Thelma pulled a cigarette case and lighter from her handbag. “I don’t know,” she said. “I hate to leave David. He can get so melancholy...”
Wallis lifted her teacup, dismissing Thelma’s concerns with a sweep of her hand. “He’s a man—they don’t stay blue for long. We’ll allow him one afternoon to moon over you before finding some suitable distraction.”
“That’s my concern,” said Thelma. “I don’t mind distractions so long as they don’t become permanent. I’ll be gone such a long time—what if someone turns his head?”
Wallis looked at Thelma, frowning. “I can’t pretend it’s not a possibility,” she said. “He will be awfully lonely without you.”
Thelma positioned the lighter so the flame caught the end of her cigarette, her heart sinking. “Well,” she said, feigning a confidence she didn’t truly feel, “nothing to be done for it now, I suppose. I’ll have to rely on you to look after him for me while I’m gone.”
There was a moment in which Thelma worried she had said the wrong thing—but then Wallis smiled. “Of course,” she said, setting her cup back in its saucer. She reached a hand across the table and patted Thelma’s arm. “You can count on me. Now, before I forget, would you mind picking up a few odds and ends for me while you’re in New York? Some things are so difficult to find here...”
Much as she adored Wallis, Thelma knew she was a cruel choice of chaperone: her brash demeanor was off-putting to many of their friends, so much so that David would likely have no fun at all while Thelma was away. She smiled as she thought of them, David and his guard dog, before chiding herself. That was unkind: if Wallis kept Thelma topmost in his mind, Thelma would have plenty of reasons to thank her. She didn’t truly believe David would follow through on his dreams of marriage, but she did, at the back of her mind, wonder.
Thelma looked around the tearoom, filling properly now that they were out of the harbor. She never dreamed of being made queen if he did propose—consort, perhaps, maybe a duchess of some kind—though, as she was already a viscountess through her marriage to Duke, perhaps she was being greedy. Still, she could only imagine what her mother would say. “Marry money,” she’d told Thelma and Gloria from the time they were young. “Marry money and you’ll never want for a thing in your lives.”
It was advice that Thelma struggled with. She had rejected it, espoused it—embraced it, even, though the notion sat heavily on her at times. It was this idea, or some form of it, which had led to her marriage to Junior; to Duke and her title as Lady Furness; and finally, to her relationship with David. Thelma leaned back in her seat, feeling the thrum of the ship as it passed through the English Channel.
It was the foundation on which, for better or worse, Thelma Morgan had built her life.
Two
July 1925
Hôtel Ritz, Paris
Thelma surveyed the dresses her maid had laid out and dismissed them all with a wave of her hand. She’d arrived in Paris only hours earlier, and while she shared Gloria’s happiness at being reunited, she was exhausted from nearly two weeks’ travel, looking forward more to her bed than to making small talk with Reggie and Gloria’s assembled guests. For one thing, Elise hadn’t had the time to unpack all of Thelma’s luggage, including the only dress she owned that would look suitable next to Gloria’s spectacular new wardrobe. For another, Thelma wasn’t quite ready to put a brave face on being Gloria Vanderbilt’s poor relation just yet.
She looked down at her bare hand, missing the heavy sapphire that she’d worn for nearly three years. When she first met him, Junior Converse had seemed like a worthy match: impulsive, adoring and wealthy, he was a decade older than her, with breathless dreams and a silver screen smile. His family had money in railroads, he told her—Thelma had never seen him work, but he always had enough to throw the best parties with the best people, constantly turning up at Thelma’s apartment with champagne and jewelry, cigarettes and flowers.
They’d eloped when Thelma was seventeen and ran out of Junior’s inheritance less than a year later. He developed a knack for speculating and gambling, and for coming home late at night—if at all. At eighteen, Thelma miscarried—a grueling, bloody ordeal that had left her barren. In the clinical light of the hospital room she’d finally seen Junior for what he really was: a boy pretending to be a man. A person so caught up in his own groundless dreams that he was incapable of seeing the harm he caused to others. When she’d gotten out of the hospital, Thelma had gone home, taken Junior’s gambling money from behind the loose brick in the chimney and left her sapphire ring on the dining table. She spent the next year in California, fighting for a divorce while attempting to make a name for herself as an actress, trading on her notoriety as a society-page divorcée to win bit parts in second-rate productions.
Thelma rested an absent hand on her flat stomach, shying away from memories that were best left undisturbed. Perhaps fate had been kinder in letting the child slip away.
Turning her attention back to Elise, Thelma dismissed the second set of dresses. The blue Lanvin she’d bought two years ago; the Florrie Westwood with the gathered waistline.
“Haven’t I got something in gold?” she said, dropping onto the daybed. The maid dove back into the wardrobe, hangers clicking as she sorted through the evening gowns. Thelma refastened the tie of her dressing robe, its cuffs showing signs of wear: Gloria would have to take her shopping soon.
As if she’d overheard Thelma’s concerns, Gloria entered the bedroom, followed by a maid carrying an armload of evening gowns. “I thought you might want to look through a few of mine,” she said, directing the maid to Thelma’s wardrobe.
In a strange twist of fate, Gloria’s relationship with Reginald Vanderbilt had begun just as Thelma’s marriage to Junior was ending. He and Junior knew each other casually, occasionally sharing boxes at the Belmont where Reggie ran a string of horses. At a dinner party Thelma and Junior hosted before the miscarriage, Thelma had arranged for Reggie and Gloria to sit together—she’d felt a bittersweet triumph when they were the last couple on the dance floor, turning in slow conversation as the other guests drifted out into the wintry night. If their meeting was the only good thing Thelma could salvage from the wreckage of her marriage to Junior, she would take it.
Elise took the dresses, throwing Thelma a look of relief as she laid them out on the bed. Gloria parsed through them, pulling out one, then another, to hold up against Thelma’s chest. Marriage suited her: Gloria had always been more prone to illness than Thelma and was slender to the point of skinniness. Thelma had been sorry to miss the wedding—sorrier still to miss the birth of her niece, Little Gloria. The delivery, Mamma had told her, had been a disaster: Gloria had needed a caesarian operation, and a subsequent bout of diphtheria had laid her up in hospital for the first six weeks of Little Gloria’s life.