The Shadow Queen (2 page)

Bessie Wallis dug her nails into the palms of her hands, not knowing what to do, certain that neither her mother nor her uncle would want to know that she was in the room listening to them.

“No, Sol!” Her mother’s voice was hysterical as she struggled against him. “Please, no!”

There came the sound of material ripping.

Bessie Wallis pushed Mrs. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Astor to one side, knowing that no matter how cross her mother and her uncle were going to be with her, she had to run and beg her mother not to be so upset. After all, being nice and polite to her uncle wasn’t such a hard thing to be. Her Grandma Warfield had told her that she, Bessie Wallis, always had to be nice and polite, that being so was a sign of good breeding.

She caught hold of the fringe of the table cover and pulled it to one side. As she did, her mother and Uncle Sol, still struggling, fell against an occasional table. A Chinese vase toppled to the floor, splintering into giant shards.

“Damnation!” Her uncle let go of her mother, staring in horror at the destruction of a family heirloom worth thousands of dollars.

With a gasp her mother whirled away from him, hurtling out of the room fast as light, the door yawning wide behind her.

Her uncle made a sound like a sob and brought his fist down hard on the mantelshelf.

He had his back to her, and Bessie Wallis let the table cover fall back down. Not for another twenty minutes, when her uncle also left the room, did she leave her hiding place.

Later that day her mother left East Preston Street and, taking Bessie Wallis with her, moved into a residential hotel. Although her mother never said so, Bessie Wallis knew why they had moved. It was because her pretty mother no longer wanted to live in the same house as Uncle Sol.

A
year later, when she was six, they moved again, this time to go and live with her Aunt Bessie, her mother’s sister. Her mother still took her to visit her grandmother, and she still sat on a little petit-point-covered stool at the side of her grandmother’s rocking chair listening to stories such as the one about Robert de Warfield, who, a long time ago, had been a friend of King Edward III of England and of how Robert had been so chivalrous and faithful in serving him that the king had made him a Knight of the Garter, which was, her grandmother had said, the highest honor in the whole of the kingdom.

Another of her favorite stories was of Pagan de Warfield, who had accompanied William the Conqueror from France and fought beside him in the great Battle of Hastings. “And just as Robert was rewarded for his chivalry, so was Pagan,” her grandmother had said with pride. “He was given a grant of land near Windsor Castle—the castle that kings and queens of England still live in—and it was named Warfield’s Walk in his honor.”

These stories of her long-departed antecedents made Bessie Wallis feel special and different from everybody else, and at school she worked hard to make sure that everyone knew she was special and different. She wore a green pleated skirt when everyone else wore a navy one, and at playtime, because her grandmother had also told her she was descended from the great Indian chief King Powhatan, she sometimes stuck a feather in the back of her braided hair.

The first day she had done so, John Jasper Bachman—who was the most popular boy in the class and who had once bloodied the noses of two older boys when he’d found them tormenting the school’s pet rabbit—said, “Your feather looks swell, Bessie Wallis. How about you be an Indian princess when we play cowboys and Indians?”

His invitation was a great honor because the boys never allowed girls to join in with them when they ganged together at break time, and joining in with them was something Bessie Wallis had longed to do for ages and ages. After that, when the boys found out she didn’t cry if she fell down and grazed her knees when playing football, and that she didn’t complain about being tagged first in games of chase, it became understood she could join in their games any time she wanted to.

Bessie Wallis wanted to often, and she knew it was something that would never have happened if it hadn’t been for John Jasper—and if John Jasper hadn’t been someone all the other boys took notice of.

Another way that she found to be different was in being cleverer than everyone else. Her homework was always meticulously done. In class, her attention never strayed. She was a star pupil, always the center of attention, and that was how she intended things to remain.

T
he day she was suddenly faced with a rival started out with her teacher, Miss O’Donnell, telling everyone she had an announcement to make. “A new girl will be joining our class later today.” There was a touch of color in Miss O’Donnell’s normally pale cheeks. “She is English and has only just arrived in America, and so we must try very hard to make her welcome.”

“Please, Miss. What is her name, Miss?”

The question came from Violet Dix. The Dixes were one of the city’s oldest families, but Violet never could get it into her head that it was vulgar to address Miss O’Donnell merely as “Miss.”

“The new girl’s name is Lady Pamela Denby.”

Clamor broke out as everyone in the class wanted to know why the new girl had such a funny Christian name.

“ ‘Lady’ isn’t a Christian name,” Miss O’Donnell said when she had restored order. “It’s a title. Lady Pamela’s father is an English duke. Daughters of dukes are addressed as ‘Lady.’ ”

John Jasper, whose desk was immediately in front of Bessie Wallis’s, shot up his hand. “Is that what we have to call her, Miss O’Donnell?”

Miss O’Donnell shook her head. “No, John Jasper. In the classroom and in the playground, Lady Pamela will be known simply as Pamela. Now we will spend a little time on multiplication and division and then, after break, we will have history.”

When Miss O’Donnell briefly left the classroom at break time, Violet Dix and her friend, Mabel Morgan, zeroed in on Bessie Wallis, eager to point out that the new girl came from a far more distinguished background than she did.

“A duke is someone who is royal, or nearly royal,” Mabel, the class know-it-all said, happy at a chance to deflate Bessie Wallis’s infuriating self-importance, “and that’s a lot more than you are, Bessiewallis Warfield.”

By the way Mabel said her name, Bessie Wallis knew Mabel was running her Christian names together in a way she hated, and she itched to slap Mabel’s gleefully smug face.

“And though you pretend to be nearly royal, you ain’t,” Violet Dix put in spitefully, abandoning the careful diction Miss O’Donnell insisted on and remaining a step or two behind Mabel so that Bessie Wallis wouldn’t easily be able to hit her. “Worse than that, you and your ma ain’t even got any money. My ma says the two of you live on rich relatives’ charity and that you wouldn’t even be at Miss O’Donnell’s if it wasn’t that your Uncle Sol pays the fees.”

Bessie Wallis balled her fists and stepped forward in order to push Mabel out of the way so she could get to Violet. Violet screamed and was saved as Miss O’Donnell walked in on them to announce it was time for their history lesson.

Bessie Wallis seethed all the way through the first part of the lesson, but when Miss O’Donnell asked, “Who knows who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London?” her hand went up immediately in order to answer.

Before she had time to do so, John Jasper beat her to it, leaping from his seat and yelling, “Guy Fawkes!”

Bessie Wallis was so mad at him and her nerves so strained, she seized hold of her pencil box and smacked him over the head with it.

Instead of being aggrieved, he hooted with laughter.

Miss O’Donnell didn’t laugh. Instead, as a punishment, she made Bessie Wallis sit outside the classroom in the corridor. She was still there when Miss Smith, the school secretary, turned into it accompanied by a girl Bessie Wallis had never seen before.

“What are you doing outside the classroom, Bessie Wallis?” Miss Smith demanded, walking briskly toward her.

Well aware the girl must be Pamela Denby, and not wanting to be humiliated, Bessie Wallis said swiftly, “I was feeling faint, Miss Smith. Miss O’Donnell thought there would be more air out here than in the classroom.” The friendly amusement in Pamela’s eyes—eyes that were a mesmerizing sea green—showed that she, at least, didn’t believe a word of her explanation.

Bessie Wallis was overcome by a feeling she’d never experienced before: the feeling that, for the first time ever, she’d met her match.

“We’re having a history lesson,” she said at last, when she could trust her voice to be steady. “It’s about Guy Fawkes and how he tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.”

Pamela shot her a wide complicit smile. “That’s good. I’m English. I know all about kings and queens.”

What neither of them could know, as the school secretary ushered them into the classroom, was that for as long as they lived, their lives would be inextricably entwined, and that though for the most part they would be best friends, they would also sometimes be enemies. Beyond her imagination was that both of them would enslave a king and that one of them would marry him.

Chapter Two

F
rom the moment Bessie Wallis and Pamela walked into the classroom together, it was clear that Pamela was going to be Bessie Wallis’s best friend and that no one else stood a chance.

The boys in the class were uncaring, but the girls were furious. “How come Bessiewallis always gets just whatever it is she wants?” Mabel had demanded at lunchtime as the rest of the disappointed clustered around her. “And where has Bessiewallis taken Pamela? Where have they gone?”

“They’ve gone to take a peek at the rabbit.” Edith Miller sounded crushed. No one blamed her. Edith’s daddy was a member of the state legislature and if anyone should have been showing Pamela the school’s pet rabbit, it was Edith.

“I vote we never speak to Bessie Wallis ever again,” Violet Dix said maliciously. “It isn’t as if she should even be at Miss O’Donnell’s. Not when she ain’t even got a daddy to pay the fees.”

There was a shuffling of feet, and then Edith put into words what most of them were feeling. “It isn’t Bessie Wallis’s fault her daddy is dead, and Bessie Wallis is fun. I don’t want to stop speaking to her.”

“An’ if we stop speakin’ to her,” someone else interjected, “she’ll make sure Pamela never speaks to us and then we’ll never get invited to a duke’s house for tea.”

This was something none of them had thought of, and, even for Mabel, it settled the matter. Mad as they were at Bessie Wallis for cheating them all of the chance of becoming Pamela’s best friend, none of them was going to run the risk of being ostracized by the only duke’s daughter they were ever likely to meet. Also, as Edith had pointed out, Bessie Wallis, with her Indian feather in the back of her hair and her peppy way of talking—she’d once told Miss O’Donnell that arithmetic brought her out in hives—was good fun. Not speaking to her anymore would be just too boring for words.

I
f Miss O’Donnell’s pupils were hopeful that a duke would have conjured up a castle in which to live, they were disappointed. Pamela’s home was, however, in the very best part of Baltimore. An Italianate mansion set in vast grounds, if Rosemont wasn’t a castle, it was certainly near to being a palace—a palace that Wallis was soon able to regard as her second home.

She was nine when she realized she and Pamela could well find themselves being separated. Miss O’Donnell’s school only took children up to the age of ten, and when she left Miss O’Donnell’s she was to go to Arundell, a Baltimore school with a prestigious reputation.

“Or she will be if Sol comes up with the fees,” she’d once heard her mother say to Aunt Bessie.

It was a doubt that filled her with apprehension—but not nearly as much apprehension as when Pamela said, “Won’t it be swell when we go to Bryn Mawr next year?” It was the summer of 1905 and they were on Rosemont’s terrace playing jacks.

“Bryn Mawr?”

As Pamela scooped up four jacks, Bessie Wallis stared at her.

“Of course.” Pamela missed catching the ball. “What other school is there to go to?”