by Rebecca Dean
She grinned naughtily as they made their way into school. “Heirs to thrones always marry young, and I would make a terrific princess. As you are my best friend, Wally, I promise you that if David comes up to scratch, you will be chief bridesmaid at our Westminster Abbey wedding!”
Chapter Four
After that particular conversation, Wallis’s interest in the British royal family increased. It was relatively easy to come across newspaper photographs of King Edward and Queen Alexandra—though the majority of photographs were of King Edward without his queen and had been taken at fashionable resorts such as Baden-Baden, or Cowes, or Biarritz. American news items about the Prince and Princess of Wales were much rarer, and in the only newspaper photograph of them with their children, Prince Edward looked quite nondescript apart from his naval cadet uniform and hair that looked to be an even paler gold than Pamela’s.
She clipped it nevertheless. It was quite the rage at Arundell to collect pinup photographs of favorite sports stars or of any other personable young man they could fantasize and daydream about. So far the pride of Wallis’s collection was a photograph of Henry. All the girls had oohed and aahed over Henry. Pamela, however, had stolen the show by flaunting a photograph taken in Cannes by her stepfather. It was of twenty-one-year-old Prince Sergei Romanov. And he had his arm around Pamela’s shoulders.
Privately, Wallis would very much have liked to add a photograph of John Jasper to her growing collection, but there was little chance of doing so because John Jasper now attended a boys’ school over on Lake Avenue and, much to her disappointment, the only time she now saw him was at the rollerskating rink.
Her mother’s angry row with Aunt Bessie had long since been made up—though Wallis knew her aunt still disapproved of the way her mother persisted in spending time with gentlemen friends.
“The trouble with your mother,” she said once to Wallis, when Christmas was over and Baltimore lay deep in snow, “is that she’s a romantic. She doesn’t have a commonsense idea in her head.”
It was a remark Wallis remembered when her mother finally admitted she wasn’t making money out of the dinners she was giving.
Nervously she showed Wallis a drawer crammed full of unpaid bills. “I don’t know how people can think I owe them so much,” she said, clutching a tear-sodden handkerchief. “Do you think some of those nice tradesmen are trying to cheat me?”
Wallis, who was no better at figures than Alice, didn’t know. Aunt Bessie had known, though.
“Dear Lord Almighty, Alice!” she said when Wallis asked her to look at the bills. “No one is trying to cheat you. You’ve been cheating yourself! How could you ever hope to make a profit giving dinners as elaborate as you have been doing, for the money you’ve been charging?”
She fanned the bills out on their dining table.
“Diamondback terrapin? And lobsters? And prime rib and squab? You haven’t been giving dinners, Alice. You’ve been giving banquets. I’m not surprised you were never short of guests!”
Alice’s tears gave way to sobs. “I g-gave traditional S-southern-style d-dinner parties and that meant my m-menus included the b-best of everything.”
“They certainly did—and now you’re goin’ to have to pay for being so foolish.” Her voice softened and she reached out across the table and covered Alice’s hands with hers. “You aren’t a businesswoman, Alice. It’s something you’re just going to have to accept.”
Alice’s slender shoulders sagged. “But the bills, Bessie.” Her voice cracked and broke. “I can’t go to Sol with them. He can hardly bring himself to speak to me since someone told him about me and …”—she threw a quick glance in Wallis’s direction—“… since my friendship with you-know-who.”
At the mention of “you-know-who,” Bessie’s mouth tightened, but there was only love and infinite patience in her voice as she said, “Sol doesn’t have to know, Alice dear.” She scooped the bills from the table and stuffed them into her handbag. “I’ll see to these, but in future there are to be no more business ventures. And try to keep on the good side of Sol, Alice. He’s all that stands between you and really severe financial difficulties.”
Wallis had no idea who “you-know-who” was, but his existence troubled her greatly.
“But why?” Pamela asked when she told her about it.
“Because he’s obviously in a different category than the others—and because my mother was so careful not to say his name in front of me.”
Pamela shrugged. “That’s just the way parents are. They don’t realize that when you’re nearly twelve you’re not a child any longer. That’s why I prefer Tarquin to my father. He doesn’t treat me as though I’m still in leading reins.”
Wallis couldn’t imagine anyone treating Pamela as if she were in leading reins, for she simply wouldn’t have suffered them; she was far too precocious.
“Sergei Romanov kissed me on the lips,” she had told Wallis, not long after coming back from Cannes. “It was a very peculiar experience because he didn’t seem to know how to do it. He tried to push his tongue into my mouth, which was a very silly thing to do, don’t you think? It wasn’t at all pleasant, and I told him that if he wanted to kiss me again he had to do it properly, with his mouth shut.”
Wallis had been round-eyed. No one in their class had been kissed by a boy—and Sergei Romanov wasn’t a boy. He was a twenty-one-year-old adult—and a Russian prince into the bargain.
“And did he kiss you again?” she’d asked, wondering what it might be like to be kissed by John Jasper.
Pamela had given a careless shrug of a shoulder. “No,” she’d said. “He looked panic-stricken and told me I must promise not to tell anyone what he’d done.”
Still deep in thought as to who her mother’s new beau could be, not able to be as dismissive about it as Pamela had been and for once not wanting Pamela’s company, Wallis slung her roller skates over her shoulder and set off for the one place Pamela never went: the skating rink at Mount Vernon.
The first person she saw there was John Jasper. He was fooling around with a couple of friends, and she knew she couldn’t just skate over and join them. That kind of camaraderie had ended the day they left Miss O’Donnell’s for single-sex schools. Eleven-year-old girls didn’t do that kind of thing. Girls hung together in groups. It was all right, though, for a boy to approach a girl, or a group of girls, on his own. That is, it was all right if he knew the girl or girls in question and if he approached them in a suitably polite manner.
Standing on the side of the skating rink as skaters noisily whizzed past her, Wally wondered how she could best attract John Jasper’s attention. It was brought home to her, for the first time, that where boys were concerned a girl had to make herself stand out from the crowd. Pamela stood out from the crowd simply because she was a duke’s daughter and had waist-length golden hair and mesmerizing sea green eyes.
She, Wally, had no such assets.
For one thing, she wasn’t head-turningly beautiful in the way Pamela was. In fact, apart from having eyes that were an extraordinary violet blue, she wasn’t beautiful at all. She wasn’t even enchantingly pretty in the way her mother was. Though she was now counting the months off to her twelfth birthday, it was quite obvious to Wallis that she wasn’t going to grow up looking like her mother. Her hair was far too dark for one thing, so dark an auburn that it was almost black. Because she liked to capitalize on her far-distant-in-the-past connection to King Powhatan and Pocahontas, she didn’t mind being dark-haired. What she did mind was that she wasn’t fine-boned. Her hands and feet were bigger than she liked—as was her nose—and she had a strong, almost boyish jawline. There was nothing softly rounded about her. Even her shoulders were bonily angular. It didn’t matter too much now, but she was enough of a realist to know that it would in a few years’ time, when she was a debutante and looking for a husband.
She had always tried to stand out from the crowd by dressing differently from her school friends, but now she de
termined that in future she would do so even more exaggeratedly. And she would capitalize on her boyish physique instead of being self-conscious about it. In one of her mother’s dressing table drawers was a monocle that had once belonged to her father. She would begin wearing it. That would certainly make her stand out from the crowd, and she already knew that simpering never engaged any boy’s attention and that it was far better to be confident and bold, as she had been with Henry.
With that decision made, all she had to do now was work out how she was going to disengage John Jasper from his friends. She looked at the way the other girls at the rink were skating. They were all doing so in twosomes or in a shrieking, chattering group, bumping into each other and regularly falling over. Confident in her own prowess, she buckled the straps on her skates a little tighter and set off to attract John Jasper’s attention.
It didn’t take long.
“Hi, Bessie Wallis,” he said, leaving his friends behind and skating up beside her. “How are you doing?”
Wallis didn’t break the rhythm of her skating. “No one calls me Bessie Wallis anymore,” she said, shouting to be heard above the roar of fifty or so careering roller skates. “I’m called Wallis now.”
He grinned, keeping pace easily with her as they expertly negotiated a curve of the rink. “Okay then, Wallis. How are you doing?”
“I’m doing just fine,” she said, trying not to think of the painful scene that had just taken place between her mother and her aunt.
Fleetingly she took her eyes off the skaters in front of her in order to quickly glance across at him.
She liked what she saw just as much as she always had. His dark hair was still as thick and curly as a ram’s fleece, and she still couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to feel those tight curls springing beneath her fingers.
“How are you liking being at Bryn Mawr with Mabel and Violet?”
She noticed that he was roller-skating with his hands laconically clasped behind his back. “I’m not at Bryn Mawr,” she said, doing the same thing with her own hands and cross that he should be linking her with the two girls she had liked least at Miss O’Donnell’s. “I’m at Arundell. With Pamela.”
He chuckled, still roller-skating with perfect balance. “I ran into Lady Pamela at Guth’s last year, just before the summer vacation. She said she was off to Europe to hobnob with royalty. She said if I wanted to tag along, her pa wouldn’t mind.”
Wallis lost her balance, crashing into him so hard it was a miracle they both didn’t end up on the wooden floor.
Hanging on to her in order to keep her upright, he steered her to the side of the rink, where they were out of harm’s way of the other skaters.
“What happened?” he asked, black-lashed brown eyes darkening in concern. “You were skating brilliantly.”
Wally leaned against the rink’s waist-high barrier, struggling to catch her breath. She could hardly tell John Jasper that Pamela hadn’t breathed a word about meeting him in Guth’s and of the invitation she had given him—and that Pamela’s not doing so, when they were best friends and constantly confided every detail of their lives to each other, was a betrayal that stunned her. Especially so when Pamela knew she had been sweet on John Jasper for years.
“Thanks,” she said in answer to his compliment, her mind whirling. “I just lost concentration for a moment.”
“Come on.” He took hold of her hand as if she still needed steadying. “Let’s do another couple of circuits.”
Her fingers interlocked with his in a way she found terribly exciting, but she couldn’t give herself up to enjoyment of the experience because she was too busy thinking about Pamela. Why hadn’t Pamela told her about running into John Jasper at Guth’s? Even more to the point, why had she told John Jasper he was quite welcome to spend the summer vacation with her and her father? There was only one answer, and it wasn’t one Wallis liked.
Pamela was just as sweet on John Jasper as Wallis was.
And though she and Pamela had always promised they would never have any secrets from each other, this was one secret Pamela had kept very firmly to herself. Just how she felt about it Wallis didn’t quite know, but she found it disconcerting, for if she couldn’t trust Pamela, who could she trust?
“John Jasper? At Guth’s?” Pamela looked perplexed, and then her expression cleared. “Oh, way back last year? Yes, I did run into him. And he told you about my asking if he’d like to tag along with Papa and me to Europe?” She gave her distinctively throaty giggle. “Didn’t you think that a hoot? What if he’d said he’d come? Can you imagine John Jasper Bachman at the Royal Hotel, Cannes, mixing with Russian royalty? Or, much, much worse, at York Cottage, Sandringham, in the presence of Prince George and Princess May?”
The images Pamela was conjuring up were so bizarre—and so unlikely—that Wallis found herself giggling along with her. Pamela had merely been teasing John Jasper and he should have had the sense to realize it, but then, as Pamela had once said to her, boys could be awfully dim.
A few weeks later, strange things began happening at the Preston Apartment House. Her mother ceased worrying about money and her new dresses were no longer ones she had made herself but instead bore the label of Baltimore’s most prestigious fashion house. If that weren’t bewildering enough, something even more bewildering followed.
“We’re moving,” Alice announced gaily. “Nineteen oh-eight is going to be a wonderful year for us, Wallis darling. There’s going to be no more Preston Apartment House. We’re going to move into a splendid little house on Biddle Street, and it will be our own house, Wallis. It won’t be rented.”
“Our own house?” The prospect was so magical, Wallis’s legs felt weak. “But how can we afford our own house, Mama?”
Her mother laughed. “We can’t, Wallis, but someone else can, and that someone is being extraordinarily generous.”
Wallis gasped. Her own relationship with Uncle Sol had improved vastly over the last few years. Sometimes he would unexpectedly slip her a ten-dollar bill and had even begun kissing her on the forehead when saying good-bye to her. It had never occurred to her, though, that his relationship with her mother had also undergone a great change, and her relief that it had was enormous.
“A house of our own!” She hugged her mother ecstatically. “It’s going to be wonderful, Mama! It’s going to be perfect!”
Although the houses on Biddle Street were relatively small brownstone row houses, it was perfect. On the first floor there was a library, a parlor, a dining room, and a kitchen and pantry. On the second floor were two large bedrooms with a bathroom in between them, and on the third floor was another bedroom. Her mother took one of the second-floor bedrooms for her own use, designating the other bedroom on the second floor for use as a guest bedroom. Wallis’s bedroom was the one on the third floor.
It was far better than living at the Preston Apartment House. Wallis thought it even better than living at East Preston Street, for though there was no grandeur at Biddle Street, it was all their very own. She even preferred it to West Chase Street, because at Biddle Street they were not living as guests—however well loved—in someone else’s home.
“I’m happy,” she said to Pamela. “Happy, happy, happy.” It was a happiness that didn’t last long.
Chapter Five
They had been in the Biddle Street house only weeks when her mother said to her, “I have a friend comin’ over for dinner tonight, Wallis. A very special gentleman friend. His name is Mr. Rasin—and I’m very fond of him, Wallis.”
Wallis stared at her, too shocked to think of a suitable response. She was still in a state of shock when, an hour later, she met up with Pamela at school.
Pamela was blasé about Mr. Rasin, but in talking about him Wallis’s concern only deepened.
“Mama’s never done this before,” she said, trying to get Pamela to understand how she felt.
“What?” Pamela was chewing on a mouthful of taffy and spoke with difficulty. “
Never become fond of anyone?”
“No. She’s never invited an admirer home to dinner before.”
Pamela continued to chew thoughtfully. Eating taffy at school was strictly forbidden, but like all the rest of Arundell’s regulations it wasn’t one she’d ever taken notice of. When her mouth was empty, she said, “Your mother had dinner guests when you were at the Preston Apartment House.”
“That was different. They were paying to be there.”
It was something Pamela had no answer for, and so she said, “But your mother won’t be dining with him on her own. You’ll be there. D’you want a piece of taffy? I’ve still got quite a bit left.”
Wallis shook her head. She’d quite enough on her mind without being found by Miss Carroll with a lump of taffy in her mouth. Not only would Uncle Sol and her grandmother be appalled at the thought of her mother entertaining an admirer at Biddle Street, Aunt Bessie would be appalled as well. It wasn’t the thought of her Aunt Bessie and her grandmother’s disapproval that was filling her with fear, though. It was the thought of Uncle Sol’s disapproval.
He had bought the dear little house on Biddle Street for them. What if he decided her mother was abusing his generosity and took the house away from them? The very thought gave her a sickening feeling of dread deep in the pit of her stomach. No matter how nice Mr. Rasin might turn out to be, she knew she wasn’t going to like him. She couldn’t afford to. He posed too much of a threat to the newfound security she had just begun to enjoy.
Mr. Rasin turned out to be nearly as old as her Uncle Sol, at least forty. And he wasn’t as fastidiously well groomed as her uncle. He was a big man with a big stomach and a huge shock of bright red hair. His stomach looked as if it were trying to escape from his clothes, and his mustache was in need of a clip.