Winsor, Kathleen (97 page)

On
the afternoon the precious Correggio arrived, she went down to watch it being
unpacked. When at last it was hung, the workmen gone, and they stood before the
fireplace looking up at it, Amber sneaked him a glance and found that he was
smiling. As always, when he had just acquired another coveted admired object,
he seemed in a pleasanter, more tractable mood.

"I
wonder, your Lordship," she began tentatively, her eyes stealing toward
him again, and then back to the picture, "I wonder if I might go abroad
today—just for a drive. I haven't been out of the house in three weeks and I
swear it's making me pale and sallow. Don't you think so?" She looked at
him anxiously.

He
turned and faced her directly, a faint amused smile on his mouth. "I
thought your pleasant humour of the past few days meant a request would be soon
forthcoming. Very well, you may go."

"Oh!
thank you, sir! Can I go
now?"

"Whenever
you like. My coachman will drive you—and, by the way, he's served me for thirty
years and is not to be bribed."

Her
smile suddenly froze, but she concealed her anger swiftly for fear of having
the privilege revoked. Then swooping up her skirts she ran out of the room,
down the hall, and up the stairs two at a time. She burst into their apartments
with a cry of triumph that made Nan start and almost drop her needlework.

"Nan!
Get your cloak! We're going abroad!"

"Going
abroad! Oh, Lord, are we? Where?" Nan had been sharing her mistress's
confinement—save for a few brief excursions to buy ribbons or gloves or a
fan—and was as tired of it as Amber.

"I
don't know! Somewhere—anywhere— Hurry!"

The
two women left the house in a swirl of velvet skirts and fur muffs, getting
into the coach with as much laughter and excitement as if they had just arrived
from Yorkshire to see the London sights. The air was so sharp and fresh it
stung the nostrils. The day was grey and windy, and petals blown from peach
trees drifted through the air, falling like flakes of snow onto the roof-tops
and into the mud.

There
was still plague in the town, though there were usually not more than
half-a-dozen deaths a week, and it had retired once more to the congested
dismal districts of the poor. By now it was almost impossible to find a shut-up
house. The streets were as crowded as ever, the vendors and 'prentices as
noisy, and the only sure sign that plague had recently passed that way were the
many plaintive notices stuck up in windows: "Here is a doctor to be
let." For the doctors, by their wholesale desertion, had forfeited even
what reluctant and suspicious trust they had once been able to command. A fifth
of the
town's population was dead, yet nothing seemed to have changed—it was the same
gay bawdy stinking brilliant dirty city of London.

Amber,
delighted to be out again, looked at and exclaimed upon everything:

The
little boy solemnly plying his trade of snipping silver buttons from the backs
of gentlemen's coats as they strolled unsuspectingly down the street. The brawl
between some porters and apprentices who, setting up the traditional cry of
" 'Prentices! 'Prentices!" brought their fellows flying to the rescue
with clubs and sticks. A man performing on a tight-rope for a gape-mouthed
crowd at the entrance of Popinjay Alley. The women vendors sitting on street
corners amid their great baskets of sweet-potatoes, spring mushrooms, small
sour oranges, onions and dried pease and new green dandelion tops.

She
directed the coachman to drive to Charing Cross by way of Fleet Street and the
Strand, for there were a number of fashionable ordinaries in that
neighbourhood. And after all, if she should chance in passing to see someone
she knew and stopped to speak a word with him out of mere civility— why, no one
could reasonably object to anything so innocent as that. Amber kept her eyes
wide open and advised Nan to do likewise, and just as they were approaching
Temple Bar she caught sight of three familiar figures gathered in the doorway
of The Devil Tavern. They were Buckhurst, Sedley and Rochester, all three
evidently half-drunk for they were talking and gesticulating noisily,
attracting the attention of everyone who passed by.

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 Ben-net 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 carriers,
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 cooly 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,
beginning to pull off her gloves. "We drove through St. James's Park—and
who d'ye think I saw?"

"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.