“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.”
“My apologies, sir, I didn’t mean to overstep. I’m merely trying to help.”
“The Duke knows and appreciates how much you’ve done for us in the past, Edward,” Wallis soothed. “Don’t you, darling?”
“Quite right.” The Duke picked up an asparagus spear with his fingers.
Wallis slapped the spear out of his hand. “Use your fork.”
Shock rippled down the table. Amelia expected the Duke to rebuke Wallis for embarrassing him but he wiped his fingers with his napkin and picked up his fork.
The eating and conversation slowly resumed as if nothing had happened.
“Is Sir Walter right about Germany’s ambition?” Amelia asked Mr. Churchill while they stood together by the fire in the library after dinner. Maurice Chevalier’s “Ma Pomme” played on the gramophone and settled beneath the low conversation of Wallis and the other women on the sofa. The clink of chips punctuated the French singing as the Duke, Sir Walter, Mr. Rogers, and Mr. Metcalf played cards at the table near the large Skinner organ, a showpiece of the library and château.
“He is. I saw their armament factories when I was in Germany reporting for the Daily Mail. They’re running at full speed, and every able-bodied man has joined an army the Treaty of Versailles says shouldn’t exist. I’ve told people there’s more to worry about than Germany overrunning the Rhineland but they listen to me as much as the Greeks listened to Cassandra. His Royal Highness is quite mistaken if he thinks Germany and Russia will simply fight it out while the rest of Europe watches and waits for a winner.”
“Unless the Duke knows something we don’t. He must have seen all sorts of state secrets when he was King.”
“None that he took seriously.” Mr. Churchill chuckled into his drink. “Statecraft was not his forte.”
“I tell you, Sir Walter, it isn’t right.” The Duke banged his fist on the gaming table, making the chips in front of him rattle in their stacks. “There’s no legal basis for denying my wife the right to be styled Her Royal Highness.”
“I’m merely His Majesty’s messenger, sir, not the decider of titles,” Sir Walter calmly replied.
Wallis watched the conversation, her hand tight on her highball glass, irritated at the Duke for bringing this up in front of Sir Walter and the other guests.
“Randolph, speak to Winston about it. He must have some pull,” the Duke commanded.
“I’ll see what I can do, sir,” Mr. Churchill assured with the same deference everyone showed the ex-king.
“There’s a good man.” The Duke returned to his card game and Wallis eased her tight grip on the glass and resumed her conversation.
“I don’t understand the Duke’s concern with Wallis’s title,” Amelia said to Mr. Churchill. She barely understood all the titles and royal protocol and why everyone was so enamored with it, almost to the point of obsession. “She’ll be a duchess when she marries him. What’s so special about ‘Her Royal Highness’?”
“It makes her a recognized member of the royal family, and the King and Queen don’t want a jumped-up adventurer on the same footing as them or His Royal Highness’s sisters-in-law, especially since they think the marriage won’t last.”
“She’s gone through too much to chuck him over.”
“Except he isn’t the catch he was when she met him, is he?” Mr. Churchill sipped his Scotch. “If she’d respected the monarchy, understood the Crown and everything it means and stands for instead of spitting in its face, she wouldn’t be in this predicament. Neither of them would be.”
“It wasn’t all her fault.” She understood Wallis’s position. Everyone had blamed Amelia for what Jackson had done, but until his arrest, she hadn’t known that every dime she’d spent on her house, clothes, and car had been stolen from someone else. Her entire life had been a lie.
“She didn’t help matters either. Who was she before she met him? Nobody. He made her someone but it wasn’t enough. Now she wants everyone to curtsey to her with the same respect as the royal women who’ve supported the family they chose to marry into. Fat chance, that. She wanted all of it and she’ll get none of it, except him. Good luck to them both.”
“Wallis, your shoe buckle has come undone. I’ll fix it for you.” The Duke dropped his cards and rushed to kneel in front of Wallis and fastened her shoe.
How sweet, Amelia thought before she caught the horrified looks exchanged between Mr. Churchill and Lady Metcalf. Suddenly, she understood
Mr. Churchill’s irritation. The man who’d once represented everything they cherished about their country was kneeling at the
feet of a commoner. Instead of demanding the Duke stand, Wallis let him buckle her shoe like a lowly footman. Mr. Churchill
was right, she hadn’t respected the Crown, she still didn’t, and everyone knew it.
Chapter Four
June 1, 1937
Amelia stood in the salon de musique helping Wallis and Mrs. Bedaux with last-minute wedding preparations. The piano in the niche had been replaced with a large chest dragged in from the hallway to make a temporary altar. Its wooden sides were carved with naked Renaissance nymphs and the top supported a plain brass cross borrowed from a local Protestant church flanked by two tall candlesticks. Footmen dressed in the Bedaux’s gold and blue livery carried in hired gilt chairs and arranged them in rows for the ceremony.
“Whatever is he playing?” Mrs. Bedaux peered through the open library door at Marcel Dupré, the premier organist in Europe, according to Mrs. Bedaux’s newspapers, who sat at the Skinner organ practicing the ceremony selections. The music reverberated out of the large pipes concealed in the château’s first- and second-story walls.
“‘O Perfect Love,’” Wallis answered. “But it doesn’t sound right.”
