stevedores unloading crate after crate at Prince George’s wharf, while a flush-faced supervisor begged them to take care.
I raised my glass. “We’re ever so grateful you found the time.”
Naturally, the champagne was sublime. I knew precious little about wine, but I knew that the Windsors ate and drank and wore only the best, and I imagined, if they smuggled champagne out of France as the Germans closed in, the champagne would be the finest vintage fizz that credit could buy.
“To victory,” said Mr. Christie. “May it arrive swiftly.”
I remember thinking, as I clicked my glass against that of Harold Christie, that he didn’t seem like much of a warrior.
By the time the duke reappeared, I’d almost forgotten he existed to begin with. You know how it is during a party, how the minutes turn liquid and run into each other, how the words and faces form a separate universe in which you rotate endlessly on your axis, North Pole and South Pole tilted just so. Afterward, you never can remember the exact chronology, who said what, where and when it all occurred. And how.
Up he popped, anyway, just as the duchess was introducing me to two of her guests, a straw-haired mother and her teenage daughter. He jumped midsentence in front of the duchess’s attention, the way a tennis player lunges for a ball, slicing neatly between us. A thick piece of hair had fallen from the shield atop his head. He pushed it back and said, “Darling, I can’t seem to find him!”
“Who?”
“Thorpe, darling. Thorpe.”
“Yes? Where is he?”
“That’s the trouble. I’ve looked all over.”
“Then I suppose we’ll just have to start things off without him,” said the duchess. “David, darling, will you please get everyone’s attention?”
David—I beg your pardon, the Duke of Windsor—cast about for something or other, his long-abandoned cocktail glass perhaps, because he wound up snatching my champagne coupe and striking it forcefully with the manicured nail of his index finger. When that produced no discernible sound, he shoved it back to me and clapped his hands. “Good evening!” he called. “Good evening, all!”
At the sound of his voice, the din of voices went absolutely silent. The strangest thing, that instant silence, as if everybody had been waiting for this signal, even the birds, as if nothing else in the world held the slightest interest. Several dozen faces turned toward us, none of them quite sober. The duke smiled, and what a dazzling smile it was. Red-lipped and toothsome. He’d practiced it all his life.
“Good evening, my dear friends. We’re so—ah, my wife and I, we’re delighted to have so many of you gathered here tonight in our humble abode”—here he paused expertly for a ripple of chuckles—“in service of, really, an absolutely tremendous cause. I am just absolutely speechless with pride at all the great work my wife has done as president of the Red Cross chapter here in the Bahamas, which we couldn’t possibly accomplish without your generous support. But my wife, I believe, has more to tell you about all that. Darling? Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Windsor.”
Nobody chuckled, nobody gave the least sign of knowing that the Duchess of Windsor was not, in fact, royal: by express decree of those who were. Certainly not Wallis herself. She painted on a thin, beautiful smile and stepped to her husband’s side. For the first time, I noticed that she wore a jeweled brooch pinned to her breast, the same brooch as in the photograph in Life magazine, and what do you know? It was a flamingo. She waved her ring-crusted hand. “Hello, everybody!”
Everybody murmured Hello!
“As David said. Thank you all for gathering here with us tonight. In a few minutes I’ll be coming round, cap outstretched, along with—I hope, anyway—someone who seems to have gone . . . oh, there he is!” Her face transformed, so that I realized she hadn’t really been smiling before, and now she was. She looked over my right shoulder, where a cluster of palms bordered the rock garden. “Mr. Thorpe! Where have you been hiding? Mr. Benedict Thorpe, ladies and gentlemen, a dear friend of mine and David’s, a scientist of international repute and a true patriot of our British Empire.”
She began to clap, and the crowd, shifting and straining to catch a glimpse of this true British patriot, burst into applause. Though I kept my gaze trained on the duchess—what a show she was, after all—I clapped along. I mean, it would have been rude otherwise, wouldn’t