Chapter Twenty-Nine 29 December 2023
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I had always liked the anonymity of airports, all that humanity packed in together, the terminals humming with stress and possibility.
As long as I didn’t hold up the security line, no one ever gave me a second look.
So I walked through Hong Kong International Airport in a hoodie that was as good as an invisibility cloak, feeling lonely and displaced, but perhaps finally free.
When I switched my phone back on, there was a message from James: How was the flight?
Good, I wrote back. One leg down, two to go.
I’ll be there to pick you up when you get home.
Once I landed in Hobart, James would take me to his farm so I could lie low for a couple of weeks.
Then I would need to find myself a flat so I could resume my residency in the new year.
Ben, terse but efficient over email, had quietly settled things with the hospital so that I could return.
I couldn’t wait to wear scrubs, my hair frizzy and tied in a knot at the crown of my head, my well-trained hands finally occupied again.
I wandered the terminal for a while. When I passed a food court, I was surprised to find that I was famished.
For months I’d been so nauseous and panicked that I couldn’t bear the thought of eating, but the scent of dumplings and barbecued pork was so dizzying that I immediately walked up to a stall and ordered a wonton soup, an egg tart and a milk tea.
I sat and ate my meal while people rushed around me. Not since I woke up on the boat all those years ago had I felt quite so alone. But this time, I was unafraid.
I wondered what would happen if I called Jack.
I had considered making contact over the last few weeks as things fell apart.
I had typed out, and then deleted, countless apologies for everything I had done—the lies I had told, the truths I had withheld, the way I’d concealed my heart for fear he might refuse it.
But it had been five months since we last spoke and, if he’d moved on, I knew the most loving thing I could do was to leave him alone.
As I finished my soup and pushed back the bowl, my phone rang, and it was Mary. Only a handful of people had my new number, and she was one of them.
“Did you get in okay?” she asked.
“All fine. Any updates at your end?”
She hesitated. “Yes. I’m afraid so. Richard’s been calling journalists again,” Mary said. “I’m not sure if you remember Posey Habsburg-Mollard from the Post? She was a favourite of your father’s.”
“How could I forget?”
“Yes, well, she called me this morning to say she’d received the most bizarre tip about you,” Mary said.
“It sounds like Richard called her very late last night, sounding worse for wear, and told her she should be digging into the death of Princess Isla. He gave her Davide Rossi’s name and said he holds the key to everything. ”
I sighed and leaned back in my chair. “Oh, Richard.”
“Yes,” Mary said. “You did warn him. But men like him simply must have the last word, I suppose.”
I looked around the terminal at the weary travellers. Some were staring into their steaming bowls of soup, others were gazing out the windows while a plane trundled down the runway.
“So we go with plan B then?” I said quietly.
Mary and I had spoken in code as we plotted my escape. Plan A would see me divulge my own secrets as I excised myself from the line. Plan B was something else altogether.
“Yes.” Mary paused again. “Are you scared?”
I thought for a while. “I was. But I don’t think I am anymore.”
After I visited Annabelle, I had determined that the only way I could fix my life was to go back to the moment when everything broke. Davide Rossi’s voice had haunted me for more than a decade, so I called him up from my bed in Scotland, gripping the witch marks to my chest with trembling fingers.
He had seemed utterly unsurprised to hear from me, chatting as if we were old friends. He told me there were too many tourists in Rapallo now, so he had moved further south, where he planned to spend the rest of his days fishing in the Gulf of Poets and watching his grandchildren grow up.
“Do you ever think about that night?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he said. “I see you in the magazines, and I remember when I found you on that boat, looking at me with your big eyes—so young, so afraid, just a girl who lost her mama.”
Tears had blurred my vision as I remembered how it felt to be caught in the bright white beam of his navigation lights.
“The agreement you signed with my father is still binding, you know. If you speak, the lawyers for his estate could sue you.”
“I see,” he said in a way that suggested he saw but didn’t particularly care. He knew he’d caught a big fish, and now he had me wriggling and gasping in the belly of his boat. Richard would pay him to speak, or I would pay him to stay quiet. Either way, he stood to benefit.
“Aren’t you worried that everyone will be angry with you if they find out?” I asked. “They’ll blame me and my father, but they’ll blame you too. They’ll reopen investigations. Journalists will follow you and your family everywhere. You’ll have money, yes, but you’ll have a lot of troubles as well.”
I heard the flinty scrape of a cigarette lighter before he sighed. “I don’t look forward to losing my quiet life. But it seems to me, carina, that no one knows what you did and yet you still have many troubles, don’t you?”
I needed a couple of days to decide what to do, so I had promised to call him back.
All it would take was a cash donation from Vikki and a fresh non-disclosure agreement in my name, and then Davide Rossi could recede to the dark edges of my subconscious forever.
But on the night of my reception at the palace, I had finally understood that my secrets would always find a way of resurfacing.
It would be a matter of months or years, and then I would be gripped by panic again, engaging lawyers and writing cheques, desperately trying to push everything back down.
When Amira and I returned to Cumberland 1 that night, we had crawled into my bed and whispered in the dark about what we should do with our lives.
“I want to be a doctor, not a queen.”
“Good,” she said. There was something scrappy in her tone. It reminded me of when she was young and bold. “What else?”
“I don’t want to spend my life wondering when the past is coming back for me. I don’t want to cut deals and pay people off. I don’t want to live like that anymore.”
She felt around the blankets until she found my hand. “Then don’t.”
The next day, I called Davide Rossi and told him that I had no interest in buying his silence.
“I’m going to speak,” I said. “I’m going to tell people what I did, so I can finally be free of it.”
The line between us went very quiet.
“Maybe you’ll call Richard now, and tell him what I’m going to do,” I went on.
“But I think the smarter option is to wait. Wait until I tell my story, because if you do, I’ll tell everyone that a very kind security guard helped me when I needed him.
I was a child out at sea alone, and you were a good man who shouldn’t be blamed for any of it.
And then, if you wish, you can sell your own story to a tabloid.
My father’s lawyers won’t take you to court, I’ll make sure of it.
But this is the only way you’ll ever get money out of this family again. ”
He was silent for so long that I wondered if he had hung up. Then he wheezed with laughter.
“You’re not a little girl anymore, are you, carina?”
Soon, everyone in the world would know my secret.
They would know that I once woke in the middle of the night and chose the crown over my own mother.
But most importantly, Richard’s power over me would evaporate.
I would be the one who allowed him to be king.
I would be the one who stepped out of the way so he could complete his relentless climb to the throne.
But I had meant what I said to him on our walk through the snow on Christmas morning.
My benevolence depended on his good behaviour, and he hadn’t even made it four days before he disappointed me.
A woman with a trolley came along and gathered up my empty bowl and teacup, and I pulled my hood up so she wouldn’t see my face.
It was unlikely that I’d be recognised in Hong Kong, but all it would take was one sharp-eyed traveller or airport cleaner to take my photo, and weeks of careful planning would be ruined.
“I’ll get in touch with Annabelle and Amira and let them know we’re going with plan B,” Mary said. “You should go to the hotel now. The reporter is waiting for you.”
I got off my chair, slung my backpack over my shoulder and headed for the airport hotel, which was tucked away at the back of the terminal.
After deciding to speak, I had texted Annabelle to ask for her blessing. I was going to reveal something that would forever change the way Papa was perceived. No matter how staunchly I defended him, his legacy would suffer.
At first, Annabelle didn’t respond. But a few days later, my phone lit up my bedroom at 3 a.m.
You shouldn’t do this alone, she wrote. If you go with plan A, I will speak in support of you and your father. If you go with plan B, I will tell them everything I know, and everything Richard has done. Either way, I am with you.
I expected Amira to try to talk us out of it. She was the practical one; she would remind me of the dangers of turning powerful friends into enemies. Instead, something ferocious shone in her eyes.
“Me too,” she said. “I want to speak as well.”
We chose the newspaper in New York not just for its reputation, but because the American courts would never intervene on the palace’s behalf.
If we exposed Richard, no injunction could stop us, no defamation suit was likely to succeed.
The paper had a team of reporters travelling the world in pursuit of the story.
One was heading to India to talk to Annabelle; another was going to South Africa to see Amira.
And I was due to meet with Dee, a fearsome Pulitzer winner who knew little about the royal family but everything about secrets and power.
In the hotel lobby, I kept my hood pulled over my face as I walked past the bored-looking staff at the check-in desk.
When we’d agreed to meet here for our interview, Dee sent me a list of instructions over Signal so I could slip into her room without being recognised.
Between two elevators stood a plastic palm tree.
I casually reached into the pot and found a key card taped to the inside, just as she’d said I would.
At room 1207, I knocked twice and swiped the card. Inside, I found a woman sitting at a table by the window with a voice recorder before her. She looked at me with shrewd, pale eyes, a leather jacket draped over her shoulders.
She rose to her feet and hesitated, unsure what to do next. How does one greet a soon-to-be-ex-royal who was briefly the heir to the British throne before tumbling back down to Earth?
“Hi,” I said. I reached out my hand. “I’m Lexi Villiers.”
“I’m Dee.”
We stood awkwardly for a moment in the rundown little room, stains on the carpet and the distant roar of a plane outside.
“I’m sorry about all the subterfuge involved in meeting up today,” I said. “I’m just trying to get through this without being recognised. My family still thinks I’m in London.”
She put a gentle hand on my arm, and I saw that she was used to being in charge of every space she occupied, a queen in her own right, who ruled over newsrooms and granted mercy to nervous interviewees.
“It’s fine. Come sit down,” she said.
I sank into a plastic chair and looked warily at the recorder before me. Once I spoke into it, there would be no going back.
I looked at Dee. “I’m here to talk about the night my mother died, and I want to explain why I am unable to wear the crown,” I said. “But there’s something else I need to tell you. It’s time the British people knew who their future king really is.”