Synchronous use of DownloadStringTaskAsync on UI thread

This is one of these things where I thought that I knew exactly what is happening, but have been unable to figure how to fix it on Windows Phone 8. I want to have two methods that read via http; one sync and one async. The sync function is currently being called from the UI thread, but ultimately will probably not be. The relevant code looks like this:

private static string result;

public static string load() {
    Task task = loadAsync();
    task.Wait;
    return result;
}

public async static Task < string > loadAsync() {
        ...
    result = await webClient.DownloadStringTaskAsync(uri);
}

I intended that when I call Task.Wait() the UI thread will wait until the read completes; that's ok - I want the UI to pause until the read completes. But as written I appear to be creating a deadlock, so that everything hangs and the Download never completes, and presumably never starts. It makes sense that the task.wait() is causing the deadlock, so I created the following Test class:

public static class Test
{
    const string apiUrl = @"http://169.254.21.12:51428/api/Q";
    private static WebClient webClient;
    private static Uri uri;
    private static string result;

    public static string Load()
    {
        webClient = new WebClient();
        webClient.Headers["Accept"] = "application/json";
        uri = new Uri(apiUrl);
        try
        {
            Task<string> task = webClient.DownloadStringTaskAsync(uri);
            result = task.Result;
        }
        catch (Exception e) { result = null; }
        return result;
    }

This class is running in the WP8 Emulator from VS13, talking to a local IIS, also launched as a separate Project in the same Solution. We get to the 'result =' line, but that line never returns. I know that IIS is running and the network link is working, since I can use IE in the phone to reach the URI.