Chapter Eleven 10 January 2023 #2
I walked Ben to his car in silence along the dusty road.
I wondered what Jack would make of it all.
Would he think of me differently? Would he think less of me for sleeping with my boss?
Jack’s breakup with Georgia was still fresh, and as I plodded up the road in my pyjamas, I grew angry at him because he could go out with anyone he liked.
Everything I did had to remain clandestine because all the details of my life had price tags dangling from them.
I’d had to listen to him and Georgia through the wall between our bedrooms for four years, and I hadn’t complained, not once.
“That wasn’t your boyfriend, was it?” Ben asked when we got to the car, interrupting the silent nuclear fission of my thoughts.
“What?”
“That guy. You both were acting weird just now.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said irritably.
Back at the cottage, and for the three years that followed, Jack and I said nothing of that morning on the verandah.
If I left the house, headed towards a destination I kept deliberately vague, I was sure Jack knew exactly where I was going.
If he had any thoughts about that, he never voiced them.
Occasionally, a pretty girl would emerge from Jack’s room, her shoes dangling from her hand.
I would nod politely at her until, finally, a few weeks later, she seemed to vanish.
Through it all, Jack and I remained unlikely, determined friends.
I might have slept in Ben’s bed, but Jack was still the one who picked me up after I had my wisdom teeth out.
He knew which brand of tea bags I liked.
He called me late at night so we could share the silence.
I kept things this way so I’d never have to lose him.
Thinking about it all now, I hugged myself closer to the roots of the old oak tree.
I thought about Jack and the vineyard he loved.
He should open it up to the public and do wine tastings.
He should host weddings in the gloriously rundown shed that had stood on the property for a hundred years.
But he couldn’t do either because I lived there like an exotic, endangered bird that must be protected at all costs.
I thought about my medical career. All those ninety-hour weeks, the orifices I’d stuck my fingers in, the first time I saved a life, the first time I watched someone die.
I thought about Kris and Louis, who deserved an apology from me, and would never get it.
I thought about Amira and her boxes of pills.
I thought about the snow cloud swallowing Papa whole.
I thought about Mum, the love of my life.
It all felt like a tangle I had no hope of ever undoing. I could only try pulling things straight and living with the knots that remained.
At the castle, I found Amira’s room already empty. She must have returned to London early. I walked back to my own room, which Mary had filled with racks of clothing and a suitcase of heels.
“Good morning, Your Royal Highness,” she said, bobbing into a distracted curtsy. “I’m just pulling together an outfit for the reading of the will. The funeral went very well, I think. Would you like to see the papers? Or perhaps I could provide a summation of your coverage?”
“I’ll pass.”
“Well, suffice it to say you were very well received—even a few of your more strident critics praised you, and your ensemble in particular.”
“Mary,” I said, sharper than I intended. “Please. Don’t.”
Her little face tightened. “I’m sorry, ma’am, forgive me.”
I looked at the garments strewn across the bed, the piles of impossible shoes.
This is what it would be like. Garden parties.
Investitures. The endless race to be declared the hardest working royal by stuffing my calendar with engagements towards the end of the year.
Winning over tabloid reporters with off-the-record cocktail parties.
Strategic leaks to keep them fed and watered.
Louis had woken up every day and pushed this boulder up the hill without complaint. Now it had rolled to my feet.
“Mary…” I sat down on the bed. “Do you think there’s a different way to do this? A better way?”
She eyed me cautiously. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“If I were maybe to give this a go, do you think there’s a way to do it so it’s not just… clothes and obsessing over the Daily Post?”
She went still. When I looked up, her eyes were blazing as she clutched a stiletto.
“I do, very much,” she breathed. “Do you remember when your mum—Princess Isla, I mean—went to Darfur and she stood in that camp with her hair covered by the scarf? And she demanded the West go look into the faces of the children before they chose to ignore their pain? Everyone slammed her, but that was the moment everything should have changed.”
I did remember. When she got home from her unapproved trip to Sudan, Papa refused to speak to her for a month. The Daily Post called her the “Darfur Ditz.” Even the American president implied that she was too much of a bimbo to understand the complexities of the situation.
“You could do it,” Mary said fiercely. “You’ve been out in the world.
You’re a doctor. It should be you to finish what Princess Isla started.
Who says the monarchy can’t be a force for change?
If it sits at the centre of British life, it should earn its place there.
It should apologise for the past and be a moral leader of the future. Why not?”
I couldn’t ignore the little swell of my heart, the heat rising in my face.
Mum used to talk this way when we were alone.
She had never dared say these things in front of Papa, especially when she was still trying to please him.
But when it was just us, she would lean forwards and murmur in my ear: “Can you imagine where we’d be if your father had one splinter of Barbara Villiers’ backbone? ”
Could I imagine a truly modern queen, who took all the nostalgia, all the love, all the unity that Britain felt for the crown and did something with it? Could I be the monarch my mother once longed for? Mary seemed to sense my thoughts, and she smiled at me.
“I could help you,” she said. “If you decided to stay.”
I looked at the clock. Everything was happening too fast, and my excitement morphed into panic. Yesterday, I was fully prepared to walk into this meeting and ask them to draw up the paperwork so I could go home. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“I should get dressed for this thing,” I said. “I can’t really keep the Queen waiting.”
She smiled again and nodded. With the mourning period officially over, it was time to emerge from our black garments.
Mary presented me with a boxy blazer and matching trousers in a deep hunter green.
It was the colour of Mum’s eyes, the colour she wore almost exclusively for her first few years as a royal woman.
“Now, I know we’re staging a quiet revolution here,” Mary said, kneeling on the floor to dig through the suitcase of shoes.
Her voice had transformed in the few moments we’d been speaking, so it was not quite so soft, no longer unsure.
She was like the little mouse who roared.
“But fashion is power. If you dress the part, they’ll accept you.
Once we’re on the inside, that’s when we change everything. ”
She held up a pair of tan suede heels and squinted at them. “These are perfect.”
The meeting was held in Granny’s private apartment, which overlooked the East Terrace Garden.
I had expected Papa’s lawyer, Antony Eastaughffe, to be there to read his last will and testament.
Instead I found Granny seated at the head of the table, with Stewart on one side and the prime minister on the other.
After tea was poured, Stewart spread his fingertips on the papers before him, as if divining their message by touch, and looked at me over the rims of his glasses.
“Now, ma’am,” he began. “You’ll understand that your father, the Prince of Scotland, was bound by the custom of male primogeniture in writing his will.”
I looked at Jenny, who managed to keep her face neutral.
I knew she was pushing for a law to remove the last hereditary peers from the House of Lords.
She had also called for the toppling of the monarchy when she was nineteen, in a video that resurfaced when she ran for office.
What must she think of us, this family that played with expensive toys that didn’t belong to us?
“Your stepmother, Annabelle, the Dowager Duchess of Exeter, will receive your father’s possessions—his estate in Scotland, his jewellery and watches, the collection of lithographs, as well as the antique gramophones.
Elton Park was bought with revenue from the Duchy of Exeter, so it therefore remains property of the duchy,” he said, his eyebrows rising and falling the way they did when he was working up to something.
“It’s okay, Stewart, I know he didn’t leave me anything.”
All three of them glanced up at me, surprised.
A part of me hoped Papa might have thought of me when writing his will.
He was far too traditional to leave me anything of value, but, against my better judgement, I had a fantasy that there was some souvenir from our past that would show he truly did love me, that he had forgiven me, that he was my father.
I had no idea what this object would be.
I could not think of a single thing that might hold deep significance to both of us.
And that, perhaps, was the trouble with Papa and me.
We were father and daughter, and we were also strangers to one another.