Forever Amber

by Kathleen Winsor

  "What's the matter with you, Nell? You look as though you're in a fit!"

  "Shh! I think I am!"

  Villiers looked annoyed, not knowing whether to take her seriously or not. "D'you want to go?"

  "No. Of course not. Be still."

  She did not even glance at him, but her cheeks had begun to burn for she was aware that Charles was looking at her, and he was so close that by leaning over slightly she could have touched his arm. And then suddenly she turned her head and stared him full in the eyes, questioningly. He grinned, his teeth shining white beneath his black mustache, and Nelly gave a relieved little laugh. Then he wasn't angry! He had thought it a good joke too.

  "What brings you here?" asked Charles, speaking in a low voice so as to attract no more attention than could be helped from those around them.

  "Why—a—I came to see if it's true Moll Davis is a better dancer than I am."

  "And do you imagine she'll be dancing today?" His eyes sparkled at her obviously painful embarrassment and confusion. "I should think she might be sick at home with the colic."

  In spite of herself Nell blushed and dropped her lashes, unable to face him. "I'm sorry, Sire. I wanted to pay her back for—" Suddenly she looked up at him, eager and serious. "Oh, forgive me, your Majesty! I'll never do such a thing again!"

  At this Charles laughed outright and his familiar deep voice drew several glances. "Give your apologies to her, not to me. I haven't spent such an entertaining evening in a long while." He leaned closer, put the back of his hand to his mouth and whispered confidentially, "To tell you truly, madame, I think Mrs. Davis is mightily out of humour with you."

  With sudden boldness Nelly retorted, "Well, she must be mighty simple or she wouldn't have been taken in with a stale old trick like that! She should have known it was physicked after the first bite!"

  At that moment Moll came whirling out onto the stage below them, spinning round and round, a small graceful figure in her close-fitted boy's breeches and thin white-linen blouse. A spontaneous roar of shouts and applause went up. Charles gave Nelly a brief glance, one eyebrow lifted as much as to say, Well, she did dare to come after all. Then he returned his attention to the stage and it was not long before the girl on it saw him and smiled, as brazenly self-assured as though nothing at all unusual had happened the night before.

  But just the next moment she saw Nell sitting there beside him, leaning with her elbows on the railing, grinning down at her. For an instant Moll's face lost its smile, then immediately she stuck it back on again. Swiftly Nelly raised her thumb to her nose and waggled her fingers, but not so swiftly that his Majesty missed the impudent gesture. When Moll's dance was over she flung several kisses toward the middle-box; then she was gone and she appeared no more, for she had no part in the play that afternoon.

  From time to time as the play progressed Charles and Nelly exchanged opinions on the acting, a song, a bit of stage-business, costuming and scenery, or the rest of the audience. Villiers was beginning to look disgruntled, but York glanced now and again at his brother's newest mistress with pleased interest, liking her expressive face, her gaiety and the spontaneous happy laugh that crinkled her blue eyes till they all but disappeared.

  When at last the play was done and they were getting up to leave Charles casually remarked, "Now that I think on it, I don't believe I've eaten any supper yet. Have you, James?"

  "No. No, I can't say that I have."

  Nelly gave Villiers a swift nudge in the ribs with her elbow and when he did not take his cue quick enough she kicked him sharply on the ankle. He winced at that and promptly said: "Your Majesty, if it would not be too great an impertinence, may I beg the honour of your company, and his Highness's company, at supper with me?"

  Charles and York accepted instantly and all of them left the theatre together, hailed a hackney and set out for the Rose Tavern. It was already dark, though not yet six-thirty, and the rain came in gusts. Charles and York were not recognized at the Rose, for both men had their hats pulled low and cloaks flung across their chins, and Nelly wore a full vizard. The host escorted them upstairs to a private room, which they asked for, with no more ado than if they had been any trio of men bringing a wench to supper.

  Villiers was not very gay, for he resented the King's intrusion but Charles and James and Nelly enjoyed themselves immensely. They ordered all the most expensive and delicious food the famous kitchen prepared, drank champagne, cracked raw oysters, and ate until they had turned the table into a litter of shells and bones and empty bottles. It was two hours before Charles suddenly snapped his fingers and said that he must be on his way. His wife was expecting him in the Drawing-Room that night to hear a newly arrived Italian eunuch who was supposed to have the sweetest voice in Christendom.

  With the first enthusiasm he had shown Villiers jumped to his feet and bellowed downstairs for the bill. The waiter came in as Charles was holding Nelly's cloak for her and, because he was obviously the eldest, presented the bill to him. Charles, a Utile drunk, glanced at it and gave a low whistle, experimentally put his fingers into the various pockets of his coat and each time brought them out empty.

  "Not a shilling. What about you, James?"

  James likewise searched his pockets and wagged his head. Nelly burst into peals of delighted laughter. "Ods-fish!" she cried. "But this is the poorest company that ever I was in at a tavern!"

  The royal brothers both looked to Villiers who tried not to show his irritation as he gave his last shilling to pay the bill. Then they went downstairs where both Charles and James kissed Nelly good-bye before they climbed into a hackney and set out for Whitehall, hanging out the coach windows to wave back at her. She flung them enthusiastic kisses.

  By the next day the story was all over the Palace and was being told in the tiring-rooms and at the 'Change, in the coffeehouses and taverns—to the vast amusement of everyone but Moll Davis. And she was angrier than ever when a bouquet arrived for her, a huge cluster of striking weed Nelly had found growing somewhere along Drury Lane.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Amber loved being a part of the Court.

  Familiarity had not disillusioned her and as far as she was concerned it was still the great world and everything that happened in it more exciting and important than it could possibly have been anywhere else. Buckingham himself was not more convinced than she that they were God's chosen people, the lords and ladies of all creation. And now she was one of them! With no protest at all she was soon sucked into the maelstrom of Court life and whirled about in a mad darkness.

  She went to suppers and plays and balls. She was invited everywhere and her own invitations were never refused, for it was dangerously impolitic to slight one of the King's mistresses. Her drawing-room was often more crowded than the Queen's and she kept several gambling-tables going at once: ombre, trente-et-quarante, lanterloo, various dice games. The street-beggars had begun to call upon her by name, a sure sign of importance. Hack poets and playwrights hung about her anterooms and wanted to dedicate a new play or sonnet to her. The first young man to whom she played generous patron— making him a gift of fifty pounds, but not troubling to read the poem before it was published—had written a virile and malevolent satire on the Court and everyone in it, including her.

  She spent money as if she had inherited the Privy Purse, and though Shadrac Newbold made investments for her and kept her accounts she paid no attention at all to what was coming in or going out. The fortune which Samuel had left still seemed to her inexhaustible.

  And anyway there were a thousand ways to make money at Court—if the King liked you: Once he allowed her to hold a lottery of Crown plate. He leased her six hundred acres of Crown land in Lincolnshire for five years at a low figure and she subleased it at a high one. He granted her the profits for a one-year period from all vessels moored in the Pool. She got the money from the sale of underwood in certain coppices in the New Forest. She engaged in two of the Court's most lucrative businesses: begging e
states and stock-jobbing. Charles gave her gifts from the Irish taxes and all the foreign ambassadors made her presents, which varied in value according to the supposed degree of her influence over the King. She could have lived in fine style from these sources alone.

  Just before Christmas she began to have her rooms completely redecorated and furnished and for four months they were filled with workmen painting and hammering and scraping. The furniture was covered over with heavy white canvas to prevent spotting, buckets of gilt and coloured paint stood everywhere, men on tall ladders dabbed at the ceiling and took measurements for a hanging. Tansy followed them from room to room, curious and interested. Monsieur le Chien snapped at their heels and barked all day long and sometimes, if his mistress was not about, he was secretly kicked.

  Amber sent to Lime Park for all its furnishings and spent several days going over Radclyffe's possessions, which she had obtained with the King's connivance.

  Among them she found a long but still unfinished poem: "The Kingdom Come. A Satire." A quick glance told her that it had been written at Lime Park during the spring and summer months of 1666, from information gathered while he had been in London, just after their marriage. It was obscene, cruel, bitterly malicious, but brilliant in style and perception. Amber read it for the malice and obscenity, recognized those qualities instantly but missed everything else—and threw it contemptuously into the fire. There were other papers: the history of the family possessions, letters (one which had evidently been written by the girl whom he had loved and who had disappeared during the Civil Wars), many alchemical recipes, sheaves of notes, bills for pictures and other objects which he had collected, translations he had made from Latin and Greek, essays on a variety of subjects. With spiteful pleasure she destroyed them all.

  She came upon a skull with a recipe attached to it by thin copper wire. It was a cure for impotency and recommended that spring-water be drunk every morning from the skull of a man who had been murdered. Amber considered this to be very funny and it even increased her contempt for the Earl. She kept it to show the King and he appropriated it for his own

  laboratory, saying that he might have a need for that remedy himself some day.

  What she liked of his hangings and pictures and furniture Amber saved for her own apartments; the rest she put up at auction. Radclyffe's lifelong interest in everything beautiful and rare, the years of collecting, the infinite labour and expense —all were sold now to people he had despised, or used as bric-a-brac by a woman for whom he had had nothing but scornful contempt. Amber's triumph, complete and terrible, was only the triumph of the living over the helpless dead. But it pleased her a great deal.

  Charles and his Court had brought back from France with them a changed taste in furniture, as in everything else. The new style was at once more delicate and more lavish. Walnut replaced the heavy solid pieces of carved oak, tapestry was considered old-fashioned, and rich Persian or Turkish carpets lay on bare floors which were no longer covered with rushes to hide dirt and keep out cold. No extravagance was beyond good taste—and the ladies and courtiers vied with one another as to who could achieve the most spectacular effect. Amber was at no loss among them.

  She had some walls knocked out and others put up to change the proportions of the rooms—she wanted everything on a scale of prodigious size and grandeur. Even the anteroom was very large—which was necessary to accommodate all those who attended upon her—but its only furnishings were wall-hangings of green raw silk, a pair of life-sized black-marble Italian statues, and a battery of gilt chairs.

  The drawing-room, which fronted directly upon the river, was seventy-five feet long and twenty-five feet wide. Its walls were hung with black-and-gold-striped silk and at night the draperies could be pulled to cover all window-space. Pearl-embroidered rugs were scattered over the floor. The delicate, graceful, deeply carved furniture was coated thickly with gold-leaf, and the cushions were emerald velvet. Because Charles preferred a buffet style of dining-service there were many little tables about and she gave her suppers in that room. Above the fireplace hung a portrait of Amber impersonating St. Catherine—all the Court ladies liked to have themselves drawn as saints. Catherine had been a queen and so Amber wore a magnificent gown with a crown upon her head; she carried a book, the martyr's palm, and beside her lay the symbol of suffering, a broken wheel. Her expression was very thoughtful and sedate.

  A small anteroom hung in white—where Radclyffe's Italian blackamoor stood on a gold table before a mirror—opened from the drawing-room into the bed-chamber, the furnishings of which cost Amber more than all the rest of the apartment together.

  The entire room, floor to ceiling, was lined with mirrors—brought from Venice and smuggled through the port officers by his Majesty's connivance. The floor was laid with black Genoese marble, supposed to be the finest in Europe. On the ceiling an artist named Streater had depicted the loves of Jupiter, and it swarmed with naked full-breasted, round-hipped women in a variety of attitudes with men and beasts.

  The bed, an immense four-posted structure with a massive tester, was covered with beaten silver and hung with scarlet velvet. And every other article of furniture in the room was thickly plated with silver; each chair, from the smallest stool to the great settee before the fireplace, was cushioned in scarlet. The window-hangings were silver embroidered scarlet velvet. Above the fireplace and sunk flush with the wall was a more intimate and considerably more typical portrait of Amber, painted by Peter Lely. She lay on her side on a heap of black cushions, unashamedly naked, staring out with a slant-eyed smile at whoever paused to look.

  The room seemed to possess a violent, almost savage personality. No human being had a chance of seeming important in it. And yet it was the envy of the Palace, for it was the most extravagant gesture anyone had yet made. Amber, not at all awed by it, loved it for its arrogance, its uncompromising challenge, its crude and boisterous beauty. It represented to her everything she had ever believed she wanted from life; and all she had got. It was her symbol of success.

  But it was not enough, now she had it, to make her happy.

  For though her days were perpetually busy, occupied with a never-ceasing round of gossip, new clothes, gambling, play-going, supper-giving, schemes and counter-schemes, she was never able to make herself forget Bruce Carlton. He would not leave her, no matter what she was doing, and though usually her longing for him was a low-keyed minor unhappiness it surged sometimes into tremendous and monumental music which seemed unbearable. When that happened, always when she least expected it, she would think and almost wish that she would die. It would seem impossible then that she could exist for another moment without him, and her yearning, wild and desperate, would reach out blindly—to inevitable disappointment.

  About mid-March Almsbury arrived in London alone to attend to some business matters and amuse himself for a few weeks. Amber had not seen him since the previous August and the first question she asked was whether or not he had heard from Bruce.

  "No," said the Earl. "Have you?"

  "Have I?" she demanded crossly. "Of course not! He's never written me a letter in his life! But it'd seem he might at least let you know how he does!"

  Almsbury shrugged. "Why should he? He's busy—and as long as I don't hear from him I know everything's well with him. If it wasn't he'd let me know."

  "Are you sure?"

  Her eyes slipped him a stealthy glance. They were in her bedroom, Amber in a dressing-gown lying on a little day-bed with her trim ankles crossed, while Tansy sat on the floor beside her contemplating the frayed toes of his shoes. Though he could be very amusing, usually he did not speak unless spoken to and was quiet in a way which suggested some strange inner tranquillity, an almost animal self-sufficiency.

  "What do you mean by that?" Almsbury's eyes narrowed slightly as he looked at her. "If you're hoping that something's happened to Corinna you may as well forget it. Hoping for another woman to die will never get you what you want; you know that as w
ell as I do. He never intended to marry you anyway."

  There were times when some suppressed impatience or cruelty in the Earl crept into his attitude toward her. She took him so much for granted that it never occurred to her to wonder about the cause, though she was always very quick to take offense when it appeared.

  "How do you know! He might have, now I'm a countess— if it hadn't been for her—"

  Her eyes hardened as she spoke of Corinna and her upper lip tightened stubbornly. But in a sense, she was almost glad to have Corinna as the reason and excuse for all her troubles— she could never otherwise have explained to herself or anyone else his refusal to marry her.

  "Amber, my dear," he said now, and his eyes and the tone of his voice had softened with a kind of affectionate pity. "There's no use pretending to yourself, is there? He didn't marry her because she's rich and titled. Probably he wouldn't have married her if she hadn't been—no man in his position would—but if that was all he wanted he'd have married long ago. No, sweetheart—you might as well be honest with yourself. He loves her."

  "But he loves me too!" she cried desperately. "Oh, he does, Almsbury! You know he does!" Suddenly her voice and eyes grew wistful. "You think he loves me, don't you?"

  Almsbury smiled and reached across to take her hand. "My poor little darling. Yes, I think he does—and sometimes I almost think, you'd have loved him even if he had married you."

  "Oh, of course I would!" she cried and then, half-ashamed: "Stop teasing me, Almsbury." She glanced nervously away, feeling foolish. But all at once the words burst forth in a rush. "Oh, I do love him, Almsbury! You can't imagine how much I love him! I'd do anything—anything in the world to get him! And I'd always love him—If I saw him every day and every night for a thousand years! Oh, you know it's true, Almsbury —I've never loved another man—I never could!" Then, seeing some strange look come into his eyes, she was afraid that she had hurt him. "Oh, of course I love you, Almsbury—but in a different way—I—"