Page 29 of The Heir Apparent
I looked into her face and tried to peel back the years to when I would have been in the Upper Sixth and she would have been a Shell. I had trudged through the aftermath of Mum’s death, conversations and classes swirling around me like a fine dust. I went to rowing practice and sat my exams and studied my textbooks. In between, I hurried around corners and into bathroom stalls for uncontrollable, silent crying jags.
“Did we ever meet?” I asked.
“No, ma’am,” she huffed, as if she found the notion absurd. “I was thirteen and you were an upperclassman.”
“Sorry about all the random questions,” I said. “I think I’m just nervous.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
At the back entrance to the hall, a huge contingent of Queen’s guardsmen and sailors stood waiting for the procession to begin. Despite the size of the crowd, it was utterly silent. I knew they had released a falcon to soar above the Abbey to scare off the pigeons for the day, one of the ridiculous flourishes only my family could think was perfectly reasonable. I could hear my heels crunch in the gravel as I walked with Mary past rows of sailors in perfect white hats and square collars.
Stewart was waiting for us in the archway, and he bowed deeply. “Your Highness, before the news crews arrive, we thought you might like a moment alone in the hall.”
I was surprised to find that I was moved by the gesture. “Okay.”
“Just five minutes, and then we’ll have you in position with your family to follow the procession to the Abbey.”
They shut the doors, and I was alone in that vast stone hall with its timber beam roof stretched high above me. A heady incense filled the air. The grey morning cast the room in gloomy shadows; at its centre, two coffins were surrounded by flickering candles. My footsteps echoed as I approached. Both were draped in the royal standard, but I could tell who was who by the flowers arranged on top of each coffin. The day before, I hadwatched from my window as Amira moved around the high-walled garden she had shared with Louis, cutting handfuls of winter heather and English lavender and piling them in a basket. Now they were arranged in a wild bundle and tied with a purple ribbon. It was right for my brother. For Papa, someone had procured mountains of jasmine, English roses, hothouse orchids, tall stems of delphiniums. He had spent his life expecting that upon his death the Sovereign’s Orb and Sceptre would be placed on top of his casket. Instead he got a floral arrangement teased to perfection.
Standing inside Westminster Hall always made the arc of history feel very short to me. This was the room where Charles I was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death, where Charles II held his coronation feast a decade later after restoring the monarchy to its former glory. Guy Fawkes was tried here. Barbara Villiers watched from a secret balcony as her enemies were condemned to lose their heads. It was the place she lay in state when she finally died.
No matter how they came to be in St. Edward’s Chair, whether they were born to it, or they fought, killed and scrambled to heave themselves into the seat, all monarchs knew their destiny ended here. Their bodies would always be carried up onto the catafalque in Westminster Hall so their subjects could say goodbye.
And, I supposed, there was always someone like me standing at the end of the coffin, either shocked or thrilled to find that they might follow the same path. Were they frightened like I was? Did they swear, if they held their breath and stood very still, that they could hear the murmur in the walls of all the people who came before them? Did it feel like the DNA of their ancestors was coming awake until every cell in their body snapped and shimmered inside them?
On the stone steps in the farthest corner of the room, a shadow shifted, and for one insane moment it was Barbara herself, there to remind me that fate didn’t care if you believed in it or not. Destiny knocked, and you either cowered behindthe door or you flung it open to see what life held for you next. I took a few steps forward, desperate to ask her what to do. But the shadow moved again, and I saw that a family of birds roosting in the stained-glass windows had flown away.
I was alone again in the hall.
The last time I had stood here, I was flanked by Papa and Louis. After days of arguments over whether the mother of a future king was entitled to a traditional funeral, Mum’s coffin was covered with the royal standard and obscured under the mound of offending white lilies. We stood at the edge of the red velvet catafalque and stared at her coffin. Louis told me they had placed Mum on a cooling plate to keep her body at three degrees so she wouldn’t further decay until after the burial. The horror of it consumed me for days, finally hardening into a pebble that rolled to the back of my mind, bothersome and always there.
Papa had put a hand on each of our shoulders. “We move forward after this. We don’t talk of it again, do you hear me?”
Now he and Louis too were lying on cold plates in their twin coffins.
Finally, a hot tear rolled down my face.
I wasn’t sure for whom it was shed.
The rest of the day passed in snatches of colour and sound. The brilliant red of a Queen’s Guard tunic. A woman sobbing in the crowd of mourners who lined the streets. Richard’s cold stare. The feel of Demelza’s and Birdie’s curious eyes as I stood ahead of them in the procession.
When we entered the Abbey, we walked across the worn floor, the two coffins bobbing on the shoulders of the Grenadier Guard pallbearers ahead of us. I looked up at the nave’s familiar ceiling. When I was a child, its great stone spine and tapered ribs had made me feel like we’d climbed inside the belly of a dragon. Then we had squeezed through my favourite place, the quire screen with its arched roof painted like the night sky. Louis and I loved to linger in there so we could look up at the stars. “Stop dillydallying,” Papa would whisper, grasping our hands.
Granny sat in her usual spot in the front row of the south lantern, staring rapt at the coffins that held her two heirs. Papa’s widow, Annabelle, took her place beside me and I noticed distantly that her hands trembled in her lap. I made no effort to comfort her. Drifting through the prayers and eulogies, I snapped to attention as the piper began the funeral lament, “Sleep, Dearie, Sleep.” It was over. We were shepherded back into our Range Rovers and driven to Watford Castle for the burial. The streets were lined with mourners and Amira put her head in my lap and fell into a deep sleep for the half-hour journey.
Whether their lives were long, glorious, ignoble or tragic, every monarch of the last two centuries had been interred beneath the smooth stone floors of St. Edward’s Chapel. Compared to the grand abbeys and palaces to which these sovereigns and their families grew accustomed, the chapel is beautiful in its simplicity.
Under the floor of a light-filled corner of the chapel lay sixteen members of the House of Villiers. Great Aunt Beatrix had been interred with her parents years ago, followed by my grandfather. We had all expected Granny to be next. Instead she stood staring at the gaping hole in the floor that led to the family’s underground crypt. It was not ready for her yet.
Granny, Amira, Annabelle and I were the only ones invited to the burial service. Richard had no objection to being excluded, perhaps because there were no photographers to capture the moment. At the archbishop’s quiet instruction, Annabelle and Amira stepped forward and scattered red earth from a silver bowl on the coffins of their husbands. After one final prayer, it was done. We would not be required to watch as the caskets were lowered underground.
Annabelle, who had yet to acknowledge anyone except Granny with a shallow curtsy, excused herself to find her children. She was the arch villain in my mother’s story, my father’s obsession, and the unspoken bogeyman of my and Louis’s childhood. Even as I buried what remained of my family, I couldn’t help but steal glances at her. There was a hard,haunted look in her eyes I’d never seen before. Now, Amira, Granny and I watched as she stalked from the chapel, followed by the archbishop.
“What a terrible waste,” Granny mused, tears gleaming in her eyes, as we lingered under the stone arches.
“Did you want to skip the reception, Granny?” I asked. “You could just head upstairs if you’d prefer.”
She looked at me for a moment and then came forward to kiss me on both cheeks. She had given Papa his dark eyes and Louis his sharp jaw. She had given me the ability to take my feelings and bury them under hard stone.
