“I’m the sister in charge of the Infant Welfare Clinic. Our nurses attend to the poorest mothers and infants and we can’t make rounds to the outlying area without proper transportation. I’ve come to personally petition Her Royal Highness to help us. We’re in desperate need of a car.”
“I’ll speak to her on your behalf and arrange a meeting for you to discuss it.”
“Will you or are you putting me off the way she has the last three times I’ve come here?”
Oh dear. Wallis was making her usual friends and enemies everywhere she went. Amelia was tempted to let Wallis stew in her failure, but she couldn’t turn away someone working to improve Bahamians’ lives. Nassau benefited from the tourists, but the poverty in the areas south of Government House in Over the Hill and Grant’s Town was heartbreaking. It was even worse in the Out Islands. She’d visited those with the Duke and Wallis and seen firsthand the poor Bahamians scraping out a hard living harvesting sponges and growing what they could in the loamy soil. Wallis could fall on her face somewhere else. “I’m sure Her Royal Highness didn’t mean to overlook you. She’s been without a private secretary for some time. Now that I’m here, I’ll see she meets with you, and put in a good word for you and your cause.”
“You seem like a woman who can get things done.”
“So do you. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.” Amelia took Miss Jones’s information then called for Mr. Hale to see her out.
She climbed the stairs to Wallis’s room for their regular morning meeting. It was across the hall from the Duke’s with a large bedroom, study, and screened veranda with stunning views of Nassau and the ocean.
“Has my dry cleaning arrived from New York?” Wallis asked the moment Amelia entered. She sat at a rectangular bentwood writing desk, her cashier’s desk still in France, her expression as stern as the judge who’d passed sentence on Jackson.
“It’ll arrive tomorrow. The plane was delayed by a storm.” The Bahamian sun and the tropical breezes scented by plumerias made it easy to forget the cold weather creeping into New York, London, and Paris. Amelia felt sorry for the people of London and Paris who’d have to endure the coming winter in bombed-out houses or with the Nazis stealing their food and heating oil.
“It’d better get here soon or I won’t have a thing to wear to Lady Williams-Taylor’s party.” Wallis capped her fountain pen and slid whatever she was writing into the desk’s top drawer and locked it.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to send your clothes to someone on the island instead of all the way to New York? It’d save time, hassle, and money and would help the local economy, build some goodwill for you and the Duke.” Miss Jones wasn’t the only visitor who’d grumbled about the Duke and Wallis not attending to their duties. Mrs. Solomon, the white chairman of the Bahamian Red Cross, had called yesterday to complain about Wallis not taking up her position as their head, one reserved for the Governor-General’s wife, and how it was delaying their war aid efforts.
“I’ll build goodwill with something other than my wardrobe. There isn’t anyone here who can clean it properly, and with the Fat Scottish Cook making sure we can’t leave Elba without royal permission, I have to make my clothes last. I want to look like a proper Governor-General’s wife.”
“Speaking of which, Miss Alice Jones, the nurse from the Infant Welfare Clinic, visited to request a meeting with you.”
Wallis frowned. “Yes, Mr. Hale told me she was here.”
Amelia ignored this. “The clinic is in need of a car. Mrs. Solomon from the Red Cross called again too. They need your assistance arranging care package transportation.”
“All the local horrors do is pester me for help with this or that.” Wallis was surly today, her delayed dry cleaning elevated to a national crisis.
“That’s because everyone knows you’re the one who gets things done.”
“A dubious honor.”
“An advantageous one. The press ignored your Red Cross work in France but they can’t ignore you here. The Governor-General is the King’s representative, making you something of a Queen. Imagine how regal you’d look coming to the aid of mothers and infants. It’d change the way people see you. Cookie would hate that.”
“She would, wouldn’t she?” Wallis trilled her fingers on her desk while she mulled over the idea. If logic couldn’t work with Wallis, then flattery usually did. “All right, arrange the meeting and figure out what she needs and how I can give it to her. Contact the Red Cross woman and do the same and make sure the press knows about it. You’re right, I’m all but a queen here. I suppose I have to take some interest in my people.”
“A queen usually does,” Amelia mumbled as she wrote a note about arranging the meetings.
The deafening quiet made Amelia stop writing and look up.
Wallis’s stare sent a chill racing up Amelia’s spine. “Is everything all right?”
Amelia caught her mistake, and felt her cheeks burn with a flush. “Y-ye-yes. Why?”
“You’re different since you’ve returned, almost the way you were those first weeks in France, except far better organized and capable of doing your job, and a touch more surly.”
“I’m sorry.” Amelia closed the notepad and slid the pencil in the holder. “Paris was hard, not knowing what was going to happen to me, unable to contact you or get help from the British, who were utterly useless there and in London, which was an awful city,” she lied, using her training to maintain Wallis’s confidence by sympathizing with her dislike of Britain. “The Americans were the only ones who helped me. They gave me a job and somewhere safe to stay during the Blitz but it was terrifying to go to bed not knowing if I’d survive the night, then wake up every morning to fire, hurt and killed people, and London destroyed.”
“They deserve it for what they did to me. A whole country against one lone woman.”
“That’s too harsh.”
“No, it’s not. You saw what happened to me.” Wallis narrowed her eyes at Amelia as if she were a back-talking maid.
“You’re right, it wasn’t fair what they did to you.” Amelia struggled to look humbled, Wallis’s callousness grating. Wallis didn’t care a whit about what Amelia had been through or the millions of suffering people. All she cared about was her ambition and revenge.
“That’s a very interesting necklace. I don’t remember you having it before.” Wallis approached and slid her fingers under the bonne chance charm and raised it to examine it. Her nails brushing Amelia’s skin made it crawl but she forced herself not to flinch or pull back. “Where did you get it?”
“Susan Harper, a friend of mine from the American Embassy in Paris, gave it to me. She said it’s for luck.” Amelia drew on memories of when she’d believed in Wallis to hide her disgust. Everything had to appear as it had been before, with nothing wrong, no secrets, no betrayals, nothing.
“An Embassy friend?”
“We were stuck in London together, but because of you I got passage out before she did.”
Wallis settled the pendant back against the boatneck top of Amelia’s striped pencil dress. “David and I are sailing with Axel this afternoon. See to it the car is ready for us at four. Also, schedule the nurse meeting at the clinic. As you are aware, colored people are discouraged from making social and business calls at Government House. It’s the way of things here, Miss Jones should have known better. Please remind her.”
She’d do no such thing. “His Royal Highness is here to represent everyone and they need his help and leadership, not restrictions.”
“David sees no reason to risk a future, better government position by causing trouble in this one. Bahamians can work here but not make social or business calls, otherwise we’ll have no end of people traipsing in and out of here with every problem and petition they have and we’ll never have a moment’s peace. That goes for the white people too or I’ll have to invite all the assemblymen’s wives to every tea, dinner party, and official reception. What a bore. What passes for society here is slim pickings already. I won’t make it worse.” Wallis strode off to her closet to change.
Amelia had to hold her notebook tight to keep from lobbing it at the back of Wallis’s perfectly rolled and pinned coiffure. The nerve of that woman, looking down on anyone after everything she’d done and was still doing.
I shouldn’t have been surly. She had to behave as if everything was the way it had been before. Judging by Wallis’s cold scrutiny, Amelia hadn’t been pretending as well as she thought. Or maybe Wallis is as jumpy as I am. Given what Wallis was embroiled in, Amelia wasn’t surprised, but it was Amelia’s fault Wallis had noticed something was off. Wallis already believed half the staff were spying on her; Amelia couldn’t give her any reason to question her or she’d never discover anything about what she was up to.
Speaking of which. Amelia glanced at the desk to see if there was anything interesting lying on top but it was clean as a whistle. If she had to guess, anything worth seeing was locked in the top drawer. Wallis had been writing to someone when Amelia had interrupted her, she usually was, but the number of personal letters Amelia mailed wasn’t equal to the number Wallis wrote. It could be because the censors refused to grant Wallis an exception for her correspondence but Amelia doubted it. Wallis was so desperate for word from her friends, she’d risk a civil servant in some stuffy postal office seeing her letters in order to write to them. However, something more important was getting by somehow, Amelia was sure of it.
