The Shadow Queen (51 page)

They foxtrotted and whenever Wallis caught sight of Edward, she was struck by how very preoccupied he looked.

Later in the evening the reason became clear to her.

“I’m just back from some dreadful provincial northern town,” he said to George Milford Haven.

Dancing was still going on, but he’d given up on it and was sitting on a sofa, Thelma at his side. George was in a comfortable chair nearby, nursing a brandy, and Wallis, always a strategist, was seated on a nearby sofa with Nada.

“I thought it was too utterly horrid that you had to travel to some boring town in the north on your first day home from Argentina,” Thelma said cooingly, laughter in her voice. He didn’t respond to her. Instead he said, still talking to George, “Those poor devils up there have absolutely no work, George. I’ve spent the whole day talking to men who have no shirts beneath their jackets, worn-out boots—that’s if they have boots—and no hope.”

“Oh dear.” Thelma’s voice was still laughter-filled. “A jacket without a shirt must be very scratchy.”

Her gaiety fell on deaf ears.

“Something must be done to help them, George.” Fiercely Edward slammed a clenched hand into his fist. “Something
must
be done!”

The music changed to a quickstep. “Brilliant!” Thelma sprang to her feet. “I just
love
quicksteps. They’re so racy!”

Edward remained where he was, his finely featured face deep in grave thought.

It was a moment that could have been embarrassingly sticky, but George rose swiftly to his feet, took hold of Thelma’s hand, and, telling her that he simply
adored
quicksteps, headed her speedily in the direction of the adjoining room and its small dance floor and orchestra.

Nada, reading Wallis’s thoughts, said languorously, “When you are a cousin of the Prince of Wales, you can ignore usual etiquette, lovely Wallis.”

For Wallis the little scene was a revelation. Pamela had said she doubted if Edward had ever experienced true intimacy with anyone, even with Freda or Thelma. Wallis now knew for a certainty that where Thelma was concerned, Edward had certainly never experienced it, for Thelma had not been remotely attuned to his mood. Even worse, she had been totally uninterested in the kind of difficult official tasks he had to undertake as Prince of Wales.

He looked up from his now-clasped hands and said apologetically, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Simpson. I’m being a bore.”

“No, sir. You’re not.”

She held his eyes in the way she had done at Burrough Court.

“Was the town you visited a mining town, sir?”

Even as she asked the question she knew she was seriously breaking the rules of royal etiquette. It was up to the prince to lead in any conversation. Pamela had been quite explicit about it when she had given her last-minute pointers before her visit to Melton. “If the prince holds you in conversation, Wally, never introduce a new subject into it and never,
never
, discuss politics or anything of a controversial nature.”

That it was totally unheard of for anyone to question him went so much without saying that Pamela hadn’t even reminded her of it.

“It was a steel town, Mrs. Simpson.” He paused, unclasped his hands, and fiddled nervously with his bow tie. “May I call you Wallis? Mrs. Simpson sounds so formal when we’re beginning to be such good friends.”

Wallis caught her breath, not at the honor, but at the realization that he was shy.

“Yes, sir,” she said, beginning to see him in an entirely new light. “I’d be honored if you would call me Wallis.”

All around them was laughter and chatter and from the adjoining room the strains of a Jerome Kern quickstep.

They were oblivious to it.

“It’s this damned economic depression,” he said, his brow furrowed, his voice passionate. “It’s crippling the working classes. You’ve no idea of the misery I see when I travel north, or into South Wales. Men who can’t feed their families. Children going hungry. I spoke to a man today and asked him what his trade was. He said he was a foreman riveter. I asked him how long it was since he had worked and he said it had been five years. Five years! He wanted hope from me, Wallis, and what hope could I give him? Was I supposed to tell him that the government was doing all that it could and that he simply had to be patient? What possible solace would that have been to a poor blighter who, through no fault of his own, has been on the dole for five years?”

Wallis hesitated and then said, “The fact that you were there, sir, would have been a comfort to him. It would have shown him that you care, that the monarchy hasn’t forgotten about him and the thousands of others like him.”

The expression in his eyes changed. He was now looking at her like a drowning man seeing a life raft.

“Do you think so, Wallis? Do you really think so?”

“I’m sure of it, sir, and I know that you’ll do everything in your power to help men like the one you have just spoken of.”

“Royal power in British politics is limited to the power of suggestion, but I’m certainly going to do something, Wallis. By God I am!”

The foxtrot had come to an end. The small orchestra was now playing a tango. Edward’s ability to tango with great panache was legendary, and Thelma came back into the room at a tripping little run, George in her wake.

“It’s a tango, sir,” she said to Edward, her dark eyes shining. “And as you are just back from Argentina, I just know you will be aching to dance it.”

Wallis had never seen a man who looked less like wanting to tango. Nevertheless, he rose to his feet. “Anything to please,” he said with a tired smile. “Excuse me, Wallis.”

Thelma was too busy chattering away about how the tango was in her Latin-American blood to notice Edward’s use of Wallis’s first name.

George noticed it, though. As Edward escorted Thelma toward the adjoining room and the dance floor, he raised an eyebrow queryingly at her.

Wallis ignored it. Her newfound relationship with the Prince of Wales was her affair and no one else’s. Without a word of explanation she rose to her feet and strolled off in search of the buffet table.

She was still in the supper room, eating grapes that had been stuffed with cream cheese, when from the drawing room she heard Edward bidding everyone good night.

“I’ve had a long day,” she heard him saying, “and am still recovering from my long return journey from South America. It’s been a splendid party. Good night, everyone.”

From the supper room’s open doorway Wallis saw Thelma accompany him out into the hall in order to say a personal good night to him at the door.

She ate another grape, wondering how it was that Thelma had been so blindly unable to pick up on Edward’s mood and his need to talk about his day and of how defeated and crushed it had made him feel.

She remembered the change in his mood at the end of his conversation with her. Of his fervor and determination. The change in him was one she had achieved and, if she were given the chance, it was something she knew she would always be able to achieve.

“So there you are,” Ernest said, breaking in on her thoughts. “I wondered where you’d got to. The orchestra is now playing a waltz. I can manage that even if I can’t manage a tango.”

As they waltzed, Wallis’s thoughts were still full of her extraordinary conversation with Prince Edward. His compassion for the unemployed had been real and touchingly deep. She wondered whom else he spoke to in such an agonized and confiding way and suspected it was no one.

Thelma danced past them with Tarquin.

Ernest removed his hand from hers in order to glance down at his watch. “It’s after midnight, darling. Unlike most people here I have an office I need to go to in the morning. Let’s call it a day, shall we?”

Wallis nodded. Now that the prince had gone she had no further need to stay.

They said their good-byes and retrieved their coats. Thelma, the party now being in full swing, didn’t trouble to accompany them to the door.

When it was opened for them, only the butler saw the royal Daimler still parked outside and the Prince of Wales leaning against it, smoking a cigarette.

“I wondered,” the prince said, as they walked down the steps to the pavement, “if I might offer you both a lift home?”

A shell-shocked Ernest opened his mouth to stammer that it wouldn’t be necessary, that they had their own car and chauffeur waiting for them.

Wallis, anticipating what he was about to say, said swiftly, “That would be most kind of you, sir. We would much appreciate it.”

The royal chauffeur opened the near door of the Daimler. The prince stepped inside. Wallis and Ernest followed.

“G” Trotter was in the front passenger seat and greeted them as though their being given a lift home by the Prince of Wales were quite in the normal run of things.

“Whereabouts do you live, Mr. Simpson?” Edward asked.

“Bryanston Court, on George Street, sir. Not far from Marble Arch.” Ernest’s voice sounded as if hands were squeezing his windpipe.

Edward repeated the address to his chauffeur and then said, “I’ve just found myself a marvelous new home. It’s called Fort Belvedere and it’s an eighteenth-century house owned by the Crown on land near to the castle at Windsor. When I told the king I would like to move into it, he called it a queer old place, but I already love it. It’s been neglected for years and I’m going to have a wonderful time fixing it up. When I’ve done so I would like it very much if you would both visit me there and tell me what you think of it.”

Wallis thought Ernest was going to pass out with pride and pleasure.

“Does it have gardens, sir?” Wallis asked. “If the house has been neglected for a long time, I imagine the gardens will have been neglected as well.”

He shot her the smile that over the last two decades and his many tours abroad had charmed millions.

“It has a wonderful garden, Mrs. Simpson. The land descends in a gentle slope toward Virginia Water, where as a child I paddled in a rowboat with my brothers. It is, though, as you have suspected, desperately overgrown. The first thing I shall need when I move in, is a billhook in order to clear the undergrowth.”

The short journey was nearly over.

The Daimler slid to a halt outside their block of flats in George Street.

When the chauffeur opened the rear doors for them and they stepped out of the car, Edward stepped out onto the pavement with them.

“Good-bye,” he said to Ernest, shaking him by the hand. “And don’t forget that when you visit the fort, billhooks and scythes will be an absolute necessity.”

“No, sir.” Ernest sounded as if he were in desperate need of a restorative drink of brandy. “Thank you for the lift, sir. It’s been a great honor.”

“Good-bye, Mrs. Simpson.” Edward shook her hand, and Wallis dipped into a curtsey. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

“The pleasure has been all mine, sir.”

He turned away from them, toward the Daimler.

The fairy-tale evening was at an end.

On unsteady legs Ernest mounted the steps leading to Bryanston Court, and Wallis followed him.

As Ernest disappeared into the building she paused on the top step and then, in order to see the Daimler drive away, turned around.

The Daimler was still there and the prince was still standing beside it.

She knew, just as she had known when she had left the party, that he was standing beside it because he was waiting for her.

Slowly she began to walk back down the short flight of steps toward him.

“No one,” he said thickly as she reached him, “has ever made me feel as if they truly know me in the way you have done this evening, Wallis. No one before has ever shown any interest in my job of work as a Prince of Wales.”

The street was silent of traffic. The night very still. The moon and the stars very bright.

Wallis was aware of a sensation she had felt only once before. The sensation when, in faraway China in a small, dark, incense-filled room, Madame Xiuxiu had placed scrawny, birdlike hands on her head.

The singsong words said then came back to her now.

“You are a woman of great destiny. The man who will love you will love you with every atom of his being. Kissed by the sun, he will be the ruler of kingdoms and you will be his shadow queen. The love you will share will echo down the centuries.”

She had dismissed the prediction as being nothing but fanciful imaginings.

The description of a man who would one day be the ruler of kingdoms had clearly never applied to either Felipe or Ernest.

It did, though, apply to Edward, Prince of Wales.

As she looked into his eyes, saw the need there and the hope, she knew there had been nothing fanciful about Madame Xiuxiu’s prediction. The old Chinese woman had seen into her future, and it was a future beyond all her imaginings.

“Will you talk with me again, Wallis?” There was urgency in his voice and in his eyes. In the moonlight his hair was the color of pale wheat. “Will you dine with me tomorrow night?”

Knowing that tomorrow night was only going to be the first in a lifetime of such nights, her lips curved in a deep, radiant smile.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Of course I will.”

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE

W
allis’s many biographers have all had to face up to the mystery of her sexuality and have done so in many different ways. Some have perpetuated the myth of the “China Dossier,” a dossier drawn up allegedly at King George V’s request and in which Wallis is said to have accompanied her husband, Win Spencer, to Chinese “singsong houses” where, virtually a prostitute, she learned sexual arts that later bewitched and enslaved Prince Edward. (At the time of the abdication, no slur about Wallis was too salacious.) Other, very different speculations, have been made: that she was not really a woman at all, but a man, or that she was a hermaphrodite. She certainly had masculine characteristics in that she was angular and flat-chested with unusually large hands and a very strong jawline.

The Shadow Queen
is a novel and, though it is based on the factual elements of Wallis’s life, the fact is mixed with fiction. (Pamela, John Jasper, and the Houghtons are all fictional characters.) The freedom that comes with being a novelist and not a biographer has enabled me to come to my own theory about Wallis’s sexuality, and I based it on things Wallis is quoted as having said, and on the surmises of some of her many biographers.