Page 110 of The Heir Apparent
“It was pretty cool, actually.” He laughed. “But now I need a pint to take the edge off.”
I’d seen how his hands had trembled on the steering wheel for the entire journey home.
“I’m just at the pub on the corner if you need me,” he told Mary, then gave me a nod. “Good luck, ma’am.”
As he slipped through the front door, Mary led me down the hall to a kitchen overlooking an empty courtyard. Everything about the terrace was small. A rooster-themed wallpaper border curled at its edges. Faded curtains hung limply in the window. This was a woman’s space, once carefully curated, but since abandoned. At the table, Jenny Walsh and a man I didn’t recognise sat together sipping tea. They rose from their chairs when I came into the room, and I knew this was the last time anyone would do this for me.
“Your Highness,” Jenny said. “Did it all go to plan?”
A month earlier, when I had reached forward to shake Jenny’s hand at the palace reception, I had pressed a note into her palm. “I need your help,” it read. She had called me the next morning, and when I told her I wished to leave, she had engaged the services of Emmanuel Mensah, a constitutional scholar she knew from law school. He had quietly agreed to represent me as I relinquished my claim to the throne. When Mary and I sat down, he pulled a piece of paper and a fountain pen from his bag and placed them on the scratched table.
After long and careful consideration, I have decided to renounce my claim as heir apparent, it began, though I didn’t bother to read the rest. I knew how it went. I would ask parliament to strip me of my titles, withdraw me from the line of succession and bar any of my future descendants from a claim to the throne.
“Are we sure this will work?” I asked, the pen poised over the page. “The Queen doesn’t need to be here to make it legal?”
“Quite the opposite,” Emmanuel said. “Only parliament can bring an act to remove you from the line. Everything they’ve planned for next week is just theatre.”
I had left the manila envelope containing Stewart’s letter on the dining table in Cumberland 1. In his version, I claimed to be temperamentally unfit to wear the crown and that I therefore had no choice but to pass it to my beloved uncle. Granny and Richard were supposed to stand behind me while a palace photographer captured the moment I signed everything away. There had been talk of an interview with the BBC, but someone had clearly baulked at the idea, no longer trusting me in front of cameras. By the time I was meant to board the jet at Northolt a week from now, the Queen would be giving a televised address, reassuring her subjects that while the line had curved in recent years, it would never be broken.
I would give Richard the crown, but I was not willing to say he was worthy of wearing it. I had told the world enough lies as it was. With my passport hidden somewhere in Stewart’s apartment, and my security detail under strict instruction to follow my every move, it had been Mary’s idea to slip me out in the back of a van.
I lowered the heavy fountain pen to the letter and signed my name. Ink dripped from the nib and left a constellation around my signature. Mary fanned the wet spatter with her hand and then signed the document as my witness. Gingerly, she passed it to Emmanuel. Everyone was very quiet as we watched the ink dry.
“So that’s it?” I asked.
“Once everything’s public, I’ll ask the opposition leader to join me in bringing an act to parliament that recognises and ratifies your decision and passes succession to your uncle,” Jenny said.
Emmanuel left with the letter and a promise to stay in touch. Jenny, Mary and I sat back down at the table in silence and listened to the monotonous ticking of a rooster clockwedged into a pine hutch. Chino draped himself across my lap and fell asleep with one hindleg still balancing on the linoleum floor. After no one made a move to leave, Mary went to the kitchen and returned with a small white box. Inside was one cupcake lathered in pink icing. She stuck a candle in it and lit it with a match.
“Happy birthday, ma’am,” she said.
We stared as the candle started to dribble, until finally I leaned forward and blew it out. Mary took over, cutting the cake into quarters and handing a piece to each of us.
“I know the risks you’re taking to help me,” I started.
“Don’t,” Mary said sharply, and Jenny looked up from her cake. “You don’t have to say that.”
“I just wanted to say how grateful I am.”
Jenny popped a piece of cake into her mouth. “It shouldn’t have been this way.”
“Still,” I said, eating icing and a smatter of candle wax, the taste of childhood. “I don’t know where I’d be without you both.”
When we were done, Jenny packed up her bag and we walked to the front door. Outside, she signalled to her officer, who was loitering further up the street. She smiled and then reached into her pocket and handed me a navy-blue passport.
“Fresh from the printers,” she said.
I opened it to the photo page and saw for the first time my new name. No HRH, no title. OnlyAlexandrina Anne Barbara Mary Villiers. It was grand by any measure—overstuffed with Christian names and far too many syllables. But to me it felt as stark as the snow that blanketed the road.
I looked up at Jenny. “Are you going to get into trouble for all this?”
She smiled at me wearily. “Privately? Probably a little bit. Publicly? No. I don’t think they’ll want it out there that I had to help you slip out of the country like a fugitive.”
We hugged for a long time, and then I watched as she walked briskly down the street towards her waiting car. When theydrove away, I stood under a foggy streetlight and breathed in the cold night air.
Inside, I found Mary at the kitchen sink, Chino lying at her feet.
“Is it just you and Charlie living here?” I asked.
