The Shadow Queen (15 page)

Something else that was on the plus side was that her pregnancy was not yet obvious. Her wedding would still be a big, splendid society event, and when she walked down the aisle, she would do so in a sumptuous white wedding gown with a train yards and yards long and a dozen bridesmaids in attendance.

“I
don’t care if it is already arranged,” John Jasper said to her tightly when the wedding came under discussion. “Under the circumstances a great big wedding would be in bad taste, and it’s not the kind of wedding we are going to have.”

Pamela’s reaction was to snap at him that it was most definitely the wedding they were going to have, but she fought the temptation. She didn’t want him changing his mind about things and sailing off into the sunset, leaving her in a situation so ghastly it didn’t even bear thinking about.

They were alone in the drawing room of Tarquin’s London town house in Eaton Square. She was seated on a Queen Anne sofa, her pale blond hair knotted at the nape of her neck, her mauve hobble-skirted dress fashionably and daringly V-necked.

He was standing by the window, looking unseeingly out at the steadily falling snow.

“If we don’t have a big society wedding, people will suspect why. I couldn’t bear that, John Jasper. Truly I couldn’t.”

It was as near as she had ever come to pleading with him about anything, and though she hated herself for it, there was a slight catch in her voice.

He took a deep steadying breath, unwillingly accepting that what she said was true. She was the daughter of a duke. Any other kind of wedding but a grand society wedding was unthinkable. By not having one, the situation would be made worse than it already was.

He turned his head toward her, and as he met the anxiety in her eyes, his heart gave an abrupt jerk. Though he didn’t love her, he most certainly had feelings for her. With one bat of her eyelashes or touch of her fingertips she could arouse a storm of desire in him that no one, not even Wallis, had ever aroused.

Even so, he had known from the very beginning that he was never going to fall in love with her the way he was in love with Wallis. With Wallis, friendship and camaraderie had underpinned the desire. With Pamela there had been only desire. Romancing her had been a sowing of wild oats. A sexual adventure. A fling. He had never intended it to be for keeps, and easing his conscience had been the knowledge that neither had she.

When it came to marriage, Pamela had intended landing a far bigger fish than a Bachman of Baltimore—and in bed had bluntly told him so.

As he remembered her hopes of becoming at the very least a countess or a duchess, guilt weighed on him heavily.

Feeling the biggest heel in Christendom, he walked across to her.

“You’re right about the wedding, Pam,” he said, taking hold of her hands and drawing her to her feet. “I won’t pretend I’m going to enjoy a big society bash, but I’ll survive it.”

She had too much pride to show how vastly relieved she felt. Instead she said philosophically, “We’re just going to have to make the best of the cards we’ve dealt ourselves, aren’t we? But be warned, John Jasper. One thing I’m never going to do is to become Mrs. Bachman of Baltimore. My Baltimore days are well and truly over, and I’m never going back there. Not for you. Not for your family. Not for Tarquin. Not for anyone. Never, never, never.”

She had known, of course, that it was the last thing he had wanted to hear, but she hadn’t cared. She might have been left with no choice but to marry him, but nothing was going to persuade her to leave the world of London high society for a comparative backwater like Baltimore. Wally might think the city of her birth the height of sophistication, but she’d had no experience of life anywhere else, and she was wrong.

Wally.

If Pamela had been about to marry anyone other than John Jasper, she would have done everything possible to persuade Wally to ignore the present dangers of Atlantic travel and join her in London. After all, when a girl was about to be married, the person she most needed at her side was her best friend and, despite everything that had happened, that was how she still thought of Wally. She knew, of course, that it wouldn’t now be how Wally felt about her.

The thought filled her with more regret than she’d thought herself capable of. She was going to miss Wally. Until John Jasper, she’d never had any secrets from Wally. Both of them had always taken it for granted that when they married, they would be each other’s chief bridesmaid or, in the case of the one of them who married first, the other’s matron of honor. Now she was going to have to marry without Wally walking down the aisle behind her—and there was no way on God’s earth Wally would now have her as her matron of honor.

It was all very depressing, but it wasn’t in her nature to brood. Wally would meet someone else and get over John Jasper. And it wasn’t as if she and John Jasper were going to be married forever and ever. Shocking though it was still perceived as being, people did, now, get divorced. Her mother, who had been a duchess, had divorced and, on remarriage, had become a countess. Though there were no doubt still some sections of society who cold-shouldered her mother and Tarquin, on the whole the cold-shouldering wasn’t very obvious. King George, who was a stickler for the proprieties, still socialized privately with Tarquin, and both she and her mother had been guests at Sandringham.

There was no reason why, like her mother, she shouldn’t divorce and marry an earl, or, if it took her fancy, a marquis or a duke. Prince Edward was now out of the running, of course. No royal in the history of the British monarchy had ever married a divorcée, and it was unthinkable that they ever would. Besides, her chances of becoming Princess of Wales had never seriously been in the cards. It had only been girlish romantic daydreaming and a bit of silliness between her and Wally.

She bit her lip.

She had to stop thinking about Wally. Wally wasn’t going to be her matron of honor, and so she had to choose someone else who would be. And she had to choose her bridesmaids. They would know, of course, why they were being asked at so late a date, but there was a war on, and hurried marriages before men went off to the front had become the norm.

John Jasper, of course, being an American, wasn’t going off to Flanders, but hopefully not everyone would think that one through.

T
he bridesmaid difficulty was one that her mother and Tarquin decided was best avoided. “I’ll rustle up five of my godchildren,” Tarquin said. “They’ll look like little angels, and their mothers will be so delighted at their being the center of attention they won’t speculate maliciously about the haste of the arrangements.”

As there was no time for a suitably extravagant bridal gown to be made, she’d had the brilliant idea of wearing her grandmother’s carefully preserved bridal gown.

When Lady Violet St. Clair had married Lord Percy Denby at St. Margaret’s in 1864, the occasion had been acclaimed the wedding of the year. Queen Victoria had not been present, but the newly married Prince of Wales, together with his ethereally beautiful Danish wife, Princess Alexandra, had headed a guest list of glittering splendor. The bridal gown—a shimmering creation of palest gold lamé with an exquisite overlay of cobweb-fine Valenciennes lace lilies—had been a head-turning sensation. Pamela knew it still would be.

“All that is now needed is that my guest list be headed by royalty,” she said to her mother as the exquisite gown was carefully adjusted by an expert seamstress for a perfect fit. “If Tarquin were to invite him, surely King George would come?”

Her mother, who because of the circumstances of the wedding could barely bring herself to speak to her, breathed in hard, her finely sculpted nostrils whitening.

“Even minor royalty does not accept invitations to whirlwind weddings,” she said icily, flicking a beringed hand in the direction of the young woman carrying out the adjustments to indicate she should leave them.

When the door had closed and they were on their own, she said with real venom, “And no one in their right minds would invite King George to a wedding knowing there will soon be a seven-month baby to explain away! It would be social suicide!”

Totally unfazed by her mother’s fury, Pamela admired her reflection in a three-way mirror. “As far as the world at large is concerned, it will be a nine-month baby. If it weren’t for the war, John Jasper would be taking me to Europe until several months after the baby’s birth. As it is, we’re going to leave almost immediately after the wedding for New York.”

“New York?” Her mother was so taken aback she forgot how angry she was. “Surely Baltimore would make more sense?”

Pamela twirled to one side in order to get a clearer view of what the gown looked like from the back, saying grimly, “Not for me, Mother.”

“But people are saying that the Atlantic is no longer safe.” There was something almost like concern in her mother’s voice. “There are rumors that the Germans are going to make all shipping to and from Britain fair game.”

“There are always rumors, but can you imagine German submarines torpedoing an American passenger liner? I can’t. Adding two months to the baby’s birth date when we return will be easy, and hopefully he or she will be obligingly small.”

Her mother made no comment for the simple reason that she couldn’t bring herself to do so. Having a daughter who should have been making a spectacular marriage marrying an insignificant American because her racy behavior had left her with no other choice was a scenario she was finding very hard to deal with.

One relief was that the wedding itself would pass without comment. There were enough titled members in her family and in Tarquin’s to enable the occasion to be seen as a splendid society event. Everyone—the press included—would think the bride’s wearing of her grandmother’s bridal gown wonderfully sentimental. The happy couple’s immediate disappearance on an extended stay in America would, because of the groom’s nationality, raise no eyebrows. Pamela was right, too, in thinking that on their return the baby could easily be passed off as being two months younger than its actual age.

Everything was under control. Everything was taken care of.

She pulled on a pair of gloves the exact shade of her mauve walking dress. All that was needed now was for the ceremony to be over and the happy couple to disappear from sight en route to Southampton on whatever liner was to take them to New York—an event that, for her, couldn’t happen quickly enough.

O
n the morning of his wedding John Jasper left the Savoy Hotel and went for a solitary walk along the nearby Victoria Embankment. The Thames was sleet-gray, the trees in the nearby Temple Gardens rimed with frost. No one was about. It was too early and too cold.

Bleakly he sat down on one of the park benches facing the river. That what should have been the happiest day of his life was, instead, going to be far from being so was his own fault and no one else’s. What had happened had happened, and now he and Pamela had to make the best of things.

He clasped his hands between his knees, reflecting that marriage and motherhood were not things Pamela was likely to be very good at. Though he tried to continue thinking about Pamela, it was Wallis who filled his thoughts. He wondered what she was doing. With a constriction of his heart, he wondered how soon it would be before she had another beau.

He remained thinking about her, his broad shoulders hunched, his head bowed low over his hands until, in the near distance, Big Ben chimed the hour.

As the last of eight strokes died away he rose to his feet. Faithlessness to Wallis had led him into his present situation. He wasn’t now going to be mentally faithless to Pamela. From now on, no matter how hard it would be for him not to do so, he wouldn’t allow himself to think of Wallis. If his and Pamela’s marriage was to work—and for the sake of their unborn child, he was determined that it would—then a line had to be drawn beneath the past.

Determined to draw that line, he quickened his pace toward the Savoy, from where, in two hours’ time, he would be leaving for St. Margaret’s, Westminster.

“I
t’s time for us to leave, Pammie.” Tarquin looked down at his fob watch. As he put it away, he said, “Your mother and the bridesmaids left fifteen minutes ago, and John Jasper has probably been kicking his heels for going on half an hour.”

“It’s traditional for the bride to be late.”

“Not so late that the groom has second thoughts and leaves for the hills.”

Pamela picked up her bouquet of bloodred roses and slid her arm through his, grateful that her father had declined to cross the Atlantic and that it was Tarquin who was to give her away. “Much as John Jasper might want to leave,” she said drily, “he won’t. I don’t imagine he’s feeling very comfortable, though. He hardly knows a soul among the guests and barely knows his best man.”

“He has his father as a support.” As he led her from the room, he added, “Pa Bachman is rather a dark horse, isn’t he? He hasn’t said a word to me about the undue haste of the arrangements. Has John Jasper put him in the picture?”

“No—and if Pa Bachman has guessed, he’s too delighted at having a duke’s daughter for a daughter-in-law to raise a fuss about it.”

They descended the grand staircase to the applause of the household staff who had gathered in the hall to see her leave.

Pamela squeezed hold of Tarquin’s arm, saying as she reached the last step, “I do hope there are absolutely
masses
of photographers waiting for us at the church door.”

“There will be, and there will be a crowd as well. Society weddings at St. Margaret’s are a source of great public entertainment.”

The journey from Eaton Square to St. Margaret’s took only minutes, and when they arrived at the church, the crowd was so large the car had to slow to a snail’s pace to inch its way through them.

Her veil, held in place by a bandeau of seed pearls and orange blossoms worn low across her forehead, fell into a train three yards long, and as she stepped from the car great oohs and aahs of appreciation went up from the crowd.

Delighted, Pamela turned and waved to them and then, as the church bells rang and her little bridesmaids were ushered into position behind her, she stepped through the ancient west door and into the church where John Jasper, the only beau Wally had ever had, was waiting for her in front of the altar.