Page 51 of The Heir Apparent
I was quiet for a moment. “Do you love him?”
He snorted, as if out of habit, and then his face became soft. How long had they been obscuring their soft hearts behind roughhousing and machismo? Our ancestor, one of the Edwards, felt the kind of all-consuming adoration for his favourite that saw him lavish the young man with silver and land. His obsession was so offensive to the court that Edward’s father ripped great fistfuls of hair from his son’s head. The favourite was exiled multiple times, but he and Edward could not be apart. On his fourth and final attempt to return to court, the barons kidnapped the man, put him on trial and beheaded him.
“You know, things are different now,” I said. “At some point there’s going to be a gay king, and they’ll just have to deal with it.”
He blanched at the word. “I don’t know if I’m that.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling childish and out of my depth. “That’s okay too. Whatever you are, or whatever you want to be, it’s fine.”
He snorted again, but his eyes were wet. “Thanks. But you know it’s more complicated than that.”
“If you told Mum, she wouldn’t mind at all. You know that, right?”
It was suddenly important to me that he know that. I had no clue how Papa would react, and the prospect that he would ever find out filled me with terror. But Mum’s devotion to us was like gravity. It was as dependable as the rising sun, the tick of the clock, the slow, relentless expansion of the universe. There was nothing we could do or say that would make her let go.
“I know,” Louis sighed. “But don’t tell her. She’s got too much going on. We need to take care of her right now, not the other way around.”
The two minutes in age between us always felt like an era to me. I assumed that whatever he had gleaned about life in that sliver of time before my arrival had made him as sage and worn as an old man. When Mum was sobbing in the bathroom, it was Louis who put the music on loud in my bedroom and went to comfort her. When Papa and Mum were fighting again, he would take me for a long walk around Elton Park so I couldn’t hear the insults they threw at each other. Now I wished he could be the boy he was supposed to be without the crown winking at him in the distance.
“How about we just… don’t do anything for now? It’s just you, me, Kris and Amira. Like it’s always been,” I said.
He nodded, gazing at nothing. After a while he surfaced from the depths of himself and smiled at me. “Yeah, okay.”
There was a rap at the door and Granny came in, wearing her burgundy dressing gown and slippers.
“Oh, you’re here too,” she said to Louis brightly.
She was breathing a little hard, as if she had been running. Her face was glowing with excitement and adventure.
“Pearl has gone into labour,” she said to me. “The first of the litter should be here within the hour. Would you like to join me while I help her?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Louis, you can come too, but you’ll have to watch from the back. This is women’s business,” Granny said as she left the room.
I pulled a jumper over my head and shuffled into my ugg boots. Louis was still on my bed, his arms wrapped around himself. He had a fragile look, like he had been crying a long time, and now he was sated and spent.
“Come on,” I said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “It’ll be fun.”
We hurried through the dark halls of the castle together, ready to stay up all night, just so we could watch new life burst into the world.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
2 May 2023
An explosion of light filled the car as we drove past the pack of photographers and through the palace gates. Amira and I glanced at each other, remembering Mary’s instruction: “Engage in conversation and smile slightly when they get the car shot. You want something in between a big grin and a neutral expression. There’s no photo more unflattering or more open to misinterpretation than a nighttime shot taken of you in a car.”
She wasn’t wrong. In the early days of Louis and Amira, the overexposed photos of them in the back of black cabs, sweaty and exhausted after a night at a club, were positively seamy. When the tabloids were trying to cast my escape to Australia as a Britney-style breakdown, I learned that the photo taken of me at the end of the night was far more important than the one taken at the beginning. Finn and Jack would dawdle at the pub’s entrance before we left, making small talk with the bouncer, while I powdered my face and brushed out my hair in the ladies’ room for the drive home.
“Are you smiling slightly, my friend?” I asked.
“Just a smidge more than a neutral expression.”
A real smile broke out on my face as another flashbulb dazzled us. That, of course, was the photo they would use in the tabloids the next day, much to Mary’s chagrin.
The state banquet for the Bahamian prime minister had been a year in the making. Every time I had visited Granny, I would see a bustle of activity: staff carefully laying out six crystal glasses for each place setting, using a ruler to ensure each seat was precisely forty-five centimetres apart, folding towers of napkins into Dutch bonnets. Granny had been tempted to call it off when Papa and Louis died, but she ultimately decided to persevere. The idea of their half-tailored tuxedos hanging limply somewhere on Savile Row was rankling me in the lead-up to the dinner.
Mary had started sourcing a gown for me the day I’d landed in London. She had spent the subsequent five months locked in quiet negotiations with Stewart and Granny over the medals I would need for the evening. As an absconder, I hadn’t been given a single honour. Demelza and Birdie would wear the deep-blue sash that signified their status as Dames Grand Cross. Granny had bestowed the honour upon them on their twenty-third birthdays. I had spent the night of my own twenty-third vomiting off the roof of the Jennings shed, so my sash was still pending.
