She bends over his arm and reads aloud, because Benedict’s eyesight is still a little blurred at close range.
RECEIVED CABLE AT LAST FROM MRS. THORPE STOP PRESENTLY WITH MARGARET IN SWITZERLAND . . .
“What?” shouts Benedict. “What did you say?”
Elfriede puts her hand on her son’s sleeve. “Shh. Listen.”
. . . WITH MARGARET IN SWITZERLAND UNDER BELIEF BENEDICT DEAD STOP MY REPLY RETURNED UNDELIVERED STOP NO FORWARDING ADDRESS STOP WILL ALERT U.S. EMBASSY ZURICH STOP YOURS ALWAYS=
=JOHANN
The yellow slip starts to crumple. She slides it gently from Benedict’s trembling fingers. He makes an anguished noise from his chest and tears his hat from his head.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “Johann will find her. Just think, she’s in Switzerland. Wherever she is, it’s not far.”
“She can’t be here. She’s in Nassau.”
“Well, it seems she’s not. She came after you.”
“It’s impossible,” he says.
“She’s an intrepid woman, I suppose.”
“She was supposed to stay in Nassau!”
Elfriede folds the telegram and slips it in her cardigan pocket with the envelope, all the while cursing herself for not reading the thing first. When would she learn? Telegrams always contained something shocking. Benedict’s bracing himself on the arm of the bench, trying to rise, and the image of Wilfred, sitting on this very bench, and her young self poised on the wall behind him, almost staggers her. But not quite. She keeps enough wit to reach out and take his arm.
“Benedict, no. Where are you going?”
“To find her.”
“Don’t be silly. You can hardly walk yet.”
“I thought she was safe,” he says. “I thought she was in Nassau.”
“Well, it seems she came after you, like a good wife should. Now sit down.”
“Why didn’t someone tell her I was alive?”
“Because by the time your brother was able to get word to his old army friend and arrange that little ruse in Colditz for us, she was already gone. Sit, please. You’re alive, she’s alive. Johann will find her somehow. Sit, Benedict.”
But Benedict will not sit. Just like his father, she thinks, as she follows him down the paved path, piles of slush to the left and the right of him, the mild smell of springtime leaking from the stones, and back inside the walls of the monastery. You can’t just keep a man like that away from this woman he loves. They will have to dig up one of the old straitjackets from the cellar or something.
But isn’t this no more than she deserves? Maybe she had no choice in the beginning, when Mrs. Thorpe had her moved from the hospital in Inverness to a— Well, let’s call it what it was, a loony bin. Naturally, Mrs. Thorpe, being the sort of woman who never spent a sunless day in her life, who saw the bright side even of her own son’s death—He died a hero, just as his father would have wanted, remember that, Elfriede, don’t dishonor his memory with these stupid moods of yours—thought it best for the children to remove this sodden, dangerous influence from their lives. A woman who tried to drown herself, what next? Drown the children?
And maybe she was right, who knows. Elfriede remembers little of the next couple of years in this loony bin that—true to its name—actually made you loonier each day you lived there, smack in the rainiest possible corner of the rainiest possible country, who the hell thought of that? Some crazy person. It was not until Johann arrived after the war and dragged the secret out of poor Mrs. Thorpe, who made him promise not to tell the little ones in exchange for allowing him to take charge of Elfriede, take charge of his beloved mother, bring her to Switzerland and care for her devotedly until, bit by bit, she discovered enough of herself to survive. By that time, years later, what could you possibly do? Announce yourself back in your children’s lives? They would hate her, she was sure. She and Johann argued fiercely over this point, right up until Johann abandoned his post in the German high command and fled to the United States in 1938. She couldn’t do it. She was brave enough to live, brave enough even to take over the clinic, run it herself to give refuge for those who were uprooted and unwanted, but she was not brave enough to introduce herself to these children she had failed. She was not brave enough to summon up that fierce, passionate love once again, because why should these children want this love of hers thrust upon them? It poisoned whatever it touched. No, she kept her love locked tight in her heart, where it could do no one any harm.
Until Johann cabled her four months ago with the news about Benedict. Then she understood what she was meant to do. What she had been waiting the past twenty years to do. What Wilfred needed her to do. So she had done it. This impossible thing, to rescue a man from Colditz prison, she had done, employing Johann’s old ties and her own ingenuity. She had bartered him out of prison—oh, the first sight of her youngest son, her baby, fevered and weak and limping, unfocused blue eyes and matted hair of indeterminate color, how it wrecked her—and then carefully maneuvered him south by train and horse cart, an injured German soldier on his way to a Swiss cure, according to the perfectly faked papers Elfriede had obtained in Zurich from a man who had found refuge in her clinic a year earlier. She had nursed him and fed him and healed him. She had saved her son, Wilfred’s son, their son, with the strength and singlemindedness of her love. So there.
And now here he goes, this lost-found son of hers, her personal redemption, her gift to Wilfred, staggering down the path, cane plunging, hair glittering in the late sunshine, and she thinks, Damn it all, Wilfred, could you have made him just a little less like yourself, please?
But then. Thirty or so yards from the old wooden door, something funny happens. The script changes without any warning at all. The door swings open, and a woman comes tumbling out, pale blond, blue eyes so well remembered that Elfriede stops dead. The woman’s gaze slides right past Benedict, who has also turned to stone, and finds her, Elfriede. They recognize each other at the same time. As if this courtyard is a bedroom in Florida, a picnic blanket, an ice cream parlor, and the decades have compressed into nothing. As if the air smells of salt instead of spring.
Mutti! Ursula gasps.
So Elfriede misses the moment when her son reunites with the woman who lumbers along behind Ursula. She’s on her knees, holding Ursula to her chest, and doesn’t see the brunette with the enormous belly, crying and crying, sinking on the stones beside her, wrapped around Benedict who is wrapped around her. That meeting will have to wait until she wakes from this dream she’s having.
Somewhere in the middle of the dream, though, Elfriede happens to squint upward—maybe by chance, maybe by human instinct, maybe by the nudge of some unseen hand—to discover a third woman, who stands near the door, arms folded. The sun beats down on her brown hair. A cigarette dangles from one hand, and she’s smiling a little.
Her other hand wipes at her eyes with a small, square linen cloth.
Epilogue
Lulu
June 1951
(RMS Queen Mary, At Sea)
I haven’t given much thought to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor over the course of the past seven years. Like you, I’ve seen their names in the newspapers from time to time, some dateline from Biarritz or Paris or New York—never Nassau, of course, and certainly not London—but the stories are of so little interest to me, so little relevance to my own life, this party or that party, this magnificent necklace or that extraordinary bracelet, I generally don’t linger. I simply don’t give a damn.
And I’m chasing the twins down the promenade deck when the luggage comes aboard, twenty-eight steamer trunks in all, and the demi-royal couple emerges from the back of a chauffeured limousine to the crump of a hundred flashbulbs and the cheering of a gullible crowd of admirers. All that fuss occurs at a distance, scarcely noticed, because Maggie’s about to throw her left shoe down a ventilation shaft, so I learn the news hours later, as we’re dressing for dinner. The ship’s already well past the tip of Long Island
, steaming out to the open ocean. My husband straightens his tie, eyes me in the mirror, and speaks in a voice of forced cheer. “I say. Jolly coincidence. Have you heard the Windsors are aboard?”
Look, I’ve been busy. At seven, Wilfred’s finally acquired a midge of sense, but Maggie and Jack turned three only last month, so you can imagine. I’ll be clackety-clacking away on my typewriter one minute, elbows-deep in a story about the Rosenberg trial, say, when a crash comes echoing down the hallway, followed by the telling pause, followed by the howl, followed by the nanny’s hushing. I’m supposed to let her sort everything out—as Thorpe reminds me time and again—but biology’s an autocrat, wouldn’t you agree, and inevitably I’ve got to rise and witness the unfolding disaster for myself. And once you’re up, you’re up. It’s an hour or more before you can disentangle yourself from the ties of motherhood and find your typewriter again. Sometimes Thorpe wanders in, bemused, while I’m still on the kitchen floor playing horsie with Jack and Maggie, and I’ll look up and say accusingly, One more, you said. Let’s have one more baby. And Thorpe will scoop Maggie or Jack (or both) into the air and say, Twins run in your family, beloved, not mine. Anyway, which one of them would you send back?
So we muddle on, me writing freelance for whatever magazine will have me, and Thorpe teaching botany to dewy undergraduates at this small college at the western edge of New Hampshire where we’ve chosen to settle, God knows why. Each June, we board one ocean liner or another and cross the Atlantic to spend the summer in Switzerland with the aunties and Gammy. (Wilfred dubbed her that when he was a year and a half old, and it stuck.) This June, it happens to be the same ocean liner selected by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for whatever whim presently moves them to Europe. What are the odds?
As it happens, our paths don’t cross until the fifth evening of the voyage. This is mostly because the Thorpes—a botany professor and his journalist wife, together with their three small children—are traveling cabin class, wedged together in a berth on D deck near the engine room, whereas Wallis and Edward occupy a massive suite of staterooms on the main deck, near the center of the ship where the noise and motion are at a minimum, don’t you know. Also—and if you haven’t traveled by ocean liner across the Atlantic with three small children, you might not fully comprehend what I mean by this—our hands might have been a little full.
Still. On the fifth night, which is fair and warm, my husband pays one of the stewardesses to mind the children for the evening, while he whisks me away to the glamour of the second-class dining room for drinks and dinner à deux, all dressed up, just like old times. He’s looking especially handsome. The burnish on his strawberry-blond hair might be fading a trifle, and he still walks with a hint of a limp, but the sight of Thorpe in his dinner jacket never fails to set my heart thumping and my back itching with the memory of a certain sea grape tree on an island, far away. After dinner there’s dancing, and after dancing we spill onto the deserted promenade deck for what my husband likes to call a spot of kissing. Mind you, we’ve both drunk a great deal of champagne, and as soon as I inhale Thorpe’s good, clean smell, the kissing turns serious, and there we are, necking desperately against the railing like a pair of teenagers, Thorpe’s wicked hand down the front of my dress, when some damned kids start yelling for their mama and papa and spoil the fun. Especially when they turn out to be our kids, followed by the exhausted stewardess we hired to prevent just such an interruption. Oh well.
But Thorpe responds in good humor. He swings Maggie into one arm and takes Jack’s little palm in his other hand, and Wilfred trots along after them, explaining how he tried to get the twins to stay in bed, really he did. I look around for the stewardess, but the ship has swallowed her up. Not that I blame her.
Now, it’s June, remember, and we’re fairly far north, and even though it’s past ten o’clock, the sun hasn’t quite set. The air is filled with this incandescence, this golden light, and for an instant or two I allow myself the pleasure of watching my husband bear our children down the deck, gilded in sunshine. The beauty of it drenches me. I think my heart stops. And that’s when I spot them.
God only knows how long they’ve been standing there like skeletons, not twenty yards away. She’s wearing a long, sleeveless dinner dress in her favorite shade of blue, and her chest and neck and arms are crusted in jewels. He’s wearing a dinner jacket identical to that of my husband. The years have not been kind. Her features have hardened into something more resembling a mask than a human face. The eyebrows are a painted caricature of their former selves. As for him. He’s haggard and goggle-eyed, and his thick gold hair is turning thin and gray. But it’s them, all right. You can’t mistake them. Their expressions are frozen in shock. We meet eyes, and I can tell they recognize me. I can tell they’ve witnessed the entire scene, the necking and the children, the late, golden sunlight drenching us.
For a moment, as we stand there arrested in silent, mutual recognition, I’m reminded of the duchess once telling me—I can’t remember where or when—how she hoped that their faithful years of service in this dump, as she called it, would lead to bigger things. I think she expected a governorship in Australia or Canada. Something suited to their station and his imagined abilities. And in these two stricken faces, which seem to have aged twice those seven and a half calendar years since I’ve seen them last, I believe I read the story of all those disappointed hopes, the glister, the vapid pointlessness of their lives. Standing before them, on a patch of wooden deck in the middle of the ocean, I imagine those painted faces are like shells around a hollow core.
Possibly I should say something. Certainly I should feel something. But I do neither of those things. I simply can’t summon them up. The strap of my dress hangs down my arm—I can feel it tickle my skin—so I secure it back atop my shoulder and proceed in the same direction as Thorpe and the children, toward the hatchway that leads to the staircase that leads to our humble cabin, where perhaps Wilfred and Maggie and Jack will eventually fall asleep and I can sneak into my husband’s bunk for the kind of silent, giggling, undercover lovemaking that is our present lot in life.
As I pass them, I nod my head and say good evening.
Good evening, Mrs. Thorpe, says the duke.
His wife remains silent. But salt breeze nudges her hair, and the setting sun flickers on her jewels.
Historical Note
My book ideas come from all kinds of sources, from newspapers or cocktail parties or when I’m researching something else, and this one started with my editor, Rachel Kahan. I was heading off to the Bahamas with my husband for a long-anticipated Weekend Away from the Kids, and she reminded me the Duke of Windsor had been governor of the then-British colony during the Second World War, and wouldn’t that be a terrific setting for a book?
So I did a little research, and I spoke with our hosts—Sean and Kara Nottage, who are lucky enough to make their home in Lyford Cay—and discovered all kinds of fascinating lore about the Windsors and the island they called home for nearly five years. It took some time, however, for the right story to take shape in my head. Generally speaking, while my novels take place in historical settings, I prefer to write from the perspective of a fictional protagonist, and in order to navigate all the significant episodes in wartime Nassau without taking a historical figure as narrator, I had to make a giant, complex imaginative leap. Lulu was the product of that leap.
Most of the major events in this novel actually took place, and many of the characters Lulu encounters actually existed. The murder of Sir Harry Oakes remains one of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century, and I’m not the first novelist to take on the subject. Each detail of his life and his untimely end are as accurate as I could make them, and I refer anyone interested in further research to the excellent Blood and Fire, written by the journalist and Bahamas native John Marquis, and to Alfred de Marigny’s memoir A Conspiracy of Crowns, both of which were indispensable to my understanding of the crime and the personalities
involved. Keep in mind, however, that this novel is a work of fiction, and both Lulu’s involvement in the affairs of the Windsors and her speculation as to the true identity of the murderer derive solely from my imagination as inspired by the known evidence.
As for the Windsors themselves, endless ink has already been spilled trying to get to the bottom of them. I recommend Anne Sebba’s That Woman and Philip Ziegler’s King Edward VIII for a wealth of biographical information and psychological insight into one of the most notorious couples of the century, as well as Andrew Morton’s 17 Carnations for an examination of the case against the Windsors’ activities—and possibly their loyalties—during the Second World War. I have tried to be fair, however, and the short memoir The Windsors I Knew, written by Jean Hardcastle-Taylor (formerly Miss Drewes, the Windsors’ private secretary during their Bahamas years, who makes a few appearances in The Golden Hour) provides a fascinating counterpoint to the largely negative portrait of the couple that emerges from history. Many of the details of everyday life inside Government House—including the red bows tied around the necks of the Windsors’ beloved Cairn terriers during the Christmas season—come from this invaluable source.
As for the larger historical context of the Bahamas, I consulted a variety of sources, both popular and academic, in trying to understand the racial and social history of the colony. I count Gail Saunders’s Race and Class in the Colonial Bahamas, 1880–1960 as the most comprehensive study, but Owen Platt’s The Royal Governor . . . and the Duchess and Sir Orville Turnquest’s What Manner of Man Is This? The Duke of Windsor’s Years in The Bahamas lent crucial details and insight. I also spent hours scouring old maps and sources to imagine Nassau and New Providence Island as they existed decades ago, before the enormous development that took place in the postwar years. While The Golden Hour is not, and was not intended to be, a scholarly history of the Bahamas and the Windsors, I’ve striven to re-create this setting and its real-life inhabitants as accurately as possible.
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