Page 24 of The Heir Apparent
“In a few weeks, he’s going back to work on his family’s vineyard in the Coal River Valley. It’s fully fenced, and it’s not open to the public. His mother lives in the main house, but he’s looking for housemates to share his cottage on the property,” James said.
We hopped into James’s old LandCruiser and drove up to the lucerne paddock, where the flock was grazing. There is something so stark and haunting about the Australian landscape. It is neither green nor pleasant. It isn’t trying to kill you, but it doesn’t particularly care if you live or die in its pitiless surroundings either. It was my ancestor who sent James Cook to this place to claim it and bend it to the crown’s will, to unleash disease, misery and pain on the people who lived here.Centuries later, I was here too, hoping to be granted the land’s benedictions. I vowed to tread lighter than the ghouls who came before me.
The wind was picking up that day and the grass swirled around us like skirts. James pulled the truck over, and Finn and I walked gingerly through the field in our inappropriate footwear. Surrounded by yapping kelpies, a man in Blundstones and jeans emerged in the near distance. When James stuck his fingers in his mouth and emitted an ear-piercing whistle, the man turned to look at us. He was tall. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to expose strong forearms and tanned skin.
“Uh oh,” Finn whispered as he ambled towards us. “Is he going to be trouble for you or for me? I can’t tell.”
“Calm down, you two. He has a girlfriend,” James muttered. Louder, he said: “Jack, this is my niece, Lexi, and her friend Finn.”
His hand enveloped mine and he gave me a warm smile. He had a flop of brown hair, dark eyes and the smallest scar on his lips that only enhanced his looks.
“Hey, Lexi—really nice to meet you.”
Finn beamed as he shook Jack’s hand. Despite the whipping autumn winds, I felt hot and breathless.
“I hear you’re both studying to be doctors—that’s amazing,” he said. “James says you’re looking for a place to stay. I hope you like wine. And dogs. The place is crawling with them.”
It was then that I knew I was the one who was in trouble.
CHAPTER EIGHT
4 January 2023
I spent all night dreaming of Mum, floating together on the imaginary raft she built for us.
“We’re going down a stream in the Pyrenees,” I would whisper.
“How about the Ganges? The air smells like spices and people are throwing flowers into the water.”
“You always want to go to the most humid places,” I would moan. “And we have curly hair.”
I snapped awake when I realised someone was in the room opening the curtains. Morning light scattered halos across my vision, and I pulled the blanket over my head. My martinis had gone rancid in my bloodstream, like battery acid. The poison was moving to my right temple in preparation for a drilling ten-hour headache.
“I might skip tea, thank you,” I said from under the blankets to the maid, who was making an awful lot of noise. “But I’ll take some paracetamol, please.”
When I felt the unmistakable weight of a person sitting down on the bed beside me, I pulled the sheets down. It didn’t matter if she was about to faint—a Cumberland maid did not sit on a royal’s bed.
“Hello, Lexi,” Vikki said.
For a woman who had just lost her only son, she was still somehow glowing with Pilates-induced health. She had stopped drawing thick lines of liquid eyeliner in sharp wings and replaced them with brown kohl pencil. She was in a sumptuous burnt-orange duster coat over a cream turtleneck, leggings and riding boots. The intervening years (or a surgeon’s incisions) gave her the snatched, angular face of a runway model.
I sat up in bed and wrapped my arms around her.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
“Good lord, you stink like a distillery,” she said airily, but there were tears in her eyes.
Papa had never been particularly kind to Vikki. He had a natural suspicion of anyone from outside the home counties, and there was something about Vikki’s raw ambition he found frightening. Being born lucky did not stop a person yearning for more, but it satiated the appetites enough to be wary of the truly hungry.
When news first broke that Amira and Louis were dating, the tabloids took vicious delight in Vikki’s history as a “trolley dolly.” Someone—either a palace aide or one of Louis’s friends—leaked to the tabloids that when invited to Scotland for a shooting weekend, Vikki showed up in a cloud of Chanel No 5. They claimed the Shankars failed to tip the keeper or thank the grouse beaters. They also apparently slammed doors, took multiple calls on their mobile phones and drank far too much at elevenses. At the end of the shoot, Vikki inquired after “the toilet” instead of calling it the lavatory.
But the Shankars would never have done any of these things. No one would have been better researched on the etiquette of a dreary shooting party than Vikki and Madhav. I had no doubt Madhav procured a fat wad of £10 notes so that he could correctly pay the traditional thirty quid for the first hundred birds and a tenner for every hundred that followed. Vikki would have raided every Purdey store in West London for tweed capsand blazers and wellies. When food and drink was served out the back of a Range Rover at 11 a.m., they would have politely sipped one Bullshot each. The leaking of falsehoods to the tabloids was a threat and a reminder: you may learn our ways, you may be richer than us, you may even infuse your genetic code into the line by becoming grandparents to the future monarch. But you will never, ever be one of us.
“Granny said you’d been in India?” I asked.
“We were, but we went to Switzerland for Kris,” she said.
I was silent for a moment. “They didn’t transport him with Papa and Louis?”
