Frances whirled around. “Oh, Sire! Don’t think that! Of course you’re not! But if I once give myself up to you I’ll have lost the only thing I have that’s any value to me. A woman can no more be excused because she gives herself to a king than if he were any other man. You know that your own mother says that.”
“My mother and I do not always think alike—and certainly not on that point. Answer me honestly, Frances. What is it you want? I’ve told you before and I tell you again—I’ll give you anything I have. I’ll give you anything but marriage—and I’d give that if I could.”
Frances’s voice answered him crisply. “Then, Sire, you will never have me at all. For I shall never give myself to a man under any other conditions than marriage.”
He stood with his back to the windows and his face in darkness, and she could not see the expression of savage anger that brushed across it. “Someday,” he said, in a soft voice, “I hope I’ll find you ugly and willing.” He went past her swiftly and out the door.
AMBER DID NOT like being shut up in a black room; it made her melancholy. But at least the fact that she was supposed to be in mourning secured her from what would otherwise have been an intolerable number of visits from every friend, acquaintance and remote relative of the entire family. Her child, a girl, had been born just a few days after Samuel’s death. And she would have been expected to give a gossips’-feast, a child-bed feast, and a great reception following the christening.
As it was she received calls only from close relatives and friends of the family, though many others sent gifts. During these she sat half propped in bed, looking very pale and fragile against all that sombre black. She smiled wistfully at her visitors, sometimes squeezed out a tear or two or at least a long sigh, and looked fondly at the baby when someone said that she was as much Samuel’s image as if she had been spit out of his mouth. She was polite and patient and as decorous as ever, for she felt that she owed Samuel that much at least in return for the great fortune he had left her.
She scarcely saw the immediate family at all. Each of them came just once to her room, but Amber knew that it was only out of a persistent sense of duty to their father. She realized that now he was dead they expected and wanted her to leave as soon as she could get out of bed. And she did not intend to linger there any longer than necessary.
But it was only Jemima who said what the others were thinking. “Well—now that you’ve got Father’s money I suppose you expect to buy a title with it and set yourself up for a person of quality?”
Amber gave her an impudent mocking smile. “I might,” she agreed.
“You may be able to buy a title,” said Jemima, “but you can’t buy the breeding that goes with it.” That sounded to Amber like something she had heard one of the others say, but the next words were Jemima’s own: “And there’s something else you can’t buy, either, not if you had all the money there is. You never
Amber’s jealousy of Jemima had faded, since she knew her to be securely trapped in marriage, to lazy contempt. There was nothing she had to fear from her now. And she gave her a slow, sweeping insolent glance. “I’m very sensible of your concern, Jemima. But I’ll shift for myself, I warrant you. So if that’s all you came for, you may as well go.”
Jemima answered her in a low tense voice, for Amber’s smugness and indifference made her furious. “I
Amber’s superiority dissolved into a cynical laugh. “I vow and swear, Jemima, you’ve grown as great a fanatic as the rest of them. If you had better sense you’d have learned by now that nothing thrives so well as wickedness. Now get out of here, you malapert slut, and don’t trouble me again!”
Jemima did not trouble her again, and neither did anyone else in the family. She was left as strictly alone as if she were not in the house at all.
She sent Nan about the town searching for lodgings—not in the City but out in the fashionable western suburbs that lay between Temple Bar and Charing Cross. And about three weeks after the baby’s birth she went herself to look at one Nan had found.
