The Shadow Queen (45 page)

T
he next morning they walked in Central Park together down paths hard with glistening, compacted snow. In the afternoon they visited the Metropolitan Museum, discovering, with pleasure, that they both shared the same taste in art. In the evening they dined at the Brevoort, which was conveniently close to her friend’s home in Washington Square. When he said good night to her, he kissed her warmly and gently.

It wasn’t the kind of overture to a love affair—something Wallis was certain they were on the verge of—that she was accustomed to. John Jasper, Win, and Felipe had all—in different ways—been hot-blooded and passionate. Though she had swiftly come to regret it where Win was concerned, Wallis knew herself well enough to know that sexually she was drawn to tigers.

Everything about Ernest’s quiet, undemanding personality indicated he was far from being a tiger. Later, lying in bed and thinking about the calm, peaceful, and enjoyable day they had spent together, she concluded that it didn’t matter. A sexually undemanding man would be far likelier to accommodate himself to her physical disability than a demanding one. After the turbulence of the last few years, she needed a relationship that would be a haven of tranquillity, and even though she had known Ernest for barely twenty-four hours, she knew that being with him would always be restful and, because he was intelligent and cultured, never boring.

F
rom that night on, life settled into a very agreeable pattern. She began spending far more time in New York than her Warrenton residency requirements allowed, but no one seemed to notice, and her divorce petition continued to move slowly but steadily toward a satisfactory conclusion. Making it easier for them to be together more often, Ernest often traveled to Warrenton, and though Warrenton didn’t provide them with the diversions of New York—museums and art galleries and elegant restaurants and Broadway shows—Wallis still enjoyed being with him.

Because of her experience in circumnavigating her physical disability, Ernest was as happy in bed with her as Felipe had been. If her pleasure wasn’t as great as it had been with Felipe, it was still satisfactory. She and Ernest were, in the words her mother had used about her third husband, “comfy together.” It wasn’t the world-shattering passion the Chinese astrologer had predicted for her, but she was now sure that the words imprinted so deeply in her memory were the result of hypnotism and her own deeply hoped-for wishes, not words that had actually been spoken.

I
n late spring her Aunt Bessie, now financially well off thanks to a legacy from her late employer, asked her if she would like to accompany her on a lengthy trip to Europe, all expenses paid. Even though she was putting her residency requirements at risk, it was an offer Wallis couldn’t bring herself to refuse.

Ernest was appalled.

“But Wallis, sweetheart, that means we’ll be separated for the whole of the summer, perhaps for longer!”

She curled her arm lovingly through his.

“Please try to understand,” she said coaxingly. “I’ll never be given such an opportunity again, and if I don’t accept, I doubt if Bessie will make the trip. Not alone. I owe her a great deal and she’s relying on me to say yes.”

Ernest, who had met Aunt Bessie and liked her a great deal, ran a hand defeatedly over his close-cropped, neatly trimmed hair. “I’m going to be understanding about this trip only on one condition, Wallis.”

Wallis, knowing what the condition was going to be, leaned her head against his shoulder so that their eyes couldn’t meet.

“My divorce is already finalized and yours will be finalized by the end of the year. When it is, I want you to marry me. I love you too deeply to care about whether we can have children or not. All I want to do is to spend my life with you. I’ve never been as happy as I have been these last few months.”

Apart from the early days of her relationships with John Jasper, Win, and Felipe, Wallis had never been happier either, and she knew that unlike the others, Ernest would never be unfaithful to her and that he most certainly wouldn’t be physically abusive to her. The problem was that though she loved him, she wasn’t in love in an overpowering, being-swept-off-her-feet way, and settling for anything less was something she couldn’t yet quite bring herself to do.

When she knew that her true feelings weren’t showing in her eyes, she turned toward him, sliding her arms up and around his neck. “I love you, too, Ernest.” Her voice was husky with truth. Seeing the flare of hope in his eyes, she added swiftly, “I’m just not sure that I’m ready to marry again yet. My marriage to Win was such a nightmare, and though I know things would be very different between the two of us, I’m just not ready to tie the knot for a second time. At least not yet. Ask me again when I’m back from Europe and when my divorce has been granted—and don’t in the meantime stop loving me, Ernest. You’ve become the center of my life. You do know that, don’t you?”

He nodded, his arms tightening around her as he fought his disappointment. “Happiness is too precious not to take it when it’s there for the taking, Wallis,” he said thickly. “By the time you get your divorce I’ll be installed in Simpson, Spence and Young’s London office. I know you have friends in London. As we’ll be living there after our marriage, we could marry there. We’ll be happy together, darling. I know we will be.”

Wallis was beginning to feel more and more certain that Ernest was right. He would bring stability into her life, stability her life badly needed. Her intention had always been to move to London after her divorce, and the thought of living there as a married woman, with a home of her own, was tempting.

And so I’m cruising the Mediterranean with Aunt Bessie
,

she wrote to Pamela a few weeks later.

At the moment we are berthed at Naples. From here our itinerary is Palermo and then Trieste, where we leave the ship. Aunt Bessie’s intention is that we then travel by either train or hired car back across southern Europe, stopping at Monte Carlo, Nice, Avignon, and Arles until we eventually reach Paris
.

As for my love life—I’m in a quandary and wish to goodness you were around for me to talk it all out with. Ernest has asked me to marry him—something I knew he would eventually do from the evening I first met him. He’s kind, sensitive, intelligent. His mother is American and he was brought up here, but he’s British, both legally and by inclination. He’s financially secure (after the way I had to live on my Uncle Sol’s charity in my Baltimore days and how since I’ve had to rely on a small Navy allowance and poker winnings, you can’t imagine how happy those words make me). I like being with him. He makes me feel safe—and that, I think, is the problem. I’m not used to feeling safe and secure and to tell you the truth, Pamela, I find it a little boring. I’ve gotten so used to excitement that now I’m living without it, I miss it. (Did I tell you that when I traveled alone from Shanghai to Peking, the train was boarded by bandits? They were terrifyingly scary but thankfully weren’t on a kidnapping spree.)

So there it is. I can stop drifting. Marry Ernest and live happily and unexcitingly, ever after. Or I can not marry Ernest and wait on fate. So far, though, fate has not been overwhelmingly kind and I’m not growing any younger. I’m thirty-one, and what is the likelihood of a prince on a white charger carrying off a thirty-one-year-old middle-aged damsel?

In the early autumn, when they were in Paris, Bessie said she was ready for home, but that Wallis could stay on in Paris for a little while if she wanted to.

Wallis did want to. Ernest had now taken over the running of the family firm in London, and in every letter she received from him he was urging her to join him there and to marry him. Becoming Mrs. Ernest Simpson was something Wallis still hadn’t made up her mind about, and Corinne hadn’t helped matters when, in her last letter to her, she’d written,

Remember the old jingle, Skinny? “To change the name and not the letter, is a change for the worse, not for the better.” As Spencer and Simpson have the same initial, I thought I’d better warn you!

That her time for hiding in Paris had run its course came out of the blue. Walking down the boulevard toward her hotel, she paused at a newsstand and bought a copy of the early edition of the
Paris Herald
. Turning it over, she was stunned to read that her Uncle Sol had died the previous day. Back at her hotel, a cable from Alice was waiting for her.

Uncle Sol dead. Heart failure. Funeral Friday. Mama

Though there was no way she could be in Baltimore in time for the funeral, she knew then and there that it was time to go home. Their relationship had never been easy, but he was the only father figure she had ever known. She owed it to him to show her respects by returning home.

Forty-eight hours later she was aboard a liner heading for New York.

“I
’m nervous about the will, honey,” Alice said as she and Wallis set out for 34 East Preston Street to hear the reading. “If it weren’t that you’re about to become divorced, I’m sure as God made little green apples Sol would have left the bulk of his fortune to you.” Wallis had never seen anyone literally wringing their hands, but her mother was wringing them now. “He was too furious with you for bringing shame on his family name. No Warfield has ever been divorced and he just couldn’t stomach it, Wallis. He said the very word stuck in his craw.”

“Stop worrying, Mama. How could Uncle Sol
not
have left me any money? You’re wrong, though, in thinking there was a time when he might have left me all of it. Devout Episcopalians are duty bound to leave generously to charity. What I will get is a smidgen—but a smidgen of such a large amount will, for me, be a fortune.”

The reading of Sol’s last will and testament took place in 34 East Preston Street’s parlor. Her Uncle Emory was seated in the rosewood rocking chair from which her grandmother had ruled the household. His wife was seated on the slippery leather couch that Wallis, as a child, had been unable to sit on without, much to her grandmother’s exasperation, sliding off it. Her grandmother’s voice rang in her memory as if it were yesterday.
Bessie Wallis, can’t you be still for just a minute? Bessie Wallis, how will you ever grow up to be a lady unless you learn to keep your back straight?

Everywhere she looked there were memories. The little petit-point-covered stool beside the rocker where, for hours on end, she had sat listening to her grandmother tell stories about Robert de Warfield and Pagan de Warfield and of how she must never forget that Warfields were descended from England’s William the Conqueror.

There were Warfield cousins in the room she barely recognized. Henry, once so handsome, now not even looking distinguished. He carefully avoided her eyes, not wanting to reveal what his hopes were where Sol’s vast fortune was concerned.

Glasses of sherry were handed around.

Sol’s lawyer cleared his throat and in a thin reedy voice began the reading.

The total amount of the estate was over five million dollars. Wallis, remembering how, in the days before her mother had married Mr. Rasin, her uncle had said if she would leave her mother and promise to never see her again, he would make her his heiress, clasped gloved hands tightly in her lap. Despite the huge amount of money now to be apportioned, the decision she had made then, when a vulnerable young girl, was not one she regretted.

There was tension in the room as it became apparent that the bequests to family being read out were nominal, not generous. Wallis was aware of several pairs of eyes sliding in her direction as the possibility dawned that this was because the bulk of his estate was being left to her.

After what seemed an eternity of waiting, the reedy voice intoned: “To my niece, Bessiewallis Spencer, wife of Winfield Spencer, I bequeath the interest from fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of shares in railway stock and the Alleghany Company and the Texas Company.”

The lawyer paused, and Wallis licked dry lips as she waited for him to continue. Uncle Sol referring to her as Bessiewallis didn’t bode well, as he knew it was a name she hadn’t answered to since she was a very young child and that she disliked it intensely. The rider
wife of Winfield Spencer
was more promising, for it indicated that the will had been made before she had begun divorce proceedings against Win and, if that was the case, her mother’s fears that her divorce would have affected what Sol was going to leave her would be proved groundless.

“This sum,” the lawyer continued, “to be paid to my niece in quarterly installments, so long as she shall live and not remarry.”

He paused, this time for a little longer.

Wallis waited expectantly.

“The remainder of my estate,” the lawyer said, “I leave for the formation of a home for aged and indigent gentlewomen in memory of my mother, Anne Emory Warfield, a room to be set aside therein for my niece, Bessiewallis Spencer, if ever she should need it.”

It was a second or two before Wallis could comprehend the enormity of the blow and the insult her uncle had dealt her. Whatever his bequests to her may have originally been, the will that had just been read had clearly been made after she had begun divorce proceedings against Win. The amount left to her, and the terms under which it had been left, cut fierce and deep, but it was the public insinuation that she would one day have need of his house of charity for impoverished gentlewomen that made her proud Warfield blood boil with such rage, she thought she was going to explode.

Her mother made a stifled sound of anguish beside her.

A Warfield cousin sniggered.

Wallis rose to her feet, her back straight, her head high. Aware that she was now most certainly going to marry Ernest, she left 34 East Preston Street knowing she was doing so for the last time. In another few weeks it would be Christmas, and by then she would have her divorce. Once it had been finally granted, she would write to Ernest, telling him she would be happy to become his wife, and then, before sailing to join him in London, she would enjoy six months of freedom as a single woman by staying with the Rogerses, who, having left Peking, were now living in a villa in the hills above Cannes, in the south of France.