by Rebecca Dean
Wallis, who had been creating her own style for years, rose to her feet, rounded his desk, and gave him a kiss on his cheek. Then she exultantly made her way back down to the grandiose foyer, dizzy with delight at the thought of all the new gowns and outfits that were about to be hers.
Her debut gown was her first priority, and she knew exactly how she wanted it to look. Months ago she had seen a picture of the Broadway star Irene Castle wearing a Grecian-style gown of white satin combined with chiffon and trimmings of pearls. The chiffon veiled the shoulders and fell in a knee-length tunic, banded in pearl embroidery. It was elegant and distinctive—and she knew no other girl would have a gown remotely like it.
The first grand ball of her season would be the Princeton Prom in September, and for that she had her dressmaker make her a floaty gown of lavender blue organdy—going to great pains to make sure the blue was the exact same color as the color of her eyes.
Though she hadn’t yet received an invite to Beatrice Astor’s debut ball, she knew for a certainty that she would be receiving one and that it would be taking place at the Astor mansion on Fifth Avenue, in New York.
“It has to be extra special, Mama,” she said to Alice. “What is the most extra-special material there is?”
Alice, who was enjoying Wallis’s visits to the dressmaker almost as much as Wallis was, tilted her head to one side, thought for a moment, and then said: “Cloth of gold. You can’t have an entire gown made of it. It would look vulgar—especially so considering how young you are. But a gown made with a bodice of cloth of gold would look spectacular—especially if it were delicately embroidered with flowers.”
“And the skirt, Mama?”
“A full skirt made of crepe de chine in a shade complementing the gold of the bodice. Something in a sunset color.”
Wallis clapped her hands in delight. In a gown such as her mother had just described, she was going to be the object of all eyes. No one—not even Beatrice—would outshine her.
All through the rest of July and the beginning of August, Wallis thought of nothing but clothes and invitations. On the twenty-fifth of July, a small two-line news piece in the Baltimore Sun announced that Austria had broken off diplomatic ties with Serbia.
In a letter she received from John Jasper a few days later, he told her he and his father would soon be heading home, as war between Austria and Serbia seemed imminent.
Wallis didn’t give another thought to the war seemingly about to take place between Austria and Serbia. All that mattered to her was that it looked as if John Jasper would be back in Baltimore in time to escort her to the Princeton Prom.
“Where is this Serbia that is in the news again?” her Aunt Bessie asked a few days later when accompanying her to a milliner’s. “Wherever it is, according to today’s Sun, Austria has just declared war on it.”
Wallis wasn’t sure where Serbia was either, and neither did she care. If Austria had declared war on it, it meant John Jasper would be home in time for the prom and that she would very soon have his ring on the third finger of her left hand.
Life had become a hectic round of dressmaker appointments and lunches with other eighteen-year-old girls, whose chatter was constantly about clothes and husband hunting. Wallis never joined in the last subject, because she had no need to. The man of her dreams was already hers, and soon, certainly before Christmas, their engagement announcement would be in the Baltimore Sun for everyone to read.
Even when it became obvious that war in the Balkans was going to be the catalyst for a great war, with Germany and Austro-Hungary ranged on one side and Great Britain, France, and Russia on the other, Wallis remained uninterested. The drama was all taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. It couldn’t possibly affect her.
A week after Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, she received a letter from John Jasper telling her that he and his father were now in London.
… and when Pa has finished meeting up with people here, we’ll be booking a sailing aboard the Mauretania and heading home at full belt for Baltimore. I can’t tell you how much I’m missing you, Wallis. The first thing I’m going to do when I have Baltimore soil under my feet again is to ask your uncle if I can have an interview with him. How does a Christmas engagement sound? Wouldn’t it be swell? I love you with all my heart, sweet Wallis—and I sure as heck don’t want anyone else escorting you to the Princeton Prom—or the Bachelor’s Cotillion!
Just as the war wasn’t affecting her, so it didn’t seem to be affecting Pamela—or at least not adversely.
Dear Wally,
In London every eligible young man is now in uniform—and they look spiffing. Tarquin’s youngest brother joined the North Somersets the instant war was declared and has just set off for France, taking with him his two best hunters, a valet, and a cook. Tarquin is hoping he’ll come home laden with medals. The Prince of Wales has been given a commission in the Grenadier Guards. Enclosed is a newspaper cutting of him in uniform. Doesn’t he look handsome? At my presentation to King George and Queen Mary he was standing a little to the left of Their Majesties, and though it was bad form of me, as I made my curtsey to the king I looked directly at his heir. Not only did I get a smile of recognition, I got a wink! Of course, afterwards, everyone said he’d simply got something in his eye and was trying to blink it away, but I know better! Rose Houghton has left for France in order to work as a nurse in one of the field hospitals. Her uniform is so divine I’m half tempted to go with her.
At the end of the month, as Wallis waited in a fever of impatience for news of John Jasper’s sailing on the Mauretania, she received a letter from him filled with disappointment.
My Dearest Sweetheart,
I don’t know how to tell you this, but Pa now says he has no intention of returning to Baltimore until the New Year.
The only glimmer of good news about this is that he has booked passage for the two of us aboard a liner sailing from Southampton January 1st.
There was much more to his letter, but Wallis scarcely read it. The devastation she felt at knowing he would not be her escort at either the Princeton Prom or the Bachelor’s Cotillion was too deep. With the letter still in her hands, she fought against giving way to tears. Tears wouldn’t solve the problem she now had—and that problem was an urgent one. Who was going to be her escort on her big night at the prom?
“What about Cousin Lelia’s boy, Basil?” Aunt Bessie suggested. “He’s very good looking. Even though he’s your second cousin, you’ll still be the envy of all the other debutantes.”
There were forty-nine other debutantes that year, and to be the envy of them all had become Wallis’s main ambition in life. That weekend she paid a self-invited visit to Wakefield Manor to speak to Basil. His reaction wasn’t at all what she had expected.
“I can’t possibly, Wallis,” he said apologetically. “I’m dating Miriam Foxwood. If I escorted you to the prom, she’d be so mad at me I might never see her again.”
To Wallis that didn’t matter a jot.
“You have to be my escort, Basil! Every other boy I know is already spoken for!”
“Nick Rhodes isn’t. He’s my best buddy. And he’ll be over the moon to escort you, Wallis. I just know he will be.”
“Is that because in the looks department he’s nothing to write home about?”
Basil grinned. “Nope. I’ll introduce the pair of you; then you can see for yourself.”
Though Nick Rhodes didn’t send her pulse racing and her heart hammering, he was presentable enough to have that effect on other girls and, with his agreement that he would be her escort, the prom was one social event nicely sorted out. It still left the Bachelor’s Cotillion, though—and the Bachelor’s Cotillion was the important event of the season.
In the end, that problem, too, was solved by family—and in a way that amused Wallis greatly.
“Your cousin Henry would like to escort you to the cotillion,” her Uncle Sol said, well pleased at the idea.
As Henry’s engagement had long since been broken off, Henry was very suitable. Even though she no longer had a crush on him, Wallis was gleeful. Henry was exceedingly good-looking, and in white tie and tails he would be even more so. At the cotillion she was going to be the envy of every girl there. She wrote Pamela with news of all the arrangements that had been made, describing what gown she would wear to each function. Pamela wrote back with news of her own.
Guess who got in touch with me the other day? John Jasper! Why didn’t you tell me he and his pa were now in London? It was good to see him again, even though all he did was talk about you and of how the two of you are going to get engaged the minute he gets home. Tarquin has invited the Bachmans to Norfolk. Won’t it be a hoot if there is an invite to Sandringham while John Jasper is with us?
The next letter from John Jasper bore a Norfolk postmark.
This is a real quaint part of England,
he wrote when he got around to telling her about how he had met up with Pamela.
Pamela’s stepfather may be an earl, but he’s an easy to know, likable guy. When you get to meet him you’ll see what I mean. (And you will get to meet him because we’ll come back here together, either on our honeymoon or after it.) I didn’t get to meet British royalty. I guess with the way things are going in the war, King George has more on his mind than vacationing at Sandringham. The British Army has called for 500,000 more men to volunteer. Did you read about the terrible bloodbath at Mons in Belgium? People are still saying it will be all over by Christmas, but I don’t think so. I’m just heartily glad it’s a war America isn’t involved in.
Wallis, too, was glad that America wasn’t at war, but gratitude for the fact wasn’t uppermost on her mind. What was uppermost was that instead of being with her in Baltimore, John Jasper was in Norfolk with Pamela.
Remembering her old suspicions that Pamela found John Jasper just as heart-stopping as she did, it wasn’t a comforting thought. She chided herself for her lack of trust. Pamela’s ambition was for marriage to a highly titled Englishman—the Prince of Wales if she could get him. The days when she might have flirted with John Jasper were long past. And John Jasper wouldn’t flirt with Pamela—not when he’d never taken interest in her when she’d lived in Baltimore.
With her mind set at rest, she focused all her attention on the whirl of social activities now filling her days. It was a debutante’s duty to host a luncheon or party for every other debutante and so sometimes she had as many as three functions to attend in one day.
Outgoing and extroverted, Wallis loved every minute of her social whirl.
At the Princeton Prom she was the belle of the ball. At the Bachelor’s Cotillion she was the star of the evening. In a letter to Pamela, she wrote:
… and the best, my debutante coming-out ball, is yet to come.
All arrangements for it had been left in her Uncle Sol’s capable hands.
In December, two weeks before it was to take place, Sol telephoned her to say he would like a private word with her at 34 East Preston Street.
When she arrived there he was waiting for her in the drawing room.
“I have unfortunate news for you, Wallis,” he said, even before she’d had the chance to sit down. “Knowing how strong your character is, I trust you will view things as I do and agree with me that there is no alternative to the action I have decided to take.”
Wallis took a deep, steadying breath.
“And what action is that, Uncle Sol?” she asked, fearful of what was to come.
He stroked his heavy mustache with his thumb and forefinger and then said bluntly: “Because of the terrible slaughter taking place in Europe, I have decided that it would be inappropriate for you to have a large debutante ball—or, indeed, a debutante ball of any kind. With thousands of families grieving and left destitute, the present time is no time for festivities.”
Wallis stared at him, hardly able to take in what he was saying. In a stunned voice she said in disbelief, “But I have to have a coming-out ball, Uncle Sol! How can I be a debutante without one?”
“You can be a very special debutante, Wallis. A debutante who doesn’t mindlessly follow the crowd, but one who has a social conscience.”
She wanted to shout that she didn’t give a damn about a social conscience but knew it would get her nowhere. What she had to do now was think of a way of overcoming the blow she had been dealt.
It was the Montague side of her family who came to her aid.
“Trust that pompous prig Solomon Warfield to have let Wallis down,” her Aunt Lelia said vehemently to Alice on being told the news. “If you ask me, he doesn’t give a damn about Wallis’s social conscience, or his own. The war is simply his excuse to save some money.”
“But what is Wallis to do, Lelia?” Alice’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Free left me totally unprovided for. There’s no way I can give her a debutante ball, and she owes hospitality to all the other debutantes.”
“Dry your eyes, Alice. I’ll give the child a coming-out ball. And I’ll give her one at the Marine barracks in Washington, D.C.—which is something Solomon Warfield couldn’t arrange even if he’d wanted to. Having a husband who is the commandant of the United States Marine Corps has uses.”
It most certainly did, as Wallis found out when she entered a flag-festooned band hall at the Marine barracks and was greeted by a Marine guard of honor.
It was an evening quite unlike that of any of the other debutantes, for not even Astor or Schermerhorn wealth could have provided a sixty-piece Marine band, every member red-jacketed and covered in gold braid.
Even though John Jasper wasn’t there to share it with her, Wallis knew she would remember the evening as being one of the happiest of her life—and one of the best things about it was that when it was over, there were only another three weeks until John Jasper sailed for home.
Every morning she expected to receive a letter from him telling her of his own fever of impatience.
None arrived.
Neither were there any letters from Pamela.
“It’s because of the war, Wallis,” Alice said when she mentioned the lack of overseas mail.
Wallis didn’t agree with her mother’s reasoning. Liners were still crossing the Atlantic just as regularly and as unhampered as they had always done. Waiting for the mail to be delivered suddenly became the most important part of her day, and when a letter bearing John Jasper’s distinctive handwriting was finally delivered, she almost snatched it out of the mailman’s hand.
Usually she took John Jasper’s letters to her bedroom so that she would be able to read them undisturbed. This time she simply tore it open where she was standing, ecstatic at knowing that with his sailing date only days away, it was probably the last one he would ever need to write to her.
The first thing she noticed was that the letter was short, barely a page long.
My dearest, darling, most wonderful Wallis,
This is the hardest letter I have ever had to write—and I would give my life not to be having to write it. There are no excuses for what has happened—apart, of course, from the fact that I was more lonesome without you than you can ever imagine. On January 1st—the day I would have been sailing home to you—I shall be marrying Pamela at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. It is a marriage of necessity—one that neither Pamela nor I want. I love you, dearest, sweetest Wallis, as I have always done, but honor demands I do the right thing by Pamela. I’m not going to ask you to forgive me, for I don’t see how you possibly can. I certainly can’t forgive myself. I’ve ruined three people’s lives. Yours. Mine. Pamela’s. All I can do is to make sure that the baby’s life won’t be ruined also. Good-bye, my dearest love. Know that for the rest of my life you will have my heart. John Jasper.
She screamed, uncaring of who might hear her. Then, with the letter crushed in her hand and her world tumbling around her ears, she raced upstairs to her bedroom. Slamming the door behind her, she threw herself face down on the bed, pummeling
the pillow and drumming her feet against the mattress in a storm of anguish so intense she thought it was going to kill her.
How could John Jasper have done such a thing? How could he have been unfaithful to her in such a way? Especially how could he have been so unfaithful to her with her best friend? The double betrayal was so gross—so unspeakable—she couldn’t even begin to imagine how she was going to live with it.
She thought of John Jasper and Pamela coming back to Baltimore to live and knew there was no way in the world she could endure such pain. But how was she to avoid it?
Sobbing so hard she could scarcely breathe, she forced herself to think about her options. She could go to Wakefield Manor and live with her Aunt Lelia. Or she could go to Pot Springs and live with her Uncle Emory’s family.
But both Wakefield Manor and Pot Springs were close to Baltimore, and she didn’t want to be close to Baltimore—she wanted to be a million miles away.
She stopped drumming her feet into the mattress and pummeling the pillow.
There was somewhere she could go; somewhere that, though not a million miles away, was still at the opposite end of the country. Her cousin Corinne’s husband, Henry Mustin, was stationed in Florida. She would write to Corinne and ask if she could stay with her and Henry. Once there, Baltimore would never see her again—and she would do her damnedest to ensure that for as long as she lived, neither would John Jasper or Pamela.
Chapter Nine
In London, Pamela wasn’t much happier than Wallis. It had been amusing luring John Jasper into being unfaithful. That she had been able to do so had proved to her yet again that no man could resist her if she’d set her mind on having him. She hadn’t wanted John Jasper long term, of course. He had simply—because of his fierce determination to stay on the straight and narrow while away from Wallis—been a challenge; a challenge that had come with the additional temptation of being forbidden fruit. To Pamela, forbidden fruit was irresistible.