SOON AFTER THAT DAY it was announced that the two royal households,
Cambridge and Sussex, would no longer share an office. We’d no longer be working together in any capacity. The Fab Four…finis.
Reaction was about as expected. The public groaned, journalists brayed. The more disheartening response was from my family. Silence. They never commented publicly, never said anything privately to me. I never heard from Pa, never heard from Granny. It made me think, really think, about the silence
that surrounded everything else that happened to me and Meg. I’d always told myself that, just because everyone in my family didn’t explicitly condemn press attacks, it didn’t mean they condoned them. But now I asked: Is that true? How do I know? If they never say anything, why do I so often assume that I know how they feel?
And that they’re unequivocally on our side?
Everything I’d been taught, everything I’d grown up believing about the family, and about the monarchy, about its essential fairness, its job of uniting rather than dividing, was being undermined, called into question. Was it all fake? Was it all just a show? Because if we couldn’t stand up for one another, rally around our newest member, our first biracial member, then what were we really? Was that a true constitutional monarchy? Was that a real family?
Isn’t “defending each other” the first rule of every family?
