The Shadow Queen

by Rebecca Dean

  Everywhere she looked there were memories. The little petit-point-covered stool beside the rocker where, for hours on end, she had sat listening to her grandmother tell stories about Robert de Warfield and Pagan de Warfield and of how she must never forget that Warfields were descended from England’s William the Conqueror.

  There were Warfield cousins in the room she barely recognized. Henry, once so handsome, now not even looking distinguished. He carefully avoided her eyes, not wanting to reveal what his hopes were where Sol’s vast fortune was concerned.

  Glasses of sherry were handed around.

  Sol’s lawyer cleared his throat and in a thin reedy voice began the reading.

  The total amount of the estate was over five million dollars. Wallis, remembering how, in the days before her mother had married Mr. Rasin, her uncle had said if she would leave her mother and promise to never see her again, he would make her his heiress, clasped gloved hands tightly in her lap. Despite the huge amount of money now to be apportioned, the decision she had made then, when a vulnerable young girl, was not one she regretted.

  There was tension in the room as it became apparent that the bequests to family being read out were nominal, not generous. Wallis was aware of several pairs of eyes sliding in her direction as the possibility dawned that this was because the bulk of his estate was being left to her.

  After what seemed an eternity of waiting, the reedy voice intoned: “To my niece, Bessiewallis Spencer, wife of Winfield Spencer, I bequeath the interest from fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of shares in railway stock and the Alleghany Company and the Texas Company.”

  The lawyer paused, and Wallis licked dry lips as she waited for him to continue. Uncle Sol referring to her as Bessiewallis didn’t bode well, as he knew it was a name she hadn’t answered to since she was a very young child and that she disliked it intensely. The rider wife of Winfield Spencer was more promising, for it indicated that the will had been made before she had begun divorce proceedings against Win and, if that was the case, her mother’s fears that her divorce would have affected what Sol was going to leave her would be proved groundless.

  “This sum,” the lawyer continued, “to be paid to my niece in quarterly installments, so long as she shall live and not remarry.”

  He paused, this time for a little longer.

  Wallis waited expectantly.

  “The remainder of my estate,” the lawyer said, “I leave for the formation of a home for aged and indigent gentlewomen in memory of my mother, Anne Emory Warfield, a room to be set aside therein for my niece, Bessiewallis Spencer, if ever she should need it.”

  It was a second or two before Wallis could comprehend the enormity of the blow and the insult her uncle had dealt her. Whatever his bequests to her may have originally been, the will that had just been read had clearly been made after she had begun divorce proceedings against Win. The amount left to her, and the terms under which it had been left, cut fierce and deep, but it was the public insinuation that she would one day have need of his house of charity for impoverished gentlewomen that made her proud Warfield blood boil with such rage, she thought she was going to explode.

  Her mother made a stifled sound of anguish beside her.

  A Warfield cousin sniggered.

  Wallis rose to her feet, her back straight, her head high. Aware that she was now most certainly going to marry Ernest, she left 34 East Preston Street knowing she was doing so for the last time. In another few weeks it would be Christmas, and by then she would have her divorce. Once it had been finally granted, she would write to Ernest, telling him she would be happy to become his wife, and then, before sailing to join him in London, she would enjoy six months of freedom as a single woman by staying with the Rogerses, who, having left Peking, were now living in a villa in the hills above Cannes, in the south of France.

  It was a break that would mark the end of her former life and the beginning of a new life—and whatever that new life might bring, Wallis knew for a certainty that she would never, ever fulfill her uncle’s expectations by becoming an inmate of the Anne Emory Warfield Home for Impoverished Gentlewomen.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “John Jasper! You’ll never guess!” Pamela rushed into the drawing room of their home in Hanover Square, Wallis’s letter to her in her hand. “Wally’s marrying an Englishman, and she’s going to do so in London!”

  It was the first week of January 1928.

  John Jasper put down the newspaper he’d been reading. “I hope he’s not a bounder,” he said cautiously. “Does she know his background?”

  Pamela, who though still curvaceous was also now a little plump, perched on the arm of his chair. “His father is English, his mother American. He went to Harvard, was a second lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, and is now running the London branch of his family’s ship brokerage firm. He’s also been married before, but then so has Wally.”

  “Where is Wallis now? Is she still in Virginia?” John Jasper’s interest was sincere.

  “Warrenton? No. She left there the minute her divorce was finalized. She’s in the south of France, staying with the friends she stayed with in Peking.”

  “And her soon-to-be second husband?”

  “Ernest?” Pamela glanced down at the letter. “He’s here in London. The wedding isn’t going to be until June. I don’t think their being apart until then is going to worry Wally unduly. After all, they don’t have to be apart, do they? Wally could be staying in London with us if she wanted. She’s had an open invitation to do so for ages.”

  She slid off the arm of the chair and crossed the room to where an Art Deco cocktail cabinet stood discreetly beside one of the room’s many large windows. “I rather suspect, darling, that dear Wally isn’t passionate about Ernest.” Though the sun was hours from being over the yardarm, she began making herself a pink gin. “I suspect he’s a safe port in a storm, not a grand romance. If Ernest had been the Argentinean diplomat she’d been so madly in love with, she wouldn’t for one minute have allowed him to remain on his own in London while she stayed with friends in the south of France.”

  John Jasper put his newspaper down and looked pointedly at the glass in her hand. “It’s only eleven in the morning, Pamela.”

  “I know, darling.” She perched again on the arm of his chair and with her free hand ruffled hair as black and curly as it had been when he’d been eighteen. “But I’m celebrating the news that Wally’s found herself another husband. Why don’t you join me? You’re not going to the embassy today. We’re going into deepest Hampshire to celebrate Rose Houghton’s fortieth birthday, or had you forgotten?”

  “No,” he said, not taking her up on her suggestion, “though why she has to celebrate it in the depths of the country instead of in London, I can’t imagine.”

  “Because it’s basically a family party and we should think ourselves lucky to be invited to it. Family matters to Rose, and her grandfather is now so infirm he never leaves Snowberry, which is why the party is being held there.”

  Aware that peace and quiet in which to read had been shattered for good, John Jasper rose to his feet. “There won’t be many people there we know,” he said. “All Rose and Hal’s other close friends are either socialists or press barons.”

  Pamela giggled. “Sometimes, darling, like Hal, they’re both.”

  John Jasper chuckled. Pamela sometimes infuriated him almost beyond endurance, but she never bored him. A family party to be celebrated in the depth of the countryside in the middle of winter wasn’t something he was particularly looking forward to, but unlike most of Pamela’s friends, Rose was a steadying influence on her, and their friendship was one he had always encouraged.

  Where Rose’s husband Hal was concerned, he had his own reasons for maintaining as close a contact with him as possible. Hal was an English press baron of enormous, if controversial, reputation and John Jasper was an American diplomat. It was in the interests of both of them to maintain a relationship in which they coul
d, when the need arose, speak frankly to each other.

  “You’ll need to wear a fur coat,” he said as Pamela remained seated on the arm of the chair, the pink gin in her glass now at a disconcertingly low level. “The temperature is always a couple of degrees lower outside London.”

  Pamela regarded him in amusement, loving the fact that he’d lost none of the Roma-like good looks that so set him apart in any social gathering. “The party is going to be held indoors, darling. Not in the garden.”

  He began to walk out of the room, intent on informing their chauffeur what time they would be leaving London. As he reached the door, he said drily, “I’ve become accustomed to the lack of heating in English country houses, Pamela, and believe me, in whatever part of Snowberry this party is to be held, you’re going to need a fur!”

  Pamela waited until the door had closed behind him and then slid off the arm of the chair and headed once again in the direction of the cocktail cabinet.

  Against all the odds, she and John Jasper were happier together than any other married couple she knew. She hadn’t always been faithful to him, of course. Being faithful would have been behavior thought far too odd in the high-society circle they were a part of, but whenever she had been naughty, it had always only ever been a fling, not a grand passion. She suspected that John Jasper, too, had had a little fling on occasions but that, like hers, they had always been of short duration and never of any importance.

  She dropped three dashes of Angostura bitters into her glass, swirled them around, and then added a measure of gin. John Jasper had said that in all probability there wouldn’t be anyone at the party whom they would know, which was quite true as she and Rose didn’t have friends in common. Rose’s sister Marigold, known to the world as Marietta des Vaux, might very well be there to add a shot of movie-star glamour, and she’d been longing to meet Marigold for as long as she could remember. There was someone else who just might be there as well, and that was Prince Edward.

  In all the years she had known Rose, she had never gotten to the bottom of Prince Edward’s relationship with the Houghton family. Rose always behaved as if no relationship had ever existed, but Lord May hadn’t done so when, during the war, she had traveled to Snowberry in order to give him his birthday present from Rose. “There was a time,” he had told her then, “when David was always down here.”

  John Jasper had dismissed it as the ramblings of an elderly man with a faulty memory, but she wasn’t convinced. She drained her glass. If Edward put in an appearance later today at Snowberry, John Jasper would have to do something he hated. He would have to admit that he was wrong.

  Later that afternoon she had to acknowledge that there was one thing John Jasper hadn’t been wrong about. Unless you were fortunate enough to be standing, or seated, immediately in front of the roaring log fire in Snowberry’s drawing room, Snowberry was freezing cold.

  The next thing that registered was that Rose’s birthday party was going to be a very small, very staid affair. Her grandfather, Lord May, was seated nearest to the fire and, despite being in such a prime position for warmth, had a tartan rug over his knees. There was a handful of county types there, the men advertising their good breeding by being chinless and their wives by looking disconcertingly like the horses that, in Pamela’s hearing at least, were the sole subject of their conversation.

  It was hard to believe that any of them were Rose and Hal’s personal friends, and Pamela concluded that they were simply neighboring estate owners who had been invited because Lord May would have wished them to be invited, and that Rose had invited her and John Jasper in order to liven things up a little bit.

  Also livening things up was Marigold, who, with her flame-red hair and husky unchained laugh, was glamour personified. Her husband came as rather a surprise, being at least two decades her senior and silver-haired.

  John Jasper, knowing how little interest Pamela took in parliamentary affairs, said to her in a quiet aside that Marigold’s husband had until recently been the Speaker in the House of Lords. However distinguished he obviously was, Pamela felt Marigold’s fame and glamour would have been better served if her husband had been John Barrymore or Douglas Fairbanks.

  “My sister, Iris,” Rose said, introducing her to a woman who looked as if she would be more at home wearing thick stockings and brogues, rather than the silk stockings and high heels she was trying to look comfortable in.

  Pamela could tell immediately that however pleasant Iris was—and her smile indicated she was very pleasant indeed—she was also uninteresting and was probably also uninteresting to her husband who, when Rose introduced him, shot her the kind of hot, speculative look that indicated he would like to get to know her much, much better.

  The introduction over, Rose moved away and one of the county set immediately claimed Iris. Over Iris’s husband’s shoulder Pamela saw a petite, stunningly beautiful woman enter the room. She wasn’t dressed for a birthday celebration. Her floral, midcalf-length cotton dress was nondescript and a little faded. It didn’t matter. It only seemed to emphasize her aura of gentle serenity. In a room where nearly every female head of hair was marcel-waved, hers was a blue-black cloud that looked as if all she had done was lightly run a comb through it. Apart from a small wristwatch she was wearing no jewelry and, obviously unaware of doing so, she put everyone, even her famous movie-star sister, into the shade.

  The man who walked into the room hard on her heels was equally striking. His hair was a burning red and he was wearing a kilt in the manner of a man who had been doing so ever since he could walk. Pamela didn’t have to ask who they both were. As the woman crossed the room swiftly to where Lord May was seated and unself-consciously sank down on her knees beside his chair, taking hold of his hand, it was blatantly obvious that the woman was Rose’s youngest sister, Lily, and that the good-looking Scot accompanying her was her husband.

  “So you’re a movie-star friend of Marigold’s, are you?” Iris’s husband said leeringly.

  Gratified by his assumption, she was tempted to say yes. Knowing that if she did, he would corral her in a corner of the room and she’d never be able to get away from him, it was a temptation she overcame.

  “No,” she said, still looking beyond his shoulder at the now-empty doorway. “Would you excuse me? I need to retrieve my handbag.”

  Without giving him the chance to detain her, she walked smartly away from him, uncaring that her clutch bag was very visibly tucked beneath her arm. Lily’s attractive husband was laughing at something Marigold was animatedly telling him. John Jasper was deep in conversation with Hal. Rose was nowhere to be seen, presumably in the dining room, checking on the buffet table and the birthday cake.

  Not wanting to be waylaid by anyone else either boring or lecherous, Pamela headed out of the drawing room in order to find somewhere she could enjoy a quiet cigarette unmolested.

  Snowberry was Elizabethan and its vast hall was stone flagged. In summer it was no doubt pleasantly cool, but now the hall was even chillier than parts of the drawing room had been. Pamela hugged her arms, wishing she had taken John Jasper’s advice and had kept her fur coat on.

  A glorious grand staircase of ancient oak, its newel posts and balustrades intricately carved, led up from the hall. She walked to the foot of it and leaned against one of the newel posts, about to take her cigarette case out of her bag.

  “I wouldn’t stay there for long,” a girl’s voice said pleasantly from somewhere above her. “The newels are carved with dragons and gremlins and make a very uncomfortable prop.”

  Pamela turned and looked upward. At the top of the first wide sweep of stairs, a landing divided the magnificent staircase into two. Seated on the top step of it was a fair-haired girl who looked to be about fifteen or sixteen.

  “You’re right.” Pamela was glad to at last have someone promisingly interesting to talk to. “I’ve got a crick in my back already. Who are you? Are you a member of the family?”

  “Ariadne Sinclair,” t
he girl said, making no move to stand and walk down the stairs to join her. “I don’t visit Snowberry often. My family home is on Islay. It’s in the Hebrides,” she added helpfully.

  “Yes, I know.” Pamela was intrigued by the girl’s hair coloring, which was neither red, like her father’s, nor night-black, like her mother’s. “Aren’t you coming down to join the party?”

  “No. I’m not allowed. Mummy says I wouldn’t enjoy it as even though Auntie Marigold is here—and she’s always terrific fun—so are a lot of people Mummy said I would find boring. Not you, of course,” she added hastily.

  “Of course not.” Pamela was beginning to enjoy the conversation hugely. “And your mother was right. It is a pretty boring party. Some music would liven it up.”

  “Oh, there will be music later. Aunt Marigold loves to dance. She’s taught me to Charleston and do the Black Bottom.”

  It was Pamela’s turn to have a wide grin on her face. The prospect of doing the Black Bottom with Ariadne’s good-looking father was one to look forward to.

  “When it’s my sixteenth birthday we’ll be having a ceilidh,” Ariadne said, obviously enjoying their conversation as much as Pamela was. “Have you ever been to one?”

  “Not a genuine one, held in Scotland.” As she spoke, Pamela was trying to figure out who it was Ariadne reminded her of. She had her mother’s delicately boned features, but so did the other person, whoever he, or she, was. “I can manage a Dashing White Sergeant,” she added, struck by the unusual summer-sky blue of Ariadne’s fair-lashed eyes and her entrancing feylike quality.