At the end of the evening, they said their goodnights and went their separate ways, he to Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace, she to a room at the Dean Street townhouse in Soho. Both were buzzing. As she relived that fateful evening in her mind, she perhaps wondered if she had been too eager to accept his invitation to meet again the following day.
As Harry later confirmed, the couple enjoyed back-to-back dates, making every minute matter before she had to fly back to Toronto on July 5 to continue promoting the new season of Suits. The normally self-contained actor was smitten. Unable to keep her feelings contained, her Instagram account gave away just a little; on July 3 she posted a picture of two Love Hearts candies that bore a simple message: KISS ME. Next to the photograph Meghan posted “Love Hearts in London.”
She had even taken herself by surprise. When Harry asked if she would be interested in joining him on safari for a few days in August—mere weeks after their first meeting—she found herself saying, “Yes, please.” Schedules were consulted, days were agreed upon, plans were made. She had to pinch herself. Here she was about to travel halfway around the world to spend five days in a tented camp in the middle of nowhere with a man she had met twice. It was a side to herself that she was just discovering.
The last full day she had in London she spent at Wimbledon, where she sat in the players’ box along with Vogue editor Anna Wintour and her niece. As she was watching her friend Serena Williams thrash Russian Svetlana Kuznetsova, it began to rain. Meghan was wearing a simple but expensive black suede Ralph Lauren dress, so Anna, ever the fashionista, offered the actor her wool cardigan so that the suede would not be stained by the water while they waited for the roof to be installed. Once play resumed, Anna recovered her cardigan and Serena eased her way through to the last eight.
Though she was nursing the biggest secret of her life, Meghan was focused on the action, standing to applaud her friend’s outstanding play. However, courtside photographers were more focused on Wintour and on Kate Middleton’s sister Pippa than on Meghan. She was placed under the heading “incidental people” by one photographic agency. Not for much longer.
“Gutted to be leaving London,” Meghan told her 1.9 million Instagram followers before she boarded her flight to Toronto. It would be some months before even her close friends realized exactly why the parting was so bittersweet. As she sipped a glass of champagne on board the flight, she would have had time to ponder the preposterous course her life had taken. But not that long. Hours after she had landed, her life continued its dizzying pace. She barely had time to make a fuss of her rescue dogs, Bogart and Guy, and check in with the design team at Reitmans about her upcoming winter capsule collection before this one-woman perpetual motion machine was on her travels again, flying to New York and Boston to continue the promotional tour for Suits.
In Boston she posed for pictures and made a video for Good Housekeeping magazine, while for NBC’s Today show she discussed her recipe for a grilled Caesar salad before talking about the plot developments in the new series.
During her publicity tour she realized how little she knew of her boyfriend’s home country. On July 12 she took part in a lighthearted quiz on the Dave TV channel. She had gamely tried, and failed, a series of questions about Britain, looking perplexed when asked what “apples and pears” meant in Cockney rhyming slang. (Answer: Stairs.)
Meghan was also amazed by the national animals of England, Scotland, and Wales, complaining: “Am I supposed to know that?” She pointed out that even the British camerawoman did not know that a lion was the national animal of England. “Am I supposed to know that? You don’t know that,” she said.
She was delighted to discover that the national animal of Scotland is a unicorn, saying: “No! Really? It’s a unicorn! We’re all moving to Scotland.” When she realized that a dragon is the national animal of Wales, she said: “Are these real right now? It’s a dragon. Lions and unicorns and dragons, oh my.”
On August 4, she was in New York for her thirty-fifth birthday and stayed in the five-star St. Regis hotel in midtown in preparation for her friend Lindsay’s big day. “Happy birthday to the most kind, generous, wickedly smart and gorgeous inside and out maid of honor a girl could want,” Lindsay told her via social media. Intriguingly, on her birthday a bouquet of peonies, her favorite flowers, were delivered to her hotel suite. A princely offering perhaps?
Certainly something was going on in Meghan’s heart. “I am feeling so incredibly joyful right now,” she wrote on The Tig. “So grateful and content that all I could wish for is more of the same. More surprises, more adventure.”
She was certainly not short of adventures. In mid-August, after the Roth wedding, she left behind the elegant butler service at the storied St. Regis in New York and flew to Rome, where she joined her style guru friend Jessica Mulroney. They planned to embrace la dolce vita in some style, checking into the equally civilized Le Sirenuse hotel on the Amalfi coast in Italy.
With breathtaking views of the Bay of Positano, it is hard not to feel that this is but an ante room to paradise. Typically, Meghan publicized every detail of their four-day stay, even giving the holiday the hashtag #MJxItaly. They lounged around the pool, strolled into the market square, and took pictures of their breakfast under the heading “Eat Pray Love.” Meghan, who had had a couple of weeks to ponder the impending safari with Prince Harry, gave an indication of her romantic feelings when she held up a red leather-bound volume titled Amore Etern’ (Eternal Love) and photographed it under the light of a full moon. It was, she said, given to her by friends as a good omen.
At the end of their stay she kissed Jessica goodbye, who was one of only a handful of friends who knew the secret of her next destination, and prepared for her thirteen-hour flight to Johannesburg.
There may have been a slight raising of eyebrows inside the royal palaces when the news percolated through that Prince Harry was taking yet another girlfriend on a safari holiday to Botswana.
Those who monitor these things would have noted that this was his seventh holiday in Botswana with the fourth female companion to join him for a few romantic nights under the stars in a southern African hideaway. The young man certainly had style.
And he was not the only prince of the realm to fall headlong in love with the delights of the African continent. Another Harry, his great uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, enjoyed a torrid affair with the famous and married aviatrix Beryl Markham during a visit to Kenya in 1928. The duke’s elder brother, the Prince of Wales, later and briefly King Edward VIII, took his mistress, Lady Thelma Furness, on safari while her husband camped nearby. “This was our Eden and we were alone in it,” she wrote breathlessly. “His arms about me were the only reality, his words of love my only bridge to life.”
There is something about the vast plains, the never-ending skies, the daily struggle for existence that seems to bring out the passionate and the spiritual in a prince. Prince Charles has passed on his more mystical appreciation of southern Africa to both of his sons. His message to William and Harry was that the exploration of the outer world allowed a deeper engagement with the inner world, a chance to seek truth in their surroundings.
Charles’s own guide was the South African philosopher Laurens van der Post, who encouraged the future king to find peace in the vast featureless wilderness of the Kalahari Desert. During a visit in March 1987 Charles and van der Post traveled to the desert by Land Rover, slept under canvas, and chatted around a campfire, listening to the sounds of the desert while marveling at the brilliant night sky. On the third day they came across a herd of zebra that stretched across the flat horizon. It was such a magnificent and imposing natural wonder that Charles found himself moved to tears. Nowhere else on the planet gives such a vivid reminder of the ineluctable rhythm of life—and of death—than the African plains.
Perhaps with these thoughts and reflections in mind, Prince Charles invited Prince Harry to join him on a five-day visit to South Africa, Swaziland, and Lesotho jus
t two months after Harry’s mother had died in a Parisian underpass. Harry was still struggling to come to terms with her loss, and his father thought that time away from England would help the healing process.
Accompanying Harry, who was then thirteen, was his “surrogate mum,” Tiggy Legge Bourke, who had been an official companion to the young boy during his parents’ separation; his school friend Charlie Henderson; and Mark Dyer, a former equerry to the Prince of Wales. While Harry’s father undertook official engagements, the young prince was taken on his first South African safari. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair.
After touring some of the famous battlegrounds, such as Rorke’s Drift from the famous Zulu war of 1879, the prince met South Africa’s first president, Nelson Mandela, and the Spice Girls, who were then at the height of their popularity and had traveled to South Africa to perform at a charity concert.
It was six years before he enjoyed a return visit. The prince, then nineteen, spent two months of his school gap year in the impoverished kingdom of Lesotho, the landlocked country that suffered from one of the highest HIV-AIDS infection rates in the world. Initially it was seen by many as a cynical public relations exercise to restore the prince’s stained reputation. But not as far as Harry was concerned. Moved by the plight of the children and with his mother’s memory clearly in mind, Harry joined forces with the country’s Prince Seeiso, who had lost his own mother. In 2006 they set up the Sentebale charity to help children suffering from AIDS to lead fulfilled and productive lives. The Sentebale charity—the name means “forget me not”—was so popular and, thanks to the prince’s involvement, became so well known outside the nation’s boundaries that it expanded into neighboring Botswana. He has energetically supported it ever since. In 2008 he recruited his brother to take part in a one-thousand-mile cross country motorbike trek along South Africa’s eastern cape to raise money for Sentebale and other charities supporting disadvantaged children. “It’s not just a bimble across the countryside, we’re expected to fall off many a time,” noted Harry.
Alongside his visits to help conservation projects as well as his charity work for Sentebale and official duties, Harry made Africa his favorite holiday destination—especially when trying to impress a girlfriend. Before Meghan, he had taken TV sports presenter Natalie Pinkham, Zimbabwean-born Chelsy Davy, and actor Cressida Bonas on safari. Botswana was the preferred destination. As his biographer Penny Junor observed: “Africa is the one place on earth where Prince Harry can be truly himself. It is his ‘second home.’ Under African skies, he is not a prince he is just Harry.”
The problem with these romances was that once he arrived back in Britain, the HRH tag got in the way of building an honest, workable commitment. Harry’s previous serious relationships with Chelsy Davy and Cressida Bonas foundered because the women couldn’t cope with being in the spotlight. As Harry’s first serious girlfriend, Chelsy bore the unwelcome media attention for seven years. During their on-off relationship that lasted from 2004 to 2011, the feisty blonde was often described as the love of his life.
She became part of the royal set and was invited to the weddings of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and Princess Anne’s daughter, Zara Phillips, and rugby player Mike Tindall. The trainee lawyer admitted that she found it difficult to cope with the pressure. “It was so full on—crazy, scary and uncomfortable,” she later confessed. “It was tough being chased down the road by photographers. I was trying to be a normal kid and it was horrible.” These days, she enjoys a “calm” life making jewelry.
Cressida told a similar story. She put her acting career on hold during her two-year romance with the prince. Though nervous of the paparazzi, she agreed to join him in public at a charity event at Wembley Arena in north London. In a telling exchange, she felt that as an actor she was being defined by a “famous man” rather than what she had achieved herself. “Yeah, I think it’s that thing of being pigeonholed,” she complained. “Especially in this country [Britain] I find people are very quick to put you in a box or put you in a corner.”
Other girlfriends, such as lingerie model Florence “Flee” Brudenell-Bruce, a former girlfriend of Formula One racing champion Jensen Button, seemed to enjoy the limelight—but not Harry’s roving eye. For his part he complained, as have princes down the ages, about the difficulty of finding a partner who wanted him for himself. As one of his friends observed: “He’s always wary in case women throw themselves at him to make a name for themselves. And often the sincere ones who love him for who he is don’t want to live in the goldfish bowl that is the royal family for the next fifty years.”
But despite the obstacles, it doesn’t appear to have been too much of a hardship, the prince enjoying romances, confirmed or suspected, with a veritable galaxy of beautiful, successful women, among them, actors Sienna Miller and Margot Robbie, TV presenter Poppy James, Brazilian socialite Antonia Packard, and German model Anastasia Guseva. The list is by no means exhaustive. Just a few weeks before he met Meghan for the first time, he was seen “dirty dancing” with a pair of brunettes and downing shots at Jak’s bar in West London. Though his headline antics had been curbed, his newfound maturity remains tempered with a healthy dose of mischief.
10
Into Africa
In August 2016, as far as the public and media were concerned, Harry was taking yet another trip to Africa. The prince was scheduled to spend several weeks in Malawi helping to protect elephants from poaching before traveling to Botswana to work on measures to save the dwindling rhino population. He had taken part in a similar effort the previous year in Namibia. As well as his charity work, he was to be a guest at the August 6 wedding of his cousin George McCorquodale to Bianca Moore at Netherwood, a wedding venue, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Unfortunately, the social occasion ended up eclipsing his good works. The Sun newspaper lasciviously described how the prince and his friends, all the worse for wear, were said to have stripped a younger cousin naked during a drunken late night session of high jinks. Under the headline JAGER LOUT HARRY STRIPS WED GUEST, a fellow reveler was quoted as saying: “Harry was on his best behavior during the wedding but afterwards he went pretty wild. Everyone was laughing having a good time.”
For all the banter and horseplay, Harry had something more meaningful on his mind. Later that month, after working with herds of elephants in Botswana, he was scheduled to meet Meghan at Johannesburg airport in South Africa to join her on the flight to Maun Airport in northern Botswana. The final leg of their journey was a bouncy ride along a series of dirt roads in a rugged 4×4 off-roader. At a roadblock the couple had to get out of their vehicle and walk across a disinfectant mat, a precaution to prevent diseases from the outside world getting into the vast game reserve. When the couple arrived at the exclusive tented camp known as Meno a Kwena, or “teeth of the crocodile,” they were greeted by breathtaking views across the dark blue waters of the nearby Boteti River, meandering along the valley below them. It was a magnificent natural paradise, with herds of elephants, zebra, and wildebeest cooling off in the waters. A casual visitor would never know that for nearly twenty years the river had been dry and had only come back to life in 2008 when millions of gallons of water came gushing through from the Okavango Delta due to a shift in tectonic plates.
Situated halfway between the delta and the spectacular Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the camp has nine luxurious guest tents, all with en suite bathrooms equipped with solar-powered hot and cold running showers.
It is run by conservationist David Dugmore, an old friend not just of Harry but also his brother and father. He and his brother Roger, who organizes mobile safaris, were guests at William and Kate’s wedding in 2011. At the forefront of dealing with the conflict between wildlife and cattle farming, Dugmore’s views have helped shape the thinking of the princes about conservation. He has a radical plan to make Botswana the biggest conservation project in the world by creating a transfrontier park in which animals can freely migrate between the Okavango
and the Kalahari.
Doubtless he discussed the latest developments with the prince, while giving a conservation primer to Harry’s American girlfriend.
However, they had not come thousands of miles to learn about conservation, interested though they both were in the topic. Their days and nights under canvas in the middle of nowhere were a chance to get to know one another without any distractions. That meant, for once, the chattily effusive Meghan Markle maintained radio silence on her social media accounts, the normally prolific web maven going dark between August 21 and 28.
Conversationally, Harry, who has spoken about his ambition to be a safari guide, was on home turf, the old Africa hand well able to impress Meghan with his local knowledge of the bush and the dynamic relationship between indigenous tribes and the native flora and fauna. After all, what is there not to love about a guy who spends his holidays saving elephants and rhinos?
Though Meghan had been to Rwanda on behalf of World Vision Canada, she had never experienced anything so remote and primitive. Sipping a glass of decent red wine by the pool at Le Sirenuse in Positano simply did not compare with watching the vast herds roaming the plains, a sundowner cocktail in hand.
When the sun finally did go down, after a meal of chicken or game stew, they drank in the shimmering carapace of the stars above them. And when they retired for the night, they were lulled to sleep by the chirping of the yellow-throated sand grouse and the melancholy call of zebra at the water’s edge. At dawn they were awoken by a chattering chorus of birds, noisier than usual, as it was their mating season.
During the days, the couple was able to choose from walking tours and day-long safaris deep into the Kalahari Desert. Along the banks of the river, crocodiles are a common sight, while sharp-eyed visitors can occasionally see lions and cheetahs. After a dusty safari the couple could relax in the natural rock swimming pool overlooking the river—crocodiles excluded.
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