Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s son Archie could have been seriously injured when his nursery caught fire during their 2019 South Africa tour.
The 41-year-old Suits alum was finishing up a royal engagement when she and Harry, 37, were told there had been “a fire in the baby’s room,” she told Serena Williams in the first episode of her “Archetypes.” podcast.
Fortunately, the couple’s “wonderful nanny” Lauren had taken Archie, who was 4 months old at the time, downstairs for a snack so the baby wasn’t in the room when the fire broke out.
“Her instinct was like, ‘Just let me take him out before I put him down,'” Markle said, pointing out that the caregiver was from Zimbabwe and often carried the toddler “on her back with a mud cloth.”
While Lauren and Archie were out of the room, “the heater in the nursery caught fire.”
Because there was “no smoke detector” there, someone “coincidentally smelled the smoke in the hallway” and extinguished the flames.
“He would sleep in there,” Markle told the 40-year-old tennis pro. “Of course, as a mother, you go, ‘Oh, my God.’ Everyone is in tears, everyone is shocked.”
Immediately after the incident, the Sussexes were expected to attend “another royal engagement”, which Markle said did not “make sense” given the traumatic incident that had just happened.
She explained, “I thought, ‘Can you just tell people what happened?’ … Optically, the focus is ultimately on how it looks rather than how it feels.
“We did. We had to leave our baby behind,” the Duchess of Sussex confirmed. “Even though we were moved to another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go on another official assignment.”
Williams said she “couldn’t have done” what Markle and Harry did if she was in the same scenario with her daughter Olympia.
The royal couple welcomed their baby boy in May 2019, eight months before stepping back from their duties as senior members of the royal family.
The duo officially retired from their royal roles in February 2021, four months before daughter Lilibet, now 1, was born.
While the family of four now lives in Montecito, California, they all traveled to England in June to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee to mark 70 years of service.