The Shadow Queen (12 page)

Forgive the shortness of this letter, but I’m in a mighty hurry—not because I’m due on the field for a baseball match but because I’m about to leave with Pa for New York. He’s heading off to Europe, and at the last minute has insisted I go with him. We sail on the
Bremen
in two days’ time. The powers that be at Loyola won’t be pleased when I don’t return after my weekend home, but what the heck. Europe is an opportunity too good to miss. We’re going to do the whole grand tour thing. London, Paris, Berlin, Geneva, Rome, Vienna. I shall miss you lots and think of you everywhere I go. Don’t forget whose girl you are while I am away. You will be in my heart every step of the way
,

Love now and always,
JJ xxx

PS. Isn’t Pamela at a finishing school near Geneva? With a bit of luck I’ll be able to meet up with her and bring her up to date with what is happening in Baltimore
.

Wallis stared down at the letter, hardly able to believe the battering that fate was giving her. First had been Free’s unexpected death—or at least it had been unexpected to her. Then had come the shattering news that through no fault of his own, he had died leaving her mother unprovided for. Now this. Instead of being able to look forward to further romantic, illicit meetings with John Jasper, he was aboard the
Bremen
, putting thousands and thousands of miles between the two of them.

She didn’t cry easily, and she didn’t cry now. Crying when things went wrong never got anyone anywhere. When, though, would things go right for her? When would she be able to live with the same sense of security her friends all so unthinkingly lived with? No one she had ever met lived off the charity of relatives as, until her mother had married Free, she and her mother had been forced to do—and as they were now being forced to do again.

Her mother would have a home, but only because Sol was providing her with one of his choice. She would remain at Oldfields, but only because her uncle was paying the fees. As for her debutante year, without her uncle she wouldn’t be having a debutante year at all. She wanted to rage aloud at the unfairness of it all, but rage, like tears, was something she couldn’t afford to indulge in. If she wanted friends like Beatrice Astor and Phoebe Schermerhorn to assume her life was as untroubled as theirs, then she had to appear to be as carefree as they were.

She rebrushed her hair and smoothed her skirt.

She was an expert at putting a good face on things. She had, after all, had years and years of practice.

Chapter Eight

E
veryone at Oldfields was exquisitely kind to her over the next few days, treating the loss of her stepfather with as much consideration as if Free had been her actual father. Quicker than she could have imagined, life settled back into a happy routine. Despite the strictness of Miss Nan’s rules and regulations, there was still a lot of fun to be had.

Tableaux were staged in the gym, and, when they were, Wallis was nearly always a central figure. At the end of the summer Miss Nan allowed Wallis’s class to put on a vaudeville show, providing that all sketches and songs were of a high moral standard. As Wallis was tone deaf and couldn’t sing a note, she opted to do a scene from Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, playing the part of Titania, the fairy queen. She won high praise, for she absolutely refused to simper and played the part with great dignity.

It was, though, mousy Edith Miller as Sophie in a scene from Strauss’s
Der Rosenkavalier
that brought the house down. Her singing was a revelation, pure and faultless, and to everyone’s stunned amazement she imbued the part with such ardent abandon that it made the hairs at the back of Wallis’s neck stand on end.

In October she went into Middleburg with Phoebe and Beatrice to have a tintype likeness taken that she could send to John Jasper. In November she escaped Oldfields again in order to go with Phoebe to a Schermerhorn costume party in Washington. Phoebe attended it dressed as a cartoon character, and Wallis, a feather from Elliott Street days in her hair, went as Pocahontas.

Not a month went by when she didn’t receive two or three letters from John Jasper. Shortly before Christmas he wrote to her from Berlin.

Dearest beautiful Wallis
,

I’m missing you more and more with every week that goes by. If I’d known how long Pa intended staying this side of the Atlantic, I’d have let him make this trip solo. Be prepared that when I do come back, I shall have a ring in my pocket for you. I don’t want you thinking of yourself as being anyone’s girl but mine! In your last letter to me you asked what life was like in Germany. All I can say is that it’s very odd and that the Germans in Germany aren’t as easy to get on with as the Germans who live in the States. There’s a very fevered atmosphere here that I don’t much care for. It seems like every day there’s a military procession of one kind or another. The kaiser and his sons are never seen out of army uniform, and they all wear pickelhaubes—medieval-looking helmets which have a fiercesome spike on their crown
.

He’d gone on to tell her of the operas he had seen and the galleries he had visited and had ended his letter with yet another strong hint that when he returned home he was going to ask her to marry him.

I’ve sense enough to know that experiencing all this European culture firsthand is something of a privilege, but the honest truth is I’m already tiring of it and what I want with a deep passion is to be back home in Baltimore, seeing you every possible moment I can. Whenever I get too down about things, I just remember that we have the rest of our lives to look forward to—and that because you’re my girl, I’m one hell of a lucky guy
.

He’d signed off with so many kisses, they ran off the page.

Pamela’s letters were very different. Instead of yearning to be back in Baltimore, she was adamant that she never intended to live there again.

Neither do I intend to live in Switzerland again
,

she wrote in her New Year letter.

Mont-Fleuri has been great, but I’ve had enough of it (after my romance with Hans was discovered, things got quite unpleasant. Hans was dismissed as Mont-Fleuri’s ski instructor, and as everyone blamed me, my popularity took a steep nosedive and so I’ve left and am now in England). I spent Christmas in Norfolk (boring because there were no invites to Sandringham), and am now under my mother and Tarquin’s not very watchful eyes in London. It’s so much fun here I can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else—apart from weekends, of course. At weekends there is always a country-house party somewhere. I can’t imagine what it must be like for you, still stuck at “Gentleness and Courtesy” Oldfields and with nothing more exciting to look forward to than a coming-out season in boring old Baltimore
.

The letter made Wallis so cross she almost didn’t reply to it. When she finally did, she didn’t let her annoyance show. Pamela was still her best friend, the one person in the world who knew all about her financially precarious upbringing: her and her mother’s utter reliance on Uncle Sol, the homemade dresses, the pay-to-attend dinners. It was a litany of scrimp and scrape that even John Jasper didn’t know about. And none of it had ever made the slightest difference to Pamela—a duke’s daughter who, with good reason, was hopeful of catching the eye of Britain’s Prince Edward and who might one day be not only Lady Pamela, but Queen Pamela.

In all of the many letters the two of them had exchanged over the past two years, Wallis had scarcely mentioned John Jasper. He was too special to her for her to want to run the risk of Pamela being dismissive about him. In Pamela’s league, eligible husbands-to-be had to be titled. Coming from an old Baltimore family, no matter how aristocratic, simply wasn’t enough. Now, though, she wanted to make it quite plain to Pamela that where romance was concerned, out of the two of them, her life was by far the more exciting—and that meant telling Pamela that John Jasper would be putting a ring on her finger when he returned home from his grand tour of Europe. In her bold, confident hand she brought Pamela up to date with just what her relationship with John Jasper was, ending with:

… and though John Jasper still has a lot more places to visit, Rome and Vienna and London—I think it’s safe to say that out of this year’s debutantes, I will be the first to walk down the aisle!

At Easter she had the choice of spending the short holiday vacation at either her Aunt Lelia’s, at Wakefield Manor, or in Baltimore. A vacation at Wakefield Manor with her cousins would have been livelier, but her grandmother had broken her hip, and so she opted for Baltimore, so that as well as spending time with her mother, she could also spend a lot of time with her now-housebound grandmother at 34 East Preston Street.

Pamela wrote to her that if she were going to marry John Jasper, she should cross the Atlantic and sow some wild oats beforehand. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she was soon to leave Oldfields and embark on her debutante year, the invitation was one she would have found seriously tempting. The letter had continued with news that Wallis found slightly surprising.

I’ve made a very unusual kind of friend over the last few weeks, Wallis. Her name is Rose Houghton and she’s a good deal older than I am, twenty-five or twenty-six. She is the granddaughter of the Earl of May and has had her hair bobbed! Her father, Viscount Houghton, died ages and ages ago. What is interesting about her is that she is a militant suffragette—and please believe me, Wallis, when I tell you that in Britain militant suffragettes are very militant! My mother loathes her, but Tarquin thinks she’s splendid and, though I couldn’t care less about votes for women, so do I
.

In the same post was a letter from John Jasper.

Dearest darling Wallis
,

We are now in Vienna as guests of a count and countess Pa made good friends with when in Berlin. Like Berlin, Vienna is built on a grandiose scale, but the mood here seems lighter and I far prefer it. As in Berlin there are a lot of military processions, but here they really are a sight to see. Austro-Hungarian uniforms must be the smartest in the world! Next stop is Geneva, where I hope to meet up with Pamela. After that it will be Paris and London—and then home!

Before reading to the end of the letter and the delicious rows and rows of kisses, Wallis laid it down on her lap. She hadn’t yet told John Jasper that Pamela had left Mont-Fleuri, and she decided that when she did, she wouldn’t tell him Pamela had left in disgrace after an illicit romance with the school’s ski instructor. If there was one quality she was known for, it was loyalty, and even though the content of Pamela’s letters was becoming more and more irritating, she had no intention of putting her in a bad light where John Jasper was concerned.

Pamela’s next letter to her was full of the arrangements for her coming-out.

I’m to be presented at court the first week in June, and I’m so hoping Prince Edward will be there. Were there photographs in American newspapers of him when he greeted the president of France at Portsmouth at the beginning of President Poincaré’s state visit here? He looked wonderfully dishy. Every inch a fairy-tale prince. If only I could engage him in conversation for only a few minutes I’m sure he’d be besotted! Rose Houghton’s youngest sister Lily is a talented sculptress, and Rose let slip that Lily once sculpted a bust of HRH. Don’t you find that thrilling? I do. I now want her to do a bust of me, but she lives somewhere romantically remote on a Scottish island, and as I’ve no intention of leaving the excitement of London for the rain-sodden Hebrides, my chances aren’t high
.

Wallis tried hard not to be jealous that Pamela’s coming-out would be launched by a presentation to King George and Queen Mary in the grand ballroom at Buckingham Palace, but it was hard not to be when plans for her own coming-out had been thrown into such disarray by her stepfather’s death.

For a coming-out year, a girl needed clothes. Lots of clothes. And the only person who could now provide the money for them was her Uncle Sol. Before very long she was going to have to ask him for the necessary money. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, and so instead of dwelling on it she thought about Prince Edward instead.

She didn’t know about other American newspapers, but there had been no photograph of Prince Edward and President Poincaré in the
Baltimore Sun
. In her next letter to Pamela she would ask her to send her a cutting from a British newspaper.