Page 3 of The Heir Apparent
BREAKING: Prince Frederick injured in ski accident in Switzerland, palace says.
BREAKING: Prince Frederick, son Prince Louis and Duchess Amira’s brother Krishiv Shankar injured skiing in Zermatt, Switzerland. Follow our live blog for updates.
BREAKING: Heir to the throne Prince Frederick dead at 63 after avalanche, confirms Queen. Prince Louis in “critical condition.”
BREAKING: Prince Louis reportedly critical and brother-in-law Krishiv Shankar “brain dead” after Prince Frederick’s death in ski accident.
WATCH LIVE NOW: UK PM Jenny Walsh addresses nation after darkest day in British monarchy’s history. Follow our updates.
BREAKING: No sign of Princess Alexandrina after ski tragedy kills her father and leaves brother critical.
I whisked the remaining news alerts away and took a shaky breath. My text messages were all condolences and exclamation points and question marks.
Text me when you land okay? Call if you’re up to it, I don’t care what time it is, Jack had written just before we took off from Hobart.
Stewart hadn’t allowed him or Finn onto the chopper, insisting he only had space for me. As the chopper darted away, I watched the two of them standing there, growing smaller. I suppose they ended the trip then, packing up the tents and taking the ferry home. I imagined them sitting in our cosy living room with the news on the TV—sleeping bags and boots on every surface, where they’d stay for weeks on end without me to insist they be dealt with immediately.
The mess would still be there when I returned, perhaps in a month. Six weeks tops. Finn would smirk and say, “Sorry, dolly,” as I slipped back into my old skin and pretended to worry about the proper care and storage of expensive camping gear. Jack would be leaning against the doorjamb, smiling at me. Papa would still be dead, but Louis would be awake by then, his snap-frozen brain cells thoroughly thawed. The rightful heir spared, his aides would shoo me back to Australia in no time, I was sure of it.
The jet punched through the clouds over the island and into the light above. I looked down the list of missed calls and texts. I spotted a message from Amira, the first she’d sent me in three years.
Lexi, please come home now. I need you.
Louis and I were the first twins born in the line for more than three hundred years.
In 1660, King Charles II fell in love with our ancestor, Barbara Villiers, who was tall and luscious, with a tumble of dark hair and insouciant hips. She was from a noble but impoverished family and already married. So the king made Barbara his royal mistress and instead made a politically advantageous match in Catherine, a Portuguese Infanta who spoke little English and couldn’t seem to bear him a child.
Barbara might have remained a footnote in history, but three years later an outbreak of smallpox tore through Whitehall. First, Barbara’s husband died. Then, Queen Catherine was overcome. The next day, Charles married his mistress, and Barbara was England’s “uncrowned queen” no more. Within months, she was pregnant with twins, and the woman once deemed a royal whore was transformed into a vessel for the heir and spare.
Only one twin survived childbirth. There was something wrong with the girl, who was born very small and grey. Her brother, William, must have been feeding off her strength, because he arrived teeming with health, all dimpled knees and bread dough cheeks.
In delivering a healthy male, Barbara had catapulted herself into that most vaunted of all positions: the mother of a future king. But fate wasn’t done with her yet. A few years later, when smallpox returned to London, Charles succumbed to the disease, making three-year-old William the new king. Barbara, who had spent years consolidating her power in court, becameQueen Regent, ruling until her son was old enough to accede the throne.
The England we know was shaped by Barbara’s small, pale hands. A Scottish rebellion against her rule was brutally put down, and she retired the title of Prince of Wales forever, instead making her son, and all future male heirs, the Prince of Scotland. Charles’s House of Stuart never technically ended, but we Villiers crept inside it like ivy, twisting around support beams and window frames until we flourished over the roof. It is her name we keep as our own. And all of it was possible because of her twins—the girl who died, and the boy who didn’t.
Three centuries later, Louis and I were both expected to survive the perils of birth, and we promised to take the monarchy into interesting new territory. The question of which twin would rule had already been settled: the first child delivered was the heir. Unless she was a girl followed by a living boy, in which case she slid down the line of succession at the first sighting of his tiny regal penis.
The TV anchors of 1993 breakfast television giddily speculated about the constitutional implications of my mother’s pregnancy. What if Princess Isla required a caesarean, and an obstetrician found two boys in her belly? He alone held the fate of the British monarchy in his hands. From the gaping wound that contained two babies curled together like fish, he would reach inside and pluck out a future king. There were also those who argued that the last twin out was the first implanted, and therefore the kingdom’s rightful monarch.
The palace sensed a looming constitutional crisis. And so, when my mother’s labour entered its twentieth hour and the doctor said it was time to consider a caesarean, the Queen was consulted over the phone. She made her ruling. Isla would have to work these babies out of herself naturally. Intervention would only take place if our lives were under threat. The life of Isla, then twenty years old and one of the most famous women in the world, was never discussed.
At the time, she was still desperate to do everything perfectly, and thirty-seven minutes after her mother-in-law refused to end her misery, Isla gave birth to a healthy baby boy. I followed two minutes later—pallid, silent and female.
As Papa clutched his heir, I was whisked to another room where I was surrounded by a dozen doctors and nurses wielding nasal cannulas and nitric oxide. My mother moaned in pain and fear until finally, either an eternity or sixty seconds later, I unleashed an almighty wail. She had done it. She had birthed an heir and a spare in one afternoon. I imagine every royal woman experiences that moment of deliverance the same way, whether it is 1664 or 1993. That intake of breath as the doctor or the midwife peers over the child. Will the baby thrive? Is it a boy? Am I finally, finally safe?
By the nineties, princesses had earned a certain cultural cachet. The tabloids wanted designer gowns, shiny hair and bad boyfriends. Then they wanted an Abbey wedding to a nice man who was the harbinger of ruddy-faced babies and postpartum weight-loss stories.
Louis was the future of the family; I was a decorative accent.
Six hours after she delivered us, Mum was helped out of bed, her black curls brushed until they shone. A blousy seafoam maternity dress was pulled over her head—this was years before she started to rebel with the men’s blazers, Calvin Klein minimalism and oversized sweatshirts that haunt trend cycles to this day. She’s the reason every woman in the world wears sneakers with dresses. Sometimes I’ll be walking through town and a girl will pass me in old Levi’s, a man’s shirt and a baseball cap pulled over her hair. The post-divorce Isla aesthetic, they called it.
But on this day in 1993, she stood on the steps of the hospital in what was effectively a big green tent, the fabric so thin and pale she must have been terrified that one sneeze would destroy this antiseptic vision of postpartum perfection. Papa was beside her in his ubiquitous Savile Row, thirty-three years old, but looking far more nervous than his young wife.
The palace aides had choreographed the photo op perfectly. Isla would emerge with both of us in her arms, the teen bride transformed into a regal mother. After a moment, Papa would take the boy from her, and they would pose with one baby each. But in the glare of the camera flashes, he forgot his cue and did nothing but stand there. Mum, wobbly and in pain, gritted her teeth and held on to five kilos of sleeping babies while the world watched. Eventually, an aide opened the door to the hospital and ushered them back inside, taking the babies from her pale, spindly arms before she sank back into the wheelchair awaiting her.
They say four thousand people flocked to the palace to wait for the announcement of our names. An easel was placed at the gates:
Prince Louis Arthur Albert Lawrence, born 28 December 1993 at 2:02 p.m.
