Black Amber

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  With a key from his pocket he unlocked a glass cabinet against the wall and reached toward a shelf, where more of the beads were spread out in display or piled in glowing heaps of mixed color. He chose several strands at random and brought them to the table.

  They were lovely things. Some of the less expensive were endlessly varied in their coloring. There were others of greater value made of ivory and amber. Some of the amber beads were still in their reddish, unaged state, while others were a golden, honey brown. All were smoothly rounded, without carving, to give a proper texture for the fingers. In the little heap on the table was a single tespih of black jet, gleaming darkly among the rest.

  Dr. Erim reached into the heap and picked it up. “This is typically Turkish,” he said. “A strand of black amber.”

  Tracy’s fingers, moving idly among the beads, stilled. Perhaps it was only her imagination, but it seemed to her that everyone in the room was staring at the black beads in Dr. Erim’s hands. Even Miles Radburn was paying somber attention. Ahmet, who had just come into the room with a tray of stemmed glasses containing rose sherbet, allowed his attention to flicker briefly over the glittering heap and focus on the black.

  For Tracy, it was as if the sound of Anabel’s voice echoed through the room. The high hysterical note of her sister’s telephone call from Istanbul was so sharply clear in Tracy’s mind that she half expected others in the room to hear and respond to it. Anabel had wailed something about “black amber”—though her confused words had meant nothing to Tracy. Now, in this house, the phrase had been repeated and it rang so insistent a note in her mind that Tracy could not let the moment escape without catching up these key words.

  “What is black amber?” she asked.

  Murat Erim dropped the black beads at her place. “It is a form of jet which is mined near our eastern border in a town called Erzerum. It is a popular stone often used for pins and other jewelry, as well as for making tespihler.”

  Tracy picked up the strand. The smooth jet shone intensely black in her hands, but, though she ran the beads through her fingers several times, they seemed in no way remarkable.

  Dr. Erim returned the black tespih to the heap and started to gather up the strands to make room for Ahmet’s dessert plates. Then he paused and gestured toward the tespihler.

  “You must choose for yourself one of these, Miss Hubbard. As a souvenir of Turkey. Please—any that you like.”

  Tracy thanked him, hesitating. She touched the black amber, picked it up, and it seemed to her that the room hushed, waiting. Carelessly she let the strand ripple through her fingers, discarding it, and chose an inexpensive string of gray-blue beads.

  “It is very kind of you,” she said. “May I have this blue one? It matches my dress.”

  “But of course,” he said. “Keep it for yourself.”

  The moment of stillness, of waiting, was past. The room seemed to move and breathe again. Dr. Erim swept up the rest of the beads and replaced them on the shelves, locking the cabinet. Tracy held up her choice, allowing the tespih to dangle from her fingers, suddenly aware that Murat was looking, not at the beads, but directly at her with an odd, questioning expression on his face. Ahmet was no longer paying attention and Miles had again retired behind his wall. Yet Tracy had received the momentary impression that the attention of the room had been upon the black beads, and that Murat was interested in her rejection of them more than he was interested in the choice she had made.

  Nursel broke the brief silence, making conversation almost nervously. “You must tell us about yourself, Miss Hubbard. What part of the United States are you from?”

  Tracy dropped the tespih into her lap. Off guard, she answered readily. “I was born in the Midwest—in Iowa,” she said, and at once could have bitten her tongue. But if it meant anything to Miles or the other two that she came from the state where Anabel was born, no one showed it and Tracy hurried on.

  “I’ve always wanted to live in New York. I love the smell of printer’s ink and I wanted to be in the center of publishing.”

  She knew she was chattering and found it difficult to stop. It was a relief when Dr. Erim, having recovered from his tiff with Miles Radburn, joined in the talk again. There was no further clash between the two men, and Miles still seemed unaware of how greatly he had annoyed the other. Tracy ate the delicately flavored sherbet and enjoyed a piece of locum—the richly sweet Turkish delight.

  When they left the table, she turned hesitantly to Miles Radburn, but before she could ask about the afternoon he spoke to her curtly.

  “I prefer that you let your—ah—housekeeping go for the moment. I won’t be around to answer questions and I’d rather you keep out of my papers when I’m not present.”

  He did not wait for agreement, but went off toward the stairs. Ahmet held the door for Tracy, bowing as she came through, and she had a feeling that he understood Miles’s words, indeed had a greater understanding of English than he pretended.

  She returned to her room, feeling more than a little annoyed with herself. She had not needed Miles Radburn’s presence that morning. She had asked him no questions. Yet only when she was angry enough did she seem able to face him with sufficient determination to gain her own way.

  The gray-blue tespih was still in her hand and she studied it absently, thinking of the black amber. Had the sense of arrested attention she felt been wholly imaginary, or had everyone in the room really watched her when she held up the black beads just before she discarded them? The strand had seemed innocent enough in itself. Yet Anabel’s frightened voice persisted in her mind. This too was part of the ominous puzzle that would not let her be until she found the answer.

  She put the beads aside, ready now to face the thing she had been holding off throughout the morning. She must confront the fact of her sister’s portrait on the wall of Radburn’s room, with all the ramifications of why it was there, if, as Anabel had implied, he had turned against her. The urge to see it again was so strong that Tracy’s next step seemed inevitable. With Miles Radburn away, this was the time.

  She opened the door of her room a crack and listened intently. The vast gloom of the salon had a thick feeling of unstirred emptiness. She could hear the voices of servants from the depths of the house, but there seemed to be no one up here. She opened her door wide and looked across the nearly empty expanse toward the door of Miles’s study. It stood slightly ajar and she went toward it, moving quietly.

  4

  When she reached the study she paused again to listen. The inner silence was complete. Cautiously she pushed the door to a wider angle so that she could look into the room. And paused in surprise, for it was not, after all, empty. The houseman, Ahmet, stood before Miles’s drawing table, apparently studying the script upon it in utter concentration. When he finally sensed her presence and looked up, his dark face did not change. He stared at her with unblinking eyes, his expression telling her nothing. After a moment he stepped back from the board, made her his usual polite bow, and gestured toward the calligraphy with one long-fingered hand.

  “Hanimefendi,” he said, “—this word of Allah.”

  The explanation seemed clear. For an uneasy moment she had felt there was something wrong about the man’s quiet, absorbed presence in this room, but there was no reason why he should not, as a good Moslem, study the word of the Koran that Miles Radburn had copied.

  “Do you read the old Turkish script, Ahmet Effendi?” she asked.

  He shook his head without indication that he understood and slipped past her from the room. So softly and smoothly did he move that she scarcely heard his tread upon the stairs, though she stood in the doorway looking after him. When she was certain he had gone, Tracy crossed the study to Miles’s bedroom door and opened it. Her heart began to thud in her ears, but there was no one there, and she went to the foot of the bed where she could best see the portrait of her sister.

  This picture, she felt sure, had never been exhibited. It must have been painted dur
ing the early time of Anabel’s marriage to Miles Radburn. She knew enough about his work to recognize the excellence of the portrayal, though the picture was unlike anything else he had done. The misty-silver quality that lay over the whole, with the lovely, tragic face emerging from it, the eyes in dark, dramatic contrast, was totally different from the usual Radburn touch. Working in a manner that was wholly virile, he had nevertheless intensified the femininity of his subject. As always, he was a superb draughtsman, and the excellence of the painting gave its emotional effect upon the beholder all the more impact.

  Out of childhood memory haunting lines of verse came to Anabel’s sister, and she spoke them aloud whimsically.

  This maiden she lived with no other thought

  Than to love and be loved by me.

  But that was Annabel Lee, and this Anabel had been mistaken in her loving. In his portrait the artist had caught the very essence of her being—a sort of gossamer tension that had always frightened Tracy. The same look had been upon her that day eight years ago when Anabel had come to Iowa to tell her fifteen-year-old sister that she was to be married.

  Tracy had played hookey from school that day in order to meet Anabel’s train. They had gone to lunch together in a drab little restaurant, where they could sit in a booth at the back and hope to pass unnoticed. Anabel had been gay and electric, yet as gossamer as mist—hard to pin down. Never had Tracy seen her look more beautiful, more magical, and her own heart had ached a little in the old way—not only with love, but with something of envy as well. To be like Anabel—the wish had been a part of her for as long as she could remember, though she knew its foolishness, knew it must be thrust back, contradicted. It had seemed to Tracy in those days that Anabel would always have what she wished, merely for the taking. While Tracy, following inescapably in her shimmering wake, must compete with a vision she could never live up to.

  At lunch that day Anabel had eaten like a bird and talked in high excitement. “I posed for him, Bunny darling,” she said, using a pet name for Tracy that went back to Easter rabbit days. “That’s how I got to meet him. He thought I had interesting bones, or something. And some sort of quality he wanted to catch on canvas. Then he began to worry about me—the way people do.” The high, light laughter made heads turn, and Anabel stilled it at once.

  Yes—people had always worried about Anabel. Her mother had worried. Tracy’s father, Anabel’s stepfather, was the only one who had refused to worry. When Anabel had run away from home shortly after Tracy’s twelfth birthday, he had not concerned himself. Indeed, he had probably been relieved to see her go. Tracy had hated him a little, and worried as much as her mother had.

  Nevertheless, though their mother had suffered deeply—Anabel had always been her favorite—she had lacked the strength to stand up to her husband in Anabel’s defense. Knowing this, Anabel would never come home. She wrote to Tracy now and then—quick, brief notes that did not say very much, while Tracy wrote long, though sometimes laborious letters because of her instinct to preserve whatever tenuous thread still bound Anabel to a family, if only through her younger sister. It had seemed necessary for someone to care about holding onto Anabel, and Tracy had never stopped trying. On the occasions when Anabel had come west it was to see Tracy secretly, never her mother or stepfather.

  At home, life had been difficult for Tracy. Her mother had always blamed her for the occurrence that had brought matters to a head and sent Anabel away from home. At the time, Tracy had accepted her mother’s evaluation and blamed herself, indulging in an orgy of twelve-year-old suffering and self-reproach. She knew better now; knew that she had been no more than a chance instrument. The fact that she had behaved with childish jealousy was not something to brood over for the rest of her life. Eventually, Anabel would have taken the same step whether Tracy had played her role or not. This was the continuing puzzle of Anabel—that she must hurl herself headlong toward disaster, when to other eyes there seemed so little need.

  After Anabel had left home there were new walls around Tracy, and watchful suspicion, as if they only waited for her to do something wrong. She, who was accustomed to being open about all she did, who expected to be trusted, found herself faced with doubt and distrust on every hand. All because Anabel had gone before. Her love for her sister had been increasingly mixed with resentment. She knew now that this had been a healthy, self-preserving emotion, and sufficiently justified. But at the time she had not understood and there had been a sense of guilt. Even now that old feeling of being somehow to blame because she had been jealous of her sister reached out of the past to give pause to the grownup Tracy and make her question her feelings toward Anabel.

  That day in the restaurant Tracy had tried to take blame upon herself for what had occurred to drive Anabel from home. But, as always, Anabel would not listen.

  “It would have happened anyway, darling,” she had said with unusual frankness. “You mustn’t reproach yourself. Not ever.”

  She had gone on to speak of her coming marriage to a man who knew “almost all” about her, and who loved her as she was. She had refused Tracy’s plea to make things up with her mother.

  “I don’t want to,” Anabel had said and the words were final. There could be stubbornness in Anabel too, though of the kind that sometimes slipped away and left you seemingly unopposed when you had really been defeated.

  “I’m sorry, Bunny darling,” she went on, “but I never want him to meet my mother or your father. He thinks I’m all alone with no one in the world to turn to—which is almost true. He likes it that way. That’s why I can’t even tell him about you.”

  Her decision had hurt Tracy, yet she had accepted it. Anabel had found someone new to worry about her, someone closer at hand who could really look after her. The relief to that very young Tracy had been considerable.

  They were going to visit Miles’s relatives in England, and then go out to Turkey for their honeymoon, Anabel told her. Istanbul had always fascinated Miles as a painter. He wanted to try something besides portraits.

  “He’s so—so accountable and wonderful,” she told her sister in warm excitement. “I can depend on him. He won’t let me hurt myself. For the first time in my whole foolish life I’m going to be happy. And safe. When we’re on our way, I’ll send you something, darling, so you’ll know everything is fine. Something that will make you think of me whenever you wear it.”

  Anabel had kept her word. By airmail had come the little feather pin that Tracy had worn ever since. A pin that said to her: “Here’s a feather for your cap, Bunny darling. Wear it and remember me. You haven’t done such a bad job raising me!”

  So Tracy had worn the pin and warmed to the thought of Anabel’s happiness, reassured that everything would now be all right for the sister she adored. Even then she had begun to suspect the flaw in Anabel that was like a crack in fine glaze—something for which there was no cure. But she closed her eyes to the flaw and kept her love and loyalty intact.

  Now as Tracy touched her fingers to the pin in the familiar way and looked up at her sister’s face, tears burned her lids. Anabel had not been safe, after all. Toward the end she had apparently been far from happy, and according to her Miles had not proved as dependable as she had expected. The faint green gleam of Anabel’s eyes peered beneath the smudge of dark lashes and there was no telling what they saw, or what the girl behind them was thinking.

  A voice spoke abruptly behind her, a bleak chill in the sound. “May I ask what you are doing in this room?”

  Tracy whirled in dismay to find Miles Radburn in the doorway. There was more than a winter chill in his face. Anger burned beneath ice, and Tracy felt alarmed. Anabel had warned her of danger, and, though Tracy had somewhat discounted her sister’s hysteria, she was suddenly afraid. She snatched at the first straw that offered.

  “I—I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have come in here. But Mrs. Erim showed me the picture this morning, and—and I couldn’t resist coming to look at it again. It must be—I m
ean I’ve seen some of your other portraits—and this must be one of your finest.”

  “The picture is not on display, Miss Hubbard,” Miles Radburn said. “If you are to stay for the week I’ve promised, you will have to resist such impulses. I suggested, I believe, that you stay out of my study this afternoon.”

  Tracy nodded mutely, unable to force words past the tight feeling in her throat, hardly able to see him through the blur in her eyes. He stood aside to let her return to the study. Then he went to his drawing table and seated himself on the high stool before it. She had been dismissed.

  At the door to the salon she paused with her hand upon the brass knob. There was something he ought to know, and she could at least tell him this.

  “When—when I came in a little while ago,” she faltered, “Ahmet was here, studying that calligraphy strip you’re doing. When I surprised him, he said those were the words of Allah and went away.”

  Miles did not trouble to look at her, nor did he comment. He simply waited for her to go, and if he had any interest in Ahmet’s actions, he did not reveal it.

  Tracy managed the toe latch at the bottom of the door awkwardly, and as she did so the white cat slipped past her into the room. With an air of being entirely at home, the animal sprang upon Miles’s desk, moving so gracefully, so lightly, that not a paper was disturbed. There she seated herself and stared at the artist out of wide green eyes. Anabel’s cat. The cat to which her sister had given Tracy’s nickname of “Bunny.” Out of loneliness, perhaps? Out of an aching for someone from home to talk to?

  Miles raised a hand as if to cuff the animal from the desk. Outraged, Tracy moved first. She caught the white cat up in her arms and faced him defiantly.

  “Poor Yasemin!” she cried, her cheek against the cat’s pricked ears.

  “That’s not its name,” said Miles sharply. “It’s called—”

  “Bunny,” Tracy provided. “I know. That’s a silly name for a cat. So I’ve renamed her. She’s my cat now. While I’m here, that is. And any man who would strike a cat—”