She left them to their puzzle and climbed the curving stone staircase beneath a vaulted gothic ceiling. Large windows at the top let in the bright sun and offered stunning views of the poplars and willows surrounding the château.
I suppose this is as good a place to work as any. It was better than the dirty, dank insurance offices she’d interviewed at where even the rotund men in their cheap suits had heard of Jackson and his crimes. They’d locked their cash drawers then told her she wasn’t suited for the position.
I’m barely suited for this one, she mused, but she had to make it work. There weren’t any other options.
“Good morning, Mrs. Bedaux.” Amelia stepped into a room of pale green walls and stately First Empire mahogany furniture.
“Bonjour, madame, thank you for coming to see me,” Mrs. Bedaux greeted in an American accent tinged with a continental flair. She sat at a drop-front secretary, and wore an afternoon dress of cream lace over silk, her figure lithe and graceful like the black and gold Charles Lemanceau statue on the pink granite mantel.
“I was going to come see you. Mrs. Simpson asked me to give you this.” Amelia handed Mrs. Bedaux the bill with more humility than Wallis had shown in asking her host to pay for it.
“I’ll take care of it.” Mrs. Bedaux set it on top of the bill from Cartier beside her correspondence.
“Mrs. Simpson also requests another laundress for her sheets, and lilies for Lady Selby’s room before her arrival tomorrow afternoon.”
“Of course. I’ll speak to Mr. Hale about it. Nothing makes a guest feel more welcome and at ease than flowers.”
Amelia thought of the flowers Mother used to fill their Baltimore home with after her marriage to Theodore Miller. There hadn’t been anything personal or inviting about those gaudy and overdone arrangements. All they’d done was block everyone’s view at the dinner table.
“When hosting guests, personal touches and attention to detail should never be overlooked,” Mrs. Bedaux explained. “What are your favorite flowers, Mrs. Bradford?”
“Pale pink roses, but only two or three of them with some greenery.”
“You have simple but elegant tastes.”
No one had ever called her tastes elegant. Common, Mother always used to say, amazed her daughter hadn’t naturally adopted her opulent style. It’d never occurred to her to actually teach Amelia to appreciate her taste and fashion. She’d simply expected Amelia to magically develop them and she’d been disappointed when she hadn’t.
Amelia waited in silence, expecting to be dismissed, but Mrs. Bedaux sat back in her chair and studied her. She was tall, with fine features beneath dark blond hair, her natural elegance enviably effortless. “How are you settling into your new position?”
“Wallis is very demanding.” Amelia sighed before she caught her mistake. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful.” This woman was Wallis’s friend, not Amelia’s confidante. She might tell Wallis what she’d said and then she’d be in for it.
“You’re not ungrateful, merely young and out of your element.” She flashed a warm smile and Amelia let out a relieved breath. Her time here would be short if she didn’t lose the babe-in-the-woods smell clinging to her. “It wasn’t easy for me either when I first came to France. I wasn’t much older than your, what, twenty-four years?”
“Twenty-one.” Although Jackson’s arrest and death, and the need to make a living, made her feel ancient some days.
“Younger than me when I arrived in France. Grand Rapids high society did little to prepare me for European society. Let me offer you a little advice, a few rules to live by, as it were. First, watch Wallis and take note of her likes and dislikes, how she does things and prefers things done, then do everything that way. Learn to anticipate her needs and you’ll make yourself indispensable. The second is to be nice to everyone no matter what their station. You never know when they’ll be in a position to help you. Third is to read.” She gathered up copies of Le Temps and Le Figaro and Marie Claire and Vogue from the round table between the tall windows. “You’ll learn who’s who and how they’re acquainted or related. These will also inform you of artistic and literary trends, which will improve your conversation skills. I’ll have my maid deliver my newspapers and magazines to your room in the evenings. If you read about something or someone you don’t understand, don’t hesitate to ask me about it.”
“Why is Lady Selby coming to the wedding without Lord Selby?” Now was as good a time as any to ask.
“His Majesty’s Government has commanded their officials not to attend the wedding. Lady Selby may come as a friend but her husband may not.”
“Why? His Royal Highness is no longer King. What does it matter who he marries or what he does?” Royal things were always so complicated.
“Kings, like popes, don’t abdicate, they die, and there are never two at once. Now there are, and it divides loyalties. That’s dangerous to both men, but especially the one wearing the crown. His Majesty doesn’t want any reminders that he could topple too. The royal family is trying to ignore a very inconvenient reality.”
They aren’t the only ones. Wallis was trying to maintain the façade of a grand royal wedding worthy of an ex-king, and every declined invitation chipped away at that illusion. No wonder she was cross.
“Another excellent way to discover who is who and what is what is to speak to those in the know. I’ll convince Wallis to have you join us for dinner tomorrow night to fill out the numbers. Mr. Randolph Churchill will be there and I’ll arrange for you to sit next to him. You’ll learn a great deal from him, including what he intends to write about the wedding for the Daily Mail. Wallis is worried about that, and if you can ease her mind, she’ll be grateful. Remember, Mrs. Bradford, your job is to always make her life easier. Do that and she’ll adore you.”
That no one was interested in making Amelia’s life easier wasn’t lost on her. She must have frowned at the thought because Mrs. Bedaux clasped her hands in front of her, calm and serene in the way Amelia wished Mother had been. “One more word of advice, rule number five, you could say. Never chafe or look irritated at being told what to do, no matter how difficult or silly you think the request is. I know it’s hard at your age, but don’t complain or be churlish, always smile and treat every encounter as an opportunity to practice poise, speech, manners, and all the skills that will further your career.”
This might be the most difficult advice for Amelia to follow.
Chapter Three
“I asked Lord Beaverbrook why he sided with His Majesty when everyone knows he’s against the monarchy and do you know what he said?” Randolph Churchill asked Amelia from beside her at the table. The party of eight dined in the wood-paneled dining room with its beamed ceiling and tapestry wallpaper. They didn’t use the Bedaux’s fine china but the shell-pink Wedgwood set Wallis had inherited from her Warfield grandmother, a doyenne of Baltimore society who’d taught Wallis the social graces and how to sit without her spine ever touching the back of a chair.
“What did he say?” Amelia asked. Mr. Churchill liked to talk, especially about himself, but Mrs. Bedaux was right, he had a wealth of knowledge. She’d learned more about British politics and society in the last two hours with him than she had during the entire last week.
“He did it to bugger Prime Minister Baldwin for forcing the Duke to abdicate.” Mr. Churchill chuckled into his champagne.
“Who’s Lord Beaverbrook?”
“Newspaper owner, quite influential. My boss, one might say. He sent me here even though he knows I’m not going to write much. Father loves the old king and won’t have me spilling the beans on his intimate affairs. Let the hacks outside the gates do it.” He glanced around the table then leaned close to her, taking a quick glance at her décolletage hidden beneath the satin sash that crossed her chest and tied in a much too large bow at the back. The pale pink chiffon dress was a leftover from her debutante season and the only formal gown she owned. It paled in comparison to the other women’s chic evening dresses, especially Wallis’s fitted gold lamé gown with the high neck. “His Royal Highness is the only one who looks as if he’s having a jolly good time. The rest appear as if they’re here for a funeral. No one wants to read about that.”
There’s a relief. Amelia could tell Wallis she had nothing to worry about from Mr. Churchill. She might even be impressed Amelia was the one who’d discovered it.
“I understand you hail from Washington, D.C.” Mr. Churchill tucked in to the last of his roast guinea hen, pomme soufflé, and asparagus in cream sauce. He resembled his father through the face and jowls but he didn’t have his father’s bulldog look of ambition and hard work she’d seen in the newsreels back home.
“Baltimore originally.” Amelia waved away a footman offering more champagne. “But I spent a few years in Washington, D.C., after my mother remarried.”
They’d been the second most miserable years of her life.
“Your father was a senator?”
“Stepfather. It was back in the late twenties. He’s in the clothing manufacturing business now, the Daniel Miller Company. They don’t do business in Europe.” Thank heavens or Theodore would probably break his shunning silence to send her warning letters about embarrassing him overseas. However, she decided to play up her lineage. She might be a black sheep, but in the middle of all these lords and ladies, pride demanded they know she wasn’t a complete nobody. “My father’s family owns the Baltimore Southern Railway but Father died in a car crash in 1931.” She’d been fifteen, and forced to watch Mother launch herself into society and land the very rich and well-connected Theodore. It’d allowed her to maintain her precious social standing, the one Amelia had threatened by eloping with Jackson. “My brother will take his place on the board of directors soon.”
“Lady Metcalf, tell me all the gossip from London that isn’t about me,” Wallis said to the woman who sat across from her. She wasn’t particularly loud but her crisp tenor always carried in even the most crowded room.
“Then I may not have much to tell you.” Lady Metcalf laughed although she was half serious.
“But you must have heard something,” Wallis insisted. “If you accept a dinner invitation, you have a moral obligation to be amusing. What about you, Fern? What does Charles write about Germany?”
“He says their factories are impressive and if Britain and France weren’t so hostile to trade agreements, they’d all benefit from the new, industrialized Germany.”
“Charles is right. We should embrace Germany instead of isolating it.” His Royal Highness handed pieces of guinea hen to the dogs, who sat patiently beside his chair. “If I could visit Germany and extend the hand of friendship, I’d do it and settle all this saber-rattling.”
“Germany isn’t interested in settling its aggressive talk,” Sir Walter pointed out to much nodding from Mr. Metcalf and a frown from the Duke. “Herr Hitler has done nothing to conceal his ambitions or his blatant breaking of the Treaty of Versailles.”
“Herr Hitler has no designs on Britain, Denmark, Holland, or the Netherlands; he’s said as much in numerous speeches. He only wants to unite the German-speaking people and halt the communist spread,” the Duke insisted. “I say leave him to it. The Bolsheviks are a greater threat to the world than Germany. Someone has to stop them. My brother isn’t about to do it, and I don’t want to end up on the wrong end of a bolshie bullet like my cousin the Tsar and his family did. All we need to do is stay out of Herr Hitler’s way and he’ll see to Russia and save us a damned lot of trouble.”
“What about his treatment of the Jews?” Mr. Rogers, Wallis’s old American friend who was here for the wedding, asked, exchanging a concerned glance with his wife across the table.
“Those stories are communist rubbish, exaggerations meant to smear a man who’s accomplishing more for the working class than any other leader in Europe.” His Royal Highness rapped his knuckles against the table.
“Sir, I advise you not to be so open in your admiration for Herr Hitler,” Mr. Metcalf cautioned. “Such remarks could easily be taken out of context to smear you.”
The Duke pinned Mr. Metcalf with an off-with-his-head look. “One may suggest things to me but they may not advise.”
