The Shadow Queen

by Rebecca Dean

  For the next forty minutes the two of them had danced almost unceasingly, following the Turkey Trot with the Bunny Hug, the Grizzly Bear, the cakewalk and then, finally, a foxtrot.

  Perspiration had been beading his brow when at last he had come to a stop. “Champagne for you, and a pint of lemon barley water for me, I think,” he had said breathlessly. “Then, as I need to cool down, how about we take a turn around the garden?”

  That their doing so would be noted by everyone and commented upon endlessly afterward because the occasion was so informal, because so few people were in attendance, because the party was one he had instigated, and because his nerves were fraught at the thought of his imminent return to the front had been something he had been uncaring about.

  Pamela had been more than uncaring. She had been ecstatic.

  With a glass of champagne in her hand and not even glancing in John Jasper’s direction, she had allowed Edward to escort her from the room.

  The night had been pleasantly mild, the moon high.

  Immediately as they were free of the house, his buoyant mood had collapsed as if pricked by a pin.

  “You’ve been a lifesaver tonight, Pamela,” he’d said bleakly, putting his half-empty glass of barley water down on one of the terrace’s glass-topped tables.

  “Because of tomorrow? Because of going back to France?” Insensitive as she normally was to what was going on in other people’s heads, she had known that on this occasion it was vitally important that she successfully do so.

  “No, and if that sounds bizarre it’s because ghastly though it is out there—so unspeakably ghastly I don’t have words to describe it—I want to be there with my fellow officers, doing my bit. Or as much of my bit as the powers that be are allowing me to do.”

  In the moonlight his hair had been the sleekest, palest blond imaginable, the despair in his eyes, as they had met with hers, absolute.

  Swiftly she had laid her champagne glass down on the table and lightly touched his arm with her hand.

  “Tell me,” she had said tenderly, certain she was living through her finest moment.

  He had taken hold of her hand, grasping it tightly. “I’m just not my own man, Pamela.” His voice had been full of the plea to be understood. “As heir to the throne I never will be. There isn’t one major decision in life I can make for myself. Everything is laid down for me for years and years ahead. When the war ends—and it will end with Britain and her allies being victorious and the Hun pounded to a pulp—it’s set in concrete that I will have to marry, whether I want to or not. Then there will be an endless treadmill of the kind of royal duties that would send any sane man screamingly off his head. The terrible truth, Pamela, is that I’m not cut out to be royal. I hate all the endless dressing up. All the fussy ceremonials.”

  It had been a confession Pamela had been totally unable to deal with.

  She had thought of how she always took all her worries to Tarquin and had said hesitatingly, “What about your father? Does he understand how you feel?”

  He’d given a humorless laugh. “My father is a bully who has never understood how anyone feels. He even shouts at my mother—and before you ask me if I’ve spoken to the queen about the way I feel, I haven’t. Attempting to talk to my mother would be like attempting to talk to an iceberg.”

  That King George and Queen Mary’s relationships with their children left a lot to be desired was something she had understood from Tarquin a long time ago.

  She had moved comfortingly closer to him and he had drawn her into his arms, burying his face in her neck.

  “Pamela, darling!” His voice had been choked with need. “You’ve no idea how wonderful it was to see you enter the room this evening and for me to know I had someone to be with who would understand me and make me feel better.”

  Remembering that he was reputed to be cripplingly shy with women, she had moved her head fractionally, making it easier for him to kiss her.

  He had done so with hungry passion, and when he had moved a hand so that it slid inside her plunging neckline and cupped her breast, she had given a small triumphant sigh and had inwardly cursed that he was to leave for London within an hour or two and then—for who knew how long?—for France.

  As if reading her thoughts and with his hand still on her breast, he had said urgently, “It’s nearly eleven and I have to leave for London. You will write to me, Pamela, won’t you? And you will be waiting for me when I return?”

  It had been like asking the pope if he were a Catholic.

  “Yes,” she’d said, keeping glee out of her voice only with the greatest difficulty. “Of course I’ll write to you, and of course I will be waiting for you when you next have leave.”

  With her head resting on his shoulder, they had walked back to the house hand in hand and hip to hip.

  Within minutes of their reentering the drawing room, Edward had thanked Tarquin and her mother for their hospitality and with a last longing look in her direction had bidden everyone farewell. Then, seated at the back of a big black car, his aide at the wheel, he had disappeared into the night en route for Buckingham Palace.

  John Jasper said again, “How will I ever explain to Oliver—when he is older—if I don’t enlist, Pammie?”

  She blinked, bringing her thoughts back to the present with difficulty.

  “I don’t know, John Jasper.” Any other answer was impossible when it was so obvious that if he was given an opportunity to fight for his country, he would do so.

  Later, when he had left the house for the American embassy, she had continued with her own plans for the day in the hope that they would help her forget the monumental step John Jasper was now taking.

  At lunchtime she was at the Ritz, meeting up with Cynthia Asquith, whose father, until a few short months ago, had been prime minister. Cynthia knew everything about everyone, and Pamela wanted to know more about Edward’s long-standing friendship with Lady Coke.

  “Marian Coke?” Cynthia had adjusted the fox fur around her shoulders and arched an eyebrow that had been plucked almost into extinction. “What is it you want to know about her, Pamela?”

  Pamela had taken a sip of deliciously ice-cold Chablis and said, trying to sound as if her interest were only casual, “I know her name has been linked with Prince Edward’s for quite a time now, but it seems so unlikely I did wonder if the rumors were true.”

  “That they are lovers?” Cynthia had flashed her a malicious little smile. “It is hard to imagine Marian Coke in the role of an experienced instructor in the art of love, isn’t it? And besides, I always thought ladies of the night were roped in to give that kind of éducation sentimentale. Marian, however, certainly used to be Edward’s closest confidante, though whether she still is I really don’t know. Have you heard that Henry Daventry died in Gallipoli? And that Charles Lister, after many woundings, has died in Egypt?”

  From then on the conversation had become a depressing roll call of friends, and friends of friends, who had died, and Pamela had been relieved when their lunch together had come to an end.

  There was a letter from America waiting for her on her arrival at home. The handwriting was Edith’s. She picked it up from the silver salver in the hall and then, en route to her bedroom, where she intended to read it in undisturbed peace, she called in at the nursery to spend a few obligatory minutes with her son.

  Now nearly two, Oliver was not yet old enough to be interesting, at least not to her. It was John Jasper who, from the minute Oliver had been born, had barely been able to tear himself away from the nursery.

  “It’s because Mr. Bachman is American,” she had said apologetically to Oliver’s nanny when she had complained about having to endure such unusual parental presence in her domain. “They don’t behave the way we do.”

  She entered the large sunlit nursery to find Oliver playing on the floor with a pile of brightly colored wooden bricks.

  His face lit up at the sight of her. “Mama!” he shouted, scrambling eager
ly to his feet and running toward her on chubby legs.

  She bent down to kiss him on his cheek, hoping he wouldn’t clutch at the waterfall of lace on the bodice of her dress, or try to grab hold of her pearls as he had done on a previous occasion.

  Nanny, ever vigilant, relieved her of her anxieties by hurrying over and scooping him up in capably beefy arms.

  “There, there, Master Oliver!” she said chidingly. “We don’t go rushing at Mama in such an ungentlemanly way! We say, ‘Hello, Mama. How are you?’ ”

  “Hello, Mama,” Oliver said obediently, the excited light in his eyes no longer there. “How are you?”

  “I’m very well, thank you, Oliver.” Pamela, oblivious to how much her son wished to be in her arms, not his nanny’s, gave him another kiss on his cheek, this time a good-bye one, her thoughts already elsewhere.

  Despite the best efforts of German submarines, domestic mail still arrived regularly from America, and Edith was a diligent correspondent. More often than not the content of her letters was boring, but occasionally she had news of Wallis, and it was for this reason that Pamela kept the correspondence going.

  Telling her maid that she wouldn’t need her for at least another fifteen minutes, she seated herself at her dressing table and, with a pearl-handled paper knife, opened the envelope.

  Dear Pamela,

  I do hope that you and John Jasper and your darling little boy are all well. There are hardly any of the old crowd now left in Baltimore. It seems like everyone has married and moved away. Violet Dix has just had another baby. I can’t get used to calling her by her married name. She’s put on an awful lot of weight. I don’t think you would recognize her. The papers are full of how we will soon be declaring war on Germany, but there is still a lot of opposition to doing so.

  Pamela glanced at the date the letter had been written. It was the sixteenth of February, a good six weeks ago.

  My mother received a courteous letter from Wallis’s Aunt Bessie, asking for Baltimore news. You know that both she and Wallis’s mother are no longer living in Baltimore, don’t you? Mrs. Merryman is acting as paid companion to a rich widow and Mrs. Rasin is also living in Washington. There are rumors (which I don’t believe) that she is working as a hostess in a club called the Chevy Chase.

  Pamela, who found it quite easy to believe the rumors, grinned. Wally’s mother had to be at least in her mid-forties, and she found the idea of her giving Solomon Warfield a heart attack by working as a hostess highly entertaining. Where joie de vivre was concerned, it seemed as if Alice was never going to run out of it.

  Edith’s letter droned on about parochial Baltimore matters and, not seeing Wallis’s name mentioned again, Pamela skipped most of it.

  Pushing the letter to one side, she took a small key out of her purse and opened the central drawer of her dressing table. It was where she kept her jewelry. Some of the jewelry had been her mother’s. Some had been given her by her father or by her stepfather. Other pieces had been presents from John Jasper. He always gave her a small item of jewelry on her birthday and, when Oliver had been born, had given her a wonderful strand of perfectly matched pearls.

  She withdrew a small box stamped with the name of London’s most exclusive jeweler and clicked it open. Inside, on a bed of velvet, lay an emerald brooch. A brooch, as an item of jewelry, was relatively modest, but there was nothing modest about the pear-cut emerald in its white-gold setting. It winked and glittered up at her with a thousand fires in its heart.

  A gift from Edward, it had been delivered by messenger within hours of his return to France.

  As she hadn’t been able to show such a gift to John Jasper, it had meant that whenever they were out together she couldn’t wear it. Remembering that John Jasper would soon be in France, or Egypt, or wherever else it was that Americans would be sent to fight, she closed the lid and put the little box to the very rear of the drawer.

  If this was Edward’s gift to her at the tentative beginnings of their affair, what kind of gifts was she likely to receive once, when he was next home on leave, it got torridly under way?

  She looked down at the letter Edith had sent her. She certainly couldn’t, when she responded to it, tell Edith that she was about to become the great love of Prince Edward’s life, or that she had already received a magnificent emerald brooch from him.

  She could have told Wally, though.

  She had always been able to tell Wally anything.

  At the thought of how much she missed Wally, her chest felt uncomfortably tight. It was nearly two and a half years since she and John Jasper had married, and she knew that by now she should be well over the friendship that her marriage had destroyed. She wasn’t over it, though, and didn’t think she ever would be. She was always going to miss Wally. There was, quite simply, no one else quite like her.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Though Pamela received several short letters from Prince Edward, there was never any mention in them of when he would next be home on leave.

  I simply don’t know when it will be,

  he wrote in one letter,

  but not, I think, for ages and ages. The king thinks it’s bad for public morale for me to be seen in England when the situation out here is so poor, and though I hate doing so—because of how very much I want to see you again—I have to agree with him. So there it is. It’s rotten luck and I hate thinking about it, but it simply can’t be helped.

  In another letter, he wrote:

  Millions and millions of thanks, Pamela, for all your great kindness to me when I was last home. I can’t possibly write all I want to say to you or thank you properly, but I know you will understand. Being discreet is terribly hard and I wouldn’t be able to write to you at all if it weren’t for your assurances that no one ever sees your private mail but you.

  Every letter he wrote fell far short of being a love letter, but they also left her in no doubt that she was constantly on his mind and that when he did next get leave, she would be the first person he would rush to see.

  For Pamela, the most frustrating aspect was that she couldn’t brag to anyone about the way Prince Edward had fallen for her, for fear that if he should hear she had been doing so, he might beg off. The only person not in Edward’s circle that she felt she could safely brag to was Rose Houghton.

  In May, Rose made a brief trip to England in order to escort a fresh intake of Guy’s Hospital nurses across to France. It had become a habit that whenever she did so, the two of them would meet up for midmorning tea and toast in the tea shop adjacent to the hospital.

  “So we see quite a lot of Prince Edward whenever he has leave and particularly when he visits Sandringham,” Pamela said to her, trying to sound as casual about it as she could. “My stepfather’s country home is only a few miles away, and he served with King George when the king was Prince of Wales and in the Navy.”

  “Yes.” With her elbow on the gaily checked tablecloth, Rose rested her chin on the back of her hand, her eyes holding Pamela’s with an expression she couldn’t quite read. “You’ve told me about your stepfather’s friendship with King George before.”

  Slightly cross that Rose wasn’t more impressed at how close she and John Jasper now were to the royal circle, Pamela said spiritedly, “Just because you aren’t interested in royal doings doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t be.”

  Rose pursed her lips and then said, “Other people wouldn’t be if they joined the VADs or the Red Cross, saw for themselves the unspeakable hell taking place across the channel, and did what the girls I’m taking across to France later today are going to do. Or worked eighteen hours out of twenty-four in an attempt to alleviate the suffering of the wounded and the dying.”

  Pamela refused to feel shamefaced. “We can’t all be heroines,” she said, infusing her voice with what she hoped sounded like deep regret. “Some of us have children.”

  It was a remark Rose let pass, but Pamela knew what she was thinking. High-society mothers never took on the task of
the day-to-day care of their children. If she had wanted to train as a nurse, she could have, just as others in the same position as herself had done.

  Their midmorning tea and toast wasn’t turning out to be a great deal of fun and, not for the first time, Pamela wondered why Rose’s friendship mattered to her so much. They didn’t have a thing in common. Rose was an idealist. Before the war that idealism had been devoted to the Votes for Women cause. On the outbreak of war she had immediately trained as a nurse. She rarely indulged in high-society gossip and, though ever since their first meeting they had kept intermittently in touch, Pamela still knew very little about her, other than that her father, Viscount Houghton, had died when she was a child, her mother, now remarried to a French nobleman, lived in Paris, and Rose and her three sisters had been brought up in Hampshire by their grandfather, Lord May.

  What had intrigued her at the beginning of their friendship was the knowledge that Rose’s youngest sister had once sculpted a bust of Prince Edward, which had indicated to her that the Houghtons had close royal connections.

  Rose had quickly disabused her of the idea. “Lily paints portraits as well,” she had said, “but she doesn’t need her subject to sit for her. Not all artists do, you know.”

  Pamela hadn’t known, and the knowledge immediately made the Houghtons less interesting. She hadn’t crossed Rose off her list of acquaintances, though. What mystified her was why, when their interests and values were so vastly different, Rose hadn’t crossed her off her list of friends.

  “I have to be getting back to the hospital.” Rose looked down at the watch pinned upside down for easy readability on her nurse’s uniform. “And it’s my turn to pay the bill.”

  She caught the waitress’s eye and, as the middle-aged waitress wrote out the bill, picked up the gaily wrapped parcel she had entered the tea shop with. From its shape it looked to be a book and was obviously a present.