The Shadow Queen

by Rebecca Dean

“Good God!”

  Everyone present could see that Prince Edward was absolutely spellbound.

  Thelma, aware that Wallis was effortlessly—and very unexpectedly—stealing her thunder, was furious and taking pains not to show it.

  Ernest was puffed with pride.

  Benny was vastly amused.

  Prince George and Averill were as spellbound as Edward.

  “And then what happened?” Edward demanded, his blue eyes holding hers.

  Despite her nerves, Wallis once again shot him a grin. “Her father spared Captain Smith’s life. A few years later, when she was eighteen, Pocahontas saved the lives of many in Jamestown by warning the settlers of an Indian attack.”

  “And then?” Edward said again, not wanting the story to come to an end.

  “And then she became a Christian, married a Jamestown settler, John Rolfe, and came to England where she was presented to King James I and his consort, Queen Anne.”

  “So the story had a happy ending?” Prince George asked.

  “No.” Wallis shook her head. “Pocahontas wasn’t accustomed to English cold and English fog. She became very ill and shortly after boarding a ship that would take her back to her beloved homeland and while the ship was still sailing down the Thames River toward the open sea, she died.”

  Edward gave a heavy sigh. “That’s a wonderful story, Mrs. Simpson—and you told it so very well.”

  Thelma’s polite, tight smile became even tighter.

  Ernest’s pride soared into the stratosphere.

  Benny’s amusement deepened.

  Before anything more could be said, they heard the front door opening and Prince George rose to his feet.

  “That will be the friends I am expecting who are taking me on elsewhere for dinner. Good-bye, Benny; hopefully I’ll be seeing you again before too very long. Good-bye, Mr. Simpson, Mrs. Simpson.” He shook hands with them. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

  When it came to Thelma, he kissed her good-bye on the cheek. Despite such intimacy, Thelma dipped him a curtsey. Realizing that she should also have curtseyed, Wallis hastily curtseyed for the third time.

  Later, as she and Ernest dressed for dinner in the suite of rooms that had been prepared for them, Ernest said, “You were marvelous, darling. Not a hint of nerves, though I know you must have been feeling them.” He fastened a stiff collar onto his dress shirt. “Wasn’t the Prince of Wales wonderful? So natural and he put one so much at ease. I’ve come to the conclusion that you Americans lost something that is very good and quite irreplaceable when you decided to dispense with the British monarchy.”

  When they went down to dinner it was to discover that the “handful” of people Consuelo had spoken of was instead a large group of at least thirty, none of whom they knew. They were seated a good distance away from Thelma and Prince Edward, and even after dinner was over they were still not in a position for him to speak to them, as Thelma deftly sorted everyone into different groups, some to play poker and some to play bridge.

  The poker players went off with the prince and Thelma to a connecting drawing room, and Wallis, designated by Thelma to be a bridge player, had no choice but to resign herself to an evening spent at a card table in the company of people in whom she had little interest.

  The next day was the kind of day she had feared it would be. The prince and “G,” together with Benny and a great many other of Thelma’s guests, went off in the direction of the stables, dressed for a day spent on horseback.

  “The prince will be with the Quorn hunt,” a female guest who also hadn’t chosen to spend the day in such a manner said when she met Wallis strolling in Burrough Court’s large and formal grounds. “He has a terrible seat on a horse. One of the worst I’ve ever seen, but he’s absolutely fearless. He’s always in the front, always taking fences other riders deem to be too risky. I’ve heard the king wants him to give up fox hunting and steeplechasing, thinking them sports too dangerous for a man who is heir to the throne. If he doesn’t give them up, he’ll end up by breaking his neck. Bound to.”

  The woman continued on her way back to the house, and Wallis continued with her walk. She hadn’t wanted company. She wanted solitude in which to think about Prince Edward.

  As a schoolgirl at Arundell, when she had first begun collecting news cuttings and photographs of him, she couldn’t have even imagined meeting him in the way she had the previous evening. Even when, married to Ernest and living in London and being introduced to people like George and Nada, she had quite feasibly been able to hope of one day being introduced to Edward, she had never imagined that if she were, she would awaken his interest in the way she knew she had awakened it the previous evening.

  She sat down on a stone seat, looking out over a sea of rosebushes rimed with frost. He had been the theme running through her life from childhood until now. The culmination of all those years of thinking and daydreaming about him had been yesterday evening when, for a few brief precious moments as she had told him the story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith, it had been as if they were the only two people in the room—two people deeply enthralled by each other.

  The sensation was one she wanted to experience again, but she could see no way of doing so. One weekend house party at which he was also present was not enough to bring her into his rarefied world.

  The only way to do that was by nurturing her tentative friendship with Thelma.

  She looked down at her watch. If she was to be bright and sparkling that evening, she needed to get rid of the last of her cold, and the most sensible way of doing so was to spend the rest of the day in bed.

  She rose to her feet, premonition telling her that the coming evening was going to be very little different from the previous one, with Thelma keeping Edward very much to herself. It was something she could do absolutely nothing about.

  With her hands deep in the pockets of her tweed cape she walked back to the house, wishing that she could see into the future, wishing she knew what it held.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  As Wallis expected, there was never another occasion when she could engage Prince Edward in conversation during their stay. Royal etiquette was such that she couldn’t engage him in conversation first. “There won’t ever be another weekend like it, Wallis,” Ernest had said to her on the train as they returned to London, “but wasn’t it splendid? The chaps at my club will be goggle-eyed when I tell them where we spent the weekend and whose company we were in.”

  Wallis wasn’t interested in name-dropping. She was only interested in meeting Prince Edward again.

  “You haven’t the remotest chance of doing so for months and months,” Pamela said to her the next time they lunched at the Ritz. “He’s en route to South America at the present moment in order to bolster British prestige, which, thanks to cutrate German and Japanese competition, has apparently fallen alarmingly and is affecting the economy badly. It will all be a terrible bore for him. He hates grand banquets that last for hours and hours, and on a trip like this he’ll be enduring one every night of the week.”

  Wallis toyed with the salad on her plate. On the two evenings at Burrough, when she had been seated at the same table with him—though at the opposite end of it—she had been able to watch every flicker of expression that had passed over his face. Mostly he had been animated, treating those seated on either side and opposite him to his engaging quizzical smile, quite often laughing at things that were said.

  The laughter never reached his eyes, though. There was always a wistful expression in them, as if he were battling a deep melancholy he could never quite overcome. She had noticed it when seated opposite him before the roaring fire in Burrough Court’s principal drawing room.

  “Do you,” she said to Pamela, “think the prince is truly happy? He’s the most famous man in the world. Millions of women idolize him. He has vast wealth and prestige and isn’t at risk of ever losing it. He has everything any man could ever ask for, yet having been in his company I’m co
nvinced he carries a terrible burden of sadness.”

  Pamela took a sip of her wine and then held Wallis’s eyes over the rim of her glass. “That is extremely perceptive of you, Wally.”

  She took another sip of wine, put her wineglass down, and said, “He hates the constraints he lives under. Way back in the days of the Great War, when he was writing to me from Flanders and Italy, he said how he hated never being able to live as other people lived—able to make his own choices. Then, of course, it was because he wanted to be in the thick of the fighting, and as heir to the throne he was kept as far from the front as the generals, who were terrified of having to take responsibility if he was killed, could manage. He must have been the only man during the entire course of the war struggling to be where the action was most dangerous.”

  She picked up her fork. “Nowadays it’s the barrier that exists between him and other people that he hates. No matter how close people in his circle are to him, the barrier of royalty always prevents real intimacy. I doubt if it’s something he’s ever known, even with Freda and Thelma. People simply don’t treat him with the informality he craves. They are too intimidated by his title and the fact that one day he will be not only king of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth, but emperor of India as well. It’s enough to intimidate anyone.”

  Wallis stopped toying with her salad and speared a mushroom. She, too, had been intimidated at the thought of meeting him, but the intimidation had evaporated when she had been in his presence, telling him the story her Grandmother Warfield had so often told her when she’d been a child.

  Then, there had been real rapport between them. If she told Pamela of it, she knew Pamela would tease her and tell her she had been imagining it.

  She knew differently, though. Prince Edward had been as attracted to her as, initially, John Jasper, Win, Felipe, and Ernest had been. After this conversation with Pamela, she knew why. It had been because when talking to him, she hadn’t been overawed by him. Her natural vitality and friendliness had penetrated the barrier that usually surrounded him. To her great astonishment she realized the Prince of Wales had been as happily at ease in her company as she had been in his.

  With Edward in South America, Thelma responded warmly to Wallis’s attempts to become better friends with her. Tarquin invited her to a party at which Ernest and Wallis were also present, and Wallis was wryly amused at how gaily Thelma flirted with her host.

  At a weekend house party given by the Milford Havens at Lynden Manor, Thelma was a fellow guest, as were Pamela and John Jasper. Thelma treated her as if her froideur at Wallis stealing her limelight at Burrough had never happened.

  “Don’t be so surprised, Wally,” Pamela said to her. “Thelma is an empty-headed little fluff. I don’t believe she’s ever had a serious thought in her life, and she’s not the type to hold a minor grievance. She doesn’t seem to be missing Edward much. She and Tarquin dined out together three times last week.”

  At the beginning of the summer, when Edward’s return to England was imminent, Thelma declared her intention of holding a welcome-home party for him.

  “Prince George says the king has scheduled a visit to a northern provincial town for David the very day after he returns, which I think is absolutely beastly of him,” Thelma said at one of Wallis’s cocktail parties, her indignation deep. “It means by the time David returns for my party for him he’s going to be absolutely shattered, poor darling.”

  “Have you permission to call Prince Edward David?” Wallis asked Pamela a little later when Thelma was happily prattling away to Nada. “I know you often do when talking about him, but I’ve never thought to ask you if you did during the time the two of you were close.”

  “That, sweet Wally, is a very sore point.” Pamela’s cat green eyes glittered with hurt pride. “Considering how long I’ve known him—since childhood—the answer is no, and it’s something I’m probably never going to forgive him for.”

  “Do you think Thelma does so?”

  “In private, or when other people present are also royal—people such as George and Nada—then yes, she does.”

  Wallis, seeing that one of her guests had nearly finished his Virginian Sherry Cobbler, began making him another before it was asked for.

  “So no one is ever asked to call him David—not unless he is very much in love with them?” she asked, pouring a measure of Amontillado into a small cocktail shaker.

  “That’s just about it.” Pamela remembered the way the Houghton family called him David but decided not to mention it. A private secret was no fun once it was shared. “I assume you’ve been invited to Thelma’s welcome-home party?” she said, changing the subject.

  Wallis poured a dash of Grand Marnier into the cocktail shaker. “Yes.” She added a slice of orange and two tablespoons of sugar. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  It was the understatement of the year. She wasn’t merely looking forward to it, she was counting off the days and hours to it.

  Faced with the choice of what to wear, when the evening arrived she decided on a backless silver lamé evening dress she had bought in Paris in which she knew she looked devastating. Her glossy dark hair was arranged in the style she hadn’t changed since her debutante days. Parted in the middle, it was combed back in deep waves over her ears to be coiled in an elegant figure-of-eight chignon at the nape of her neck.

  Her jewelry was a problem, as, because she had few good pieces, she had so little choice. In the end she decided on her Grandmother Warfield’s choker of pearls—the same pearls she had worn the evening at the del Coronado when she had come so close to being introduced to Prince Edward and Lord Louis Mountbatten.

  As a finishing touch she sprayed herself with her favorite perfume, Mitsouko, and then, taut with tension, joined Ernest in order to walk downstairs and outside to where their chauffeur was waiting for them.

  “There’s going to be a crush of people there,” Ernest warned as the car neared the Furnesses’ town house on Grosvenor Square, “and I doubt if Prince Edward will even recognize us.”

  It wasn’t a doubt Wallis shared. When the prince saw her, he would remember her. Ernest was right, though, in that it was a very crowded party. The entire house was blanketed in flowers, and as they walked into the drawing room, Wallis was grateful for the weekend house parties she and Ernest had spent at Lynden Manor. It meant she was already acquainted with many of Thelma’s guests. Pamela and John Jasper were there, of course, as well as George and Nada and other people, such as Tarquin and Cecil and Sibyl, all of whom she counted as being not just acquaintances, but real friends.

  Despite the number of guests, the party was informal. “Thelma knows the Prince of Wales well enough to know it’s what he prefers,” Tarquin said as they each lifted a glass of champagne from the tray a footman was proffering. “He won’t be in the room long before the dancing starts.”

  When Thelma and the prince entered the room, Wallis’s first reaction was that he looked far more than the “exhausted” Thelma had predicted; he looked shattered. There were pouches beneath his eyes that hadn’t been there at Burrough Court, and though he was smiling as readily as always, Wallis thought she detected signs of strain around his mouth.

  He and Thelma began making their way through the crowded room, greeting people as they did so. When they reached Wallis and Ernest, the prince stopped. “Mr. and Mrs. Simpson,” he said with a warm smile. “How nice to see you again. I remember our meeting at Melton.”

  Flushed with pleasure at being not only recognized but called by name, Ernest bowed. Wallis dipped into a by-now-confident curtsey.

  The prince, with Thelma at his side like a limpet, moved on.

  Tarquin was right in that there was soon dancing, but it seemed to Wallis that Edward wasn’t throwing his heart and soul into it—and he didn’t ask her to dance.

  “But then, apart from Thelma, he isn’t dancing with anyone,” John Jasper said, sensing her disappointment. “Will I do as a
substitute? I can’t do the Black Bottom, but I can do a fairly competent foxtrot.”

  They foxtrotted and whenever Wallis caught sight of Edward, she was struck by how very preoccupied he looked.

  Later in the evening the reason became clear to her.

  “I’m just back from some dreadful provincial northern town,” he said to George Milford Haven.

  Dancing was still going on, but he’d given up on it and was sitting on a sofa, Thelma at his side. George was in a comfortable chair nearby, nursing a brandy, and Wallis, always a strategist, was seated on a nearby sofa with Nada.

  “I thought it was too utterly horrid that you had to travel to some boring town in the north on your first day home from Argentina,” Thelma said cooingly, laughter in her voice. He didn’t respond to her. Instead he said, still talking to George, “Those poor devils up there have absolutely no work, George. I’ve spent the whole day talking to men who have no shirts beneath their jackets, worn-out boots—that’s if they have boots—and no hope.”

  “Oh dear.” Thelma’s voice was still laughter-filled. “A jacket without a shirt must be very scratchy.”

  Her gaiety fell on deaf ears.

  “Something must be done to help them, George.” Fiercely Edward slammed a clenched hand into his fist. “Something must be done!”

  The music changed to a quickstep. “Brilliant!” Thelma sprang to her feet. “I just love quicksteps. They’re so racy!”

  Edward remained where he was, his finely featured face deep in grave thought.

  It was a moment that could have been embarrassingly sticky, but George rose swiftly to his feet, took hold of Thelma’s hand, and, telling her that he simply adored quicksteps, headed her speedily in the direction of the adjoining room and its small dance floor and orchestra.

  Nada, reading Wallis’s thoughts, said languorously, “When you are a cousin of the Prince of Wales, you can ignore usual etiquette, lovely Wallis.”

  For Wallis the little scene was a revelation. Pamela had said she doubted if Edward had ever experienced true intimacy with anyone, even with Freda or Thelma. Wallis now knew for a certainty that where Thelma was concerned, Edward had certainly never experienced it, for Thelma had not been remotely attuned to his mood. Even worse, she had been totally uninterested in the kind of difficult official tasks he had to undertake as Prince of Wales.