Chapter Fifteen 2 May 2023
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
An explosion of light filled the car as we drove past the pack of photographers and through the palace gates.
Amira and I glanced at each other, remembering Mary’s instruction: “Engage in conversation and smile slightly when they get the car shot. You want something in between a big grin and a neutral expression. There’s no photo more unflattering or more open to misinterpretation than a nighttime shot taken of you in a car. ”
She wasn’t wrong. In the early days of Louis and Amira, the overexposed photos of them in the back of black cabs, sweaty and exhausted after a night at a club, were positively seamy.
When the tabloids were trying to cast my escape to Australia as a Britney-style breakdown, I learned that the photo taken of me at the end of the night was far more important than the one taken at the beginning.
Finn and Jack would dawdle at the pub’s entrance before we left, making small talk with the bouncer, while I powdered my face and brushed out my hair in the ladies’ room for the drive home.
“Are you smiling slightly, my friend?” I asked.
“Just a smidge more than a neutral expression.”
A real smile broke out on my face as another flashbulb dazzled us. That, of course, was the photo they would use in the tabloids the next day, much to Mary’s chagrin.
The state banquet for the Bahamian prime minister had been a year in the making.
Every time I had visited Granny, I would see a bustle of activity: staff carefully laying out six crystal glasses for each place setting, using a ruler to ensure each seat was precisely forty-five centimetres apart, folding towers of napkins into Dutch bonnets.
Granny had been tempted to call it off when Papa and Louis died, but she ultimately decided to persevere.
The idea of their half-tailored tuxedos hanging limply somewhere on Savile Row was rankling me in the lead-up to the dinner.
Mary had started sourcing a gown for me the day I’d landed in London.
She had spent the subsequent five months locked in quiet negotiations with Stewart and Granny over the medals I would need for the evening.
As an absconder, I hadn’t been given a single honour.
Demelza and Birdie would wear the deep-blue sash that signified their status as Dames Grand Cross.
Granny had bestowed the honour upon them on their twenty-third birthdays.
I had spent the night of my own twenty-third vomiting off the roof of the Jennings shed, so my sash was still pending.
Ultimately, Stewart and Mary had agreed it would be far too conspicuous for me to become a Grand Dame Cross after a few months and the tabloids would rightly call it out.
That was fine with me. Mum had been a royal woman for fourteen years, birthed an heir, endured the humiliations of Papa’s indifference, and Granny still hadn’t bothered to admit her.
It would feel like a betrayal to wear the sash she was denied.
But Mary had been able to secure for me a brooch that signified I was part of the Royal Family Order.
Reserved for women and awarded entirely at the pleasure of the monarch, the brooch featured a tiny portrait of Granny affixed to a yellow silk ribbon.
The question of tiaras was a more vexed one.
Stewart had thought it appropriate that Amira wear her wedding tiara and I borrow Mum’s.
According to tradition, royal women did not wear their first tiara until their wedding.
But I was a dubious heir, pushing thirty and desperately in need of royal legitimacy, so Stewart bent the rules.
However, once Richard got wind of the plan, he launched a sustained campaign to ensure the Clarence sisters were also given access to the collection.
With the dispute threatening to spill into the tabloids, Stewart had quietly recommended to Granny that she dispense with tradition and give us each a sparkly plaything for the evening.
On the morning of the banquet, Mum’s wedding tiara and my Royal Family Order were delivered to Cumberland 1 by a footman and two security guards.
I sat with the tiara in my lap, remembering how, as a child, I had perched on the bed and watched Mum’s stylist sew it into her hair for important events.
I brought it to my face and inhaled, as if its glistening edges might hold her scent.
Now it was stitched to my own hair as we passed through the palace entrance.
Our Rolls-Royce slowed to a stop and two footmen came forth to open our car doors.
Amira and I were shown into the grand hall, where all the eyes in the room surreptitiously turned to look at us as we walked in.
Five months back in London, and I was still an object of fascination to the people I’d once left behind.
Jenny Walsh was, as always, the first to approach us.
She kissed our cheeks and smiled. Her business card was still hidden under my mattress, though I was yet to call her.
She had less to do with the family than most prime ministers, but on the occasions I saw her, we seemed to fall easily into our own conversation.
“How’s it going?” I asked quietly, trying to ignore the openly curious gazes of the people around us.
“Well, this is definitely not my scene. But it’s all part of the job, isn’t it?” She looked at us. “You both look great. These things always make me feel rather frumpy.”
“Nonsense, Prime Minister,” Amira said. “If you saw the armies of people who dress us, you’d think us ridiculous.”
Amira’s gown for the banquet had been ordered and tailored months before she had toppled down the ranks of the family: a simple white Emilia Wickstead column dress with a draping train that would fan out behind her when she walked.
The gown was positively bridal and, as a new widow, she had considered wearing something else.
But she didn’t want to let down the designer, and Mary reminded her that almost every royal woman chooses white for formal occasions because it doesn’t compete with the sashes and military stars that garnish their outfits.
Since I would only have the yellow-ribbon brooch to hide behind, Mary was determined that my dress should stand out. She’d found a young Bahamian designer who had delivered to Cumberland 1 a flowing aquamarine dress the same colour as the nation’s flag.
As guests poured into the hall, Jenny was pulled away from us, and people began to drift towards me, curious and eager to chat.
Working in hospitals had only enhanced my command of the art of small talk.
Encountering people on the worst day of their lives, distracting them while I popped their shoulder back in its socket, sitting with an older patient who had no visitors—this was where I shone.
After Amira and I chatted to an emerging cookbook author, a nightmare Tory MP and several members of the Bahamian delegation, I suddenly felt a presence at my side. It was a very tall man, about my age, with a swirl of red hair. He bowed solicitously.
“Your Royal Highness,” he said, “I have been instructed by the Queen to personally escort you to the ballroom for dinner.”
“Is that right?” I asked.
I could tell by the way he wore his tailcoat as easily as if it were a fuzzy dressing gown that he was an Eton boy. The Patek Philippe on his wrist shimmered in the candlelight. He had blue eyes and a friendly smattering of freckles across his nose.
“Knock it off, Colin, would you?” Amira muttered.
His solemn expression dissolved into a grin, and he leaned forward and kissed Amira on both cheeks. “How are you, darling? Her Maj really did send me over here, you know.”
“Lexi, this is Colin.” Amira sighed. “He’s one of Louis’s vile friends.”
He waited until I offered him my hand and then he shook it.
“We’ve actually met before, you know,” he said. “You whacked me across the head with a croquet mallet when we were children.”
I could finally place him: Colin Bellingham, the Earl Amherst. His father was the Duke of Hereford, and therefore one of the richest men in Britain.
Colin’s family owned tens of thousands of acres of land, including the prime London suburbs of Mayfair and Belgravia.
When his father died, Colin was set to inherit the whole ￡10 billion fortune over his four older sisters.
At the age of seven, I had lost my mind when he pulled my skirt up during a game of croquet.
“Well, that’s what you get for showing everyone my knickers,” I said.
“I never did apologise for that, did I?” He held out his elbow as the pipers began to play, signifying it was time for dinner. “Allow me to escort you to your seat, ma’am.”
I took his arm. It was a state banquet tradition for a man to escort a woman down the long hallway to the ballroom.
Amira was making the walk with the Bahamian finance minister, while I could just glimpse a bored-looking Demelza in a one-shouldered silver gown on the arm of the Lord Chamberlain.
The official palace photographer held the shutter down as the couples streamed by.
“So,” Colin said, “how is it being back in town?”
“I don’t get to see much of it, I’m afraid. I feel like I spend all of my time behind the walls of the palace.”
“Well, that’s not entirely true. I see you on the front page of the Daily Post every other day. Weren’t you dancing with schoolkids in Hackney last week?”
“That’s some highbrow reading you’re doing,” I laughed.