The Shadow Queen (14 page)

Guess who got in touch with me the other day? John Jasper! Why didn’t you tell me he and his pa were now in London? It was good to see him again, even though all he did was talk about you and of how the two of you are going to get engaged the minute he gets home. Tarquin has invited the Bachmans to Norfolk. Won’t it be a hoot if there is an invite to Sandringham while John Jasper is with us?

The next letter from John Jasper bore a Norfolk postmark.

This is a real quaint part of England
,

he wrote when he got around to telling her about how he had met up with Pamela.

Pamela’s stepfather may be an earl, but he’s an easy to know, likable guy. When you get to meet him you’ll see what I mean. (And you will get to meet him because we’ll come back here together, either on our honeymoon or after it.) I didn’t get to meet British royalty. I guess with the way things are going in the war, King George has more on his mind than vacationing at Sandringham. The British Army has called for 500,000 more men to volunteer. Did you read about the terrible bloodbath at Mons in Belgium? People are still saying it will be all over by Christmas, but I don’t think so. I’m just heartily glad it’s a war America isn’t involved in
.

Wallis, too, was glad that America wasn’t at war, but gratitude for the fact wasn’t uppermost on her mind. What was uppermost was that instead of being with her in Baltimore, John Jasper was in Norfolk with Pamela.

Remembering her old suspicions that Pamela found John Jasper just as heart-stopping as she did, it wasn’t a comforting thought. She chided herself for her lack of trust. Pamela’s ambition was for marriage to a highly titled Englishman—the Prince of Wales if she could get him. The days when she might have flirted with John Jasper were long past. And John Jasper wouldn’t flirt with Pamela—not when he’d never taken interest in her when she’d lived in Baltimore.

With her mind set at rest, she focused all her attention on the whirl of social activities now filling her days. It was a debutante’s duty to host a luncheon or party for every other debutante and so sometimes she had as many as three functions to attend in one day.

Outgoing and extroverted, Wallis loved every minute of her social whirl.

At the Princeton Prom she was the belle of the ball. At the Bachelor’s Cotillion she was the star of the evening. In a letter to Pamela, she wrote:

… and the best, my debutante coming-out ball, is yet to come
.

All arrangements for it had been left in her Uncle Sol’s capable hands.

In December, two weeks before it was to take place, Sol telephoned her to say he would like a private word with her at 34 East Preston Street.

When she arrived there he was waiting for her in the drawing room.

“I have unfortunate news for you, Wallis,” he said, even before she’d had the chance to sit down. “Knowing how strong your character is, I trust you will view things as I do and agree with me that there is no alternative to the action I have decided to take.”

Wallis took a deep, steadying breath.

“And what action is that, Uncle Sol?” she asked, fearful of what was to come.

He stroked his heavy mustache with his thumb and forefinger and then said bluntly: “Because of the terrible slaughter taking place in Europe, I have decided that it would be inappropriate for you to have a large debutante ball—or, indeed, a debutante ball of any kind. With thousands of families grieving and left destitute, the present time is no time for festivities.”

Wallis stared at him, hardly able to take in what he was saying. In a stunned voice she said in disbelief, “But I
have
to have a coming-out ball, Uncle Sol! How can I be a debutante without one?”

“You can be a very special debutante, Wallis. A debutante who doesn’t mindlessly follow the crowd, but one who has a social conscience.”

She wanted to shout that she didn’t give a damn about a social conscience but knew it would get her nowhere. What she had to do now was think of a way of overcoming the blow she had been dealt.

It was the Montague side of her family who came to her aid.

“Trust that pompous prig Solomon Warfield to have let Wallis down,” her Aunt Lelia said vehemently to Alice on being told the news. “If you ask me, he doesn’t give a damn about Wallis’s social conscience, or his own. The war is simply his excuse to save some money.”

“But what is Wallis to do, Lelia?” Alice’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Free left me totally unprovided for. There’s no way I can give her a debutante ball, and she owes hospitality to all the other debutantes.”

“Dry your eyes, Alice. I’ll give the child a coming-out ball. And I’ll give her one at the Marine barracks in Washington, D.C.—which is something Solomon Warfield couldn’t arrange even if he’d wanted to. Having a husband who is the commandant of the United States Marine Corps has uses.”

It most certainly did, as Wallis found out when she entered a flag-festooned band hall at the Marine barracks and was greeted by a Marine guard of honor.

It was an evening quite unlike that of any of the other debutantes, for not even Astor or Schermerhorn wealth could have provided a sixty-piece Marine band, every member red-jacketed and covered in gold braid.

Even though John Jasper wasn’t there to share it with her, Wallis knew she would remember the evening as being one of the happiest of her life—and one of the best things about it was that when it was over, there were only another three weeks until John Jasper sailed for home.

Every morning she expected to receive a letter from him telling her of his own fever of impatience.

None arrived.

Neither were there any letters from Pamela.

“It’s because of the war, Wallis,” Alice said when she mentioned the lack of overseas mail.

Wallis didn’t agree with her mother’s reasoning. Liners were still crossing the Atlantic just as regularly and as unhampered as they had always done. Waiting for the mail to be delivered suddenly became the most important part of her day, and when a letter bearing John Jasper’s distinctive handwriting was finally delivered, she almost snatched it out of the mailman’s hand.

Usually she took John Jasper’s letters to her bedroom so that she would be able to read them undisturbed. This time she simply tore it open where she was standing, ecstatic at knowing that with his sailing date only days away, it was probably the last one he would ever need to write to her.

The first thing she noticed was that the letter was short, barely a page long.

My dearest, darling, most wonderful Wallis
,

This is the hardest letter I have ever had to write—and I would give my life not to be having to write it. There are no excuses for what has happened—apart, of course, from the fact that I was more lonesome without you than you can ever imagine. On January 1st—the day I would have been sailing home to you—I shall be marrying Pamela at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. It is a marriage of necessity—one that neither Pamela nor I want. I love you, dearest, sweetest Wallis, as I have always done, but honor demands I do the right thing by Pamela. I’m not going to ask you to forgive me, for I don’t see how you possibly can. I certainly can’t forgive myself. I’ve ruined three people’s lives. Yours. Mine. Pamela’s. All I can do is to make sure that the baby’s life won’t be ruined also. Good-bye, my dearest love. Know that for the rest of my life you will have my heart. John Jasper
.

She screamed, uncaring of who might hear her. Then, with the letter crushed in her hand and her world tumbling around her ears, she raced upstairs to her bedroom. Slamming the door behind her, she threw herself face down on the bed, pummeling the pillow and drumming her feet against the mattress in a storm of anguish so intense she thought it was going to kill her.

How could John Jasper have done such a thing? How could he have been unfaithful to her in such a way? Especially how could he have been so unfaithful to her with her best friend? The double betrayal was so gross—so unspeakable—she couldn’t even begin to imagine how she was going to live with it.

She thought of John Jasper and Pamela coming back to Baltimore to live and knew there was no way in the world she could endure such pain. But how was she to avoid it?

Sobbing so hard she could scarcely breathe, she forced herself to think about her options. She could go to Wakefield Manor and live with her Aunt Lelia. Or she could go to Pot Springs and live with her Uncle Emory’s family.

But both Wakefield Manor and Pot Springs were close to Baltimore, and she didn’t want to be close to Baltimore—she wanted to be a million miles away.

She stopped drumming her feet into the mattress and pummeling the pillow.

There was somewhere she could go; somewhere that, though not a million miles away, was still at the opposite end of the country. Her cousin Corinne’s husband, Henry Mustin, was stationed in Florida. She would write to Corinne and ask if she could stay with her and Henry. Once there, Baltimore would never see her again—and she would do her damnedest to ensure that for as long as she lived, neither would John Jasper or Pamela.

Chapter Nine

I
n London, Pamela wasn’t much happier than Wallis. It had been amusing luring John Jasper into being unfaithful. That she had been able to do so had proved to her yet again that no man could resist her if she’d set her mind on having him. She hadn’t wanted John Jasper long term, of course. He had simply—because of his fierce determination to stay on the straight and narrow while away from Wallis—been a challenge; a challenge that had come with the additional temptation of being forbidden fruit. To Pamela, forbidden fruit was irresistible.

“And now look where it’s got me!” she had said bitterly to Rose Houghton when she had first realized she was pregnant. “I’m a duke’s daughter. How can I marry a man who has no title and who never will have a title?”

Rose, in London in order to accompany a group of newly recruited nurses to the field hospital she had been assigned to, had been unsympathetic. “You should have thought of that before you behaved as if he were the only man you were ever going to love,” she’d said bluntly. “And I’ve got more serious things to think about than your problem, Pam—which isn’t much of a problem at all, as the unlucky man in question is prepared to marry you.”

Their meeting had taken place in a tea shop adjacent to Guy’s Hospital.

Rose, rising to her feet, had brought it to an abrupt conclusion. “I have to get back. The nurses I’m taking to France are waiting for me. Make the best of the situation you’ve created, Pam. From all you’ve told me about him, if you give him half a chance, Mr. Bachman will make you a very good husband.”

Then, with only the curtest of good-byes, she had marched out of the tea shop and back to the hospital and her waiting nurses.

Pamela, who had expected far more from Rose, had been incensed.

“I don’t see why,” Tarquin said to her when she complained to him about how uncaring of her plight Rose Houghton had been. “In France she’s nursing men who have lost legs and arms, and sometimes their sight. You can’t expect her to be massively concerned because you’ve misbehaved and now have to marry whether you want to or not.”

“I wouldn’t be having to get married if you’d find someone who’d get rid of the baby!”

Despite being a man of the world—and one who often sailed close to the wind—he blanched, white to the lips. “This isn’t a conversation suitable between a stepfather and stepdaughter, Pammie. That you feel able to say such things is my fault for never having taken my role as a stepfather seriously. Over this matter, though, I am very serious. Abortions—even the most expensive abortions—lead all too often to the girl in question dying in slow and bloody agony. It is a risk I have no intention of taking where you are concerned. John Jasper isn’t from some no-account family. The Bachmans are wealthy and, in Baltimore, socially prestigious. He may not be the stepson-in-law I had anticipated or the husband you had envisaged, but he’s the one both of us are going to have to settle for!”

It was a conversation that had left her with no room for maneuvering, and though she hadn’t admitted it to either Rose or Tarquin, there were some aspects to her forthcoming marriage she didn’t find objectionable. She had always found John Jasper, with his thick thatch of curly black hair and golden brown eyes, wildly attractive, and though unlike Hans he hadn’t been experienced as a lover, once he had taken the plunge he had been a very quick learner. From now on, bedtime was going to be enjoyable. There was another aspect of marriage, as well, which she knew was going to be convenient.

As she had found out to her cost, a baby could all too easily be the result of taking a lover. For a single woman, such an outcome was nearly always disastrous—as it would have been for her if John Jasper had already been married, or if he had dishonorably chosen not to marry her. Once a woman was married, though, there could be no scandal at all should she fall pregnant.