Amelia stopped in the dark paneled dining room and drew in a deep breath. This is my job now.
She sighed then stepped into the château entryway. “Good morning, Monsieur Mainbocher. Mrs. Simpson is occupied at present but will be with you shortly. If you’ll follow me, I’ll escort you to her dressing room.”
“And you are?” The American-born couturier stared down his aquiline nose at Amelia. His two chic assistants affected the same arrogant air. Even the one carrying the garment bag with Wallis’s wedding dress eyed Amelia as if she were one of the contemptible throng of press crowding the château gates.
“Amelia Bradford,” she whispered, then cleared her throat and spoke up. “Mrs. Simpson’s new private secretary.” She didn’t mention she was also Wallis’s third cousin. Her plain brown wool skirt and jacket already made her look like a poor relation. “If you’ll follow me?”
“Of course.” He motioned for her to lead the way.
“Whatever is she wearing?” the assistant in the tailored gray suit asked her companion in French as Amelia led them down the narrow Norman stone hallway with its wood-beam ceiling and up the spiral stone staircase to the second floor.
“Something she found in the bottom of an old trunk,” the other woman sneered.
Amelia understood them perfectly. She’d excelled in French at Oldfields, baffling her mother, who’d wondered what she’d do with an education.
If Mother could see me now she’d be shocked, Amelia mused, assuming her mother could muster enough interest in her youngest child to care. Mother had barely noticed her before Father’s death. Afterward, Amelia had been little more than an unwanted and embarrassing nuisance.
“Taisez-vous,” Monsieur Mainbocher commanded when they reached the second floor, and the assistants stopped their snide remarks. He smoothed his thick, pomaded hair away from his severe side part, offering Amelia a touch more respect as he encouraged her to continue. “Mademoiselle?”
“Madame, if you please, I am a widow,” Amelia replied in perfectly accented French.
The assistants’ cheeks went red. Monsieur Mainbocher didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow.
“When I’m finished making a marvel out of Mrs. Simpson, I’ll do wonders for you,” he offered in French.
“That’s very kind of you, monsieur,” she replied in French, neither refusing nor accepting his offer. She didn’t have the money for a new wardrobe, especially not one by the famous designer. “Here we are.”
Amelia opened the door to the Bedaux’s private suite. Mr. and Mrs. Bedaux, the owners of Château de Candé, were hosting the Duke and Wallis’s wedding and Mrs. Bedaux had been kind enough to move to another room so Wallis could use hers. Amelia led the designer and his assistants through the small foyer and into the elaborate closet. It was larger than most of the servants’ garret bedrooms, with pale green walls, built-in drawers with crystal knobs, and lighted cabinets with glass doors.
Down a short passage, just past the shoe closet, was Mr. Bedaux’s dark paneled study, where Amelia and Aunt Bessie stayed, Aunt Bessie in the bed, Amelia on a trundle beside her. Mr. Bedaux was on a business trip to Germany and Amelia worked at his desk; at least, that’s where she sat while she tried to figure out how to deal with Wallis’s accounts, receipts, and the travel itineraries for the London florist, organist, milliner, and everyone else involved in the wedding.
The assistants, with their perfectly coiffed hair and manicured nails, carefully removed the pale blue dress from the garment bag and hung it on a gilded hook between the windows.
“It’s beautiful.” Amelia fingered the silk crepe skirt, wondering what her wedding dress might have looked like if things had been different. She’d married Jackson in her traveling suit at the First Presbyterian Church wedding chapel in Elkton, Maryland. She’d worried every second of the five-minute ceremony about her stepfather bursting in to stop them but it’d gone off without a hitch.
Amelia opened her fingers and let the fabric fall back into place. I should’ve listened to Theodore. It would’ve saved her a lot of heartache and trouble.
“I call the color Wallis blue,” Monsieur Mainbocher announced in English. “I had the silk custom dyed to match the shade of her eyes. They’re the most stunning I’ve ever seen.”
“Then you can’t have seen very many if you think so.” Wallis’s clipped tone with its odd mix of British and Southern accent carried over them as she swept in. Pookie, Prisie, and Detto followed obediently behind and settled on the rug near the heating grate. Wallis extended her hand to Monsieur Mainbocher, who raised it to his lips. His assistants curtseyed to Wallis as if she were the Queen while Aunt Bessie quietly joined Amelia. “I’m glad you’re here. I couldn’t endure another moment of that Fat Scottish Cook muttering her vows in that insipid voice of hers. It’s like nails on a chalkboard.”
Wallis stepped behind the screen in the corner and changed from her navy-blue-and-white wool suit into the wedding dress. “It galls me to think she’s gathering all the glory while I’m relegated to this French backwater.”
“You’d outshine the woman even if you wore a potato sack.” Monsieur Mainbocher took Wallis’s hand when she emerged from behind the screen and helped her onto the stool in front of the window. “You don’t need a crown to be a queen.”
“But I need a king and I don’t have one.”
Everyone went stiff.
“Wallis, you have something better than a king. You have true love,” Aunt Bessie proclaimed.
“Of course, and I’m deliriously happy.” Wallis glared at the two assistants, who busied themselves marking the flared skirt and fitted waist with pins and tape measures.
When Monsieur Mainbocher was satisfied that everything was hemmed, nipped, and tucked to perfection, Wallis changed and rang for Mr. Hale to escort the couturier and his assistants out of the room.
“Wallis, you must be more discreet around outsiders,” Aunt Bessie warned as she and Amelia followed Wallis into her bedroom. “Those pretentious shopgirls might repeat what you said to the press.”
“If they do, they’ll be blackballed from ever working in Paris again, and they know it. That should keep their thin lips sealed.” Wallis strode to the pink marble fireplace mantel and straightened the gilded clock a maid had moved while dusting. The room was painted a rich butter color set off by white boiserie and a suite of Louis XVI furniture. The dogs hopped on the bed and settled into the fluffy, pale cream comforter. “Besides, I can’t keep up this façade every moment of my life.”
“If you don’t, you’ll be crucified for not making his sacrifice for you worth it.”
“I never asked him to make the sacrifice, and now I’m stuck with it as much as he is, but he’s getting what he wants, while I’m getting the short end of the stick.” Wallis threw her arms out to the room, her usual stern composure slipping for the first time since Amelia’s arrival last week. “He and all those simpering courtiers said I’d be Queen or the woman behind the throne, then they all jumped ship the moment it started to sink, leaving me to go down with the captain.”
“A captain who’s devoted to you,” Aunt Bessie reminded.
“If he’d been devoted to keeping his crown we wouldn’t be in this mess but in Westminster Abbey.” Wallis sank into one of the silk-covered chairs and rested her head in her square hands, careful to keep her fingers arched out and not disturb her tightly parted, smoothed, and rolled dark brown hair. “He gave up with barely a fight. Instead of heads of state and hundreds of people watching and kneeling to us, I’m the cruel witch who stole Britain’s beautiful king. I’m hounded by the press, run out of Britain, and Cookie is doing everything she can to turn everyone against me.”
“You can’t think about that,” Aunt Bessie insisted. “You have to think of your future.”
“That’s all I think about.” Wallis stood and paced, twisting the engagement ring around her finger. “What is there for us? No home, no position, no real status. We have to make something of ourselves, and this marriage, and with the whole world watching and waiting for us to fail.”
“You won’t fail.” Aunt Bessie rested her hands on Wallis’s shoulders, settling her in a way no one else could. “You can’t afford to.”
Wallis clutched Aunt Bessie’s wrinkled hands to her chest. “What’ll I do when you go back to America? I can’t endure this without you.”
“You’ll have Amelia here to help you.”
They turned to Amelia, who wanted to bolt straight back to Maryland. Nothing in her Baltimore childhood, her married life in Wellesley, not even her year at the Katherine Gibbs School of Secretarial and Executive Training for Educated Women had prepared her to manage a duchess’s personal affairs, but she couldn’t run. There was nothing left for her in Baltimore or Wellesley. Like Wallis, she had no choice but to succeed. “Of course.”
Wallis pursed her red lips. “We’ll see.”
The door swung open and the Duke marched in clutching a letter with the royal crest emblazoned across the top. He waved it over his blond head, shaking it as if he could flick off what was written there. “Sir Walter just arrived and what do you think he brought me? This! Buck House’s idea of a wedding present.”
The dogs started barking, agitated by the Duke’s excitement. Sir Walter Monckton was the Duke’s former attorney and the go-between for the feuding King George and his brother, as Amelia had discovered the first day of work when Wallis had fired off a telegram to him complaining about how bad the British press treated her.
“Silence!” Wallis commanded, and the dogs stopped barking and settled back into the comforter.
“The Palace is denying you the title of Her Royal Highness,” the Duke fumed. “And they’ve cooked up some ridiculous legal reason why they can do it. A wife is entitled to her husband’s honors. I’m a Royal Highness and you bloody will be too.”
He flapped the paper in Wallis’s face and she snatched it out of his fingers, pinning him with a reprimanding glare that made him bow his head. Wallis read the letter while the Duke waited with his hands clasped behind his back like a chastened schoolboy.
“This is the Fat Scottish Cook’s doing. Your brother doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to his wife or insist on something this underhanded.” Wallis dropped the letter in the grate and it caught fire.
“I’ll call my brother and instill some backbone in him,” the Duke threatened in his high, nasally voice.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. They’re trying to hurt us but they can’t, not when we have each other.” Wallis smoothed his lapels with quick circles of her broad hands. “We have our love, our life together. That’s worth more than any extra-chic title.”
“But . . . ?” The Duke cast a mournful look at the blackened letter.
