hurts him so much. But I know we can’t, so with regret, I get him back on track.
“So you moved into Buckingham Palace,” I say.
His smile evaporates. So does my happiness, but I know we need to keep going.
“Right. So we moved into Buckingham Palace. I had my parents and Christian—he was three—but all these staff people were an enormous change from the staff we had at Clarence House. My parents were given all new responsibilities that had to be attended to. My grandmother—the dowager queen—was overcome with grief. She told my father how important it was to carry on his father’s legacy, but not to change what King Phillip had established. And that’s where I think we went wrong. We had an opportunity to modernise, within reason, as I know the illusion is important—the fairy tale has to exist—but we lost so much time preserving what my grandparents had done, in the way they had done it, that it has fallen upon us, the squad, to move the monarchy forward before it’s too late.”
The words are tumbling out of him now, Xander’s own narrative on how he grew up mingled with what he sees for the future of the royal family. It’s as if his thoughts are blurring together as he finally sets them free for someone outside of palace walls to hear.
“What is the illusion?” I ask, staring at his profile. “You’ve used that word several times now.”
He slowly draws his lower lip between his teeth. Then he exhales, a long, deep breath of air.
“My parents hate each other,” he confesses, his voice nearly a whisper.
I nearly gasp in shock. King Arthur and Queen Antonia? They always look happy together whenever they are on TV or photographed. In interviews, she gazes at him adoringly. I remember one clip where they were walking around the gardens at Balmoral, with her hand wrapped around his arm. That is all fake? How can that be?
He lets go of my hand so he can rub the back of his neck. “Shocking, isn’t it? But that’s how good the illusion is. The cracks started soon after they were married. Ironic. They gave the world the fairy tale wedding and the belief in happily ever after. But behind closed doors, the marriage was a nightmare.”
“What happened? Did they ever love each other?” I ask.
“They were in love. I can tell the difference in old pictures,” Xander says. Then he winks at me. “See? Born to be a detective.”
I smile at him, and he squeezes my hand.
“But no, if you look at early pictures—before they got married, during the engagement period—I have no doubt they loved each other. It was the monarchy that destroyed them.”
A cold fear runs through me. “How so?”
“My father was away a lot when they were first married, doing his military service, and I know that had to be hard on the marriage, especially when they were so young. Mother was around my grandmother most of that time, and she no doubt helped shape my mother’s idea of what her role should be and groomed her for the role of queen—in her vision. The monarchy changed my mother. She loved the adoration of the public and the press. The new power she had. She loved being a duchess. And that became her passion, her need, above everything else.”
I think about this and choose my words carefully before speaking. “Perhaps her role in the monarchy helped her fill the void that was in her marriage,” I say. “She had to be terribly lonely. And that had to be scary, stepping onto the world stage like that, having this big televised wedding, and she is in this new life and then your father—her support system—is gone. I would be terrified if I were her.”
And I can’t explain it, but a wave of sympathy for Queen Antonia washes through me. She was in a difficult situation. It would have been awful to navigate that alone like she had to do, and she filled her heart the only way she knew how.
“I think there is truth there,” Xander admits. “But it changed her. For the worse. The monarchy became her all-consuming love. Not my father. And I know my father changed, too. You grow a lot in the military. You find out who you are. So that is when I think the marriage fell apart. If they were any other couple, they would have divorced before I was born. But my mother was never going