Chapter Nineteen 2020
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I cruised down the Tasman Highway in my old Corolla, the windows rolled down so I could feel the dry February heat.
It was a rare forty-degree day in Hobart, the kind of weather that enveloped the city for a maximum of twelve hours, leaving its cold-blooded residents wilted and cranky.
But inevitably, gloriously, winds from the Southern Ocean would blow in, and everyone would open their doors to let a cross-draught through the house.
By bedtime, you could sleep comfortably with the blankets pulled up to your nose.
“Are you sure you want to pick me up?” Louis had asked when we were planning his visit.
“Of course,” I said. “Hobartians pick everyone up from the airport. It’s how we show our love.”
It was an easy fifteen-minute drive from town, over the bridge and through the bushy surrounds of Mount Rumney.
When I had first moved to Hobart, I was surprised by how eager everyone was to shuttle you to and from the airport, even if they didn’t know you particularly well.
It was partly because there were no good public transport options, but it was mostly a point of honour for the city.
When I pulled into the pick-up lane, I immediately spotted Louis among the other travellers waiting for their loved ones.
His cap was pulled low over his eyes, and he had sloughed off all his layers in the heat.
He could pass for any other guy in his twenties, though the four-wheel drive loitering at the kerb just ahead was clearly his security detail.
They would keep a respectful distance as we pretended to be any other brother and sister spending a few days together.
“Hey,” he said, jumping into the passenger seat, “I thought you said it’s chilly here.”
“The cool change is coming.”
I pulled back into the lane and watched the four-wheel drive follow us out of the airport car park.
We hadn’t seen each other for more than a year, but we were silent as I drove up the highway towards the vineyard.
I realised I should have brought Finn with me so he could fill the car with his charm.
“How was the flight?”
“Yeah, fine. Long. He made me fly commercial.”
“Right,” I said. I’d skipped family Christmas the year before because my car had needed new brakes a few months earlier, and I couldn’t afford the flights home. I texted Papa to apologise. He never responded, but a week later the Post reported that I had tried to shake him down for money.
“How is he?”
Louis sighed and looked out the window, his cap slung so low I couldn’t see his eyes. “He’s the same old bastard.”
“I told James we’d try to see him, but you might run out of time.”
“Yeah, thanks,” he said. “I don’t think I should. I’m trying to keep Papa on side before the wedding.”
The lead-up to the wedding was always going to be a treacherous time for Louis.
Papa’s greatest fear was that his subjects saw him as the caretaker king, a throne warmer in between the illustrious rule of Queen Eleanor and the accession of his shining boy.
I had been surprised that Louis wanted to risk Papa’s ire by coming to visit me so close to the ceremony, but he’d done it anyway.
If Louis met up with the man who had facilitated my escape as well, it would likely cost him too much.
At the vineyard, Louis and I put on our brightest smiles for Paula, Jack and Finn.
Our posture was straighter, our voices clear and eager.
We were the royal twins, after all. Louis put his hands on his hips and surveyed the hills adorned with pinot grapes.
The vineyard was putting on a show of its own that day.
The vines were fat with fruit, the grass was luscious from a wet start to summer, and the estuary sparkled in the distance.
“It’s truly magical, Paula,” Louis said. “Tell me about the house. That stone wall is extraordinary.”
Paula, who was suspicious of celebrities and openly hostile to anyone with inherited power, was beaming at my irresistible brother. She took him over to show off the high stone wall that surrounded the house, built by convicts in the nineteenth century.
“He’s so gorgeous,” Finn whispered to me. “I’ve seen his photo, but it’s totally different up close, isn’t it? He looks like the prince in The Little Mermaid.”
“Then who do I look like?” I asked.
He stepped back to study me, as if he hadn’t seen my face every morning for the past seven years. “I can’t remember her name, but you know when the sea witch disguises herself as a hot girl? You look like her.”
For dinner, Paula had gone down the road for fresh oysters, crayfish and scallops.
We opened a few bottles of the 2010 Jennings sparkling and ate in the arbour.
A century-old vine had slowly woven its tendrils around the wooden shelter that joined the main house to our cottage.
It no longer bore fruit, but its frilly green leaves shielded us from the sun as we ate and read and talked beneath it.
Jack raised his glass for a toast. “To Louis. We’re really happy to finally meet you. Congratulations on your wedding.”
Everyone sipped and Louis’s eyes briefly met mine.
“Honestly, this is the best champagne I’ve ever had,” he said, turning to Paula.
“It’s sparkling wine!” she corrected him, laughing. “We don’t want to be sued by the French.”
“Well, it’s better than anything they’ve done.”
Finn put down his glass, his unspoken request for our attention. “Tell us about the worst thing Lexi did when she was a kid. I bet she was a terror.”
There are public and private answers to this question.
There was the time Mum threw herself down a flight of stairs in front of me.
Papa was in Wales at the time, but I immediately called up Granny and insisted that he was the one who pushed her.
Or there was the time I hid Papa’s passport in the treehouse, hoping to keep him from an eight-week tour of the Pacific.
When Louis eventually discovered it, he burned it in the wood behind Elton Park so Papa would never find out what I had done.
At twelve, I discovered a mobile phone wedged between the cushions in Papa’s study and quickly established that it belonged to Annabelle.
It was the era before pincode-locked smartphones, and I had a marvellous few days texting everyone in her contacts: I’M A BIG OLD BITCH and LET’S HAVE SEX PLEASE and CAN I BORROW MONEY?
I’M SUCH A POOR OLD BITCH. After two days of fun, I confessed to Louis what I’d done.
He took the phone off me, sent one text to Papa reading LET’S brEAK UP and then crept back into Papa’s study to put it back where I’d found it.
But the story deemed fit for public consumption goes like this: as a toddler, I was fascinated by Papa’s signet ring.
Engraved with the official crest of the Prince of Scotland, he wore it every day on his left pinky.
When I was three, I took it from the dish on his bedside table and played with it on the floor.
I remember holding the gold ring in my palm, wondering if I could drop it into the wide gap between two floorboards below me, like a letter in a letterbox.
I had never mailed a letter, even though people seemed to do it on television all the time.
The ring, I quickly found, slipped straight through the black slit with a little thud.
Papa appeared in the doorway moments later, and I famously rose from the floor, turned to him and said: “Your Highness, I’ve been very naughty. ”
When recounting this story at dinner parties and on television, Papa said his anger immediately dissolved in the face of such childish decorum, and he procured a toolbox so that we could remove the plank and fish out the ring together.
In reality, a groundsman was called to complete the job, but Papa had told the story so often and so vividly that I could almost picture him crouched beside me on the floor with a chisel.
I could almost believe he wasn’t irritated, but instead had given me a gentle lecture on the importance of respecting other people’s treasures.
When the groundsman pried up the floorboard and plucked out the ring, we noticed something strange about the underside of the plank in his hands. It was covered in crude carvings—crisscrosses and squiggles that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“Those are witch marks,” the groundsman said and then smiled at me when he saw my alarm. “They’ve been found under the floors of many old houses in which kings once slept. These etchings were thought to protect you from witches—back when people believed such things were real.”
The plank was carefully placed back where it belonged.
For years after, I would sit on the floor and stroke my hand along the surface of the wood.
I imagined that the witch marks ringed his bed, keeping him safe from demons as he slept.
Whenever he went away, I would ask if the bed he’d be sleeping in was surrounded by carvings.
“Of course, mignonette,” he would always say. “There are witch marks everywhere I go.”
But Louis didn’t reach for this familiar tale.
“When we were five, our nanny took us to the shops and I stole a creme egg,” Louis said.
“We rarely went to public places, and I was so excited seeing them displayed in the box like that, so I just nicked one and put it in my pocket. Mum found it in the nursery an hour later, of course. But when she confronted us, Lexi said she did it. I was too scared to own up to it, so the next day, Mum marched her down to the shop to apologise and return it.”
“Oh, don’t tell them this,” I groaned.
Louis went on, ignoring me. “The shopkeeper told Mum she’d seen me steal the egg but didn’t want to get me into trouble, because she knew who I was. So when Mum asked Lexi why she was covering for me, she said, ‘I didn’t want people to be angry at the future king.’”