HaveUHeard

Meghan Markle shared a terrifying story involving her and Prince Harry’s son, Archie, during the first episode of her new podcast series, “Archetypes,” released on Tuesday.

The Duchess of Sussex revealed there was a fire in her then-infant son’s room, where he was supposed to be sleeping, during the family’s tour of Southern Africa in 2019. Luckily, Archie was not in the room at the time, Meghan told her guest, close friend and tennis icon Serena Williams.

Archie was about 4 1/2 months old during the trip, Markle said. Immediately after landing, the couple had to drop off Archie at the housing unit where the family would be staying before heading off to an official engagement in Nyanga.

His nanny went to put him down for a nap and the unthinkable happened, as Meghan learned after a speech.

“There was this moment where I’m standing on a tree stump and I’m giving this speech to women and girls, and we finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say, ‘There’s been a fire at the residence,’” Meghan said, acting out the conversation. “‘What?’ ‘There’s been a fire in the baby’s room.’”

Meghan said the couple quickly returned to the residence and found their nanny, Lauren, “in floods of tears.”

“She was supposed to put Archie down for his nap and she just said, ‘You know what? Let me just go and get a snack downstairs,’” the duchess explained. “And she was from Zimbabwe and we loved that she would always tie him on her back with a mud cloth. And her instinct was like, ‘Let me just bring him with me before I put him down.’”

In that brief period, the heater in the nursery caught fire. There was no smoke detector in the room, the former “Suits” actor said.

“Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway ― went in, fire extinguished. He was supposed to be sleeping in there,” she said.

“Of course, as a mother, you go, ‘Oh, my God, what?’ Everyone’s in tears, everyone’s shaken,” she said. “And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement.”

“I said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense. Can you just tell people what happened?’ And so much, I think, optically, the focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels,” she said.

She lamented that they had to leave their baby after the incident.

“Even though we were being moved into another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement,” Meghan said.

Williams replied, “I couldn’t have done that.”

The incident occurred on the very first day of the family’s royal tour, meaning that they had nine more days left of engagements after the fire.

The couple were also briefly separated during the trip, as it was planned that Harry would visit some countries without Meghan.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex did end up bringing Archie with them to an engagement during the tour, two days after the fire, when the family met with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter Thandeka Tutu-Gxashe.

Also on the couple’s royal tour, both Harry and Meghan showed immense vulnerability as they spoke candidly with reporter Tom Bradby for the documentary “Harry & Meghan: An African Journey.”

Harry addressed rumors of a rift with Prince William, while Meghan revealed that she was not really OK following her pregnancy, and that she found it “challenging” to cope with the intense global spotlight focused on her.

Shortly after the couple’s royal tour was over, they embarked on a six-week sabbatical to North America, missing Christmas with the royal family. And just after returning to the U.K. in January 2020, the Sussexes announced that they were stepping back as working members of the royal family on Jan. 8.

The couple relocated to California in March 2020, just as borders closed down due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Since stepping back, both the duke and duchess have been open and honest about their relationships with members of the royal family, a racist incident that occurred with Archie before he was born, and their own mental health struggles.

Given that the Duke of Sussex’s memoir will be released later this year ― and there are 11 more episodes of Meghan’s podcast ― the insights will likely keep coming.