William Found Camilla Wearing Diana’s Private Jewelry — No One Expected What Followed (part 1)
William Found Camilla Wearing Diana’s Private Jewelry — No One Expected What Followed (part 1)
“That was my mother’s,” he said.
Camilla looked at him. What she said next and what it led his father to do the following morning, nobody expected.
It was the summer of 2000. Their mother had been gone for nearly 3 years. Camilla was no longer a secret. She and Charles had stepped out publicly the year before and the photographs had been everywhere. William had looked at them once. He had not looked again. He had been managing it. That was the word he used to himself.
Managing. The way you manage something you have decided to accept without being asked if you accepted it. The gathering at Highgrove that summer was small. A handful of people from Charles’s circle. The kind of occasion that had become ordinary. Harry was somewhere across the lawn laughing at something.
He was better at this than William or he appeared to be. William moved through the groups. He answered questions when they were directed at him. He was, to anyone watching casually, entirely present. Camilla was there. She was usually there now. The evening passed the way these evenings passed. Small groups forming and dissolving on the lawn.
Conversations he half followed. The particular performance of being present when you are only partially there. Camilla was somewhere to his left. He was aware of her the way he was always aware of her at these things. Not watching. Just knowing where she was. It was perhaps an hour in when his eyes moved across the lawn and caught something.
He wasn’t sure what at first. He looked again. Something snagged. The necklace at her throat was not remarkable from a distance. Fine chain, a small pendant. The kind of piece that didn’t announce itself. But he knew it. He just needed a moment to find where from. His mother. An evening at Kensington Palace.
He couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. She was dressed for something, an official dinner, he thought, though he couldn’t be certain. He was sitting on her bed watching her get ready, the way he sometimes did in those years. She had her back to the mirror adjusting something. And she had put on that necklace and turned to ask him something.
He couldn’t remember what she had said. Something ordinary. Something about whether he’d eaten or whether Harry was in bed. But the necklace. The particular way it lay at her collarbone. The way she touched it briefly. Her fingertips at her collarbone before she turned away. The unconscious gesture of someone checking something is still there.
He had watched her do that more than once. He didn’t move at first. He kept looking at it. As if, given enough time, it might become something else. It didn’t. He put down his glass. He crossed the terrace. Camilla saw him coming. Her expression shifted. Not dramatically. Just the slight adjustment of someone who reads situations well and had noted his movement.
