Page 32 of The Heir Apparent
“I don’t want Cumberland 1,” I said, softer now. “You should stay there as long as you like.”
She rolled her eyes and huffed out a foggy breath. “I don’t care about the stupid bloody apartment.”
“Well, whatdoyou care about then?” I asked. “Because it seems like you’ve got a chance to get your life back now. You’re not even thirty. You’ve got time to have a career, if that’s what you want. You’ve got a business degree you’venever used. You can have kids. Why are you so determined to stay in this thing?”
She stared at me, aghast. Her eyes were ringed black from exhaustion and smudged mascara. Wisps of hair were starting to curl out of her chignon. “You are so conceited, you know that? You havealwaysthought you were better than everyone else. You had to move to Australia to prove how much smarter and how much more special you are than the rest of us.”
“Amira—”
“You haven’t spoken to me in three years, you haven’t been properly in my life for more than a decade, and now you’re back here telling me how I should live?”
She strode towards me and pointed a shaking finger in my direction.
“You were a shitty friend to me,” she said, tears cracking her voice. “And an even worse sister to Louis. When you left, you trapped him here. All of this is your fault. And now you have the gall to stand before me and say you’re still not sure what you’re going to do? Your brother sacrificed so much for his duty to the crown, and you don’t even care about it. Even after you bury him, you’re still failing him.”
Somewhere in the stone battlements above us, a robin whistled an incongruously happy tune. Amira turned and walked away from me, disappearing into the dark castle.
I sat in the quadrangle for a long time, even as my hands and face began to ache in the cold, even as the robin’s song fell silent.
CHAPTER TEN
2009
It was March Equinox and everyone at Astley was getting ready for the end of Lent Term. We always celebrated the arrival of spring holiday with a school dance. The next day, our parents came to watch the cadets parade through campus, and then we all went home for Easter break.
But first, I had to get through ballet class. I was up at dawn, trudging through grass that crackled underfoot as I made my way to the dance studio. My ears hurt in the cold. My nose streamed. The sun seemed as sleepy as I was, only deigning to rise at seven-thirty. I was fifteen, no longer a “Shell” in boarding school parlance, but a “Remove.” Breasts and hips had bloomed seemingly out of nowhere. My period had arrived a year earlier, bringing with it an onslaught of furious, fiery acne. To my great shame, a crisis meeting had been held at the palace to discuss my face. A doctor I’d never met prescribed me a contraceptive pill that is now banned in France for causing an inordinate number of strokes in young women. The little tablets, as sugary and delicate as silver cachous on a Christmas biscuit, were decanted into a vitamin bottle and sent to Astley in bulk to conceal the fact that I was a child on birth control.
But there was no cure for my unwieldy figure. I had alwaysbeen a tiny, beautiful child, with black curls cascading down my narrow shoulders. It was assumed that I would grow to be like my mother who, by then, was divorced from Papa and clambering out of Rolls-Royces with her collarbones protruding and her thigh gap on display. No one ever mentioned that her elegant body was achieved with a bony finger thrust to the back of her gullet. The courtiers who ran our lives never had much command of hereditary genetics. The classic Villiers hips and arse that suddenly sprouted from my teenage body were met with grave disappointment.
Dancing was my idea. I had seen an interview on television with a famous actress who seemed to be celebrated mostly for her childlike body. She looked like a twelve-year-old boy with B-cup breasts, a prominent sternum and veins that roped around her spindly arms. When the journalist asked how she maintained such an enviable figure, she tittered and claimed she ate nothing but burgers and ice cream.
“But I used to dance and that kind of changed my physicality,” she said. “I started ballet as a child and I danced every day for four hours until I was nineteen when I became an actress.”
It was 2009, and this seemed like a pretty good deal to me. I signed up for ballet classes through Astley’s dance program, and convinced Mum I should be allowed to do additional training in town on the weekends. The burgers and ice cream would have to wait until dancing successfully scrambled my genetic code. There were many days when I consumed nothing but watermelon.
On the morning of the end-of-term dance, I was walking past The Mound, a strange little hill on school grounds that may have been a neolithic structure for ancient rituals. Now it served as a convenient location for Astley kids to smoke and pash, away from the prying eyes of housemasters. I had put myself on a “Diet Coke cleanse” that week and my heart was racing from the combination of caffeine and roaring hunger. When I felt myself lift off the ground, I wasn’t sure if I’d finally pushed it too far and this was what fainting felt like.
“Creeping back to your suite after a wild night on the town?” Kris crooned in my ear.
Slung over his shoulder, I looked upside down to see Louis wandering up the path in his camo fatigues with two rifle bags under his arm.
“Put her down, mate,” my brother said.
Louis was already six feet tall and well muscled for a fifteen-year-old. His skin was clear and his braces had recently been unhooked from his teeth. As he ascended towards manhood, I wondered if the conditions on his side of the womb were fairer than mine. Was the amniotic fluid warmer? Did his cord deliver him an extra flush of oestrogen to create those big eyes that made him look like a Disney forest creature?
“I’ve got ballet,” I said. “What are you two doing?”
“We’ve got cadets,” Kris said as he placed me back on the ground. “We’re learning to be men.”
Cadets was introduced to a handful of schools in the nineteenth century to give boys basic military training in case France ever invaded. In the intervening decades, it was decoupled from the British military and touted to parents as a program that taught teenagers discipline and wilderness skills.
“You joining us for a drink on The Mound before the dance?” Kris asked. “It’s Removes only—no Shells allowed.”
“Yep, we’ll be there,” I said.
Louis nudged me with his rifle bag. “Don’t forget they’ll be here tomorrow. Both of them.”
Since the divorce, Mum and Papa had studiously avoided each other, letting their aides manage the drudgery of parenting (permission slips, broken eyeglasses, poor exam results) on their behalf. But Louis was leading the Removes class cadets in tomorrow’s parade. In increasingly passive-aggressive messages sent via their courtiers, neither Mum nor Papa would back down. In the end, there was no other option but for both to attend. For regular divorced couples, this wouldn’t be an issue. Astley’s immense quadrangle provided plenty of space to avoidcontact while still being able to glower at one another over a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers. But a royal rota photographer was also being sent to capture Louis’s display of masculinity and natural leadership in his military dress uniform. The Prince and Princess of Scotland simply had to stand together, or the tabloids would have their front-page story sorted for the next week. A compromise was struck: I would stand between them as a visual and emotional buffer.
