Kathleen Winsor - Forever Amber

He gave her a surprised look, without recognition, as though he had heard her for the first time. Radclyffe had probably been working them for hours. He gave a jerk of his head. “Upstairs, I think. In his closet.”

Amber ran up the stairs, dodging around servants and furniture, with Big John close at her heels. But now her legs were weak and trembling. She felt her heart begin to pound. She swallowed but her throat was dry. Nevertheless her exhaustion was suddenly and miraculously gone.

They hurried down the gallery to his Lordship’s apartments. Two men were just coming out, each of them bearing a tall stack of books, and as they went she signalled Big John to turn the lock. “Don’t come till I call you,” she said softly, and then walked swiftly across the parlour toward the bedchamber.

It was almost empty—but for the bed, too big and unwieldy to be moved—and she went on, toward the laboratory. Her heart seemed to have filled all her chest now and it hammered so that she expected it suddenly to burst. He was there, going hastily through the drawers of a table and stuffing his pockets with papers. For once his clothes were in disarray—he must have ridden horseback to have arrived so soon—but even so he presented a strangely elegant appearance. His back was turned to her.

“My lord!” Amber’s voice rang out like the tolling of a bell.

He started a little and glanced around, but he did not recognize her and returned instantly to his work. “What do you want? Go away, lad, I’m busy. Carry some furniture down to the carts.”

“My lord!” she repeated. “Look again. You’ll see I’m no lad.”

For a moment he paused and then, very slowly and cautiously, he turned. There was a single candle burning on the table beside him, but the glare of the flames lighted the room brilliantly. Outside the fire roared like unceasing thunder; the constant booming of explosions rattled the windows, and burnt buildings toppled to the ground, crashing one after another.

“Is it you?” he asked at last, very softly.

“Yes, it’s me. And alive—no ghost, my lord. Philip’s dead—but I’m not.”

The incredulity on his face shifted at last to a kind of horror, and suddenly Amber’s fears were gone. She felt powerful and strong and filled with a loathing that brought out everything cruel and fierce and wild in her.

With an insolent lift of her chin she started toward him, walking slowly, and the riding whip in her right hand flicked nervously against her leg. He stared at her, his eyes straight and steady, but the muscles around his mouth twitched ever so slightly. “My son’s dead,” he repeated slowly, fully realizing for the first time what he had done. “He’s dead—and you’re not.” He looked sick and beaten and older than ever before, all confidence gone. The murder of his son had completed the ruin of his life.

“So you finally found out about us,” taunted Amber as she stood before him, one hand on her hip, the other still flicking the riding-crop.

He smiled, a faint and reflective smile, cold, contemptuous, and strangely sensual. Slowly he began to answer. “Yes. Many weeks ago. I watched you together—there in the summer-house—thirteen times in all. I watched what you did and I listened to what you said, and I got a great deal of pleasure from thinking how you would die—one day, when you least expected it—”

“Did you!” snapped Amber, her voice taut and hard, and the whip flickered back and forth, swift as a snake. “But I didn’t die—and I’m not going to either—”

Her eyes flared to a wild blaze. Suddenly she raised the whip and lashed it across his face with all the force in her body. He jerked backward, one hand going up involuntarily, but the first blow had left a thin red welt from his left temple to the bridge of his nose. Her teeth clenched and her face contorted with murderous fury; she struck at him again and again, so blind now with rage she could scarcely see. Suddenly he grabbed hold of the candlestick and lunged toward her, heaving all his weight behind it. She moved swiftly aside and as she dodged gave a shrill scream.

The candlestick struck her shoulder and glanced off. She saw his face loom close and his hand seized the whip. They began to struggle and just as Amber brought up her knee to jab him in the groin Big John’s cudgel came down on his skull. Radclyffe began to double. Amber jerked the whip out of his hand and lashed at his face again and again, no longer fully conscious of what she was doing.

“Kill him!” she screamed. “Kill him!” She cried it over and over again: “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”

With one hand John swept off the Earl’s periwig and with the other he smashed again at his skull. Radclyffe lay sprawled grotesquely on the floor, his naked head streaming blood. A strong revulsion swept Amber. She felt no pity or regret but only a violent paroxysm of satisfied rage and hatred.

All at once she became aware that the draperies were on fire and for a horrified moment she believed the house was burning and that they were trapped. Then she saw that the candle he had thrown at her had fallen beside the window, the draperies had caught, and now flames roared to the ceiling and licked along the wooden moulding.

“John!”

He turned, saw the flames, and both of them started out of the apartment in a rush. At the door they glanced back, briefly, before John shut and locked it. The last they saw of Radclyffe was a broken and bloody old man who lay dead on the floor, with the flames already approaching him. John put the key into his pocket and they began to run down the gallery toward the rear of the house. But Amber had not gone ten yards when she suddenly pitched forward, unconscious as she fell. Big John swooped her into his arms and ran on. He went clattering noisily down the little back staircase, Amber held limp and flopping before him, and halfway down he met two men who would have pushed past him. They wore no livery and must have been thieves.

“Fire!” he shouted at them. “The house is afire!”

Instantly they turned and rushed down, the three of them making a furious noise in the narrow echoing cavity. One stumbled and almost fell, recovered himself and burst out into the courtyard. Big John came close on their heels, but they had disappeared. He glanced around once, and saw that the flames from the upstairs window already were casting a reflection into the courtyard pool.

WHEN AMBER RETURNED to London in mid-December, three and a half months after the Fire, she found almost all the ancient walled City gone. The ground was still a heap of rubble and twisted iron, brick debris, molten lead now cooled, and in many cellars fires continued to smoke and burn. Not even the torrential October rains had been able to put them out. Most of the streets had been completely obliterated by fallen buildings and others were blocked off because chimneys and half-walls which still stood made them dangerous. London looked dead and ruined.

The city was infinitely more sad and pitiful now that the cruel gorgeous spectacle of the flames was gone. There were gloomy predictions that she would never rise again, and on that rainy grey December day they seemed to be only inevitable truth. Beaten down by plague and war and fire, her trade fallen off, burdened with the greatest public debt in the history of the nation, full of unrest and misery—men were saying everywhere that the days of England’s glory had passed, her old valour was worn out, she was a nation doomed to perish from the earth. The future had never seemed more hopeless; men had never been more pessimistic or more resentful.

But in spite of everything the indomitable will and hope of the people had already begun to conquer. A mushroom city of mean little shacks and rickety sheds had sprung up where whole families took shelter on the sites of their former homes. Shops were beginning to open and some new houses were a-building.

And not all the town had burned.

For outside the walls there was still left standing that part of the city east of the Tower and north of Moor Fields; on the west there remained the old barristers’ college of Lincoln’s Inn and still farther west Drury Lane and Covent Garden and St. James, where the nobility was moving in steadily increasing numbers. Nothing around the bend of the river had burned. The Strand was still there and the great old houses with their gardens running down to the Thames. The fashionable part of London had not been touched by the Fire.

Amber and Big John had left the city immediately, hired horses when they found their own gone, and ridden straight to Lime Park. She told Jenny that when she had arrived the house had been burnt and she had not been able to find his Lordship anywhere—but nevertheless for the sake of appearances she sent a party of men back to London to search for him. They returned after several days to say he could not be discovered and that according to all evidence he had been trapped in the house and burned to death. Amber, immeasurably relieved that she was evidently not going to be caught, put on mourning—but she did not pretend to be very sorry, for she did not consider that particular piece of hypocrisy essential to her welfare.

But the best news she heard was from Shadrac Newbold—who had a messenger out there two days after she got back to inform her that not one of his depositors had lost a shilling. She found out later that though much money had gone up in the Fire, almost all the goldsmiths had saved what was entrusted to them. And though there was less than half of it left now, twenty-eight thousand pounds, even that was enough to make her one of the richest women in England. Furthermore, it was being added to by interest and by returns on the investments he had made for her, and later she could augment it by renting Lime Park and selling much of the furnishings—though so far she could not bring herself to touch Radclyffe’s effects.