The Duchess Read online

  Praise for

  The Royal Governess

  “A beautifully woven and exquisitely detailed story of strong upstairs-downstairs women whose lives entwine during some of the most significant periods of modern British history. . . . A novel that will stand the test of time. I loved it.”

  —Heather Morris, New York Times bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz

  “An intimate view of the royal family at a time of great uncertainty and change, The Royal Governess is a beautifully written and richly detailed piece of historical fiction. Marion Crawford’s dedication to her charges, as well as her passion for education and reform, shines through the pages. Through her eyes, the reader is transported back in time and thoroughly immersed in the lives of the British royal family. A delightful read!”

  —Chanel Cleeton, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Train to Key West

  “Wendy Holden absolutely delivers in this perfect blend of story and history. The Royal Governess is a fabulous read for not only devotees of period fiction and the British royals, but anyone with a hunger for a well-crafted tale. Lovers of The Crown will adore this!”

  —Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Last Year of the War

  “A moving, gorgeously written page-turner. We peek behind the Windsors’ swagged silk curtains—the insider details are a total delight—but the story’s beating heart belongs to the devoted royal governess, Crawfie. Holden takes the reader on a glittering, unforgettable journey.”

  —Eve Chase, author of The Daughters of Foxcote Manor

  “This is a warm and often witty work of biographical historical fiction that deftly weaves fact with imagination into an engaging tale of life behind the palace walls. Fans of the genre and of the British royals will find it absolutely delightful.”

  —Booklist

  “Holden grounds the story of Marion’s attempt to help the princesses understand all classes of English society with rich historical details, and develops Marion’s character as she navigates her true calling amid staggering privilege. This lively historical tale will please fans of the English royal family.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A very satisfying reading experience. It’s doubtful the queen would enjoy it, but pretty much everybody else will.”

  —The Washington Post

  Titles by Wendy Holden

  The Royal Governess

  The Duchess

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2021 by Wendy Holden

  Readers Guide copyright © 2021 by Wendy Holden

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Holden, Wendy, 1965- author.

  Title: The duchess / Wendy Holden.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021022748 (print) | LCCN 2021022749 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593200353 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593200377 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Windsor, Wallis Warfield, Duchess of, 1896-1986—Fiction. | Windsor, Edward, Duke of, 1894-1972—Fiction. | Great Britain—Politics and government—1936-1945—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6058.O436 D88 2021 (print) | LCC PR6058.O436 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022748

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022749

  Welbeck Fiction Limited UK hardcover edition: August 2021

  Berkley trade paperback edition: September 2021

  Cover design by Sarah Oberrender

  Cover photograph by Horst P. Horst/Condé Nast via Getty Images

  Book design by Katy Riegel, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt

  This is a work of fiction. Apart from the well-known historical figures and actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all other characters are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are not intended to change the entirely fictional nature of the work.

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  To Noj, Andrew and Isabella

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for The Royal Governess

  Titles by Wendy Holden

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Acknowledgments

  Readers Guide

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  The Duke of Windsor’s Funeral

  London

  June 1972

  In his coffin of English oak, on the Royal Air Force plane, he had gone before her. Wallis had not wanted him to be alone on that last journey. But grief had weakened her, and her physician insisted she stay in Paris. A few days later a plane of the Queen’s Flight arrived to bring her to England for the funeral. Now they were almost here. Below, London spread flat and gray. There was the squiggle of the Thames, there the Tower, Tower Bridge, St. Paul’s.

  Wallis stared at her reflection in the cabin window. She had never felt old before. He had made her feel youthful and beautiful always. But with him gone she was suddenly a woman in her late seventies.

  Her once-smooth, pale skin was furrowed and powdered. Behind her brave red lipstick her mouth was wrinkled. Hair that had been naturally black and glossy was now dyed and lacquered. Only her navy-blue eyes were the same. Framed thickly with mascara, they registered shock and bewilderment.

  She still could not believe it. It was a dream from which she would soon wake, in her bedroom at home in the Bois de Boulogne. Bwah de Bolone, as he always drawlingly pronounced it.

  Opposite, her companion shifted in her armchair. “The Queen’s Flight might be the most prestigious in the world,” she remarked. “But no one could claim its aircraft are the most luxurious.”

  Wallis gave Grace a weary smile. She knew her old friend was only acting the spoiled part, trying to distract her from the trials that lay ahead. How would she bear a single moment of any of it? And yet borne it must be.

  “I suppose her Purple Passage has proved useful,” Grace conceded, referring to the invisible red carpet in the sky that only the Queen’s Flight could use.

  “It’s called Purple Airspace,” Wallis corrected. “As well you know!”

  Grace had been Princess Radziwill in a former marriage—Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister, Lee, was the current one. Grace had moved on to become the reigning Countess of Dudley. She and Wallis went back years; besides a dry sense of humor, they shared a similar taste in clothes and an outsider’s perspective on the British upper class. Both were foreigners—Grace from Dubrovnik—and neither had been born aristocrats.

  “I’m grateful to Lilibet anyway,” Wallis went on. “She’s been very kind. She came to see us, which was good of her.”

  After decades of cold war with the Windsors, the call had come out of the blue. The Foreign Office relayed that the queen wished to visit her uncle at his Paris home. Sh
e would come during her five-day state visit to France.

  Lilibet had clearly heard about the ex-king’s cancer. Someone had said that after the failed radiation treatment his life hung by a thread. She wanted to say goodbye but only afterward had the high-stakes game that was the run-up to the visit been revealed. Britain’s ambassador in Paris had been adamantly against the idea. It would, he had warned, spell disaster for Anglo-French relations if the ex-monarch died before the present one left England. The state visit would have to be canceled and President Pompidou would be greatly offended.

  The farcical aspect this lent the situation would, in other circumstances, have amused the former Edward VIII. But he rose to the occasion. His country needed him. He was important in a way he hadn’t been these past thirty-six years. Through sheer strength of will he hung on and waited during the whole of the royal visit. Lilibet did not hurry, dazzling banquets at Versailles and the British embassy in one tiara after another before touring Provence and attending the races. Finally, accompanied by Princes Philip and Charles, she arrived at route du Champ d’Entraînement on a sunny May afternoon.

  Grateful as she was to her niece-in-law, Wallis could not help being struck by the hideousness of the royal-blue hat and the horrible matching box-pleated suit. Amid the riot of pattern, Lilibet’s bow-shaped diamond brooch and three strings of perfect pearls were completely lost. How could such a naturally pretty woman with such wonderful skin contrive to seem so plain?

  In his overcoat Philip had looked like a testy bank manager, while Charles, his striped shirt clashing with his floral tie, had just looked uncomfortable. Beneath his checked tweed jacket, his shoulders sloped. His eyebrows too; his face wore a permanent expression of weary disappointment.

  Wallis had felt sorry for him. She knew what it was to be steamrollered by the Windsors. And Charles was obviously terrified of his father, whose mannerisms he seemed condemned to imitate: pulling at his cuffs, clasping his hands, even walking with one arm behind his back.

  As she entered the airy marble-floored hall, Lilibet had glanced without comment on the great silk Garter banner fixed to the ornate balcony. If she was surprised, in the drawing room of an abdicated monarch, to take tea under his full-length portrait in kingly robes and another of Queen Mary in all her splendor, she did not show it.

  Philip had been another matter, lounging against the Louis XV sofa and gazing satirically around at the collection of Meissen pug dogs and Black Diamond and Gin-Seng, their panting real-life counterparts. “Is it true you’ve got one called Peter Townsend?” He had smirked.

  “We used to,” Wallis had answered levelly. “But we gave the group captain away.”

  “Ha. As did Margaret, of course.”

  Tea over, she took Elizabeth II upstairs to the orange sitting room on the first floor. Uncle David, as she called him, using the name the family always had, was fixed and threaded with tubes and clamps to the drip that sustained his life. He had, however, insisted his doctor hid the latter behind the curtains and the former beneath his clothes. His wizened face, still handsome beneath his combed silver hair, blazed with delight when Lilibet came in. He did his courtly best, rising from his wheelchair with great difficulty to bow and kiss his royal visitor on both cheeks. Still the fashion plate, he had sported a perfectly cut blue blazer and a silk cravat round his withered throat. They talked for exactly fifteen minutes.

  But afterward, once the queen had left, David seemed annoyed.

  “Oh, David. You didn’t ask her about my HRH again?” Exasperation and love twisted within Wallis. Surely he hadn’t wasted a precious—and final—personal interview with the sovereign on something so utterly pointless. The Windsors would never let her be a Royal Highness, and she didn’t care anyway. But David did, passionately, and had spent a lifetime trying to bring it about.

  Wordless, spent from the recent effort, he shook his head. But he was growling, trying to speak, and she gathered he was irked by his doctor not being presented to Her Majesty. “Monsieur Thin would have remembered it all his life.”

  She shook her head. Oh, the irony. No one was ever more aware of the power of the Crown than David, who had been so eager to give it up.

  He had lasted just nine days after that. On the night he died, black ravens, harbingers of death, sat in the bright leaves outside his window. They had come for him. When, much later, she was called by the nurse, it was to see that Black Diamond, who always slept on his bed, now lay on the rug on the floor. The pug too knew what was about to happen. At 2:20 in the morning, the onetime King Edward VIII of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions Beyond the Seas, Emperor of India, breathed his last. It was May 28, 1972.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Honeymoon in Paris

  1928

  The hotel room was dingy and had an odd smell. There was a brass double bed whose counterpane sagged in the middle. The floral wallpaper was faded, with rust-edged stains.

  Two long windows looked out into the street. Wallis went across to them. The window opposite had dried-up plants and dirty curtains.

  She had not expected Paris to look like this. All the way over on the boat from Dover she had imagined views of the Eiffel Tower. But Wallis was an optimist, and never more so than now. This was her wedding day. A fresh start. A new life.

  There was a mirror on the wall by the window, positioned to throw light on the face. Critically, she examined hers. She was no longer young—thirty-four at her last birthday—but she looked pretty good, she thought. Poised, sleek, fashionable. And hopeful, most of all.

  Her wedding outfit—primrose-yellow dress, sky-blue coat—made a colorful contrast to the glossy black hair center-parted and curled in two “earphones.” In her pale face her lips were a bold slash of red. If, in her dark-blue eyes, there was still something sad behind the sparkle, that would not stay long. Everything would be fine from now on.

  They had married that morning in London. At the Chelsea Register Office, as both had been divorced. But Wallis did not regret being unable to wed in a church. She had done that the first time around, and to a cad. Ernest could not be more different. He was a fine, kind, honorable man, and she was a lucky woman.

  A movement in the mirror caught her eye. She saw that the bellhop who had brought their bags up was still standing in the doorway, scratching himself.

  “Ernest,” she prompted, smiling. “I think he expects a tip.”

  Her new husband rummaged in his overcoat pocket and handed over a small coin. The boy looked at it, raised his eyebrows and disappeared.

  Wallis heaved her suitcase onto her bed and snapped the locks open. In the dingy surroundings, her dresses, new for the honeymoon, bolstered her feelings of optimism. She had bought them all for a song and altered them herself. She was clever with her needle and had once thought of a career in fashion. After the divorce, the idea of supporting herself, of becoming an independent woman, had strongly appealed.

  But her shattered self-confidence and her lack of practical skills had made this more difficult than she expected. And once she met Ernest, she had abandoned the effort altogether. He had been a port in a storm, quite literally, as his family owned a shipping firm. When he announced he was leaving America for the London office, and asked her to marry him and come too, she had seized the chance to begin again.

  She shook out a dress and thought about the great Paris fashion houses. She was keen to see them even if there was no chance of buying anything. Money was tight, hence the shabby hotel room. Hence the tiny stone in the ring on her finger, so small it struggled to catch the limited light.

  The family firm was in trouble, although Ernest was determined to turn it round. There were also the alimony payments to his first wife and young daughter. He had thought that would annoy her, but it didn’t. On the contrary, she was pleased that he already had a child. She was in her early thirties and the prospect was fading, but after her own miserable childhood, she had no wish for one anyway. She felt sorry for her little stepdaughter, whose life had been upended by her parents’ divorce. When Audrey came to stay with them in London, Wallis would give her a good time. They would be friends.

  She felt Ernest’s solid, reassuring presence behind her. He came close and put his large hands over hers. She leaned her head back, into his chest, and relished, for a few moments, his tall broadness, the feeling of utter safety, of being cherished and protected.