She had known in the past dark bitter moments of loneliness, self-distrust, desolation—but this was something more. Whatever she had hoped for the future, whatever she held dear in the present had been lost that day at Almsbury House. In only a few minutes she had destroyed everything, and the destruction had been complete; there seemed nothing left on which to build. Even her energy, the intense vitality which had never failed, now seemed dissipated.
When Buckingham tried to interest her in his latest plot he found her, to his annoyance and surprise, indifferent almost to apathy. To get any response at all he had to offer twice what he had intended. But with his usual early enthusiasm he was prepared to squander all that remained of his fortune for this most dark and fantastic of all his schemes. It was his intention to poison Baron Arlington.
Amber heard him explain the plan with mounting if half-reluctant admiration. At the end she gave a mock shudder. “Lord, but your Grace is an ingenious murderer! Then how d’you plan to rid yourself of me?”
Buckingham smiled blandly. “Get rid of you, madame? I protest. Why should I? You’re far too useful to me.”
“Of course,” she agreed. “I doubt not you’d rather see my head stuck on a pole over London Bridge than your own.”
“Bah! His Majesty wouldn’t put you to trial if you murdered his own brother. He’s far too tender of any woman he’s ever laid with. But don’t trouble yourself, madame—I’m no such clumsy contriver as to endanger either of us.”
Amber did not argue with him on that point, but she knew well enough why he could not manage the business without her —he wanted a scapegoat should anything go wrong. And she was, furthermore, the one woman then at Court most likely to be able to wheedle the King into thinking or pretending to think that his Lordship had died from natural causes. If she failed, then it was she who must suffer the consequences.
But Amber did not expect to fail. Almost by the time he had told her what his plan was she had another of her own. The Duke’s scheme was a challenge to which her own ingenuity could not but rise and she began to shed some of her paralyzing torpor. She thought she could see a way to deceive the Duke, outwit the Baron, and make herself a great sum of money at very little risk.
Buckingham delivered to her the twenty-five hundred pounds he had promised—the other half to be paid when the Baron lay safe in his grave—and Amber sent for Shadrac Newbold to come get it. She did not intend to chance having his Grace steal it back. Then she went to keep the appointment she had made with Arlington.
It was near midnight when she left the Palace in a clothes-hamper borne by two porters, covered with her own soiled smocks and petticoats which were supposedly being carried to her laundress. A moment later Nan came out the same door. She was dressed in the clothes and jewels Amber had had on earlier that day and she wore a wig the colour of Amber’s hair; her face was covered with a vizard. A man who had been loitering about that entrance since nightfall looked after the hamper as if undecided whether he should follow it or not—but when Nan appeared, climbed into Amber’s great coach and went off, he whistled to signal his own coach and followed her instead.
Nan took a leisurely roundabout course across town to Camomile Street, giggling as she watched the Duke’s spy try to keep at a discreet distance without losing sight of her. He waited outside a lodging-house for her for three hours and when she had gone inquired of the landlady who lived there. On being told that the apartment was taken by Mr. Harris, a young actor of the Duke’s Theatre, he went to make his report to Buckingham, who sat picking his teeth with a gold toothpick and meditatively sucking air through them, amused that the Duchess should be consorting with such low creatures after all the trouble she had taken to rise above them.
Amber, meanwhile, was carried to an obscure little courtyard in one of the festering alleys of Westminster. The porters had some difficulty getting their burden up to the dirty little third-floor tenement lodging, and Amber alternately held her breath and cursed as she felt the hamper tip, slide, thump on each step. But at last they set her down and went out. Hearing the door close she knocked up the top of the hamper, flung off the covering linen and drew a deep breath. She was just climbing out when Arlington entered from an adjoining chamber—his black cloak swept almost to the floor, his hat was pulled low over his eyes and he held a vizard in one hand.
“The time’s short, my lord,” said Amber, untangling a petticoat from about her shoulders and neck and throwing it aside. “I’ve got some information of great value—I’ll give it you for five thousand pound.”
Arlington’s expression did not alter. “That’s very civil of you, madame. But five thousand is a considerable sum. I don’t think I can—”
