Spare

The therapist told me to take deep breaths. She asked me to describe the scene several times. Each time I did it seemed more like a bad dream.

And made me a bit calmer.

I told her: I’m proud of myself.

Proud, Harry? Why’s that?

I didn’t hit him back.

I stayed true to my word, didn’t tell Meg.

But not long after she returned from her trip, she saw me coming out of the shower and gasped.

Haz, whatare those scrapes and bruises on your back?

I couldn’t lie to her.

She wasn’t that surprised, and she wasn’t at all angry.

She was terribly sad.

63.

Soon after that day it was announced that the two royal households, Cambridge and Sussex, would no longer share an office. We’d no longer be working together in any capacity. The Fab Four…finis.

Reaction was about as expected. The public groaned, journalists brayed. The more disheartening response was from my family. Silence. They never commented publicly, never said anything privately to me. I never heard from Pa, never heard from Granny. It made me think, really think, about the silence that surrounded everything else that happened to me and Meg. I’d always told myself that, just because everyone in my family didn’t explicitly condemn press attacks, it didn’t mean they condoned them. But now I asked: Is that true? How do I know? If they never say anything, why do I so often assume that I know how they feel?

And that they’re unequivocally on our side?

Everything I’d been taught, everything I’d grown up believing about the family, and about the monarchy, about its essential fairness, its job of uniting rather than dividing, was being undermined, called into question. Was it all fake? Was it all just a show? Because if we couldn’t stand up for one another, rally around our newest member, our first biracial member, then what were we really? Was that a true constitutional monarchy? Was that a real family?

Isn’t “defending each other” the first rule of every family?

64.

Meg and I moved our office into Buckingham Palace.

We also moved into a new home.

Frogmore was ready.

We loved that place. From the first minute. It felt as if we were destined to live there. We couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning, go for a long walk in the gardens, check in with the swans. Especially grumpy Steve.

We met the Queen’s gardeners, got to know their names and the names of all the flowers. They thrilled at how much we appreciated, and praised, their artistry.

Amid all this change we huddled with our new head of comms, Sara. We plotted a new strategy with her, the centerpiece of which was having nothing whatsoever to do with the Royal Rota, and hoped we might soon be able to make a fresh start.

Towards the end of April 2019, days before Meg was due to give birth, Willy rang.

I took the call in our new garden.

Something had happened between him and Pa and Camilla. I couldn’t get the whole story, he was talking too fast, and was way too upset. He was seething actually. I gathered that Pa and Camilla’s people had planted a story or stories about him and Kate, and the kids, and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. Give Pa and Camilla an inch, he said, they take a mile.

They’ve done this to me for the last time.

I got it. They’d done the same to me and Meg as well.

But it wasn’t them, technically, it was the most gung-ho member of Pa’s comms team, a true believer who’d devised and launched a new campaign of getting good press for Pa and Camilla at the expense of bad press for us. For some time this person had been peddling unflattering stories, fake stories, about the Heir and Spare, to all the papers. I suspected that this person had been the lone source for stories about a hunting trip I’d made to Germany in 2017, stories that made me out to be some fat-bottomed seventeenth-century baron who craved blood and trophies, when in reality I was working with German farmers to cull wild boar and save their crops. I believed the story had been offered as a straight swap, in exchange for greater access to Pa, and also as a reward for the suppression of stories about Camilla’s son, who’d been gadding around London, generating tawdry rumors. I was displeased about being used like this, and livid about it being done to Meg, but I had to admit it was happening much more often lately to Willy. And he was justifiably incandescent.

He’d already confronted Pa once about this woman, face-to-face. I’d gone along for moral support. The scene took place at Clarence House, in Pa’s study. I remember the windows being wide open, the white curtains blowing in and out, so it must’ve been a warm night. Willy put it to Pa: How can you be letting a stranger do this to your sons?