The Shadow Queen (4 page)

O
n her tenth birthday, something happened that had never happened before. Her Uncle Sol asked to have a private meeting with her at 34 East Preston Street.

Though she couldn’t be certain, Bessie Wallis thought she knew the reason. West Chase Street, where they had lived with Aunt Bessie, was a distance from 34 East Preston Street, but the Preston Apartments were only a few blocks away, and Uncle Sol couldn’t help but see her mother’s gentlemen friends coming to call. His reaction had been to drastically reduce her allowance.

In order to overcome this blow, her mother had increased the number of dinner parties she gave for paying guests, and she and Bessie Wallis now spent backbreakingly long hours in the kitchen, slaving over the stove. If word of their doing so had gotten back to 34 East Preston Street, it would be the reason Uncle Sol wanted to meet with her—and he would be doing so to demand she cease letting his family name down by working like a servant in a kitchen.

“S
it down, Bessie Wallis,” he said unsmilingly when she walked into his study. “I have some serious things to say to you.” Having greeted her at the door, he retreated behind his large leather-topped desk. “I am a very wealthy man, Bessie Wallis,” he said without preamble, stating what she, and everyone else in Baltimore, already knew. “And as I am unmarried and you are my only niece, I would like to do my best to see that as you grow and take your place in Baltimore society, you do so with all possible material advantages.”

If it was possible to sit any straighter, Bessie Wallis did so. “I intend to adopt you, Bessie Wallis. It is, I think, what your father would wish. In looks you are very much a Warfield. You have the firm Warfield jaw, and your schoolwork shows you have the Warfield ability to work hard. Though you are perhaps too young to be aware of it, your mother’s déclassé reputation has already damaged your social standing. As you grow into a young woman, that damage will affect you severely. It will, however, cease the instant it becomes known you are to be my heir.”

Bessie Wallis gasped. Her mother had, she knew, always hoped that some Warfield money would one day be left to her, but even her mother hadn’t dreamed that her uncle would leave her his entire fortune.

“And will I live here again, Uncle Sol?” Her head reeled at the thought of what that would mean. When she went to Arundell, instead of being one of the poorest pupils in the school, she would become one of the richest.

“Live here again?” Her uncle’s steely blue eyes held hers. “Of course you will live here again. Your life is going to change dramatically—and in ways you are far too young to understand as yet.”

She wondered how her mother would feel about living in close contact with Uncle Sol again, but considering the benefits that would now come with doing so, it was certain her mother would find a way of managing.

“Thank you, Uncle Sol.” She was so transported by happiness she jumped to her feet, rounded his desk, and gave him a kiss on his cheek.

“Mama is going to be so happy when I tell her we’re coming back here to live.”

Her uncle’s eyes narrowed. “Not so fast, Bessie Wallis. Your mother won’t be coming back here to live. The Preston Apartments—and the life she lives there—were her choice, and it’s a choice she’s going to have to stick with. When you come back here, you’ll be doing so alone.”

Bessie Wallis’s euphoric happiness drained as fast as an ebb tide.

Sol saw the expression on her face. “All that I’m offering comes with conditions,” he said grimly. “Not only will you come back to live here without your mother, you will have no future contact with her. Not of any kind. Now what is it going to be, Bessie Wallis? A life of pinch and scrape with a woman who has lost her reputation, or a life as one of the richest heiresses in Baltimore?”

Chapter Three

“A
nd so what choice did you make, Wally?” Pamela asked, riveted by Bessie Wallis’s account of her meeting with her uncle.

“I told him I would never sever my relations with my mother. That there wasn’t money enough in the world to make me do so.”

Pamela let out her breath in a long, admiring sigh. “You’re a heroine, Wally.
I
couldn’t have done that.” She shot Bessie Wallis her irrepressible grin. “But then my mother lives in England and I haven’t seen her in over three years.”

It was a Saturday and they were on their way to Guth’s pastry shop for Kossuth cake and meringues.

“And even if my mother were around, she wouldn’t be as much fun as yours is,” Pamela added as they crossed St. Paul Street. “What did your uncle do when you told him you weren’t going to leave your mother in order to be adopted by him?”

“He looked as if he’d been socked in the stomach by a baseball bat! He just couldn’t believe what he was hearing. And when he did finally believe it, he got angry. He said it was a foolish decision I would live to regret.”

“And what if you do?” Pamela’s forehead creased in a frown. “What if he stops your mother’s allowance?”

“He won’t. He’s an Episcopalian. It’s his duty to provide for the widow and child of his dead brother, and though he doesn’t always do it in a way my mother likes, he does always do it. My grandmother sees to that.”

B
essie Wallis had been right in thinking that her uncle wouldn’t renege on his promise to pay for her fees at Arundell. She went there in September 1906 and immediately knew that Arundell was going to be all she had hoped it would be. No one mocked her for having high and mighty airs about her family lineage, because she had outgrown the childishness of constantly referring to it. Pamela was still her best friend, but she made lots of other friends too.

She was even happy living at the Preston Apartment House, because thanks to her mother’s irrepressible talent for turning adverse situations into something fun-filled, living there was enjoyable. All their fellow tenants at the Preston thought her mother a ray of sunshine, and there was never any shortage of takers whenever she announced she was going to give one of her pay-to-attend dinners.

“When people eat at someone else’s table, they like the food to be elaborate,” her mother said as she stirred a sauce she was preparing for the soft-shell crab that was to be one of the evening’s side dishes. “They don’t want to sit down to something they could have made themselves. You need to remember that, Bessie Wallis, when you’re a married lady giving candlelit dinners for your husband’s wealthy friends.”

The thought of being married made Bessie Wallis giggle. She was far too young to have a sweetheart, but she’d confided to Pamela that when she was old enough she’d rather like her sweetheart to be her second-best friend, John Jasper Bachman.

“But you told me you once hit him over the head with your pencil box!” Pamela had said, hardly able to believe what she was hearing and keeping the fact that she was also sweet on John Jasper to herself.

“He deserved it.” Bessie Wallis hadn’t been remotely sorry for the incident. “But he has the thickest, curliest hair of any boy I’ve ever seen. I bet if you dug your fingers into it, it would be just like digging into a sheep’s fleece.”

W
hen she had been at Arundell a week she asked Miss Carroll, the headmistress, if her name could be altered from Bessie Wallis to Wallis in the class register. When Miss Carroll knew the reason—that Bessie Wallis felt “Bessie” to be a cow’s name—she said that as long as her mother didn’t object, the alteration would be made.

Life was suddenly perfect. Just as she had been head of her class at Miss O’Donnell’s, so she became head of her class at Arundell. It wasn’t that she was brighter than the other girls—some of the girls at Arundell were very bright indeed—but none of them needed to prove that they were just as good as, if not better than, anyone else in the way she did. The insecurities she lived with—the knowledge that she owed her place at Arundell to her Uncle Sol’s charity, just as she did the roof over her head and the clothes on her back—ran deep, and the result was a fierce competitiveness. She had to shine. She had to be best, and when she had set herself a goal, she had to achieve it.

Some things, though, couldn’t be achieved by sheer determination and willpower, as she was painfully reminded whenever long school vacations came around.

When she was eleven and had been at Arundell for nearly a year, the arrangement for her summer vacation was that she would spend it at Pot Springs, a country estate belonging to her late father’s youngest brother, her Uncle Emory. Pamela was going to be spending it in Europe with her father.

“I don’t want to go, Wally. Truly I don’t,” she’d said with apparent sincerity. “I’d much rather be coming with you than going with Papa to Cannes and Biarritz.”

Much as she would have liked to believe Pamela, Wallis found it hard to do so and couldn’t help wondering if, unlike her, Pamela sometimes only told people what she thought they’d like to hear and kept her true opinions to herself.

Uncle Emory’s home was a sprawling, verandahed, Southern-style mansion, and his passion was horses. Wallis was nervous of horses, having been brought up only with tame carriage horses, and she was determined that on this visit to Pot Springs she was going to conquer her nervousness and learn to ride really well.

“Henry will give you lessons,” her Uncle Emory said indulgently when she told him what it was she wanted to do. “No one better. He’s the best horseman for miles around.”

Her cousin Henry was nine years older than she was, and she had never previously spent much time with him. That she would be doing so now didn’t faze her, for her interest in the opposite sex was precociously well developed and the word
shyness
wasn’t in her vocabulary. Henry was, of course, much older than anyone she had previously attempted a flirtation with, but that only made the thought of flirting with him even more exciting.

“How old are you, cuz?” he asked abruptly as they walked toward the stables together the morning after she’d spoken to her uncle.

Wallis hesitated, wondering if she could get away with saying she was twelve. Twelve sounded so much better than eleven. If Henry hadn’t been family she most certainly would have done so—in fact, she knew that she would have said she was thirteen—but within family that sort of fib was hard to get away with.

“Eleven,” she said carelessly, as if she didn’t find being only eleven a handicap.

He gave a snort of laughter. “Merciful heavens, Wally. How d’you get to be eleven without having learned to ride well?”

Wallis stopped walking, forcing Henry, out of good manners, to stop walking as well. She eyeballed him as if she were one of his male friends. “I did it by choice,” she said crisply, aware it was a fib she couldn’t be found out in. “I live in Baltimore, or had you forgotten? And there are other things to do in Baltimore.”

His mouth twitched at the corners. “And just what are those things, Wallis?” he asked, making no move to continue walking.

“Roller-skating. I can roller-skate better than anyone else you can possibly know.”

He burst out laughing.

Wallis didn’t mind. It wasn’t unkind laughter, and, whereas when they had left the house for the stables he had done so in a bored, carrying-out-a-duty kind of way, his boredom had now vanished.

She had caught his attention, and the knowledge gave her a heady sense of power.

“Come on, then.” He ran a hand through straw-colored hair. “I’ll improve your riding, and the next time I’m in the city you can take me to the roller-skating rink and show me how ace you are on a pair of skates.”

Reluctantly—for his eyes were gray-green with intriguing gold flecks—she broke eye contact with him and began walking again, knowing that the age barrier that had been here when they had started out from the house was there no longer. She’d made him like her and be interested in her, and it had all been done as easy as winking.

T
he summer of 1907 was long and hot, and not once did Henry make an inappropriate move toward her. There were, though, other thrilling intimacies. The heat of his hands around her waist as he steadied her when she dismounted. The pressure of his hand over hers as he corrected her hands on the reins. The way his arm would sometimes fall casually around her shoulders.

Sometimes she would catch an expression in his eyes when he looked toward her that sent a tingling sensation into parts of her body she’d been brought up to pretend didn’t exist, and she knew without a shadow of doubt that if she were just a few years older, Cousin Henry would be behaving very inappropriately toward her.

She wondered how inappropriate behavior would feel. She could imagine the kissing part of it, for after all everyone knew what kissing was. You just pursed your lips and pressed them against someone else’s pursed lips. She couldn’t imagine what the other thing would be like. The thing that came after the kissing. All she knew was that it was a cardinal sin for a young lady to allow a man to go “too far”; but what “too far” meant she’d never been able to find out, for no one was telling.

“We’ll just have to find out things for ourselves, Wally,” Pamela had said breezily during one of their many discussions as to what actually went on when two people married, “and personally I can’t wait to do so!”