Kate (19 page)

There is no suggestion that Kate – or indeed any of William’s guests that weekend – met Prince Charles, although he did arrange for the catering staff at Sandringham to organise a deluxe takeaway service for his son’s guests. It would not be long, though, before she was introduced to her flatmate’s father.

Five months later, on 3 May 2003, the relationship between William and Kate appeared to have stepped up a pace when they attended the annual May Ball organised by the notorious Kate Kennedy Club, of which William was now a member. Having splashed out on VIP tickets for the charity event, they spent the majority of the ball, held at Kinkell Farm in the Fife countryside, huddled in a corner with their closest friends, sparking rumours that they only had eyes for each other.

A few weeks later, Kate went to watch William playing in a rugby sevens tournament sponsored by The Gin House. Cheering on his team – rival pub the West Port Bar – from the sidelines, Kate seemed more like a girlfriend in waiting than a flatmate. During breaks in the game, when William was not playing, the couple lay side by side in the spring sunshine, deep in conversation, and appeared so comfortable in each other’s company that they yet again created speculation that their relationship had moved on to a different level. Following the match, after which the runners-up – William and his team – took home a consolation prize of three crates of lager, they headed for the West Port Bar, where they downed shots and partied. Known for his generosity, William often bought a round for everyone.

Within a month, the Candlemas Semester was drawing to a close, ending Kate and William’s second year at the prestigious university. Having finished their exams, the two moved out of their flat, looking forward to the long summer ahead. But they would not be apart for long.

Although Kate had turned 21 at the beginning of the year, both she and William celebrated their birthdays during that idyllic summer in 2003. But while Kate’s birthday party was a private affair, attended by the prince and her closest friends, William’s celebration a few weeks later was, naturally, a grander and more public event, attended by most of the royal family as well as a smattering of celebrities. Organised by the Prince of Wales’s valet Michael Fawcett, it was held on 21 June 2003 – William’s actual birthday – at Windsor Castle. The oldest and largest occupied castle in the world was converted into an African jungle, with two giant model elephants towering over guests, their trunks intertwined to form an archway to the dance floor. Animal skins decorated the walls, a giant giraffe’s head took pride of place over the long golden bar, which snaked the length of the room, and a tribal mask stood out from the opposite wall. Three hundred guests, all in fancy dress, danced to the sounds of the band Shakarimba, a six-piece group from Botswana, and William got into the vibe by jumping on stage and playing the drums. Guests included his uncles Earl Spencer and Prince Andrew, who were both dressed as big-game hunters in safari outfits, comedian Rowan Atkinson and polo player Luke Tomlinson. William’s grandmother looked stunning as the Queen of Swaziland, in a white gown, tribal headdress and giant fur wrap, while his father wore a safari suit and hunting hat and his cousins Beatrice and Eugenie dressed in matching leopard-skin costumes.

The St Andrews set arrived in a battered white van decorated with balloons and tinsel. But Kate’s appearance barely merited a mention in the media, being overshadowed by two events. The first was the arrest of intruder Aaron Barschak, a self-styled ‘comedy terrorist’, who managed, dressed as osama bin Laden, to gatecrash the party and stumble onto the stage in the Great Hall, grabbing the microphone from the prince, who was thanking the Queen and Prince Charles for his party. While William maintained his calm, Barschak was hauled out of the hall and arrested, although he was not prosecuted.

The second was the attendance of Jessica ‘Jecca’ Craig, the daughter of a wealthy conservationist, and generally believed at the time to have been William’s first serious girlfriend. He had grown close to Jecca when he visited her family’s 45,000-acre wildlife reserve in the foothills of Kenya during his gap year, two years earlier – there were even reports that they had had a ‘pretend engagement’ – but only they know whether they still had feelings for one another when she flew into Britain for his out of Africa party.

Either way, the Prince seemed at pains to quash rumours about their involvement and prove he was single, releasing a public statement, approved by Prince Charles, denying any romance with Jecca – the first and only time that such a step has been taken. The statement was generally deemed to be a shot across the bows intended to stem the intense media speculation that surrounded their relationship, which intensified when her boyfriend, Henry Ropner, received only a last-minute invitation to the party.

But not only did William deny having a relationship with Jecca – he denied having a girlfriend at all. In an interview to mark his birthday, he said: ‘There’s been a lot of speculation about every single girl I’m with, and it actually does quite irritate me after a while, more so because it’s a complete pain for the girls. These poor girls, whom I’ve either just met or are friends of mine, suddenly get thrown into the limelight and their parents get rung up and so on. I think it’s a little unfair on them, really. I’m used to it, because it happens quite a lot now. But it’s very difficult for them and I don’t like that at all.

‘If I fancy a girl and she fancies me back, which is rare, I ask her out. But at the same time, I don’t want to put them in an awkward situation, because a lot of people don’t understand what comes with knowing me, for one – and secondly, if they were my girlfriend, the excitement it would probably cause.’

That summer, then, the prince was telling the world that he was single, but it would not be long before the glare of the media’s attention shifted to Kate and it became clear that a new royal romance had begun in earnest.

Chapter 17
Cold Hands, Warm Hearts

W
earing a red bodywarmer and black salopettes, Kate Middleton shared a T-bar lift with Prince William on the slopes in Klosters, the exclusive skiing resort in the Swiss Alps, which has become a favourite with the royal family, revealing that she had captured the heart of Britain’s most eligible bachelor.

After months of speculation about their romance, the couple, both 21, were finally snapped by paparazzo photographer Jason Fraser, the man, ironically, who caught on film the famous kiss between Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed on a Mediterranean yacht. That tender moment between William and Kate on 31 March 2004 was photographed and the pictures published in
The Sun
newspaper, infuriating aides at Clarence House, the private office of the Prince of Wales, which had brokered a gentlemen’s agreement with the media to allow the prince privacy while he was at university.

The pair, in their third year at St Andrews, had flown from Heathrow to Zurich four days earlier, at the beginning of the spring vacation, to spend a week on the slopes with their most trusted and intimate friends. Amongst their coterie were Harry Legge-Bourke, the elder brother of Tiggy, the former royal nanny, Guy Pelly, a former student at Cirencester Agricultural College, and friend of the royal family William van Cutsem and his girlfriend Katie James, all of whom could be trusted to keep a secret.

By day, the group took to the pistes; by night, they explored the après-ski options, spending one evening at a karaoke bar, where William took the microphone, and another dining at a mountain restaurant overlooking the village, with Prince Charles and his regular skiing companions Charlie and Patty Palmer-Tomkinson.

William and Kate’s skiing holiday brought to a conclusion the increasing speculation about the intimacy of their friendship, conjecture that had begun eighteen months earlier when they moved into a flat with two other students at the start of their second year and had gathered pace ever since.

The beginning of the third year must have been a difficult time for Kate, who was grieving over the death of her maternal grandfather, Ronald Goldsmith, who had been in a wheelchair for some time, suffering a narrowed outlet valve to his heart. He was the first of her grandparents to die and his heart gave out on 10 September 2003, when he was 72, at the cottage he shared with his wife Dorothy in Pangbourne, Berkshire.

That autumn, when they returned to Scotland, Kate, William and Fergus decided to move away from the centre of town and into a farmhouse on the outskirts of St Andrews, where William and Kate, who both loved the countryside, felt more comfortable. When Martinmas Semester began on 29 September 2003, the four flatmates moved into Balgove House on the Strathtyrum estate. They would remain there until they left university.

In advance of the move, William said: ‘Most people tend to move houses and that was always my intention. In my third year, I have fewer lectures and have to spend less time in the university and so I thought: how about moving somewhere different? I do think I am a country boy at heart. I love the buzz of towns and going out with friends and sitting with them drinking and whatever – it’s fun. But, at the same time, I like space and freedom.’

The cottage, set in rolling grounds brimming with orchids and fuschia bushes, was an idyllic venue for the prince to woo his girl. Not only was the house discreet, but it was also totally secure. By the time the royal party moved in, a £1.5 million operation had swung into action in order to prevent another humiliating breach of security in the aftermath of the gatecrashing of William’s 21st birthday. A neighbouring cottage was chosen as the centre of a security operation, and squads of officers were drafted in to keep 24-hour surveillance on the farmhouse. The cottage was also bombproofed and CCTV cameras and panic buttons installed, linked to both local police stations and Buckingham Palace in case of an emergency.

The increased privacy and freedom of their new, more rural home gave William and Kate the opportunity to begin their burgeoning relationship away from prying eyes, a rarity for members of the royal family, especially the young prince. When confirmation that they were a couple came, initial reports claimed that they had been going out since Christmas, although there have been suggestions that they began dating the previous summer, around the time of their birthday celebrations.

Either way, the young couple behaved with the utmost care in their public dealings with one another in an elaborate effort to keep their romance secret. Apparently, they had a pact not to show any affection towards each other in public, leaving the house separately in the mornings and never holding hands if they were out and about. They kept the nature of their relationship completely hidden from the outside world by having romantic evenings at home, trysts at Birkhall (a 14-bedroom mansion on the banks of the River Muick near Balmoral, inherited from the Queen Mother by Prince Charles) and weekends at Highgrove, where Kate met her boyfriend’s father for the first time. The couple would drive down in his black VW Golf for weekends hunting and shooting.

The first hint that their relationship had changed pace came a few weeks before their skiing holiday, when they went riding with the Middleton Hunt in North yorkshire, and William introduced Kate to his friends as his ‘girlfriend’. Within weeks, it was common knowledge that they were together.

When William and Kate returned from Switzerland, it was business as usual, despite the fact that their relationship was now in the public eye. True to form, they remained holed up in their country farmhouse, rarely venturing out unless they could ensure their privacy.

Indeed, they were more cautious than ever. Whereas the previous year Kate had watched from the touchline as William played in the town’s annual seven-a-side rugby tournament, in 2004 she kept a lower profile and did not turn out to watch him play for their old local, the West Port Bar, one of a dozen sides competing in the tournament. Hundreds of students and members of the public had come to see the matches, organised by St Andrews publicans, and no doubt more particularly to watch the prince, in his number 4 shirt, limber up and play alongside his housemate Fergus Boyd. Brought on as a substitute, he took a couple of hard tackles and dragged down one of his opponents in pursuit of the ball, but the team still lost two of their three matches. It was only during the evening, at the post-tournament party in the St Andrews Golf Hotel, that Kate turned up to commiserate with her boyfriend. The couple kissed in public for the first time, but there wasn’t a photographer in sight.

A few weeks later, William and Kate donned evening attire for the annual May Ball, held again at Kinkell Farm, which that year had a Saints and Sinners theme. As in the previous year, the royal couple had a VIP pass for the charity do so that they could avoid the riffraff. ‘William was given an access-all-areas pass for security reasons,’ the Kate Kennedy Club president, Alex Walsh, admitted.

The couple’s discretion was quite extraordinary. Society photographer Zygmunt Sikorski-Mazur, a former solicitor, shot William’s inner circle for society magazines such as
Tatler
and
Harpers & Queen
. He snapped their flatmate Fergus Boyd and close friends olivia Bleasdale and Bryony Daniels but never managed to photograph the couple. ‘They were an engaging bunch,’ reveals Zygmunt, 60. ‘They were always very friendly and helpful to me in my photographic work. As with any young people in the same situation, there were plenty of high jinks, but they always seemed to know when there was a line which should not be crossed. They were almost without exception very well-brought-up children from some of the most well-to-do families in the country.

‘It’s amazing when I think back that I was never able to photograph Kate, let alone William. It wasn’t that they were deliberately obstructive. I just think they had a very good intelligence network and wanted to keep their lives at the university behind a veil of discretion for the most part.