Kathleen Winsor - Forever Amber

Amber blew out her cheeks in a sigh of utter exhaustion, throwing the hair from her face with the back of one hand. “Very well. Go to sleep. I’ll watch him. There’s a bed in there.” She pointed toward the nursery.

Through the rest of the long night she stayed beside him. He was quieter than he had been and she did not want to disturb him to make him eat, but she prepared some black coffee to keep herself awake and now and then she took a swallow of cherry-brandy, but she was so tired that it made her dizzy and she dared not drink much. In the next room Spong lay spewing and hawking; an occasional late coach rattled by, the horses’ hoofs clopping rhythmically on the pavement; and the night guard stamped wearily up and down. Somewhere a cat squalled in nocturnal ecstasy. The passing-bell tolled three separate times and the watchman went by with his musical call:

“Take heed to your clock, beware your lock,

Your fire and your light, and God give you good-night.

One o’clock!”

MORNING CAME AT last, the sun rising bright and hot in a cloudless sky. Amber, looking out, wished desperately for fog. The brilliant joyous sunlight seemed a cruel mockery of the sick and dying who lay in a thousand rooms all over the city.

Toward dawn the look of angry worry which had been on Bruce’s face, from the first morning she had seen him at the wharf, changed to one of listlessness and apathy. He seemed to have no consciousness whatever of his surroundings or of his own actions. When she put a glass of water to his mouth he swallowed involuntarily, but his eyes stared dully, seeing nothing. His quietness encouraged her and she thought that perhaps he was better.

She got into the dress she had worn yesterday and began to clean up the night’s accumulated filth. Her movements were slow, for her muscles felt heavy and aching and the rims of her eyeballs burned. She carried the slop-jars—all but that which Mrs. Spong had used—down to the courtyard privy and there she had to stand and wait, for there was a man inside and he seemed leisurely.

At six she went to wake Spong, shaking her roughly by the shoulder. The old woman smacked her lips together and looked up at Amber with one eye. “How now, mam? What happened?”

“Get up! It’s morning! Either you’ll help me or I’ll lock the food away and you can starve!”

Spong looked at her resentfully, her feelings hurt. “Lord, mam! How was I to know it’s mornin’?”

She flung back the quilt and got out of bed, fully dressed but for her shoes. She buttoned the front of her gown, pulling and twisting at the skirt, and cocked her wig back to approximately where it had been. She leaned backward, stretching and yawning noisily, massaging her fat belly, and she stuck one finger into her mouth to pick out some shreds of meat, wiping what she extracted on the soiled front of her gown.

Amber stopped her as she was going through the bedroom on her way to the kitchen. “Come here! What d’you think? He’s quieter now—does he look better?”

Spong came back to look at him, but she shook her head. “He looks bad, mam. Mighty bad. I’ve seen ’em like that not a half-hour before they’re dead.”

“Oh, damn you! You think everyone’s going to die! But he isn’t, d’ye hear me? Go on—get out of here!”

Spong went. “Lord, mam—ye but asked me and I told ye—”

An hour later, when she had finished cleaning the bedroom and had fed him the rest of the soup, Amber told Spong that she was going to a butcher-shop for a piece of beef and would be gone perhaps twenty minutes. There was one, she knew, not a quarter of a mile away near Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She fastened her gown as high as she could and filled in the neck-line with a scarf. It was too hot to wear a cloak but she took a black-silk hood out of the chest and tied it beneath her chin.

“The guard won’t allow ye to go, mam,” predicted Spong.

“I think he will. You let me alone for that. Now listen to what I say: Watch his Lordship and watch him close, because if I come back to find you’ve let him harm himself in any way or so much as throw off the blankets—believe me, I’ll slit your nose for it!” Her tawny-coloured eyes glared, the black centers swelling, and her lips drew tight against her teeth. Spong gaped, scared as a rabbit.

“Lord, mam, ye can trust me! I’ll watch ’im like a witch!”

Amber went through the kitchen, down the back staircase, and started off along the narrow little alley that ran behind the house. She had not gone twenty yards when there was a shout, and she turned to see the guard running toward her.

“Escaping, eh?” He seemed pleased. “Or maybe ye didn’t know the house is locked?”

“I know it’s locked and I’m not escaping. I’ve got to buy some food. Will a shilling let me out?”

“A shilling! D’ye think I can be bribed?” He lowered his voice. “Three shillings might do it.”

Amber took the coins from inside her muff and flipped them to him—he did not venture to step up close and he had a pipe of tobacco in his mouth, for that was thought a plague preventive. She walked swiftly down the lane and turned into a main street. There seemed to be even fewer people out today than yesterday and those who were did not loiter or stop to gossip but moved along briskly, pomanders held to their noses. A coach followed by a train of loaded wagons went by and several heads turned wistfully; it was only the prosperous ones who could afford to leave, the others must stay and take their chances, put their faith in amulets and herbs. And there were several houses shut up along the way.

At the butcher’s stall she bought a good-sized chunk of beef, taking the meat from the hooks on which he extended it to her and dropping the money into a jar of vinegar. She put the meat, wrapped in a towel, into her market-basket and on the way back she stopped to buy a couple of pounds of candles, three bottles of brandy and some coffee. Coffee was so expensive that it was not hawked on the streets and while Amber did not drink it often she hoped that it would help her get through the day.

She found Bruce just as she had left him, and though Spong protested that she had not so much as taken an eye off him Amber strongly suspected that she had been foraging, at least in the bedroom, for money or jewels. But it was all locked up behind a secret panel, where neither Spong nor anyone else was likely to find it without a long search.

Spong would have followed her to the kitchen to find out what she had bought, but Amber sent her back to stay with Bruce. She locked the brandy away, for she knew that otherwise it would disappear, but first she took a good swallow herself. Then she tied back her hair, pushed up her sleeves and went to work. Into a great blackened kettle full of hot water went the meat, cut up in cubes, and some of the bacon she had bought the day before. She split the bones with a heavy cleaver and added them with the marrow and when the vegetables were ready they went in too: a quartered cabbage, leeks, carrots, peas and a handful of crumbled herbs, and she ground in some rock-salt and peppercorns.

The soup had to be cooked for several hours until it was boiled down and thickened, and meanwhile she prepared a caudle of sack, spices, sugar and eggs for him to drink. She crushed each egg-shell to tiny bits, remembering the old country belief that otherwise a witch would write your name on it. She had trouble enough now, without inviting more.

She found, as she poured the drink down his throat, that the fur on his tongue was beginning to peel, leaving raw red patches, and that his teeth had made deep indentations in it. His pulse had quickened, his breathing was more rapid and sometimes he coughed slightly. He lay in a deep coma, not sleeping but wholly unconscious, and it was no longer possible to rouse him at all. Even when she touched the plague-boil, now a soft doughy mass, he gave no indication of awareness. It did not seem possible, even to her, that a man could be so sick and live very long.

But she refused to think about it. She was, in fact, so tired that it was almost impossible to think at all.

She went back to the kitchen to finish the cleaning there. Then she swept the other rooms and dusted the furniture, put the towels to soak in hot soapy water and vinegar, brought up some more water and finally—when she felt that she could not make another move—she went into the bedroom and dragged out the trundle. Her lids felt rough and seemed to scratch against the eyeballs and there were muddy circles around her eyes.

It was about noon when she lay down and though the draperies were pulled the hot sun beat into the room. She woke up several hours later, wet and with a heavy aching head, feeling as though the house was rocking. It was Spong shaking her shoulder.

“Get up, mam! The doctor’s below a-knockin’.”

“For God’s sake,” muttered Amber, “can’t you do anything without being told? Go let ’im in.”

Spong was offended. “Ye told me not to leave his Lordship—no matter what happened!”

Amber got up wearily. She felt as though she had been drugged, her mouth had a vile taste, and days seemed to have gone by since she had lain down. But it was only five o’clock and though the room was darker the fire kept it as hot as ever. She pushed back the curtains and bent to look at Bruce, but he seemed not to have changed, either for better or worse.

Dr. Barton came into the room, looking tired and sick himself, and once more he merely looked at Bruce from a distance of several feet. Amber knew with despair that he had seen so many sick and dying men he could no longer distinguish one from another.