The Shadow Queen (5 page)

By the time Wallis returned to Baltimore in September, she was glowing with the knowledge that she had aroused improper feelings in her handsome twenty-year-old cousin. The glow of burgeoning sexual confidence nearly compensated her for what had been the downside of her stay at Pot Springs: an even greater awareness of her poor-relation status.

Every relation she had lived with had the same kind of financial security as her Uncle Emory’s family. A leisured lifestyle, such as the one lived at Pot Springs, was one her many Warfield and Montague cousins took for granted. Only she, out of all of them, couldn’t do so. Without her Uncle Emory’s kindness, her summer would have been spent in the heat of Baltimore, helping her mother cook dinner for their fellow tenants in an effort to make ends meet.

“C
annes was blissful,” Pamela said as they walked in with the rest of their classmates toward the nearby gymnasium where their games lessons took place. “The British upper classes don’t patronize it in the height of summer—it’s too hot—but my mother visited with her new husband. He’s an earl, which is a couple of degrees down in rank from a duke, and so Mama is now a countess, not a duchess. She doesn’t seem to mind much, and I don’t blame her. Tarquin is the most awful fun.”

“Tarquin?”

They weren’t supposed to talk as they walked the short distance from Arundell to the gymnasium, but Pamela never gave a fig for school rules and Wallis was now too mystified to care about any reprimand she might receive.

“Tarquin St. Maur. He’s my new stepfather. He’s quite young. Much younger than Mama. He said he didn’t want me calling him Papa. He said it would make him feel as old as Moses. After Cannes Papa went to Nice to meet up with an old lady love, and I went to England with Mama and Tarquin.”

“To London?”

The gymnasium was on the corner of Charles Street and Mount Vernon Avenue and was now only twenty yards or so away.

“No, silly. No one stays in London during August. Tarquin’s pile is in Norfolk, quite near to Sandringham.”

Wally had been a friend of Pamela’s for long enough to know that in English slang, a
pile
was a stately home of mammoth proportions. And she knew what was meant by Sandringham. Sandringham was the country home of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.

Before she could even ask about King Edward, Pamela said, “The king wasn’t at Sandringham. He was at Cowes, sailing. The Prince of Wales and his family were there, though. They live there all the time. Not actually in Sandringham House itself, but on the Sandringham estate. Mama says Prince George and Princess May are pathetically provincial and she didn’t really want to spend time with them, but Tarquin was insistent. He went to naval college with Prince George, and between men that kind of thing matters.”

“D’you mean to say that you met the prince and princess?” Wallis was so stunned she forgot to whisper, and in front of them several heads turned.

“Meeting royalty is no great shakes for me, Wallis. Didn’t I ever tell you Queen Victoria was my mother’s godmother?”

“No, you didn’t!”

They were at the gymnasium now and Miss Noland, who took them for games and whom they both liked immensely, shook her head sternly in their direction.

“More later, Wally,” Pamela said, and, because they were due to play basketball and she was on the team opposite Wallis, she sauntered off to join her teammates, leaving Wallis with a host of unasked questions.

By inclination Wallis was not particularly athletic, but her competitiveness ensured that she worked just as hard in the gym as in the classroom, and to her great satisfaction she was captain of her team. Within seconds of the game starting she was giving it all her concentration, and when she shot the ball into the net from outside the three-point line, she was so euphoric she almost forget about all the questions she wanted to ask Pamela about Prince George and Princess Mary.

“Well done, Wallis! Keep up the speed!” Miss Noland shouted from the side of the court. And then, seconds later, “That’s a foul, Pamela! When will you understand that you can’t impede another player if she is still moving?”

After the match, when they were again arranged in pairs for the short walk back to Arundell, she said urgently to Pamela, “The Prince and Princess of Wales. What were they like?”

“Stuffy. Neither of them even spoke a word to me. I was sent off to play with the children.”

“The children?”

“Prince Henry, who is always called Harry, and Prince George, named after his father. Harry is seven and George is five. Needless to say, I didn’t want to spend time with either of them. I wouldn’t have done, either, if it hadn’t been for their sister joining us. She’s ten, and if she’d been any fun I would have broken my rule of never spending time with anyone younger than myself, but she wasn’t. She’s so shy and tongue-tied it’s criminal.”

Wallis was mesmerized. Pamela was speaking about a royal princess in the same offhand way she spoke about Mabel Morgan or Violet Dix.

“Then things got a whole lot better, because Bertie and David turned up. Bertie is twelve,” Pamela continued as they turned off Charles Street, “and David is thirteen. Only he doesn’t look it. He looks much younger.”

Thinking of her own school vacation and the thrilling time she had spent with her cousin Henry, Wallis was vastly relieved that she did at least have the edge over Pamela where a flirtation with the opposite sex was concerned.

“And so did you ignore him?” she asked as they neared the school gates.

“Of course I didn’t ignore him!” Pamela never wore her hair braided, and she lifted a long fall of golden waves back over her shoulder. “David is Prince Edward, and after his father he’s next in line to the throne. By the time I’m a debutante he’ll be just the right age for me, and so I made sure that we got on terrifically well and that he liked me a lot.”

She grinned naughtily as they made their way into school. “Heirs to thrones always marry young, and I would make a terrific princess. As you are my best friend, Wally, I promise you that if David comes up to scratch, you will be chief bridesmaid at our Westminster Abbey wedding!”

Chapter Four

A
fter that particular conversation, Wallis’s interest in the British royal family increased. It was relatively easy to come across newspaper photographs of King Edward and Queen Alexandra—though the majority of photographs were of King Edward without his queen and had been taken at fashionable resorts such as Baden-Baden, or Cowes, or Biarritz. American news items about the Prince and Princess of Wales were much rarer, and in the only newspaper photograph of them with their children, Prince Edward looked quite nondescript apart from his naval cadet uniform and hair that looked to be an even paler gold than Pamela’s.

She clipped it nevertheless. It was quite the rage at Arundell to collect pinup photographs of favorite sports stars or of any other personable young man they could fantasize and daydream about. So far the pride of Wallis’s collection was a photograph of Henry. All the girls had oohed and aahed over Henry. Pamela, however, had stolen the show by flaunting a photograph taken in Cannes by her stepfather. It was of twenty-one-year-old Prince Sergei Romanov. And he had his arm around Pamela’s shoulders.

Privately, Wallis would very much have liked to add a photograph of John Jasper to her growing collection, but there was little chance of doing so because John Jasper now attended a boys’ school over on Lake Avenue and, much to her disappointment, the only time she now saw him was at the rollerskating rink.

Her mother’s angry row with Aunt Bessie had long since been made up—though Wallis knew her aunt still disapproved of the way her mother persisted in spending time with gentlemen friends.

“The trouble with your mother,” she said once to Wallis, when Christmas was over and Baltimore lay deep in snow, “is that she’s a romantic. She doesn’t have a commonsense idea in her head.”

I
t was a remark Wallis remembered when her mother finally admitted she wasn’t making money out of the dinners she was giving.

Nervously she showed Wallis a drawer crammed full of unpaid bills. “I don’t know how people can think I owe them so much,” she said, clutching a tear-sodden handkerchief. “Do you think some of those nice tradesmen are trying to cheat me?”

Wallis, who was no better at figures than Alice, didn’t know. Aunt Bessie had known, though.

“Dear Lord Almighty, Alice!” she said when Wallis asked her to look at the bills. “No one is trying to cheat you. You’ve been cheating yourself! How could you ever hope to make a profit giving dinners as elaborate as you have been doing, for the money you’ve been charging?”

She fanned the bills out on their dining table.

“Diamondback terrapin? And lobsters? And prime rib and squab? You haven’t been giving dinners, Alice. You’ve been giving banquets. I’m not surprised you were never short of guests!”

Alice’s tears gave way to sobs. “I g-gave traditional S-southern-style d-dinner parties and that meant my m-menus included the b-best of everything.”

“They certainly did—and now you’re goin’ to have to pay for being so foolish.” Her voice softened and she reached out across the table and covered Alice’s hands with hers. “You aren’t a businesswoman, Alice. It’s something you’re just going to have to accept.”

Alice’s slender shoulders sagged. “But the bills, Bessie.” Her voice cracked and broke. “I can’t go to Sol with them. He can hardly bring himself to speak to me since someone told him about me and …”—she threw a quick glance in Wallis’s direction—“…  since my friendship with you-know-who.”

At the mention of “you-know-who,” Bessie’s mouth tightened, but there was only love and infinite patience in her voice as she said, “Sol doesn’t have to know, Alice dear.” She scooped the bills from the table and stuffed them into her handbag. “I’ll see to these, but in future there are to be no more business ventures. And try to keep on the good side of Sol, Alice. He’s all that stands between you and really severe financial difficulties.”

W
allis had no idea who “you-know-who” was, but his existence troubled her greatly.

“But why?” Pamela asked when she told her about it.

“Because he’s obviously in a different category than the others—and because my mother was so careful not to say his name in front of me.”

Pamela shrugged. “That’s just the way parents are. They don’t realize that when you’re nearly twelve you’re not a child any longer. That’s why I prefer Tarquin to my father. He doesn’t treat me as though I’m still in leading reins.”

Wallis couldn’t imagine anyone treating Pamela as if she were in leading reins, for she simply wouldn’t have suffered them; she was far too precocious.

“Sergei Romanov kissed me on the lips,” she had told Wallis, not long after coming back from Cannes. “It was a very peculiar experience because he didn’t seem to know how to do it. He tried to push his tongue into my mouth, which was a very silly thing to do, don’t you think? It wasn’t at all pleasant, and I told him that if he wanted to kiss me again he had to do it properly, with his mouth shut.”

Wallis had been round-eyed. No one in their class had been kissed by a boy—and Sergei Romanov wasn’t a boy. He was a twenty-one-year-old adult—and a Russian prince into the bargain.

“And did he kiss you again?” she’d asked, wondering what it might be like to be kissed by John Jasper.

Pamela had given a careless shrug of a shoulder. “No,” she’d said. “He looked panic-stricken and told me I must promise not to tell anyone what he’d done.”

S
till deep in thought as to who her mother’s new beau could be, not able to be as dismissive about it as Pamela had been and for once not wanting Pamela’s company, Wallis slung her roller skates over her shoulder and set off for the one place Pamela never went: the skating rink at Mount Vernon.

The first person she saw there was John Jasper. He was fooling around with a couple of friends, and she knew she couldn’t just skate over and join them. That kind of camaraderie had ended the day they left Miss O’Donnell’s for single-sex schools. Eleven-year-old girls didn’t do that kind of thing. Girls hung together in groups. It was all right, though, for a boy to approach a girl, or a group of girls, on his own. That is, it was all right if he knew the girl or girls in question and if he approached them in a suitably polite manner.

Standing on the side of the skating rink as skaters noisily whizzed past her, Wally wondered how she could best attract John Jasper’s attention. It was brought home to her, for the first time, that where boys were concerned a girl had to make herself stand out from the crowd. Pamela stood out from the crowd simply because she was a duke’s daughter and had waist-length golden hair and mesmerizing sea green eyes.

She, Wally, had no such assets.

For one thing, she wasn’t head-turningly beautiful in the way Pamela was. In fact, apart from having eyes that were an extraordinary violet blue, she wasn’t beautiful at all. She wasn’t even enchantingly pretty in the way her mother was. Though she was now counting the months off to her twelfth birthday, it was quite obvious to Wallis that she wasn’t going to grow up looking like her mother. Her hair was far too dark for one thing, so dark an auburn that it was almost black. Because she liked to capitalize on her far-distant-in-the-past connection to King Powhatan and Pocahontas, she didn’t mind being dark-haired. What she did mind was that she wasn’t fine-boned. Her hands and feet were bigger than she liked—as was her nose—and she had a strong, almost boyish jawline. There was nothing softly rounded about her. Even her shoulders were bonily angular. It didn’t matter too much now, but she was enough of a realist to know that it would in a few years’ time, when she was a debutante and looking for a husband.