Page 86 of The Heir Apparent
A wave slapped the rocks and a salty mist landed on our bare skin. I sipped my Aperol spritz in silence. Mum was staring at Louis.
“Could I?” she asked coldly.
“I’m not saying… you know, I’m just… if you go on people’s yachts and into nightclubs, it’s part of the territory.”
“And what places would you deem acceptable?” she asked. “Given that I was cut out of my own life with absolutely no protection, and all my old friends and relatives stopped speaking to me?”
Louis and I stared at our plates.
“Sorry, Mum,” he said. “I just worry about you sometimes, that’s all.”
“Yes, well, you can hold your father responsible for that,” she sniffed. “He wasn’t always quite so cruel, but the closer he gets to the crown, the more vicious he becomes.”
We started eating again and I hoped that was the end of it.
“You’re not exactly making it easy for him either,” Louis said softly.
There was a clattering of cutlery and the scrape of a chair. The table shuddered and the drinks slopped out of their glasses as Mum stood up and stalked back into the villa. We sat in silence as the horizon glowed and then blazed behind us.
“Sorry, Lexi,” he murmured.
The year before, Mum had travelled to Haiti to raise money for earthquake victims. Separated from us over Christmas, she had spent a week at a rape crisis centre in the Democratic Republic of Congo instead. A month before we went to Italy, she had been on the Turkish–Syrian border to draw attention to the growing refugee crisis. But she also went to movie premieres and fashion shows, and so all I heard from the people around me was how she was bringing the monarchy into disrepute.
Eventually Louis and I gave up on the evening and parted ways. He was on the top floor of the villa facing the gardens,while I was on the bottom floor overlooking the sea. I have no idea what time it was when Mum woke me up. Later, I would piece together every moment of what happened next, and it’s likely I hadn’t been asleep for long. I felt her warm hands on my cheeks and when I opened my eyes, she was already dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans.
“What is it?” I whispered.
She smiled at me. “Let’s go on a raft, for real this time.”
I looked out the window. The ocean was like mercury under a sliver of moon. “Now?”
“We’ll take the boat out into the gulf and watch the sun rise,” she said. She didn’t seem quite herself, her eyes glassy in a way that should have given me pause, although I dismissed it as a trick of the moonlight. “I can’t believe we’ve never done it before. My father would sometimes take me and James out on the loch at night. It was the only time we really spent with him. It’s magical out there.”
What I really wanted to do was go back to sleep. I will forever wonder what would have happened if I did. But until the end, I followed her. If she was the only one dancing at a reception, I would join her. If she gamely ate the goat testicles floating in stew during a trip to Mongolia, I picked up a spoon. If she wanted to take a boat into unfamiliar waters on a near moonless night, it took very little convincing for me to agree. My eighteenth birthday loomed. Soon I would be travelling the world, and then I would be at St. Andrews, and she would be unmoored from the last ties to her old life.
“Do you even know how to drive that boat?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” she said and pulled back my blankets.
It was chillier than I expected on the dock, but Mum strode confidently ahead of me. Davide, who had been leaning against a pole, stood straight when he saw us.
“Bellezza,” he said. He had the gravelly voice of a pack-a-day smoker. “What are you doing up so late?”
“Davide, we’re going to take the boat out so we can watch the sun rise. We’ll be back at six-thirty at the latest.”
He looked between us. “I’ll come, yes?”
“No, darling,” she said kindly. “It’s a mother–daughter outing. But don’t worry. You’ll be able to see us the whole time. We won’t go far.”
Again, he hesitated. “Bellezza, I must be with the boy and the girl, that’s what the Englishmen said.”
She gripped his arm and leaned in as if they had a secret. “They’re so strict, aren’t they? Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. I spent my whole childhood sailing, I know what I’m doing.”
Finally, he relented and helped us onto the boat. It was a motor yacht that was small enough for me to assume the owner rarely did anything but anchor it in the Tigullio Gulf to day-drink. There were two tiny cabins below deck. At the stern was a flat lounging area in white leather, with a diving board attached so you could jump straight from the yacht into the sparkling sea. As Davide untied the boat and tossed us the ropes, Mum pressed buttons, inserted the key and used the gear stick to lower the motors into the water. As she moved confidently around the cockpit, I started to relax.
“Have you driven this boat before?” I asked.
“Last summer,” she said. “I was here for about a week, and I got a quick lesson, although they’re all pretty much the same. This one’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
