But the duchess had already lifted one of the garments in question, a sunset-yellow number, made of silk and long, elegant sunbeams. She carried it across her forearms and presented it to me along with an expression I recognized, that of the indomitable inner Wallis who wouldn’t be told no.

“I don’t like yellow,” I told her.

She held the sleeves to my shoulders and cocked her head to the side. “Oh, do give it a try. Please, Lulu.”

I took the dress and went behind the Chinese screen in the corner, though not before checking the angles of the mirrors around me. As for the frock, I hadn’t much hope. Along with the olive skin and brown eyes, my Italian mother had bestowed on me a set of curves that required posted warnings in certain states, a predicament Wallis had never faced in her life. I stepped into the dress, reached around back, sucked in all the breath to the bottom of my lungs, and pulled on the zipper tab.

And here’s the funny part: I met no resistance at all. That dress, castoff of Wallis Simpson, whose figure resembled a clothes hanger more than a living woman, slipped right over every hill and plain. “I’ll be damned,” I muttered, and stepped from the screen. Wallis clapped her hands.

“Oh, I knew it,” she said. “A perfect fit. Yellow’s your color, darling, with that skin. You look like a dream. Come along, let’s show the duke.”

“The duke!”

“He adores a woman in a fine dress.”

“I can’t possibly—”

“Don’t be shy. He’s not busy at the moment.”

She took my hand—Miss Drewes had disappeared—and led me out of the suite and down the hall to the stairs, toward the duke’s private study. The dress reached all the way to the floor, thank goodness, disguising the rather serviceable saddle shoes I’d worn from the canteen. The duchess was in a strange mood, ebullient, mischievous. Whatever she was, she was not unwell, and I wasn’t such a dunce that I didn’t smell a rat around the place, by now. Why, the whole affair stank to high heaven. But it was not until the duchess opened the door to the duke’s study—she didn’t knock, of course not—and, linking arms, drew me into the room, that I discovered the source of this aroma.

He stood next to the duke, at his massive desk, wearing a neatly pressed tropical suit of pale linen and a hibiscus flower in his buttonhole. Also a wide, shy smile, which he offered to me now, along with a small white box, the best kind.

This time it did contain a ring.

Elfriede

June 1916

(Scotland)