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Henry Appleman Wilkerson IV was born in Hartford, Conn., in 1898. He never knew his father, a prosperous merchant, who was thrown from his horse and killed three months before the baby’s birth. Henry’s mother never remarried, since the estate her late husband left her -- which included prudent investments in railroad and oil shares -- made her not only financially secure but, in fact, quite rich. She devoted the rest of her life to raising her four children, three daughters and young Henry, as best she could, with the help of two maids and a succession of live-in nurses and, later, governesses. Henry’s three sisters were Elizabeth, aged 4, and the twins Anne and Margaret, aged 1 and a half. All three of them were very active girls, and devoted to the new baby.

For the first two years of his life, young Henry wore skirts, a common practice in the days when cheap or disposable diapers were not available. When he was finally toilet-trained, and it came time to dress him in pants, his mother found that she just couldn’t do it. He was way too pretty. Moreover, Henry himself also refused to wear pants when his nurse tried to dress him in them, and threw a tantrum until she relented. The girls, who played with him as though he was one of their dolls, also insisted. They loved dressing him up in pretty clothes (some of them in fact belonging to their dolls), and he enjoyed it no less. So, by consensus, “the day” was put off again and again, and Henry continued to wear and enjoy dresses just like those of his sisters. During their games, they would call him “Henrietta”, and, pretty soon, he would answer to no other name. His mother, the maids, and the nurses began using that name, and treating him like one of the girls. His mother kept on worrying that this was wrong, but it WAS so much more convenient to have an all-female household and she was sure that he would outgrow this phase in time. Besides, Henrietta was just too pretty for words.

And so, to make a long story short, Henrietta grew up as a girl, and indeed a beautiful one at that. Her sisters were not particularly attractive, since they took after their father more than their mother. Henrietta, on the other hand, was slight and delicate, with her mother’s big eyes, silky blonde hair, rosy cheeks, and long eyelashes. Whenever people came to visit, they would always ooh and aah over such a beautiful young lady and hug her tightly. Everybody predicted that she would have no trouble finding a rich and handsome man to marry.

Since the girls had few outside friends, they played mostly with each other and became very close. They shared all of their feelings and experiences, including the most personal, with no shame or worry. When Elizabeth began having her period, Henrietta, no less than the others, paid careful attention to her story so that she would be ready when it happened to her too.

Still, Mrs. Wilkerson knew in her heart that this couldn’t remain forever. At some point, Henry’s voice would break and his facial and body hair would start to grow, and that would have to be the end of things. After a long period of indecision, she resolved that at the age of 14, Henrietta would become Henry for good and would be sent off to The Haverhall Academy, a boys’ school which his father had attended, which had as its motto “We Make Men”. The time for make-believe would have to be over.

To sweeten the coming of this event (which she secretly dreaded, though not nearly as much as Henrietta did), she resolved that she and “the girls” would have one last major experience together, one which they would always remember. In the summer of 1911, she booked passage for the entire family (plus one of the maids and the girls’ governess) to England, which they would spend the next six months touring. Miss Markham, the governess, filled the girls with the poetry of Keats and Shelly and the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson, as well as endless romantic tales of the Knights of the Round Table and the Wars of the Roses.

For six months, the family toured all of the most romantic British castles and cathedrals, stayed in thatched-roof inns, attended concerts and plays in London and Stratford, and even met with the children of a few minor aristocrats at parties to which Mrs. Wilkerson managed to get them invited. The most important event, however, was that the oldest of the girls, Elizabeth, fell in love. The object of her infatuation was Leonard Stout, from Chicago, who was also touring England with his parents. Leonard’s father owned some hotels on the Chicago Lakeshore area, which were — so he let on — quite successful. Leonard was being given the grand tour of England before being sent to Yale, his father’s alma mater. After that, he was expected to take an executive position in his father’s business. Leonard had beautiful jet-black hair and limpid eyes, as well as a ready wit. He had been trying to grow a stylish moustache, but so far had not been very successful. The Stout and Wilkerson families met in a rather damp and dreary hotel in the Lake Country in December (only American tourists would go to the Lake Country at that time of year, of course), and since Margaret and Leonard got along so well together, they decided to travel together for the rest of their time in England.

Mr. Stout also persuaded Mrs. Wilkerson that both families should book return passage on the new and luxurious ship Titanic, which was scheduled to make its maiden voyage in April. Nothing but the best would do, and everybody knew that the Titanic was not only safe, it was guaranteed unsinkable. It was clear that Elizabeth and Leonard were getting along very well together (Henrietta, Margaret, and Anne knew, of course that things between Leonard and their older sister had gone way beyond the “getting along” stage, but they would die rather than tell) and they agreed to announce the formal engagement of the two young people during the voyage. The representative of the White Star Line promised that if they would do so, the shipping line would be glad to foot the bill for a lavish engagement party -- it would be great publicity after all.

As the day of departure approached, Margaret and her sisters became more and more excited. Mrs. Wilkerson took them all shopping for the most beautiful gowns and accessories. Only Henrietta was depressed, because she knew that this would be the last time she would be wearing such clothes. Her mother wanted to take her to a tailor on Bond Street to have several male suits made for her, but she absolutely refused and sulked in her room until her mother relented. Inside, however, she did know the final day of her “girlhood” was rapidly approaching, and that she had better learn to come to terms with it. In her heart, Henrietta prayed for some medical miracle procedure that could turn her into a girl, but in her head she knew that such things are impossible. She might as well pray that men would be able to fly over the Atlantic or walk on the moon — in a thousand years, it would never happen.

So, when the Wilkerson and Stout families boarded the great liner, Henrietta did so with great foreboding and trepidation. This was going to be the end of her life as she knew it, and the beginning of a new chapter, unknown and terrifying, in her life. Still, she was determined that if she only had a week left as a girl, she would make the most of it, and have as much fun as she could, while she could. Maybe she could even find a boy who would kiss her.

The fateful and tragic story of what happened on the Titanic’s first (and last) voyage need not be repeated here. When the ship struck an iceberg at 11:40 pm, most of the passengers panicked, but Mrs. Wilkerson, remained surprisingly calm and collected. She quickly dressed all of her daughters in warm dresses and cloaks, and, together with the maid and Miss Markham, led them to the first-class lifeboat area, where the crew members were doing their best to direct the women and children to the few available boats.

The girls all held hands, to avoid getting separated. However, on the way, Henrietta noticed a familiar figure hunched up in a corner sobbing pitifully. It was Leonard. She let go of Anne’s hand and ran over to him. He had totally lost control of himself: “I am going to die, I am going to die” he kept on repeating between the sobs he could not control. He was obviously not capable of taking any course of action to save himself. Immediately, Henrietta realized what she had to do. She hugged Leonard tightly, took him by the hand, and dragged him into a nearby empty cabin. “Take off your clothes,” she ordered him. He meekly obeyed her. She then removed her dress, cloak, and bonnet, and handed them to him. “Put these on, she said, and run to Lifeboat #4. Elizabeth should be there. She needs you.” Still sobbing, Leonard obeyed and was gone. He did not even think to thank her.

Then, slowly, for the first time in his life, Henry Appleman Wilkerson IV dressed himself in a man’s shirt and trousers. He went out onto the strongly-listing deck amid the panicking passengers, found a place to sit and there, calmly, prepared himself for the fate that awaited him in the icy waters. In all of her protected girlhood, Henrietta had never learned how to swim.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: Many people have asked me to write a followup to my story “Women and Children First”. I hope this satisfies their request. One has to first read the original story in order to figure out what has happened so far.
 

The lifeboat containing Mrs. Wilkerson and her three daughters, Elizabeth, Anne, and Margaret, was picked up by the Carpathia and they were safely rescued and returned home. They mourned the loss of Henrietta, who had slipped from Anne’s grasp in the confusion and panic on board the Titanic, but time, as the cliché says, does eventually heal most wounds and, slowly, the family life returned to its normal course.

The first daughter to leave home was Margaret. When she was 17, she met a dashing Yale junior named Timothy. They were married a year later, after he had graduated, and moved to New York, where Timothy landed a job with J. P. Morgan’s bank.

Margaret’s twin sister, Anne, joined the Red Cross after war broke out in Europe, and volunteered to go to France as a nurse. In one of the hospitals, she met a severely-wounded British officer, a blond giant of a man named Captain Bill Percy, whom she cared for and nursed back to health. Bill Percy had lost a leg while apparently doing something extremely brave, for he was awarded a Victoria Cross (Britain’s highest award for military valor) while in the hospital by General Haig in person. The ribbon was hung in a glass case over his bed, but he had it removed the next day, saying that it just attracted flies. As the months passed and Anne slowly and gently nursed and treated him, the two fell in love and, one day, Bill asked Anne to marry him — not without warning her that life with a disabled war veteran was not likely to be an idyll and that he would probably spend the rest of his life grousing about his wounds or, worse, boring her and everyone else with his war stories. Anne, however, was not worried and agreed. They were married quietly by the hospital chaplain, since Bill was still unable to leave his bed.

Two days later, a military courier brought Bill a large cream-colored envelope which, he explained, was a letter of congratulations from his Uncle George. “Your uncle must be an important man, if he can send his letters by courier,” remarked Anne. “Look,” said Bill, “there is some family stuff I should really have told you about before we were married, but I was afraid that you wouldn’t have me if you knew it.” With that, he handed Anne the envelope, which, to her amazement, was not addressed to Capt. Bill Percy but rather, in a very fancy script, to Capt. The Honorable William Henry Taillefer Lord Percy, Duke of Sheffield, Earl of Carrington, VC, KG. “That’s quite a much of a muchness, isn’t it,” he smiled. “I really much prefer just being plain Bill Percy, but when your ancestors landed with William the Conqueror at Hastings, you do acquire a modicum of baggage which, unfortunately, you are expected to tote until the next generation takes over. My uncle, by the way, wishes us the best on our marriage and hopes to see us soon,” Bill went on, “he is rather busy most of the time, being King and all, but from what I know of him he will always find time for a pretty lady. In any case, I am being transferred to his personal staff in London, so we shall be seeing him soon. We do own a townhouse on Portman Square, but it is currently taken over by a flock of code-breaking boffins whose feathers I think it is best not to ruffle, so I suppose we will end up camping out in one of the spare bedrooms in Buckingham Palace. I hope you don’t mind awfully. The food there is actually quite good.” When he received no response, Bill looked up and saw that Anne, now suddenly Duchess of Sheffield, had, in the best aristocratic tradition, fainted dead away.

Anne’s marriage left Elizabeth as the only remaining unmarried daughter. Having lost her fiancé on the Titanic, she seemed to be in no hurry to acquire another one. She enrolled at Vassar College and graduated with a major in history, magna cum laude. Her mother died of a stroke the year before her graduation and, with heavy heart, she returned to live alone in the family home in Hartford.

Elizabeth had plenty of money, so she did not have to work to support herself, however she decided that she must do something to ward off boredom and ennui, and so started writing a book on the women of Hartford during the Revolutionary War. This project took up her time quite fully until, after two years, it was interrupted by a letter from, of all people, Leonard, whom Elizabeth had presumed had died, along with the others, on the Titanic.

Leonard’s letter was long and began with a profuse apology. He began by relating what happened to him on the night the ship sank, and how Henrietta sacrificed herself so that he might live, by trading clothes with him. He had, as she had told him to do, run to lifeboat #4, where Elizabeth and her family were waiting, only to find that it had already been lowered into the sea. With great difficulty, he managed to get into another lifeboat and, after that too had been lowered into the water, the enormity of what happened, and particularly Henrietta’s self-sacrifice, suddenly hit him, and he lost consciousness. When he came to, Leonard had found himself in a bed in a psychiatric ward of New York’s Bellevue hospital, over six months later. According to the doctors, he had been suffering from acute shock and had not spoken a word since he was rescued, nor did he show any response to conversation with him. He just allowed himself to be passively led from place to place. They were not even sure who he was, and he was officially listed on their records just as an “unknown Titanic survivor”. Fortunately, Leonard’s family had several friends living in the New York area, and they were able, now, to come to the hospital and positively identify him.

Leonard had been afraid to write to Elizabeth; since he wasn’t sure she would forgive him for allowing Henrietta to go to her death in his place. Much as he still loved her, he felt he just couldn’t face her again, at least not at that time.

Both of Leonard’s parents were dead, his mother, according to eyewitness reports, refusing to leave her husband’s side as the ship sank. Leonard, too, had been declared presumably dead by the court handling his father’s estate, and it took considerable legal efforts to have that declaration reversed. When he finally left the hospital, Leonard decided to leave the management of the hotels he inherited to the company’s general manager, an old friend of his father, and to go off to study at Yale after all, a year later than was originally planned. However, instead of studying business or law, as his father had intended, Leonard decided to major in psychology, so that he could understand what had happened to him. In fact, he then continued on to graduate work in psychology, and was now delving into the work of Freud, Jung, and other Europeans, while trying to find a topic for his Ph.D. thesis.

The topic which particularly interested Leonard concerned a phenomenon identified by a British doctor named Havelock Ellis, who had circulated, but not yet published, his results. Dr. Ellis had studied men who had been raised as women, or who chose to live as women. He called this phenomenon “eonism”, named after the 18-th century French diplomat and spy, the Chevalier Charles-Genevieve-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée Eon de Beaumont, who had been raised as a girl and who lived most of his life as a woman. A few weeks prior to his letter, Leonard had met Margaret and her husband at an event for Yale alumni, and Margaret had told him that “Henrietta” had really been “Henry” and was, in fact, a perfect example of eonism. This touched Leonard very deeply, since he owed his life to Henrietta, and he decided to make her the major focal point of his research. If at all possible, he would very much like to come to Hartford to visit Elizabeth and talk to about her youngest sister and to see the surroundings in which she grew up.

Elizabeth, needless to say, was stunned by the letter. Leonard had been her first love after all, their engagement party had been scheduled for the night following the one on which the Titanic sank, and she had always assumed that he had died, along with all of the others. She was not sure she could face him again. On the other hand, she also felt that she had an obligation to Henrietta’s memory to help in any research which would help people like her sister in the future, and so she wrote to Leonard that she would be happy to have him visit, at his convenience.

The reunion of Elizabeth and Leonard was very moving, and both of them felt a resurgence of the affection they had known many years before. But more moving still, to Leonard, was his acquaintance with Henrietta’s life. Elizabeth showed him the family photo album, full of pictures of a beautiful young girl growing up. He spent hours in her room, which was kept exactly as she left it, since her mother could never bring herself to throw any of Henrietta’s things out and Elizabeth had, somehow, never gotten around to that either. It was the room of a typical teenage girl. Here were her dresses hanging in the closet, there were her books (she seemed to have a great love for Louisa May Alcott), some of which contained flowers pressed between the pages. The dolls from her large collection were everywhere. Leonard even found her diary, not well kept-up but full of the anxieties and hopes of a teenage girl. She had begun noticing boys, and had gushed about one boy whom she noticed in the park and whom she really hoped had noticed her as well. She worried about fashion, and what frocks would look like in the upcoming spring. She even wrote about her dreams, about her hopes of marriage and even of motherhood. Nobody could have guessed that the person who wrote this had been born Henry and was due to return to being Henry after her return from England. Leonard tried to imagine a baseball bat and glove in the corner, pictures of Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson on the wall, books by Bret Harte and Rudyard Kipling on the bookshelf. It was a totally impossible vision.

For days, Elizabeth told him stories about how the sisters lived and played together, the games they played: jump-rope, jacks, and endless doll parties. The stories they would make up and act out: Henrietta always got to be the princess or the fairy child, because she was the youngest and everyone acknowledged that she was the prettiest too. She told him how they learned to sew and behave like proper ladies and how they teased their governesses. As she told them, she felt she was bringing Henrietta back to life.

They also talked, on a more abstract level, about the meaning of all this. How can an eonist be one sort of being physically and another mentally? Elizabeth said that God must have made a mistake, and put a girl’s soul into Henry’s body. Leonard, who did not really believe in the soul, tended more to believe that somehow Henrietta’s subconscious was somehow rejecting the physical facts and instead creating an alternative persona to deal with a reality it found hard to cope with. Elizabeth countered that, since the girls grew up in a rather isolated environment, there was nothing for Henry to feel threatened by; Leonard retorted that, on the contrary, because it was an all-female environment, he had everything to feel threatened by.

Long and sometimes loud discussions ensued, which had the surprising effect of bringing Elizabeth and Leonard closer together. With Henrietta acting as a guardian angel, they fell in love again and, within a year, decided to get married. Leonard would finish his degree and then they would devote their combined efforts to studying and helping people like Henrietta, and making sure that they be able to live good and productive lives.

They had definite plans, but … that is another story.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE I am afraid that you have to read the first two installments of this story in order to understand what is going on. Havelock Ellis and the Duke of Windsor were, of course, real persons but all actions and conversations attributed to them in this story are purely fictional. The rumors about the Duke of Windsor’s gender behavior have surfaced from time to time, but the author has no reason to believe that they are in fact valid, and is using them here merely as a literary device. They are not to be taken as an assertion of fact.

 
 

The news of the marriage of Elizabeth and Leonard was warmly received by Elizabeth’s sisters, as one can imagine. Margaret and her husband attended the wedding but Anne, busy learning that the title of Duchess of Sheffield also entailed considerable duties in postwar England, was not able to come. Instead, she invited the couple to come visit her in Britain.

Leonard really wanted to travel to Europe. He was very anxious to talk to Dr. Havelock Ellis and to present Henrietta’s story to him. In return, he hoped to be able to look at the many case studies that Dr. Ellis must have collected over the years. On the other hand, having survived the Titanic disaster made both Elizabeth and Leonard reluctant, to say the least, to hazard another crossing of the Atlantic by ship. Finally, the vision of the future overcame the fear of the past, and they decided to do it.

Elizabeth’s first idea was to book a place on the RMS Carpathia, the ship which had rescued both of them. However, it turned out that the Carpathia had been sunk during the Great War while serving as a troop ship. They finally settled on another Cunard liner, the RMS Aquitania, which was considered to be the most beautiful of all of the four-stack ocean liners. (Author’s note: In fact, the Aquitania was known as the “lucky ship”; it served as an ocean liner until it was scrapped in 1950, having the distinction of being one of the few such ships to survive service as a troop ship in both world wars, crossing the submarine-infested North Atlantic many times, without a scratch.)

Elizabeth’s sister Anne, now Duchess of Sheffield, met them at the dock in Southampton, full of hugs, kisses, and stories about her life among the aristocracy. Her husband, Bill, insisted that he would not sit around the house and mope (or go to ghastly parties and hunts with other bored members of his class) and so used his connections and his reputation as a war hero to get a job with the Ministry of Defense. He claimed that all he did was push paper from one side of his desk to another, but Anne was sure that it was really something terribly important and hush-hush, which he couldn’t tell her about, since she was a “colonial”, after all. Anne took over whatever ceremonial duties were expected of them, and showed up at all of the necessary charity events which they were expected to attend. Elizabeth noticed that Anne had begun to cultivate a distinct British accent, but didn’t say anything.

Anne had invited Elizabeth and Leonard to come to her country home not far from Oxford, but Leonard was anxious to meet with Dr. Ellis, who lived in Paddington, as soon as possible and so Anne gave them the use of the town house in London, which was empty at the moment (except, of course, for the maid, butler, gardener, and cook).

Dr. Ellis, who did not actually practice medicine though he did have a medical degree, was married to writer Edith Lees, well-known as a lesbian, and lived apart from her in his own apartment. He, himself, was quite heterosexual, and had several affairs with well-known women, including birth-control crusader Margaret Sanger. It was a most unusual marriage. He was delighted when Leonard came to visit him and even more so when Leonard told him the story of Henrietta (born Henry) and her decision to go down with the Titanic rather than face being forced to continue her life as a male. Certainly, this was just the sort of case study he was looking for, though of course he would not publish it, since that might damage Leonard’s thesis. He listened to the story with rapture and asked very many probing questions about Henrietta’s life.

When Dr. Ellis found out that Leonard was staying in the town house of the Duke of Sheffield, and that his wife and the Duchess were sisters, he was even more astonished. He then sank into thought and then told Leonard that he would like to meet him again and talk further, but that, unfortunately, he will be very busy for the next few days. In the meantime, he would be glad to lend Leonard several case files he had collected over the years, and which Leonard would be sure to find interesting. In a few days, they would hopefully have time for a long discussion of these cases, as well as some more theoretical, points.

Leonard, indeed, spent the next few days going over the files which Dr. Ellis was kind enough to lend him. From a research point of view, they were a pure gold mine, and allowed him to bolster some of the points he intended to make in his thesis. He and Elizabeth also had time for some sightseeing, but they found that the ghost of Henrietta and the memories of their previous visit seemed to pervade the city. Here is where she fed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square; there is where she skipped down the walks in Hyde Park. They were seeing the city through the eyes of the teenage girl who, more than they could imagine, was shaping their present and their future.

Four days passed before a letter from Dr. Ellis arrived, asking Leonard to meet him not in his home in Paddington but at a certain location in Regent’s Park. When Leonard arrived there, he was surprised to find that Dr. Ellis was accompanied by another man, whom he introduced as being a government official who would like to talk to Leonard in private. Dr. Ellis then excused himself and left, while the man then motioned to an empty park bench and sat down. It all seemed a trifle mysterious.

“Let me come right to the point,” the man said. “I am Sir Reginald McKay, confidential secretary of the Prime Minister. In the terms you Americans use, I am in charge of the government’s “shovel brigade”, cleaning up the messes caused by major public figures, hopefully before somebody steps in them. At the moment, I am involved in an extremely delicate matter about which I approached Dr. Ellis a few weeks ago. He thinks that you, of all people, are in a unique position to help us, and I tend to agree. I am going to outline the problem to you without, for the moment, telling names, and then explain what we want of you. Let me emphasize, however, that the matter is extremely secret and that not a word of this conversation must leak out to anyone.

There is a high-ranking person, let me for the moment call him David, who is in a position to become even of higher rank in the near future. That person is very popular with the people and the press, but his private life, especially his behavior with women, has been very bothersome and has caused the government much concern. He seems to deliberately seek out and have affairs with foreign married women of the dominating type, whom he allows to have great influence over his decisions and actions, both public and private. They also seem to influence the political positions he takes publically, something which has embarrassed His Majesty’s government more than once.

Based on what we have heard from several sources, we have reason to believe that in his childhood, David suffered from what Dr. Ellis, and you, call “eonism”. This behavior had been found out and prohibited by his parents and that his current philandering is apparently a reaction to that prohibition. We would like Dr. Ellis to have a talk with David, and try to discern whether this presumption is true, and give us an opinion as to the suitability of David to continue in public life. However, because of Dr. Ellis’ rather … sordid … reputation, it is impossible for the two of them to meet in any place where they are likely to be seen, especially by members of the press, who follow David around constantly.

Here is where you come in, by being a bridge in some sense between them. We would like you to talk to your sister-in-law, the Duchess of Sheffield, and ask her if she can put at your disposal, for a period of one week, one of their more remote properties, say her husband’s hunting and fishing lodge in Scotland. David would certainly have a legitimate reason to go on a vacation with the Duke, and Dr. Ellis could be brought there without anyone knowing about it.

You will not be allowed to be present at that meeting, or even see David. However, in return for your help, we are willing to allow you to discuss the case with Dr. Ellis, should you wish, and to use whatever data you want from these discussions in your research, on the condition that the identities of the people involved are sufficiently disguised.”

“Of course I am willing to cooperate,” replied Leonard, “and promise total secrecy. But I need to know the real name of the person involved, and I need to be able to tell that name to the Duke and Duchess of Sheffield, if need be.” “We can allow that,” Sir Reginald replied. “I will also need to tell my wife, who acts as my research associate,” Leonard continued. Sir Reginald hesitated for a few seconds, but finally agreed to that too.

“The person involved,” he was told, “is Edward, Duke of Windsor and Prince of Wales, our future monarch.” Leonard swallowed hard. He had not expected this. “Why did you call him David?” he asked, more to relieve the tension of the moment. “His full name is Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David,” the man replied, “and he is known as David to his family.” Sir Reginald then gave him a card with a confidential telephone number, which he was asked to ring when the matter was settled, one way or the other.

After Sir Reginald left, Leonard just sat alone, stunned. Could the popular heir to the throne of England be an eonist? It was hard to believe. Finally, he pulled himself together and returned to Portman Square, where he told his Elizabeth what had transpired. He also rang up Anne and Bill Percy, and asked them to come down to London urgently. The next day, when they arrived, and after swearing everyone to secrecy, Leonard related what Sir Reginald had told him. Elizabeth and Anne were just as stunned as he had been, but Bill, the Duke, reacted very calmly. “We actually had a meeting at the Ministry a few weeks ago about the Prince of Wales’ philandering and the possible compromises to national security which it might entail, and minuted the PM about it. It is jolly good, really, to see that he actually reads the material we send him. I would not have guessed anything about this eonism business, but now that I remember it, Edward often did take girls’ roles in the various plays and musicals we put on at Eton (but then, the younger boys are often forced to do that).

Sir Reginald McKay is just the person to deal with this affair; he is really awfully good at scooping up the poop dropped from high places before anyone notices it and sometimes even before it plops. The idea of using Dr. Ellis must surely be his, for he has contacts at all strata of society and I can well imagine him knowing Havelock Ellis quite well. Of course, we shall cooperate in any way possible. I shall ring up the caretaker of the lodge immediately to let him know that I will be coming up there with a visitor shortly.” (The “lodge”, by the way, is not a small cabin as the name might imply; it is in fact a 15-bedroom Victorian mansion in the remote highlands. Its nearest neighbor is another similar “lodge”, 30 miles away, owned by Lord Rothschild, who was known to be out of the country for the next several months.)

Leonard rang up Sir Reginald and, within a few days, the entire machinery was set in motion. The palace issued a routine bulletin to the effect that from such-and-such a date, HRH the Prince of Wales would vacationing at the lodge of his cousin, the Duke of Sheffield. The two aristocrats set out for Scotland in the Prince’s private railway carriage, after joking with reporters in London and again in Glasgow, where they transferred to the Duke’s private saloon automobile. A day later, Dr. Havelock Ellis set out for Glasgow by second-class railway carriage, a totally undistinguished and unnoticed traveler. At the station, he was met by two representatives of Sir Reginald, who bundled him into a waiting anonymous-looking automobile and left Glasgow with a total lack of fanfare and attention.

The staff at the lodge prepared for the arrival of the Prince and the Duke. They were also told that a “Dr. Harrington” would be staying there too in order to treat the Prince for a “disease of a rather intimate nature” and that their total discretion was expected. Indeed, the Duke stayed mostly in his study — preparing a major report for the ministry, he explained — while “Dr. Harrington” and the Prince met for long hours in the Prince’s room or, occasionally, walked the grounds together. No hunting or fishing seems to have taken place. Finally, an automobile came to take Dr. Ellis away and, two days later, the Prince and the Duke returned to Glasgow and traveled in the Prince’s private railway carriage back to London.

For the next week, Leonard sat hours on end with Dr. Ellis, and pored over the notes of his meetings with the Prince and working very hard on drafting a comprehensive report to Sir Reginald. The parents of the Prince of Wales, then Duke and Duchess of York, had been quite removed from the actual upbringing of their children, as was the custom of the late nineteenth century. He had been essentially brought up by a series of nannies, and saw his parents only infrequently and for short periods of time. As with Henrietta, young David wore skirts until he was toilet-trained, this in his case came very late, after the age of 3. He did not like wearing pants and often rebelled against it. In the privacy of the nursery, one of the nurses, May O’Brien, took pity on him and often let him dress up in dresses. She would also play with him, pretending he was a girl. During these “play” times, she would call him the Golden Princess of Pompadiddle and they would make up fairy tales in which he would take a leading role. The memories of those play sessions were strongly etched in his memory and, even today, he could recite large portions of those roles by heart. Unfortunately, when the Prince was near the age of six, his parents found out about these harmless games and were furious. His mother, formerly Danish Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, summarily dismissed May O’Brien and forbad all such dressing-up play in the nursery. Young David swallowed this medicine, but with a grimace. During his youth, he seized every opportunity to dress up in girls’ clothes, whether it was through theatricals or other means.

When he became an adult, the Prince managed to locate and gain entrance to one of those very exclusive and shadowy clubs in London, in which men indulge themselves by dressing as women. On the outside, however, he maintained the life of an aristocratic playboy, and had various (often publicized) relationships with women, all of whom were of a very domineering type and foreign-born. Most were also married. In point of fact, these women all bore an eerie resemblance in character to his mother.

Leonard and Dr. Ellis were unsure whether the Prince’s behavior represented true eonism or whether it was just a way of getting back at his parents. In considering this point, they had several long discussions on the ways of verifying eonism and isolating it from other possibly-similar phenomena. In the final report they drafted, they suggested that Sir Reginald might consider calling upon the services of Herr Doktor Freud of Vienna — with whom Dr. Ellis was in contact and could provide an introduction -- though they were skeptical that such a move would succeed, given the Prince’s known strongly negative feelings about Jews.

Sir Reginald was very pleased with the report, and promised that it would be acted upon in the best interests of the nation. (Author’s historical note: The health of King George V was better than was feared in the 1920’s. Edward, Prince of Wales, finally ascended to the throne upon the death of his father in January 1936; Prime Minister Baldwin, nervous about the new King’s repeated intervention in political matters and rather pro-fascist views, forced a constitutional crises which ended in Edward VIII’s abdication in December of that year.) He was sorry that he could not publically thank Dr. Ellis for his work, but promised to have a word with the Lord Chief Justice to make sure that there would be no more attempts by the courts to stop the sales and distribution of his books. As for Leonard, a letter would be sent to his thesis advisor by the appropriate authority, informing him that His Majesty’s Government was most appreciative of certain advisory services that this brilliant young man had performed and that, once Leonard had obtained his degree, a visiting position at one of the Cambridge colleges could be arranged for him, should he desire to spend some more time in England. (Leonard laughed inside at what Bill Percy, an Oxford man, would think of that.)

Later, as Leonard thought about the Prince’s case, and about the several other cases in Dr. Ellis’ files which he was allowed to see, he had long discussions about them with Elizabeth. In particular, they compared the dry stories with Elizabeth’s recollections of her sister Henrietta and began to see many emerging patterns. In the end, Leonard formulated a series of general statements about eonism, which became the fundamental axioms of his work:

(1) Eonism is either inborn or develops during the first year of life.
(2) Once eonism is detected in a child, it is impossible to eradicate by prohibitions or strict limitations on behavior; any attempt to do that will just drive it underground, from where it will eventually emerge.
(3) The best way to deal with eonism in a child is through love and understanding.
(4) The best way to deal with eonism in an adult is through acceptance.

Leonard felt strongly that eonists should be treated with sympathy and understanding, and a social framework should be found that would allow them to express their true selves. He decided that, when he returned to the United States, he would set up a framework in which that will happen. At the same time, he would also try to locate young surgeons who would understand, in the hope of exploring surgical techniques that could change a physical male into a close semblance of a physical female. He clearly saw his life’s work ahead of him.

On the deck of the liner taking the Stouts back to the United States (they again chose the Aquitania), Elizabeth mused about her sister Henrietta and the ripples that her untimely death had caused in the lives of so many people. Henrietta did not sacrifice herself in vain, for the result would be a new ray of hope for hundreds, maybe thousands, of girls like her, who would otherwise never have had a chance.