The Shadow Queen (47 page)

“You’re right.” Pamela was glad to at last have someone promisingly interesting to talk to. “I’ve got a crick in my back already. Who are you? Are you a member of the family?”

“Ariadne Sinclair,” the girl said, making no move to stand and walk down the stairs to join her. “I don’t visit Snowberry often. My family home is on Islay. It’s in the Hebrides,” she added helpfully.

“Yes, I know.” Pamela was intrigued by the girl’s hair coloring, which was neither red, like her father’s, nor night-black, like her mother’s. “Aren’t you coming down to join the party?”

“No. I’m not allowed. Mummy says I wouldn’t enjoy it as even though Auntie Marigold is here—and she’s always terrific fun—so are a lot of people Mummy said I would find boring. Not you, of course,” she added hastily.

“Of course not.” Pamela was beginning to enjoy the conversation hugely. “And your mother was right. It is a pretty boring party. Some music would liven it up.”

“Oh, there will be music later. Aunt Marigold loves to dance. She’s taught me to Charleston and do the Black Bottom.”

It was Pamela’s turn to have a wide grin on her face. The prospect of doing the Black Bottom with Ariadne’s good-looking father was one to look forward to.

“When it’s my sixteenth birthday we’ll be having a
ceilidh
,” Ariadne said, obviously enjoying their conversation as much as Pamela was. “Have you ever been to one?”

“Not a genuine one, held in Scotland.” As she spoke, Pamela was trying to figure out who it was Ariadne reminded her of. She had her mother’s delicately boned features, but so did the other person, whoever he, or she, was. “I can manage a Dashing White Sergeant,” she added, struck by the unusual summer-sky blue of Ariadne’s fair-lashed eyes and her entrancing feylike quality.

“The nice thing about Scottish dancing is that it’s a group thing.” Ariadne rose to her feet. “I’d better go back and make sure my little sister isn’t getting into any mischief. With a bit of luck you’ll be dancing very shortly. Avoid my Aunt Iris’s husband. He’s a dreadful lecher. He has hands like an octopus!”

“I will.”

As Ariadne ran lightly up the next flight of stairs, Pamela wondered if her parents were aware of the hand-groping liberties their delightful daughter had obviously been well able to fend off. Like her Aunt Marigold, Ariadne Sinclair was obviously someone it would always be fun to be with.

She turned, about to walk back into the drawing room, and sucked in her breath.

Opposite her, in an unlit alcove and on a pedestal, was the bronze bust of Prince Edward that Ariadne’s mother had sculpted.

Pamela didn’t have to walk closer to it to know that when she did so, she would see exactly the same curve of cheekbone and lip that made Ariadne so distinctively pretty. Prince Edward’s indefinable feylike quality—which Lily had so skillfully captured—was a quality her daughter also possessed.

With a trembling hand Pamela took her cigarette case out of her bag, lifted a cigarette from it, and lit it. Edward was thirty-four, and Lord May had told her that Edward’s visits to Snowberry had been made when he was a naval cadet, which meant, if the bust was anything to go by, that he’d been between sixteen and eighteen at the time.

She inhaled deeply. Ariadne had told her that she would soon be celebrating her sixteenth birthday—and sixteen from thirty-four was eighteen, subtract another nine months for the length of a pregnancy and it meant Edward would have been seventeen when he had been visiting Snowberry and when Lily had conceived Ariadne.

She blew a plume of blue smoke into the air. No wonder Rose had always played down any kind of a connection between her family and Edward. No wonder, either, that Lily was now keeping her daughter as well hidden from view as the bust she had sculpted. If it had remained in its usual position in the drawing room and Ariadne had also been in the room, the likeness between her and the bust was so marked it would have attracted comment—and the comment among any neighbors who had known of Prince Edward’s youthful visits to Snowberry might have hardened into suspicion.

Delighted with the secret that was now hers—and knowing that out of loyalty to Rose she would never be able to share it with anyone—she made her way back to the drawing room. There was dance music playing now, and she wanted to capture Rory Sinclair as a partner before anyone else did.

“T
his wedding of Wallis’s sounds as if it’s going to be a very mean little affair,” John Jasper said to her six months later as they left Hanover Square by car for the Chelsea register office. “Who else is going to be there, apart from us?”

Pamela adjusted a raspberry-pink hat that perfectly matched her Parisian-designed dress. “Hardly anyone. Ernest’s father, but not his mother. They are separated and can’t even bear being in the same country together. Mrs. Simpson lives abroad but whenever she visits England, Mr. Simpson promptly leaves it as if the air has become contaminated.”

She adjusted her five-string pearl necklace so that it lay a little more perfectly over the neckline of her dress. “Maud Kerr-Smiley, Ernest’s sister, will be there. Her husband won’t be as they are recently separated.” As their chauffeur headed toward the Chelsea Embankment, she shot John Jasper an impish glance. “The Simpson family don’t have a very good record where happy marriages are concerned, though I can’t see Ernest getting up to any mischief and causing Wally grief, can you?”

“God! After what she endured with that louse of a first husband, I sincerely hope not!”

She slid her gloved hand into his. “Peter Kerr-Smiley Junior will be there. He’s acting as Ernest’s best man—or he is if grooms at register-office weddings have best men. There may be a couple of Ernest’s ship-broking colleagues there. And there will be us. That’s all.”

“No family from America? Not even her mother?”

The car was now speeding along the embankment, the Embankment Gardens on their right, the glittering, busy Thames on their left.

“Not a one. No Alice, no Bessie, no Lelia Barnett, and no Corinne Murray and no Edith, either. Wallis would
hate
anyone from Baltimore to know she was marrying in a London register office.”

They arrived there only seconds before the bride and groom. Wallis was wearing a blue taffeta coat over a pale lemon silk dress, her glossy dark hair parted in the middle and drawn back tightly into a low figure-of-eight chignon.

Pamela squeezed John Jasper’s arm, whispering to him as they entered the small room where the service was to take place, “Don’t you think that ever since her stay in Peking, Wallis has begun to look a little Chinese? It’s the hair. It’s as sleek as only Chinese women know how to make it.”

The service was over almost before it had begun.

“I do solemnly declare,” Ernest said, “that I know not of any lawful impediment why I, Ernest Aldrich Simpson, may not be joined in matrimony to Bessie Wallis Warfield Spencer.”

Pamela raised her eyes to heaven, knowing exactly how much Wallis must be hating hearing her full Christian name. Moments later, after Ernest had made his vows, she was also having to speak it.

“I call upon these persons here present,” she said, her American drawl very pronounced in contrast to Ernest’s very clipped English, “to witness that I, Bessie Wallis Warfield Spencer, take thee, Ernest Aldrich Simpson, to be my lawful wedded husband.”

Ernest then slid a ring onto the third finger of Wallis’s left hand and, as Wallis said drolly afterward, “the deed was done before I’d even had a chance to realize the service was under way!”

Later, at the champagne wedding brunch held at the Grosvenor Hotel where Ernest’s father had permanent rooms, Pamela said, “I hope you’ll be very happy this time around, Wally.”

“So do I.” Wallis shot her a wry smile. “Marrying Ernest may be about the only sensible thing I’ve done in life so far. He’s very kind—which after Win will be a welcome contrast—and I’m very fond of him.”

“Fond, but not in love?”

They were in the bedroom her father-in-law had put at Wallis’s disposal. Wallis, who had gone there to refresh her makeup before leaving for the honeymoon Ernest had planned for them in France, slid her powder compact back into her handbag. “Being in love has never done me any favors, Pamela. Not with John Jasper, not with Win, and certainly not with Felipe. I’m tired of fighting the world alone and with no money. Ernest and I will rub along very well together. For once I’m utterly sure I’ve done the right thing.”

Her mood changed and she laughed, looking finally like a radiant bride. “Ernest has bought a Lagonda touring car for our drive through France. It’s the most ridiculous color. Bright yellow. Can you imagine Ernest buying a bright yellow car? Isn’t it a hoot?”

She gave a final look in the mirror and then picked up her handbag. “So here I go, Pamela. No longer Mrs. Spencer, but Mrs. Simpson. It’s a very ordinary name, isn’t it? I doubt that anyone in the world but me is ever going to remember it!”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

W
allis learned a great deal about her husband on their honeymoon—all of it pleasing. Their sexual relationship had been worked out during their courtship, so there were no surprises there, apart from Ernest’s physical needs being even more low-key than she had believed them to be. Sometimes it was hard for her to believe that they were husband and wife, not brother and sister. It didn’t trouble her. She liked being with Ernest. He was the only person she knew who could be both interesting and restful at the same time.

Once in France she discovered that not only was Ernest’s French fluent, but he had an all-embracing knowledge of many other subjects as well, including art, church architecture, and French history. As they pottered around cathedral towns such as Rheims and Chartres, he was able to bring the past alive for her in a way any professional tourist guide would have envied.

In Paris they walked narrow cobbled streets hand in hand for hours, visiting the Louvre, Sacré Coeur, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower. In the Place Vendôme he told her of how the column in its center was a replica of the original.

“The original was torn down in 1871 by revolutionaries led by the painter Gustave Courbet,” he said knowledgeably, adding with a grin, “The revolt failed and Courbet had to pay for the replacement. It must have cost him every last franc he ever earned.”

He knew other little-known facts as well. That Paris, as well as New York, had a Statue of Liberty, though one on a much smaller scale. Wallis thought he was teasing her and, to prove that he wasn’t, he drove her out to southwest Paris where, on an island next to the Pont de Grenelle bridge, it stood, a brave reminder that the New York statue had been a gift to America from France.

At midday they lunched in small bistros at gingham-checked tables. In the evening they dined more splendidly, seated on velvet-covered banquettes at white-naperied tables lit by candles.

If Wallis wasn’t heedlessly in love, and if Ernest’s love for facts and figures was sometimes a little tedious, she was content—and contentment was something she was quite happy to settle for.

“I
need help decorating and furnishing the Mayfair flat Ernest has found for us,” she said to Pamela on her return. “I can’t spend a fortune, but I do want to make it suitable for entertaining the fine folk you’ll soon be introducing us to.”

Pamela rolled her eyes. “Where do you want to start? Perhaps George and Nada would be the best bet.”

They were lunching at the Ritz. It was somewhere Ernest found too expensive, except for the celebration of a special occasion, and whenever she and Pamela lunched there it was always amicably understood that Pamela would be the one picking up the bill.

Wallis took a sip of deliciously chilled Chablis. “Who are George and Nada?”

“George is the second Marquess of Milford Haven and Lord Louis Mountbatten’s brother. His mother was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and one of his aunts, Alexandra, was married to the last emperor of Russia. Nada is the daughter of Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich Romanov. Between them, George and Nada know everyone there is to know. Nada,” she added, “is
extremely
naughty—and not only with men.”

W
allis sensed Nada’s lesbian leanings the first time she met her. As she in no way shared them, they didn’t trouble her, and all through the autumn of 1928 and the spring of 1929 she and Ernest were soon regular house party guests at the Milford Havens’ country estate, Lynden Manor, near Maidenhead in Berkshire.

Thanks to George and Nada they soon had other high-society friends as well. Friends such as Cecil Beaton, who had taken the most wonderful photographs of Prince Edward’s younger brother, Prince Albert, and his family, and Lady Sibyl Colefax, who enthusiastically helped her when it came to choosing color schemes for the spacious drawing room and dining room in which she intended entertaining with all the flair her mother had shown in those far-off days of pay-to-attend dinners.

“I want colors that will show off my Chinese treasures,” she said to Sybil, adding with a face-splitting grin, “and my clothes. I’ve had the Chinese silk I bought in Hong Kong and Shanghai made up into mandarin-necked jackets and dresses and luscious evening gowns with side splits at the ankle.”