William and Harry (17 page)

By the start of his second year, in September 2002, William was living in a flat at 13a Hope Street, a smart house in the centre of the town. One of his conditions for staying was that he would be allowed to move out of halls after his first year, and share an apartment with his friends. It was a luxury no prince before him had enjoyed and exactly the normality that William
craved. Of course there were the necessary security issues to consider: the property was fitted with bulletproof windows, a bomb-proof front door and a state-of-the art laser security system that came with a thick instruction manual. The floor-to-ceiling windows were also protected with reinforced full-length pine shutters in keeping with the rest of the street. William’s room, which was situated between the galley kitchen and the open-plan living and dining room on the first floor, was the biggest and looked onto an overgrown private garden and the back of the student union building on Market Street.

He had decided to move in with Kate, Fergus and Olivia Bleasdale, a former pupil at Westonbirt School in Gloucestershire who William knew through one of his best friends, Natasha Rufus Isaacs, daughter of the Marquess of Reading. They each paid £100 a week rent for the two storey top-floor flat and shared the cleaning. With its high ceilings and open-plan living area it was perfect for entertaining. ‘They did throw dinner parties and took it in turns to go shopping for groceries,’ one of their friends recalled. ‘William was part of the dinner-party brigade and being seen in Tesco was all part of it. It was a bit of a meeting place for the great and the good. Fergus would get dressed up to the nines and only ever wore different shades of white. He was always immaculately turned out and William was always with him, so it was not uncommon for girls to stake out Tesco in the hope of seeing the pair of them.’ Indeed it was while searching for an exotic fruit for dessert that William bumped into his friend, fellow geography student Bryony Daniels. When they were photographed walking in the town together they were immediately linked, but there was nothing going on between them. By
now William had decided the only St Andrews girl he wanted was Kate.

William and Kate were determined to keep their fledgling romance quiet, and behind the closed doors of 13a Hope Street they could. Their bedrooms were on separate landings, but by this stage it was nothing more than pretence. William was enjoying a freedom no royal before him had ever had and it signalled how much the royal family had modernised. William and Kate had fallen in love and were enjoying a conventional university romance, albeit one involving elaborate cover-ups and decoys. In a bid to keep their relationship below the radar for as long as possible, they would leave the house at different times, arrive at dinner parties separately and made a pact never to hold hands in public.

In their own apartment they were like any other couple in love. During the cold winter months they would spend their evenings watching DVDs and ordering in pizzas or Indian takeaways from the Balaka, a Bangladeshi restaurant at the end of their road. Sometimes they would venture to the West Port bar on South Street, where Kate loved the decor – whitewashed walls with modern chrome fireplaces and extravagant vintage chandeliers. The bar sponsored a local rugby team called the Rat Pack, which William sometimes played for. The couple were also fans of Ma Belle’s, a popular student haunt beneath the Golf Hotel on the Scores, which served a cheap and decent brunch including a salmon teriyaki that Kate claimed was the best cure for a hangover. At night the orange-painted restaurant metamorphosed into a fashionable drinking venue where cocktails were just five pounds. For dancing the couple would visit the
Lizard, a garish lime-green-and-purple-painted subterranean late-night bar beneath the Oak Rooms on North Street.

Although she had spent much of the first year with the Sally’s boys, by the second year Kate had her own social set. She co-founded the Lumsden Club, a women-only rival to the all-male Kate Kennedy Club, and spent much of her spare time planning summer drinks parties to raise money for various charities with her friend Katherine Munsey, who lived several doors away in Hope Street. She was also friendly with Bryony Gordon and Lady Virginia Fraser, the daughter of Lord Strathalmond, who knew Kate from her former school, Downe House. Leonora Gummer, daughter of Tory MP John Gummer, was also part of their well-heeled clique, along with Sandrine Janet, a pretty French student who was dating William and Kate’s flatmate Fergus.

While it was the boys’ job to shop at Tesco, the girls prepared the weekly dinner parties. ‘Katherine Munsey would go to extreme efforts, and had the silver brought up from London when she was throwing a really big event,’ recalled a member of their inner circle. ‘She was very stylish and so were her dinner parties, which would consist of courses and courses. They would take it in turn to have parties at each other’s houses, which always entailed lots of drinking and lots of fun.’ When dinner was over and the claret had switched to port or Jack Daniel’s, a bottle of which William would always bring, the friends would enjoy playing drinking games. Their favorite was I’ve Never, which entails one player admitting to the others something she or he has never done and then asking the others if they have. If anyone has done the deed in question they must take a drink. One member of the group recalled,

By the end of their second year the relationship was clearly a close one. When William attended Kate’s belated twenty-first birthday party in June 2003 at her family home in Bucklebury, Berkshire, the glance she threw him across the room when he walked into the 1920s-themed party was beyond platonic. Such was the speculation about their relationship that Kate’s father Michael was approached by a reporter on the doorstep of the Middletons’ home. ‘We are very amused at the thought of being in-laws to Prince William, but I don’t think it is going to happen,’ he said when asked about their alleged courtship. But then at William’s twenty-first birthday party at Windsor Castle later that month it seemed as though Kate was barely registering on William’s radar; he seemed preoccupied with a very pretty girl called Jecca Craig.

William had first met Jecca, daughter of British conservationist Ian Craig and his wife Jane, in 1998 in Kenya during his school holidays. He had fallen in love with Africa, and returned during his gap year to spend several weeks learning about conservation at the Craigs’ 55,000-acre game reserve situated in the beautiful Lewa Downs in the foothills of Mount Kenya. William had adored every minute of it and years later would get involve with the Tusk Trust, a conservation charity which finances some of Lewa’s activities and of which William is now patron. Mr Craig recalled, ‘William just loves Africa, that’s clear. He did everything from rhino-spotting to anti-poaching patrols to checking fences. He’s a great boy.’ At the end of the day he and Jecca would eat al fresco and talk of Africa. It was not long before rumours were circulating among their friends that something was going on. William had apparently had a secret crush on Jecca since the first time he met her. She was beautiful, with long blond hair, deep-blue eyes and legs like a gazelle. But when it was reported that the two had staged a mock engagement ceremony to pledge their love to one another before William returned to England, the prince instructed his aides to deny this had happened.

It was a rare move – usually the Palace never comments on the princes’ private lives – but on this occasion William wanted the story refuted. ‘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,’ he said. The tale had rattled him and embarrassed Jecca, who at the time was dating Edinburgh University undergraduate Henry Ropner, a former Etonian and a friend of William. The denial
did little to quash the rumours of a romance however, and as Kate raised her champagne flute to toast the birthday prince at the aptly themed Out of Africa celebration at Windsor Castle, it was Jecca who had pride of place next to William at the head table.

By the end of the summer, however, the relationship seemed back on track and was an open secret at St Andrews, and William and Kate were desperate for some privacy. While Fergus decided to stay on at 13a Hope Street they decided to move out to Balgove House on Strathtyrum, a sprawling private estate a quarter of a mile outside the town centre owned by a wealthy landowner called Henry Cheape, a distant cousin of the prince and close friend of the royals. The impressive four-bedroom cottage was a perfect sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of the town, and with a long gravel drive framed by hedgerows leading from the busy main road up to the house it was far more private than Hope Street. Unmarked police cars patrolled the estate and William’s protection officers lived in the assorted outhouses. As with all his residences, the cottage had been made secure for the prince complete with bomb-proof doors and windows. To the right of the hallway was a small lounge with an open fireplace and to the left a large kitchen-diner with a black and white chequered floor where William, Kate and their new housemate Oli Baker spent most of their time. They intended to entertain frequently: William installed a champagne fridge as soon as they moved in, while Kate set about dressing the windows with pretty red and white gingham curtains. As well as the grounds, where they enjoyed long romantic walks, the couple had the privacy of two acres of wild grassland hidden behind a six-foot stone wall.
William joked that it was like a miniature Highgrove, and with its crab-apple trees, blooming rhododendrons and patches of wild poppies it was an impressive substitute. When it was warm enough, they would pack a picnic hamper and spend pleasant afternoons stretched out on a blanket sharing a bottle of chilled white wine, an occasional pheasant their only company. They were blissful days, made all the more romantic by the fact that virtually no one knew about their romance. But the secret would soon be out.

Against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains William put his arm around Kate. Wrapped up against the cold mountain air in their salopettes and ski jackets, they waited in line for a ski lift. As the T-bar arrived, William helped Kate on and they glided up the steep mountain, ski poles in their hands. The shot of William gazing lovingly at Kate that was published in the
Sun
newspaper on 1 April 2004 was no April Fool. The rumours, which had been around for months, were confirmed: William and Kate were definitely more than just friends. ‘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,’ William had remarked in that twenty-first-birthday interview. He was right about the excitement. He had chosen to go to Klosters, where the royal family are photographed every year, and he had made no attempt to disguise his affection for Kate. They were with a group of friends that included Tiggy Legge-Bourke’s brother Harry, Guy
Pelly and William Van Cutsem and his girlfriend Katie James. The candid shots of them on the slopes had been taken by the world-famous paparrazo Jason Fraser, who had seven years earlier taken photographs of William’s mother in the arms of Dodi Al Fayed aboard the
Jonikal
. The Palace was furious and accused the
Sun
of breaching the embargo which protected Prince William while he was at university. But the paper had decided that this was a scoop just too good to turn down. F
INALLY
… W
ILLS
G
ETS
A
G
IRL
was the headline. The truth was he had had this girl for many months. Suddenly the floodgates opened and the world wanted to know everything about this shy, pretty and unassuming girl.

Catherine Elizabeth Middleton was born on 9 January 1982 at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading. The first child of Michael and Carole Middleton, she grew up with her younger sister Philippa, known as Pippa, and their brother James at the family’s modest home in Bradfield Southend. In her only ever interview to date Kate recalled how she used to love dressing up as a clown in giant dungarees and play musical statues with her siblings because she has ‘always been a keen dancer’. Birthdays were always an occasion in the Middleton household and Kate remembered ‘an amazing white rabbit marshmallow cake that Mummy made when I was seven’. Kate’s mother Carole Goldsmith came from a working-class background and traced her ancestry back to the coal-mining villages of County Durham, but she was determined to get on and became a stewardess for British Airways in the 1970s. It was while working for the airline that she met Michael Middleton, a flight dispatcher from a distinctly
middle-class background, and they were married in 1980, a year before Charles married Diana. While Carole and Michael had been educated at comprehensives, they could afford to send all three of their children to private schools, having set up a lucrative mail order company called Party Pieces. The business, which grew into a successful online company, also enabled them to move into an impressive £1 million home just a few miles away in the village of Chapel Row, near Bucklebury in Berkshire. There was even enough money for a pied-à-terre in London’s exclusive Chelsea.