Page 21 of The Heir Apparent
During the fraught negotiations over her funeral, the Kilchurns confirmed that Isla’s mysterious twin, James, would be the one to speak on her family’s behalf. He lived in Australia, and I’d never seen him before he walked up the aisle of Westminster Abbey in his black suit. Once he stood at the pulpit, he abandoned the eulogy approved by Stewart and instead calmly disembowelled my father, my grandmother and the palace.
“If I had been a better brother, you would still be alive today,” he said before the stunned congregation. He had dark, wild hair and his eyes glowed with rage. “You were seeking something your blood family failed to give you. Our neglect sent you down this path. I pledge to do all I can to make sure your fine children keep the open hearts you gave them.”
At the wake, he pulled me into an awkward embrace and slipped a piece of paper into my hand. I tucked it away before anyone saw. I always wondered if he did the same for Louis whenI wasn’t looking. If he had, neither of them ever mentioned it to me. Later that night, I sat on my bed and fished the folded-up paper out from my pocket. It contained James’s phone number and email address.
If you need someone to talk to—or if you need a rescue, it read.
Sometimes I think I might want out of this, I wrote to him that night.
We emailed for my remaining twelve months at Astley. Sometimes we chatted aimlessly, sometimes we edged closer to what might best be described as a plot. Both Louis and I were permitted a gap year after school if we used it to do volunteer work. At James’s recommendation, I developed a very public fascination with Australia. He had been running a small merino wool farm in the midlands of Tasmania for fifteen years, and he was happy to facilitate my escape.
I didn’t know much of his childhood except that he and Mum grew up in the family seat at the head of Loch Fyne on a 60,000-acre estate. Their father, the duke and local clan chief, was nothing more than a strong set of shoulders striding through the castle gates, and in a scandal that rippled all the way to London, their mother, the Duchess of Kilchurn, abandoned the family when her twins were two. Eventually, the duchess begged for the children to join her down south, but her ex-husband denied her.
Instead the twins were consigned to governesses and otherwise left to drift along draughty halls like ghosts. While James roamed the moors, Isla wandered into the kitchen and made friends with the servants. One afternoon when she was twelve, she took her small sailing dinghy and went out on the loch alone. Once she was on the water, she heard a rip and looked up to see a gash opening up in her mainsail. It would be nine hours before anyone noticed she was gone, and another four before a search party found her, shivering and terrified, on her drifting raft.
Without a parent to guide them, James and Isla never really knew their neighbours. They didn’t attend the Highland Games,and they didn’t dance reels with kids their age. They were sent to separate boarding schools at the age of thirteen—Isla to Switzerland and James to the Highlands—and neither of them returned to the castle on the loch. She moved to London after school, living briefly and disastrously with her mother, before she found herself being courted by the heir to the throne. When they became engaged, the Scottish press found issue with her plummy accent and her European education, branding her the “Gall princess”—a Gaelic insult for stranger.
Their father died in 2005. But even though he was the new Duke of Kilchurn, James refused to spend another night in the castle where he grew up. To cover its considerable maintenance costs, he opened it to the public for guided tours—an enterprise that became especially lucrative after Mum’s death.
I had the impression that he and his sister were never particularly close. By the time Isla went into the water, she and James were barely speaking. But there was no one more incensed by her death than her twin brother. Days after they found her, James turned on the television and saw Louis and me. They’d sent us out to inspect the flowers and work the teary crowds who would not leave the palace gates. We were seventeen. Somehow he knew I was drowning in the depths of my family, and he threw me a rope.
After finishing school, I was meant to be in Australia for six months. The palace had arranged for me to spend half the trip jillarooing at a cattle station in Far North Queensland before I was permitted to travel around the country on my own. I was then expected to head to the Shankar lodge in South Africa, where I would reunite with Louis, Kris and Amira and spend six months volunteering at a game reserve. By Michaelmas 2013, all four of us would walk into the University of St. Andrews, where I planned to study chemistry.
As a blood princess, I had no expectations that I would ever have a job beyond being a “working royal.” But I had noticed that science came remarkably easily to me, and with little effort.In chemistry class, I could successfully make the mercury oscillate like a beating heart and turn flames blue or green with the correctly chosen chemical. And come exam time, the answers to the questions on the page seemed to surface in my mind like bubbles from the bottom of a dark lake. Papa thought it would be a suitable degree for me to acquire and never use.
But I never made it to Queensland, or to South Africa or to the gates of St. Andrews. As soon as I landed in Australia, I’d abandoned my itinerary and headed straight for James’s property in Tasmania. I never really thought I’d go through with it, but after a week spent immobile and unshowered on his couch, I decided to put the second phase of my plan into action. I applied for a student visa and enrolled in a chemistry degree. But rather than Sydney, as I had originally intended, I applied for a course in Tasmania.
To this day I cannot explain why I chose Hobart over the mainland. Somehow, I stepped off the plane and I knew. Below me was Antarctica. To the west was nothing but the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean all the way to Argentina. Everything was rugged and windswept. Hobart still has the air of a swashbuckling whaling town. Nestled into the slopes of kunanyi/Mount Wellington, the city uses the mountain as its thermometer, its playground, its spiritual touchstone. You don’t bother with the weather forecast in Hobart. You simply look for a dusting of snow on the peak and dress accordingly. There is nothing more stirring than the sight of mist caught in its organ-pipe cliffs. In the afternoon, the sinking sun casts a chiffon shroud over the mountain’s broad shoulders. The locals are the butt of national jokes and the victims of the poorest health outcomes in the country. They’re consistently left off the map, both literally and figuratively. And yet no one wants to leave. They log off at 4 p.m. for a pottery class and they shut their tourism-dependent businesses to go bushwalking for the summer. They strip off naked and swim in nine-degree waters to celebrate the winter solstice. There are red wine and oysters and firepits. Somehow,everyone knows everyone. No one ever asks you what you do for a job because no one cares. Who could care about work when you’re living on a magical island where everything glows, from the bioluminescent mushrooms to the seas edged with electric-blue algae to the aurora-filled skies? I had reached the southernmost edge of the world, and I decided to stay.
My email sent with shaking hands to inform Papa of my new plans received no response. A week later, Stewart appeared at the door of James’s farmhouse.
“You’ve made a commitment to the station in Queensland,” he said, sitting awkwardly at the kitchen table across from me while James stood sentry in the doorway.
“She can do the same sort of volunteer work here,” James said.
When he first arrived in Tasmania, James had purchased his property as a hobby farm. Now, from a flock of five thousand sheep, he produced ultra-fine wool that was made into luxury Italian suits. I had not been much help in the fortnight since I arrived. Every morning, we ate breakfast together, and then I’d watch him walk down the hill, off to muster, or shear, or fence, or whatever it was sheep farmers did. I sat around reading in his living room until he texted me at exactly noon to remind me to eat the sandwich he’d left for me in the fridge. Then I moved to the porch to silently fret. Regretting and reaffirming my decision. Deciding to pack my bags and return to London. Realising the group chat with Kris, Louis and Amira had fallen silent. Knowing they’d started a spinoff without me.
But when the sun finally melted over the horizon, James would return, and I’d sit at the kitchen table while he chopped things for our dinner. For the first time in a long time, I ate. And I swallowed. And with each meal that James prepared, I thought less and less about the food inside me. It took me years to realise that he must have recognised this problem of mine, approaching it like a skittish lamb in one of his fields, quietly shooing it away before it imprinted on me and followed me around for the rest of my days.
I wasn’t sure how he knew this about me, but I suppose he watched his own sister stalked by the very same shadow. Once she became a royal, the full face of her youth receded until her cheekbones pushed up like colliding tectonic plates. All her softness was replaced with right angles and a fine down that grew over her pale limbs, fluffing up against the cold so she looked like a little nestling. Everyone agreed she looked sick, but also sensational. Everyone wanted to be her.
But James and I had both read the autopsy report, and we knew she died with the skeleton of an eighty-year-old, with wrecked teeth and a listless heart. Worse, she died with a near-empty stomach, having almost forgotten what it was like to sit down and eat a full meal, to enjoy it and let it remain inside her.
“Ma’am, it has been a very trying few years, and you are entitled to a break,” Stewart had said, clearly delivering the lines he and Papa had agreed upon. “But you have a duty to your family, and privilege entails responsibility.”
It was smart of Papa to send him. The speech James and I had agreed upon suddenly left me.
“I’m sorry, Stewart,” I said.
He had looked down at his hands for a long moment and then returned his gaze to my face. He had the soft golden eyes of a Saxon merino. I wondered if this might be the last time we ever saw each other.
“Ma’am,” he began. “Prince Frederick cannot support this; he refuses to pay for this.”
The kettle on the stove took its breath and emitted a low whistle that escalated into an almighty wail. James shuffled across the kitchen and took it off the hob. Taking his time, he had prepared the tea, following the steps just as Mum had. A scoop for each person and one for the pot.
“It never seemed right to me that I got everything when our father died, and Isla got nothing,” James said with his back turned to us. “It’s the way things have always been done, I know. But it seems wrong to send a girl out into the world with nothing—especially a girl who’s never been taught how to take care of herself.”
He placed the pot on the table between us and laid out the cups and saucers. He sat down and made himself comfortable.
