“Ah. Ah.” He searches the papers on his desk and finds the one he’s looking for, the sailing schedule. He runs his finger down the column. “The Ryndam came in two days ago, I believe, and departs tomorrow morning. The Rotterdam is due in next week, and departs for Rotterdam on the twenty-sixth.”

“I see,” she says. “You’re quite sure the Ryndam departs in the morning?”

“Yes, Frau. She’s scheduled to leave the pier at ten o’clock.”

Elfriede hands him the passenger list and puts her gloves back on. Her heart beats and beats in that overheated room, and yet she’s strangely cold, she has to stop herself from shivering.

“Mama?” says Johann.

“Thank you so much for your help, Mr. Patterson,” says Elfriede.

“It’s my pleasure, Frau von Kleist. Is there anything else I can do to assist you?”

“Yes, if you would. I should like to reserve a first-class cabin on the SS Ryndam for myself and my son, if there are any still available.”

Mr. Patterson, of course, is happy to make this arrangement for her.

Lulu

June 1942

(The Bahamas)

For a woman born and raised in the American South, Wallis Windsor didn’t express much tolerance for the heat of a Bahamian summer. She had this fan of Chinese silk, acquired during what she called her “lotus year” in the Orient—this occurred between husbands one and two, a kind of soul searching—and she waved it vigorously as the limousine trundled up the hill toward the maternity clinic in Grants Town.

“I don’t know why on earth you stand it here, Lulu,” she said. “We’ve got no choice, of course, but you don’t have to stay in this dump. You could go to Maine.”

“I don’t know anybody in Maine.”

“The Oakeses?”

“I’d say they already have their hands full, at present.”

“Oh, of course. That business. Do you know something funny? I’d put the whole sordid affair out of my mind.” She turned her head and stared out the window. “Awful man. Did you ever meet him?”

“Yes. He seemed like a gentleman to me.”

“She’s a schoolgirl, Lulu.”

“Nancy’s eighteen and just graduated.”

“He’s in his thirties. Divorced. It’s too horrible, really.”

On my other side, Miss Drewes looked up from the duchess’s appointment book, and I wondered if she was thinking the same thing I was. Ex-husbands, I mean, of which Wallis had two. If she did, she made no sign. Just tapped her pencil against her lips a couple of times and turned back to her work. Miss Drewes was an American through and through, Mamaroneck bred, a Mount Holyoke girl, but she greeted her employers each morning with Your Royal Highness and continued in that vein throughout the day, which was just the sort of attitude Wallis appreciated most.