Spare

In seeming direct contradiction of this plan, he concluded by promising that the handsome prince would return to his grandmother “without ears.”

I remember hearing that and feeling the tips of my ears grow warm. I flashed back to childhood, when a friend suggested my ears be surgically pinned back, to prevent or correct the family curse. I said, flatly, no.

Days later, another insurgent leader invoked my mother. He said that I should learn from her example, break away from my family. Rebel against the imperialists, Harry.

Or else, he warned, a prince’s “blood will flow into our desert.”

I would’ve worried about Chels hearing any of this, but since we’d begun dating she’d been so harassed by the press that she’d completely unplugged. The papers didn’t exist for her. The internet was off-limits.

The British military, however, was very plugged in. Two months after announcing my deployment, the head of the Army, General Dannatt, abruptly called it off. Besides the public threats from insurgent leaders, British intelligence learned that my photo had been distributed among a group of Iraqi snipers, with instructions that I was the “mother of all targets.” These snipers were elite: they’d recently cut down six British soldiers. So the mission had simply become too dangerous, for me, for anyone who might have the bad luck to be standing next to me. I’d become, in the assessment of Dannatt and others, a “bullet magnet.” And the reason, he said, was the press. In his public statement canceling my deployment, he blasted journalists for their overwrought coverage, their wild speculations, which had “exacerbated” the threat level.

Pa’s staff also issued a public statement, saying I was “very disappointed,” which was untrue. I was crushed. When word first reached me I was at Windsor Barracks, sitting with my guys. I took a moment to collect myself, then told them the bad news. Though we’d just spent months traveling, training together, during which we’d become brothers in arms, they were now on their own.

It wasn’t simply that I felt sorry for myself. I worried about my team. Someone else would have to do my job, and I’d have to live forever with the wondering, the guilt. What if they were no good?

The following week, several papers reported that I was in deep depression. One or two, however, reported that the abrupt about-face in my deployment had been my own doing. The coward story, again. They said that, behind the scenes, I’d pressed my superiors to pull the plug.

2.

I pondered quitting the Army. What was the point of staying if I couldn’t actually be a soldier?

I talked it over with Chels. She was torn. On the one hand she couldn’t hide her relief. On the other she knew how much I wanted to be there for my team. She knew that I’d long felt persecuted by the press, and that the Army had been the one healthy outlet I’d found.

She also knew that I believed in the Mission.

I talked it over with Willy. He had complicated feelings as well. He sympathized, as a soldier. But as a sibling? A highly competitive older brother? He couldn’t bring himself to totally regret this turn of events.

Most of the time Willy and I didn’t have any truck with all that Heir-Spare nonsense. But now and then I’d be brought up short and realize that on some level it really did matter to him. Professionally, personally, he cared where I stood, what I was doing.

Not getting comfort from any quarter, I looked for it in vodka and Red Bull. And gin and tonic. I was photographed around this time going into or coming out of multiple pubs, clubs, house parties, at wee hours.

I didn’t love waking to find a photo of myself on the front page of a tabloid. But what I really couldn’t bear was the sound of the photo being taken in the first place. That click, that terrible noise, from over my shoulder or behind my back or within my peripheral vision, had always triggered me, had always made my heart race, but after Sandhurst it sounded like a gun cocking or a blade being notched open. And then, even a little worse, a little more traumatizing, came that blinding flash.

Great, I thought. The Army has made me more able to recognize threats, to feel threats, to become adrenalized in the face of those threats, and now it’s casting me aside.

I was in a bad, bad place.

Paps, somehow, knew. Around this time they began hitting me with their cameras, deliberately, trying to incite me. They’d brush, smack, jostle, or just straight wallop me, hoping to get a rise, hoping I’d retaliate, because that would create a better photo, and thus more money in their pockets. A snap of me in 2007 fetched about thirty thousand pounds. Down payment on a flat. But a snap of me doing something aggressive? That might be a down payment on a house in the countryside.

I got into one scrap that became big news. I came away with a swollen nose, and my bodyguard was livid. You made those paps rich, Harry! You happy?