“Does he? That’s kind.” She rose from the sofa and stepped to the window, a few feet away, overlooking the street outside the courthouse. “Just look at all those folks standing there. They all support Freddie, you know. They love him.”
I made myself rise, too, and came to stand with her by the window. By “those folks” she of course meant “the Negroes.” The Windsors and the Bay Street Boys might not abide Freddie, but the greater part of the population, the colored part, the part that didn’t sit in parliament or on juries, stood firm behind him.
“Anyway,” Nancy said, “however things turn out. I appreciate your support. I mean that. Seeing you up there in the gallery, every day, it just gave us strength. Both of us.”
“I wouldn’t have been anywhere else. Anyone could see he’d been framed. Just as anyone could see who the real culprit was.”
A twitch involved the corner of Nancy’s mouth. She stubbed out her cigarette on the windowsill and turned to me.
“Anyone could see, sure,” she said, “but do you think anyone’s got the guts to say it out loud?”
Across the room, a telephone rang. We both jumped. One of the policemen answered it, speaking in low tones, glancing in our direction. Nancy grabbed my hand and dug her fingernails into my palm with such ferocity, my eyes stung.
The policeman hung up the phone and rose. “Mrs. de Marigny. It seems the jury has reached its verdict.”
By the time I elbowed my way back to my seat in the press gallery, the courtroom was packed, the air electric. Freddie was back in his cage. From the opposite wall, in its place of honor, a portrait of the King of England stared nobly into the distance, as it had done throughout the trial. The resemblance to the duke unsettled me. At certain moments, it had seemed as if the brothers had switched places, as if the duke himself were somehow staring through the bland eyes of his successor, as if he presided over us—participants and spectators alike—from a point higher than that of the judge himself.
When the jurors had filed back inside the courtroom, Sir Oscar entered and resumed his seat on the dais in his robes and his curling wig. The court registrar asked the foreman of the jury, a grocer named James Sands, if they had reached a verdict.
Yes, we have, said Mr. Sands.
How silent that room was, how taut, how stifling. There was not the slightest sound, not a movement. I remember I stared not at Mr. Sands, or the judge, or the portrait of King George there on the wall, but at Freddie in his cage. I remember how I looked at his face and realized he might actually die, that his life hung on this decision, on these words, and who on earth could willfully put an innocent man through such an ordeal? Who could frame a man for a capital crime he did not commit? It was murder, absent the courage of murder, the moral conviction of looking your man in the face and pulling the trigger. It was cowardice, the act of a runner. Freddie stared at Mr. Sands, waited for his fate, and for a terrible instant I forgot all about Sir Harry Oakes. I forgot about the Bahamas and the Windsors. For a terrible instant, I thought we were in Bakersfield, and it was Tommy’s murder being tried, it was my guilt for which Freddie would hang.
I heard the registrar speak.
How say you, is the prisoner guilty or not guilty of the offense with which he is charged?
He is a goner, I thought. God forgive me.
Mr. Sands called out, Not guilty.
In the pandemonium that followed, I was possibly the only person who kept my seat. While my colleagues stampeded for the telephones, I stared at Mr. Sands, whose lips still made words, though you couldn’t hear them in all that noise. In the corner of my vision, Freddie was leaping from his cage to embrace his wife, a free man.
Well, so are you, I thought. You’re free, aren’t you? Freddie’s acquittal is your acquittal. But I was not free. The world spun in frantic loops around the small, fragile core inside my womb, the piece of himself that Thorpe had left behind. I rose from my seat and shouldered out of the press gallery. I found a telephone and communicated my dispatch to the Associated Press, and to this day I’ve got no idea what that dispatch actually said. By now, everybody had tumbled out of the courthouse and into Rawson Square, where Freddie was hoisted onto the shoulders of the crowd—white and Negro—and carried through the evening air to his car. I stood there on the steps and watched it all. A sense of dread overcame me, of imminent disaster, and I fought to master it. The Lady of Nassau had a column to write and transmit by two o’clock in the morning, after all, just in time to set the press for the December issue, and since Lightfoot had agreed—with many a grumble—to pay me a thousand clams for said column, I needed my conscience at its clearest and my pencil at its sharpest. No morbid thoughts, no impending doom. Not guilty, remember?
A man stood next to me, checking his watch. Godfrey Higgs, Freddie’s barrister.
“Why, Mr. Higgs! There you are. The man of the hour.”
He looked up. “Mrs. Thorpe. You give me too much credit. The prosecution laid a contemptible case. Any competent barrister should have won acquittal.”
“Any barrister should, maybe. But they weren’t exactly scrambling to take on the defense, were they? Just you.”
“I did my duty, that’s all, Mrs. Thorpe.”
“Well, at least you were wise enough to leave certain questions unasked. I wonder if we’ll ever see justice?”
He shook his head, and I saw how weary he was, not that I blamed him. The poor fellow probably hadn’t experienced a good night’s sleep since July.
“Mr. Higgs,” I said. “I thought I saw the foreman speaking, after the verdict. Only I couldn’t hear him in all the racket. Was it something important?”
Mr. Higgs turned his head to watch Freddie’s car as it drove slowly through Rawson Square, parting the crowd, honking its joyous horn. “It was,” he said. “I’m afraid there was an addendum to the verdict.”
“An addendum? What do you mean?”
“Mr. Sands went on to say that the jury recommended—in spite of the verdict—that Mr. de Marigny and his cousin, Georges de Visledou, be deported from the Bahamas immediately as undesirables.”
“Deported? Undesirables? Why?”
“A very good question, Mrs. Thorpe. I shall seek answers as soon as possible, although I don’t imagine it will make any difference.”
Across the square, Freddie’s car had disappeared around a corner, and the jubilant glow of the headlamps arced across a building to dissolve into blackness. “Why not?” I whispered.
“Because I suspect that certain elements of the government will move heaven and earth to see that the deportation is carried out forthwith.”
I turned to gaze at him. He had removed the wig, of course, and while I privately thought these wigs an absurdity, Mr. Higgs did seem to have shed a certain air of importance along with his gray curls.
He went on. “I haven’t told him yet. I thought he should have a few hours to celebrate.”
“Mr. Higgs,” I said softly, “could you perhaps offer me a lift home?”
When Mr. Higgs dropped me off at the door of my bungalow, he wished me a sober good evening and conveyed his warmest regards to my husband.
“Yes, of course,” I replied. “And he returns his to you. Naturally, he’s followed news of the trial with the utmost interest.”
This was a lie, of course. Benedict Wilfred Thorpe hadn’t sent any regards at all to Alfred de Marigny or Nancy de Marigny; had not sent a single word, in fact, to his own wife, or to anybody—at least so far as I’d heard—since disappearing on the morning of Harry Oakes’s murder. Of course, a lot of people disappeared around that time, and nobody showed the slightest curiosity about that singularity. Everybody just carried on, and since the fact of our marriage was indisputable—why, the Windsors themselves confirmed the story, terribly romantic, and what cachet to have been married by the governor himself, everybody was so envious—the fiction of Thorpe’s urgent, unfortunate business elsewhere stood pretty firm, thank you. There was a war on, after all.
Everybody understood that.
And so I walked up the path to my bungalow alone that night, the fourteenth of November. I unlocked the door and went into my empty house and checked the rug, the hall table, as I always did.
I found no note, no letter, no message of any kind. But a fellow stood in my living room, a blond giant of a man, wearing a creased suit and a sober, anxious expression.
“Who the devil are you?” I cried, hand on heart.
He opened his mouth and spoke in impeccable English, though a pronounced German accent. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Thorpe. Your housekeeper was kind enough to admit me. My name is Johann. Johann von Kleist.”
“Johann?” I whispered.
“I’m afraid I have taken the trouble to come to you with some grave news.”
I covered my mouth with my hand.
“It’s to do you with your husband,” he said. “My brother. Benedict Thorpe.”
Eleven days later, on the twenty-sixth of November, I followed Marshall into the drawing room of Government House, where the Duchess of Windsor was supervising the erection of a tall blue spruce in full needle. The air smelled deeply of pine. For a moment, I stared at the back of her head, her trim waist in its blue jacket, belted in yellow, and I couldn’t quite comprehend what was going on. Then I remembered. Christmas.
“Madam,” said Marshall, “Mrs. Thorpe is here.”
The duchess made no sign of having heard him, except that she raised one finger in the air. “A little to the left,” she said, and the footman moved the spruce to the left.
“Will there be coffee, madam? Tea?”
“No, thank you. That will be all, Marshall.”
Marshall bowed and turned. I believe, in passing, he offered me a look of sympathy. But I might have been mistaken. When it came to poker faces, Marshall could have cleared the card table in Amarillo, Texas.
The duchess rested one hand on her hip and tilted her head. So far as I could tell, that Christmas tree could have modeled for the Saturday Evening Post, but then it wasn’t my job to present the world with a picture-perfect picture of life inside Government House, was it? It wasn’t my job to create that kind of fiction for a living. Not anymore, at least.
I knew better than to say anything. Let her enjoy the exercise of petty power, after all. It cost you nothing and meant the world to her. She told the footman to move it an inch thataway, then thisaway. Preezie nibbled at her ankles. She held up her finger at last and said, “There. Thank you, Brown. That will be all. You may send in the maid to clean up the mess.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the footman. He dusted off the needles and hurried out, and the duchess began a slow, deliberate turn to face me. To my surprise, she was smiling.
“Mrs. Thorpe. How good of you to stop by. I was going to send for you. We were only back from the States last night.”
“Yes, I heard.”
She leaned her head to one side, regarding me as she had regarded the spruce tree. “I read your column, Mrs. Thorpe.”
“Did you, now? I’m flattered you found the time, what with all the Christmas shopping.”
“Of course I found the time. We’ve been very important to each other, haven’t we? Of course I found the time to read this column of yours.” She lifted her finger and waved it back and forth, the way you might scold a naughty child. “Not your best work, Mrs. Thorpe. Not at all.”
“No?”
“I don’t know how that scoundrel de Marigny wormed his way into your affections—I can only guess—but really, I was embarrassed for you. To say nothing of all those dreadful insinuations.”
“I’m sorry about those. I would’ve been delighted to accuse outright, but I don’t want to get killed, like everybody else.”
“I beg your pardon?”
The face she presented me was thoroughly shocked, and I had no doubt of its sincerity. Women like Wallis never, for a single moment, imagine themselves really guilty of anything. Each action is perfectly defensible, each enemy perfectly vile and deserving of whatever fate casts his way.
“Never mind,” I said. “That’s not why I came.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I came to discuss my husband. To be frank, I’ve been concerned, since I hadn’t heard a thing from him since the morning we learned poor Sir Harry was murdered.”
“The day you were married,” she said.
“Yes. And eleven days ago I learned that instead of flying back to London under the care of the Royal Air Force, he was captured by German agents that very morning, on his way to Windsor Field.”
“No!”
“Someone had betrayed him as a British agent, you see, and he’s presently imprisoned in the fortress at Colditz.”
“In Colditz!”
“Yes.”
“My goodness! Poor Thorpe. How very awful for you. My deepest sympathies.”
“Yes,” I said. “Quite.”
“Why, you can’t possibly think—”
“No, of course not. Perish the thought.”
We regarded each other for a moment or two, eyes of Wallis blue to eyes of plain brown, American to American, both of us all tangled up in the affairs of a country not our own.
I went on softly. “It would have been awful, wouldn’t it, if anyone had ever laid the finger of suspicion on Harold Christie. If Scotland Yard, say, had taken over the investigation, instead of those two incompetent specimens of the Miami Police Department the duke put in charge the very first morning. My God, heaven knows what they might have found. They might have found what my husband found. What my husband had already reported to his superiors back in London.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
I reached up to my earlobes and unscrewed the first earring. “What would you say, Duchess, if I told you that I had made copies of all those documents I passed along to you? All those interesting financial statements.”
She stared, transfixed, at my fingers. The earring came free, and I went to the other ear.
“What, for example, would those documents be worth to you and your husband? I’m just speaking hypothetically, of course. It’s not as if I mean to blackmail you.”
“Mrs. Thorpe. Lulu. Really.” She forced her gaze away from my left earlobe and made a brittle laugh. “This has gone far enough. What documents do you mean? I’m afraid my memory fails me.”
I held out the earrings in my palm. She looked down, but she didn’t touch them. At her temples, a few beads of perspiration had begun to form. I thought I smelled something peculiar in the air, something tangy.
“How we trusted you,” she whispered.
“I trusted you, and now my husband’s imprisoned in Colditz.”
“I—we had nothing to do with that. Nothing at all. How could we? We are loyal servants of the Crown, Mrs. Thorpe. Loyal servants.”
“No doubt. In which case, I’m sure you’ll be more than happy to give me what I need to save him.”
“What do you need?”
I took her hand, stuck the earrings in the middle of her palm, and closed her cold fingers around them. Her eyes met mine, round and vulnerable. I thought of my dear, empty bungalow, my belongings packed in a few wooden boxes, on the slow boat back to the United States. I spoke softly, so as not to frighten her further.
“What I need, at your earliest convenience, is a place on one of those Liberators taking off from Windsor Field.”
Part VI
Ursula
January 1944
(Germany)
Maybe there’s some truth to what they say about second sight, or intuition, or whatever you want to call it, because on the morning Ursula Kassmeyer receives the message from Scotland, she wakes up thinking vividly of Mutti.
Her sisters don’t remember this woman they once called Mutti, but Ursula does. There’s a little irony in this, because Frederica and Gertrud were the ones who wept so bitterly as that long-ago train rattled northward from Florida to New York, who cried and cried for Mutti’
s fragrant, loving arms, while Ursula remained dry-eyed and comforted them. But eventually the younger ones dried their tears, they called for Mutti less and less, and by the time they were settled in a little villa outside Paris, near a village on the Marne river where Maman’s uncle still lived—Nurse said she was not their nurse anymore, but Maman—only Ursula stayed awake in her bed at night and remembered all the little details of Mutti, her smile and her kisses, her patient instruction at the piano, her pale hair that felt like silk against your cheek. Only Ursula gazed upon the painting of the Madonna in the village church and thought of Mutti. Only Ursula recalled the beach and the picnics, the magical man with the ginger hair and the gigantic laugh who swung you up screaming in the air and caught you just before you dunked in the water. Mr. Thorpe. She even remembered his name.
Maybe if Maman had been less drunk, if she had spent less time sick in her bed or else out all night, sometimes all the next day or even several days together, Ursula might have forgotten Mutti, instead of holding the little shards of memory close to her heart and turning them over and over, examining each tiny facet, each glint, each inclusion. But what other comfort did she have? Only God and her great-uncle, who was old and not well himself. When he died—this was maybe a year or so before the Great War started, when Ursula was twelve years old—Maman moved them all into Paris itself, a few grubby rooms on the top floor of a building in the Montparnasse, where there was little food, less heat, and almost no money at all.
But isn’t this how Ursula became what she is today? Those lean days in wartime Paris, scrounging for food and knowledge. This morning, as Ursula forces her body out of bed, the dark, frozen air brings back the memory of those nights in Paris, huddled under a moth-eaten blanket with her sisters. The days in Paris, helping out Madame Pistou at the boulangerie around the corner, shaping the dough into endless loaves, in order to earn some bread for them to eat. The stinking gutters, the wounded soldiers hobbling down the street with their stricken faces.
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