Page 10 of The Heir Apparent
“Lexi.” Amira’s quiet whisper brought me swimming back to the surface. “What will she do with me now?”
I held my breath. How many women in the long history of this family have lain awake asking themselves this very question? The palace was silent for the night, and deep within its labyrinthine halls, a woman was fearful of her fate. I reached across the no-man’s land between us and found her hand. I wanted to lie and tell her it was all going to be okay.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’m here now. And I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“You won’t leave again, will you?”
I was silent for a long time, and it felt like the palace itself had stopped to hear my answer.
“It’s all going to be okay,” I said.
CHAPTER FIVE
1991
The thing about being an aristocrat is that you meet very few people.
With our garden parties and investitures, the royal family is unique in brushing up against the masses. But the ranks of nobility below us are cloistered in a suffocating circle of exclusivity.
From nursery schools to pony clubs, through to Eton and the Bullingdon, a small batch of people enriched by the transatlantic slave trade, generous inheritance taxes and colonial robbery rise up together. They play together, they study together, they marry each other, and then they have children together, braiding the gilded threads of this community even tighter.
Grown men wear their Eton cufflinks to their Berkeley Square offices—if they have a job at all. They order £30 Johnnie Walker Blue cocktails at Louie and complain that the influx of foreign oligarchs is driving up house prices in Chelsea. They mercilessly mock the Saudis and Russians arriving in London—as if their money isn’t dripping in blood as well. They vacation in Mustique. Their wives wear neutral cashmere jumpers from JOSEPH, go to Pilates at Lanserhof, and get bi-weekly blowouts at Jo Hansford.
From the cradle to the grave, they associate only with each other. Hardly anyone is granted admittance. Occasionally a nobleman will marry a model to inject some height and cheekbones into his gene pool. But she is never truly one of them. Even fewer leave by choice. Mum and I are the only self-imposed exiles that I can name.
For many, it’s cosy in this pond. You could spend your whole life swimming in its warm waters. As long as you don’t roil its delicate ecosystem, the creatures that lurk in the mud would never open their snapping jaws on your feet.
Victoria Shankar wanted in.
She was born Vikki Yarborough, the daughter of a plumber and a doctor’s receptionist, in Newcastle upon Tyne. She had long legs and a pleasing face, and she parlayed these assets into a job as a flight attendant for British Airways. Vikki wasn’t just pretty; she was clever. She used her meagre salary to pay for elocution lessons, smoothing out the swooping vowels of her Geordie accent, emerging with a good approximation of Received Pronunciation.
Her counterfeit refinement and 25-inch waist propelled her straight to the front of the plane, where she walked the aisles with a tray of champagne flutes. Madhav Shankar, the son of a tech millionaire, was sitting in seat 4A when Vikki caught his eye. An hour before the plane landed in Milan, he slipped her his business card and said: “I’m staying at the Grand Hotel.”
She smiled demurely and tucked the card under his dinner tray.
“That’s very kind, sir, but I’m not allowed to see you outside of this plane. It’s forbidden.”
She’d settled on the word months ago for this very scenario: handsome businessman, first-class seat, an invitation for a tryst. There was something about the word “forbidden” that felt salty sweet on the tongue. Madhav’s eyebrow quirked and she knew it had the desired effect.
“I would never wish to imperil your employment,” he said.
Again, she gave that smile, a slow blink and she moved along with her bottle of Bollinger.
It was a high-stakes gamble, but Vikki somehow knew that the right man with the right resources did not need a little thing like her phone number to find her. And she was right. When she emerged that evening from the hotel where the BA staff were staying in a velvet cocktail dress and the Alaïa heels she couldn’t afford, Madhav was waiting for her. She blew off her colleagues for drinks that night.
From Frankfurt to Brussels, Madhav appeared outside Vikki’s hotels. Usually he was leaning against a rented sports car, ready to take her to the most boring, most exclusive restaurant in town. At all times, she displayed a careful ambivalence to their relationship. She was too young for anything serious, she intimated. Her career was too much of an adventure to give up. She liked the pretty things he bought her, but she did not value them. When she went back to her grimy Bexley flat at the end of her flight rotation, she lay on her bed and plotted.
Four months in, she lowered the boom.
“I’m never going to marry you,” she breathed over a guttering candle and porto tonicos in Lisbon. Vikki kept it light and teasing, just how she’d practised.
“Is that right?” he asked.
They were married eight months later. A working-class Geordie was not the girl Madhav’s wealthy Hindu parents had in mind for him, their first-born son and heir to the family company. Vikki had anticipated this and never pushed for an introduction during their courtship. She had rightly sensed he felt stifled by his family and yearned for someone to hand him the match to set fire to his life. When he told her he’d been disinherited, she held him in her arms.
“I’ve never cared about money, we can strike out on our own,” she said, again just as she’d practised.
The Chelsea apartment, the South African hunting lodge in the Kruger National Park, and a £5 million trust were beyondhis parents’ reach. It was a good start for the newly minted Victoria Shankar. When Krishiv was born in 1992, Mayfair IT (an extremely white name chosen by Vikki to obscure its foreign founder) was becoming increasingly popular in London’s financial services sector for its systems integration. Madhav, set adrift from his family, had no qualms exploiting the connections they had forged in London when he worked for them. He also found that he could steal his father’s clients by suggesting perhaps they’d prefer the services of a British-based company over an Indian one.
