Amber wrenched herself free; her own eyes were a little wild and her face was flushed. “You’ve got the wrong opinion of me, Captain Morgan! I may be on the stage, but I’m no whore! My poor father would die of shame if his daughter gave herself up to a sinful life! Now let me go—” She brushed past him, starting to get her cloak, and when he turned swiftly, catching her arm, his jaw set and hard, she cried warningly, “Have a care, sir! I’m not one of your willing rapes, either!”

She jerked away and getting her cloak, flung it on, took up her muff and went to the door. “Good-night, Captain Morgan! If you’d told me why you brought me here I could’ve saved you the cost of a supper!” She looked at him haughtily, but the cold angry expression on his face alarmed her.

Now! she thought. If he doesn’t really like me I’ve spoiled everything.

One eyebrow went up as he stared at her and his mouth twisted slightly, but as she took hold of the knob he crossed over and stopped her. “Don’t go away like this, Mrs. St. Clare. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. I’d heard—Well, never mind. But you’re a damned desirable woman. A man must be gelt if he wouldn’t want you—and to tell the truth, I’m not.” He grinned down at her. “Let me see you home.”

After that she saw him often, but not at the theatre, for she was not sure of him yet and did not care to give Beck the opportunity of jeering at her. Beck, meanwhile, continued to boast and brag of his attentions to her, showed Amber his gifts, and gave her the intimate details of his visits. Amber was receiving some gifts, too: A pair of exquisite black-lace stockings from France, garters with little diamond buckles, a muff made of wide bands of gold brocade hooped at either end with black fox—but she was very mysterious about the giver.

She used every trick she knew—and by now they were several —to heighten his desire for her. But each time he imagined himself about to succeed she pushed him off and insisted again that she was a woman of virtue. Fortunately for her, he did not suggest that such behaviour seemed quite the opposite of virtuous. Sometimes he bellowed that she was a jilting baggage and stormed off, swearing that he would never see her again. Other times he staved and pleaded, doggedly, with real desperation, and then finally went away defeated. But each time he came back.

And then one evening, his face haggard and his cravat askew, he slumped down into a chair, demanding, “What the devil do you want, then? I can’t go on like this. I’m fretting my bowels to fiddle-strings over you!”

She had a sense of quick poignant relief. At last! And though a moment before she had been feeling tired and discouraged and all too inclined to be virtuous no longer, now she laughed, got up, and went to the mirror to smooth her hair.

“That isn’t what Beck says. She was telling me today how last night you came to see her, so hot you wouldn’t be put off for an instant.”

He scowled, like an embarrassed boy. “Beck prattles too much. Answer me! What are you holding me off for? What do you want? Marriage?” She knew that he had been dreading to ask that, that he was no more eager to get married than were any of the other young men, and that even though he believed or pretended to believe her story about her aristocratic family, he would not marry an actress.

“Marriage!” she repeated in mock astonishment, staring at him in the mirror. “That’s enough to give one the vapours! What woman in her right senses wants to get married?”

“Any woman, it seems.”

“Well, they wouldn’t if they’d ever been married!” She turned around and stood looking at him, her hands easily on her hips.

“Ye gods! Are you married?”

“No, of course not! But I’m not blind. I’ve seen a thing or two. What’s a wife, pray? The men use ’em worse than a dog nowadays. They think they’re good for nothing but to breed up their brats—and serve as a foil to a mistress. A wife gets a full belly every year, but a mistress gets all the money and attention. Be a wife? Pooh! Not me! Not for a thousand pound!”

“Well!” he said, obviously much relieved. “You talk like a woman of rare good sense. But you don’t seem very anxious to be a mistress, either. Surely you don’t expect to be that worthless object, a virgin, all your life? Not a woman like you.”

“Have I said I did? If a man I liked made me a fair offer, I assure you I’d do him the kindness to think it over.”

He smiled. “Well, now—we’re getting somewhere at last. And what’s your notion of a fair offer, pray?”

She leaned her elbow back on the mantelpiece and stood with her weight on one foot, the other bare knee sliding out of her satin dressing-gown; she began to count on her fingers. “I’d want a settlement of two hundred pound a year. I’d want lodgings of my own choosing, and a maid, and a neat little coach-and-four—and of course a coachman and footman—and leave to keep on acting.” She had no intention of quitting the stage, for she had met him there and hoped someday to meet another and more important man. As she saw what was possible for a young and beautiful and obliging woman, her ambitions soared.

“You set a damned high price on yourself.”

“Do I?” She smiled a little and gave a faint shrug. “Well—a high price, you know, serves to keep off ill company.”

“If I take you at that figure I’ll expect it to keep off all company, but mine.”

It took Amber several days to find the lodgings that suited her and she rattled all over town in a hackney, searching, whenever she could be free from the theatre. But at last she found a three-room suite on the third floor of the Blue Balcony, down at the fashionable Strand end of Drury Lane. The rent was high, forty pounds a year, but Captain Morgan paid it in advance.

Everything here was in the latest fashion, reflecting the light gay colourful taste of the new age. The parlour was hung in emerald-green damask. There were French tables and chairs of walnut, some of them gilt, and all very different from the heavy old oaken pieces she was accustomed to seeing in inns. A long walnut couch had thick green cushions, fringed with gold, and there were several green-and-gold lacquered mirrors. She decided immediately that she would have her portrait painted and sink it flush with the wall above the fireplace, like one she had seen in the apartments of another actress, who was in the keeping of a lord.

The walls of the dining-room were covered with hand-painted Chinese paper, flaunting peonies and chrysanthemums, all aswarm with brilliant-hued birds and butterflies. The chairs and stools had thick bright-green cushions tied to them. In the bedroom the hangings were also of damask, patterned in green and gold; there was a five-leaved screen, two leaves red and three green, and green-and-red-striped chair cushions.

“Oh!” cried Amber, when Captain Morgan went with her to see it and agreed that she might have it. “Thank you, Rex! I can’t wait to move in!”

“Neither can I,” he said. But she gave him a quick pout and then a smile.

“Now, Rex—remember what you said! You promised you’d wait.”

“And I will. But for God’s sake—not much longer.”

She insisted on having the whole of her allowance in advance and, when she got it, hunted out Shadrac Newbold—whose name, she remembered, Bruce Carlton had told her—and put it with him at six percent interest. In Cow Lane they found a second-hand coach which, though small, was freshly painted and in good condition. It was glossy black with red wheels and red reins and harness, and he bought four handsome black-and-white horses to draw it. The coachman and footman were named, respectively, Tempest and Jeremiah, and she ordered red livery trimmed with silver braid for them.

She hired her maid from an old woman Mrs. Scroggs recommended with the absolute assurance that the girl was honest, demure, and well-bred, that she could carve and sew and clean, would not sleep late or gossip to the neighbours or run about in slovenly dress. She was a plain-faced girl whose teeth had wide spaces between them and whose face was entirely covered with little pale freckles. Prudence was her name, which Amber did not like, for she remembered simple harmless Honour Mills who had been in league with a pair of thieves to rob her. But still the girl seemed anxious to please and looked so pitiful at the prospect of not being hired that Amber took her.

The first night at her new apartments she and Rex had an elaborate supper sent in from the Rose Tavern nearby and opened a bottle of champagne, but they scarcely drank a glass, for he picked her up impetuously and carried her into the bedroom. And yet for all his passionate fervour he was tender and considerate, as eager to give pleasure as to take it, and Amber thought that this was far more like a wedding-night than that wretched experience she had had with Luke Channell. For the first time in a year and a half she was wholly and completely satisfied, for Rex had the same combination of experience, energy, controlled violence, and instinctive understanding which Lord Carlton had also had.

There’s a world of difference, she told herself, between being a man’s mistress and his wife. And as far as she was concerned that difference was all for the better.


The next afternoon Amber found the women’s tiring-room buzzing like a swarm of angry hornets, and Beck Marshall was the centre of their chattering indignation. She realized instantly that they had heard about her and Rex. And though they all turned at once to fix upon her their cold wrathful stares, she sauntered into the room and pulled off her gloves with a great show of unconcern. Scroggs waddled over to her immediately, a self-satisfied grin on her ugly old face.