“I am! You made me come away because I was enjoying myself! You can’t stand seeing anyone happy!”

“On the contrary, madame. I do not object at all to happiness. But I do object to watching my wife make a ridiculous display of herself.”

“Ridiculous! What was ridiculous about it? I was doing nothing but dancing and laughing—is that so ridiculous? Maybe you even danced and laughed once yourself—if you were ever young!” She gave him a look of furious loathing, and turned her face away, muttering, “Which I doubt!”

“You’re not so naive, madame, as you try to pretend. You know as well as I do what was in the minds of those men tonight.”

“Well!” she cried, clenching her fists. “What of it! Isn’t the same thing in the minds of all men! It’s in yours, too, even if you—” But there she stopped, suddenly, for he gave her a look so swift and so venomous, so threatening that the words caught short in her throat and she remained quiet.


The next morning, rather early, Amber and Nan came downstairs wrapped in cloaks and hoods and muffs. She spoke to the footman at the door. “Please send for his Lordship’s great coach. I’m going abroad.”

“The coach is being repaired, madame.”

“Then I’ll go in mine.”

“I’m sorry, your Ladyship, but that one is also at the coachmakers’.”

Amber heaved an impatient sigh. “Very well, then! I’ll call a hackney. Open the door, please!”

“I’m sorry, your Ladyship. The door is bolted and I have no key.”

She looked at him with sudden suspicion. “Who has it then?”

“His Lordship, madame, I presume.”

Without another word Amber swirled about and rushed from the entrance-hall toward the library, threw open the door without knocking, and burst in like a gust of wind. The Earl was seated at a table, writing, with a great sheaf of papers beside him.

“Would you mind telling me why I’m made a prisoner?” she cried.

He looked up as though she were, indeed, a disrupting physical force rather than a human being. Then his eyes ran over her slowly and he gave a faint smile, as of a patient man who is somewhat bored.

“Where did you wish to go?”

She was on the edge of telling him that where she went was not his business, but thinking better of it she replied, more quietly: “To the New Exchange. I have some purchases to make.”

“I can’t imagine what they could be. But it seems that no matter how much a woman may have, she always needs something more. Well, if you feel you cannot do without a new pair of gloves or a bottle of essence—send Britton.”

Amber stamped her foot. “I don’t want to send Britton! I want to go myself! I will go myself! God’s curse, sir! is there any reason why I shouldn’t leave the house? What the devil have I done to be used like this!”

Radclyffe paused a long moment before he answered her, gazing reflectively at the pen he turned in his fingers. “This is a strange age. A man is considered a fool if he allows his wife to cuckold him—and an even greater one if he takes measures to prevent it.”

Amber’s mouth twisted into an ugly triumphant sneer. “So at last we have it! You’re afraid some other man will get your children for you! Well, now—wouldn’t that be strange?”

“You may go, madame.” As she continued to glare at him, he suddenly spoke with startling sharpness. “Get out! Go to your rooms!”

Amber’s eyes blazed, as though she could wither him where he sat by the sheer force of her hatred. All at once she muttered a curse, slammed her fan onto the floor, and as she went out flung the door wide and banged it with all the force in her body.

But Amber soon discovered that shouts and violence would gain her nothing. He had the legal right to lock her in, and to beat her if he thought that she deserved it. She had little fear the thin brittle Earl would ever attempt physical chastisement—since she was certainly more than a match for him—but she sometimes had a sneaking apprehension of poison or the sudden thrust of a knife. He wouldn’t dare! she told herself. But she was never wholly convinced, and fear made her cautious.

For several days she sulked. She thought of starving herself to make him submit, but realized after she had missed two meals that such a process would be more uncomfortable for her than for him. Then she ignored him completely. When he was in the room she turned her back, sang bawdy songs, chattered with Nan. She never left her apartments but went about all day in her dressing-gown, her hair undone and no paint on her face. He seemed scarcely to notice, and certainly did not care.

She thought of every possible solution, but was compelled to abandon each in turn. If she left him he would have all her money—and she would have no title. To get a divorce was almost impossible and would have required an act of Parliament; not even Castlemaine had obtained a divorce. Annulment was almost as difficult, for the case must rest upon impotence or sterility, and how was she to prove herself a virgin or him incompetent? To make matters worse, the courts, she knew, were not inclined to side with a woman. And so at last she decided that if it had been possible for her to tolerate him before they were married it should be possible now. She began to speak civilly to him once more, joined him at dinner, went into the library to search among the books when he was there. She took an extraordinary care of her appearance, in the hope of buying what she wanted by pandering to his salaciousness.

On the afternoon the precious Correggio arrived, she went down to watch it being unpacked. When at last it was hung, the workmen gone, and they stood before the fireplace looking up at it, Amber sneaked him a glance and found that he was smiling. As always, when he had just acquired another coveted and admired object, he seemed in a pleasanter, more tractable mood.

“I wonder, your Lordship,” she began tentatively, her eyes stealing toward him again, and then back to the picture, “I wonder if I might go abroad today—just for a drive. I haven’t been out of the house in three weeks and I swear it’s making me pale and sallow. Don’t you think so?” She looked at him anxiously.

He turned and faced her directly, a faint amused smile on his mouth. “I thought your pleasant humour of the past few days meant a request would soon be forthcoming. Very well, you may go.”

“Oh! thank you, sir! Can I go now?”

“Whenever you like. My coachman will drive you—and, by the way, he’s served me for thirty years and is not to be bribed.”

Her smile suddenly froze, but she concealed her anger swiftly for fear of having the privilege revoked. Then swooping up her skirts she ran out of the room, down the hall, and up the stairs two at a time. She burst into their apartments with a cry of triumph that made Nan start and almost drop her needlework.

“Nan! Get your cloak! We’re going abroad!”

“Going abroad! Oh, Lord, are we? Where?” Nan had been sharing her mistress’s confinement—save for a few brief excursions to buy ribbons or gloves or a fan—and was as tired of it as Amber.

“I don’t know! Somewhere—anywhere—Hurry!”

The two women left the house in a swirl of velvet skirts and fur muffs, getting into the coach with as much laughter and excitement as if they had just arrived from Yorkshire to see the London sights. The air was so sharp and fresh it stung the nostrils. The day was grey and windy, and petals blown from peach trees drifted through the air, falling like flakes of snow onto the roof-tops and into the mud.

There was still plague in the town, though there were usually not more than half-a-dozen deaths a week, and it had retired once more to the congested dismal districts of the poor. By now it was almost impossible to find a shut-up house. The streets were as crowded as ever, the vendors and ’prentices as noisy, and the only sure sign that plague had recently passed that way were the many plaintive notices stuck up in windows: “Here is a doctor to be let.” For the doctors, by their wholesale desertion, had forfeited even what reluctant and suspicious trust they had once been able to command. A fifth of the town’s population was dead, yet nothing seemed to have changed—it was the same gay bawdy stinking brilliant dirty city of London.

Amber, delighted to be out again, looked at and exclaimed upon everything:

The little boy solemnly plying his trade of snipping silver buttons from the backs of gentlemen’s coats as they strolled unsuspectingly down the street. The brawl between some porters and apprentices who, setting up the traditional cry of “ ’Prentices!” Prentices!” brought their fellows flying to the rescue with clubs and sticks. A man performing on a tight-rope for a gape-mouthed crowd at the entrance to Popinjay Alley. The women vendors sitting on street corners amid their great baskets of sweet-potatoes, spring mushrooms, small sour oranges, onions and dried pease and new green dandelion tops.

She had directed the coachman to drive to Charing Cross by way of Fleet Street and the Strand, for there were a number of fashionable ordinaries in that neighbourhood. And after all, if she should chance in passing to see someone she knew and stopped to speak a word with him out of mere civility—why, no one could reasonably object to anything so innocent as that. Amber kept her eyes wide open and advised Nan to do likewise, and just as they were approaching Temple Bar she caught sight of three familiar figures gathered in the doorway of The Devil Tavern. They were Buckhurst, Sedley and Rochester, all three evidently half-drunk for they were talking and gesticulating noisily, attracting the attention of everyone who passed by.