SHE DID NOT see him at all for six days. At first she thought that she could make him come to her, but he did not. She wrote to let him know that she was ready to accept an apology. He replied that he had no wish to apologize but was satisfied to leave it as it was. That alarmed her, but still she refused to believe that all those tempestuous years, the undeniably powerful feeling they had for each other, could end now—tamely, uselessly, disappointingly—over a petty quarrel that could so easily have been avoided.
She looked for him everywhere she went.
Each time she entered a crowded room her eyes swept over it, searching for him. When she walked through the Privy Garden or along the galleries she expected and hoped to see him there, perhaps only a few feet ahead of her. At the theatre and driving through the streets she kept an eager alert watch for him. He filled her mind and emotions until she was conscious of nothing else. A dozen different times she thought that she saw him. But it was always someone else, someone who did not really look like him at all.
Not quite a week after their quarrel she went to a raffle at the India House in Clement’s Lane, Portugal Street, which opened just off the Strand and had several little shops patronized by men and women of fashion. On that day every surrounding street was blocked by the great gilt coaches of the nobility and crowds of their waiting, gossiping footmen.
The room, which was not a very large one, was packed full of ladies with their lap-dogs and blackamoors and waiting-women, as well as several gallants who stood among them. Feminine voices and high little shrieks of laughter babbled through the room like a spring freshet dashing headlong toward the river. China tea-dishes clinked and taffeta skirts whistled softly.
The raffle had been under way for an hour or more when the Duchess of Ravenspur arrived. Her entrance was spectacular, made with the sense of showmanship and ostentation which proclaimed her still more actress than great lady. Like a wind she swept upon them, nodding here and smiling there, well aware of the sudden lull she had caused, the murmurs that followed after her. She was, as always, splendidly dressed. Her gown was cloth-of-gold, her hooded cloak emerald velvet lined in sables and there was a spray of emeralds pinned to her great sable muff. The blackamoor carrying her train wore a suit of emerald velvet and his skull was bound in a golden turban.
Amber was pleased by their interest, malicious as it was, for only jealousy and envy ever got a woman such attentions from her own sex she thought. Next to a man’s admiration she valued a woman’s envy. Someone quickly placed a chair for her beside Mrs. Middleton, and as she took it Jane’s face clouded with the resentful troubled expression of a pretty woman forced into comparison with one far handsomer.
Amber saw at a glance Middleton’s ambitious costume, too expensive for her husband’s modest estate, the pearls that had been given her by one lover, the ear-drops by another, the gown in which she had been seen more times than was fashionable and which should have been on her waiting-woman’s back several weeks since.
“My dear!” she cried. “How fine you look! I vow and swear, that gown! Where’d you ever get it?”
“How kind of you to say so, madame, when of course you outshine me by far!”
“Not at all,” protested Amber. “You’re too modest, with every man at Court adying to be your servant!”
The fencing-match of compliments ended when a young Negro brought Amber a bowl of tea which she took and began to sip while her slanted eyes moved about the room—looking for him. He was not here either, though she would have sworn that was Almsbury’s coach in the street. They were preparing now to auction off a length of Indian calico—the expensive flowered cotton which the ladies liked to have made into morning-gowns, because of its extreme rarity. The auctioneer measured down an inch of candle and stuck a pin into it, the candle was lighted, and the bidding began. Middleton gave Amber a nudge and smiled at her slyly from over the top of her bowl, glancing off across the room.
“Well! Who d’ye think I see?”
Amber’s heart stopped completely and then began to pound.
“Who!”
But even as she spoke her eyes followed Middleton’s and she saw Corinna sitting just a few feet away, but half-turned so that only the curve of her cheek and the long black arc of her lashes was visible. Her cloak fell slantwise, concealing the grotesque bulge of pregnancy, and as she moved her head to speak to someone her full profile appeared, serene and lovely. Amber was seized with a fury of murderous hatred.
“They say,” Middleton was drawling, “that his Lordship is
