Now, once the table had been cleared and they were left alone, he merely took a pack of cards from his pocket and began to shuffle them idly; they flew through his fingers with a speed and sureness which proclaimed the accomplished gamester.

“You look uneasy, madame. Pray compose yourself. I hate to see a woman on edge—it always makes me feel that she expects to be raped, and to tell you truly I’m not in the mood for such strenuous sport tonight.”

“Why, I didn’t think the woman breathed who couldn’t be persuaded by your Grace by an easier means than that.” In spite of her awe and eagerness Amber could not keep a certain tartness from her voice; something in the personality of the Duke set her teeth on edge.

But if he noticed the sarcasm he ignored it. He dealt himself two putt hands, one from the top and the other from the bottom of the deck, inspected each with satisfaction and began to shuffle again.

“She doesn’t,” he said flatly. “Women are all inclined to make two mistakes in love. First, they surrender too easily; second, they can never be convinced that when a man says he is through with them he means it.” As he talked he continued to watch the cards, but there had spread over his face a look of brooding discontent, a self-occupied bitterness. “It’s long been my opinion the world would run far smoother if women would not insist on expecting love to be a close relation of desire. Your quality whore is always determined to make you fall in love with her—by that means she thinks she justifies the satisfaction of her own appetite. The truth of the matter is, madame, that love is only a pretty word—like honour—which people use to cover what they really mean. But now the world has grown too old and too wise for such childish toys—thank God we’re beyond needing to deceive ourselves.”

He looked up at her now and tossed the cards away. “I take it you’re for hire on the open market. How much do you ask?”

Amber looked at him, her eyes narrowed slightly and slanting at the corners. His harangue, made obviously for the sole purpose of amusing himself, since it was plain he did not consider it necessary to convince her of anything, had made her angry. She had been listening to that kind of talk from the tiring-room gallants for a year and a half, but the Duke was the first man she had met who wholly believed what he said. She would have liked to get up, slap his face and walk out of the room—but he was George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and the richest man in England. And her morals were dictated rather by the expediency of the moment than by any abstract formula of honour.

“What am I bid?”

“Fifty pound.”

Amber gave a short unpleasant langh. “I thought you said you weren’t in the mood for a rape! Two hundred and fifty!”

For a long moment he sat and stared at her, and then he got up and walked to the door. Amber turned, watched him apprehensively, but he merely spoke to a footman who was waiting just outside and who ran off down the steps. “I’ll give you your two hundred and fifty, madame,” he said. “But pray don’t flatter yourself it’s because I think you’ll be worth it. I can give you that sum without missing it any more than you would miss a shilling flung to a whining Tom o’ Bedlam. And when all’s said and done, I doubt not you’ll be more surprised by this night’s business than I.”

Amber was surprised; it was her first experience with perversion. And it would, she swore, be her last if she starved in the streets.

Shocked and disgusted, she conceived a violent loathing for the Duke which not even one thousand pounds could dispel. For days she thought of nothing but how she could contrive to pay him back. But in the end all she could do was put him in her list of enemies to be dealt with at some future date—when she should be powerful enough to ruin them all.


The theatre reopened late in July, and Amber found that she now had among her admirers the finest beaus in town. Buckingham had done that much for her, at any rate.

There was Lord Buckhurst and his plump black-eyed friend Sir Charles Sedley. The huge and handsome Dick Talbot, wild Harry Killigrew, Henry Sidney whom many thought to be the finest-looking man in England, and Colonel James Hamilton who was generally considered the best-dressed man at Whitehall. All of them were young, from Sidney who was twenty-two to Talbot who was thirty-three; all of them came of distinguished families and were allied through marriage or blood to the country’s ruling houses; all of them frequented the innermost circles of the Court, associated on familiar terms with the King and might have been men of more consequence if they had cared to spare the time from their amusements.

Almost every night she went to supper with one or more of them, sometimes in a crowd of young men and women— actresses and orange-girls and other professed whores—often it was an intimate group of only two or three. They drank toasts to her and strained wine through the hem of her smock, and anatomized her among themselves. She went to the bear-baitings and cock-fights and spent three or four days at Banstead Downs with Buckhurst and Sedley, attending the horse-races—for the old passionate English love of field sports had returned three-fold since the Restoration.

She went several times to Bartholomew Fair during the three weeks it was in progress, saw every puppet-show and ropedancer, gorged herself on roast pig and gingerbread and made a great collection of Bartholomew Babies—the pretty dolls which it was customary for a gentleman to buy and present to the lady he admired.

One Sunday afternoon she visited Bedlam to see the insane hung up in cages, their hair matted and smeared with their own filth, raving and screaming at the sight-seers who jeered at and tormented them. At Bridewell, where they went to watch the prostitutes being beaten, Talbot recognized a woman he had known some time since and she began to yell at him, pointing her finger and accusing him of being the cause of her present shame and misery. But when they wanted to stop at Newgate to visit the great highwayman, Claude de Vall, who was holding his court there, Amber declined.

After the play she often drove in Hyde Park with four or five young men, and sometimes she saw a copy of her latest gown on one of the Court ladies. She slept short hours, neglected her dancing and singing and guitar lessons, and was so little interested in the theatre that Killigrew threatened to turn her out and would have done so but for the intervention of Buckhurst and Sedley and his own son. When he chided her for missing rehearsal or forgetting her lines—or not even troubling to learn them—she laughed and shrugged her shoulders or flew into a fit of anger and went home. The fops threatened to boycott the theatre if Madame St. Clare was not there, and so Hart and Lacy and Kynaston would be sent to coax her back again. Her popularity made her arrogant and saucy.

At first she had intended to be just as independent and unattainable as she had been at the beginning of her acquaintance with Rex Morgan. But the gentlemen were not subtle. They told her frankly that they would never spend the time courting an actress which they would lavish on a Maid of Honour. And Amber, faced with the alternative of abandoning either her resolutions or her popularity, did not hesitate long in her choice. When Sedley and Buckhurst offered her one hundred pounds to spend a week with them at Epsom Wells she went. But she was never offered so large a sum again.

To each of her lovers she gave a bracelet made from her abundant hair, and some who did not get them had imitations made which they swore were hers. Her name began to appear in the almanack records of half the young fops in town, many of whom she did not even know. Buckhurst gave her a painted fan with a dreamy sylvan scene on one side and on the other the loves of Jupiter which depicted the god in the guise of a swan, a bull, a ram, an eagle, with various women—all of whom looked like Amber. Within a week copies of it were hiding blushes and veiling smiles in the Queen’s Drawing-room.

In December a filthy verse which was unmistakably about her—though the woman in it was called “Chloris” and the man “Philander,” after the old pastoral tradition—began to circulate through the tiring-room and the taverns and bawdy-houses. Amber, who was becoming tired, resented it deeply though she knew many similar poems had been written with far less provocation than she had given, but she could never find out whose it was. She suspected either Buckhurst or Sedley, both poets and very creditable ones, but when she accused them they smiled blandly and protested their innocence. Harry Killigrew followed the insult by flipping her a half-crown piece one night when she tardily suggested a settlement.

Early in January she spent two nights in succession at home without a caller or an invitation, and she knew all at once that her vogue was passing. And only a few days later Mrs. Fagg confirmed her fears that she was again with child. She felt suddenly sick and discouraged and exhausted. It was all but impossible for her to force herself to get out of bed in the morning, her appetite was gone, she looked pallid and thin and there were dark smudges beneath her eyes. Almost anything could bring forth a passionate flood of tears or a hysterical tantrum.

“I wish I was dead!” she told Nan. For her future was only too clear.

Nan suggested that they go away from London for a few weeks and when Mrs. Fagg advised a long ride in a coach, to be taken with her own special medicine, she agreed. “If I never see another fop or another play as long as I live I’ll be glad!” she cried violently. She hated London and the playhouse, all men and even herself.