Page 70 of The Heir Apparent
“Oh, yeah, we had to have pasta with olive oil and salt,” I said, remembering the driving rain and clinging mud of our seven-day odyssey through the bush. “Honestly, it’s still the best meal I’ve ever had.”
“It was so good,” Jack agreed, his face a marvel in the campfire’s flickering light.
“Pretty sure we were just starving, guys,” Finn said around a mouthful of linguine. He turned in his camp chair. “Where are you going for your honeymoon, Louis?”
My brother looked up. “Oh, uh, South Africa. Amira’s family has a hunting lodge there. It’s our favourite place. It’s totally isolated, and there’s a waterhole. You can watch animals gathering at dusk. It’s pretty great.”
Amira cared little for the lodge. I would have thought she’d want a honeymoon in the Maldives or Bora Bora. But I had also assumed she wanted a husband who would have sex with her, and I was wrong about that too. I’d told no one of their arrangement, even as the carefully arranged paparazzo set-ups gave way to a formalised agreement that was taking them all the way to the altar at Westminster Abbey. The deliberately grainy photos from Patagonia had escalated into handholding on ski slopes and kissing on the dancefloor of Mahiki. Like almost everyone else in the world, Jack and Finn believed Louis had fallen in love with my best friend.
I had learned Louis and Amira were engaged along with everyone else when they posed for photographs at Wolseley House. Amira looked radiant on Louis’s arm, dressed in a forest-green Victoria Beckham dress that perfectly offset Mum’s hunk of emerald on her finger.
But the ring belonged to me. The terms of the will stated that it be kept in a safe deposit box until my own engagement or until I turned thirty—whichever came first. The palace had told the tabloids that I had been so overjoyed my twin was marrying my best friend that I immediately gifted him the ring. When it suited them, I was the selfish, preening princess who refused to speak to her poor family for reasons unknown; the next week I was a cherished sister who handed over one of the few reminders of her mother in support of her brother’s marriage. I had never seen myself as the marrying kind, but in the weeks after the engagement announcement, I found myself googling photos of the ring on Amira’s hand, pinching and zooming in so I could get a better look. I wondered whose idea it had been to undermine Mum’s will yet again—Papa’s or Louis’s—so they could deny me one more piece of her.
At first, I’d refused to have anything to do with the wedding, ignoring Stewart’s quiet inquiries about whether I might be willing to be Amira’s bridesmaid. But a few weeks later, I found myself in need of his help. Finn and I had met Jack and Georgia at a pub in town for drinks, and when we came out a few hours later, a photographer was waiting for me on the kerb. Most of the men who followed me used long lenses and hid behind trees and postboxes, but this one rushed forward, blinding us with his incessant flashes.
“On the turps again, sweetheart?” he said. “Making Daddy proud, are you? Nasty little tart.”
I was more ashamed than afraid, but the lights were making me dizzy, and I nearly stumbled over. Finn grabbed Georgia and me by the hands and pulled us away.
“Off you run, you stupid bitch!” The photographer laughed. “I know where you live.”
Dazed by the cameras, it took us a moment to realise Jack wasn’t with us. When we went back, he had the photographer pinned to the wall of the pub. Jack’s eyes were blazing, and the man gasped and struggled in his grip.
“Stay away from her,” Jack seethed. “If I see you again, I’ll kill you.”
A week later, a police car had pulled up at the vineyard. The photographer wanted to press charges, and the investigation had got far enough that they were going to check the pub’s CCTV cameras. When Jack started looking for a lawyer, I called Stewart, who had a knack for making problems disappear. In exchange for settling matters with the photographer, Stewart asked that I come to London in a few months’ time and hold Amira’s train while she walked down the aisle.
I never admitted to Jack that I had struck this bargain to keep him out of trouble. But Georgia was clearly suspicious when the charges were dropped on the same day the palace announced that I was to be Amira’s bridesmaid. Georgia and I had been friends for years, but she suddenly became distant, and then cold, and finally outright hostile. She and Jack began to argue constantly, and when she asked him to move to New York with her, the atmosphere in the cottage went from uncomfortable to unbearable. I hated the idea that he might leave, though I pretended to be agnostic about the decision he had to make. Two weeks before Louis’s visit, I’d been getting into my car as Georgia stalked across the gravel towards her own. She said nothing, but she looked at me with such barely contained hatred that I knew she and Jack had just broken up. She moved to New York alone, blocked my number and never spoke to me or Jack again.
I wasn’t sure if Louis knew how my presence in the wedding party was secured, but I was hardly going to ask him about it when he’d come all this way to see me. After dinner, we listened to Louis’s stories from his travels. He had taken up extreme sports—cave diving, heli-skiing and whitewater rafting.
“I really want to try volcano boarding next,” he said. “They do it in Indonesia and Vanuatu—nice and close if you ever wanted to do it. It’s supposed to be an incredible rush.”
“Wait, so you snowboardintoa volcano?” Finn asked.
“Not into its mouth. The slopes are covered in ash and gravel after they erupt, and you coast down that.”
“Sounds wild,” Finn said.
“Sounds suicidal,” I muttered, embarrassed for him.
Finn and Jack made meaningful eye contact across the fire.
“Nature is there to be conquered,” Louis said.
It was the kind of boneheaded thing his friends might say, but never him.
“I don’t know,” Jack said lightly. “I feel like anyone who tries to conquer nature pays the price. The natural world has its own rules, and if we break them, we die.”
Louis shook his head, grinning in a way that made him look like a stranger to me. “There are no rules out there, that’s the thing.”
We were all quiet for a while. I glowered at Louis over the campfire while he pretended not to notice.
“Well, I’m knackered. I might turn in,” Jack said, getting up from his chair.
“Me too,” Finn said.
Pots were washed, teeth were brushed, and Jack and Finn were swiftly zipped up in their tents. Louis’s security team, who had set themselves up at a respectful distance along the beach, hid among the melaleuca trees, though we knew they were keeping watch with their night-vision goggles.
