The royals - Kitty Kelley [172]
“God, what’s this all about?” she said with a gulp as photographers pressed in.
“Keep smiling,” whispered Diana as she held her son’s hand. “Whatever you do, just keep smiling.”
The Princess later invited Sarah and Andrew to spend private weekends at Highgrove, where the housekeeper remembers Fergie’s pocketing the crested stationery and asking for more. “I’ve just got to send some letters on Highgrove paper,” she said, giggling. “I promised a friend, who will be so terribly impressed.” The housekeeper brought her extra stationery along with her clean laundry. “Every time she came,” the housekeeper recalled, “we had to wash and iron all her dirty clothes.”
Most of the courtship was conducted on weekends in the privacy of friends’ country estates, where guests remember an unmistakable physical attraction between the couple and incidents of exuberant horseplay. On one winter weekend in 1985, during a game of hide-and-seek, Andrew hid under a table, and Sarah, who was blindfolded, crawled around the floor looking for him. When she found him, she pinched his behind—hard. “Steady on!” he shouted. “You’re not allowed to squeeze the royal bottom yet!” That evening he proposed.
Sarah replied, “When you wake up tomorrow morning, you can tell me it’s all a huge joke.”
The next morning Andrew proposed again and gave her a $37,000 ruby ring.
Sarah immediately called her father. “Dads, he’s asked me to marry him,” she yelled. “I made him propose twice, just to be sure.” She cautioned her father not to say anything until Andrew received the Queen’s permission to marry.
Intent on ingratiating herself with the royal family, Sarah spent weekends at Windsor when Andrew was home on leave. She took morning horseback rides with the Queen, something Her Majesty was never able to do with Diana, who was afraid of horses. Diana had been thrown as a child and broken her arm; since then she had not ridden. Unlike Diana, Sarah enjoyed playing charades and all the card games that Her Majesty liked. “Sarah cheats even more than my mother at Racing Demon,” the Queen told Sarah’s grandmother. The Queen called her future daughter-in-law by her Christian name. “It was never Fergie,” recalled an aide, “always Sarah.” Her Majesty enjoyed the spirited rapport between her son and his fiancée and observed approvingly, “He’s met his match this time.” Trading barbs with Prince Philip, Fergie laughed uproariously at his off-color jokes and asked him to teach her his favorite sport of competitive open-carriage driving. “I think she will be a great asset,” Philip told the press. Prince Charles agreed. “She’s so spunky, so enthusiastic,” he marveled. “Delightful company. Just delightful.”
Andrew was clearly besotted. “I know that the decision I made to marry Sarah was, and always will be, the best decision I have made, or ever will make in my life,” he said. He felt especially reassured when she announced plans to take forty hours of flight training so she could share his career as a helicopter pilot. “She’ll be a great navy wife,” he told his family.
In Andrew, Sarah had finally found a man who treated her respectfully. “The most important thing that I felt… is his amazing ability to make one feel like a lady, like a woman…. I just couldn’t get over how in my life outside, as I call it, there were so many men strutting around thinking that they were so smart while they were being so foul to women.”
Eager to prove herself, Sarah offered to accompany Andrew on one of his few royal duties. As the couple walked through the corridors of a convalescent home, she spotted the pool used for physical therapy and flippantly suggested that Andrew take a dip. She knew he was afraid of water and had not learned to swim. He smiled at her remark but looked slightly embarrassed. “Oh, dear,” she told a patient,