Forever Amber

by Kathleen Winsor

  "Is he rich?"

  "He's very poor. The Wars ruined his family."

  "Then that's why he thinks I'm so handsome!"

  "Not at all. He said you're the finest woman he's seen in two-score years—you remind him, he says, of a lady he once knew, long ago."

  "And who can that be, pray?"

  Almsbury shrugged. "He didn't say. Some mistress he had, most likely. Men are never favourably reminded of their wives."

  She saw the Earl of Radclyffe again the next day at dinner, but now there were two more guests: a cousin of Emily's, Lady Rawstorne, and her husband. Lord Rawstorne was a big man —about Almsbury's height, but much heavier—with a boisterous laugh, a red face and a smell of stables about him. The moment he saw Amber he seemed delighted and throughout dinner he stared across the table at her.

  His wife looked sour and discontented, as though she had watched such behaviour for a great many years and was not even yet resigned to it. And the Earl of Radclyffe, though he elaborately ignored Rawstorne and his staring at Mrs. Danger-field, was clearly annoyed. For the most part he sat with his eyes on his plate, and regarded the food with the expression of one to whom it could mean only future distress. Amber was amused by both of them and found a sort of mischievous pleasure in flirting with Lord Rawstorne. She pouted her lower lip, slanted her eyes at him, and moved her body provocatively. But it was not a very entertaining diversion. Loneliness and boredom continued to mock at her.

  As she left the table she saw Rawstorne begin to edge around from one side, trying to avoid his wife's glowering signals and get to her, but before he could do so Radclyffe was at her side. He bowed, stiffly as a marionette whose joints had not been well oiled for years.

  "Your servant, madame."

  "Your servant, sir."

  "Perhaps you recall, madame, that yesterday Lord Almsbury mentioned I had brought several objects of interest and value with me from abroad? Some of those things were in my coach and in the hope that you might honour me by looking at them I had a case unpacked last night. Would you be so kind, madame?"

  Amber was about to refuse but decided that she might as well do that as go back upstairs and sit alone, and probably cry again. "Thank you, sir. I'd like to see them."

  "They're in the library, madame."

  The great room was dark, oak-panelled and but dimly lighted. Before the fireplace there was a large table spread with several articles and next to it was a torchere; the shelves of books stood far away in the spreading gloom. Almsbury was no ardent scholar and the place smelled unaired and musty.

  Amber approached the table without interest, but immediately her indifference turned to delight, for it was covered with a great number of rare and delicate and precious things. There was a small white marble statue, a Venus with the head broken off; a blackamoor carved out of ebony with an enamelled skirt of ostrich feathers and real jewels in the turban and around the thick muscular arms; a heavy gold frame, exquisitely wrought; tortoise-shell jewel-boxes and diamond buttons and dainty blown-glass perfume-bottles. Each was perfect of its kind and had been selected by a man whose taste was never-failing.

  "Oh, how beautiful! Oh! Look at this!" She turned to him eagerly, eyes sparkling. "Can I pick it up if I'm careful?"

  He smiled, bowed again. "Certainly, madame. Please do."

  Forgetting that she did not like him she began to ask him questions. He told her where he had found each one, what its history was, through whose hands it had passed before it had come to him. She liked the story of the blackamoor best:

  "Two hundred years ago there was a Venetian lady—very beautiful, as all ladies in legends are—and she owned a gigantic black slave whom her husband believed to be a eunuch. But he was not and when the lady bore his black child she had the infant killed and a white one put in its place. The midwife, from some motive of jealousy or revenge, told the husband of his wife's infidelity and he killed the slave before her eyes. She had the ebony statue made, secretly of course, in her lover's memory."

  At last, when there was no more to be said, she thanked him and turned away with a sigh. "They're all wonderful. I envy you, my lord." She could never see a beautiful thing without longing violently to possess it.

  "Won't you allow me, madame, to make you a gift?"

  She turned swiftly. "Oh, but your Lordship! They must mean a great deal to you!"

  "They do, madame, I admit it. But your own appreciation is so keen I know that whichever you choose will be loved as much by you as it could be by me."

  For several moments she stared at them critically, determined to make the one choice she would not regret, deciding first on one and then another. She stood bent forward, tapping her fan on her chin, wholly absorbed. Slowly she became aware that he was watching her and gave him a swift sidelong glance, for she wanted to catch his expression before he could change it. As she had expected he glanced hastily away, refusing to meet her eyes, but nevertheless the look she had surprised on his face made the frank good-natured lust of Lord Rawstorne seem naive and artless. The repugnance she had felt the first moment of their meeting came back again, stronger than ever. What is there about this old man? she thought. He's strange— he's strange and nasty.

  She picked up the blackamoor—which was very heavy and about two feet high—and turned to the Earl. Once more he presented to her a face cool and polite, austere as an anchorite's.

  "This is what I want," she said.

  "Certainly, madame." She thought that a hint of a smile lurked somewhere about his thin mouth, but she could not be sure. Had her choice amused him, or was it only her imagination, perhaps a trick of the lighting? "But if you are of a timid nature, madame, perhaps another choice would be more comfortable to you. There's an old superstition the statue's cursed and brings ill-luck to whoever owns it."

  She glanced at him sharply, momentarily alarmed, for she was passionately superstitious and knew it. But she decided instantly that he did not want to part with the blackamoor after all and was trying to scare her into making a less valuable choice. She would have kept it now no matter what the curse might be and her eyes glittered defiance.

  "Pooh, my lord! That's a tale to scare children and old ladies! But it doesn't scare me! Unless you have some objection —I'll take this."

  He bowed again and this time she knew that he was smiling, ever so faintly. "I protest, madame. I have no objections at all —and I knew that you were a person of too much wit to be alarmed by such foolishness."

  The next day Radclyffe was gone. Three days later a letter came for Amber. She showed it to Almsbury that same morning when he came in to talk to her as Nan was brushing her hair. The ebony blackamoor stood beside the dressing-table.

  Almsbury grinned. "So the old goat finds that his thoughts return to you as to any creation of perfect beauty."

  Amber stuck a patch at the left side of her mouth. "Since I've become a rich widow I find my attractions have increased a hundredfold."

  "Only on the score of marriage, sweetheart. You've always had attractions enough for a dozen other women—but in the way of the world a pretty face without money must go abegging for honest suitors. Now you're rich, you can take your pick from a dozen." He stood up and leaned close enough so that his next words could not be overheard by the maids in the room. "If I weren't married I'd make you a proposal myself." Amber laughed gaily, thinking that he was joking.

  He bent down then and as he kissed her cheek he whispered in her ear. She murmured an answer, they exchanged a wink in the mirror and he went out. Lord Carlton formed the pivotal point for their mutual affection: Amber liked Almsbury better for being Bruce's friend; he liked her better for being his Lordship's mistress and mother of his children. But not one of the three considered it either strange or disloyal that in Carlton's absence the Earl sometimes made love to her.

  Only a few days later she heard from Radclyffe again. He sent her a gilded Florentine mirror with a very wide frame, carved in lavish scrolls like the swirl of os
trich plumes. The accompanying note said that this mirror had once reflected the image of the loveliest woman in Italy, but he hoped it might now reflect the most beautiful face in Europe. In less than a week there arrived a basket of oranges—a great rarity now with the war and intense cold—and hidden among them was a topaz necklace.

  "He must intend marrying me," said Amber to the Earl. "No man makes such valuable presents unless he expects to get 'em back again."

  Almsbury laughed. "I think you're right. And if he does make you a proposal—what about you? Will you accept?"

  Amber gave a sigh and a shrug. "I don't know. It's ho use being rich, unless you've got a title too." She made a face. "But I hate that stinking old buck-fitch."

  "Then marry a young man."

  She gave him a glance of indignation. "Why, I'd rather be buried alive than marry one of your hectoring Frenchified Covent Garden fops. I know well enough what that means. They get you with child and send you off to the country to breed—while they stay in London to play the town-bull and spend all your portion on actresses and 'Change women. No thanks, not for me. I've seen enough of that to learn my lesson. If I've got to marry someone to get a title I'd rather marry an old man I hate than a young one I hate. At least there's a sooner prospect of freedom that way."

  The Earl burst into hearty laughter. Amber looked at him in surprise and some annoyance. "Well—my lord? What makes you so hysterical, pray?"

  "You do, sweetheart. I swear no one would ever guess to hear you talk that six years ago you were a simple country-wench and so virtuous you slapped my face for making you an honest offer of my affections. I wonder what's happened to her—that innocent pretty girl I saw on the Marygreen common?" His voice and eyes turned a little wistful at the last.

  Amber was petulant; why shouldn't he be satisfied with the way she was now? She liked to think of Almsbury as one man who accepted her exactly as she was, liked her and approved of everything she said and did. "I don't know," she said crossly. "She's gone now—if she ever existed at all. She couldn't last long in London."

  He gave her hand a quick friendly grasp. "No, darling, she couldn't. But seriously, I think it would be a mistake for you to marry Radclyffe."

  "Why? You suggested it yourself to begin with."

  "I know. But I only wanted to make you think about something besides Bruce. In the first place, he's deep in debt. It might take half your inheritance to get him out."

  "Oh, I've got that all planned. I'll have the contract drawn to let me retain management of my own funds."

  Almsbury shook his head. "That'll never do. He wouldn't marry you with any such arrangement as that—any more than you'd marry him if he was to retain sole use of his title. No, if you marry Radclyffe you've got to sign over your money to him. But do you think you could tolerate living in the same house with him—not to mention sleeping in the same bed?"

  "Oh, as for that! In London I won't know he's about. I'll spend all my days at Court—and maybe some of my nights, too." Her mouth turned up significantly at one corner; she had never completely abandoned her earlier ambition of being his Majesty's mistress—and whenever Bruce Carlton was gone the prospect glittered.

  To be mistress to the King, a great lady, feared and envied and admired. To be stared and pointed at in the streets, watched in the galleries of the Palace, bowed and truckled to in the Drawing-Rooms. To be begged for favours, fawned upon for a smile—to hold the power of success or failure over dozens, even hundreds, of men and women. That was the summit of ambition—higher than the Queen, mightier than the Chancellor, greater than any nobly born woman in the land. And if she could once be presented at Whitehall, have the right and privilege of the royal apartments, see him day after day—Amber had no doubt that she could occupy the place which Castlemaine was said to be rapidly losing.

  All those things were in her mind when—just a few days after Christmas—she accepted the Earl of Radclyffe's proposal of marriage.

  It came after a boresome week of impatient waiting on her part, for though she had been so scornful of him at first and still was, the more she thought about it the more she wanted to become a countess. And marriage with him did not seem any formidable price to pay for the honour. He had come back to Barberry Hill for the avowed purpose of "paying his compliments to Mrs. Dangerfield," but he did very little of that or anything else which seemed to Amber like courting. She could not even catch him looking at her again as he had that day in the library.

  The day before he was to return to his own home some thirty miles north, they sat alone in the gallery playing a game of trick-track. The gallery, on the second floor of the house, was an immense room which ran along two sides of the courtyard. It was massed with deep-set diamond-pane windows, on the panelled walls were dozens of portraits, and the ceiling was painted light blue with great wreaths of gilt roses. Radclyffe wore his hat and both of them had on long fur-lined cloaks; a brazier of hot coals was set beside each of them, and an enormous log blazed in the fireplace. But in spite of all that they were uncomfortably cold.

  Amber moved a peg in the board to change her score. Then she sat, staring absently at it and waiting for him to make the next play. At last, when several seconds had passed, she looked up. "Your move, my lord." He was watching her, very carefully, like a man studying a painting—not like a man looking at a woman.

  "Yes," he said quietly, not taking his eyes from her. "I know." Amber returned his stare. "Madame—I am not unaware that it is a breach of propriety to ask for the hand of a lady who has been widowed only nine months. And yet my regard for you has reached that pitch I am prepared to fly in the face of all decorum. Madame, I ask you most solemnly— will you do me that honour to become my wife?"

  Amber answered him immediately. "With all my heart, sir." She had thought from the first that since each knew what the other wanted it was absurd they must mince and simper like a couple of dancing-mice at Bartholomew Fair.

  Again she thought that she caught the hint of a smile on his mouth, but could not be sure. "Thank you madame. Your kindness is more than I deserve. I must return to London soon after the first of the year, and if you will go with me we can be married at that time. I understand that the sickness is now greatly abated and the town has begun to fill again."

  He wanted, of course to make certain her fortune had survived the Plague before he married her—but Amber was tired of the country and eager to get back herself.

  They set out together in his coach on the second of January, bundled in furs and covered with fur-lined robes; it was so cold they could see their breath as they talked. The roads were so hard and frosty that it was possible to travel much faster than if it had been raining, but they had to stop that afternoon at four because the bouncing and jogging distressed his Lordship.

  The marriage-contract had been signed at Barberry Hill and Amber supposed he would take advantage of the usual custom to lie with her that night. At eight o'clock, however, he bowed, wished her a good night, and retired to his own chamber. Amber and Nan watched him go, both of them staring with astonishment. Then as the door closed they looked at each other and burst into uncontrollable giggles.

  "He must be impotent!" hissed Nan.

  "I hope so!"

  It was nightfall on the fifth day when they reached London. Amber had a feeling of dread as they approached the city, but as they rolled through the dark quiet streets it began to disappear. There were no dead-carts, no corpses, very few red crosses to be seen. Already the sloping mounds in the graveyards had been covered over with a coarse green vegetation— the hundred thousand dead were effacing themselves. Taverns were brightly lighted again and crowded, coaches teetered by filled with gay young men and women, the sound of music came from some of the houses.

  It never really happened, she thought. It never really happened at all. She had a strange sense of discovery, as though she had wakened from some terrible nightmare and found to her relief that it had been only a dream.

  Radclyffe
House stood in Aldersgate Street above St. Anne's Lane and just without the City gates. The street was a broad one lined with large wide-spaced houses. Radclyffe told her that it resembled an Italian avenue more than any other street in London. It was the only place left so near the walls where some of the great old families were still living.

  The house had been virtually unoccupied for almost twenty-five years, but for a few servants left there as caretakers, and most of the windows were bricked up. Inside it was dark and dusty, the furniture was shrouded in dirty white and nothing had been brought up to date since it had been built eighty-five years ago. One room led into another like a maze, and with the exception of the grand staircase in the center of the house, all passages and stair-wells were narrow and dark. Amber was relieved to find that the apartments to which she was shown had at least been cleaned and dusted and aired, even though otherwise it was in no better condition than the rest.

  Early the next morning she went to visit Shadrac Newbold and found that he had kept all her money intact. (He also told her that Lord Carlton had sailed for America two weeks before.) When she told him that her money was safe Radclyffe suggested that they be married as soon as all necessary arrangements could be made. As she knew, he was a Catholic—hence it would be necessary to have two services performed, for a Catholic ceremony could be declared null and void.

  "I'd intended," said Amber, "to bespeak a gown of my dressmaker. I haven't got anything that's new—and I think she could get one done in ten days or so."

  "I don't think it would be safe, madame, as yet—the sickness is still too much with us. But if you would care to oblige me, I have a gown laid away I should be most happy to have you wear."

  Somewhat surprised, wondering if he kept a wedding-gown about for unexpected marriages, Amber agreed. Certainly it seemed a simple harmless request.

  Later in the day he came to her chamber, carrying in his arms a stiff white-satin gown, embroidered all over with tiny pearls, and as he shook it out she saw that there were deep sharp creases in it, as though it had been lying folded for a very long time. She realized then that it actually was an old gown; the white had turned creamy and the cut and style were many years out of fashion. The waist-line was high with a flaring peplum slashed in four places; the low square neck had a deep collar of lace and lace cuffs finished the long full sleeves; when the skirt opened down the front a petticoat of heavy silver cloth showed.