by Rebecca Dean
Wallis didn’t answer her. With a fresh lot of tears falling down her cheeks, she began mounting the stairs, and the instant she was on a level with Pamela and Pamela saw her face, Pamela’s gaiety vanished.
“Dear Lord, Wally. What’s happened?”
“Felipe has asked Courtney Letts Stilwell to marry him.” Her voice was hoarse from crying, her face sheet white.
Pamela sucked in her breath, told her maid she no longer needed her, and, as the girl swiftly left the bedroom, closed the door on her so that she and Wallis were alone.
“When?” she asked succinctly. “Why? How did you find out?”
“I don’t know when. Why is much easier. Because she comes from a socially prominent military and political family, and marriage into it will help further his career—and plus she’s indecently wealthy.”
She sat down on the toile-covered ottoman at the foot of Pamela’s bed, a sodden handkerchief clutched in her hands. “Corinne says gossip about his proposal is widespread, but I didn’t have an inkling. So how long have I been a laughingstock, Pamela? Do you know?”
Pamela shook her head. “I haven’t heard a whisper, Wally. If I had, I would have told you.”
“I wanted to marry him so much! Far more than I ever wanted to marry John Jasper or Win. Why is it nothing ever goes right for me, Pamela? Why can’t I have someone love me the way John Jasper loves you?”
Pamela sat beside her and, as Wallis wept and wept, hugged her close. At last, when Wallis had wept herself into a state of exhaustion, she said gently and with great reluctance, “I have some news of my own that you’re not going to want to hear, Wally. John Jasper has been recalled to London. We leave Washington at the end of the week.”
The thought of living in Washington without Pamela, when Felipe would be squiring Courtney Letts Stilwell around the city, was a horror too far. “Oh God,” she said in despair. “Oh Christ. Oh hell.”
“What will you do, Wally?” Pamela asked, knowing exactly what Wallis felt unable to face. “Will you leave Washington and go back to Baltimore?”
For a long moment Wallis made no reply, and then she said slowly, resolution replacing despair, “No. I’m never going back to Baltimore.” She wiped the tears from her face. “I’m going somewhere much farther away. I’m going somewhere I’ll never run the risk of seeing Felipe with Courtney Letts Stilwell. I’m going to China.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
There was a longer time gap than she had wanted between her agreeing to take top-secret documents to China and leaving for China.
“You need to be fully briefed, Mrs. Spencer,” Harry W. Smith said to her. “That will entail you staying for several weeks with Captain Luke McNamee, chief of naval intelligence, and his wife, Dorothy. They live in Georgetown. I’m sure you will be very comfortable there.”
Despite knowing that she was under close scrutiny, Wallis enjoyed her stay with the McNamees. Dorothy McNamee was a painter and lively, intelligent company. As Luke McNamee gave her a crash course in Chinese politics, telling her how the People’s Party under Sun Yat-sen was heavily influenced by Russia and deeply divided by violent internal conflicts, and of how the government in Peking that it was trying to overthrow was just as deeply faction-riven, Dorothy told her of the living conditions she would meet with.
“For an unescorted woman, the violence that can erupt on the streets at any time is the worst danger,” she warned. “You will need to carry a small pistol with you for self-protection. Sickness is the next huge danger. Even in British-controlled Hong Kong, raw sewage is a problem and outbreaks of typhoid are frequent. Then there are the extremes of temperature. In China the summer heat is unbearable and in winter the cold is crippling.”
Wallis was uncaring. All that mattered to her was that she wouldn’t be at risk of going to a party and seeing Felipe with Courtney Letts Stilwell.
In mid-July she boarded the troop carrier USS Chaumont at Norfolk, Virginia, and, along with a handful of other Navy wives, set off for the Far East.
It was a long, slow, hot voyage. Her accommodation—a cabin in the bowels of the ship that she shared with two other Navy wives—was cramped and airless. The troops on board grew more unruly with every day that passed, and by the time the ship eased its way into the Panama Canal—after a sweltering forty-eight-hour wait to do so—fistfights were frequent.
Once in the Pacific, things grew worse, and as courts-martial began taking place, Wallis and the handful of other women on board kept to their cabins. Six weeks later, at Manila in the Philippines, they thankfully transferred to a far more comfortable ship, the Empress of Canada.
At last, and for the first time, Wallis began to enjoy the journey that was now nearly over. Five days later, on the fourth of September, one of the women she was sharing a cabin with shook her awake, saying, “You need to be on deck, Wallis. Hong Kong is in sight.”
The next couple of hours, as they steamed closer and closer to their destination, were magical. First they passed scatterings of deserted islands, the offshore breezes heavy with the fragrance of the wildflowers growing on them, and then three-masted junks began appearing, to be joined by sampans as Victoria Peak, Hong Kong Island’s most famous mountain, grew ever clearer, its topmost slopes gray and mauve and silver in the early morning sunshine.
For the women she was traveling with, Hong Kong was as far as they were going. Only Wallis carried a special intelligence-authorized naval passport that would enable her to travel to war-torn Shanghai and Peking.
Win was waiting on the dockside to greet her, as the McNamees had told her he would be. Tanned and wearing his summer-white officer’s uniform, he looked almost handsome once again.
“I’ve been told to take care of you until you have seen certain people here and to look after you until you leave for Shanghai,” he said, shaking hands with her as if she weren’t still his wife, but someone he had never met before. “I must say I’ve never known anyone like you for springing surprises, Wallis.” There was grudging respect in his voice. “This time, though, you may well have bitten off more than you can chew.”
“I appreciate your concern, Win, but my life is my own now to do with as I please.”
“As is mine.” All around them coolies were transferring steamer trunks and suitcases into rickshaws and taxis. Her own suitcase was relatively modest, and without waiting for a coolie to do so, Win picked it up and led the way toward a parked, open-top car.
“There’s something you need to know before we go a step further, Wallis.” Beneath his mustache his mouth was set in the grim, uncompromising line she knew so well. “There’s going to be no reconciliation between us. I’m involved in a relationship with a married woman. I don’t want it making things more complicated than it already is.”
“Don’t worry. As you well know, I want a divorce. If you’ve got someone else in your life now, perhaps you’ll stop being obstructive about giving me one.”
He heaved the suitcase onto the rear seat of the car, opened the passenger-side door for her, and said, his manner changing, “Things could have been very different between us, Wallis. I can’t help wishing that perhaps they had been.”
Though she had as little desire for a reconciliation as he had, there was a lump in her throat as she said sincerely, “So do I, Win.”
She seated herself in the car, thinking back to their wedding day and of how happy they had been, and of how their wedding night had turned that happiness to ashes.
It was her physical disability that had ruined their marriage, just as, eventually, it had ruined her relationship with Felipe. Felipe might never have accused her of not being a proper woman, as Win so often had, but she had been wrong in thinking her disability didn’t matter to him. When it had come to marriage it had mattered a great deal.
It hadn’t been Courtney Letts Stilwell’s family background and wealth that had ensured he had proposed to Courtney and not to her. It had been Courtney’s already proven ability to bear children.
It was a bleak prospect, and tears stung her eyes. She blinked them away, fast.
Self-pity was not in her nature, and she wasn’t going to begin giving in to it. She was in a country exotically strange and fascinating and she had an assignment to carry out, so important it had even earned her Win’s respect.
The street began to widen slightly and she glimpsed a small shop window piled high with jade jewelry. Her mouth watered. Perhaps when her business in Hong Kong was completed and before she left for Shanghai, she would be able to do some shopping. A jade necklace was just the balm her hurting heart needed.
“For a novice, you bought beautiful quality jade,” Mary Sadler said admiringly when Wallis asked for her opinion on the necklace she had bought. “You can tell the quality of jade by its translucency and coldness to the touch—and this is both very translucent and very cold.”
It was November and they were aboard a Canadian ship, the Empress of Russia, their destination far-distant Shanghai.
Reluctantly Wallis laid down the magazine she had been reading. It was one she had found in the ship’s lounge and was several months old. What had attracted her to it was its front-cover wedding photograph of Prince Edward’s younger brother, Bertie, and his bride, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, and she had just been reading of how the bride, on her way into Westminster Abbey, had laid her bouquet on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.
“China is so vast it’s hard to comprehend,” Mary said, handing the necklace back to her, “but at least Hong Kong to Shanghai can be traveled by sea and in relative comfort. Shanghai to Peking has to be traveled by train, and though the Blue Express is relatively luxurious—a little like the Blue Train through France to the Riviera—it has become so dangerous the luxury can’t be enjoyed.”
Wallis dragged her thoughts away from the new Duchess of York’s memorably touching gesture.
“How so?” They were seated in deck chairs, blankets across their knees.
Mary quirked an eyebrow. “Luke McNamee didn’t tell you?”
Wallis slid the necklace back into her handbag. “He told me I could expect to be caught up in violence at any time. He didn’t specifically mention the Blue Express.”
“Naughty of him, but then if he had, you might have had second thoughts about agreeing to go on to Peking.”
“It’s not too late for second thoughts.” Wallis’s voice had wry humor in it. “So what is the problem with the train, Mary? Is the food bad beyond description?”
“In spring, last year, one group of passengers didn’t have the chance to find out. Bandits stopped the train while they were asleep, overpowered the guards, and then forced everyone aboard off it.”
“If they were intent on robbing them, why didn’t they rob them on the train?”
“They weren’t intent on robbing them. They captured them in order to hold them for ransom.”
A chill, not caused by the stiff ocean breeze, ran through Wallis.
“What was the outcome?”
“The women—one of them was Lucy Aldrich, John D. Rockefeller Junior’s sister-in-law—made such slow progress over what was mountainous ground that the bandits released them, leaving them to find their own way back to civilization. In the end, five million Chinese dollars were paid for the release of the men. Since then, although no further Europeans have been kidnapped, bandits boarding the train and demanding what they call ‘tribute’ has become a regular occurrence. If you’ve been given a pistol, and I assume you have—and that you’ve been taught how to use it—keep it where you can easily get to it.”
Mary knew so much about everything and was so calm and unflappable, Wallis wished that her journey to Peking were going to be taken in her company.
“Not a chance, I’m afraid,” Mary said when, two days later, she voiced this hope over dinner in the Empress of Russia’s dining room. “I’m joining Frank in Shanghai and not moving even a yard toward Peking. You won’t want to either when you’ve experienced life behind the safe walls of the International Settlement.”
“How safe are the walls?”
“Very. The walls are massive and manned by American, British, French, Italian, and Japanese infantry. Outside is chaos. Shanghai is a city jam-packed with refugees, brothels, opium dens. There can’t be a more dangerous city on the face of the earth. Inside is another world—one of cosmopolitan sophistication. The Majestic Hotel and the Astor House Hotel—where we will be staying—have every Western comfort imaginable.”
She reached for her wineglass. “The Astor House Hotel’s Winter Garden ballroom is the most beautiful I have ever seen. As for the shopping …” She took a sip of wine and raised her eyes to heaven. “In the Yellow Lantern, the curio shop just off the hotel’s lobby, you can find every kind of Oriental antique imaginable.”
“And silks and embroideries?” Wallis’s interest was intense.
“It’s an Aladdin’s cave of them, plus it’s the place to go if you are looking for more jade—or for pearls.”
Wallis thought she might very well be looking for both jade and pearls. Her Navy allowance was slim, but on the previous two ships she had sailed on, the Chaumont and the Empress of Canada, she had indulged in her love of poker and her winnings had been substantial—as had her winnings on the Empress of Russia. It wasn’t a way of getting by that her Episcopalian grandmother would have approved of, but it was one she had relied on steadily ever since Pensacola.
Once Wallis was installed in the Astor House, her first port of call was the nearby British consulate. It was a measure of how important her mission as a courier was regarded that she was greeted not by a minor official, but by the consul general.
“I understand from Mrs. Sadler that your journey from Hong Kong was without unpleasant incident,” he said affably as she handed over to him top-secret documents that had been by her side since leaving Washington. “However, I must stress to you that Shanghai is a city consumed by hatred for all Westerners—as, indeed, is the whole of China. Resentment for the way the country and its people have been exploited by foreigners over the last two hundred years is a major reason for the bloodily violent political upheavals now taking place. Within the International Settlement, as long as you are everywhere escorted, you are relatively safe. It is not, however, safe for you to continue on to Peking. The risk of capture by bandits is too high and there would be enormous consequences if the documents you would be carrying fell into their hands. For the moment I must ask you to remain in Shanghai. When the railway line to Peking has been secured, you will then be able to carry on with your instructions from Washington.”
Wallis was quite happy to stay in Shanghai; the civil war raging outside the walls of the International Settlement gave the entire city an aura of danger and excitement. The Astor House was less than a block away from the International Settlement’s protective walls, and she could often hear bursts of gunfire and hear shouts and screams as the British-controlled police force clashed with Communist Chinese protesters.
As the weeks passed, letters began to arrive for her from the States. One, in her mother’s handwriting, arrived black-edged, and she opened it with her heart in her mouth, terrified she was about to be plunged into grief for the loss of her dearly loved Aunt Bessie.
To her vast relief her mother was merely marking the anniversary of a death.
Corinne’s husband, Henry Mustin, had died of pneumonia the previous year.
… And I can’t get over what a terrible, terrible tragedy it was,
her mother wrote in her spidery handwriting.
Diving into an ice-cold sea to rescue a cadet who had fallen overboard was such a brave thing to do and though he didn’t die in the water, but died in his bed of pneumo
nia, he wouldn’t have caught pneumonia if it hadn’t been for his heroic action. Corinne is distraught and I don’t blame her. Good husbands don’t grow on trees.
Wallis made a wry moue. She knew that last sentence all too well.
There was a hastily written postscript at the bottom of the page.
PS I’ve got myself a new beau. His name is Charles Gordon Allen and he is a legal clerk in the Veterans’ Administration. He says you can obtain a divorce on the grounds of separation if you can show you’ve been separated for three years and live in Virginia for a year while the divorce is being processed.
She had immediately written a letter of condolence to Corinne and then, wanting to think about both Henry and her mother’s new beau, left the hotel intent on a good long walk to clear her head.
She hadn’t been close enough to Henry to be heartbroken by his death, but she had been fond enough of him to be deeply affected by it. As for Charles Gordon Allen, she knew her mother well enough to know that her mother wouldn’t have written to her about him unless she was thinking of marrying him. His being a legal clerk made him sound dull and stuffy, but perhaps someone a little dull and stuffy was the stabilizing influence her laughter-loving mother needed.
When she reached the Bund, she stood at the point where the Suzhou Creek poured its silt into the Hungpu River’s clouded yellow waters. If a divorce on the grounds of three years’ separation was as easy to come by in Virginia as her mother’s new beau said it was, then it was something she was going to consider very seriously.