Page 47 of The Heir Apparent
“Good morning,” he said and severed the line between us.
I gave into my worst instincts and checked the news sites that were analysing my high-stakes performance of walking into a church, sitting through a service and walking out again. The outfit Mary had constructed for me seemed to have done the trick in shifting the conversation away from my paternity. Rather than the ubiquitous floral dresses favoured by royal women, she had pulled for me a menswear-inspired cream suit by Vivienne Westwood. We were a bit daring in using the waistcoat as a shirt, but, once paired with the oversized blazer and wide-leg trousers, no one could argue it was inappropriate for church. It was just weird enough to confuse the tabloids, while sendingVogueand the blogs into a spin.
I closed my phone. I was slightly embarrassed that, only months ago, I’d been diagnosing heart attacks and ordering MRIs, and now I seemed to spend all my time telegraphing secret messages through my outfits and staring at polling numbers that suggested Britons were still sceptical of me. Since January, my popularity had risen five points to forty per cent, but Mary seemed most preoccupied with winning over the swathe of people who described themselves as “neutral” on my existence.
“The trouble is, no one really knows you,” she explained. “You’ve been gone eleven years, and now we need to reintroduce you so we can build your support back up.”
Richard knew Granny had given me a year to make my decision and it wasn’t long before the tabloids knew as well. There was an entire page on theDaily Postwebsite calledLexi’s Choice, filled with speculation about whether I would stay or go. There was even a timer in the corner, counting down the number of days I had left before my dithering must finally end.Lexi’s Choicetracked my approval rating against Richard, who maintained a far more respectable figure of sixty-eight per cent.It also kept a tally of our public appearances, sending us both on separate charity binges so we could top the leaderboard. Even as I dismissed the whole thing as ridiculous, I could feel myself longing to see my name edge above his in the rankings, the triumph that came when a lunch I hosted for International Women’s Day briefly put me on top, the frustration when he packed his itinerary during a trip to Northern Ireland so that I slid back down again. We were gamifying charity and I was horrified to admit that I was becoming rapidly addicted.
Though we had successfully avoided seeing each other for weeks at a time, Richard’s tabloid campaign against me was relentless. Last month, theDaily Postreported that I was self-prescribing semaglutide injections in a desperate attempt to be as slender as Demelza. There were rumours that the palace had quashed multiple malpractice suits against me in Australia, that I planned to evict Amira from Cumberland 1, that Granny’s secret, ardent hope was that I would give up my place in the line.
But I didn’t have the heart to retaliate. Louis and I had a pact to always keep each other’s secrets, even as our own father leaked against us. Once I got down in the mud with Richard, I would never be able to get out again, something Mary couldn’t seem to understand. We’d had an argument two weeks before when I refused to let her leak to the press that Richard had crashed the function I’d hosted for NHS care home staff.
“But he’s doing it tous,” she had insisted.
“I don’t give a shit,” I said. “I don’t do that. I never have, not once.”
She shook her head. “I know you want to change things, but you can’t do that until you have everyone playing by the same rules. The Duke of Clarence’s office is briefing the media against you, and right now you’re not giving them anything in return. You need to build relationships with reporters—you need to have a few of them in your corner. The media narrative is there to be shaped, and unless you grab onto it, you’re letting Prince Richard chisel it into whatever he wants.”
She stopped and looked down both ends of the long hall to make sure no one was listening.
“This was yourbiggestmistake when you were in Australia,” she whispered. “The Prince of Scotland painted you as some sort of deserter, and I was always astounded that you never fought back against us. You could have easily won over the public, if only you’d tried to bring a few sympathetic journalists onto your side.”
She had finally taken a breath and seen my face. I thought of all those stories that had flooded the front pages after I left. The jokes they had made as my body healed itself after years of deprivation. The way they had whispered about my state of mind, speculating about involuntary psychiatric holds and conservatorships. The unnamed Wolseley House aides who gave quotes to the tabloids about how selfish and spoilt I was, how much I had broken Papa’s heart.
“Mary,” I said, “when you worked for my father, did you brief the press against me?”
“No, of course not. I was a junior aide, I was there for social media only.”
“But you were there for those conversations.”
She hesitated. “No.”
“It’s okay if you were. That was the job. I’m just curious.”
In the three months Mary had worked for me, she seemed to have grown taller. She stood straighter, adding length to her spine, taking up more space in rooms where she was now the boss. But she shrank back down as I watched her.
“No,” she said meekly. “I swear to you.”
I wasn’t sure I believed her, and I thought briefly of what Annabelle had said to me at Watford Castle.Watch out for Mary. She’s not what you think.But if I had to choose between the word of my stepmother, who had briefed the press against me whenever she needed to divert attention from herself, and the word of the junior aide who had sat in the room while these instructions were given, I would choose Mary every time.
So I had decided to leave it in the past, that strange territory that would probably always lie between us. I had given Mary permission to issue on-the-record denials whenever a reporter called to inquire whether I was an alcoholic, or a bully, or secretly married. But she was not to leak, and, if she did, she would be terminated as my private secretary.
“In a couple of years, when you have a proper power base, and the Queen starts giving you more duties, we can ban the family from leaking altogether,” Mary had promised.
At first, when she said these things, I would remind her that I was committed to one year only. But the more Mary talked of the future, the less I reminded her that mine was yet to be determined. As we planned out this new, modern monarchy that would require members of the family to be loyal and true, the more real it became in my mind.
When I came downstairs after the phone call with Jack, Amira was cooking in the kitchen with Vikki. Chino was getting underfoot, hoping someone would either throw him a scrap or kick the tennis ball he plopped down at strategic locations as they tried to move around him.
“Did Mary leave?” I asked.
“She said she’ll be back at 7 a.m. sharp tomorrow,” Amira said, cracking pepper over a bowl of foaming eggs. “Meticulous Mary.”
“She’s always been a strange girl, hasn’t she,” Vikki said absently. “But she does have a wonderful sense of style.”
She found me a spare glass and filled it up with a pinot from Alsace that was a little too sweet for my liking. I would need to ask Jack to send me a shipment of Jennings wine to get me through the year.
I looked at Vikki. “I didn’t know you knew Mary.”
