to the Abbey on two royal gun carriages, each drawn by a contingent of 140 sailors.
In the interest of keeping calm and carrying on, it was decided that one funeral instead of two was more appropriate.
“As is tradition, we would expect His Royal Highness Prince Richard and Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandrina to lead the procession from the hall to the Abbey,” Stewart said.
“I’d like my girls with me,” Richard interjected, his mouth half-full of one of the muffins he’d piled onto his plate.
The room was silent for a moment. I glanced at Granny, but she was staring blankly out the window and barely seemed to be listening.
“Birdie and Demi have just lost their beloved uncle and cousin,” Richard continued. “They’re the Princesses of Clarence—and blood princesses at that.”
Amira, the target of this little shot across the bows, shrank in her seat. Stewart looked to Granny and then me for some kind of direction.
“Sir, traditionally only male members of the family join the procession,” he began.
“Lexi’s walking, though.”
“Yes, sir. We thought given the circumstances—”
“She’s not a working royal anymore. So if we’re dispensing with old traditions—sexist traditions at that—then it’s only fair that my girls walk too.”
A sunrise pink rose in Stewart’s cheeks, and he glanced again towards the Queen for guidance. The tea in her hands had long gone cold and she put the cup on the table before her.
“Well, I have my view,” she said and suddenly looked at me with her brown eyes, so much like Papa’s. “But I’d like to hear what Lexi thinks first.”
Everyone turned and I felt my face grow hot. No one in this family had ever asked me for my opinion before.
“Richard is right,” I said. “Demelza and Birdie should walk. If they want.”
Amira stared at me. She was wearing a full face of makeup, and her hair was pulled into a sleek bun at the nape of her neck. And yet she still looked like a woman close to her edge.
Richard wanted Demelza and Birdie in the procession for his own schemes, no doubt.
But I had watched this family spiral into blood feuds over nonsensical, mediaeval traditions far too many times.
After Mum died, Papa and Uncle James ended up in a screaming match over a spray of lilies placed atop her coffin.
To the palace, it was the traditional symbol of mourning.
For Isla’s grief-struck twin brother, it was one too many insults to bury her under a mound of flowers she once declared “smelled like cat piss.”
Stewart snapped his folder shut, relieved the worst was over.
“I think we’ve made great progress, and I thank you all for your patience,” he said, stacking papers and hustling aides from the room.
Granny eased herself from the couch. “I think I’ll go to my room for a rest.”
“Oh, yes, Mummy, you should. Amira, will you go with her?” Richard said.
The room emptied of everyone but the two of us and Richard fixed me with a smile that verged on a sneer.
He was of the generation of British royals who never received braces or cared much for dental aesthetics.
In recent years, he had his top teeth whittled down to fine points and then enveloped in blinding white veneers.
But he left the bottom row untouched. His mouth reminded me of a freshly painted McMansion rimmed by a rickety picket fence.
“It was so good of you to come all this way,” he said. “Your father was truly agonised by your estrangement. It was difficult to watch at times.”
My heart sank. Most of the time, I believed Papa barely noticed that I was no longer around.
“But Lexi, I have a favour to ask you,” he said. “Mummy is not faring well, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, and I think it’s best if I move in here for a while.”
What a sacrifice for a man who already lived in a thirty-room mansion for free, staffed with aides and maids for whom Granny paid.
“That makes sense,” I said.
“But here’s the issue,” he said, leaning forward in his fussy gold chair and crossing his legs. He was wearing the same silk argyle socks Papa had favoured. “I think Mummy would be more comfortable if Amira weren’t here.”
I crossed my own legs and leaned forward, placing my chin in my hands. “Is that right?”
“She doesn’t really know her well, and I think it can be rather overwhelming when you’re grieving your son and grandson to be somewhat… subsumed in someone else’s grief. I just think it’s best if she’s surrounded by the people she’s actually close to.”
It was a clever ruse—I had to give it to him. He could jettison both of us out of here, install himself as the Queen’s favourite, and then tell the tabloids he was her pillar of strength. If I refused, he’d tell them we were two layabout princesses overstaying our welcome with a grieving sovereign.
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll go to Amira and Louis’s apartment.”
He clasped his hands together, the way men always do when they’ve won the conversation, and grinned. “Superb. Gosh, it’s nice to have you back here, Lexi. The girls are going to be thrilled to see you. I don’t think they even got to speak to you before you slipped out of Louis and Amira’s wedding.”