I’m told the duchess’s dress was made by Mainbocher out of Wallis blue satin, to match her eyes, but of course you can’t tell about color in a black-and-white photograph. Suffice to say the dress fits the occasion, long and rather demure, flattering all the same. No surprise there. It’s their faces, my God. Her face, and his face. I mean, they’re not smiling, either of them. In fact, they remind me of a pair of aristos about to board the tumbrel. She wears an expression of taut stoicism, and he looks scared out of his wits. I believe Cecil Beaton himself took those photographs. I sometimes wonder what he was thinking as he snapped the shutter.

There were no cameras around as I took for my second husband, for better or worse, Benedict Wilfred Thorpe—good Lord, what a moniker—in a private service officiated by the former king of England, if you will, witnessed by the notorious Wallis Simpson, his wife, and Miss Jean Drewes of Mamaroneck, who laughed out loud and handed me a bouquet of hibiscus plucked straight from the gardens of Government House. It was a long way from the clerk’s office in Niagara, I’ll say that, and certainly the groom was a decided improvement. But I’ll never know what we looked like, side by side, facing the world as husband and wife for the first time. I do know that my dress was yellow, not blue. The color of old sunshine and telegrams.

The duchess, that miraculous woman, had ordered a proper wedding tea laid out in the formal dining room. We drank two bottles of iced champagne and ate a great deal of cake. Afterward, she took me aside and wished me happiness. There were tears in her eyes, I’m not kidding. We sat on a pair of armchairs in the drawing room while the Duke of Windsor and my brand-new husband laughed and smoked cigars at the mantel. Those Union Jack pillows adorned the sofa nearby. She leaned forward and said, in her throaty voice, “How do you feel? Were you surprised?”

“Awfully.”

She laughed. “For a moment, I thought you were going to be sick. That’s all right. I felt the same way.”

“You? The romance of the century?”

We still held our glasses, the last of the champagne from the two vintage bottles, both of which had been smuggled out of France ahead of the Nazi advance. Wallis looked away from me and toward her own portrait, above the mantel, right between our two chummy husbands. I thought how strange it must be, to sit beneath this monumental version of yourself, day after day. She idled the glass between her fingers and said, “Have you ever been skiing, Lulu?”

“No.”