“Duchess,” I said, fingering my pocketbook, “while I’m here. Perhaps you could spare a moment for a private matter? If it’s convenient, of course.”

The Duchess of Windsor met my gaze over the back of the sofa. “Of course. Miss Drewes, would you mind showing Mrs. Gudewill to her car?”

Miss Drewes rose. “Not at all.”

Now, let me make something clear, before I explain what happened next. You could fault the duchess for any number of defects—we all have our defects, remember—but you couldn’t claim she shirked her duties as the wife of the governor of the Bahamas.

“They think I’m nothing but a clotheshorse,” she told me, as we cruised to Cat Island aboard the Gemini, a few weeks after our first productive little chat in the library of Government House. “They think I’m some kind of lazy, frivolous socialite. Dinner parties and ocean cruises. And nothing could be further from the truth, Lulu.”

I remember gazing at her against her tableau of pillows on the sofa—we sat inside the deckhouse, because of the draft—and recalling a certain dinner party the night before, at the home of Fred Sigrist and his wife. The Oakeses were there, and Harold Christie and his brother Frank, and yours truly, and a warm breeze off the ocean, and plenty of wine and brandy, palm trees and sea grapes and tranquility, such that you would hardly have known there was a war on at all, over on the other side of the world, where they existed under gloom of German bombers and English weather. Of course, there was no need to ask Wallis who they were. She meant David’s family, her nemesis, those wicked, cold-blooded, implacable snobs, hypocrites all, determined always to cast her—Wallis—in the worst possible light, when nothing could be further from the truth, Lulu. Behind her, the ocean shimmered under the sun.

“Nothing at all,” I said.

“I simply couldn’t believe my eyes when we began to tour about. The poverty! It’s heartbreaking, worse than anything I saw in China. And no one was doing a thing to help. I remember visiting a woman in her hut on one of the Out Islands—I don’t remember which one, it doesn’t matter—dirt floor, surrounded by children in rags, their bellies all swollen, another baby on the way, and she wasn’t any more concerned about the coming event than a . . . a cat might be concerned about an impending litter.” Wallis shook her head. “And that’s when I conceived the idea of a maternity clinic. To help, you know. To help these poor creatures take care of their young.”

“And to think the newspapers report nothing but the number of steamer trunks in your retinue.”