Page 69 of The Heir Apparent
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 BITCHandLET’S HAVE SEX PLEASEandCAN 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 readingLET’S BREAK UPand 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 thoughpeople 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 Iwas 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.’”
There was an awkward silence. It was an odd story for Louis to choose, because it captured our family in all its weirdness and dysfunction. Nanny-reared children who thought the supermarket was exotic. A sad little kid who sensed she was worth less than her sibling. My texting spree on Annabelle’s phone would have gone down much better. Louis was ordinarily so good with civilians. He had Mum’s gift of bewitching them while bonding with them at the same time. Then I realised this story was for me.
Jack laughed, breaking the silence. “That’s not a bad story,” he said. He had an innate sense of the collective mood and a knack for shifting it back into cheery territory whenever it drifted. “That’s Lexi, being brave and selfless.”
Paula circled the table, topping up everyone’s glasses. She placed a gentle hand on Louis’s shoulder as she filled his flute. It was a mother’s touch, warm and unheeding. Paula wore her hair down to her waist. She had tattoos and multiple piercings. But there was something about her that always reminded me of Mum. Louis’s eyes met mine again.
“What a strange way you two grew up,” Paula mused. “Now tell us all about the wedding. Are they letting your fiancée have any Hindu traditions during the ceremony?”
The next day, we drove down to the peninsula to camp for a few days. Paula held Ragu by the collar as he watched us pileinto the car and drive away without him. Jack’s aunt lived on an acreage that overlooked the sand flats of Bellettes Bay. She spent most of the year travelling abroad and encouraged us to use the beach whenever we liked. It was technically a coastal reserve, but since it could only be accessed by the sandy path from her property, the beach was as good as hers. We packed our things into her wheelbarrow and ambled down the tree-lined slopes so that we could set up our tents on the water’s edge. Pine trees planted a couple of centuries ago had begun to yield to the shifting sands. Their great trunks swayed towards the water and their roots rose up like the tentacles of an enormous sea creature. When the tide was out, the vast beach was like an unfamiliar planet. Creatures skittered around our feet. Strange craters pockmarked the sand where stingrays once burrowed. Birds arrived for their evening feast. All around us were the haunting hills of the Tasman Peninsula. The pale trunks of the gums looked like skeletons in the distance. Whenever I was here, I thought of the men who dared to escape the penal colonies to try their luck in the southern wilds. How frightening it must have been to walk into the ancient forest with no food and no plan. What horrors awaited them if they chose to remain in the convict camps.
It was strange to see Louis and Jack together. They were the two halves of my life, and now they were building a fire, discussing the best options for kindling and fuel wood. I could tell that they liked each other, and I was inexplicably relieved by this. Finn and I made dinner while Louis and Jack tended the fire and talked. We had gone to the farmers market the day before so we could make fresh pasta with smoked mozzarella and tomatoes from Paula’s garden. We ate by firelight and the fading summer sun that refused to set until 8 p.m.
“This is good, Lexi,” Louis said, surprised. “How did you learn to cook?”
“It turns out cooking is chemistry.”
I had been nervous about him seeing this life of mine, in which I worried about bank overdrafts and filed tax returns andtried to remember how long it had been since I’d been to the dentist. But he was here, and he was getting on with the two most important people I had.
“Once we were walking the Overland Track and possums broke into our stash and ate all the food Lexi had insisted on bringing,” Jack said.
