Spare (59 page)

My emotions are complicated on this subject, naturally, but my bottom-line position isn’t. I’ll forever support my Queen, my Commander in Chief, my Granny. Even after she’s gone. My problem has never been with the monarchy, nor the concept of monarchy. It’s been with the press and the sick relationship that’s evolved between it and the Palace. I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me.

And I believe they’ll look back one day and wish they had too.

The question was:
Where to live?

We considered Canada. By and large it had been good to us. It had already come to feel like home. We could imagine spending the rest of our lives there. If we could just find a place the press didn’t know about, we said, Canada might be the answer.

Meg got in touch with a Vancouver friend, who connected us with an estate agent, and we started looking at houses. We were taking first steps, trying to be positive. Doesn’t really matter where we live, we said, so long as the Palace fulfills its obligation—and what I felt was its implicit promise—to keep us safe.

Meg asked me one night:
You don’t think they’d ever pull our security, do you?

Never. Not in this climate of hate. And not after what happened to my mother.

Also, not in the wake of my Uncle Andrew. He was embroiled in a shameful scandal, accused of the sexual assault of a young woman, and no one had so much as suggested that he lose his security. Whatever grievances people had against us, sex crimes weren’t on the list.

February 2020.

I scooped Archie from his nap and took him out to the lawn. It was sunny,
cold, and we gazed at the water, touched the dry leaves, collected rocks and twigs. I kissed his chubby little cheeks, tickled him, then glanced down at my phone to see a text from the head of our security team, Lloyde.

He needed to see me.

I carried Archie across the garden and handed him to Meg, then went across the soggy grass to the cottage where Lloyde and the other bodyguards were staying. We sat on a bench, both of us wearing puffer jackets. Waves rolling gently in the background, Lloyde told me that our security was being pulled. He and the whole team had been ordered to evacuate.

Surely they can’t.

I would tend to agree. But they are.

So much for the year of transition.

The threat level for us, Lloyde said, was still higher than for that of nearly every other royal, equal to that assigned the Queen. And yet the word had come down and there was to be no arguing.

So here we are, I said. The ultimate nightmare. The worst of all worst-case scenarios. Any bad actor in the world would now be able to find us, and it would just be me with a pistol to stop them.

Oh wait. No pistol. I’m in Canada.

I rang Pa. He wouldn’t take my calls.

Just then I got a text from Willy.
Can you speak?

Great. I was sure my older brother, after our recent walk in the Sandringham gardens, would be sympathetic. That he’d step up.

He said it was a government decision. Nothing to be done.

Lloyde was pleading
with his superiors at home, trying to get them at least to postpone the date when he and his team pulled out. He showed me the emails. He wrote:
We can’t just…leave them here!

The person at the other end wrote:
The decision has been made. As of March 31 they’re by themselves.

I scrambled to find new security. I spoke to consultants, gathered estimates. I filled a notebook with research. The Palace directed me to a firm, which quoted me a price. Six million a year.

I slowly hung up.

In the midst of all this darkness came the horrible news that my old friend
Caroline Flack had taken her life. She couldn’t stand it anymore, apparently. The relentless abuse at the hands of the press, year after year, had finally broken her. I felt so awful for her family. I remembered how they’d all suffered for her mortal sin of going out with me.

She’d been so light and funny that night we met. The definition of carefree.

It would’ve been impossible then to imagine this outcome.

I told myself it was an important reminder. I wasn’t being overdramatic, I wasn’t warning about things that would never happen. What Meg and I were dealing with was indeed a question of life and death.

And time was running out.

In March 2020 the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, and Canada began to discuss the possibility of closing its borders.

But Meg had zero doubt.
They’re definitely going to close those borders, so we need to figure out somewhere else to go…and get there.

We were having
a chat with Tyler Perry, the actor-writer-director. He’d sent a note to Meg before the wedding, out of the blue, telling her that she wasn’t alone, that he saw what was happening. Now, FaceTiming with him, Meg and I were trying to put on a brave face, but we were both a mess.

Tyler saw. He asked what was up.

We gave him the highlights, the loss of security, the borders closing. Nowhere to turn.

Whoa
.
OK, that’s a lot. But…just breathe.
Breathe.

That was the problem. We couldn’t breathe.

Look…take my house.

What?

My house in Los Angeles. It’s gated, it’s secure—you’ll be safe there. I’ll keep you safe.

He was traveling, he explained, working on a project, so the house was empty, waiting for us.

It was too much. Too generous.

But we accepted. Eagerly.

I asked why he was doing this.

My mother.

Your…?

My mother loved your mother.

I was caught completely by surprise. He said:
After your mother visited Harlem, that was it. She could do no wrong in Maxine Perry’s book.

He went on to say that his mother had died ten years earlier, and he was still grieving.

I wanted to tell him it gets easier.

I didn’t.

The house was Xanadu.
High ceilings, priceless art, beautiful swimming pool. Palatial, but above all, ultra-safe. Better yet, it came with security, paid for by Tyler.

We spent those last days of March 2020 exploring, unpacking. Trying to get our bearings. Halls, wardrobes, bedrooms, there seemed no end of spaces to discover, and niches for Archie to hide.

Meg introduced him to everything. Look at this statue! Look at this fountain! Look at these hummingbirds in the garden!

In the front hall was a painting he found especially interesting. He started every day locked on to it. A scene from ancient Rome. We asked each other why.

No clue.

Within a week Tyler’s house felt like home. Archie took his first steps in the garden a couple of months later, at the height of the global pandemic lockdown. We clapped, hugged him, cheered. I thought, for a moment, how nice it would be to share the news with Grandpa or Uncle Willy.

Not long after those first steps Archie went marching up to his favorite painting in the front hall. He stared at it, made a gurgle of recognition.

Meg leaned in for a closer look.

She noticed, for the first time, a nameplate on the frame.

Goddess of the hunt.
Diana
.

When we told Tyler, he said he hadn’t known. He’d forgotten the painting was even there.

He said:
Gives me chills.

Us too.

Late at night, with
everyone asleep, I’d walk the house, checking the doors and windows. Then I’d sit on the balcony or the edge of the garden and roll a joint.

The house looked down onto a valley, across a hillside thick with frogs. I’d listen to their late-night song, smell the flower-scented air. The frogs, the smells, the trees, the big starry sky, it all brought me back to Botswana.

But maybe it’s not just the flora and fauna, I thought.

Maybe it’s more the feeling of safety. Of life.

We were able to get a lot of work done. And we had a lot of work to do. We launched a foundation, I reconnected with my contacts in world conservation. Things were getting under control…and then the press somehow learned we were at Tyler’s. It had taken six weeks exactly, same as Canada. Suddenly there were drones overhead, paps across the street. Paps across the valley.

They cut the fence.

We patched the fence.

We stopped venturing outside. The garden was in full view of the paps.

Next came the helicopters.

Sadly, we were going to have to flee. We’d need to find somewhere new, and soon, and that would mean paying for our own security. I went back to my notebooks, started contacting security firms again. Meg and I sat down to work out exactly how much security we could afford, and how much house. Exactly then, while we were revising our budget, word came down: Pa was cutting me off.

I recognized the absurdity, a man in his mid-thirties being financially cut off by his father. But Pa wasn’t merely my father, he was my boss, my banker, my comptroller, keeper of the purse strings throughout my adult life. Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable.

I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf. I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa. I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending
Truman Show
in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon,
almost
never traveled on the
Underground. (Once, at Eton, on a theater trip.) Sponge, the papers called me. But there’s a big difference between being a sponge and being
prohibited
from learning independence. After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilized, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature? For not standing on my own two feet?

The question of how to pay for a home and security kept Meg and me awake at nights. We could always spend some of my inheritance from Mummy, we said, but that felt like a last resort. We saw that money as belonging to Archie. And his sibling.

It was then that we learned Meg was pregnant.

We found a place.
Priced at a steep discount. Just up the coast, outside Santa Barbara. Lots of room, large gardens, a climbing frame—even a pond with koi carp.

The koi were stressed, the estate agent warned.

So are we. We’ll all get along famously.

No, the agent explained, the koi need very particular care. You’ll have to hire a koi guy.

Uh-huh. And where does one find a koi guy?

The agent wasn’t sure.

We laughed. First-world problems.

We took a tour. The place was a dream. We asked Tyler to look at it too, and he said: Buy it. So we pulled together a down-payment, took out a mortgage, and in July 2020 we moved in.

The move itself required only a couple of hours. Everything we owned fitted into thirteen suitcases. That first night we had a quiet drink in celebration, roasted a chicken, went to bed early.

All was well, we said.

And yet Meg was still under loads of stress.

There was a pressing issue with her legal case against the tabloids. The
Mail
was up to its usual tricks. Their first crack at offering a defense had been patently ridiculous, so now they were trying a new defense, which was even more ridiculous. They were arguing that they’d printed Meg’s letter to her father because of a story in
People
magazine, which quoted a handful of Meg’s
friends—anonymously. The tabloids argued that Meg had orchestrated these quotes, used her friends as
de facto
spokespeople, and thus the
Mail
had every right to publish her letter to her father.

More, they now wanted the names of Meg’s previously anonymous friends read into the official court record—to destroy them. Meg was determined to do everything in her power to prevent that. She’d been staying up late, night after night, trying to work out how to save these people, and now, on our first morning in the new house, she reported abdominal pains.

And bleeding.

Then she collapsed to the floor.

We raced to the local hospital. When the doctor walked into the room, I didn’t hear one word she said, I just watched her face, her body language. I already knew. We both did. There had been so much blood.

Still, hearing the words was a blow.

Meg grabbed me, I held her, we both wept.

In my life I’ve felt
totally
helpless only four times.

In the back of the car while Mummy and Willy and I were being chased by paps.

In the Apache above Afghanistan, unable to get clearance to do my duty.

At Nott Cott when my pregnant wife was planning to take her life.

And now.

We left the hospital with our unborn child. A tiny package. We went to a place, a secret place only we knew.

Under a spreading banyan tree, while Meg wept, I dug a hole with my hands and set the tiny package softly in the ground.

Five months later.
Christmas 2020.

We took Archie to find a Christmas tree. A pop-up lot in Santa Barbara.

We bought one of the biggest spruces they had.

We brought it home, set it up in the living room. Magnificent. We stood back, admiring, counting our blessings. New home. Healthy boy. Plus, we’d signed several corporate partnerships, which would give us the chance to resume our work, to spotlight the causes we cared about, to tell the stories we felt were vital. And to pay for our security.

It was Christmas Eve. We FaceTimed with several friends, including a few in Britain. We watched Archie running around the tree.

And we opened presents. Keeping to the Windsor family tradition.