Lettice gave Sam a look of scornful disgust. “You know where she learns all this, don’t you?”
Jemima sprang hotly to the defense of her step-mother. “If you mean I learned it from Madame, I did! And you’d better not let Father hear you speak of her in that tone, either!”
Lettice gave a little sigh and shook her head. “What have we Dangerfields come to—when the feelings of a common actress are—”
“What do you mean a ‘common actress,’ Lettice?” cried Jemima. “She isn’t common at all! She’s a lady of quality! Of better quality than the Dangerfields are, let me tell you! But her father—who was a knight, I’ll have you know—turned her out when she married a man he didn’t like! And when her husband died she was left without a shilling. Tom Killigrew saw her on the street one day and asked her to go onto the stage, and so she did—to keep from starving! And as soon as her husband’s father died and left her some money she quit and went to Tunbridge Wells where she could live quiet and retired! Well—what are you both smirking at?”
Sam sobered immediately, for it was his opinion that Jemima would be less injured by her association with the woman if she did not know what she really was. “Is that the story she told Father?”
“Yes, it is! You believe it, don’t you, Sam? Oh, Lettice! You make me sick!”
Suddenly she swirled about and lifting up her skirts started off up the stairs and as she went Lettice saw that with everything else she had begun to wear green silk stockings. Sam and Lettice looked at each other.
“Do you suppose he really believed that wild tale?” he asked at last.
Lettice sighed. “I know he did. And if he thought that we didn’t—well, he mustn’t ever think it, that’s all. I don’t know what happened to him to make him change, but something did and we must hide our feelings and thoughts for his sake. We still love him even if—even if—” She turned about quickly and walked away, though Sam gave her arm a brief pressure as she went. And at that moment Samuel and Amber walked into the room, Jemima triumphantly beside them with one arm linked through her step-mother’s.
By June Amber, who was not yet pregnant, was beginning to worry frantically. For Samuel, she knew, was anxious to have a child—mostly, she suspected, to justify his marriage to her in his own and his family’s eyes. And she wanted one herself. He had already redrawn his will to give her the legal one-third, but she thought that a baby might induce him to give her even more. He had grown almost comically sentimental about babies, considering that his first wife had borne him eighteen children. And perpetually aware as she was of the hostility they all felt toward her, she believed that a baby would protect her as nothing else could.
Enveloped in a cloak, her face covered with a vizard, she went to consult half the midwives and quacks and physicians in London, asking their advice. She had a chestful of oils and balsams and herbs and a routine of smearing and anointing which occupied a great deal of time. Samuel’s diet included vast quantities of oysters, eggs, caviar, and sweetbreads—but still the maddening fact persisted, she was not pregnant. She finally went to an astrologer to have her stars read and was encouraged when he told her that she would soon conceive.
One very hot day late in June she and Jemima returned from a visit to the Royal Exchange and came into her apartments to drink a syllabub cooled in ice. The streets had been dusty and the crowds bad-tempered. There were so many flies in the house that though Tansy was detailed with a swatter to kill them they zoomed and buzzed everywhere. Amber tossed aside her fan and gloves and the hood she had been wearing and dropped onto a couch, beginning immediately to unfasten the bodice of her gown.
Jemima was less interested in the heat than in the exciting adventure they had just had. For two very fine and good-looking gentlemen had stopped her step-mother in the Upper Walk of the ’Change and one of them had asked, with charming impudence, to be presented to “that pretty blue-eyed jilt”—meaning Jemima. And then he had kissed her on the cheek, bowed most graciously, and invited her to drive to Hyde Park with him and have a syllabub.
“Imagine!” cried Jemima delightedly. “Mr. Sidney saying that after meeting me the day seemed hotter than ever!” She giggled and sipped her drink. “I vow I’ve never seen such handsome men—at least not in a great while. And the other one, Colonel Hamilton, is my Lady Castlemaine’s lover, isn’t he?” She felt flattered to have been looked at admiringly by a gentleman her Ladyship loved. Barbara’s notoriety was now so extensive that she had become a kind of myth, known even to innocent and sheltered girls like Jemima.
“That’s the gossip,” said Amber lazily.
“Of course I know you were right to tell them we couldn’t go—and yet they seemed so fine, and so genteel and well-bred. I vow we’d all have been mighty merry.”
