My amazing (and v racy) romance* with Sarah, the Duchess of York...
*That’s romantic plot,explains) Scots Mills and Boon author who helped Fergie write her f irst novel. And, not surprisingly, there’s no toe-sucking in evidence!)
We have a very open working relationship. Our style is organic
AS the video began to play and the familiar face of Sarah, Duchess of York suddenly appeared on the screen before them, four of the five women watching gasped in surprise. For the fifth, Marguerite Kaye, one of the UK’s most prolific historical fiction writers for Mills & Boon, it was the moment she had waited more than a year for and, she now admits, the looks of incredulity on the faces of her mother and three younger sisters, as they finally learned of her latest ‘top secret’ project, will live with her forever as one of the most ‘magical’ of her life.
The following morning, the world would learn that she and Sarah Ferguson, the former wife of Prince Andrew and now a successful children’s author, had collaborated on a new historical novel. But, anticipating the shock of Ms Kaye’s nearest and dearest at the news when it broke, the Duchess had kindly volunteered to record a video message to her family on the eve of the project’s announcement.
Laughing at the memory, the author, who is based near Dunoon,
Argyll, recalled: ‘I’d been dying to tell them for months but I’m also very good at keeping secrets.
‘I knew that they’d be shocked when they found out, so Sarah offered to soften the moment by putting a little video together of herself to play on a Zoom call with my mum and sisters.
‘So I’m on the call with them the night before the news breaks, and I said to them, “I’ve been writing a book and I’ve been working on it with somebody famous and I’m going to hand over to her to tell you….”
‘That’s when I played the video, and Sarah appeared on the screen, saying, “Hi, I’ve been working with your fabulous sister” and she went on to talk to them about the book and the fact that we’d been collaborating for ages.
‘It was very touching and very personal – and it was all her idea.
‘Watching their faces was one of the most magical moments ever. Their jaws were dropping and they were screaming, “Oh my God!”
They were just absolutely gobsmacked.’
Last week, the book they co-authored, titled Her Heart for a
Compass, was published by Mills & Boon
– a first for the Duchess in the world of adult fiction and the
58th by Ms Kaye, who was hand-picked by the company to work with the former HRH on the project.
For all her success to date as a writer, the Scot, who is better known for her hot historical romances involving Regency rakes, Highlanders and sheiks, admits she is still mentally pinching herself, not only at the turn of events but that she now has a ‘genuine and long-lasting friendship’ with the Duchess.
She said: ‘I’m so excited about the book and I think it’s fabulous. But one of the most unexpected things that’s happened is that I’ve acquired a new friend in Sarah.
‘It doesn’t happen very often where you meet someone and you absolutely click but she’s become a genuine friend and I don’t think you get many of those in your life.’
It was autumn 2019 when Ms
Kaye, a law graduate and former IT specialist who started writing books for Mills & Boon – which has three million regular readers in the UK alone – after completing a history degree with the Open University, took the call from her editor about the project.
Light on detail and with no mention of the client she’d be working alongside, she was asked if she would be interested in taking on a new task. Ms Kaye said: ‘She said, “We’ve got an opportunity for you to work on an historical novel with romance in it. Do you fancy doing that?” And I said, “Well, what is it?” She told me it would be set in the Victorian period and it would be with the Duchess of York. I was like, “What?”
‘Of course I said, “Yes”, and by the time a face to face meeting was arranged, I’d calmed down a little bit and felt ready for the challenge.
‘But more than anything I knew that if it was going to work, we needed to get on. I honestly didn’t know much about her life, apart from the fact she’d been married and had two daughters.
‘I don’t follow the Royal Family, I don’t read gossip columns and I’ve made a point in the time I’ve known her to take Sarah as my friend, so I try to blank everything out.’
Astonishing as that seems, it does take some doing to remain unaware of the Duchess’s personal exploits over the past three decades, particularly the scandalous end to her six-year marriage to Prince Andrew when she was caught in paparazzi photographs, in 1992, having her toes sucked by her financial adviser at the side of the pool of her holiday villa in St Tropez. There was also a series of cash-for-access stings.
The Queen’s late sister, Princess Margaret, is said to have told her: ‘You have done more to bring shame on the family than could ever have been imagined’ and she was subsequently cut off by the Duke of Edinburgh, who described her behaviour as ‘simply beyond the pale’.
The mother of Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, she spent the years that followed barred from Royal Family events, and set out to reinvent herself as an ambassador for Weight Watchers and a children’s book author.
IT is interesting to note, however, that when Ms Kaye was finally introduced to the Duchess just under two years ago, the pair met in a room at Buckingham Palace. Ms Kaye said she felt nervous ahead of meeting the Duchess, but when she walked in, she quickly put her at her ease.
She said: ‘I didn’t pay too much attention to where we were. Apparently, for convenience, she’d managed to borrow a room at the palace. But by the time I got there, I already had a hundred questions in my head about the book and I was also still questioning whether I was up for this.
‘I was terrified I wasn’t going to be able to carry it off, even though I was excited by the prospect. But I stopped being scared very quickly because she was just so welcoming and enthusiastic.
‘I knew a little bit about what the book was going to be about, now we both wanted to find out from that first meeting if we could collaborate, never mind how or where we were going with it.
‘Could we get on? Did we have an understanding of what type of story it was? Was there an empathy between us and the story?
‘She had quite a strong idea of the story and the character and had had it in her head for a long time, and she wanted somebody who could help her construct it.’
Set in the Victorian period and packed with real people given fictitious lives, the plot follows the life and loves of Lady Margaret Montagu Douglas Scott, born in 1846 and the second daughter of the fifth Duke of Buccleuch and his wife, Charlotte – who were also the Duchess of York’s great-great-great grandparents.
In reality, details of her life are scant, apart from the fact she was a bridesmaid to Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Helena, in 1866, and married late herself at the age of 29.
But after carrying out her own research, the Duchess decided to flesh out the character to be the main heroine for her book.
The fact that Lady Margaret is flame-haired and impetuous, not to mention being besties with a princess, fond of chocolate cake and a dab hand at writing stories for children, has inevitably drawn comparisons with the Duchess of York.
UNLIKE the raunchy Bridgerton novels, however, the book is no ‘bodice ripper’ and Lady Margaret’s romantic exploits amount to little more than ‘deep, starving kisses, adult kisses, their tongues tangling, hands clutching and clinging’ when she eventually meets the man who wins her heart.
Reviews so far have been mixed, ranging from ‘amiable tosh’ to ‘a slog’ but such is the rapport now between the Duchess and Ms Kaye, whose characters in other recent titles have not shied away from the
horizontal, that they’ve already started working on a second Mills & Boon together. The Duchess has hinted this one could ‘rival Fifty Shades of Grey’.
And just like first time round, they plan to write the script through lengthy telephone calls, WhatsApp chats, email and Zoom sessions to bridge the 400-mile distance with the Duchess, who after rekindling her friendship with Prince Andrew has now shared his home at Royal Lodge, on the sprawling Windsor estate, for some years.
Ms Kaye said: ‘We have a very open, frank working relationship and our writing style is a very organic process.
‘For the first book, Sarah had ideas, there was a rough outline story, volumes of research and characters in her head but nothing pre-written. That’s where the complementary skills came in.
‘I’d say to Sarah about a scene and what would Lady Margaret do and how does she feel. Sarah would just get into character and she’d tell me how the character felt. She’s so brilliant at that, and I would be madly scribbling things down and asking her questions.
‘That’s how it worked. She’s actually very modest and open about wanting to learn and not scared to reach out and ask.
‘So, a lot of the time we were working, she was Lady Margaret and I was Marguerite. That doesn’t mean that she and Lady Margaret are one and the same. It was just a joke we had between each other, to shut the world out and have Lady Margaret time.
‘In any book, your own experiences inform the characters. You are kind of a magpie when you’re a writer, in collecting experiences.
‘Sarah’s been quite open about the colour of Lady Margaret’s hair and the weight issues and the impetuous and fiery personality and the kind of somebody who wants to be her own person.
‘But it is absolutely not an autobiography by another name, despite what some people might think.’
Now, with a second book in the offing, which promises to feature ‘another strong female character’, Ms Kaye added: ‘I’m desperate to talk about it but I’m quite limited in terms of what I can say just now. It’s set in the Victorian period as well, and it’s building on the same world, so there will be some characters that will be quite familiar but it is quite a different type of story.’
MS Kaye has also decided to pay tribute to her new friend by dedicating her next Mills & Boon novel – due to be published in October – to the Duchess and has gone even further, by including her in the plot as a redhead, aptly called Sarah, with her own dedicated romance.
She said: ‘I was writing it while I was working with Sarah on Her Heart for a Compass, and I said jokingly to her in one of our many phone calls during lockdown that it would be fun to put her into my latest book. She loved the idea and agreed, so it came from there.
‘It’s also got some of the same themes about beauty and image. But in this one, my heroine in the book has been physically scarred and has to wear a veil all the time, and her sister is best friends with a red-haired character called Sarah.’
No stranger to the ups and downs of romance, it seems the Duchess was also able to help give the author a tantalising insight into her character’s heart in the novel, the first in a twopart series and entitled The Earl Who Sees Beauty.
Ms Kaye added: ‘Sarah’s a secondary character, and in a 70,000-word novel you don’t have a lot of space for secondary characters but she even gets her own romance. Sarah herself actually had quite a big say in how that pans out.’
Last week, following the official launch of Her Heart for a Compass, the Duchess revealed she is now in talks with a number of streaming services for a TV adaptation of their book and hopes that Lady Margaret will be played by Jess Buckley (of The Woman in White) or Eleanor Tomlinson (Poldark).
‘If it ended up on TV, I’d be over the moon,’ said Ms Kaye, ‘but I’m not involved in any of those discussions.
‘I leave that to Sarah who’s got such a cinematic imagination that a lot of the book does lend itself to filming. Either Jess Buckley or Eleanor Tomlinson in the role would be fantastic – and if I could get a part as one of the maids, I’d be delighted.’
It is a small in-joke in Ms Kaye’s family that she’s managed to write her mother, Johanna, into Her Heart for a Compass. ‘My mum’s in the book as a maid, Johanna,’ she said. ‘She’s absolutely delighted.’
There is no question that a bond has been firmly forged between the author and the Duchess, who is now treated – and almost considers herself – part of Ms Kaye’s family, thanks to months of working secretly on their project.
Now a grandmother, after Eugenie gave birth to son, August Brooksbank, six months ago, the Duchess recently said: ‘I’ve learned to love myself, with all my flaws, and to be true to the person I am.
‘You can’t please everyone all of the time. At 61, I’ve come to realise that that’s just fine.’
Behind the scenes, it is clear she has learned from her mistakes and goes to extraordinary lengths to support her friends.
Piers Morgan revealed she was one of the royals who reached out to him after he was forced to quit Good Morning Britain over his coverage
She’s very good at establishing empathy with strangers
of Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Now Ms Kaye considers herself blessed to be part of her friendship circle – and only last week received a spontaneous visit from the Duchess at her sister’s house in Surrey, where she has been cat-sitting to allow her sibling to go on holiday.
Ms Kaye said: ‘She paid an informal visit because she wanted to meet my sister, Catriona, and her family because she knew it meant a lot to me.
‘I’d talk to her so much about my family while we wrote the book, and I think she felt she knew them. She’s very good at establishing empathy with complete strangers, like she did with me the first time we met. She came into the living room and chatted to my sister’s girls and her husband, and took some photos.
‘She’s very generous with her time and emotions and I feel I’ve made a genuine friend. She doesn’t pry but she’s very attuned to people’s emotions, and I think, if you see us together, it must be obvious how well we like each other.’