William had been here for that. He had not been back since. Their uncle met them at the door. Charles Spencer was 35 that year. He had their mother’s eyes. William had noticed this before, but it always arrived as a small shock, the same particular shade, the same way of looking at you as if you were the only person in the room.
“You look well,” he said to William. “Thank you for having us,” William said. Harry had already gone inside. Charles Spencer looked at his nephew for a moment. “She loved this place,” he said, simply, not as comfort, as fact. “I know,” William said. They went in. That first evening they ate together, the three of them, at the long table in the dining room.
Charles Spencer asked them about school, about their plans for the summer, about ordinary things. He was good at that. He had his sister’s gift for making people feel that what they were saying mattered. Harry talked more than William. He usually did. William ate and listened and thought about the house around him. After that, the days settled into their own rhythm.
Harry found a dog somewhere and adopted it entirely. Charles Spencer showed them parts of the house they hadn’t seen before. There was a room with portraits, ancestors going back centuries, faces that didn’t look like anyone William had ever known, except occasionally in a certain light, like his mother. Evenings were harder, Not badly. Not dramatically.
Just the particular quality of evenings in a house where someone was absent. Where the shape of rooms had been formed partly around a person who was no longer in them. William felt it more than he expected to. He had thought coming here that it would be clarifying. That being somewhere she had been would make her more present somehow, more accessible.
Instead, he found that her absence had a different texture here, more specific. Not the absence of a princess or a public figure. The absence of a girl who had grown up in these rooms. Who had been ordinary here in a way she had never quite been anywhere else. He didn’t know how to hold that. On the second afternoon, William wandered out to the gardens alone.
Harry was inside with their uncle. Some game, some conversation. And William had felt the particular need to be outside. To walk, to have the grounds around him rather than walls. The gardens at Althorp were enormous. He walked for a while without direction through the formal gardens, past the lake where she was buried.
He didn’t stop there, not yet, and out toward the rose beds at the far end of the east garden. An older man was working there, moving slowly, methodically, the way someone moves when they have done the same work for decades and no longer need to think about it. He looked up when William approached. “You’re Diana’s boy,” he said, not unkindly, just placing him.
“Yes,” William said. The gardener nodded. He looked back at his rose beds. “I’ve worked these gardens since before your mother was born,” he said. “43 years.” A pause. “I knew her when she was smaller than those bushes.” William stood very still. “What was she like?” he said. He hadn’t planned to ask.
It came out before he thought about it. The gardener considered this seriously, the way people do when they’re reaching for an actual memory rather than a polished version of one. “Determined,” he said finally. “That’s the word I’d use.” “Stubborn,” her father called it. “But it wasn’t stubbornness, really.” He paused. “She knew what she wanted.
Even at 6 years old, she knew.” William waited. “There was a summer. She must have been eight or nine. She decided she was going to grow the biggest sunflower on the estate. Told everyone about it. Planted the seed herself. Watered it every single day.” He smiled at the rose beds. “It died in August. Too much water, I told her.
You can love something too hard.” He was quiet for a moment. “She cried,” he said. “Not a lot. She wasn’t one for a lot of crying. But she cried about that sunflower.” He looked at William. “She came back the next year and tried again,” he said. “That one grew.” William stood very still and felt something move through him that he couldn’t quite name.
“She never told me that story,” he said. “No,” the gardener said. “I don’t suppose she did.” A pause. “She had a lot of stories she never told,” he said. “That was the thing about her. You’d think you knew her and then you’d find out you’d only seen the front of it.” He bent back to his roses. “Come back anytime,” he said.
“The gardens are always here.” William walked back toward the house. That evening, he couldn’t sleep. He lay in bed for an hour listening to the silence of the house, older and deeper than any silence he knew from London. Then he got up quietly so as not to wake Harry in the next room and went out into the corridor.
He didn’t know where he was going at first. Then he did. The door to his mother’s childhood bedroom was at the end of the second corridor on the east wing. He had walked past it twice before without going in. He went in now. The room was not as it had been when she was a child. It had been repurposed, redecorated, used for guests over the decades, but there were traces of her still.
A particular view from the window that he recognized from a photograph he had seen once, a built-in wardrobe that had been there since the beginning. He hadn’t meant to come here, but he didn’t turn back either. He didn’t turn on the main light. He used the small lamp by the door. He looked around the room. In the corner, half behind the wardrobe, there was a wooden box.
Not large, the size of a shoe box, roughly. Old wood, slightly worn at the corners, no lock. He didn’t know why he crossed the room and picked it up. He just did. He sat on the floor with the box in his lap. He opened it. Inside, a drawing, crayon on paper, clearly made by a small child. A house, a sun, two figures, one tall, one small.
The tall one had yellow hair. At the bottom, in large unsteady letters, “For Mom.” He recognized the handwriting. It was his. He had no memory of making it, but he remembered giving her things and waiting to see if she kept them. He set it carefully aside. Beneath it, a dried flower, pressed flat, brown with age, but still holding its shape, a daisy.
He didn’t know its story. A folded piece of paper. He opened it. Another drawing, this one rougher, less careful, the work of a younger child or a less patient one. A figure on what appeared to be a horse with enormous hair. Beneath it, in Harry’s unmistakable scrawl, “Mummy on a horse.” The horse had six legs. He set it down carefully.
