by Rebecca Dean
“The nice thing about Scottish dancing is that it’s a group thing.” Ariadne rose to her feet. “I’d better go back and make sure my little sister isn’t getting into any mischief. With a bit of luck you’ll be dancing very shortly. Avoid my Aunt Iris’s husband. He’s a dreadful lecher. He has hands like an octopus!”
“I will.”
As Ariadne ran lightly up the next flight of stairs, Pamela wondered if her parents were aware of the hand-groping liberties their delightful daughter had obviously been well able to fend off. Like her Aunt Marigold, Ariadne Sinclair was obviously someone it would always be fun to be with.
She turned, about to walk back into the drawing room, and sucked in her breath.
Opposite her, in an unlit alcove and on a pedestal, was the bronze bust of Prince Edward that Ariadne’s mother had sculpted.
Pamela didn’t have to walk closer to it to know that when she did so, she would see exactly the same curve of cheekbone and lip that made Ariadne so distinctively pretty. Prince Edward’s indefinable feylike quality—which Lily had so skillfully captured—was a quality her daughter also possessed.
With a trembling hand Pamela took her cigarette case out of her bag, lifted a cigarette from it, and lit it. Edward was thirty-four, and Lord May had told her that Edward’s visits to Snowberry had been made when he was a naval cadet, which meant, if the bust was anything to go by, that he’d been between sixteen and eighteen at the time.
She inhaled deeply. Ariadne had told her that she would soon be celebrating her sixteenth birthday—and sixteen from thirty-four was eighteen, subtract another nine months for the length of a pregnancy and it meant Edward would have been seventeen when he had been visiting Snowberry and when Lily had conceived Ariadne.
She blew a plume of blue smoke into the air. No wonder Rose had always played down any kind of a connection between her family and Edward. No wonder, either, that Lily was now keeping her daughter as well hidden from view as the bust she had sculpted. If it had remained in its usual position in the drawing room and Ariadne had also been in the room, the likeness between her and the bust was so marked it would have attracted comment—and the comment among any neighbors who had known of Prince Edward’s youthful visits to Snowberry might have hardened into suspicion.
Delighted with the secret that was now hers—and knowing that out of loyalty to Rose she would never be able to share it with anyone—she made her way back to the drawing room. There was dance music playing now, and she wanted to capture Rory Sinclair as a partner before anyone else did.
“This wedding of Wallis’s sounds as if it’s going to be a very mean little affair,” John Jasper said to her six months later as they left Hanover Square by car for the Chelsea register office. “Who else is going to be there, apart from us?”
Pamela adjusted a raspberry-pink hat that perfectly matched her Parisian-designed dress. “Hardly anyone. Ernest’s father, but not his mother. They are separated and can’t even bear being in the same country together. Mrs. Simpson lives abroad but whenever she visits England, Mr. Simpson promptly leaves it as if the air has become contaminated.”
She adjusted her five-string pearl necklace so that it lay a little more perfectly over the neckline of her dress. “Maud Kerr-Smiley, Ernest’s sister, will be there. Her husband won’t be as they are recently separated.” As their chauffeur headed toward the Chelsea Embankment, she shot John Jasper an impish glance. “The Simpson family don’t have a very good record where happy marriages are concerned, though I can’t see Ernest getting up to any mischief and causing Wally grief, can you?”
“God! After what she endured with that louse of a first husband, I sincerely hope not!”
She slid her gloved hand into his. “Peter Kerr-Smiley Junior will be there. He’s acting as Ernest’s best man—or he is if grooms at register-office weddings have best men. There may be a couple of Ernest’s ship-broking colleagues there. And there will be us. That’s all.”
“No family from America? Not even her mother?”
The car was now speeding along the embankment, the Embankment Gardens on their right, the glittering, busy Thames on their left.
“Not a one. No Alice, no Bessie, no Lelia Barnett, and no Corinne Murray and no Edith, either. Wallis would hate anyone from Baltimore to know she was marrying in a London register office.”
They arrived there only seconds before the bride and groom. Wallis was wearing a blue taffeta coat over a pale lemon silk dress, her glossy dark hair parted in the middle and drawn back tightly into a low figure-of-eight chignon.
Pamela squeezed John Jasper’s arm, whispering to him as they entered the small room where the service was to take place, “Don’t you think that ever since her stay in Peking, Wallis has begun to look a little Chinese? It’s the hair. It’s as sleek as only Chinese women know how to make it.”
The service was over almost before it had begun.
“I do solemnly declare,” Ernest said, “that I know not of any lawful impediment why I, Ernest Aldrich Simpson, may not be joined in matrimony to Bessie Wallis Warfield Spencer.”
Pamela raised her eyes to heaven, knowing exactly how much Wallis must be hating hearing her full Christian name. Moments later, after Ernest had made his vows, she was also having to speak it.
“I call upon these persons here present,” she said, her American drawl very pronounced in contrast to Ernest’s very clipped English, “to witness that I, Bessie Wallis Warfield Spencer, take thee, Ernest Aldrich Simpson, to be my lawful wedded husband.”
Ernest then slid a ring onto the third finger of Wallis’s left hand and, as Wallis said drolly afterward, “the deed was done before I’d even had a chance to realize the service was under way!”
Later, at the champagne wedding brunch held at the Grosvenor Hotel where Ernest’s father had permanent rooms, Pamela said, “I hope you’ll be very happy this time around, Wally.”
“So do I.” Wallis shot her a wry smile. “Marrying Ernest may be about the only sensible thing I’ve done in life so far. He’s very kind—which after Win will be a welcome contrast—and I’m very fond of him.”
“Fond, but not in love?”
They were in the bedroom her father-in-law had put at Wallis’s disposal. Wallis, who had gone there to refresh her makeup before leaving for the honeymoon Ernest had planned for them in France, slid her powder compact back into her handbag. “Being in love has never done me any favors, Pamela. Not with John Jasper, not with Win, and certainly not with Felipe. I’m tired of fighting the world alone and with no money. Ernest and I will rub along very well together. For once I’m utterly sure I’ve done the right thing.”
Her mood changed and she laughed, looking finally like a radiant bride. “Ernest has bought a Lagonda touring car for our drive through France. It’s the most ridiculous color. Bright yellow. Can you imagine Ernest buying a bright yellow car? Isn’t it a hoot?”
She gave a final look in the mirror and then picked up her handbag. “So here I go, Pamela. No longer Mrs. Spencer, but Mrs. Simpson. It’s a very ordinary name, isn’t it? I doubt that anyone in the world but me is ever going to remember it!”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Wallis learned a great deal about her husband on their honeymoon—all of it pleasing. Their sexual relationship had been worked out during their courtship, so there were no surprises there, apart from Ernest’s physical needs being even more low-key than she had believed them to be. Sometimes it was hard for her to believe that they were husband and wife, not brother and sister. It didn’t trouble her. She liked being with Ernest. He was the only person she knew who could be both interesting and restful at the same time.
Once in France she discovered that not only was Ernest’s French fluent, but he had an all-embracing knowledge of many other subjects as well, including art, church architecture, and French history. As they pottered around cathedral towns such as Rheims and Chartres, he was able to bring the past alive for her in a way any professional touris
t guide would have envied.
In Paris they walked narrow cobbled streets hand in hand for hours, visiting the Louvre, Sacré Coeur, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower. In the Place Vendôme he told her of how the column in its center was a replica of the original.
“The original was torn down in 1871 by revolutionaries led by the painter Gustave Courbet,” he said knowledgeably, adding with a grin, “The revolt failed and Courbet had to pay for the replacement. It must have cost him every last franc he ever earned.”
He knew other little-known facts as well. That Paris, as well as New York, had a Statue of Liberty, though one on a much smaller scale. Wallis thought he was teasing her and, to prove that he wasn’t, he drove her out to southwest Paris where, on an island next to the Pont de Grenelle bridge, it stood, a brave reminder that the New York statue had been a gift to America from France.
At midday they lunched in small bistros at gingham-checked tables. In the evening they dined more splendidly, seated on velvet-covered banquettes at white-naperied tables lit by candles.
If Wallis wasn’t heedlessly in love, and if Ernest’s love for facts and figures was sometimes a little tedious, she was content—and contentment was something she was quite happy to settle for.
“I need help decorating and furnishing the Mayfair flat Ernest has found for us,” she said to Pamela on her return. “I can’t spend a fortune, but I do want to make it suitable for entertaining the fine folk you’ll soon be introducing us to.”
Pamela rolled her eyes. “Where do you want to start? Perhaps George and Nada would be the best bet.”
They were lunching at the Ritz. It was somewhere Ernest found too expensive, except for the celebration of a special occasion, and whenever she and Pamela lunched there it was always amicably understood that Pamela would be the one picking up the bill.
Wallis took a sip of deliciously chilled Chablis. “Who are George and Nada?”
“George is the second Marquess of Milford Haven and Lord Louis Mountbatten’s brother. His mother was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and one of his aunts, Alexandra, was married to the last emperor of Russia. Nada is the daughter of Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich Romanov. Between them, George and Nada know everyone there is to know. Nada,” she added, “is extremely naughty—and not only with men.”
Wallis sensed Nada’s lesbian leanings the first time she met her. As she in no way shared them, they didn’t trouble her, and all through the autumn of 1928 and the spring of 1929 she and Ernest were soon regular house party guests at the Milford Havens’ country estate, Lynden Manor, near Maidenhead in Berkshire.
Thanks to George and Nada they soon had other high-society friends as well. Friends such as Cecil Beaton, who had taken the most wonderful photographs of Prince Edward’s younger brother, Prince Albert, and his family, and Lady Sibyl Colefax, who enthusiastically helped her when it came to choosing color schemes for the spacious drawing room and dining room in which she intended entertaining with all the flair her mother had shown in those far-off days of pay-to-attend dinners.
“I want colors that will show off my Chinese treasures,” she said to Sybil, adding with a face-splitting grin, “and my clothes. I’ve had the Chinese silk I bought in Hong Kong and Shanghai made up into mandarin-necked jackets and dresses and luscious evening gowns with side splits at the ankle.”
“Then we’ll go for muted and subtle,” Sybil said, aware of how much the elegant severity of Chinese-style clothes would suit her new friend. “Let me have a look at the carpet you bought in Peking. It’s going to make a wonderful centerpiece for the drawing room—and we’ll need to shop for a really elegant vitrine in order to show off your jade and ivory lucky elephants.”
Not only was Wallis and Ernest’s home full of artifacts that set it apart, but her style of entertaining was different and interesting, too.
“Don’t play down being American,” Pamela had said to her. “Play it up. Serve the kind of food your mother used to serve. Maryland crabcakes, fried chicken, white cloud cake—and put the cocktail-making skills Win taught you to good use. Cocktail parties are the easiest and swiftest way of widening your social circle.”
Wallis had always found the London cocktail parties she had attended with Ernest to be little more than a fill-in hour before the real entertainment of the evening began. The cocktails had always been unimaginatively restricted in choice, food had rarely been served, and, when it had been, it had always been uninspiring.
Right from the first she decided that her cocktail parties were not merely going to be the precursor to other events, but events in themselves, and that she was going to conduct them with Virginian open-house hospitality so that, at cocktail hour, people would feel free to call on her and Ernest without having been formally invited to do so.
Pamela had raised her eyes to heaven at the idea, saying it would never catch on. She was proved wrong. With a nub of people such as herself and John Jasper, Tarquin, the Milford Havens, Cecil Beaton, and Sibyl Colefax regularly to be found in Wallis and Ernest’s flat at cocktail hour, word spread that Wallis was great fun, that her cocktails were cocktails that couldn’t be found anywhere else, not even at the Ritz or the Savoy, and that to drop in on her and Ernest before continuing on to a dinner engagement, the opera, or the theater was the thing to do.
Not all the new people in their lives were English. John Jasper introduced Benjamin Thaw, the first secretary of the U.S. embassy in London, and his sultrily exotic half-American, half Latin-American wife Consuelo, into their ever-expanding social circle.
Consuelo’s distinctive, head-turning beauty was a beauty one of her younger sisters, Thelma, shared. First married when she was seventeen, divorced when she was twenty, Thelma was now married to a British aristocrat, Viscount Furness, who was known to all and sundry as “Duke.” Despite her friendship with Consuelo, Wallis still barely knew Thelma. By early 1929 it was something she realized she was going to have to change.
“Thelma,” Consuelo said at one of Wallis’s early evening parties, “has finally ousted Freda Dudley Ward from Prince Edward’s life. Isn’t that spiffy?”
She and Benny were continuing on to the opera, and she was wearing a black-and-gold evening dress embroidered with coral beads and crystals. Her nails and lips were a searing matching coral and she was sitting, unasked, upon John Jasper’s knee, one arm carelessly around his neck.
“He’s absolutely mad for her,” she continued, gratified that she had caught everyone’s attention, “and let’s face it, who can blame him? She’s far more fun than Freda, who was always trying to keep him on the straight and narrow.”
Wallis was kneeling at the coffee table that held everything she needed for cocktail making. She paused in what she was doing, saying to Ernest, “Darling, will you turn the music down a little, so that we can more easily hear what Consuelo is saying?”
Ernest obligingly turned down the peppy strains of “Cecilia” by Johnny Hamp’s Kentucky Serenaders.
Wallis continued with what she had been doing, pouring two and a quarter measures of American rye whiskey into a cocktail shaker and adding a measure of sweet red vermouth, saying as she did so, “Are you sure Freda is really a thing of the past, Consuelo? People have thought it before and been proved wrong.”
Consuelo gave a dismissive wave of her long cigarette holder. “What would you say if I told you that when he goes on his South African tour in February, he’s arranged to meet up with Thelma in Kenya? He’s never made those sort of arrangements for Freda when he’s been on any of his trips abroad.”
Once again Wallis stopped what she was doing.
John Jasper cleared his throat. “Are you, or are you not, making me a Manhattan, Wallis?”
“I am.” Wallis added ice and a dash of bitters to the mix and began shaking it.
Benny Thaw said, “It’s a shame Thelma isn’t single. Rumors from the palace are that the king’s health is so poor he isn’t expected to live for much longer. If Prince Edward were able to
marry Thelma and make her Princess of Wales, she’d be queen before you could spit—and I rather like the idea of having a queen for a sister-in-law.”
“Cecilia” came to an end, and Ernest deftly removed the record and replaced it with “A Precious Little Thing Called Love,” sung by George Olsen.
Pamela, who was privately concluding that Consuelo had been sitting on John Jasper’s knee for quite long enough, said, “Even if she were single, she’d be a divorcée, and there’s no way a king of England can be married to a divorced woman, because as well as being the king, he’s also head of the Church of England—and the church doesn’t recognize divorce. So eat your heart out, Benny. Your daydream is never going to come true.”
Wallis strained the contents of the cocktail shaker into a martini glass and added a cherry for garnish.
As she did so, her eyes met Pamela’s. Whenever Edward was under discussion, Pamela never mentioned the letters he had written to her from France and Italy during the war. Wallis knew there were two reasons. The first was that Pamela valued still being part of Edward’s “set” and didn’t think he’d take kindly to it if she gossiped about the letters he had written to her. The second was that Pamela enjoyed having secrets and was never happier than when she was keeping one.
It wasn’t something Wallis had realized in the days when they had been at Arundell and Oldfields together. Then, Pamela had always said that being best friends meant they would never have any secrets from each other, but her affair with John Jasper had shown Wallis that what Pamela said and what she did were often two very different things.
Whether Pamela had anything she was keeping secret from her now Wallis didn’t know, but she did know that none of their mutual friends—not even Georgie Mountbatten, who was Edward’s cousin—knew how close she’d once come to becoming Edward’s mistress.
“My Manhattan, Wallis,” John Jasper said, using his feigned exasperation as an excuse to remove Consuelo from his knee and get up from his chair.