“Aunt Bessie’s fine.” Wallis snatched up the bell from her bedside table and gave it a sharp shake and the maid hurried in. “Take the breakfast tray away.”
The maid clutched both sides of the tray and started to move it when Wallis flipped back the covers, catching the side and nearly upending it. “I said remove it! Can’t you do anything right?”
“Je suis désolé, madame,” the maid stuttered.
“Your Royal Highness,” Wallis screeched. “Your Royal Highness!”
The maid scurried away with the tray, the china rattling with her shaking hands. The dogs jumped off the bed and trotted to their baskets, smart enough to lie low in the middle of Wallis’s fury.
“Dismiss her.” Wallis stormed to the window and stared out at the Paris skyline.
“Yes, ma’am.” The girl didn’t deserve to be sacked but there was no reasoning with Wallis in this state. Amelia wanted to slip out of the room but she never left until she was dismissed, and Wallis had not dismissed her. Time stretched out while she waited for Wallis to either send her away or say something.
Finally, Wallis picked up Pookie and settled in a chair, stroking the dog from head to tail. “Ernest married Mary in New York last week.”
The same death of hope Amelia had experienced when the policemen had told her about Jackson washed over Wallis’s face and Amelia’s heart dropped. She’d met the vivacious and dark-haired Mary Raffray in Baltimore a few years ago during one of Wallis’s visits. Mary had introduced Wallis to Ernest, and during her last visit to England, she’d been kind enough to give Wallis the evidence she’d needed to sue him for divorce for adultery by posing as Buttercup Kennedy, the woman the maid had found Ernest in bed with at the Hotel de Paris in Berkshire. Apparently, the two of them hadn’t been pretending.
“She was my oldest and dearest friend. We went to Oldfields together. I thought we’d be friends forever. How did I get it so wrong?”
“Do you think something was going on before the divorce?”
“I suspected it, especially when Ernest started making so many business trips to New York. The business of screwing my friend.” Wallis looked at the letter again. There were no tears, but a longing for something lost that resonated in Amelia. She’d thumbed through the photo album of her and Jackson’s first year so many times, wishing she could go back to that halcyon time instead of existing in the middle of her wrecked life. “I loved him, in my own way, and we were happy together. I thought we always would be. Now he’s gone for good.”
She didn’t know how Wallis could be surprised that Ernest would find someone else while she’d enjoyed the dubious position of maîtresse-en-titre but Wallis rarely saw how her actions led to her troubles. Amelia couldn’t be too hard on her. She’d done the same thing during the first few months after Jackson’s death, refusing to see how her unwillingness to question him about his late nights at the Boston office, his ridiculous reasons for why bills were paid late or not at all, and her blind faith in him had helped create her current troubles. She’d given up everything to be with him and she’d wanted her sacrifice to be worth it and it hadn’t been. “I’m so sorry things didn’t turn out as you’d hoped.”
“Do they ever? I’m sure your mother, my mother, and Aunt Bessie didn’t expect to become widows so young.”
“I don’t suppose they did. I didn’t.”
Amelia waited for one of Wallis’s proclamations about standing up in the face of difficulty with grace and poise and carrying on with determination, all the things Amelia admired about her, but the words didn’t come. Instead, Wallis stared out the window, dejected in a way Amelia had never seen before.
Finally, she let out a deep, tired sigh. “Call Antoine in New York and arrange to have him meet the Bremen at the dock. Have an Elizabeth Arden makeup artist there too. I must look perfect when I step off the liner. I want Mary to open her newspaper over her eggs and see me, a duchess, a woman of note, splashed across the pages.”
There was more spite than determination in the command. Amelia didn’t try and coax her out of her blue mood but left to make the appointments. This was Wallis’s grief, and she needed to sit with it.
Amelia returned to her office to find a letter from Peter waiting for her on the blotter. At least someone in her family besides Aunt Bessie still wrote to her. It wasn’t often but it was something. Hopefully, his news wasn’t as alarming as Wallis’s, and it wasn’t, but it took until the bottom of the first page for Peter to finally get to his reason for writing.
I’m working in the New York office and I’d love to see you when you’re here with the Windsors. Cable me when you’re available. I miss you, Melly.
Tears misted her eyes. It’d been years since anyone had called her Melly, and just as long since she’d seen Peter. He’d been one of the few bright spots in the years after Father’s death, even if, with college and then the railroad, he’d spent more time away from home than in it. The chance to see him again was the only thing about the American trip she looked forward to, especially when she read the rest of his letter.
Mother saw the pictures of Wallis with Hitler. She was relieved you weren’t in any of them and told everyone you’d stayed in Paris. Typical Mother, more concerned about her reputation and her social standing than anything else. I’m trying to convince her to come up to New York to see you when you’re here, to bury the hatchet as they say, but she won’t hear of it. I’ll try and change her mind. I miss being a family and want that again. I hope you want that too. War might come and then who knows what will happen to any of us.
Your loving brother, Peter
Amelia folded the letter and leaned back in the chair, grateful he’d extended the invitation and terrified at the same time. At least she’d land stateside better turned out than when she’d left, but a Schiaparelli wardrobe and a smart hairdo wouldn’t silence the old critics. People had long memories and once they got wind of you not being up to their standards, it didn’t matter what you did afterward, past sins always defined you. At least as the secretary she wouldn’t be front and center like Wallis. She could hide behind her cousin and hope no one noticed her, exactly as she’d done during her debutante years.
Until Jackson noticed me. If Mother hadn’t ignored her, she might never have eloped. She wouldn’t have wanted to escape, to be seen and loved.
She’d make sure to stand out this time.
She called Antoinette’s and they were more than happy to squeeze her in for a haircut and manicure before she left. Let the old Baltimore biddies whisper about her. It no longer mattered.
The Duke strolled into the dining room with his arms loaded with shopping bags from Schiaparelli and Mainbocher. “I picked up everything you asked me to collect, darling, but the items from Cartier weren’t ready. I’ll fetch them tomorrow. I want you to look your best in America.”
“Thank you, David,” Wallis said from over her light lunch, and the Duke beamed under her praise like a new footman during his first week of work.
“A letter for you, Your Royal Highness.” Mr. Hale held out a silver salver with an envelope on it.
The Duke exchanged the shopping for the letter. His enthusiasm immediately dropped when he read it. “Charles is canceling the American tour.”
Well, that was a waste of money, Amelia thought as she admired her freshly painted nails.
“But we leave in three days,” Wallis cried. “The tickets are purchased. Our trunks are at the dock. He can’t cancel now. Think what people will say.”
“Well, he has.” The Duke dropped the letter beside Wallis’s plate then slumped in his chair, waving away the footman trying to serve him his usual fruit tart.
Amelia wanted to groan in frustration. All her hard work arranging travel and schedules had been for nothing. It’d be a hassle to get the luggage back from Calais and a massive embarrassment for Wallis. The press reveled in reporting on the number of trunks the Windsors traveled with, and it was considerable. They’d go into raptures over the luggage returning to Paris because the trip was canceled.
“Charles says the labor unions used that picture of us at Berchtesgaden to rile up their members against the trip. They threatened to boycott his companies if he carried through with it. It sent his stock spiraling. Their uproar made the manufacturers jittery, especially the New York Clothing Manufacturers’ Exchange, and for once they threw in with the workers.”
Wallis looked at Amelia. “Your stepfather was the exchange’s president once, wasn’t he?”
“I don’t know. He never discussed business with me,” Amelia lied to avoid catching any of Wallis’s simmering anger. As far as she knew, Theodore Miller was still a prominent member of the exchange, and he might have had a hand in torpedoing this trip, or maybe not. She didn’t know.
“It’s more than the labor unions.” The Duke picked a flake of tobacco off his dark burgundy lounge suit. “A number of politicians raised concerns about the trip because of our German one. Of course, we are free to go at our own expense . . .”
Wallis flung down the letter. “Then we should and not allow anyone to bully us from staying out of yet another country.”
“Let’s not be hasty, darling. A tour of that magnitude is expensive and we’re far from wealthy. I’d hate to compromise our ability to afford our future home.”
“I don’t care about the future, I care about the present and how people will gloat when we cancel,” Wallis seethed. “I’ll be humbled yet again before everyone who’s ever insulted or sneered at me, all those old Baltimore biddies, Alice Gordon, Mary Raffray, everyone.”
“I’m sorry, darling, I’m sorry.” The Duke hung his head in shame.
“No, you’re not. So long as you don’t have to spend a farthing you don’t care what happens to me or what I have to endure.” Wallis rose and bent over him. “If you stood up to your brother and forced him to pay the promised allowance, demand he give you a position worthy of your talents and rank, we could afford the trip. I could hold my head up high, recognized by your family and with a proper title.”
“I’ve never wanted to fail you. I’ve always wanted the best for you.” Fat tears rolled down the Duke’s face and dropped on the tablecloth, leaving wet rings on the silk.
His crying drove Wallis’s fury and her voice rose two octaves. The footmen quietly left while Amelia remained perfectly still, attempting to blend into the woodwork.
“You’re weak and pathetic. You let them push you off your throne and you’ll let them shove you aside like some forgotten plant and force me to wilt in the dark with you. I won’t have it, I tell you. I won’t.”
Amelia silently willed the Duke to stand up for himself but he didn’t. He simply sat there and took the berating, sobbing like a chastened child.
“You make me sick.” Wallis stormed out of the dining room.
