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2.

A shock to the system, going from sun- drenched St. Tropez to cloud- shadowed Balmoral. Ivaguely remember that shock, though I can’t remember much else about our first week at thecastle. Still, I can almost guarantee it was spent mostly outdoors. My family lived to be outdoors,especially Granny, who got cross if she didn’t breathe at least an hour of fresh air each day. Whatwe did outdoors, however, what we said, wore, ate, I can’t conjure. There’s some reporting thatwe journeyed by the royal yacht from the Isle of Wight to the castle, the yacht’s final voyage.

Sounds lovely.

What I do retain, in crisp detail, is the physical setting. The dense woods. The deer-nibbledhill. The River Dee snaking down through the Highlands. Lochnagar soaring overhead, eternallysnow-spattered. Landscape, geography, architecture, that’s how my memory rolls. Dates? Sorry,I’ll need to look them up. Dialogue? I’ll try my best, but make no verbatim claims, especiallywhen it comes to the nineties. But ask me about any space I’ve occupied — castle, cockpit,classroom, stateroom, bedroom, palace, garden, pub—and I’ll re-create it down to the carpet tacks.

Why should my memory organize experience like this? Is it genetics? Trauma? SomeFrankenstein- esque combination of the two? Is it my inner soldier, assessing every space aspotential battlefield? Is it my innate homebody nature, rebelling against a forced nomadicexistence? Is it some base apprehension that the world is essentially a maze, and you should neverbe caught in a maze without a map?

Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as itsees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tellourselves about the past. The past is never dead. It’s not even past. When I discovered thatquotation not long ago on BrainyQuote.com, I was thunderstruck. I thought, Who the fook isFaulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?

And so: Balmoral. Closing my eyes, I can see the main entrance, the paneled front windows,the wide portico and three gray-black speckled granite steps leading up to the massive front doorof whisky-colored oak, often propped open by a heavy curling stone and often manned by one red-coated footman, and inside the spacious hall and its white stone floor, with gray star-shaped tiles,and the huge fireplace with its beautiful mantel of ornately carved dark wood, and to one side akind of utility room, and to the left, by the tall windows, hooks for fishing rods and walking sticksand rubber waders and heavy waterproofs—so many waterproofs, because summer could be wetand cold all over Scotland, but it was biting in this Siberian nook—and then the light brownwooden door leading to the corridor with the crimson carpet and the walls papered in cream, apattern of gold flock, raised like braille, and then the many rooms along the corridor, each with aspecific purpose, like sitting or reading, TV or tea, and one special room for the pages, many ofwhom I loved like dotty uncles, and finally the castle’s main chamber, built in the nineteenthcentury, nearly on top of the site of another castle dating to the fourteenth century, within a fewgenerations of another Prince Harry, who got himself exiled, then came back and annihilatedeverything and everyone in sight. My distant kin. My kindred spirit, some would claim. If nothingelse, my namesake. Born September 15, 1984, I was christened Henry Charles Albert David ofWales.

But from Day One everyone called me Harry.

In the heart of this main chamber was the grand staircase. Sweeping, dramatic, seldom used.

Whenever Granny headed up to her bedroom on the second floor, corgis at her heels, she preferredthe lift.

The corgis preferred it too.

Near Granny’s lift, through a pair of crimson saloon doors and along a green tartan floor, was asmallish staircase with a heavy iron banister; it led up to the second floor, where stood a statue ofQueen Victoria. I always bowed to her as I passed. Your Majesty! Willy did too. We’d been toldto, but I’d have done it anyway. I found the “Grandmama of Europe” hugely compelling, and notjust because Granny loved her, nor because Pa once wanted to name me after her husband.

(Mummy blocked him.) Victoria knew great love, soaring happiness—but her life was essentiallytragic. Her father, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, was said to be a sadist, sexuallyaroused by the sight of soldiers being horsewhipped, and her dear husband, Albert, died before hereyes. Also, during her long, lonely reign, she was shot at eight times, on eight separate occasions,by seven different subjects.

Not one bullet hit the mark. Nothing could bring Victoria down.

Beyond Victoria’s statue things got tricky. Doors became identical, rooms interlocked. Easy toget lost. Open the wrong door and you might burst in on Pa while his valet was helping him dress.

Worse, you might blunder in as he was doing his headstands. Prescribed by his physio, theseexercises were the only effective remedy for the constant pain in Pa’s neck and back. Old poloinjuries, mostly. He performed them daily, in just a pair of boxers, propped against a door orhanging from a bar like a skilled acrobat. If you set one little finger on the knob you’d hear himbegging from the other side: No! No! Don’t open! Please God don’t open!

Balmoral had fifty bedrooms, one of which had been divided for me and Willy. Adults called itthe nursery. Willy had the larger half, with a double bed, a good-sized basin, a cupboard withmirrored doors, a beautiful window looking down on the courtyard, the fountain, the bronze statueof a roe deer buck. My half of the room was far smaller, less luxurious. I never asked why. I didn’tcare. But I also didn’t need to ask. Two years older than me, Willy was the Heir, whereas I was theSpare.

This wasn’t merely how the press referred to us—though it was definitely that. This wasshorthand often used by Pa and Mummy and Grandpa. And even Granny. The Heir and the Spare—there was no judgment about it, but also no ambiguity. I was the shadow, the support, the PlanB. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy. I was summoned to providebackup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion.

Speck of bone marrow. This was all made explicitly clear to me from the start of life’s journey andregularly reinforced thereafter. I was twenty the first time I heard the story of what Pa allegedlysaid to Mummy the day of my birth: Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an Heir and a Spare—mywork is done. A joke. Presumably. On the other hand, minutes after delivering this bit of highcomedy, Pa was said to have gone off to meet with his girlfriend. So. Many a true word spoken injest.

I took no offense. I felt nothing about it, any of it. Succession was like the weather, or thepositions of the planets, or the turn of the seasons. Who had the time to worry about things sounchangeable? Who could bother with being bothered by a fate etched in stone? Being a Windsormeant working out which truths were timeless, and then banishing them from your mind. It meantabsorbing the basic parameters of one’s identity, knowing by instinct who you were, which wasforever a byproduct of who you weren’t.

I wasn’t Granny.

I wasn’t Pa.

I wasn’t Willy.

I was third in line behind them.

Every boy and girl, at least once, imagines themselves as a prince or princess. Therefore, Spareor no Spare, it wasn’t half bad to actually be one. More, standing resolutely behind the people youloved, wasn’t that the definition of honor?

Of love?

Like bowing to Victoria as you passed?