Forever Amber

by Kathleen Winsor

  "Sire!"

  She was beginning to push at him now, a little frightened, arching her back and trying to bend away from him, but his body curved over hers, his hands and his mouth seeking. "Oh, Frances, you can't put me off any longer—I've waited two years—I can't wait forever—I love you, Frances, I swear I do! I won't hurt you, darling, please—please—"

  It was true that he was in love with her. He was in love with her beauty and her femininity, the promise of complete fulfillment which she seemed to offer. But he did not really love her any more than he had ever loved any other woman; and he believed furthermore that her show of virtue was a stubborn pretense, designed to get something she wanted. In his relations with women as in all other phases of his life, his selfishness took refuge in cynicism.

  "Sire!" she cried again, really alarmed now, for she had never realized before how powerful was his strength, how easy it would be for him to force her.

  But he did not hear. His hands had pushed the low-cut gown far off her shoulders, and he held her hard against him, as though determined to absorb her body into his own. She had never seen him so blindly excited and it terrified her, for her emotions did not answer his but fled to the opposite extreme— she was scared and disgusted. And all at once she hated him.

  Now she put her crossed arms against his shoulders and pushed, and at the same time she gave a sobbing desperate cry. "Your Majesty, let me go!" She burst into tears.

  Instantly he paused, his body stiffening, and then he released her, so swiftly that she almost lost her balance. While he stood there in the darkness beside her, so quiet she would have thought she was alone but for the sound of his breathing, she turned away and continued to cry—not softly but with whimpering sobs so that he would hear her and regret what he had done. And also so that he would realize she was even more offended than he could possibly be. For she was afraid now that he might be angry.

  It seemed a long time, but at last he spoke. "I'm sorry, Frances. I didn't realize that I was repulsive to you."

  Frances whirled around. "Oh, Sire! Don't think that! Of course you're not! But if I once give myself up to you I'll have lost the only thing I have that's any value to me. A woman can no more be excused because she gives herself to a king than if he were any other man. You know that your own mother says that."

  "My mother and I do not always think alike—and certainly not on that point. Answer me honestly, Frances. What is it you want? I've told you before and I tell you again—I'll give you anything I have. I'll give you anything but marriage—and I'd give that if I could."

  Frances's voice answered him crisply. "Then, Sire, you will never have me at all. For I shall never give myself to a man under any other conditions than marriage."

  He stood with his back to the windows and his face in darkness, and she could not see the expression of savage anger that brushed across it. "Someday," he said, in a soft voice, "I hope I'll find you ugly and willing." He went past her swiftly and out the door.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Amber did not like being shut up in a black room; it made her melancholy. But at least the fact that she was supposed to be in mourning secured her from what would otherwise have been an intolerable number of visits from every friend, acquaintance and remote relative of the entire family. Her child, a girl, had been born just a few days after Samuel's death. And she would have been expected to give a gossips-feast, a child-bed feast, and a great reception following the christening.

  As it was she received calls only from close relatives and friends of the family, though many others sent gifts. During these she sat half propped in bed, looking very pale and fragile against all that sombre black. She smiled wistfully at her visitors, sometimes squeezed out a tear or two or at least a long sigh, and looked fondly at the baby when someone said that she was as much Samuel's image as if she had been spit out of his mouth. She was polite and patient and as decorous as ever, for she felt that she owed Samuel that much at least in return for the great fortune he had left her.

  She scarcely saw the immediate family at all. Each of them came just once to her room, but Amber knew that it was only out of a persistent sense of duty to their father. She realized that now he was dead they expected and wanted her to leave as soon as she could get out of bed. And she did not intend to linger there any longer than necessary.

  But it was only Jemima who said what the others were thinking. "Well—now that you've got Father's money I suppose you expect to buy a title with it and set yourself up for a person of quality?"

  Amber gave her an impudent mocking smile. "I might," she agreed.

  "You may be able to buy a title," said Jemima, "but you can't buy the breeding that goes with it." That sounded to Amber like something she had heard one of the others say, but the next words were Jemima's own: "And there's something else you can't buy, either, not if you had all the money there is. You never can buy Lord Carlton."

  Amber's jealousy of Jemima had faded, since she knew her to be securely trapped in marriage, to lazy contempt. There was nothing she had to fear from her now. And she gave her a slow, sweeping insolent glance. "I'm very sensible of your concern, Jemima. But I'll shift for myself, I warrant you. So if that's all you came for, you may as well go."

  Jemima answered her in a low tense voice, for Amber's smugness and indifference made her furious. "I am going— and I hope I never see you again as long as I live. But let me tell you one thing—someday you're going to get the fate you deserve. God won't let your wickedness thrive forever—"

  Amber's superiority dissolved into a cynical laugh. "I vow and swear, Jemima, you've grown as great a fanatic as the rest of them. If you had better sense you'd have learned by now that nothing thrives so well as wickedness. Now get out of here, you malapert slut, and don't trouble me again!"

  Jemima did not trouble her again, and neither did anyone else in the family. She was left as strictly alone as if she were not in the house at all.

  She sent Nan about the town searching for lodgings—not in the City but out in the fashionable western suburbs that lay between Temple Bar and Charing Cross. And about three weeks after the baby's birth she went herself to look at one Nan had found.

  It was a handsome new building in St. Martin's Lane, between Holborn, Drury Lane, and Lincoln's Inn Fields, where she would be surrounded by persons of the best quality. The house was four stories high with one apartment on each floor and there was a top half-story for the servants. Amber's apartment was on the second floor; a pretty young girl just in from the country with her aunt to find a husband was above her, and a rich middle-aged widow occupied the fourth. The landlady, Mrs. de Lacy, lived below Amber. She was a frail creature who sighed frequently and complained of the vapours, and who talked of nothing but her former wealth and position, lost in the Wars along with a husband whom she had never been able to replace.

  The house was called the Plume of Feathers and a large wooden sign swung out over the street just below Amber's parlour windows—it depicted a great swirling blue plume painted on a gilt background and was supported by a very ornate wrought-iron frame, also gilded. The coach-house and stables were up the street only a short distance. And the narrow little lane was packed with the homes and lodgings of gallants, noblemen, titled ladies and many others who frequented Whitehall. Red heels and silver swords, satin gowns and half masks, periwigs and feathered hats, painted coaches and dainty highbred horses made a continuous parade beneath her window.

  The apartments were the most splendid she had ever seen.

  There was an anteroom hung in purple-and-gold-striped satin, furnished with two or three gilt chairs and a Venetian mirror. It opened into one end of a long parlour which had massed diamond-paned windows overlooking the street on one side and the courtyard on another. The marble fireplace had a plaster overmantel reaching to the ceiling, lavishly decorated with flowers, beasts, swags, geometrical figures and nude women. The chimney-shelf was lined with Chinese and Persian vases, there was a silver cha
ndelier, and the furniture was either gilded or inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. Nothing, Mrs. de Lacy explained proudly, had been made in England. The emerald-and-yellow satin draperies were loomed in France, the mirrors came from Florence, the marble in the fireplace from Genoa, the cabinets from Naples, the violet-wood for two tables from New Guinea.

  The bedroom was even more sybaritic: The bedstead was covered with cloth-of-silver and all hangings were green taffeta; even the chairs were covered with silver cloth. Several wardrobes were built into the walls and there was a small separate bench-bed with a canopy and tight-rolled bolster for lounging, surely the most elegant little thing Amber had ever seen. And there were three other rooms, nursery, dining-parlour and kitchen, which last she did not expect to use.

  The rent was exorbitant—one hundred and twenty-five pounds a year—but Amber had the merest contempt for such small change and paid it without a word of protest, though she hoped and expected that she would not be there even half that long. For Bruce should be back soon; he had been gone now more than eight months and the Pool was crowded again with captured merchant-shipping.

  She moved her belongings from Dangerfield House before she herself left, and though the process took three or four days no one came near or commented on what she was taking, not all of which strictly belonged to her. She had hired a wet-nurse and a dry-nurse for the baby, and now she hired three maids, which completed the equipage necessary to a woman of fashion living alone. The day she left, the great house was perfectly silent; she scarcely saw a servant and not even one of the children appeared in the hallways. Nothing could have told her more plainly than this silent contempt how they hated her.

  But Amber did not care at all. They were nothing to her now—those stiff precise formal people who lived in a world she despised. She sank back onto the seat of her coach with a sigh of relief.

  "Drive away! Well—" she turned to Nan. "That's over— thank God."

  "Aye," agreed Nan, softly but with real feeling. "Thank God."

  They sat quietly, looking out the windows as the coach jogged along, enjoying everything they saw. It was a dirty foggy day and the moisture in the air made stronger than ever the heterogeneous and evil smells of London. Along one side of the street swaggered a young beau with his arm in a sling from a recent duel. Across the way a couple of men, obviously French, had been caught by a group of little boys who were screaming insults at them and throwing refuse picked up out of the kennels. The English hated all foreigners, but Frenchmen most of all. A ragged one-eyed old fish-woman lurched drunkenly along, holding by its tail a mouldering mackerel and bawling out her unintelligible chant.

  All at once Nan gave a little gasp, one hand pressed to her mouth and the other pointing. "Look! There's another one!"

  "Another what?"

  "Another cross!"

  Amber leaned forward and saw a great red cross chalked on the doorway of a house before which they were stalled. Beneath it had been printed the words, in great sprawling letters: LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US! A guard lounged against the house, his halberd planted beside him.

  She leaned back again, giving a careless wave of her gloved hand. "Pish. What of it? Plague's the poor man's disease. Haven't you heard that?" Barricaded behind her sixty-six. thousand pounds she felt safe from anything.

  For the next few weeks Amber lived quietly in her apartments at the Plume of Feathers. Her arrival in the neighbourhood, she knew, created a considerable excitement and she was aware that every time she stepped out of the house she was much stared at from behind cautiously drawn curtains. A widow as rich as she was would have aroused interest even if she were not also young and lovely. But she was not so eager to make friends now as she had been when she had first come to London, and her fortune made her suspicious of the motives of any young man who so much as stepped aside to let her pass in the street.

  The courtiers were all out at sea with the fleet and—though she would have enjoyed flaunting to them her triumph over the conditions which had once put her at their mercy—she had no real interest in anyone but Bruce. She was content waiting for him to return.

  Most of the time she stayed at home, absorbed in being a mother. Her son had been taken away from her so soon, and she had seen him so infrequently since, that this baby was as much a novelty to her as if it were her first. She helped the dry-nurse bathe her, watched her while she fed and slept, rocked her cradle and sang songs and was fascinated by the smallest change she could discover in her size and weight and appearance. She was glad that she had had the baby, even if it had temporarily increased her waist-line by an inch or so, for it gave her something of Bruce's which she could never lose. This child had a name, a dowry already secure and waiting, an enviable place of her own in the world.

  Nan was almost as interested as her mistress. "I vow she's the prettiest baby in London."

  Amber was insulted. "In London! What d'you mean? She's the prettiest baby in England!"

  One day she went to the New Exchange to do some unnecessary shopping, and happened to see Barbara Palmer. She was just leaving when a great gilt coach drove up in front and Castlemaine stepped out. Barbara's eyes went over her clothes with interest, for though Amber was still dressed in mourning her cloak was lined with leopard-skins—which Samuel had bought for her from some African slave-trader—and she carried a leopard muff. But when her eyes got as far as Amber's face and she saw who was wearing the costume she glanced quickly and haughtily away.

  Amber gave a little laugh. So she remembers me! she thought. Well madame, I doubt not you and I may be better acquainted one day.

  As the days went by red crosses were seen, more and more frequently, chalked on the doors. There was plague in London every year and when a few cases had appeared in January and February no one had been alarmed. But now, as the weather grew warmer, the plague seemed to increase and terror spread slowly though the city: it passed from neighbour to neighbour, from apprentice to customer, from vendor to housewife.

  Long funeral processions wound through the streets, and already people had begun to take notice of a man or a woman in mourning. They recalled the evil portents which had been seen only a few months before. In December a comet had appeared, rising night after night, tracing a slow ominous path across the sky. Others had seen flaming-swords held over the city, hearses and coffins and heaps of dead bodies in the clouds. Crowds collected on the steps of St. Paul's to hear the half-naked old man who held a blazing torch in his hand and called upon them to repent of their sins. The tolling of the passing-bell began to have a new significance for each of them:

  Tomorrow, perhaps, it tolls for me or for someone I love.

  Everyday Nan came home with a new preventive. She bought pomander-balls to breathe into when out of doors, toad amulets, a unicorn's horn, quills filled with arsenic and quicksilver, mercury in a walnut shell, gold coins minted in Queen Elizabeth's time. Each time someone told her of a new preservative she bought it immediately, one for each member of the household, and she insisted that they be worn. She even put quicksilver-quills around the necks of their horses.

  But she was not content merely with preventing the plague. For she realized sensibly, that in spite of all precautions one sometimes got it, and she began to stock the cupboards with remedies for curing the sickness. She bought James Angier's famous fumigant of brimstone and saltpetre, as well as gunpowder, nitre, tar and resin to disinfect the air. She bought all the recommended herbs, angelica, rue, pimpernel, gentian, juniper berries, and dozens more. She had a chestful of medicines which included Venice treacle, dragon water, and a bottle of cow-dung mixed with vinegar.

  Amber was inclined to be amused by all these frantic preparations. An astrologer had told her that 1665 would be a lucky year for her, and her almanac did not warn her of plague or any other disease. Anyway it was true, for the most part, that only the poor were dying in their crowded dirty slums.

  "Mrs. de Lacy's leaving town tomorrow," said Nan one morning as she brushe
d Amber's hair.

  "Well, what if she is? Mrs. de Lacy's a chicken-hearted old simpleton who'd squeak at the sight of a mouse."

  "She's not the only one, mam, you know that. Plenty of others are leaving too."

  "The King isn't leaving, is he?" They had had this same argument every day for the past two weeks, and Amber was growing tired of it.

  "No, but he's the King and couldn't catch the sickness if he tried. I tell you, mam, it's mighty dangerous to stay. Not five minutes' walk away—just at the top of Drury Lane—there's a house been shut up. I'm getting scared, mam! Lord, I don't want to die—and I shouldn't think you would either!"

  Amber laughed. "Well, then, Nan—if it gets any worse we'll leave. But there's no use fretting your bowels to fiddle-strings." She had no intention at all of leaving before Bruce arrived.

  On the 3rd of June the English and Dutch fleets engaged just off Lowestoft, and the sound of their guns carried back to London. They could be heard, very faintly, like swallows fluttering in a chimney.

  By the 8th it was known that the English had been victorious—twenty-four Dutch ships had been sunk or captured and almost 10,000 Dutchmen killed or taken prisoner, while no more than 700 English seamen had been lost. The rejoicing was hysterical. Bonfires blazed along every street and a mob of merrymakers broke the French Ambassador's windows because there was no fire in front of his house. King Charles was the greatest king, the Duke of York the greatest admiral England had ever known—and everyone was eager to continue the fight, wipe out the Dutch and rule all the seas on earth.

  The red crosses had now entered the gates of the City.

  Nan came in a few days later with a bill-of-mortality in her hand. "Mam!" she cried. "Mam! There was 112 died last week of the sickness!"

  Amber was entertaining Lord Buckhurst and Sir Charles Sedley who—along with the other gentlemen—had just returned from sea, all of them sunburnt heroes. Nan stopped on the threshold in surprise to find them there.