The Shadow Queen (8 page)

As her mother said, “I will,” Wallis reached the door and left the room.

Across the hallway, the dining room door was open. A white naperied table was laid, all ready for the reception. In the center of it, in wonderful splendor, stood the many-tiered wedding cake.

Wallis walked into the dining room and stood opposite the cake.

From the parlor came the sound of Free Rasin’s deep bass, “I will.”

Something red exploded in Wallis’s head. With emotion surging in a way she could no longer control, she made a fist with her hand and plunged her fist into the center of the cake.

Icing cracked and splintered. The decorative figures of bride and groom on top of the cake toppled and fell.

Instead of being appalled at what she had done, now that she had started, Wallis was determined to finish her work of destruction. She plunged her hand into the bottom tier of the cake again and again, pulling out great handfuls of raisins, currants, cherries, and candied peel and letting them fall on the table and on the floor.

There came the sound of clapping and then the sound of footsteps crossing the hall. Brought to her senses, she whirled around to find herself face to face with her stepfather.

For a long, never-to-be-forgotten moment, their eyes held. Behind him were a whole group of wedding guests, their mouths round in horror at the sight of the destroyed cake. She heard someone call for her mother and someone else call for her Aunt Bessie.

In a moment of blinding self-hatred, the enormity of what she had done and of how she had totally ruined what should have been one of the happiest moments of her mother’s life flooded over her. Her mother would never again love her. Even Aunt Bessie would never again love her.

Free saw the emotions chasing through her eyes, and in one swift second he put an end to all her fears.

“Why, looky here!” he boomed jovially, stretching his arms wide as he stepped toward her. “Wallis has beaten us all in the race to find the good-luck tokens!” And he put his massive arms around her, lifting her off her feet and twirling her round and round, laughing so loud everyone else began laughing as well.

Chapter Six

“H
e made everything all right at a stroke,” she said afterward to Pamela.

Pamela was impressed. People who could make difficult situations right at a stroke were worth the time of day, in her opinion.

“And so are the two of you friends now?” she asked, wishing she could have been there when Wallis had plunged her fist into the cake. “Do you call him Papa?”

“No.” Wallis looked horrified. “I call him Mr. Rasin.”

Pamela hooted with laughter. “You are a case, Wally. I know I don’t call my stepfather Papa, but I do at least call him by his Christian name!”

Wallis shot her a wry grin. “Mr. Rasin’s Christian name is Free. And somehow, Pamela, I just can’t bring myself to make free with it.”

They giggled at the awfulness of her quip, and then Pamela said, “How about we go to the Mount Vernon rink? You never know who’s going to be there, and at least there’ll be some boys to talk to.”

There had been boys to talk to, but to Wallis’s intense disappointment John Jasper hadn’t been one of them.

W
allis had been correct in thinking Mr. Rasin’s presence at Biddle Street would change her and her mother’s way of life. It did, and though there were times when despite his constant kindness she resented his presence, for the most part the changes were all beneficial, the most beneficial being that her mother no longer had constant money worries.

Though Alice had told Bessie that Free’s father gave him whatever money he needed, his income actually came from a trust fund. To Alice it was a seemingly bottomless well, and she spent joyously, transforming 212 Biddle Street with new carpets, new drapes, elegant furniture, and a magnificent piano.

For Wallis, the piano came with a drawback, for her mother insisted she learn to play it, and as she was tone deaf and had no musical sense whatsoever, her piano lessons were a form of prolonged torture.

Free left the running of Biddle Street and Wallis’s upbringing entirely in Alice’s hands, and he continued to give Wallis surprise presents. His very best present to her was a French bulldog puppy she christened Bully.

If there was any real drawback to Free—which was the name Wallis always used when speaking about him to Pamela or Aunt Bessie, even though she couldn’t bring herself to call him it to his face—it was that he simply didn’t have the knack, when he was at home, of living as a gentleman should live.

He was nearly always happily untidy, which was an agony to Wallis, who was fastidiously neat. Sometimes he breakfasted unshaven. Even worse, he liked to enjoy champagne with his breakfast, something Wallis knew would shock her Episcopalian grandmother to the depths of her being if she ever knew about it. Not having to worry about a lack of money, though, was ample compensation for Free’s embarrassing habits at home.

“And though Biddle Street isn’t a big house and though Free doesn’t often leave it, he’s never overly visible,” she said to Pamela one day in 1911 when they were on their way to a school friend’s fifteenth birthday party. “He spends most of the day in the library, reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes.”

“And drinking?” Pamela asked.

Wallis grinned. “There is usually a bottle of bourbon by the side of his chair, but he never gets falling-down drunk. Not that I’ve ever seen anyway.”

“How is your Uncle Sol? Has he ever got over your mother becoming Mrs. Rasin instead of becoming Mrs. Solomon Warfield?”

They began walking up the steps to the Mount Vernon mansion where the party was being held.

“If he is, he isn’t letting anyone know.” Wallis transferred the present she was carrying from one arm to the other. “Nowadays Uncle Sol is
very
nice to me—and he never mentions my mother’s name. Not ever.”

As at most of her school friends’ parties, the guests were nearly all girls—something that bored Wallis and Pamela equally. Boys were a topic they never tired of discussing, but though Wallis spoke of her cousin Henry quite often to Pamela, she no longer brought John Jasper’s name into their conversations. Although she still only saw him infrequently it was John Jasper, not Henry, who was the center of all her romantic fantasies, and for a reason she wasn’t entirely sure about, she didn’t want Pamela to know how important John Jasper was to her.

It was Pamela who sometimes brought up John Jasper’s name. “Wouldn’t it be fun for you,” she said once, “if John Jasper Bachman had your cousin Henry’s looks and if he became a Navy pilot like your cousin Corinne’s husband? Then he’d be your perfect beau.”

Privately Wallis thought John Jasper just perfect as he was, but she wasn’t going to admit it. “And if he were royal, like Prince Edward,” she’d said, laughing the subject away. “But then, Prince Edward is going to be your beau, isn’t he? Not mine.”

Whereas it had once been hard to find photographs of Prince Edward in newspapers, now he was rarely out of them. A year earlier his grandfather King Edward VII had died and, with his father now king, Prince Edward was heir to the throne. If being royal had always imbued him with glamour, that glamour had intensified a hundredfold now that he was in line to be not only the next king of Great Britain and Ireland and all her dominions over the seas, but the next emperor of India as well.

The crowning of his father, as George V, had only recently taken place in the same week as Wallis’s fifteenth birthday.

“It takes a year for preparations for a coronation to be made,” Pamela had said to her when Wallis had been puzzled by the year time gap. “You would think in that year arrangements could have been made for me to be in London when it happened.” There was disgust in her voice. “As a peer of the realm, my father is eligible for a seat in Westminster Abbey when a king is crowned. If he’d returned to London for the coronation—and taken me with him—think of how wonderful it would have been. But he simply couldn’t be bothered.”

“What about your mother?” Wallis found Pamela’s family situation just as intriguing as Pamela found hers. “Tarquin is an earl, isn’t he? Isn’t an earl a peer of the realm?”

“He is.” Pamela was so cross she could hardly get the words past her lips. “But he’s married to a divorced woman and so wouldn’t have been on the guest list. That doesn’t mean my mother couldn’t still have invited me to London.”

“Why didn’t she?”

Pamela’s eyes had flashed fire. Wallis had never seen her quite so angry. “She didn’t invite me, because she doesn’t want to remind people she’s old enough to have a fifteen-year-old daughter. She’s going to have to remind people when I’m eighteen, because when I come out as a debutante, I sure as peas-are-green am not going to do so in Baltimore!”

Photographs of the coronation procession and of King George and his queen waving to the crowds from the balcony of Buckingham Palace, Prince Edward and their other children by their side, had been featured in every American newspaper, and nearly every girl at Arundell had clipped one of them.

Almost immediately after the coronation had come another sacred and spectacular royal ceremony, and this time Edward, not his father, had been center stage.

“As Prince of Wales, the ceremony at Caernarvon Castle was his formal investiture,” Pamela had said when they were looking at a photograph in the
Baltimore Sun
and Wallis had questioned her about it. “I don’t think much of his robes, do you? They look far too big for him. Let’s hope he grows a bit taller. I don’t want a husband who is shorter than I am!”

Wallis hadn’t believed her, knowing that if Pamela’s daydream ever came true she would accept Edward’s proposal fast as light, not caring how small or slightly built he might be.

Daydreams about Prince Edward were daydreams they comfortably shared, though Wallis was well aware that Pamela’s daydreams had a far greater chance of coming to fruition than had her own. When Pamela returned to London for her debutante coming-out year she would, thanks to her stepfather’s friendship with the king, at least have the opportunity of meeting Prince Edward. Her own coming-out would take place in Baltimore, and though she was greatly looking forward to it, she wouldn’t be being presented to King George and Queen Mary—as Pamela, along with all the other debutantes of her year, would be. It was something, whenever their debutante year was under discussion, that she had to try very hard not to be jealous about.

The years she was enjoying were the happiest she had ever known. Harsh words were never spoken at Biddle Street. On the rare occasions when she misbehaved, it was her mother who disciplined her—and Alice was far too loving to ever be cross with her for long.

At Arundell, too, she seldom found herself in trouble.

“That’s because you’re far too clever to be found out,” Pamela said grumpily when, after it had been Wallis’s idea that they and their classmates should spy on a Masonic ceremony they knew was taking place in a building close to Arundell, they had been discovered and hauled up in front of a furious Miss Carroll. All, that is, apart from Wallis, who had adroitly slipped away unobserved.

“You’re just not fast enough on your feet,” Wallis had said with a smirk, dodging away before Pamela could lay violent hands on her.

Other things, as well as home life at Biddle Street and school life at Arundell, were also going well for her. Every Sunday morning she went to church with her grandmother and her Uncle Sol, and afterward she had lunch with them on East Preston Street, where she enjoyed the sense of being part and parcel of a highly respectable family.

I
n the spring vacation of 1912 she went again to Pot Springs. It had been two years since she had last been there, and though she’d then been thirteen and eager for Henry to make a romantic move toward her, he hadn’t done so. In Henry’s eyes, her being thirteen had, apparently, been little different from her being eleven. He had still rated her far too young to be kissed. There was, however, a lot of difference between being thirteen and being fifteen.

On her first morning down to breakfast, she wore her glossy hair plaited into a long thick braid, a crisp white shirtwaist, a black currant–colored paneled skirt that barely skimmed a pair of the latest Mary Janes, and, cinching her narrow waist, a broad black patent leather belt. At first glance she looked to be at least seventeen, and she knew it.

“I think you may want to change into a riding skirt and boots, Wallis,” her Uncle Emory said jovially as she joined him at the table. “Henry is already at the stables waiting for you. He has a new hunter he wants to show off.”

Henry’s eagerness to be out riding with her again sent a ripple of pleasure down her spine. She helped herself to sausages, determined not to show her own eagerness. Making Henry wait—and then arriving dressed in a way that indicated going riding with him wasn’t top of her list of things to do—would be a great tease.

She spun breakfast out for as long as possible and then, with a fast-beating heart, forced herself to keep to a leisurely stroll as she made her way toward the stables.