And anyway there were a thousand ways to make money at Court—if the King liked you: Once he allowed her to hold a lottery of Crown plate. He leased her six hundred acres of Crown land in Lincolnshire for five years at a low figure and she subleased it at a high one. He granted her the profits for a one-year period from all vessels moored in the Pool. She got the money from the sale of underwood in certain coppices in the New Forest. She engaged in two of the Court’s most lucrative businesses: begging estates and stock-jobbing. Charles gave her gifts from the Irish taxes and all the foreign ambassadors made her presents, which varied in value according to the supposed degree of her influence over the King. She could have lived in fine style from these sources alone.
Just before Christmas she began to have her rooms completely redecorated and furnished and for four months they were filled with workmen painting and hammering and scraping. The furniture was covered over with heavy white canvas to prevent spotting, buckets of gilt and coloured paint stood everywhere, men on tall ladders dabbed at the ceiling and took measurements for a hanging. Tansy followed them from room to room, curious and interested. Monsieur le Chien snapped at their heels and barked all day long and sometimes, if his mistress was not about, he was secretly kicked.
Amber sent to Lime Park for all its furnishings and spent several days going over Radclyffe’s possessions, which she had obtained with the King’s connivance.
Among them she found a long but still unfinished poem: “The Kingdom Come. A Satire.” A quick glance told her that it had been written at Lime Park during the spring and summer months of 1666, from information gathered while he had been in London, just after their marriage. It was obscene, cruel, bitterly malicious, but brilliant in style and perception. Amber read it for the malice and obscenity, recognized those qualities instantly but missed everything else—and threw it contemptuously into the fire. There were other papers: the history of the family possessions, letters (one which had evidently been written by the girl whom he had loved and who had disappeared during the Civil Wars), many alchemical recipes, sheaves of notes, bills for pictures and other objects which he had collected, translations he had made from Latin and Greek, essays on a variety of subjects. With spiteful pleasure she destroyed them all.
She came upon a skull with a recipe attached to it by thin copper wire. It was a cure for impotency and recommended that spring-water be drunk every morning from the skull of a man who had been murdered. Amber considered this to be very funny and it even increased her contempt for the Earl. She kept it to show the King and he appropriated it for his own laboratory, saying that he might have a need for that remedy himself some day.
What she liked of his hangings and pictures and furniture Amber saved for her own apartments; the rest she put up at auction. Radclyffe’s lifelong interest in everything beautiful and rare, the years of collecting, the infinite labour and expense—all were sold now to people he had despised, or used as bric-a-brac by a woman for whom he had had nothing but scornful contempt. Amber’s triumph, complete and terrible, was only the triumph of the living over the helpless dead. But it pleased her a great deal.
Charles and his Court had brought back from France with them a changed taste in furniture, as in everything else. The new style was at once more delicate and more lavish. Walnut replaced the heavy solid pieces of carved oak, tapestry was considered old-fashioned, and rich Persian or Turkish carpets lay on bare floors which were no longer covered with rushes to hide dirt and keep out cold. No extravagance was beyond good taste —and the ladies and courtiers vied with one another as to who could achieve the most spectacular effect. Amber was at no loss among them.
She had some walls knocked out and others put up to change the proportions of the rooms—she wanted everything on a scale of prodigious size and grandeur. Even the anteroom was very large—which was necessary to accommodate all those who attended upon her—but its only furnishings were wall-hangings of green raw silk, a pair of life-sized black-marble Italian statues, and a battery of gilt chairs.
