The Shadow Queen (48 page)

“Then we’ll go for muted and subtle,” Sybil said, aware of how much the elegant severity of Chinese-style clothes would suit her new friend. “Let me have a look at the carpet you bought in Peking. It’s going to make a wonderful centerpiece for the drawing room—and we’ll need to shop for a really elegant vitrine in order to show off your jade and ivory lucky elephants.”

Not only was Wallis and Ernest’s home full of artifacts that set it apart, but her style of entertaining was different and interesting, too.

“Don’t play down being American,” Pamela had said to her. “Play it up. Serve the kind of food your mother used to serve. Maryland crabcakes, fried chicken, white cloud cake—and put the cocktail-making skills Win taught you to good use. Cocktail parties are the easiest and swiftest way of widening your social circle.”

Wallis had always found the London cocktail parties she had attended with Ernest to be little more than a fill-in hour before the real entertainment of the evening began. The cocktails had always been unimaginatively restricted in choice, food had rarely been served, and, when it had been, it had always been uninspiring.

Right from the first she decided that her cocktail parties were not merely going to be the precursor to other events, but events in themselves, and that she was going to conduct them with Virginian open-house hospitality so that, at cocktail hour, people would feel free to call on her and Ernest without having been formally invited to do so.

Pamela had raised her eyes to heaven at the idea, saying it would never catch on. She was proved wrong. With a nub of people such as herself and John Jasper, Tarquin, the Milford Havens, Cecil Beaton, and Sibyl Colefax regularly to be found in Wallis and Ernest’s flat at cocktail hour, word spread that Wallis was great fun, that her cocktails were cocktails that couldn’t be found anywhere else, not even at the Ritz or the Savoy, and that to drop in on her and Ernest before continuing on to a dinner engagement, the opera, or the theater was
the
thing to do.

Not all the new people in their lives were English. John Jasper introduced Benjamin Thaw, the first secretary of the U.S. embassy in London, and his sultrily exotic half-American, half Latin-American wife Consuelo, into their ever-expanding social circle.

Consuelo’s distinctive, head-turning beauty was a beauty one of her younger sisters, Thelma, shared. First married when she was seventeen, divorced when she was twenty, Thelma was now married to a British aristocrat, Viscount Furness, who was known to all and sundry as “Duke.” Despite her friendship with Consuelo, Wallis still barely knew Thelma. By early 1929 it was something she realized she was going to have to change.

“Thelma,” Consuelo said at one of Wallis’s early evening parties, “has finally ousted Freda Dudley Ward from Prince Edward’s life. Isn’t that spiffy?”

She and Benny were continuing on to the opera, and she was wearing a black-and-gold evening dress embroidered with coral beads and crystals. Her nails and lips were a searing matching coral and she was sitting, unasked, upon John Jasper’s knee, one arm carelessly around his neck.

“He’s absolutely mad for her,” she continued, gratified that she had caught everyone’s attention, “and let’s face it, who can blame him? She’s far more fun than Freda, who was always trying to keep him on the straight and narrow.”

Wallis was kneeling at the coffee table that held everything she needed for cocktail making. She paused in what she was doing, saying to Ernest, “Darling, will you turn the music down a little, so that we can more easily hear what Consuelo is saying?”

Ernest obligingly turned down the peppy strains of “Cecilia” by Johnny Hamp’s Kentucky Serenaders.

Wallis continued with what she had been doing, pouring two and a quarter measures of American rye whiskey into a cocktail shaker and adding a measure of sweet red vermouth, saying as she did so, “Are you sure Freda is really a thing of the past, Consuelo? People have thought it before and been proved wrong.”

Consuelo gave a dismissive wave of her long cigarette holder. “What would you say if I told you that when he goes on his South African tour in February, he’s arranged to meet up with Thelma in Kenya? He’s never made those sort of arrangements for Freda when he’s been on any of his trips abroad.”

Once again Wallis stopped what she was doing.

John Jasper cleared his throat. “Are you, or are you not, making me a Manhattan, Wallis?”

“I am.” Wallis added ice and a dash of bitters to the mix and began shaking it.

Benny Thaw said, “It’s a shame Thelma isn’t single. Rumors from the palace are that the king’s health is so poor he isn’t expected to live for much longer. If Prince Edward were able to marry Thelma and make her Princess of Wales, she’d be queen before you could spit—and I rather like the idea of having a queen for a sister-in-law.”

“Cecilia” came to an end, and Ernest deftly removed the record and replaced it with “A Precious Little Thing Called Love,” sung by George Olsen.

Pamela, who was privately concluding that Consuelo had been sitting on John Jasper’s knee for quite long enough, said, “Even if she were single, she’d be a divorcée, and there’s no way a king of England can be married to a divorced woman, because as well as being the king, he’s also head of the Church of England—and the church doesn’t recognize divorce. So eat your heart out, Benny. Your daydream is never going to come true.”

Wallis strained the contents of the cocktail shaker into a martini glass and added a cherry for garnish.

As she did so, her eyes met Pamela’s. Whenever Edward was under discussion, Pamela never mentioned the letters he had written to her from France and Italy during the war. Wallis knew there were two reasons. The first was that Pamela valued still being part of Edward’s “set” and didn’t think he’d take kindly to it if she gossiped about the letters he had written to her. The second was that Pamela enjoyed having secrets and was never happier than when she was keeping one.

It wasn’t something Wallis had realized in the days when they had been at Arundell and Oldfields together. Then, Pamela had always said that being best friends meant they would never have any secrets from each other, but her affair with John Jasper had shown Wallis that what Pamela said and what she did were often two very different things.

Whether Pamela had anything she was keeping secret from her now Wallis didn’t know, but she did know that none of their mutual friends—not even Georgie Mountbatten, who was Edward’s cousin—knew how close she’d once come to becoming Edward’s mistress.

“My Manhattan, Wallis,” John Jasper said, using his feigned exasperation as an excuse to remove Consuelo from his knee and get up from his chair.

As he walked across to her, Wallis gave him a smile of apology. “Sorry, John Jasper, I was trying to come to terms with the fact that if Prince Edward were suddenly to become king, Thelma would be
maîtresse-en-titre
.”

“Which wouldn’t matter if, as king, he had also had a queen and an heir—or at least the prospect of an heir. Something he not only doesn’t have, but doesn’t even show the slightest interest in having.” He took the martini glass from Wallis’s hand. “Even for a republican, that seems to me a dodgy situation for a monarchy. Especially one that rules a third of the globe.”

A
ll through the year and into 1930, rumors as to King George’s health continued to be rampant. Wallis found it surreal to think that when he died and when Prince Edward became king, his mistress would be a woman whose sister she regarded as being a close friend. Even after over a year of being friends with George and Nada, she could never quite believe that George was Lord Louis Mountbatten’s brother.

Her memory of when she had seen Louis Mountbatten standing by Prince Edward’s side in the grand ballroom of the Hotel del Coronado was still vivid. Then, even being presented to him and shaking his hand would have been one of the high spots of her life. Now his brother and sister-in-law bandied his name across her and Ernest’s dining table so casually it made her head spin.

Common sense told her she was being foolishly snobbish, but the fact that she was friends with minor royalty gave her a great deal of pleasure. One reason was that she knew how much pleasure her grandmother would have gained from it. Another was that she knew how furiously jealous the people who had once sneered at her for living off her Uncle Sol’s charity would be. If Violet Dix or Mabel Morgan were in London now they would, she knew, be selling their souls in order to be invited to a cocktail party at which the marquess and marchioness of Milford Haven would be present.

What she had yet to achieve, though, was the presence of Thelma at one of her cocktail parties, for with Thelma would also—eventually—come Prince Edward.

She was in the back of a taxicab, thinking of a way of achieving this objective, when the cabdriver opened his glass partition and said: “Yer might loike to know, madam, that the Prince of Wales’s car ’as just driven up alongside of us.”

Wallis spun her head to the right. There was only one passenger in the limousine, and beneath a homburg hat his delicate profile was immediately recognizable. He was staring straight ahead of him, his expression somber.

“ ’E’s no doubt thinkin’ about the king,” the cabdriver said with a knowing nod as the limousine pulled away from them, heading in the direction of Buckingham Palace. “ ’E’s pretty bad, by all accounts. My missus ’as bin sayin’ prayers for ’im all week.”

Wallis leaned back against the cracked leather seating. She had now seen Prince Edward twice, both times fleetingly and both times at a distance. It had been ten years since she had seen him at the del Coronado and yet, despite his now being thirty-seven and despite his having a world of worry on his slender shoulders, the boyish handsomeness that was his trademark was undimmed.

For what seemed like an age, Pamela had been promising her she would arrange things so that she would be introduced to him, but so far, despite Pamela’s best efforts, it hadn’t happened. Her hands tightened on her snakeskin clutch bag as she wondered if it ever would.

W
hen the occasion finally arose, it came completely out of the blue on a dank January day thick with fog. She had woken with a heavy head cold, and when the telephone rang she was uninterested in who it was that was calling.

“It’s Mrs. Bachman, Mrs. Simpson,” the butler who formed the nucleus of her and Ernest’s small household staff of five said.

“Please tell her I will call her back.”

He nodded and went back into the hall.

Seconds later he was again at her side. “Mrs. Bachman says it is extremely urgent, Mrs. Simpson.”

Hoping there hadn’t been an accident or other real emergency, Wallis forced herself into movement.

As soon as she heard the tone of Pamela’s excited voice she knew the matter of urgency hadn’t been connected to anything grave.

“Wally, darling! I have the most wonderful news.…”

“Sorry, Pamela,” she said, cutting across her, “but I’ve come down with a dreadful cold and I’m really not in the mood for whatever it is you’re about to tell me.”

“You’re going to be in the mood for this—and you’re going to have to get over your cold pretty damn quick.” Pamela’s voice wasn’t merely excited; it was jubilant. “I’ve just had a telephone call from Consuelo. She and Benny were due to spend the weekend as guests of Thelma’s at Burrough Court, Duke’s hunting lodge at Melton Mowbray. Prince Edward is going to be at his hunting lodge, Craven Court, which is only a mile or so away. Thelma is expecting Edward to be spending nearly all the weekend at Burrough and has arranged a small party for him. Nothing big, just a handful of people. As Duke won’t be there—he’s in Africa, on safari—Thelma needed Consuelo and Benny there to act as chaperones, and now Consuelo can’t go.”

Wallis sneezed, wiped her nose, and said, “All very interesting, Pamela, but what do Thelma’s romantic weekend arrangements have to do with me?”

“Everything, Wally! Absolutely everything! Benny’s mother has fallen ill, and Consuelo is leaving for Paris later this morning to look after her. She phoned me in a panic to ask if I knew who was likely to be able to stand in for her and Benny at short notice, and I immediately said that you and Ernest would absolutely love to do so. She will be phoning you any second, so good-bye, darling, and good luck!”

Before Wallis could even draw breath, the connection was severed. She was just about to call Pamela back in order to ask her to repeat everything she’d said, so she could make sure she’d hadn’t misunderstood her, when, beneath her hand, the telephone rang again.

“Wallis, sweetie.” Consuelo sounded slightly breathless. “Thank goodness you’re at home. I need the most awfully big favor. Thelma is entertaining you-know-who at Burrough, Duke’s place in Leicestershire, this weekend. Benny and I were to be chaperones—so silly, but you-know-who insists on the outward proprieties—and I now won’t be there as Benny’s mother is ill and I have to do the done thing and rush to her side—which very inconveniently happens to be in Paris. Benny is still going to Burrough, but Thelma needs a married couple for the chaperoning lark and so if you don’t mind, darling.…”