Page 23 of The Heir Apparent
Finn checked to see if I’d changed my hair. “No?”
It was probably a testament to my security detail that they had managed to fade so skilfully into the backdrop of my life that no one even noticed when they left. They dressed down in black puffer coats and sneakers, so they looked like everyone else in Hobart. They mostly walked a few paces behind me or sat in theback row of my lectures. New friends found them fascinating and would always offer them a schooner or a handful of chips while they leaned against the wall of the pub, waiting for me to be done. With the exception of Leo, they always declined.
“My security disappeared this morning.”
Finn’s eyes went wide, and he looked up and down the street for the officers who were no longer tailing us.
“Do you think your dad took them away?” he asked. “Or do you think they’re tied up in the garage right now and your killer is waiting for you in the apartment?”
There was no killer in our apartment. When I texted Stewart to ask if he knew anything, I got the answer I expected.
Yes, ma’am, you may wish to talk to Prince Frederick, he wrote back.There was a review conducted by RAVEC into the security costs for the family. Best, Stewart.
The Royal and VIP Executive Committee, or RAVEC, decides who among Britain’s high-profile figures gets state-sponsored security and who doesn’t. Stewart sat on the committee, but he never would have withdrawn my protection unless Papa had ordered him to do it. I left it for a week. But one night after I had three cocktails at the Grand Poobah, I dialled my father’s direct line on the walk home. The phone rang out and sent me to his voicemail.
“Hello, Papa!” I chirped. “Just thought I’d let you know it’s about ten o’clock at night here and I’m cutting through a city park on my own. Gosh, it’s quite overgrown, isn’t it? It’s very dark actually, and I’m quite drunk and stumbling about in a very short skirt. Anyway, they always say that if you find yourself alone at night, you should call someone. I’m not sure why. I suppose rapists hesitate to attack you because the other person on the phone might hear everything and call the police? But you didn’t pick up, so I’m on my own here. Hope everything is well with you! Let’s chat soon if I survive this walk home! Night night, Daddy.”
He never called me back.
A week later, theDaily Postpublished details of the RAVEC review into the protection of the royal family. I’d been stripped of my security detail because I was deemed a “low-risk target.” ThePostrather cattily described Demelza and Birdie as “minor royals,” but their protection arrangements were left intact.
“With Alexandrina off on her own course, the girls have had to pick up so many public engagements, even though they’re busy students as well,” a royal “source” told thePost.
“Hundreds of charities are entirely dependent on the favour of the Royal Family, and they were left high and dry when the princess took off for a new life in Australia. Demelza and Birdie stepped into the breach beautifully, and they’ve made their grandmother extremely proud.
“Demelza and Birdie have a higher profile thanks to their cousin,” Richard’s aide told thePost. “It was not a role they sought, but they are loyal to the crown, and they’ve put themselves at great risk to take on the burden of Alexandrina’s duties. It’s entirely right she was stripped of her protection, given she is in the middle of nowhere and her cousins are picking up her slack.”
When word reached James that my security detail was gone, he called an emergency meeting at his farm. Finn and I got in his old RAV4 and made the drive north, fearful we were about to be kicked out of our Sandy Bay flat. Despite being my benefactor and my only relative in a 14,000-kilometre radius, James and I only saw each other a couple of times a year. If I wasn’t going to Norfolk for Christmas, I went to Finn’s family lunch. James would almost always decline to join us. He worked the parched plains of central Tasmania in solitude and ate almost every meal alone.
He didn’t seem particularly surprised that Papa had withdrawn my protection. “It’s classic Frederick—he was always going to lash out when you finished your undergrad and didn’t go back.”
“I probably am low-risk, though,” I said. “It’s been four years now.”
James grimaced and shook his head. “You’re still third in line to the throne.”
“Would it make any difference if you took yourself out of contention for the throne, Lexi?” Finn asked while nibbling on an Arrowroot biscuit.
Regular people—Australians in particular—imagined that my HRH style, my title and my place in the line were things I could just hand back, like ugly candlesticks inherited from a distant aunt. When Mum and Papa had divorced, she was allowed to keep her title, but they stripped her of her HRH.
“He wants me to have to curtsy to my own children,” she said with big wet eyes.
“Don’t worry, Mum,” Louis said, wrapping his skinny arms around her. “I’ll be able to give it back to you one day.”
I knew I had no use for the letters and titles that hung on my name like silver charms. But the idea of losing them, of being just Alexandrina, felt like I was being asked to stand naked in the midst of a huge crowd. Perhaps one day I would do it, when I could swap them out and become Dr. Alexandrina Villiers, MD. Those letters were adornments I would drape across my name with pride, I thought.
Of course I got my doctorate a few years later, and still never considered—not even for a moment—giving up my HRH. I knew once I did that, there was no going back. Even as I drifted further and further from my family, I found that I couldn’t sever the last bond between us. Sometimes, in the early days, when I was particularly lonely, I wondered if perhaps I should just go home. They were my family, after all. But then Papa’s office would leak a lie to the tabloids—I was hitting him up for money again, I had fallen under the spell of my anti-establishment uncle—and I would remember what my future in London looked like. At least in Australia, whatever happened next was entirely up to me.
“It’s a whole thing to give up the titles,” I said to Finn. “I don’t just hand them in. It would take an Act of Parliament. Or I’d have to become a Catholic.”
James probably saw through my excuses, but he said nothing and dipped his biscuit into his tea. He was a Scottish dukemasquerading as an Australian wool farmer. He could sell the family seat tomorrow for millions of pounds to a Qatari emir, and yet he couldn’t let it go.
It was decided that the Sandy Bay flat was not secure enough for us to stay. Without officers guarding the entrance to the garage, it was frighteningly easy for someone to slip inside by lurking behind the recycling bins and waiting for a resident to drive in. A ladder could be leaned against our balcony, and if our glass doors weren’t locked, someone could be in our apartment in less than a minute. With toxic levels of charm emitted over the years we had lived there, Finn and I had managed to win over our sceptical neighbours. But they would not be happy if we asked them to withhold the door code from relatives and delivery men.
“I can’t ask you to pay for security guards,” I said to James.
“I’m not offering,” he said. “Look, you’re never going to be a normal girl, no matter what you do. But that doesn’t mean you have to go home. We just need to get you into a more secure living situation—and no more stumbling through town steamin’, alright?”
James had a livestock manager who’d proven to be a hard worker and a good guy.
