Page 80 of The Heir Apparent
Out the window, Belgravia’s gleaming white buildings looked like wedding cakes. Young men in suits who drove cars and opened doors for the surrounding embassies loitered and smoked on the kerb below, waiting for something to happen. I could no longer ignore the wasp-like buzzing of my phone and answered Mary’s call.
“Hi.”
“Oh, Your Royal Highness,” Mary said, “I’ve been trying to reach you. We’re due at the hospital soon, but you’re… not home. Did you go swimming this morning?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. I’d forgotten all about it. “No, I’ll text you the address. Swing by and pick me up. I’ll change in the car.”
There was a long pause. “Will you be camera-ready?”
I looked at my reflection in Colin’s glossy oven door. “Maybe bring some makeup.”
Later, in the back of the car, I struggled into the candy-pink suit Mary had brought with her—clearly I was being punished for my bad behaviour—and tried to swipe neat swoops of liquid liner along my lids. I was due to open a refurbished obstetrics ward. It was my biggest engagement yet, an issue that was all mine, not a patronage I’d picked up on Papa or Louis’s behalf.
“Your numbers are up again, ma’am,” Mary said, pecking at her phone.
“Okay.”
“Sixty-nine per cent approval. Very good. We’re officially ahead of the Duke of Clarence now.”
I closed my eyes, wondering if a quick nap would deflate my puffy eyes or only make me look worse. The appearance at the hospital would last an hour and then I could go back to bed.
“Ma’am,” Mary said sternly, “is something the matter?”
“I’m just tired, sorry. I’ll perk up.”
“No, that’s not it,” she said, and I turned to her, surprised. “You’ve been off for two months now. Today is the day. This is the first day of your campaign, the start of everything we’ve been planning: you’re going to show them a new monarchy that doesn’t shy away from the issues. Maternal health is the one thing you wanted to focus on above all else. Then we’d do sexual violence. Then we’d start addressing the injustices of colonialism.”
I laughed. I could not believe I’d once had the gall to think I could fix those things. Mary looked astonished, and I sobered. “Sorry, sorry. I’m not laughing at you,” I said. “I’m just in a weird mood. You’re right. It is a good day.”
She studied me for a minute and then turned to her window. “You’re dropping weight too. If you lose any more, the tabloids will notice.”
Chastened, I tried to remember the last thing I’d eaten. There had been no time for breakfast because I was running late. Had I eaten dinner? I’d been to the palace in the evening for a reception and headed to Colin’s as soon as it was over. There had been talk of pizza. But then he’d made a pitcher of gimlets while I perched on his kitchen counter to watch, and then he was kissing me and undoing my blazer, and then he pinned me, gasping, against the cold marble benchtop. I closed my eyes again. Hunger pangs had woken me up in the middle of the night, but instead of getting up to search for food, I’d found my phone in the mess of clothes on the floor and googled the name again and again:David Rossi, Who is David Rossi?, Rossi + David, LinkedIn David Rossi, Instagram David Rossi.Now was the timeto tell Mary about David Rossi, to ask her to use the palace’s shadowy connections and her sheer bloody-mindedness to track this person down. But I hadn’t told a soul since I’d heard the name ten weeks earlier.
When the car pulled up at the hospital, the royal rota photographer was waiting alongside a Wolseley House videographer who would capture my every move so he could splice it together in a meaningless montage, set to an upbeat pop song, and upload it to Instagram. The family wasn’t on TikTok yet, but that was another silly little idea that Mary and I had thought up which would never be realised. I got out of the car, winched up my brightest smile and shook the hands of the doctors and hospital administrators lined up to greet me.
It was nice to be in a hospital again, even with the unfamiliar rat-a-tat of my stilettos on the floor. The chemical iodoform, used as a disinfectant, is what gives hospitals their ubiquitous, astringent odour. For most people, it hits the olfactory nerve and triggers a trauma response. For me, it’s the scent of comfort, of the one place I am totally myself. Coffee, exhaustion, Finn, the chaos of the human life cycle. It all came back to me as Dr. Jacqueline Rockcliffe, the newly minted head of obstetrics at Prince Frederick Memorial Hospital NHS Trust, showed me from room to room. A woman who had just given birth was pre-screened and served up for a seemingly natural conversation with me as the cameras rolled. My hand, guided by the muscle memory developed over a thousand night shifts, rested on the chart hanging from the edge of her bed. I intertwined my fingers to keep myself from picking it up and reading it. She handed me her scrunchy-faced baby and I held him in my arms as the camera shutters clicked.
“His stomach is a bit rounder today. Do you think that’s normal?” the woman asked.
“Probably just a bit of gas,” I murmured, feeling his distended belly. Then I caught myself. Quickly, I smiled. “Ask your doctor about it. Obviously we’re not going to try to sort that out with the cameras rolling!”
The photographers and assembled doctors laughed, and the pinched expression cleared from Mary’s face. This event was the closest we had come to acknowledging the fact that I had once been a member of the professional class. It was a potent, but perilous, part of my story. The thinking was that by the time I was a ninety-year-old monarch, everyone would remember fondly that I once was a doctor, that I’d once made use of my hands before my function became entirely symbolic. But while my future subjects were still getting to know me, my MD could be problematic. It suggested I didn’t want to really play this role, that I thought I was better than everyone else. That’s what the focus groups said, anyway.
After my visit with the new mother, the event was done, and the rota photographer was thrilled to move on with his day. I lingered for a moment to chat to Dr. Rockcliffe at the nurses’ station while Mary and the team waited, checking their watches and exchanging meaningful glances. Palace scheduling was practically set by an atomic clock, and we were now ten minutes behind.
Dr. Rockcliffe looked over my shoulder and brightened. “This here is the junior doctor assigned to the patient we just met.”
I turned to see a man my age, looking crumpled in his green scrubs. He dropped his charts on the bench and shook my hand, too exhausted to smile or bow. His eyes were ringed in black shadows, and his hair was flat from a recent nap against a hard surface.
“I’m Dr. Lee. Nice to meet you,” he said.
“A real pleasure,” I trilled, suddenly aware of my lurid pink outfit and stage makeup, detesting myself. “What year are you in, Dr. Lee?”
“I’m an F2,” he said. “Second year.”
I leaned in conspiratorially and whispered, “Are you exhausted?”
After a moment, he laughed, his reflexes as slow as if he were moving underwater. “A little. But it’s okay.”
