Kathleen Winsor - Forever Amber

Instantly Amber leaned forward to rap on the wall, signalling the driver to stop, and letting down the window she stuck out her head. “Gentlemen!” she cried. “You must stop that noise or I’ll call a constable and have you all clapped up!” and she burst into a peal of laughter.

They turned to stare at her in astonishment, momentarily surprised into silence, and then with a whoop they advanced upon the coach. “Her Ladyship, by God!” “Where’ve you been these three weeks past!” “Why’n hell haven’t we seen you at Court?” They hung on one another’s shoulders and leaned their elbows on the window-sill, all of them breathing brandy and smelling very high of orange-flower water.

“Why, to tell you truth, gentlemen,” said Amber with a sly smile and a wink at Rochester, “I’ve had a most furious attack of the vapours.”

They roared with laughter. “So that formal old fop, your husband, locked you in!”

“I say an old man has no business marrying a young woman unless he can entertain her in the manner to which she’s accustomed herself. Can your husband do that, madame?” asked Rochester.

Amber changed the subject, afraid that some of the footmen or the loyal old driver might have been told to listen to whatever she said and report it. “What were you all arguing about? It looked like a conventicle-meeting when I drove up.”

“We were considering whether to stay here till we’re drunk and then go to a bawdy-house—or to go to a bawdy-house first and get drunk afterward,” Sedley told her. “What’s your opinion, madame?”

“I’d say that depends on how you expect to entertain yourselves once you get there.”

“Oh, in the usual way, madame,” Rochester assured her. “In the usual way. We’re none of us yet come to those tiresome expedients of old-age and debauchery.” Rochester was nineteen and Buckhurst, the eldest, was twenty-eight.

“Egad, Wilmot,” objected Buckhurst, who was now drunk enough to talk without stammering. “Where’s your breeding? Don’t you know a woman hates nothing so much as to hear other women mentioned in her presence?”

Rochester shrugged his thin shoulders. “A whore’s not a woman. She’s a convenience.”

“Come in and drink a glass with us,” invited Sedley. We’ve got a brace of fiddlers in there and we can send to Lady Bennet for some wenches. A tavern will serve my turn as well as a brothel any day.”

Amber hesitated, longing to go and wondering if it might be possible to bribe the coachman after all. But Nan was nudging her with her elbow and grimacing and she decided that it was not worth the risk of being locked up for another three weeks, or possibly longer. And worst of all, she knew, Radclyffe might be angry enough even to send her into the country—the favourite punishment for erring wives, and the most dreaded. By now her coach had begun to snarl the traffic. There were other coaches waiting behind, and numerous porters and carmen, vendors, beggars, apprentices and sedan-chair-men—all of them beginning to growl and swear at her driver, urging him to move on.

“There’s some of us got work to do,” bawled a chair-man, “even if you fine fellows ain’t!”

“I can’t go in,” said Amber. “I promised his Lordship I wouldn’t get out of the coach.”

“Make way there!” bellowed another man trundling a loaded wheelbarrow.

“Make room there!” snarled a porter.

Rochester, not at all disturbed, turned coolly and made them a contemptuous sign with his right hand. There was a low, sullen roar of protest at that and several shouted curses. Buckhurst flung open the coach-door.

“Well, then! You can’t get out—but what’s there to keep us from getting in?”

He climbed in—followed by Rochester and Sedley—and settled himself between the two women, sliding an arm about each. Sedley stuck his head out the window. “Drive on! St. James’s Park!” As they rolled off, Rochester gave an impertinent wave of his hand to the crowd. There was a breeze blowing up and it now began to rain, suddenly and very hard.

Amber came home in a gale of good humour and high spirits. Tossing off her rain-spattered cloak and muff in the entrance hall she ran into the library and, though she had been gone almost four hours, she found Radclyffe sitting just where she had left him, still writing. He looked up.

“Well, madame. Did you have a pleasant drive?”

“Oh, wonderful, your Lordship! It’s a fine day out!” She walked toward him, begining to pull off her gloves. “We drove through St. James’s Park—and who d’ye think I saw?”

“Truthfully, I don’t know.”

“His Majesty! He was walking in the rain with his gentlemen and they all looked like wet spaniels with their periwigs soaking and draggled!” She laughed delightedly. “But of course he was wearing his hat and looked as spruce as you please. He stopped the coach—and what d’you think he said?”

Radclyffe smiled slightly, as at a naive child recounting some silly simple adventure to which it attached undue importance. “I have no idea.”

“He asked after you and wanted to know why he hadn’t seen you at Court. He’s coming to visit you soon to see your paintings, he says—but Henry Bennet will make the arrangements first. And”—here she paused a little to give emphasis to the next piece of news—“he’s asking us to a small dance in her Majesty’s Drawing-Room tonight!”

She looked at him as she talked, but she was obviously not thinking about him; she was scarcely even conscious of him. More important matters occupied her mind: what gown she should wear, which jewels and fan, how she should arrange her hair. At least he could not refuse an invitation from the King—and if her plans succeeded she would soon be able to cast him off altogether, send him back to Lime Park to live with his books and statues and paintings, and so trouble her no more.

THE TWO WOMEN—one auburn-haired and violet-eyed, the other tawny as a leopard, and both of them in stark black—stared at each other across the card-table.

All the Court was in mourning for a woman none of them had ever seen, the Queen of Portugal. But in spite of her mother’s recent death Catherine’s rooms were crowded with courtiers and ladies, the gaming-tables were piled with gold, and a young French boy wandered among them, softly strumming a guitar and singing love-songs of his native Normandy. An idle amused crowd had gathered about the table where the Countess of Castlemaine and the Countess of Radclyffe sat, eyeing each other like a pair of hostile cats.

The King had just strolled up behind Amber, declining with a gesture of his hand the chair which Buckingham offered him beside her, and on her other side Sir Charles Sedley lounged with both hands on his hips. Barbara was surrounded by her satellites, Henry Jermyn and Bab May and Henry Brouncker—who remained faithful to her even when she seemed to be going down the wind, for they were dependent upon her. Across the room, pretending to carry on a conversation with another elderly gentleman about gardening, stood the Earl of Radclyffe. Everyone, including his wife, seemed to have forgotten that he was there.

Amber, however, knew very well that he had been trying for the past two hours to attract her attention so that he might summon her home, and she had painstakingly ignored and avoided him. A week had passed since the King had invited them to Court again, and during that time Amber had grown increasingly confident of her own future, and steadily more contemptuous of the Earl. Charles’s frank admiration, Barbara’s jealousy, the obsequiousness of the courtiers—prophetic as a weather-vane—had her intoxicated.

“Your luck’s good tonight, madame!” snapped Barbara, pushing a pile of guineas across the table. “Almost too good!”

Amber gave her a smug, superior smile, with lips curled faintly and eyes slanting at the corners. She knew that Charles was looking down at her, that almost everyone at the table was watching her. All this attention was a heady wine, making her feel vastly important, a match for anyone.

“Whatever do you mean by that, madame?”

“You know damned well what I mean!” muttered Barbara, half under her breath.

She was hot and excited, trying desperately to control her temper for fear of being made to look a fool. It was bad enough that Charles in his forthright, casual way had let everyone know he intended laying with this upstart wench from the theatres. But to make matters even worse that miserable wretch, Buckingham, had taken it into his maggoty head to sponsor her himself—and if she dared so much as murmur a protest he reminded her that it was only by his good nature she remained in England at all.

Oh, damn those letters! Damn Buckingham! Damn everything! I’d like to claw that bitch’s hair off her scalp! I’ll learn her she can’t use me at this rate!

“Here!” she cried. “I’ll raffle you for the whole of it!”

Amber gave a delicate lift of her eyebrows. The more furiously excited Barbara grew, the cooler she seemed. Now she looked up and exchanged smiles with Charles, a smile that took him into her camp, and he grinned lazily—a willing prisoner.

She gave a careless shrug. “Why not? Your throw first, madame.”

Barbara ground her teeth and gave Charles a glare that might once have warned him. Now he was frankly amused. She swept three ivory dice off the table and flung them into a dice-box, while all around them conversation stopped and the lords and ladies leaned forward to watch. Barbara gave the box a defiant vigorous shake and with a dramatic flourish she tossed the dice out onto the table where they tumbled along the polished surface and slid at last to a stop. Two sixes and a four.