“Half-a-dozen! I don’t want half-a-dozen! I just want one!” She pulled her hand away from him, for he seemed sticky and repulsive to her, and he had been holding on somewhat too tightly. But he was not done yet.

“And one thing more I see—if I may be frank with you?—I see that someday you will have, madame, a hundred lovers.” His greedy eyes watched her with obscene calculation, taking vicarious pleasure from her look of surprise and the faint pink blush that spread over her face and neck. “More or less, that is.”

Amber gave an excited little laugh. He was making her feel ill-at-ease and she wished that she was out of there; it was difficult to breathe, and though he had moved no nearer he seemed to be oppressively close. “A hundred lovers!” she cried, trying to sound city-bred and casual. “Marry come up! One’s enough for me! Is that all, Mr. Chout?” She got to her feet.

“Isn’t that enough, madame? I don’t often discover as much, let me tell you. The fee is ten shillings.”

Amber took a dozen or more coins from her muff and dropped them onto the table. His broad grin told her that most likely she had overpaid, again. But she did not care. Bruce always left a handful of coins for her to use and when one pile was gone another appeared in its place. Ten shillings as a sum of money meant nothing to her at all.

I’m going to have a baby and marry Bruce and be rich! she thought exultantly as she rode home.

That night she asked Bruce what the planet Venus was, though she did not tell him of her visit and did not intend to, until something more definite had come of it. But perhaps he guessed.

“It’s a star called Venus after the Roman goddess of love. It’s supposed to control the destinies of those who are born under it. I believe such people are thought to be beautiful and desirable and generally dominated by emotion—if you believe in that kind of nonsense.” He was smiling at her, for Amber’s face showed her shock at this heretical statement.

“Don’t you believe in it?”

“No, darling, I don’t believe in it.”

“Well—” She put her hands on her hips and gave her curls a toss. “One day you will, I warrant you. Just wait and see.”

But nothing which happened immediately seemed to indicate that any of Mr. Chout’s predictions were coming true. And meanwhile her life continued very much as it had been.

Most of the time Bruce was away from home, either gambling at the Groom Porter’s Lodge, where the nobles went to play cards and dice, or overseeing the supplying and loading of his ships. Often, too, she knew that he went to balls or suppers given at Court or the homes of his friends. And though she thought wistfully of how wonderful it would be to go with him he did not ask her and she never mentioned it. For she was still strongly conscious of the great gulf which separated his social position from hers—and yet when she lay waiting for him to come back she was lonely and sad, and jealous too. She was morbidly afraid of Barbara Palmer and other women like her.

Almsbury often came to call and, if Bruce was not there, took her out somewhere with him.

One day they went to see a bull-and-bear baiting across the river in Southwark. And Amber leaned out the coach window to gape at the weather-beaten heads, some twenty or thirty of them, exposed above London Bridge on poles that stuck up crazily, like toothpicks in a glass. Another time he took her to a fencing-match, and one of the antagonists lost an ear which flopped off into the lap of a woman sitting down in front.

They went to supper at various fashionable taverns and two or three times he took her to the theatre. She paid no more attention to the play than did the rest of the audience—for she was too much interested, though she pretended not to be, in the havoc she was creating down in the pit. Some of the young men came up to Almsbury in such a manner that he could not avoid presenting them, and two or three made her outrageous proposals beneath his very nose. Almsbury, however, always assumed his dignity at this and let them know she was no whore but a lady of quality and virtue. While Amber, ashamed of her country accent, hoped that they would indeed take her for a Royalist lady who had lived retired with her parents during the Protectorate and had only now come up to Court.

But the greatest adventure of all was her visit to Whitehall Palace.

Whitehall lay to the west, around the bend of the river from the City. It was a great sprawling mass of red brick buildings in the old Tudor style, honeycombed with hallways and having dozens of separate apartments opening one into another like some complex maze or huge rabbit-warren. Here lived the royal family and every court attendant or hanger-on who could wheedle official lodgings on the premises. It fronted directly on the river, so close that at high tide the kitchens were often flooded. And through the grounds ran the dirty unpaved narrow little thoroughfare of King Street, flanked on one side by that part of the Palace called the Cockpit and on the other by the wall of the Privy Garden.

Whitehall was open to all comers. Anyone who had once been presented at Court or who came with one who had could get in, and many total strangers filtered through the carelessly watched gateways. Hence, when Amber and Almsbury arrived in the Stone Gallery they found it so thronged as to be almost impassable.

The gallery was the central artery of the Court, a corridor almost four hundred feet long and fifteen feet wide, and on the walls were hung some of the splendid paintings which Charles I had collected and which his son was now trying to reassemble—paintings by Raphael, Titian, Guido. Scarlet-velvet drapes covered all doors opening into the royal apartments, and Yeomen of the Guard were posted before each one. The crowd was a motley assortment of satin-gowned ladies, languid sauntering young fops, brisk men-of-business hurrying along with an air of having weighty problems to solve, soldiers in uniform, country squires and their wives. Amber could easily recognize these latter for they all wore clothes hopelessly out of fashion—boots, when no gentleman would be seen off his horse in them; high-crowned hats like a Puritan’s, though the new mode was for low ones; and knee-gartered breeches, although wide-bottomed ones were now the style. Here and there was even a ruff to be seen. Amber was contemptuous of such provinciality and glad that her own clothes did not betray her origin.

She was less confident, however, about herself. “Gemini!” she whispered, round-eyed, to Almsbury. “How handsome all the ladies are!”

“There’s not one of ’em,” said the Earl, “half so pretty as you.”

She gave him a grateful, sparkling smile and slipped her arm through his. She and Almsbury had become great friends and though he had not asked again to sleep with her he had told her that if she ever needed money or help he would be glad to give it. She thought that he had fallen in love with her.

And then all at once something happened. A ripple of excitement flowed along the Gallery, turning heads as it passed, catching the Earl and Amber in its wake.

“Here comes Mrs. Palmer!”

Amber’s head turned with every other. And she saw advancing toward them, with people falling back on either side to make way for her, a magnificent red-haired white-skinned woman, trailing behind her a serving-woman, two pages, and a blackamoor. Haughty and arrogant, she walked with her head held high, seeing no one, though she could not but be well aware of the excitement she was creating. Amber’s eyes began to burn with rage and jealousy and her heart set up a suffocating flutter. She was sickeningly afraid that Madame Palmer would see Almsbury—who she knew was acquainted with her—and stop. But she did not. She went past them without a glance.

“Oh! I hate her!” The words burst out as though driven by some pent-up violence.

“Sweetheart,” said Almsbury, “someday you’ll learn it’s impossible to hate every woman a gentleman may make love to. It wears out your own guts, and that’s all the good it does.”

But Amber neither could nor wished to accept his Lordship’s mellow philosophy. “I don’t care if it does!” she insisted stubbornly. “I do hate her! And I hope she gets the pox!”

“No doubt she will.”

After that they went to the Banqueting Hall to watch the King dine in state, which he usually did at one o’clock on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. The galleries were massed to see him but he did not come and at last they had to go away, disappointed. Amber had been much impressed when she had seen King Charles the day he returned to London; after Bruce she thought him the finest man in England.


About the first of August Amber became convinced that she was pregnant, partly because she had at least one symptom but mostly because it was forever on her mind. For a couple of weeks past she had waited and counted on her fingers and nothing had happened. Now her breasts began to feel stretched and sore and as though pricked by a thousand pins. She wanted to tell Bruce and yet she was half scared, for she guessed that he would not be pleased.

He got up early every morning—no matter how late he might have come in the night before—and Amber would put on her dressing-gown and talk to him until he left, after which she went back to sleep again. On this day she sat at the edge of the bed, swinging her bare feet and pulling a tortoise-shell comb through the tangled snarls of her hair. Bruce stood near her, wearing only his breeches and shoes, shaving with a long sharp-bladed razor.

For several minutes Amber watched him and neither of them spoke. Each time she tried to open her mouth her heart gave a leap and her courage failed her. Then all at once she said: “Bruce—what if I should get with child?”