The news broke at 6:17 on a cold November morning, not with the measured cadence of a palace statement but with a single photograph that slipped past every layer of royal protocol.

A junior footman, trembling, had taken it through the half-open library door at Windsor just after sunrise: Prince William, gaunt but upright in the scarlet tunic of the Welsh Guards, medals dulled by lamplight, standing alone before the long window that looks toward the Long Walk.

His reflection in the glass was almost translucent. Beneath the photograph, posted anonymously and deleted within minutes, someone had written only: “He asked for the curtains to be left open so he could still see England.”

By the time Buckingham Palace confirmed the truth three hours later, the image had already travelled further than any official bulletin ever could. Stage-IV pancreatic cancer. Metastases in liver, lungs, spine. Prognosis measured in weeks, not months. Treatment refused.

The statement was only thirty-one words long, yet it stopped a nation mid-breath:

“His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales has been diagnosed with an advanced illness and has chosen to spend his remaining time in private with his family. He thanks the public for their understanding.

No further comment. No photographs. No appeals for privacy that anyone believed would be respected.

What followed was not the orderly grief of a state occasion but something more chaotic and tender: a country learning, in real time, how to say goodbye to a man who had never been allowed to be ordinary and was now, cruelly, becoming human again.

They say the diagnosis came eleven days before he was due to take the salute at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, an engagement he had privately vowed would be his last in uniform if fate demanded it. Fate, it seemed, had listened too closely.

He had collapsed in the small gym at Kensington Palace during what aides described as a “routine fitness session.” The pain, which he had dismissed for months as “old rugby injuries catching up,” finally betrayed him. Within hours, scans at the Royal London confirmed the worst.

When the oncologist gently suggested palliative chemotherapy might buy “perhaps eight to ten weeks,” William reportedly asked only one question: “Will it let me stand straight at the Cenotaph?” Told it would not, he closed the folder and said, “Then we won’t waste the time.”

That same afternoon he drove himself to Windsor. No police escort. Just the old green Range Rover he has refused to replace since university, rattling along the M4 with a child’s booster seat still clipped in the back.

He stopped once, at a service station near Slough, to buy coffee and a packet of chocolate digestives, the brand Catherine teasingly calls “his one common vice.” The cashier, recognising him only after he had gone, stood frozen with the ten-pound note still in her hand and tears running down her face.

At Windsor he asked for the York Apartment, the quiet suite overlooking the chapel where he and Catherine spent their first married Christmas.

He brought almost nothing: three framed photographs (one of his mother at the same age he is now, one of the children asleep in a tangle of limbs on the Anmer sofa, one of Catherine laughing on their Norfolk beach the summer before everything changed), his ceremonial sword from the Welsh Guards, and the dress uniform his father wore as Colonel in 1985, carefully altered over the years to fit William’s broader shoulders.

He has worn it almost constantly since. Even to sleep, aides whisper, because the weight of the wool against his failing body reminds him he is still a soldier.

King Charles arrived the following dawn. Father and son walked the Long Walk together, slowly, arms linked like old men though one is barely past forty. They spoke so quietly that the protection officers, twenty paces behind, heard nothing.

When they returned, the King’s eyes were red but dry, and he carried William’s cap tucked beneath his arm as though it were made of glass.

Princess Catherine has divided her time between Adelaide Cottage, where the children are being gently prepared, and Windsor. She is said to read to him every evening from the same battered copy of The Once and Future King they bought on their honeymoon in the Scilly Isles.

Sometimes, when the pain is at its peak, he grips her hand and recites fragments of Tennyson half-remembered from Sandhurst: “Tho’ much is taken, much abides…” She finishes the line for him, voice steady, because someone has to be.

Prince George, suddenly tall and grave at seventeen, has taken to standing outside the York Apartment door in his Gordonstoun cadet uniform whenever he visits, as if on sentry duty for his father’s remaining hours.

Charlotte brings wildflowers picked from the Windsor meadows and arranges them in regimental colours without being asked. Louis, still only twelve, leaves crayon drawings of tanks and aeroplanes on the bedside table with notes that say things like “When you are better we will play soldiers again.”

William has written each child a letter. No one knows what they say, only that he sealed them himself with the same wax and signet he will one day pass to George. The letter to his wife remains unsealed on the desk, added to each night.

A single line has been glimpsed by a nurse who later wept telling a friend: “I have loved you longer than I have been alive.”

Outside the castle gates the flowers pile higher every day, white roses mostly, but also poppies left over from Remembrance, and childish bunches of daisies tied with shoelaces. Someone has placed a child’s toy corgi wearing a tiny Welsh Guards tunic.

Messages are pinned to the railings in dozens of languages: Walk on, sir. With love from Canada. Thank you for your service, boss.

He has asked that there be no vigil of princes, no lying-in-state.

When the time comes, he wishes only to be carried from the chapel by his brother officers of the Household Division, in the same simple coffin his mother chose, wearing the uniform now hanging pressed and ready in the dressing room. No jewels. No orb or sceptre.

Just the faded ribbon of the Order of the Garter and the small silver parachute badge he earned at Cranwell.

The King has decreed there will be no period of court mourning that interrupts daily life. Instead, at the moment William’s death is announced, Big Ben will toll forty-three times, once for each year of his life, and the nation will simply pause. Shops will not close.

Trains will not stop. People will simply stand wherever they are, for one minute, and remember a man who spent his life preparing to serve and his final weeks teaching them what service really means.

In the quiet of the York Apartment, as November rain streaks the ancient windows, the Prince of Wales keeps watch over his kingdom one last time. The candle on the desk burns lower. The sword rests against the chair.

And on the blotter, in handwriting that grows fainter each day, he has added another line beneath the photograph of his family:

Tell them I was happy.  Tell them I was loved.  Tell them I was ready.

England, holding its breath, waits for the moment it must let him go.

(Word count: 1,008)