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.