The Shadow Queen

by Rebecca Dean

  He looked up from his now-clasped hands and said apologetically, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Simpson. I’m being a bore.”

  “No, sir. You’re not.”

  She held his eyes in the way she had done at Burrough Court.

  “Was the town you visited a mining town, sir?”

  Even as she asked the question she knew she was seriously breaking the rules of royal etiquette. It was up to the prince to lead in any conversation. Pamela had been quite explicit about it when she had given her last-minute pointers before her visit to Melton. “If the prince holds you in conversation, Wally, never introduce a new subject into it and never, never, discuss politics or anything of a controversial nature.”

  That it was totally unheard of for anyone to question him went so much without saying that Pamela hadn’t even reminded her of it.

  “It was a steel town, Mrs. Simpson.” He paused, unclasped his hands, and fiddled nervously with his bow tie. “May I call you Wallis? Mrs. Simpson sounds so formal when we’re beginning to be such good friends.”

  Wallis caught her breath, not at the honor, but at the realization that he was shy.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, beginning to see him in an entirely new light. “I’d be honored if you would call me Wallis.”

  All around them was laughter and chatter and from the adjoining room the strains of a Jerome Kern quickstep.

  They were oblivious to it.

  “It’s this damned economic depression,” he said, his brow furrowed, his voice passionate. “It’s crippling the working classes. You’ve no idea of the misery I see when I travel north, or into South Wales. Men who can’t feed their families. Children going hungry. I spoke to a man today and asked him what his trade was. He said he was a foreman riveter. I asked him how long it was since he had worked and he said it had been five years. Five years! He wanted hope from me, Wallis, and what hope could I give him? Was I supposed to tell him that the government was doing all that it could and that he simply had to be patient? What possible solace would that have been to a poor blighter who, through no fault of his own, has been on the dole for five years?”

  Wallis hesitated and then said, “The fact that you were there, sir, would have been a comfort to him. It would have shown him that you care, that the monarchy hasn’t forgotten about him and the thousands of others like him.”

  The expression in his eyes changed. He was now looking at her like a drowning man seeing a life raft.

  “Do you think so, Wallis? Do you really think so?”

  “I’m sure of it, sir, and I know that you’ll do everything in your power to help men like the one you have just spoken of.”

  “Royal power in British politics is limited to the power of suggestion, but I’m certainly going to do something, Wallis. By God I am!”

  The foxtrot had come to an end. The small orchestra was now playing a tango. Edward’s ability to tango with great panache was legendary, and Thelma came back into the room at a tripping little run, George in her wake.

  “It’s a tango, sir,” she said to Edward, her dark eyes shining. “And as you are just back from Argentina, I just know you will be aching to dance it.”

  Wallis had never seen a man who looked less like wanting to tango. Nevertheless, he rose to his feet. “Anything to please,” he said with a tired smile. “Excuse me, Wallis.”

  Thelma was too busy chattering away about how the tango was in her Latin-American blood to notice Edward’s use of Wallis’s first name.

  George noticed it, though. As Edward escorted Thelma toward the adjoining room and the dance floor, he raised an eyebrow queryingly at her.

  Wallis ignored it. Her newfound relationship with the Prince of Wales was her affair and no one else’s. Without a word of explanation she rose to her feet and strolled off in search of the buffet table.

  She was still in the supper room, eating grapes that had been stuffed with cream cheese, when from the drawing room she heard Edward bidding everyone good night.

  “I’ve had a long day,” she heard him saying, “and am still recovering from my long return journey from South America. It’s been a splendid party. Good night, everyone.”

  From the supper room’s open doorway Wallis saw Thelma accompany him out into the hall in order to say a personal good night to him at the door.

  She ate another grape, wondering how it was that Thelma had been so blindly unable to pick up on Edward’s mood and his need to talk about his day and of how defeated and crushed it had made him feel.

  She remembered the change in his mood at the end of his conversation with her. Of his fervor and determination. The change in him was one she had achieved and, if she were given the chance, it was something she knew she would always be able to achieve.

  “So there you are,” Ernest said, breaking in on her thoughts. “I wondered where you’d got to. The orchestra is now playing a waltz. I can manage that even if I can’t manage a tango.”

  As they waltzed, Wallis’s thoughts were still full of her extraordinary conversation with Prince Edward. His compassion for the unemployed had been real and touchingly deep. She wondered whom else he spoke to in such an agonized and confiding way and suspected it was no one.

  Thelma danced past them with Tarquin.

  Ernest removed his hand from hers in order to glance down at his watch. “It’s after midnight, darling. Unlike most people here I have an office I need to go to in the morning. Let’s call it a day, shall we?”

  Wallis nodded. Now that the prince had gone she had no further need to stay.

  They said their good-byes and retrieved their coats. Thelma, the party now being in full swing, didn’t trouble to accompany them to the door.

  When it was opened for them, only the butler saw the royal Daimler still parked outside and the Prince of Wales leaning against it, smoking a cigarette.

  “I wondered,” the prince said, as they walked down the steps to the pavement, “if I might offer you both a lift home?”

  A shell-shocked Ernest opened his mouth to stammer that it wouldn’t be necessary, that they had their own car and chauffeur waiting for them.

  Wallis, anticipating what he was about to say, said swiftly, “That would be most kind of you, sir. We would much appreciate it.”

  The royal chauffeur opened the near door of the Daimler. The prince stepped inside. Wallis and Ernest followed.

  “G” Trotter was in the front passenger seat and greeted them as though their being given a lift home by the Prince of Wales were quite in the normal run of things.

  “Whereabouts do you live, Mr. Simpson?” Edward asked.

  “Bryanston Court, on George Street, sir. Not far from Marble Arch.” Ernest’s voice sounded as if hands were squeezing his windpipe.

  Edward repeated the address to his chauffeur and then said, “I’ve just found myself a marvelous new home. It’s called Fort Belvedere and it’s an eighteenth-century house owned by the Crown on land near to the castle at Windsor. When I told the king I would like to move into it, he called it a queer old place, but I already love it. It’s been neglected for years and I’m going to have a wonderful time fixing it up. When I’ve done so I would like it very much if you would both visit me there and tell me what you think of it.”

  Wallis thought Ernest was going to pass out with pride and pleasure.

  “Does it have gardens, sir?” Wallis asked. “If the house has been neglected for a long time, I imagine the gardens will have been neglected as well.”

  He shot her the smile that over the last two decades and his many tours abroad had charmed millions.

  “It has a wonderful garden, Mrs. Simpson. The land descends in a gentle slope toward Virginia Water, where as a child I paddled in a rowboat with my brothers. It is, though, as you have suspected, desperately overgrown. The first thing I shall need when I move in, is a billhook in order to clear the undergrowth.”

  The short journey was nearly over.

  The Daimler slid to a halt outside their block of
flats in George Street.

  When the chauffeur opened the rear doors for them and they stepped out of the car, Edward stepped out onto the pavement with them.

  “Good-bye,” he said to Ernest, shaking him by the hand. “And don’t forget that when you visit the fort, billhooks and scythes will be an absolute necessity.”

  “No, sir.” Ernest sounded as if he were in desperate need of a restorative drink of brandy. “Thank you for the lift, sir. It’s been a great honor.”

  “Good-bye, Mrs. Simpson.” Edward shook her hand, and Wallis dipped into a curtsey. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

  “The pleasure has been all mine, sir.”

  He turned away from them, toward the Daimler.

  The fairy-tale evening was at an end.

  On unsteady legs Ernest mounted the steps leading to Bryanston Court, and Wallis followed him.

  As Ernest disappeared into the building she paused on the top step and then, in order to see the Daimler drive away, turned around.

  The Daimler was still there and the prince was still standing beside it.

  She knew, just as she had known when she had left the party, that he was standing beside it because he was waiting for her.

  Slowly she began to walk back down the short flight of steps toward him.

  “No one,” he said thickly as she reached him, “has ever made me feel as if they truly know me in the way you have done this evening, Wallis. No one before has ever shown any interest in my job of work as a Prince of Wales.”

  The street was silent of traffic. The night very still. The moon and the stars very bright.

  Wallis was aware of a sensation she had felt only once before. The sensation when, in faraway China in a small, dark, incense-filled room, Madame Xiuxiu had placed scrawny, birdlike hands on her head.

  The singsong words said then came back to her now.

  “You are a woman of great destiny. The man who will love you will love you with every atom of his being. Kissed by the sun, he will be the ruler of kingdoms and you will be his shadow queen. The love you will share will echo down the centuries.”

  She had dismissed the prediction as being nothing but fanciful imaginings.

  The description of a man who would one day be the ruler of kingdoms had clearly never applied to either Felipe or Ernest.

  It did, though, apply to Edward, Prince of Wales.

  As she looked into his eyes, saw the need there and the hope, she knew there had been nothing fanciful about Madame Xiuxiu’s prediction. The old Chinese woman had seen into her future, and it was a future beyond all her imaginings.

  “Will you talk with me again, Wallis?” There was urgency in his voice and in his eyes. In the moonlight his hair was the color of pale wheat. “Will you dine with me tomorrow night?”

  Knowing that tomorrow night was only going to be the first in a lifetime of such nights, her lips curved in a deep, radiant smile.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “Of course I will.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Wallis’s many biographers have all had to face up to the mystery of her sexuality and have done so in many different ways. Some have perpetuated the myth of the “China Dossier,” a dossier drawn up allegedly at King George V’s request and in which Wallis is said to have accompanied her husband, Win Spencer, to Chinese “singsong houses” where, virtually a prostitute, she learned sexual arts that later bewitched and enslaved Prince Edward. (At the time of the abdication, no slur about Wallis was too salacious.) Other, very different speculations, have been made: that she was not really a woman at all, but a man, or that she was a hermaphrodite. She certainly had masculine characteristics in that she was angular and flat-chested with unusually large hands and a very strong jawline.

  The Shadow Queen is a novel and, though it is based on the factual elements of Wallis’s life, the fact is mixed with fiction. (Pamela, John Jasper, and the Houghtons are all fictional characters.) The freedom that comes with being a novelist and not a biographer has enabled me to come to my own theory about Wallis’s sexuality, and I based it on things Wallis is quoted as having said, and on the surmises of some of her many biographers.

  Greg King, in his excellent biography The Duchess of Windsor: The Uncommon Life of Wallis Simpson, quotes Wallis as having said in 1936 to Jack Aird, Prince Edward’s equerry—and prior to her marriage to Edward—“I have had two husbands and I never went to bed with either of them.” Donald Spoto, in his 1995 book Dynasty, cites Wallis as having told Herman Rogers, who gave her away on her marriage to Edward, that she had “never had sexual intercourse with either of her first two husbands nor had she ever allowed anyone else to touch her below what she called her personal Mason-Dixon line.” Greg King also cites Wallis’s lawyer in her later years, Maître Suzanne Blum, as saying, “Wallis remained a virgin until her death.” Wallis’s mother is quoted in several biographies as having said that Wallis could never have children. I coupled these intriguing quotes with the mystery of why Wallis’s first husband, Earl Winfield Spencer, should have changed in attitude toward her after their marriage, becoming violently abusive and accusing her of “not being a real woman.” In the most recent biography of Wallis, That Woman, Anne Sebba writes that Wallis may have been born with a disorder of sex development (DSD) or intersexuality, a term that embraces a wide range of conditions and would have explained much about Wallis’s distinctively masculine appearance and the hints Wallis herself gave about her intimate relations with Win Spencer and Ernest Simpson.

  The conclusion is my own, a theory not based on fact, for there are no facts to base it on. If it were true, though, it would answer a lot of the speculation that has been made about her.

  The Shadow Queen ends in 1931. In January 1934 Thelma sailed to the United States in order to be supportive to her sister, who was engaged in a custody battle for her daughter. By the time she returned, Wallis had become the great love of Prince Edward’s life. In January 1936 he succeeded his father as king of the United Kingdom and all her Dominions beyond the Seas and as emperor of India. His one desire was to marry Wallis and, at his coronation, to have her crowned as his queen consort. The prospect of a twice-divorced woman becoming queen was one the British government and church violently opposed. Faced with the choice of remaining king or of marrying the woman he loved, Edward saw no choice at all. On December 10, 1936, Edward abdicated from the greatest throne in the world. Thereafter he and Wallis were known as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and made their home in France. To the end of Edward’s life, his love for Wallis never faltered. He died in 1972 and is buried in the royal burial ground at Frogmore, Berkshire. Wallis, who died in 1986, lies next to him.

  HISTORICAL MAIN CHARACTERS

  Royalty

  King George V

  Queen Mary

  Prince Edward (David)

  Prince Albert (Bertie—Prince Edward’s brother)

  Prince George (Georgie—Prince Edward’s brother)

  George Mountbatten, second marquess of Milford Haven (Prince Edward’s second cousin)

  Nada (Nadejda) Mountbatten, marchioness of Milford Haven

  Others

  Felipe Espil (first secretary at the Argentinean embassy, Washington, D.C.)

  Lady Thelma Furness

  Bessie Merryman

  Corinne Mustin

  Lieutenant Commander Henry Croskey Mustin

  John Freeman Rasin

  Ernest Aldrich Simpson

  Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer

  Freda Dudley Ward

  Wallis Warfield

  Alice Montague Warfield Rasin Allen

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks are due to my editor, Christine Kopprasch, who has been enormously helpful and supportive; Tina Pohlman, my publisher; and Amy Schneider, my copy editor. My agent, Sheila Crowley at Curtis Brown, has been constantly encouraging, and I am deeply grateful for her pep talks and friendship.

  The Shadow Queen

  READER’S GUIDE

 
1. Very early in the novel, a young Wallis hides beneath the table as her Uncle Sol violently confronts her mother about the nature of their relationship. Though Wallis is too young at this point to understand the substance of their conversation, what impact does this event have on her as both a child and an adult?

  2. Uncle Sol offers Wallis a chance, as his adopted daughter, to live as “one of the richest heiresses in Baltimore,” on the condition that she has no future contact with her mother. Is it fair to ask a child of Wallis’s age to make that choice? What would you do in this situation?

  3. Before Pamela departs for Europe, she and Wallis form a blood pact, stating that they would be friends forever. Considering Pamela’s betrayal of Wallis in the following years, do you feel Pamela was sincere about her end of the pact? How might she and Wallis differ in their notions of fairness, friendship, and even morality?

  4. After receiving word of John Jasper’s delayed return from Europe, Wallis can “hardly believe the battering that fate was giving her.” How else does fate—in the forms of history, chance, and the actions of others—affect Wallis?

  5. Wallis lies to her friend Corinne about her desires to become engaged while in Pensacola, and we are told that “every girl her age was looking to get engaged, because there was no other future for a girl but for marriage.” Does this statement prove true? How does the time period Wallis was born into influence her actions? How would Wallis have conducted herself in the modern age, where the pressure for women to marry is far less significant?