Chapter Seven 2012 #3
In our second year of uni, he moved into the guest bedroom of my flat.
Neither of us had any practical skills and it was a relief to find someone with whom I could sit on the floor and watch YouTube tutorials so we could figure out how to reboot the modem or remove red wine from the carpet.
Being my hanger-on came with very few perks, except for being described as my “unidentified male companion” by the Daily Post. The photographers who stalked me in packs eventually thinned out to just a few stragglers as the novelty of my desertion wore off. But still, Finn stayed by my side.
Through the relentless grind of university and then medical school and hospital night shifts, our relationship of convenience deepened into something else.
We raised each other. Not once had he betrayed my confidence.
He knew all my secrets and he held them close.
In the end we succumbed to a real friendship.
I was shadowed by my security detail for the duration of my bachelor’s studies in Australia.
The Daily Post repeatedly reminded its readers that it was costing the British taxpayer ￡250,000 a year to guard an absconding princess.
Leo, a thirty-year-old with a cheeky grin, was my protection officer for more than a year, and we carried on a frenzied affair that was fuelled almost entirely by the thrill of secret sex.
But then Martin, his gruff older colleague, caught us kissing in the underground garage of my apartment block.
The next day Leo was gone, put on a plane back to London, and replaced with a stern female protection officer called Susan.
I had been smart enough to keep my texts to Leo in code and avoid the sharing of nudes altogether.
But when he tried to sell the details of our trysts to the tabloids, I was forced to issue an SOS to Stewart.
A mysterious arrangement was made that likely involved a lump payment for Leo and a requirement that I return home for Christmas for the traditional family walk to church.
“This is why royals fuck other royals, doll,” Finn sighed. “It’s mutually assured destruction.”
My taxpayer-funded security was finally withdrawn when word reached Papa that I had sat the Graduate Medical School Admissions Test, the dreaded exam that determines whether undergrads will be admitted into the Doctor of Medicine master’s program.
Finn and I passed, and he posted the news, coupled with a boomerang of us clinking champagne flutes, on his Instagram stories.
A month later, I walked out of my building and got halfway down the street before I realised something was different.
There had been no white Holden Commodores idling by the kerb when I left the house.
No middle-aged man with a crew cut had given me a brusque hello.
No one was following me. I stood on Sandy Bay Road in Tasmania’s strange autumn light.
I looked out at the jumble of masts on the boats docked at the marina.
I realised this was only the second time in my entire life that I had been completely alone.
I went to my classes, met friends for drinks and said nothing to anyone.
Finn and I bought a barbecue chicken and a pasta salad from Coles and walked home.
I was aware that if any of the Isla obsessives who sent me ranting 72-page handwritten letters were to jump out of a bush, they could easily kill us both.
“Have you noticed anything different?” I asked.
Finn checked to see if I’d changed my hair. “No?”
It was probably a testament to my security detail that they had managed to fade so skilfully into the backdrop of my life that no one even noticed when they left.
They dressed down in black puffer coats and sneakers, so they looked like everyone else in Hobart.
They mostly walked a few paces behind me or sat in the back row of my lectures.
New friends found them fascinating and would always offer them a schooner or a handful of chips while they leaned against the wall of the pub, waiting for me to be done.
With the exception of Leo, they always declined.
“My security disappeared this morning.”
Finn’s eyes went wide, and he looked up and down the street for the officers who were no longer tailing us.
“Do you think your dad took them away?” he asked. “Or do you think they’re tied up in the garage right now and your killer is waiting for you in the apartment?”
There was no killer in our apartment. When I texted Stewart to ask if he knew anything, I got the answer I expected.
Yes, ma’am, you may wish to talk to Prince Frederick, he wrote back. There was a review conducted by RAVEC into the security costs for the family. Best, Stewart.
The Royal and VIP Executive Committee, or RAVEC, decides who among Britain’s high-profile figures gets state-sponsored security and who doesn’t.
Stewart sat on the committee, but he never would have withdrawn my protection unless Papa had ordered him to do it.
I left it for a week. But one night after I had three cocktails at the Grand Poobah, I dialled my father’s direct line on the walk home.
The phone rang out and sent me to his voicemail.
“Hello, Papa!” I chirped. “Just thought I’d let you know it’s about ten o’clock at night here and I’m cutting through a city park on my own.
Gosh, it’s quite overgrown, isn’t it? It’s very dark actually, and I’m quite drunk and stumbling about in a very short skirt.
Anyway, they always say that if you find yourself alone at night, you should call someone.
I’m not sure why. I suppose rapists hesitate to attack you because the other person on the phone might hear everything and call the police?
But you didn’t pick up, so I’m on my own here.
Hope everything is well with you! Let’s chat soon if I survive this walk home! Night night, Daddy.”
He never called me back.
A week later, the Daily Post published details of the RAVEC review into the protection of the royal family.
I’d been stripped of my security detail because I was deemed a “low-risk target.” The Post rather cattily described Demelza and Birdie as “minor royals,” but their protection arrangements were left intact.
“With Alexandrina off on her own course, the girls have had to pick up so many public engagements, even though they’re busy students as well,” a royal “source” told the Post.
“Hundreds of charities are entirely dependent on the favour of the Royal Family, and they were left high and dry when the princess took off for a new life in Australia. Demelza and Birdie stepped into the breach beautifully, and they’ve made their grandmother extremely proud.
“Demelza and Birdie have a higher profile thanks to their cousin,” Richard’s aide told the Post. “It was not a role they sought, but they are loyal to the crown, and they’ve put themselves at great risk to take on the burden of Alexandrina’s duties.
It’s entirely right she was stripped of her protection, given she is in the middle of nowhere and her cousins are picking up her slack. ”
When word reached James that my security detail was gone, he called an emergency meeting at his farm.
Finn and I got in his old RAV4 and made the drive north, fearful we were about to be kicked out of our Sandy Bay flat.
Despite being my benefactor and my only relative in a 14,000-kilometre radius, James and I only saw each other a couple of times a year.
If I wasn’t going to Norfolk for Christmas, I went to Finn’s family lunch.
James would almost always decline to join us.
He worked the parched plains of central Tasmania in solitude and ate almost every meal alone.
He didn’t seem particularly surprised that Papa had withdrawn my protection. “It’s classic Frederick—he was always going to lash out when you finished your undergrad and didn’t go back.”
“I probably am low-risk, though,” I said. “It’s been four years now.”
James grimaced and shook his head. “You’re still third in line to the throne.”
“Would it make any difference if you took yourself out of contention for the throne, Lexi?” Finn asked while nibbling on an Arrowroot biscuit.
Regular people—Australians in particular—imagined that my HRH style, my title and my place in the line were things I could just hand back, like ugly candlesticks inherited from a distant aunt. When Mum and Papa had divorced, she was allowed to keep her title, but they stripped her of her HRH.
“He wants me to have to curtsy to my own children,” she said with big wet eyes.
“Don’t worry, Mum,” Louis said, wrapping his skinny arms around her. “I’ll be able to give it back to you one day.”
I knew I had no use for the letters and titles that hung on my name like silver charms. But the idea of losing them, of being just Alexandrina, felt like I was being asked to stand naked in the midst of a huge crowd.
Perhaps one day I would do it, when I could swap them out and become Dr. Alexandrina Villiers, MD.
Those letters were adornments I would drape across my name with pride, I thought.
Of course I got my doctorate a few years later, and still never considered—not even for a moment—giving up my HRH.
I knew once I did that, there was no going back.
Even as I drifted further and further from my family, I found that I couldn’t sever the last bond between us.
Sometimes, in the early days, when I was particularly lonely, I wondered if perhaps I should just go home.
They were my family, after all. But then Papa’s office would leak a lie to the tabloids—I was hitting him up for money again, I had fallen under the spell of my anti-establishment uncle—and I would remember what my future in London looked like.
At least in Australia, whatever happened next was entirely up to me.
“It’s a whole thing to give up the titles,” I said to Finn. “I don’t just hand them in. It would take an Act of Parliament. Or I’d have to become a Catholic.”
James probably saw through my excuses, but he said nothing and dipped his biscuit into his tea. He was a Scottish duke masquerading as an Australian wool farmer. He could sell the family seat tomorrow for millions of pounds to a Qatari emir, and yet he couldn’t let it go.
It was decided that the Sandy Bay flat was not secure enough for us to stay.
Without officers guarding the entrance to the garage, it was frighteningly easy for someone to slip inside by lurking behind the recycling bins and waiting for a resident to drive in.
A ladder could be leaned against our balcony, and if our glass doors weren’t locked, someone could be in our apartment in less than a minute.
With toxic levels of charm emitted over the years we had lived there, Finn and I had managed to win over our sceptical neighbours.
But they would not be happy if we asked them to withhold the door code from relatives and delivery men.
“I can’t ask you to pay for security guards,” I said to James.
“I’m not offering,” he said. “Look, you’re never going to be a normal girl, no matter what you do. But that doesn’t mean you have to go home. We just need to get you into a more secure living situation—and no more stumbling through town steamin’, alright?”
James had a livestock manager who’d proven to be a hard worker and a good guy.
“In a few weeks, he’s going back to work on his family’s vineyard in the Coal River Valley. It’s fully fenced, and it’s not open to the public. His mother lives in the main house, but he’s looking for housemates to share his cottage on the property,” James said.
We hopped into James’s old LandCruiser and drove up to the lucerne paddock, where the flock was grazing.
There is something so stark and haunting about the Australian landscape.
It is neither green nor pleasant. It isn’t trying to kill you, but it doesn’t particularly care if you live or die in its pitiless surroundings either.
It was my ancestor who sent James Cook to this place to claim it and bend it to the crown’s will, to unleash disease, misery and pain on the people who lived here.
Centuries later, I was here too, hoping to be granted the land’s benedictions.
I vowed to tread lighter than the ghouls who came before me.
The wind was picking up that day and the grass swirled around us like skirts.
James pulled the truck over, and Finn and I walked gingerly through the field in our inappropriate footwear.
Surrounded by yapping kelpies, a man in Blundstones and jeans emerged in the near distance.
When James stuck his fingers in his mouth and emitted an ear-piercing whistle, the man turned to look at us.
He was tall. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to expose strong forearms and tanned skin.
“Uh oh,” Finn whispered as he ambled towards us. “Is he going to be trouble for you or for me? I can’t tell.”
“Calm down, you two. He has a girlfriend,” James muttered. Louder, he said: “Jack, this is my niece, Lexi, and her friend Finn.”
His hand enveloped mine and he gave me a warm smile. He had a flop of brown hair, dark eyes and the smallest scar on his lips that only enhanced his looks.
“Hey, Lexi—really nice to meet you.”
Finn beamed as he shook Jack’s hand. Despite the whipping autumn winds, I felt hot and breathless.
“I hear you’re both studying to be doctors—that’s amazing,” he said. “James says you’re looking for a place to stay. I hope you like wine. And dogs. The place is crawling with them.”
It was then that I knew I was the one who was in trouble.