A secret ex-lover of Prince Charles’ playboy brother-in-law said she put her hand on his heart as he lay dying from a fall during a night of partying in Manhattan.
Ruth Powys, 36, tearfully told Britain’s Daily Mail that she raced to Bellevue Hospital to be with Mark Shand after his tragic tumble outside the Gramercy Park Hotel early Wednesday morning.
“Mark was my everything, my inspiration in life,” said the willowy blond, who was CEO of Shand’s Elephant Family charity.
Powys said she and Shand, 62, had an on-again, off-again relationship since his 2009 divorce, adding that “we had the deepest love, we were full of love for each other.”
“Our relationship was low key, we had a shared passion for elephants, we had the same spirit,” she said.
But Powys said that she recently moved to New York “to try and separate myself from him” because “he wanted me to find someone my own age.”
She also said she danced with Shand — the younger brother of Camilla Parker Bowles — after Wednesday’s Faberge Big Egg Hunt charity auction at Sotheby’s to beneift the Elephant Family and Studio in a School.
“He had such energy, when people aged 20 and 40 were leaving, he said, ‘I want one more, I want to carry on,'” she said.
According to law-enforcement sources, Shand fell backward and cracked his head on the sidewalk while trying to use a revolving door to return to the hotel’s Rose Bar after smoking a cigarette outside.
An autopsy Thursday revealed he died of blunt impact head trauma with skull fracture and subdural hematoma, and his death was ruled an accident, according to the Medical Examiner’s Office.