The Shadow Queen

by Rebecca Dean

  Pamela had smiled wryly, amused by the fact that Wally was quite obviously just as bored as she now was.

  In October she received a letter from Prince Edward that filled her with dismay.

  Dearest Angel,

  he wrote in his distinctive handwriting,

  I hardly know how to break this news to you, but the next letters you receive from me will be from even further away than France.

  She went immediately to the one person who did know of Edward’s infatuation for her and of the steady stream of letters he sent to her.

  “What does he mean?” she demanded of her stepfather. “Where is he being posted? Egypt? Palestine? Why can’t even the Prince of Wales mention place names in his correspondence?”

  Tarquin clipped the end of a cigar and lit it.

  “Because although his mail isn’t subject to censorship, there’s a principle at stake and he’s adhering to it, and because at the moment the situation with regard to the Italians is critical.”

  “Is that where he’s going? Italy?”

  They were in the drawing room of Tarquin’s town house in Eaton Square. Her mother wasn’t in residence and wouldn’t be until Tarquin left London for their home in Norfolk. That they no longer spent time in each other’s company was something Pamela uncaringly accepted.

  Tarquin blew a plume of blue smoke upward.

  “If you read your newspapers, Pamela, you will know that the Italian line is close to collapsing and Russian resistance has already collapsed. It means German troops are bolstering up the Austrians, and if British and French reinforcements aren’t sent immediately to her aid, Italy runs the risk of being knocked out of the war. That being the case, the Fourteenth Army Corps is to be sent south immediately, and it was suggested, at the highest level, that if Prince Edward accompanied the corps it would boost morale in Italy enormously.”

  Pamela, uncaring of the Italians, flung herself petulantly down on the nearest chair. “Then there’s no telling when his next leave may be! Oh, this bloody, bloody war! How much longer is it going to go on for?”

  “It’s going to go on until we win it—and with American help, that could now be quite soon. A year. Maybe less.”

  At Christmas John Jasper was home on leave, not looking remotely like the John Jasper who had kissed her good-bye six months earlier. That he had seen horrors beyond telling was imprinted in the deep lines that now furrowed his face and the flat, shuttered expression in his eyes.

  For once Pamela had shown sense. She had asked no questions, and when he had used frenzied, violent lovemaking in an effort to blot out the hell he had just left and would soon be returning to, she had responded with a depth of passion even she hadn’t known herself capable of.

  “Don’t get yourself killed, John Jasper,” she had said fiercely when the time came for them to say good-bye. “I couldn’t bear it. Truly I couldn’t.”

  They had clung together, his head bent low over hers, his mouth touching her hair, her cheek pressed hard against the roughness of his army jacket. For once there were no thoughts of Prince Edward in her mind and, in his, no regrets for having been forced into a marriage he had not wanted.

  The fears she felt for John Jasper, fighting in the front line where the average rate of survival for an officer was less than three months, were not fears she felt for Prince Edward. Despite his keenness to be in the thick of the fighting, because he was heir to the throne, the powers that be ensured that his exposure was limited. It was something he had complained bitterly about in one of his letters to her.

  All this heir to the throne bosh drives me wild,

  he had written.

  I’ve got three brothers and if I should be killed, Bertie would simply become the next heir. If Bertie were to be killed, it would be Henry and, if Henry were killed, it would be George.

  Pamela hadn’t spent time with either Henry or George, but she had been in Prince Albert’s company, and a less likely Prince of Wales and heir to the throne than Bertie she couldn’t imagine. Unlike Edward, but like his father, he possessed no charisma. This lack was made worse by a stammer so bad it made any kind of public speaking an impossibility.

  The letters she now began receiving from Edward from Italy were far less guarded about where he was and what he was doing than his letters from France had been. In one of the first ones she received, he wrote of the situation in France, which, despite the arrival of American troops, was as nightmarish as ever.

  … It’s not even a stalemate now that small squads of Hun stormtroopers are infiltrating the British front line wherever it has been smashed, creating breaches which the German Eighteenth Army then pour through. As for the situation here in Italy … If it weren’t so tragic, it would be a joke. The Italians have suffered a massive defeat, and British and French help is proving to be too little, too late. The only thing keeping me cheerful are your letters—and your photograph, which I carry with me everywhere. For now, my angel, I must close if I want to catch the King’s Messenger bag. Good night, Pamela darling. Tons and tons of all my very best love, E.

  Sometimes, when she put his letters away in a secret compartment in a jewelry box she had bought precisely for that purpose, she wondered if he also wrote to Marian Coke. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. If he did, though, she was quite sure he wouldn’t be using endearments such as “My Angel!” and “My Darling Angel!” to her.

  Edith’s letters arrived as intermittently as ever. In one she wrote that her brother was now one of the cadets training under Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer.

  Though not at Squantum, but on a new naval air station on North Island, near San Diego. I haven’t heard from Wallis in quite a while, but Humphrey (my brother) says she has had a nasty fall and is sporting a black eye!

  Remembering the monocle that Wallis had worn in order to attract attention when they were at Oldfields, Pamela wondered if Wallis was sporting an eye patch to cover her injured eye and if, on an evening, she wore an eye patch covered in sequins.

  At the beginning of 1918 she received two pieces of stupendously good news. John Jasper had been injured, though not seriously.

  But seriously enough for me to be in an army hospital. Be warned that I’m going to have a permanent limp, but at least I still have my leg, which is more than most of the other poor buggers here have.

  Unsaid was that he was also now far from the front line and that she no longer ran the daily risk of receiving a black-edged telegram.

  The other piece of good news was from Prince Edward.

  Dearest Angel!

  I’ve been given six weeks’ home leave in order to make a tour of the defence plants. I’m certainly going to make sure that there will also be time for a little rest and recreation in London. I haven’t danced now for over half a year, so get your dancing shoes out and ready! Tons and tons of love, E.

  Excitement spiraled so high, Pamela felt drunk on it. By the time his leave was over everyone in his circle would know she had usurped Lady Coke as being the most important woman in his life—and she was determined to remain so not for a few mere months, but for years.

  Mistresses were not something Edward’s father had ever indulged in. A more straitlaced and, in Pamela’s eyes, more boring man than King George would be impossible to find. Edward’s grandfather, King Edward VII, though, had been a very different kettle of fish, a renowned womanizer. His list of mistresses had been long and varied. Many of his affairs had been fleeting, but a handful of mistresses, especially as he had grown older, had stayed the course, and his relationship with his last mistress, Mrs. Kepple, had been regarded by high society as being almost a marriage. Even his long-suffering queen had regarded it as such, sending for Mrs. Kepple when her husband lay dying so that he could have the comfort of having the woman he so dearly loved at his bedside.

  That was the kind of mistress Pamela intended to become, but unlike Alice Kepple she wasn’t going to wait for Edward’s middle-aged years before enjoying such a prominent position. She
was going to become a royal mistress now and remain so right until, and after, Edward became king.

  She clutched the letter elatedly in her hand. John Jasper wouldn’t like the situation, but he would simply have to come to terms with it, as George Kepple had. It was traditional for an Englishman to regard it as an honor if his wife became the mistress of the reigning monarch or his heir. The benefits to him careerwise, financially, and socially were always enormous, and if she couldn’t convince John Jasper of those benefits, she would leave it up to Tarquin to convince him.

  She needed new gowns. War shortages had affected high fashion, and material was at a premium. The last time she had visited the Ritz there hadn’t been an enviable frock to be seen. Even worse, a hideous number of the frocks had been black, signifying mourning for a husband, brother, or father.

  She shuddered, pushing the memory away, concentrating instead on how she could be clad in something suitably floaty and glittery and eye-catching when she again stepped into Prince Edward’s arms.

  His next letter to her was brief and to the point.

  When we first meet again, can we do so out of the public eye?

  With her heart hammering, Pamela had replied that there was nothing she would like better and, realizing he was leaving it up to her to arrange a discreet venue, suggested that, in her stepfather’s absence, they dine à deux at his town house in Eaton Square.

  “You are a very naughty girl, Pamela,” Tarquin said to her when she told him of the arrangement she had made. “And I’m damned if I’m leaving town just so you and Prince Edward can enjoy an illicit romantic tryst. However, as I certainly don’t want you doing so in your own home when your husband is lying wounded in a military hospital, I shall absent myself accordingly, but tell His Royal Highness that I expect him to begin making his own arrangements.”

  Pamela flung her arms around his neck and gave him an unrestrained kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, dearest Tarquin! You really are the most wonderful stepfather!”

  “I’m the most appalling stepfather. The only person I know who has less morals than myself is you.”

  She giggled, well aware he was speaking the truth. “That’s why we’ve always got on so well,” she said, removing her arms from around his neck. “My naughtiness amuses you.”

  She picked up the fox fur she had carelessly dropped on a sofa when entering the room. “The one thing I don’t understand is why someone as puritanical as King George regards you as a friend.”

  “He wasn’t always so puritanical, and I remind him of his Navy days when he was able to kick up his heels. He’s become a bore, I agree, but he is a king and the glamour of kingship is very alluring, Pamela. I like being in its presence. Which is why I’m quite happy to help you further your romance with Prince Edward. For a man of twenty-three I suspect he’s relatively inexperienced. Handle him with care and don’t frighten him off. This is a chance that won’t come again.”

  Edith’s next letter came so hard on the heels of her last one that Pamela’s first thought was that someone must have died. Without taking it to her bedroom to read, she opened it immediately, seeing with alarm that Edith’s pin-neat handwriting had degenerated into a hasty scrawl.

  Dearest Pamela,

  You will never ever guess the news I have just received from Humphrey! He says the entire air station at North Island is agog with it! Apparently the reason Wallis’s husband wasn’t sent on active service overseas is that his superior officers have known for a long time that he has a DRINK PROBLEM!

  Humphrey says Lieutenant Spencer’s alcoholism has never been a secret on the base, but that as he is such a popular character and, despite his drinking, such a good administrator, it has been something overlooked until now, when the truth about a far worse vice has been revealed.

  Dear Pamela, my hand is shaking as I write this. Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer is a WIFE-BEATER!!! Wallis and Win were due to attend a dinner at Commander L. E. Summers’ home and when they didn’t arrive for it, the commander sent an officer to the Spencers’ home. Mrs. Summers, who had a headache, accompanied him in order to get a breath of fresh evening air. When they arrived they could hear Wallis sobbing and had to force a way in. She was alone in the house and TIED TO THE BED!!!

  Humphrey says that if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Summers seeing Wallis’s condition—her monster of a husband had beaten her black and blue before leaving her in such a helpless state—the incident would have been hushed up, but Mrs. Summers was so incandescent with rage that now everyone knows about it. Mrs. Summers says there was old bruising as well as new and that this HIDEOUS INCIDENT was not an ISOLATED ONE!

  No one now believes Wallis was telling the truth about her black eye. It is quite obvious she received it at the hands of her husband. However, Humphrey says Wallis is being tight-lipped and he thinks she is probably FURIOUS that everyone now knows about her husband’s treatment of her. Wallis always did have a lot of pride, and it isn’t as if she can leave her husband, for where would she go? I feel desperately sorry for her, but can’t write and tell her so because I know she would HATE it that I know how VILE her husband is to her. You were always her very closest friend and I do so wish you still were, for she obviously has absolutely no one to confide in and no one from whom she is willing to accept sympathy.

  Yours in haste, Edith

  Pamela sat down on the nearest chair, anger at Wallis’s plight pulsing through every vein in her body. She knew, even better than Edith, that Wallis had no family who either could, or would, help her. Certainly Wallis’s Uncle Sol wouldn’t do so. He would simply view a broken marriage as being a slur on his fine family name. As for Wallis’s mother and her aunt, if her mother was working as a paid hostess in a Washington club, then she certainly wasn’t in a position to help her, and, as Bessie Merryman had given up her Baltimore home in order to become a rich widow’s companion, she couldn’t provide an escape for her either.

  If she had still been in America and if they had still been best friends, then she most certainly would have been able to help. She would have taken the train to San Diego and, if Wallis hadn’t been willing to pack her own bags, would have packed them for her. Then she would have taken Wallis back to Baltimore—or Washington or New York—and funded her and stood by her while she got a divorce and rebuilt her life.

  But she wasn’t still in America, and they weren’t still best friends.

  The siren signaling a Zeppelin raid wailed ominously into life, and as members of her household staff scurried toward the kitchen in order to take shelter under its massive scoured work-table, she made her way into the dining room to take a similar precaution, though under polished mahogany and in dignified isolation.

  “… And so I’m going to squire you to Maud Kerr-Smiley’s party tomorrow night, and then afterward, darling Pamela, we will finally have some time on our own together.”

  For the first time since their last meeting, Edward’s contact with her wasn’t by letter, but by telephone. Even more thrillingly, he was less than a quarter of a mile away, at Buckingham Palace.

  Maud Kerr-Smiley was the wife of an MP, Peter Kerr-Smiley, and someone she knew socially, though not very well. That Edward had chosen to spend the early part of their reunion evening at a party given by Maud surprised but didn’t faze her. It didn’t really matter where the early part of the evening was spent. It was their dinner à deux later—and what would happen after it—that was important.

  She spent the entire day preparing for the evening with the single-mindedness of a soldier preparing for battle. She was lavish with the perfumed oil she poured into her bathwater. When she patted herself dry, she smoothed a mixture of glycerin oil and rose water over every inch of her body. The silk, lace-trimmed lingerie she chose to wear was the most exquisite she possessed, and the gown her maid helped her step into was a Poiret-inspired creation of flame-colored chiffon embroidered with crystals.

  Her hair had always been her crowning glory and was the reason that, though
it was now fashionable to do so, she hadn’t yet had it bobbed. Carefully her maid combed the torrent of golden waves softly back over her ears and into a heavy knot at the nape of her neck. Pamela clipped pearl drop earrings to her ears, surveyed herself in the mirror, and liked what she saw.

  Her cat-green eyes were emphasized by beautifully arched eyebrows. She had lightly smeared Vaseline on her eyelids, and her eyelashes were enhanced by the latest cosmetic: cake mascara. She wore a light dusting of powder on her flawless pale skin, and her lipstick was the exact flame color of her gown.

  As she sprayed herself lightly with a perfume perfect for the mood she hoped to invoke in Edward, she sensed, rather than heard, his chauffeur-driven car arrive.

  Putting down her perfume spray, she pressed a hand hard against her stomach to still the butterflies fluttering there.

  A few moments later the front doorbell rang.

  Her butler, who had been primed to expect a royal guest, answered it and, moments later, was announcing, “His Royal Highness, Prince Edward.”