by Rebecca Dean
“It’s for my grandfather,” she said as Pamela quirked an inquisitive eyebrow in its direction. “It’s his seventy-fifth birthday in a few days’ time. I had hoped to get down to Snowberry to give it to him myself, but my turnaround time is so short I’m going to have to post it.”
“If you are due to leave for France this afternoon, you don’t have time to be going to the post office. Let me do it for you.”
“Will you?” Rose looked relieved and began taking more money from her purse.
Anticipating why, Pamela said exasperatedly, “For goodness’ sake, I can pay the postage without you having to give it to me, Rose.”
Taking the book from Rose’s hand, she rose to her feet. “Keep yourself safe,” she said as they left the tea shop. For once the sincerity in her voice was deep and real. “Don’t do a Nurse Edith Cavell and get yourself shot by the Germans.”
“Nurse Edith Cavell was a heroine,” Rose said crisply as they reached the street and paused for a moment before parting. “I’m not.”
Pamela, who totally disagreed with her, was far too elated at what she now intended to do to say so.
Having given Rose a good-bye kiss on the cheek, she watched her hurry off to the hospital, the mid-calf-length navy cloak of her uniform lifting gently around her in the breeze.
Then, instead of making her way to the nearest post office, she stepped into the street and hailed a cab.
Forty-five minutes later she was seated in a train steaming southeast through London’s grimy suburbs. Rose’s neat handwriting on the wrapped book gave Snowberry’s full address, and though she knew she would have to hire a cab once she left the train at Winchester, Snowberry’s nearest town, she didn’t anticipate it would be too difficult to find the village in which Lord May’s family home was sited.
As smoke-blackened terrace houses gave way to more superior housing, it suddenly occurred to her that she’d never told Rose the news she’d been bursting to tell her: the news that Edward, Prince of Wales, was infatuated with her.
She shrugged. It was too late to tell her now—which was maybe all for the best. Rose certainly wouldn’t have gossiped to anyone about it, but she might very well have been disapproving. Usually Pamela couldn’t care less if people disapproved of her, but she didn’t want Rose doing so. For reasons she couldn’t define, she wanted Rose to think well of her.
She also wanted Rose to be less of a mystery to her, which was why she was en route to Snowberry. That and the fact that with no Prince Edward on hand to pursue an affair with and John Jasper at officer’s training camp, life had become extremely dull. Visiting Snowberry would, at the very least, give her day an element of interest.
“Snowberry Manor, Little Hemingfold,” she said to the driver of the first cab she came to after walking out of Winchester’s train station.
She had thought he might not know where Snowberry was, but he simply asked her to step inside the cab and within a very short time they were passing through unbelievably beautiful countryside.
Pamela had never been a country girl. The bulk of her childhood had been spent in Baltimore, and when she had returned to England for her debutante coming-out she had lived with her mother and Tarquin at Tarquin’s town house in London.
The only countryside she was familiar with was that around Tarquin’s country home in Norfolk—a landscape she found unbelievably flat—and the hunting country of Leicestershire.
Everyone who was anyone hunted, and her stepfather was no exception. Because of her years spent in Baltimore, her riding skills were too mediocre for riding at full tilt across open country, leaping ditches, hedges, and fences, but the social side of hunting was vibrant, and in the years before she had married John Jasper she had rarely missed a season.
This countryside was far more pleasantly rolling and lush than that of Leicestershire. The well-tended fields were interspersed with woodland, and everywhere there were clouds of foaming white May blossoms.
They passed through several small villages and then, after trundling through a particularly pretty village and climbing the hill leading out of it, the cabdriver turned right, swinging through a huge gateway.
The long driveway beyond it was lined by giant elms and, at the end of it, its mellow walls covered in ivy and honeysuckle, was an exquisitely beautiful Elizabethan manor house. Diamond-leaded windows winked in the early-summer sunshine, chimneys soared from huge buttressed chimney stacks, and gables rose at odd, intriguing angles.
“Will you be wanting me to wait for you, miss?” the cabdriver asked as he came to a halt in front of an iron-studded oak door that Pamela was sure had been in place long before the Civil War of the 1600s.
“I don’t think so.” She opened her purse to pay him. “But wait until someone opens the door to me before leaving.”
Moments later the door was opened by a butler who looked to be nearly as old as the house.
The cabdriver trundled away down the magnificent drive and Pamela said brightly, “Mrs. John Jasper Bachman for Lord May.”
She was met with a look of bewilderment and added, “I am a close friend of his granddaughter, Miss Rose Houghton, and Miss Houghton has asked me to pay her grandfather a visit.”
“If you would wait here, Mrs. Bachman, I will inform his lordship of your arrival.”
Creakily he disappeared out of the hall and down a corridor.
A few moments later, Pamela heard another elderly voice say spryly, “A friend of Rose’s, William?” and then, seconds later, Lord May was walking up to her as arthritically as his butler, saying genially, “Welcome to Snowberry, Mrs. Bachman. William tells me Rose is a friend of yours?”
“Yes. At the moment she is in London on one of her twenty-four-hour turnarounds in order to escort another batch of nurses across to France. She had hoped to be able to visit you, especially as it is your birthday soon. As doing so was an impossibility and she was anxious that you received the present she had got for you for your birthday, I said I would bring it down on her behalf.”
She held out the carefully wrapped parcel.
“But how wonderful!” Lord May’s face was bewhiskered with a mustache as white as William’s hair. “D’you hear that, William? This young lady has traveled all the way from London to give me a present from Rose.”
As he was talking he was escorting her out of the large stone-flagged entrance hall and into a massive drawing room stuffed with comfortable-looking sofas and chairs. On one occasional table was a half-completed jigsaw puzzle; on another chess men were set out in midplay. At the far end of the room stood a baby grand piano, its gleaming black surface crowded with photographs in silver frames.
“Sit down, my dear, and tell me all the up-to-date news about Rose. Would you like tea, or would you prefer a glass of sherry?”
Pamela would have far preferred a pink gin but kept the thought to herself. “A glass of sherry would be lovely,” she lied, her attention caught by a bronze bust standing on a pedestal in a corner of the room.
Ignoring the invitation to sit, she walked across to it, staring at it in rapt fascination. The likeness to Edward was spellbinding; the sculptor—or sculptress, for she knew it must be the bust Rose’s sister had done of Edward—had even caught the look of melancholy that often filled Prince Edward’s eyes when he thought himself unobserved.
“What a superb bronze of the Prince of Wales,” she said, accepting a glass of dry sherry from William.
With a glass of sherry also in hand, Lord May crossed the room to stand beside her. “Yes. Quite a magnificent likeness, don’t you think? My youngest granddaughter sculpted it five or six years ago.”
The pride in his voice was both well deserved and touching.
Pamela put a hand out and lightly touched the bronze, shiny straight hair—hair that, in life, she had now felt beneath the palm of her hand. Wondering what Lord May would say if he knew how intimately close she was to Prince Edward, she said, “Rose told me her sister had sculpted a bronze bust of t
he prince. I never thought it would be so breathtakingly like him, though. Not when he hadn’t sat for her.”
Lord May chuckled. “He had no need to sit for her. Not when she knew him so well.”
Rose hadn’t actually said her sister had never met Prince Edward, but that was certainly the impression she had given.
Trying to keep what was now burning curiosity out of her voice, she said casually, “Did she? I hadn’t realized.”
Lord May turned away from the sculpture and, a little unwillingly, Pamela also turned her back on it.
“There was a time, Mrs. Bachman,” he said to her confidingly, “when David was always down here. That was when he was at naval college. You can’t get from Windsor to Dartmouth without passing within a mile or so of Snowberry.”
He was politely waiting for her to sit down before sitting down himself. With legs weak from shock, Pamela sat.
David?
David?
It was common knowledge in society that within his family circle Prince Edward was known by the last of his many Christian names, but no one else that she knew had been given the liberty of using it. He certainly hadn’t yet invited her to use it.
She wondered if, in private, Lady Coke was allowed to call him David.
And why had the Houghtons been allowed to call him David? It didn’t make sense. Not when Rose wasn’t part of Edward’s inner circle of friends and had given no indication of ever having been so.
Lord May seated himself comfortably in a nearby chair and began opening his birthday present.
“A biography of Admiral Nelson!” he said, withdrawing the book from its wrapping paper. “How typical of Rose to know exactly what I would most want. And now let’s chat about Rose. How did the two of you come to be friends? Are you friends with Iris and Marigold as well?”
“I met Rose at a supper party. I’ve never met Iris and Marigold—or Lily.”
Lord May chuckled. “Not many people have met Lily. She lives on a Hebridean island with her husband and two girls and rarely leaves it. Iris lives very close. Her husband’s estate, Sissbury, abuts Snowberry for a good half mile. She’s a homebody, though, and rarely visits London. Marigold, of course, you will know of, even if you haven’t met her.”
“Will I?” Pamela was startled and desperately in need of another drink.
Lord May nodded his head in the direction of the mass of silver-framed photographs standing on the piano. “There are several photographs of Marigold you may like to look at. I particularly like the one taken when she played the part of Mary, Queen of Scots in Mr. Barker’s film of that beautiful, but tragic queen. There’s also another of her taken when she played the part of one of Henry the Eighth’s wives in Mr. Barker’s film about Henry. I can never remember whether the part she played was that of Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard.”
Will Barker was a producer and director as famous in England as D. W. Griffith was in America, and Pamela, more weak in the knees than ever, rose to her feet and crossed to the piano.
She and John Jasper had seen all of Will Barker’s epic feature films, and Lord May was quite right in that, though she had never met Marigold, she certainly knew of her, though by the name Marietta des Vaux, not Marigold Houghton.
Reading her thoughts, Lord May said obligingly, “When Marigold embarked on her career as an actress, her husband insisted she use a professional name and not her married name. Marigold didn’t mind. Rose had already set a precedent for that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?” Pamela felt dizzy. “Is Rose not Rose’s real name?”
Lord May stood from his chair, saying as he crossed the room to join her at the piano, “Yes, it is. But as you are a close friend of hers, you will know how militant a suffragette she was until the war halted such activity. The militant young women of the movement didn’t go in much for marriage and, when they did, they made a stand by not relinquishing their maiden names.” He lifted up a photograph Pamela hadn’t yet looked at. “That is what Rose did when she married Hal.”
The photograph was a wedding photograph, and the radiant bride was Rose.
The surprise was so great, Pamela gasped.
Realizing how much he had taken her aback, Lord May said sympathetically, “You look as if you could do with another drink. I don’t think you enjoyed that sherry very much. How about a pink gin? It’s Marigold’s favorite tipple.”
With vast relief she answered that it was her favorite tipple, too. Then, wondering how many other surprises he had up his sleeve, she said before he left her side, “Who is Rose’s husband, Lord May? Is he, as Marigold’s husband is, a member of the peerage?”
“Hal?” Another deep chuckle rumbled up from his throat. “No, and even if he were given the chance of a peerage I doubt he would take it. He’s as radical in his views as Rose, but then, if you’ve read his editorials, you will know that.”
“Editorials?” Pamela was beginning to wish she hadn’t delayed him in ringing for William. She’d never felt more in need of a stiff drink in her life.
“Hal,” Lord May said with relish, “is the editor of the Daily Dispatch.”
Pamela opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. How could she have known Rose for so long and not known she was married—and to whom? How, with a sister nearly as famous in eight-reeler feature films as Mary Pickford, could Rose not have told her who her sister was? Most important of all, why had Rose never mentioned what close terms Prince Edward had once been on, not only with her, but also with her entire family?
David.
You had to be very close to the Prince of Wales to be invited to call him by the name his family used. The general mystery she had always felt surrounded Rose had now deepened into one particular mystery. What kind of friendship had her family and Prince Edward enjoyed? And why did Rose no longer even acknowledge that it had once existed?
The only person who could answer the last question was Rose herself—and she had no way of knowing when she would next be seeing Rose. It could be within weeks or not for months.
As Lord May personally chauffeured her back to Winchester and the train station, she wondered what Wallis would make of the conundrum. Wallis had always loved talking about Prince Edward and, if she had known of it, would be jealous to death of the relationship Pamela now had with him.
Wallis.
There had to come a time when Wallis would no longer intrude on her thoughts, but she couldn’t imagine when that time would be.
“It has been a splendid afternoon,” Lord May said, bringing his stately Talbot motorcar to a halt outside the station. “I quite understand why you and Rose are friends.”
“Do you?” It was more than Pamela had ever understood.
He gave her a beaming smile and said, solving at least one mystery, “You remind her of the naughtiest of her sisters. You remind her of Marigold.”
Chapter Nineteen
Pamela found the next few months deeply boring. John Jasper was now in an officer’s training camp somewhere in the southwest of England, gung ho at the prospect of being speedily sent to France in order to join up with an American battalion under the overall command of Major General “Black Jack” Pershing.
Black Jack is a veteran of the Mexican and Philippine wars,
he had written to her.
If anyone can give the British and French the support they need in order to finally bring this world war to a close, it’s him.
Pamela had liked the nickname “Black Jack.” It summed up a handsome, piratical figure. When she had next written to John Jasper, she had asked how old General Pershing was. John Jasper had replied that Black Jack was in his fifties, and she had immediately lost interest.
By the end of June the first wave of American troops had reached France. The Daily Dispatch—which Pamela read with added interest now that she knew its editor was married to Rose—had as its headline:
HEROES’ WELCOME FOR US TROOPS IN FRANCE
After an all-too-brief leave home
, John Jasper was sent to Flanders in order to join one of the American battalions. His first letter to her, hastily scrawled in pencil, had been typically positive.
Black Jack is a superb commander, Pammie. Though the British and French don’t particularly want an American army—they simply want men—he’s digging his heels in and not allowing us to be dispersed under British and French commands. We are the U.S. Army in Europe—and he’s making sure everyone knows it.
It was interesting information but did nothing to relieve her boredom. Edward’s brief letters to her weren’t much better, though as he had now taken to addressing her as “My Angel,” they did send a shiver of anticipation down her spine.
Even though his letters weren’t subject to the same kind of censorship as other mail from the front, he still carefully never mentioned names or places or dates. He did, though, ask her for a photograph. It will cheer me up enormously, he wrote in handwriting that sloped very heavily to the right, and will do me worlds of good.
With John Jasper no longer at home to see her doing so, she began wearing the emerald brooch when out to dinner with friends. “It’s a gift from an admirer,” she said whenever it was commented on, half hoping that two and two would be put together and half fearing it would be, in case too much early speculation should work against her and not for her.
In July she received another letter from Edith, this time with news of Wallis in it.
Wallis’s last letter to me was from Squantum, near Boston, not Pensacola,
Edith had written in painfully neat handwriting.
Her husband has been put in command of the naval air base there. Wallis says he is desperately disappointed at not being posted overseas on active service. All three of his brothers are serving in Europe. Dumaresque, who was best man at their wedding, has joined the Lafayette Escadrille (a squadron of the French air service) and his two younger brothers, Egbert and Frederick, are members of the U.S. expeditionary forces in France. At Pensacola they lived on the base, but Wallis says Squantum is too new a base for there to be such facilities, and their home is a hotel apartment in the Back Bay section of Boston. She didn’t say she was lonely, but I imagine she is, for I can’t think of any old Oldfields girls who were Bostonians. Wallis says she spends most of her time visiting places of historical interest in order to fill up her day.