Page 11 of The Heir Apparent
When Amira came along fifteen months later, the company was offering consulting services in the UK, Bangalore, Berlin and Munich.
By the time Kris and Amira were teenagers, Mayfair IT was as large as the Indian company from which Madhav had been cast out. They traded in the old flat for a £14 million five-storey townhouse, complete with a lift and the walk-in closet of Vikki’s dreams. She shopped at Browns and drove a big black Range Rover. A diamond-encrusted Rolex slid up and down her slender wrist as she enacted a perfect plié at barre. Her metamorphosis was almost complete.
She had been pleasantly surprised to discover that Madhav was just as socially ambitious as she was. He wanted to conquer London. And what was the point of conquering a city if you couldn’t breach its highest gates? He took lessons in deer stalking, as well as a whisky, cognac and armagnac appreciation course. He took up polo and carriage driving. Together, they planned Kris’s and Amira’s schooling like they were drawing the battlelines of a continental war.
From the moment Louis and I were born, London’s upper class speculated feverishly about which schools we might attend. It became a favourite cocktail party conversation across the city: where will the royal twins be enrolled? Mum had received a rather lackadaisical education from Swiss boarding schools. Papa had been subjected to a Scottish institution, apparently chosento toughen him up, which instead left him with PTSD and a determination that his children would go to a school that allowed you to close the windows in winter.
Many assumed Louis would head to Eton, a school that had educated kings and prime ministers for hundreds of years. That would surely be a tolerable compromise for the Queen, and for Papa, who was really rather insistent that his young son not be subjected to punishment runs and cold showers.
The institution chosen for me was of far less interest, given I was a girl and the fallback, but London’s best families wanted their daughters to go where I went.
While almost every woman on the planet had a parasocial relationship with Isla, there were none more fixated than those who had their babies around the same time as her. They watched with fascination as her belly swelled and her limbs stayed ballerina thin. Somehow she made the billowy maternity fashion of the day both chic and child-like. Two weeks after she pushed not one but two babies out of her tiny body, she was back in her old Levi’s.
Vikki desperately wanted to be her friend, but unlike everyone else, she was willing to do whatever it took to make it happen. For Vikki, the opportunity was obvious. Her ascent would always be limited by their circumstances. Madhav would never be white, and she would never not be the daughter of Barry Yarborough. Kris and Amira might have been rich and beautiful, but they were still relatively new money. Who better to help them transcend the traits deemed unforgivable by the upper classes than the royal twins?
The trick would be placing Kris and Amira in our path. In the end, all Vikki needed to make the introduction was what had always propelled her life: a high threshold for risk, guile, and a tiny bit of good luck.
When Louis and I were twelve, the decision about boarding school had still not been announced. Kris, a year older than us, was already at Whitmer Hall, an institution famed for acceptingall the boys who failed to make it into Eton. Vikki could still be brought to tears by Eton’s rejection of Kris, something she insisted was due to race. In reality, he’d deliberately flubbed the interview because he couldn’t stand the idea of wearing tails to school every day.
One conversation changed everything.
At the time, Vikki’s project was Genevieve Lambert, the Marchioness of Northampton. The Northamptons were the only true aristocratic family at Amira’s junior school. Genevieve rarely did the drop-off herself, but on the rare occasion she breezed into the courtyard in a perfect Stella McCartney poncho, Vikki made a point of trying to talk to her. To Vikki’s great delight, Amira had struck up a friendship with little Lady Sophie Northampton that year. Enrolling her in the same ballet class had paid off splendidly. Vikki used these rare opportunities to offer to buy two candy-pink leotards necessary for an upcoming recital—the girls so loved to be dressed the same. Or there’d be an exhibition at the British Museum, to which Vikki would be more than happy to chaperone the children.
Genevieve never removed her oversized sunglasses for these conversations, not once. Vikki couldn’t quite tell if she was even looking at her behind those inscrutable shades. But she would take Vikki up on her grovelling offers about forty per cent of the time. It didn’t seem as if the frequency was increasing, but Vikki was prepared to put in the work.
One day in 2006, the conversation turned to boarding school, as it always did for the mothers of twelve-year-olds.
“Kris is happy at Whitmer Hall,” Vikki said. “Madhav wanted him to go to that awful Scottish school that Prince Frederick went to, but I said absolutely not.”
Genevieve smiled and said nothing.
“I suppose the royals will send Prince Louis there, poor lamb,” Vikki added.
She knew full well that Frederick and Isla would do no such thing. She read the tabloids as often as anyone else did. Butfeigning ignorance in front of a person who believed herself to be a natural authority on all things was one of Vikki’s old tricks. The only way a friendship would blossom with Genevieve was if the marchioness saw Vikki as desperately in need of her guidance. They could never be equals, but Vikki might be a fun fixer-upper—if only Genevieve chose to take her on.
Genevieve sighed a laugh. Her mother had been a bridesmaid at the Queen’s wedding. Her husband was the Lord Great Chamberlain, a hereditary role that required him to walk backwards in front of Queen Eleanor at the State Opening of parliament each year. Vikki had seen the Northamptons in paparazzi shots of Frederick and Isla’s summer trip to Capri a few months back.
“She would never let them go,” Genevieve said smugly.
“You mean Isla?”
“Of course. I’m not sure how she’ll cope with the children at boarding school at all. She’s got no life beyond them.”
Vikki swallowed the dozens of questions brimming in her throat and made a sound she hoped would register as bored sympathy.
“She does seem a bit… vulnerable,” she said.
“Miserable, more like it. She’ll want them close to London. He’ll acquiesce so she doesn’t completely lose it,” Genevieve said.
She looked down at her watch, a Tank Louis Cartier on a crocodile band that made Vikki’s beloved Rolex suddenly seem mortifyingly tacky.
“I’ve got to run, lovely to chat,” Genevieve breathed and walked away.
That night, Vikki went online and found a map of all the best boarding schools near London. There weren’t many. The whole point was to get children into the countryside where they had space to play and run free.
Eton, just forty minutes from the palace, still seemed like a good bet. But something told Vikki that if Isla were as preciousand demanding as Genevieve implied, she would want the twins together. That way she could drop them off and fetch them in one trip. Needy women, like Vikki’s own mother, romanticised everything. She wondered if Isla was the type to believe that being separated from their mother was traumatic. She would insist the twins not be torn apart as well.
If her hunch was correct, it left only one option: Astley College. It was co-ed, breathtakingly expensive and just forty-five minutes from the palace. With its emphasis on tiny class sizes, “academic experimentation” and scholarship pathways for the underprivileged, it was not a place Vikki had even considered before. It was a place where filmmakers and artists sent their children. It even let the girls wear trousers as part of their uniform if they wished.
