Untitled: The Real Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. Anna Pasternak

      By the spring of 1934, Wallis and Ernest’s life was almost ‘completely caught up and submerged in the prince’s private world’. The Simpsons received the ultimate invitation of society’s summer season: to join the prince’s party for Ascot week. The royal procession from Windsor Castle to the racecourse was a brilliant piece of pageantry – the king, queen, their family in open landaus, with bewigged postilions astride the grey horses. ‘That year, as I watched from the Royal Enclosure,’ Wallis recalled, ‘I felt an odd surge of pride and admiration when I saw that fleeting, boyish smile directed at us from under his grey topper.’

      When the prince invited Wallis and Ernest as his guests on his summer holiday to Biarritz, Wallis initially declined. Ernest was due to go to America on business and she had invited Aunt Bessie to stay with her in his absence. Not to be deterred, the prince reassured Wallis that he would welcome Bessie. Her seventy-year-old aunt, would, of course, make the perfect chaperone.

      It was a small party that set off for France on 1 August. The prince, his assistant private secretary, Hugh Lloyd-Thomas, his equerries, ‘G’ Trotter and John Aird, and his old friends, Lieutenant-Commander Buist and his wife Gladys, and Wallis and Aunt Bessie. Edward had rented a sprawling villa called Meretmont, overlooking the ocean. The holiday did not get off to a promising start. There were two days of continuous rain, then their regal host suffered from a surfeit of langoustines and was sick at his table in the Café de Paris. Fortunately, they soon settled into a happier routine. ‘As at the Fort, life was simple – swimming and sunbathing, golf, sometimes a little bridge,’ said Wallis. Once a week, Edward and Wallis would leave the rest of the party and dine alone at local bistros. This was their first opportunity to be together as a couple. John Aird wrote in his diary of the prince at this time: ‘Behaviour in public excellent, in private awful and most embarrassing for others. The prince has lost all confidence in himself and follows W around like a dog.’

      The prince soon tired of Biarritz. When Mrs Kenelm Guinness, known as ‘Posy’, joined the party, she invited them to extend their holiday. Her cousin, Lord Moyne, an heir of the Guinness brewing family and Conservative politician, was sailing his yacht, Rosaura, nearby. Edward jumped at the chance to spend more time with Wallis. Bessie, who had planned a motoring trip in Italy, refused to be diverted and left Wallis with the royal party. John Aird, who was responsible for organising the logistics of joining the cruise, later wrote of Wallis: ‘I feel that she is not basically a bad sort of tough girl out to get what she can, but unless she is much cleverer than I think, she does not know how to work it so as to cash in best.’

      The yacht was a converted channel steamer. Lord Moyne, a distinguished-looking Irishman, made a point of boasting to his guests that he was an accomplished seaman and the Rosaura could override any Atlantic gale. In spite of a furious storm in the Bay of Biscay as the royal party went aboard, Lord Moyne ordered the vessel to get underway, announcing: ‘I have yet to see the storm that could keep me in port.’ Wallis, a seasoned seafarer who rarely got seasick, took to her cabin, clinging to the bed as her trunk was flung back and forth across her berth. As the storm mounted in violence, each of the rest of the party retreated to their cabins, with the exception of John Aird. Wallis, convinced that their host would have to accept defeat, asked a steward who checked in on her later that night, how soon they would be in port. He replied: ‘I’ve never seen his Lordship in finer fettle. He has just ordered caviar and grouse and a bottle of champagne for Mr Aird and himself.’

      The last straw was when Lord Moyne’s pet, a terrifying monkey who had the run of the vessel, suddenly leapt on Wallis’s bed, having jumped through a skylight. Wallis let out such a scream that Lord Moyne himself was startled from the bridge. A steward was sent to coax the spirited animal from Wallis’s berth. Fortunately, the prince, reeling with seasickness himself, struggled to the bridge and, summoning his finest diplomacy, ordered the yacht to the nearby Spanish port of Coruna.

      John Aird felt that Wallis’s fear of physical danger had an enfeebling effect on the prince. Always before, he had been physically intrepid, even recklessly so. He enjoyed flying in aircraft and was always the one who wanted to push ahead in bad conditions. Of the storm they faced in the Rosaura, Aird later wrote bitterly: ‘He was really frightened, and in my opinion is a coward at heart.’

      Once the storm had blown over, the party enjoyed a relaxed, delightful cruise down the Spanish and Portuguese coasts. Often finding themselves alone on deck in the evenings, Wallis recognised that here she and Edward ‘crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love’. Eleven days after leaving Biarritz, they reached Cannes. After dinner with Wallis’s friends, Herman and Katherine Rogers, at their hillside villa, Edward placed a tiny velvet pouch from Cartier in Wallis’s hand. It contained a diamond and emerald charm for a bracelet – the first of what would become his legendary acquisition of exquisite jewellery for his beloved.

      The prince’s advisors were aware of the beneficial influence Wallis could have on him. On holiday, Edward liked to sport the simplest of clothes; an antidote to the constant, starchy dressing up that his position required. But Wallis could see that it was inappropriate for the Prince of Wales to go ashore practically deshabille in shorts, shirt and sandals. It took all her powers of persuasion to entice him into linen trousers and a jacket.

      It was their visibility on the Côte d’Azur that inspired the first mention in the press of the new romance. That September, Time magazine referred to the fun that ‘Edward of Wales [was] having at Cannes last week with beautiful Mrs Wallace Simpson’. Still the courtiers were not alert to any real danger. At the end of the holiday, John Aird concluded of Wallis: ‘She does not seem to have any illusions about the situation and definitely does not want to do anything that will lose her husband.’

      The wiser, more perceptive Aunt Bessie queried her niece’s motives that September. Over dinner, she asked Wallis: ‘Isn’t the prince rather taken with you?’ adding: ‘These old eyes aren’t so old that they can’t see what’s in his every glance.’ Bessie cautioned Wallis that if she continued enjoying this kind of life – which Wallis herself described as ‘Wallis in Wonderland’ – it would leave her niece unsettled and dissatisfied with the life she had known before. Wallis batted away her concerns. ‘It’s all great fun,’ she told her. ‘You don’t have to worry about me – I know what I am doing.’ Aunt Bessie’s conclusion was wisely prescient: ‘I can see no happy outcome to such a situation.’

      Similarly concerned were the king and queen. Up until then, they had publicly ignored Wallis’s existence. That September, after his prolonged summer holiday, Edward joined his parents at Balmoral. He had composed a tune for the bagpipes, dedicated to Wallis, called ‘Majorca’. He practised it relentlessly, marching up and down the castle terrace in the rain until the exasperated king threw open the window and yelled at him to stop.

      In November, tensions escalated over Wallis in the royal household. The prince had included Mrs Simpson’s name on a list of guests that he wanted to invite to an evening celebration at Buckingham Palace for his brother George, the Duke of Kent’s, wedding to Princess Marina of Greece. When the king saw it he scratched it out. The Duke of Kent later reinstated her on the list.

      Wallis resumed her letters to Aunt Bessie, writing from the Fort on 5 November about circulating rumours: ‘Don’t listen to such ridiculous gossip. E[rnest] and myself are far from being divorced and have had a long talk about [the] P[rince of] W[ales] and myself and also one with the latter and everything will go on just the same as before, namely the three of us being the best of friends. I shall try and be clever enough to keep them both.’

      In the run-up to the royal wedding at Westminster Abbey on 29 November, the Simpsons spent many happy times at the Fort with the two princes. George was living there in preparation for his marriage, while Princess Marina was in Paris with her parents, selecting her trousseau. Wallis, Ernest and the princes ‘had great fun together’. Wallis declared Princess Marina ‘a most beautiful woman’ whom Prince George was ‘genuinely in love with’. It amused Wallis to see Prince George jokingly checking the tally at the end of the day of