Page 22 of The Heir Apparent
“I would like to pay for Lexi’s education,” he said.
Stewart kept his gaze downward.
“I should have done more for Isla, and I didn’t. Our father rarely spoke to us, but when he did, he would say to Isla, ‘Be careful, your face is your future.’ She always wanted to get away from him, but in the end, she married a man just like him,” James said, slowly preparing his own tea.
Our cups steamed untouched in front of Stewart and me.
“Your Grace, your dedication to your niece is admirable,” Stewart said. “But I fear significant decisions are being made in the fog of grief.”
“Lexi is free to choose,” James said. “I am simply facilitating her choice to have a different kind of life than the one to which she was born.”
Stewart turned to me. “Once you head down this path, it will be enormously difficult to turn back.”
I began to cry, not because I was particularly scared, but because James had warned me they would try to coerce me back with an ultimatum. Stewart looked pained, but forged ahead.
“Prince Frederick wishes me to inform you that as executor of your trust, he has enacted a variance so that you will only be able to access your inheritance at age thirty, rather than twenty-five,” he said.
I nodded, hot tears and snot streaming down my chin. Stewart handed me a handkerchief, which I blindly accepted. Louis and I had been surprised to find that Mum had a will prepared before she died, though we couldn’t understand why she made Papa the executor of the trust. I suppose she had no one else to ask.
She was almost broke by the last few months of her life—not that I particularly cared about the money. But I was also set toinherit her jewellery, including her engagement ring, which I yearned to hold in my fist until it dug into my flesh. I wanted that ring the same way I would have treasured her discarded apple cores, her pencils delicately marked by her teeth, a water glass with the ghost of her lipstick on the rim.
“Probably best you go now, don’t you think?” James said calmly and Stewart nodded.
Six months later, I was living in a two-bedroom flat in Sandy Bay and ready to begin my new life as a science student. I was surprised to find that apartment living was not dissimilar from boarding school life. There were popular tenants and outcasts, villains and shut-ins. The block was filled with wealthy retirees who had downsized from the sagging mansions along the beachfront. Most seemed to fear the moment their adult children would find out about a fall or an accidental attempt to microwave a metal saucepan and move them into nursing homes. All disapproved of my presence since I came with a horde of photographers and 24/7 security guards who sat outside the block in their cars with the engines running.
James paid for my rent and school fees and gave me a credit card with a monthly limit for expenses. For the first three months, I was terrified by the concept of finite resources and lived on nothing but pasta and balsamic vinegar. Once James encouraged me to live normally, I blew it all in ten days. Over time, I slowly worked out what things cost, mostly by imitating my fellow students on their purchases. I learned that I could live on packets of Indomie Nasi Goreng noodles on the last days of the month, and that the most dreaded expense of all was university textbooks. I floated the idea of getting a job, but my security detail deemed it too dangerous. I got better over time, but I still had the stink of a rich girl pretending to be normal, scouring the Chemist Warehouse catalogue for bargains, and then dropping $350 on Miu Miu sunglasses because I forgot to ask the saleswoman the price before having her wrap them up.
The palace told the tabloids that Granny and Papa were thrilled by my choice and had counselled me by phone as I considered changing my long-held plans.
“She’s always had such a love of Australia. Prince Frederick was not at all surprised she wanted to stay there after finally having the chance to visit. She’s truly a daddy’s girl and he was there every step of the way as she rethought her plans to study at St. Andrews with her brother,” a “friend” told theDaily Post.
“Alexandrina still intends to be a working royal, but her dream is to focus her future philanthropic efforts on health and medical research. She’ll simply be the most educated princess in British history.”
I met Finn in my first week of classes. At first, no one dared approach me. It was a phenomenon I had seen only occur around Granny: when she walked into a room, she was like a shark swimming into a school of fish. Hordes of guests stepped back in unison, eyes averted, the path before her magically cleared. For lower-ranked royals it was quite the opposite. The socially ambitious swam alongside us like suckerfish. I had expected to be accosted at university, but instead I found myself friendless.
Finn was the most popular boy in Hobart. His family dated back to the first penal colony—the ultimate status symbol in the state—and the Vanderville name was on street signs and buildings across the city. No one knew he was smart until he graduated at the top of his class and decided to study chemistry. Everywhere he went on campus, he was trailed by a swarm of recent grads from Hobart’s private schools. With his blond curls and flushed cheeks, he had been a cherubic child who drew gasps everywhere he went, and he still had the confidence of a little boy who believed himself truly beautiful. On our first day of organic chemistry, our lecturer paired everyone off as lab partners by going down the class list alphabetically. Vanderville and Villiers were assigned to Bench 5.
When I approached him, he quirked a brow and grinned at me. “I’ve been waiting for us to meet.”
And that was it. I had made my first friend outside the gates of palaces and boarding schools. I was aware that Finn initially saw me as a novelty prize from a circus sideshow. He displayed me at nightclubs and gay bars and family gatherings. He casually captured me in the background of his Instagram stories, which were so abundant that they looked more like tiny grains of rice than dashes at the top of his page. I was useful to him and I allowed myself to be used because he was fun and I was lonely.
In our second year of uni, he moved into the guest bedroom of my flat. Neither of us had any practical skills and it was a relief to find someone with whom I could sit on the floor and watch YouTube tutorials so we could figure out how to reboot the modem or remove red wine from the carpet. Being my hanger-on came with very few perks, except for being described as my “unidentified male companion” by theDaily Post.The photographers who stalked me in packs eventually thinned out to just a few stragglers as the novelty of my desertion wore off. But still, Finn stayed by my side.
Through the relentless grind of university and then medical school and hospital night shifts, our relationship of convenience deepened into something else. We raised each other. Not once had he betrayed my confidence. He knew all my secrets and he held them close. In the end we succumbed to a real friendship.
I was shadowed by my security detail for the duration of my bachelor’s studies in Australia. TheDaily Postrepeatedly reminded its readers that it was costing the British taxpayer £250,000 a year to guard an absconding princess. Leo, a thirty-year-old with a cheeky grin, was my protection officer for more than a year, and we carried on a frenzied affair that was fuelled almost entirely by the thrill of secret sex. But then Martin, his gruff older colleague, caught us kissing in the underground garage of my apartment block. The next day Leo was gone, put on a plane back to London, and replaced with a stern female protection officer called Susan.
I had been smart enough to keep my texts to Leo in code and avoid the sharing of nudes altogether. But when he tried tosell the details of our trysts to the tabloids, I was forced to issue an SOS to Stewart. A mysterious arrangement was made that likely involved a lump payment for Leo and a requirement that I return home for Christmas for the traditional family walk to church.
“This is why royals fuck other royals, doll,” Finn sighed. “It’s mutually assured destruction.”
My taxpayer-funded security was finally withdrawn when word reached Papa that I had sat the Graduate Medical School Admissions Test, the dreaded exam that determines whether undergrads will be admitted into the Doctor of Medicine master’s program. Finn and I passed, and he posted the news, coupled with a boomerang of us clinking champagne flutes, on his Instagram stories.
A month later, I walked out of my building and got halfway down the street before I realised something was different. There had been no white Holden Commodores idling by the kerb when I left the house. No middle-aged man with a crew cut had given me a brusque hello. No one was following me. I stood on Sandy Bay Road in Tasmania’s strange autumn light. I looked out at the jumble of masts on the boats docked at the marina. I realised this was only the second time in my entire life that I had been completely alone.
I went to my classes, met friends for drinks and said nothing to anyone. Finn and I bought a barbecue chicken and a pasta salad from Coles and walked home. I was aware that if any of the Isla obsessives who sent me ranting 72-page handwritten letters were to jump out of a bush, they could easily kill us both.
“Have you noticed anything different?” I asked.
