That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor by Anne Sebba

cost. Instead she decided, rather than return to the US and her disapproving mother, that she would visit Peking. As she was not yet thirty, there was an element of now or never about it for her. In 1925 there was no direct rail link between the two cities, so getting to the capital involved a journey of at least a thousand miles, taking a coastal steamer to Tientsin and then transferring by train, the famous ‘blue express’. The warlords were renowned for stopping trains in remote places, boarding them and arousing fear and havoc among the passengers. Wallis, having persuaded Mary Sadler to travel with her, was warned when she arrived at Tientsin that trains were experiencing daily raids. Both women were firmly advised by the American Consul not to proceed to Peking, and Mary Sadler, taken ill at this point, returned to Shanghai. Yet Wallis insisted on her right to proceed. ‘Having come so far, I did not propose to be stopped by a mere Civil War and accordingly informed the Consul that I was sure my husband would have no objections to my going on and there could be no question of the government being held responsible for me.’
    Wallis disobeyed the Consul’s advice and continued on what became a thirty-eight-hour train journey, interrupted by brigands with rifles boarding the train several times. But although they looked menacing, nothing disastrous happened to her and she arrived in Peking several hours late to be met on the platform by Colonel Louis Little, the officer commanding the US Legation Guard at Peking and a man she had known slightly in Washington through Corinne. The Consul, snubbed by Wallis, had wired forward about this brazen American subject. Wallis’s ability to use to her advantage contacts she barely knew was an art form enabling her to leap around the world. The Colonel forgave her and helped her on her way to the Grand Hôtel de Pékin, located close to tlerd closehe US Legation and just across the road from the old Imperial City and Palace.
    Staying here was a luxury which for the two weeks she had in mind would have used up all of Win’s $225-a-month allowance. But one evening, escorted by a man she had met once or twice in Paris through Corinne, a minor diplomat called Gerry Green who had invited her to a dance at the hotel, Wallis spotted yet another friend on the other side of the ballroom. Katherine Bigelow was a stunningly beautiful friend from Coronado days whose first husband had been killed early on in the First World War and who was now married to an American would-be writer and dilettante, Herman Rogers. Pleased to see an old friend, Katherine introduced Wallis to Herman: ‘an unusually attractive man with a lean handsome face, brown wavy hair and the bearing and look of an athlete’.
    Herman, who came from a wealthy family in New York, had been a rower at Yale. He met Katherine in 1918 in France as a soldier on a train passing through a station where she was working as a Red Cross nurse. After they married they travelled the world searching for a beautiful place to make their home that would also inspire Herman to write. They were currently in Peking living in an old courtyard house in a hutong , or narrow alleyway, in the Tartar City close to the Hataman Gate. They invited Wallis to lunch the next day and ‘insisted that I leave the hotel and come to stay with them’.
    Wallis admits she did not resist when they pressed her to stay. They had created a delightful home with a leisurely lifestyle and offered to put an amah (maid) and a rickshaw boy at her personal disposal. Motor cars were rare in Peking but servants came cheap – about $15 a month. Wallis wanted to pay but had only her allowance from Win on which to live, plus a small amount from a legacy left by her grandmother. In the event her skill at poker, learned at Pensacola, carried her through. The first time she played with Herman and Katherine Rogers she won $225 – the same as her monthly allowance. Gambling came