Chapter Eight 4 January 2023
CHAPTER EIGHT
I spent all night dreaming of Mum, floating together on the imaginary raft she built for us.
“We’re going down a stream in the Pyrenees,” I would whisper.
“How about the Ganges? The air smells like spices and people are throwing flowers into the water.”
“You always want to go to the most humid places,” I would moan. “And we have curly hair.”
I snapped awake when I realised someone was in the room opening the curtains.
Morning light scattered halos across my vision, and I pulled the blanket over my head.
My martinis had gone rancid in my bloodstream, like battery acid.
The poison was moving to my right temple in preparation for a drilling ten-hour headache.
“I might skip tea, thank you,” I said from under the blankets to the maid, who was making an awful lot of noise. “But I’ll take some paracetamol, please.”
When I felt the unmistakable weight of a person sitting down on the bed beside me, I pulled the sheets down. It didn’t matter if she was about to faint—a Cumberland maid did not sit on a royal’s bed.
“Hello, Lexi,” Vikki said.
For a woman who had just lost her only son, she was still somehow glowing with Pilates-induced health.
She had stopped drawing thick lines of liquid eyeliner in sharp wings and replaced them with brown kohl pencil.
She was in a sumptuous burnt-orange duster coat over a cream turtleneck, leggings and riding boots.
The intervening years (or a surgeon’s incisions) gave her the snatched, angular face of a runway model.
I sat up in bed and wrapped my arms around her.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
“Good lord, you stink like a distillery,” she said airily, but there were tears in her eyes.
Papa had never been particularly kind to Vikki.
He had a natural suspicion of anyone from outside the home counties, and there was something about Vikki’s raw ambition he found frightening.
Being born lucky did not stop a person yearning for more, but it satiated the appetites enough to be wary of the truly hungry.
When news first broke that Amira and Louis were dating, the tabloids took vicious delight in Vikki’s history as a “trolley dolly.” Someone—either a palace aide or one of Louis’s friends—leaked to the tabloids that when invited to Scotland for a shooting weekend, Vikki showed up in a cloud of Chanel No 5.
They claimed the Shankars failed to tip the keeper or thank the grouse beaters.
They also apparently slammed doors, took multiple calls on their mobile phones and drank far too much at elevenses.
At the end of the shoot, Vikki inquired after “the toilet” instead of calling it the lavatory.
But the Shankars would never have done any of these things.
No one would have been better researched on the etiquette of a dreary shooting party than Vikki and Madhav.
I had no doubt Madhav procured a fat wad of ￡10 notes so that he could correctly pay the traditional thirty quid for the first hundred birds and a tenner for every hundred that followed.
Vikki would have raided every Purdey store in West London for tweed caps and blazers and wellies.
When food and drink was served out the back of a Range Rover at 11 a.m., they would have politely sipped one Bullshot each.
The leaking of falsehoods to the tabloids was a threat and a reminder: you may learn our ways, you may be richer than us, you may even infuse your genetic code into the line by becoming grandparents to the future monarch. But you will never, ever be one of us.
“Granny said you’d been in India?” I asked.
“We were, but we went to Switzerland for Kris,” she said.
I was silent for a moment. “They didn’t transport him with Papa and Louis?”
Vikki coolly held my gaze. They would not make space for her son’s body on our plane. They would have her book a commercial flight and go collect him herself.
“It was important to Madhav that we honour Hindu death rites, so we had him cremated in Bern,” she said in a strange voice.
She took in an unsteady breath. “There’s a lovely waterhole at the Kruger lodge.
I was thinking perhaps we spread his ashes there, but I don’t know.
Maybe he’d prefer to be here in England with us.
Amira asked her lady-in-waiting to buy some pendants that can hold some of his ashes.
But would he like that? Bits of him all over the place? ”
I put my hand over hers. For a moment I was running across the main lawn of Astley at dusk, the sky bruising mauve and indigo above us.
Amira screeching with laughter as she struggled to keep up.
Kris shooting past me on his runner’s legs.
Me, wheezing as he doubled back, scooped me up effortlessly and took off again.
Louis, as always, was ahead of us all, bounding like a gazelle towards a grove of mulberry trees.
We were big, reckless kids grasping onto those final days of childhood.
“I think he’d like that, Vikki,” I said. “Part of him gets to stay with the people he loves and part of him gets to watch every sunset at Kruger.”
She crumpled suddenly, bending forward, her face in her hands. I put my hands on her shoulders, but she pulled herself together more quickly than she needed to and brushed at the tears threatening to ruin her eye makeup.
“I came up to talk to you about something, actually,” she said, and dug in her pocket for her phone. She turned it to show me the Daily Post’s front page.
“Partying princesses Amira and Lexi rock Cumberland Palace ALL NIGHT by playing wild music until dawn, leaving their royal neighbours wondering: Aren’t they supposed to be in MOURNING??” the front-page headline shouted.
It was one of the Post’s classic Photoshop jobs: our smiling faces were superimposed on an image of Cumberland with a disco ball cut-and-pasted where the flag post usually stood.
The picture of Amira looked like it was taken recently.
With her beaming smile, I assumed it was a visit to a children’s hospital or a nursery.
My picture was less flattering. My head was thrown back in abandon as I laughed at something.
I couldn’t quite place the photo, but it was probably taken by the pap who stalked through the crowds at last year’s wine festival to get a few shots of me working the Jennings booth with Jack.
I looked at Vikki sheepishly.
“Read it,” she said.
The Royal Family members who call Cumberland Palace home were left stunned by the thumping sounds of a wild party being held by one of their neighbours until dawn this morning.
And who was holding this all-night rager?
It was Duchess Amira, who is supposed to be in mourning for her husband, Prince Louis, and her brother, Krishiv Shankar.
And the one guest at this party was none other than Princess Alexandrina.
The Daily Post understands that Duchess Amira had been staying with Queen Eleanor for several days after returning from Switzerland, while Princess Alexandrina arrived on Monday from Australia.
But the ageing monarch, who was devastated by the loss of her son and grandson, was unable to cope with the noise, mess and chaos made by the posh pair.
Yesterday it was finally suggested they return to Duchess Amira’s Cumberland apartment, so that the 85-year-old could mourn in peace.
But the Queen did ask her youngest son, Prince Richard, to stay with her at the palace for the foreseeable future, with aides describing the Duke of Clarence as “her golden child.”
“It was simply too much for the Queen, trying to grapple with this loss, while being expected to take care of these overgrown children,” a source tells the Post.
“Alexandrina hasn’t stepped foot in this country for years, and she came here yesterday making wild demands, throwing tantrums and showing up extremely late to meetings.”
Prince Richard smoothed things over so that both women knew it was time to leave.
“Richard has always been a source of strength for his mother. Now is a time when she needs those closest to her to hold her up and support her,” the source said.
“Alexandrina has been MIA for years, barely staying in touch with anyone. Meanwhile, with her lavish spending, Amira has been burning through the allowance given to her by her father-in-law. The Queen doesn’t need people asking her for favours right now.”
But once evicted, Amira and Lexi took their reign of terror to Cumberland Palace, blasting their dance music at window-shaking volume and keeping up their relatives until the early hours of the morning.
“It was extremely inconsiderate,” one Cumberland resident complained to a friend this morning.
It’s understood the royal chums were taking a trip down memory lane, blaring many hits from their childhood and high school years.
“C’est La Vie” by B*witched is understood to have been given a remarkably good run, with many repeat plays.
While it is admirable for Duchess Amira to make amends with her old school pal, her boisterous behaviour just five days after her husband’s death has raised many eyebrows within the Royal Family.
The couple had recently been dogged by rumours that one or both were no longer happy in the union.
Prince Louis had been spending much of his time in the couple’s countryside bolthole in Norfolk, while Duchess Amira was often in London, either staying at their Cumberland apartment or her parents’ opulent Mayfair townhouse.
For Amira to be partying just days after her husband’s tragic death in a ski accident, along with her father-in-law, Prince Frederick, and her brother, Krishiv Shankar, is being seen as tacit confirmation that all was not well with the royal couple.
“If nothing else, it’s poor form,” said royal commentator Harold Himmelhoch.