Aly held out his lighter, flame dancing on gold. She leaned forward, cigarette poised, sensing, rather than seeing, Aly’s steady gaze as she inhaled. “You can’t take her troubles all on yourself. Gloria made her own choices.” He shifted the flame and lit his own cigarette. “Don’t flatter yourself by thinking you could have prevented her from making mistakes.”
“No? I could have stopped her from turning to the least suitable person—”
“I know Nada. She’s a force of nature. Do you really think desperation was the only reason Gloria chose her?”
Thelma played with the stem of her martini glass.
“Maybe I hoped it was desperation,” she said. “If she’d chosen someone suitable—but then, she’d tried to, hadn’t she, with Friedel? It’s caused so much trouble, her and Nada...if it had been a mistake from the start, perhaps I could understand it more.”
“Perhaps Gloria didn’t see it as a mistake. Perhaps the risk was worth it.”
“Perhaps,” said Thelma. She wasn’t sure why she was confiding in Aly. Maybe it was because he was the first sympathetic person she’d found since she’d come over for the trial—the only one without a vested interest in the trial’s outcome. She set down her empty glass. “I can’t imagine she thinks it was worth it all, now,” she said. “She’s losing everything, and for what? Nada hasn’t sent a letter, a telegram—nothing. Just a lawyer. Not even a note in his briefcase.”
Aly gestured to the bartender for another round.
“I might not have stopped her from taking up with Nada,” Thelma said, “but I could have paid more attention. I should have—” She broke off as the bartender set fresh drinks on the table. Thelma took hers with a belated, automatic smile. “I should have been there,” she said. “I was so happy with David that I didn’t bother paying attention to Gloria. I didn’t want the responsibility.”
“Why is Gloria your responsibility?” said Aly, sounding brusque. “I can’t imagine feeling such a sense of obligation. Do you think I feel responsible for my father’s actions? Does David feel responsible for yours?”
Thelma bristled. “She’s my sister.”
“Did Gloria ever try to stop you from pursuing your affair with the prince?” asked Aly, tapping ash into an empty glass. “Will she tear out her hair when he breaks your heart?”
Thelma didn’t respond. He sounded like Friedel. Gloria was her own person. She’d made her own choices.
She smiled, feeling the hot pressure of unshed tears. “She’s going to lose the case.” She finished her cigarette in a long, shaky inhale that earned her a few more moments of composure. “Nada saw to that. Her lawyer made a deal.”
Aly raised his eyebrows but said nothing; unbidden, Thelma recounted everything that had happened with Burkan, feeling a detached, bitter pleasure at his expression of genuine surprise.
“They closed ranks,” he said simply. “I understand his position in all this, truly I do. When you’ve got a title to protect, you must do what you can to protect it. That doesn’t make it easier, but it’s the truth.” He gestured to Thelma’s drink. “Another?”
“Could we get some air?”
Aly stood and held out his arm. Together, they walked down the hall.
“Surely, though, you see why I feel responsible for it all?” said Thelma. “David’s at the root of it—I’m at the root of it. He probably doesn’t even know Mathew’s here.”
Aly looked at Thelma with sudden disdain. “Oh, don’t go making excuses for him,” he said. “Listen to yourself! Gloria’s not responsible for her actions, David isn’t responsible for his. Are you always such a martyr to fate?”
Thelma pulled away from Aly but he wheeled around to face her head-on. “He knows,” he continued, with flat conviction. “I hate to tell you the obvious, but he knows about all of it. If he loves you, nothing could keep him from your side. Nothing would, if it was the woman I love.” He met Thelma’s eyes, fleetingly vulnerable, and Thelma wondered what twist of chance, exactly, had led him to the Carlyle bar.
Aly offered her his arm again, and they continued toward the lobby.
“If he knows,” said Aly, “and he’s cutting you out deliberately, he’s a weaker man than I thought. If he’s truly ignorant, he’s weaker still.”
Thelma had expected Aly’s words to cut more, but the martinis had dulled their sharpness. David always had been weak; always prepared to crumble at the first sign of hardship.
She’d sacrificed so much to her relationship with him: her time, her strength, her attention. Her marriage. And what, now, had her loyalty bought?
She slid her hand down Aly’s forearm, turning his palm with gentle pressure so that her fingers rested in his.
“He’s cheating,” she said. “Or he’s about to. Amounts to the same thing, really.”
With unspoken understanding, they walked past the front doors in silence. Aly’s fingers tightened around Thelma’s, and she allowed him to lead her through the lobby, through another hallway punctuated with double doors.
Thelma didn’t think as she pulled him into an alcove. She kissed him, and he responded in kind, pressing her against the door. The molded plaster was hard against her back but his lips were soft, and she wrapped her arms around his neck to pull him closer. It was a betrayal, and Thelma knew it wouldn’t solve a thing—but she pushed her thoughts aside and sank deeper into something that was more real, more urgent than her goodbye from David, truer than anything she’d felt since coming to New York.
Aly pulled away, frowning.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
Reeling in the sudden glow of courage, Thelma felt invincible, reckless. “You aren’t?”
Aly smiled, and ran a hand down her back. “Of course I am,” he replied. “But I don’t want to win by default.”
“Is it a competition?”
“It’s always a competition.”
Thelma leaned in, letting her lips brush against his.
He pulled back once more and looked at her intently—Thelma knew he was searching for her conviction. Finding it, Aly took her hand and Thelma followed him into the lift.
Forty-Six
July 1933
London
Of all the hotels in London, the Ritz was Thelma’s favorite.
It reminded her of Paris, in its old-world brilliance, yet to Thelma’s mind the Ritz London surpassed its French cousin in glamour. She loved it all: walking beneath the arcade entrance on Piccadilly, with its marquee-bright letters. Passing an afternoon in the butter-gold tearoom, overhearing conversations from other tables, new loves and old feuds forming and dissolving around her; watching couples pass arm in arm through the flower-laden lobby.
Most of all, Thelma loved descending the marble staircase to the Ritz’s subterranean ballroom. It was an entrance into another world, heralded by echoes of music that grew louder with each downward step, sound exploding into Technicolor brilliance as the double doors opened. To Thelma, her mind floating on champagne bubbles as she returned from a trip to the powder room, the ballroom’s mirrored walls expanded the space into a never-ending cavern of gilt and wood and music, a thousand-thousand dancers stretching far beneath the streets of London. On a raised platform, a twelve-piece band played a waltz, their stage framed by a series of painted panels depicting a serene afternoon of Edwardian elegance. What would they say, those staid Edwardians, if they could see the ballroom now, filled with the crowd that David had assembled for Freda Dudley Ward’s thirty-ninth birthday party? Women, bare-backed in whispering silk and satin; men in black tuxedoes drinking cocktails out of thin-stemmed glasses, swaying in time beneath chandeliers and cigarette smoke.
Thelma paused at the edge of the dance floor, watching a man in an ill-fitting suit stumble to a nearby table to speak to a young woman in a sparkling dress. Ten years ago he would have been handsome, with his boyish features
and crumpled carelessness, but years of overindulgence seemed to have taken their toll, an alcoholic bloat pushing out those of his features that ought to have been small: pouched lips, blue shadows under overripe cheeks. He straightened his tie, watching the girl with a devil-may-care smile that, no doubt, had carried him through his youth. The girl rose and took his hand; together they passed, leaving a beery scent in their wake as they went to dance.
Thelma accepted a glass of champagne from a motionless waiter, suppressing a smile. But for the dresses and the music, she figured the Edwardians likely wouldn’t have seen anything too far removed from their own gatherings.
It had been David’s idea to have Freda Dudley Ward’s birthday party at the Ritz. He’d been planning the evening for months, personally overseeing the menus and the guest list. As Thelma walked through the crowd, she could see dozens of people that David had invited, as well as a few that he hadn’t but who’d decided to turn up anyway: there, by the band, was Diana Guinness with Oswald Mosley, her body turned toward his as they spoke in an undertone. Fruity Metcalfe, a cigar jammed between his teeth, balanced three drinks in his hands as he walked toward a table where Louis Mountbatten, who shared his brother George’s long face, sat with Piers Legh and G Trotter. Surrounded by men at the bar, Nada, dressed in a chartreuse gown, stood out like punctuation.
Thelma returned to her table, hoping to steal a few more minutes’ rest before David or anyone else pulled her back onto the dance floor and sent her head spinning again. For the moment, though, David was dancing with Freddie. Had they been anyone else their figures would have been lost in the crowd, but Freddie and David moved like oil through water, separating the tide as they turned in unison. David pulled back to say something to Freddie, smiling tenderly; she looked back with an expression closer to fondness than desire.
Wallis Simpson, seated farther down the table, shifted into the free chair next to Thelma.
“Are you jealous?” she said. Her words melted into each other with delicate precision; Wallis raised an eyebrow and Thelma could see that she’d had nearly as much to drink as Thelma herself.
Thelma rested her chin on her hand, watching as David pulled Freddie close enough for their cheeks to brush. But for her two daughters, Freda had come to the Ritz alone: since divorcing her husband two years earlier, she hadn’t shown any inclination toward marrying again. Not that she would—not to David, at least. Though their affair had long since cooled to friendship, Thelma knew that David would respond to any suitors in Freddie’s life with jealousy. Any man would have to be content with sharing her.
“Not in the slightest,” said Thelma as the music shifted into a cheery ragtime.
“Really?” said Wallis. She looked at David and Freddie with a hard expression, as though trying to bring them into better focus. “I don’t think I could stand it.”
“I trust him,” said Thelma as David one-stepped with Freddie, his hand low on her waist. “Or more to the point, I trust her.”
Nada excused herself from her crowd of admirers and made her way toward Gloria and George Mountbatten, who were fox-trotting on the dance floor. She tapped her husband on the shoulder and George, conceding defeat, relinquished his lead. Nada took Gloria by the hand, and they launched into a well-practiced routine.
David swung Freddie out with an exaggerated flourish; their hands broke apart and she took the momentary distance to shake her head, laughing, before walking toward the bar. David shrugged good-naturedly and spun around, eyebrows raised as he caught sight of Thelma and Wallis.
“Too quick for her,” he said once he’d weaved his way over to them, taking out a handkerchief to wipe perspiration from his forehead. “Golly, I’m hot. Another round, Thelma? Wallis?”
The song ended and the band shifted into something more sedate—an Ozzie Nelson number that had come out a few years ago, smooth and sentimentally trite, crooning stars and dreams but lovely all the same. Rather than retiring from the dance floor Gloria and Nada moved closer together and danced on. The slender train of Nada’s dress drifted with their movement, brushing itself against Gloria’s legs as they swayed, hands clasped, contented.
Beside her, Thelma felt Wallis shift closer.
“Your sister ought to be more discreet,” she said as David relieved a waiter of a tray of drinks.
Thelma shrugged. “They’re only dancing,” she said. “A private room, a private party... Entirely innocent.”
“A private room in a public hotel,” Wallis pointed out. “And you know how people talk.”
Thelma frowned but before she could answer, David, his elbow planted on the table to better steady his hand as he lit a cigarette, cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t think too hard on it, Mrs. Simpson,” he said. He inhaled and the cigarette caught the flame; satisfied, he leaned back with an easy, heavy-lidded smile. “It’s not really a concern. Not to people like us. Let the girls have their dance, they’re not harming anybody.”
After a few minutes, David stubbed out his cigarette with renewed vigor as the opening strains of “Blue Danube” floated through the room. He held his hand out to Thelma and she took it, head spinning, as he whirled her onto the dance floor.
“You remember this one?” he said, pulling Thelma close.
Thelma nodded, glowing in the warmth of his smile. “Lady Londonderry’s ball.” She closed her eyes, trusting in David’s sure movements as he led her in the dance. Somewhere nearby, Thelma supposed that Nada and Gloria were still dancing together. She hoped they were.
David’s words echoed in her head, making her smile at the impossibility of it all. People like us, he’d said. People like us, she thought, dance with the Prince of Wales. People like us buy out the ballroom at the Ritz. She opened her eyes and looked around; as she’d expected, Gloria and Nada were still dancing nearby, and it was enough to make her throw caution to the wind, lean forward and press her lips against David’s.
People like us, she thought triumphantly, own the world and everything in it.
Forty-Seven
October 22, 1934
Carlyle Hotel, NYC
Thelma awoke, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling in an unfamiliar room. She nestled into feather-down sheets, feeling Aly, sleep-heavy, beside her, and closed her eyes, unwilling to make the morning real. Sunlight streamed through the open window, warming her face as she listened to the muted sounds of traffic and birdsong.
Perhaps she ought to feel remorseful. Unlike her guilt over Gloria, this was a mistake entirely of Thelma’s own making, though now—clear-eyed in the morning—she didn’t count it a mistake at all. How long would it last, this feeling of contentedness? Until she faced Gloria? Until she reunited with David?
Aly stirred, turning onto his side to wrap his arm around Thelma’s waist and pull her close. She nestled in, her back to his chest, threading her pale fingers through his dark ones.
Did he truly see the world as one endless competition, a series of battles to be won and lost, conquests of the heart and mind and body? But then, was that so very different from how others saw it—Mamma, pushing her daughters toward whichever man offered the most money or social status, encouraging them to conquer cold hearts in exchange for comfort? How naive she’d been, to think that such battles ended with marriage: that, once she’d reached the peak, she wouldn’t have to fight to remain there, grasping what she could, with no guarantee that it wouldn’t all end through divorce or circumstance, or the abrupt expiration of a beating heart. How little it all amounted to, when such choices were made on the promise of money or power.
Aly shifted again and Thelma turned to face him. Even in sleep, he had a casual, frowning elegance that denied him the sort of vulnerability that David, in his quiet moments, had: he looked as though he were working out some problem—another battle, even in his dreams. Thelma ran her thumb along the line of his jaw, across the thin mustache that covered the bridge of his lip, and
he opened his eyes.
“Good morning,” he said, his voice low with sleep.
“Good morning.”
Aly closed his eyes once more; Thelma kissed him lightly and slid out of the bed.
“So early?” He raised his hand in the air, consulting his wristwatch without sitting up. “It’s not even seven o’clock. Come back to bed. We’ll order breakfast.”
Thelma wrapped a quilt around her shoulders. “The courtroom opens at nine,” she said, finding her undergarments on a nearby chair. “And I’ll have enough to explain as it is. As fun as this has been, time didn’t stop last night.”
Aly smiled. “Didn’t it, just for a moment?” He sat up, reaching for his cigarettes. “You’ll return afterward?”
Thelma finished fastening her brassiere and retrieved her slip. Aly exhaled, drumming his fingers on the end of the cigarette.
“I thought not,” he said.
Thelma returned to the bed, perching on the edge as he ran a hand down her back. “I can’t,” she replied. “You know where I’ve got to be.”
Aly held her gaze before kissing her, once, softly, on the lips.
“You’re wasted on him, you know,” he said as she rose to continue dressing.
Thelma leaned forward to check her reflection in a mirror, twisting her hair back into place. “Is that so?”
She watched him nod in the mirror’s reflection. “When all this is over, we should go away together. Leave the prince to his toys and marry me.”
Thelma smiled. “Do you say that to all the women you sleep with?”
“Yes. But this time I mean it.”
She sat on the edge of the bed. It was tempting: wipe the slate clean. Run away from David, from Gloria—from all of it.
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