The Shadow Queen (32 page)

P
amela found the next few months deeply boring. John Jasper was now in an officer’s training camp somewhere in the southwest of England, gung ho at the prospect of being speedily sent to France in order to join up with an American battalion under the overall command of Major General “Black Jack” Pershing.

Black Jack is a veteran of the Mexican and Philippine wars
,

he had written to her.

If anyone can give the British and French the support they need in order to finally bring this world war to a close, it’s him
.

Pamela had liked the nickname “Black Jack.” It summed up a handsome, piratical figure. When she had next written to John Jasper, she had asked how old General Pershing was. John Jasper had replied that Black Jack was in his fifties, and she had immediately lost interest.

By the end of June the first wave of American troops had reached France. The
Daily Dispatch
—which Pamela read with added interest now that she knew its editor was married to Rose—had as its headline:

H
EROES’
W
ELCOME FOR
U
S
T
ROOPS IN
F
RANCE

After an all-too-brief leave home, John Jasper was sent to Flanders in order to join one of the American battalions. His first letter to her, hastily scrawled in pencil, had been typically positive.

Black Jack is a superb commander, Pammie. Though the British and French don’t particularly want an American army—they simply want men—he’s digging his heels in and not allowing us to be dispersed under British and French commands. We are the U.S. Army in Europe—and he’s making sure everyone knows it
.

It was interesting information but did nothing to relieve her boredom. Edward’s brief letters to her weren’t much better, though as he had now taken to addressing her as “My Angel,” they did send a shiver of anticipation down her spine.

Even though his letters weren’t subject to the same kind of censorship as other mail from the front, he still carefully never mentioned names or places or dates. He did, though, ask her for a photograph.
It will cheer me up enormously
, he wrote in handwriting that sloped very heavily to the right,
and will do me worlds of good
.

W
ith John Jasper no longer at home to see her doing so, she began wearing the emerald brooch when out to dinner with friends. “It’s a gift from an admirer,” she said whenever it was commented on, half hoping that two and two would be put together and half fearing it would be, in case too much early speculation should work against her and not for her.

In July she received another letter from Edith, this time with news of Wallis in it.

Wallis’s last letter to me was from Squantum, near Boston, not Pensacola
,

Edith had written in painfully neat handwriting.

Her husband has been put in command of the naval air base there. Wallis says he is desperately disappointed at not being posted overseas on active service. All three of his brothers are serving in Europe. Dumaresque, who was best man at their wedding, has joined the Lafayette Escadrille (a squadron of the French air service) and his two younger brothers, Egbert and Frederick, are members of the U.S. expeditionary forces in France. At Pensacola they lived on the base, but Wallis says Squantum is too new a base for there to be such facilities, and their home is a hotel apartment in the Back Bay section of Boston. She didn’t say she was lonely, but I imagine she is, for I can’t think of any old Oldfields girls who were Bostonians. Wallis says she spends most of her time visiting places of historical interest in order to fill up her day
.

Pamela had smiled wryly, amused by the fact that Wally was quite obviously just as bored as she now was.

In October she received a letter from Prince Edward that filled her with dismay.

Dearest Angel
,

he wrote in his distinctive handwriting,

I hardly know how to break this news to you, but the next letters you receive from me will be from even further away than France
.

She went immediately to the one person who
did
know of Edward’s infatuation for her and of the steady stream of letters he sent to her.

“What does he mean?” she demanded of her stepfather. “Where is he being posted? Egypt? Palestine? Why can’t even the Prince of Wales mention place names in his correspondence?”

Tarquin clipped the end of a cigar and lit it.

“Because although his mail isn’t subject to censorship, there’s a principle at stake and he’s adhering to it, and because at the moment the situation with regard to the Italians is critical.”

“Is that where he’s going? Italy?”

They were in the drawing room of Tarquin’s town house in Eaton Square. Her mother wasn’t in residence and wouldn’t be until Tarquin left London for their home in Norfolk. That they no longer spent time in each other’s company was something Pamela uncaringly accepted.

Tarquin blew a plume of blue smoke upward.

“If you read your newspapers, Pamela, you will know that the Italian line is close to collapsing and Russian resistance has already collapsed. It means German troops are bolstering up the Austrians, and if British and French reinforcements aren’t sent immediately to her aid, Italy runs the risk of being knocked out of the war. That being the case, the Fourteenth Army Corps is to be sent south immediately, and it was suggested, at the highest level, that if Prince Edward accompanied the corps it would boost morale in Italy enormously.”

Pamela, uncaring of the Italians, flung herself petulantly down on the nearest chair. “Then there’s no telling when his next leave may be! Oh, this bloody, bloody war! How much longer is it going to go on for?”

“It’s going to go on until we win it—and with American help, that could now be quite soon. A year. Maybe less.”

A
t Christmas John Jasper was home on leave, not looking remotely like the John Jasper who had kissed her good-bye six months earlier. That he had seen horrors beyond telling was imprinted in the deep lines that now furrowed his face and the flat, shuttered expression in his eyes.

For once Pamela had shown sense. She had asked no questions, and when he had used frenzied, violent lovemaking in an effort to blot out the hell he had just left and would soon be returning to, she had responded with a depth of passion even she hadn’t known herself capable of.

“Don’t get yourself killed, John Jasper,” she had said fiercely when the time came for them to say good-bye. “I couldn’t bear it. Truly I couldn’t.”

They had clung together, his head bent low over hers, his mouth touching her hair, her cheek pressed hard against the roughness of his army jacket. For once there were no thoughts of Prince Edward in her mind and, in his, no regrets for having been forced into a marriage he had not wanted.

The fears she felt for John Jasper, fighting in the front line where the average rate of survival for an officer was less than three months, were not fears she felt for Prince Edward. Despite his keenness to be in the thick of the fighting, because he was heir to the throne, the powers that be ensured that his exposure was limited. It was something he had complained bitterly about in one of his letters to her.

All this heir to the throne bosh drives me wild
,

he had written.

I’ve got three brothers and if I should be killed, Bertie would simply become the next heir. If Bertie were to be killed, it would be Henry and, if Henry were killed, it would be George
.

Pamela hadn’t spent time with either Henry or George, but she had been in Prince Albert’s company, and a less likely Prince of Wales and heir to the throne than Bertie she couldn’t imagine. Unlike Edward, but like his father, he possessed no charisma. This lack was made worse by a stammer so bad it made any kind of public speaking an impossibility.

The letters she now began receiving from Edward from Italy were far less guarded about where he was and what he was doing than his letters from France had been. In one of the first ones she received, he wrote of the situation in France, which, despite the arrival of American troops, was as nightmarish as ever.

… It’s not even a stalemate now that small squads of Hun stormtroopers are infiltrating the British front line wherever it has been smashed, creating breaches which the German Eighteenth Army then pour through. As for the situation here in Italy … If it weren’t so tragic, it would be a joke. The Italians have suffered a massive defeat, and British and French help is proving to be too little, too late. The only thing keeping me cheerful are your letters—and your photograph, which I carry with me everywhere. For now, my angel, I must close if I want to catch the King’s Messenger bag. Good night, Pamela darling. Tons and tons of all my very best love, E
.

Sometimes, when she put his letters away in a secret compartment in a jewelry box she had bought precisely for that purpose, she wondered if he also wrote to Marian Coke. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. If he did, though, she was quite sure he wouldn’t be using endearments such as “My Angel!” and “My Darling Angel!” to her.

Edith’s letters arrived as intermittently as ever. In one she wrote that her brother was now one of the cadets training under Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer.

Though not at Squantum, but on a new naval air station on North Island, near San Diego. I haven’t heard from Wallis in quite a while, but Humphrey (my brother) says she has had a nasty fall and is sporting a black eye!

Remembering the monocle that Wallis had worn in order to attract attention when they were at Oldfields, Pamela wondered if Wallis was sporting an eye patch to cover her injured eye and if, on an evening, she wore an eye patch covered in sequins.

At the beginning of 1918 she received two pieces of stupendously good news. John Jasper had been injured, though not seriously.

But seriously enough for me to be in an army hospital. Be warned that I’m going to have a permanent limp, but at least I still have my leg, which is more than most of the other poor buggers here have
.

Unsaid was that he was also now far from the front line and that she no longer ran the daily risk of receiving a black-edged telegram.

The other piece of good news was from Prince Edward.

Dearest Angel!

I’ve been given six weeks’ home leave in order to make a tour of the defence plants. I’m certainly going to make sure that there will also be time for a little rest and recreation in London. I haven’t danced now for over half a year, so get your dancing shoes out and ready! Tons and tons of love, E
.

Excitement spiraled so high, Pamela felt drunk on it. By the time his leave was over everyone in his circle would know she had usurped Lady Coke as being the most important woman in his life—and she was determined to remain so not for a few mere months, but for years.

Mistresses were not something Edward’s father had ever indulged in. A more straitlaced and, in Pamela’s eyes, more boring man than King George would be impossible to find. Edward’s grandfather, King Edward VII, though, had been a very different kettle of fish, a renowned womanizer. His list of mistresses had been long and varied. Many of his affairs had been fleeting, but a handful of mistresses, especially as he had grown older, had stayed the course, and his relationship with his last mistress, Mrs. Kepple, had been regarded by high society as being almost a marriage. Even his long-suffering queen had regarded it as such, sending for Mrs. Kepple when her husband lay dying so that he could have the comfort of having the woman he so dearly loved at his bedside.

That was the kind of mistress Pamela intended to become, but unlike Alice Kepple she wasn’t going to wait for Edward’s middle-aged years before enjoying such a prominent position. She was going to become a royal mistress now and remain so right until, and after, Edward became king.

She clutched the letter elatedly in her hand. John Jasper wouldn’t like the situation, but he would simply have to come to terms with it, as George Kepple had. It was traditional for an Englishman to regard it as an honor if his wife became the mistress of the reigning monarch or his heir. The benefits to him careerwise, financially, and socially were always enormous, and if she couldn’t convince John Jasper of those benefits, she would leave it up to Tarquin to convince him.

She needed new gowns. War shortages had affected high fashion, and material was at a premium. The last time she had visited the Ritz there hadn’t been an enviable frock to be seen. Even worse, a hideous number of the frocks had been black, signifying mourning for a husband, brother, or father.

She shuddered, pushing the memory away, concentrating instead on how she could be clad in something suitably floaty and glittery and eye-catching when she again stepped into Prince Edward’s arms.

H
is next letter to her was brief and to the point.

When we first meet again, can we do so out of the public eye?

With her heart hammering, Pamela had replied that there was nothing she would like better and, realizing he was leaving it up to her to arrange a discreet venue, suggested that, in her stepfather’s absence, they dine à deux at his town house in Eaton Square.

“You are a very naughty girl, Pamela,” Tarquin said to her when she told him of the arrangement she had made. “And I’m damned if I’m leaving town just so you and Prince Edward can enjoy an illicit romantic tryst. However, as I certainly don’t want you doing so in your own home when your husband is lying wounded in a military hospital, I shall absent myself accordingly, but tell His Royal Highness that I expect him to begin making his own arrangements.”