Silk

Maybe his grandmother could be persuaded that, as a loving older cousin, he would dutifully pay the occasional visit to London to keep a protective eye on Amber.

Chapter Two

Blanche Pickford surveyed her granddaughter critically. At seventeen Amber was showing the promise of great beauty. She was only of medium height, but she was slender and fine-boned, with an elegant neck and porcelain skin. Her face, once it lost the last roundness of girlhood, would be perfectly heart-shaped, with her eyes widely spaced and thickly lashed.

Blanche had not been pleased when her daughter – no doubt influenced by her husband – had announced that her child was to be named Amber, which Blanche had thought far too exotic. It was a tradition of the family that its daughters were given names that reflected the colours of silks. But there was no denying the fact that the girl’s eyes were indeed the honey-gold colour of that precious resin.

Amber’s straight nose and the curve of her lips, like her blonde curls, almost exactly mirrored Blanche’s own looks at Amber’s age, but as yet there was no sign in her granddaughter of the smouldering sensuality that she herself had possessed at seventeen – nor any sense of the power of such a gift. By temperament Amber was kind and gentle; weak, where she had always been so very strong, thought Blanche critically. There was no fire to her, no passion, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t passion or sensuality on which the kind of marriage she wanted for her granddaughter was brokered. Quite the opposite.

And at least the girl had looks, unlike her mother. Blanche had been furiously angry when she had realised how plain her daughter was going to be, so very much Henry Pickford’s daughter, with her attachment to the mill, and her leanings towards the labour movement and equality for the workers. However, that anger had been nothing to the fury she had felt when the plain twenty-five-year-old Blanche had assumed would remain a spinster had defied her to marry a Russian émigré, using her small inheritance from her father to do so. Not that that had lasted very long. And, of course, ultimately, just as she had known she would, her daughter had had to come begging to her.

Yes, all in all she was not entirely displeased with the raw material she had to work with. The girl’s looks would certainly count in her favour, but it was Blanche’s money that would bring into the family the title that Blanche craved.

‘Sit down, Amber,’ Blanche instructed her granddaughter. ‘We’ve got something important to discuss.’

Amber could never remember seeing her grandmother wearing anything made from silk. Instead she favoured clothes from the French designer Chanel, and today she was wearing one of her signature jersey gowns, the bodice cleverly draped to fasten on the hip with a large brooch studded with crystals, which caught the light with every movement of her body.

Slender, and with an upright bearing, her grandmother had the figure for such clothes. Amber had inherited her slenderness, although her shape was concealed by the schoolgirlish lines of her own woollen pinafore worn over a plain cotton blouse. Beneath that blouse Amber’s heart was beating anxiously. Surely what Greg had told her couldn’t possibly be true?

She looked at her grandmother, waiting apprehensively. As always Blanche was wearing her pearls, three long strands of them, their lustre possessing far more warmth than the woman herself.

‘I promised you that since this is your seventeenth birthday you are to have a very special gift. This gift concerns your future, Amber. You are a most fortunate young woman, and I hope you realise that. As my grandchild you will have opportunities and benefits beyond the reach of many young women of your age and station, and whilst you are enjoying them I want you to remember just why you have been given them and what your responsibility is to them and to me. Now,’ Blanche permitted herself a slight smile, ‘in January you will be travelling to London to prepare for your presentation at court. I have made arrangements—’

So it was true. Greg had been right. Amber felt sick with despair.

‘No,’ she protested frantically. ‘No, I don’t want to be presented. I want to go to art school.’

Blanche looked aghast. The girl’s parents had done more damage with their irritating and worthless talk of art and design than she had realised. The Russian was to blame for that. He may have filled his daughter’s head with his own folly, but Blanche had no intention of allowing such ridiculousness to remain there.

Amber was seventeen, crying for a life she knew nothing whatsoever about – at thirty-seven she would be thanking her for saving her from it. It was ludicrous even to think of comparing the drudgery of making her own way with the status and comfort that would be Amber’s if she did as she was told.

Not that it mattered what Amber thought or how much she protested. Blanche would do what she had decided she would do.

‘Art school?’

Amber could feel her grandmother’s steely gaze virtually pinning her into the uncomfortable chair in which she was struggling to sit bolt upright.

Amber hated the décor of this room. Everything about its Edwardian heaviness was overpowering and intimidating, from the puce-coloured wallpaper and matching velvet soft furnishings to the polished mahogany furniture.

‘Formidable’ was how most people described her grandmother, but Amber could think of other words: formal; forbidding; frightening. Her mother and father wouldn’t have been frightened, she reminded herself. She took a deep breath.

‘It’s what I’ve always wanted.’

Her words, more anguished than defiant, seemed to fall through the cold silence that chilled the room, despite the good fire burning in the marble fireplace: Carrara marble from the famous quarries in Italy, chosen for its perfection, just like everything else in her grandmother’s life. Not that she seemed to gain pleasure from the craftsmanship. It was just the status that owning it conferred on her that mattered.

‘You are seventeen years old, Amber, far too young to know what is right for you.’

Her grandmother’s words spiked fear into Amber’s heart, panicking her into bursting out, ‘It is what my parents wanted for me. My father talked about it often, and when I do marry, I shall marry someone whom I love and who loves me as much as my father loved my mother.’

Too late she realised her mistake. Her grandmother’s face had set into an icy cold mask.

‘Your father? Your father, Amber, was a penniless immigrant who married your mother for her money – or rather, for my money.’

As always when she was angry, her grandmother’s voice had quietened to a barely audible whisper that still somehow hurt the ears.

For her father, though, Amber was determined to overcome her fear of her grandmother’s anger, and defend him.

‘That’s not true. My father loved my mother.’

Ignoring her, Blanche continued remorselessly, ‘I warned her what would happen when she defied me to marry him, and I was right. When he lost his job she had to come begging to me, pleading with me to give him work. Your father didn’t love my daughter. Your father loved my money and my mill.’

‘He did love her. They were so happy together. My mother said so. She said my father was gifted, a true artist.’

‘He was nothing but a third-rate failure, who would have ruined the mill with his ridiculous ideas, if I had allowed him.’

Amber felt as though she was choking, all too conscious of her own overheated emotions whilst her grandmother remained calm and cold. Her parents had loved one another, she knew that. Before the factory where he had worked in London had closed down, their small house had been filled with the sound of her parents’ laughter. Amber could remember how her father would bring home his friends, fellow artists who would sit around her mother’s kitchen table, drinking her soup and talking. Those had been such happy times and Amber treasured their memory.

There had been less laughter when her parents had been forced to move back to Macclesfield, but there had still been warmth and love in the house her parents had insisted on renting rather than live in Denham Place with her grandmother. Her father had loved reading, and on winter evenings they would gather round the fire and he would read aloud, very often from one of Charles Dickens’s wonderful books set against a background of the dreadful circumstances in which the poor lived. How could her grandmother try to destroy the memory of their love by denying its existence?

Her grandmother was wrong too when she said that Amber’s father would have ruined the business. He was the one who had saved it. Amber knew that. It was because of his designs that Denby Mill’s agents in London were able to report that their new silk had sold out within days of being available, with repeat orders for more. There had been fierce arguments about his designs and his desire to follow the direction of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and her grandmother’s dislike of change and innovation. It was through her father that the mill had secured its valuable contracts with that movement and with the Church of England to supply it with the rich ecclesiastical silks that were especially woven.

Amber struggled desperately to hold back her angry tears. ‘If my parents were alive they wouldn’t let you do this.’

‘That is quite enough.’ Her grandmother stood up. ‘I don’t want to hear another word about your father or this nonsense about art school. I am the one who will decide your future, Amber. No one else.’

‘You’re a snob! You’re only doing it because of Barrant de Vries, because people laughed at you because he wouldn’t marry you …’

Amber recoiled as Blanche stepped forward, striking her across the face, the shock of the blow silencing her into horrified awareness of what she had done. Her cheek stung and her heart was racing.

Two red coins of angry colour burned on her grandmother’s face and her breathing was rapid and shallow.

‘How dare you speak to me like that? In my day you would have been whipped for your insolence. You will go to your room and you will stay there until I give you permission to leave it.’

Half blinded with tears, Amber fled, leaving Blanche alone in the room.

For several minutes after Amber had gone Blanche didn’t move. Anger, seared with pride, burned inside her that her granddaughter, a child she believed to be so much less than she herself had been at her age, should have dared to speak to her in such a way and of something so intimately connected with her own past.

Blanche stiffened. For forty-four years she had lived with the memory of Barrant’s humiliation and rejection of her and not once in that time had anyone ever dared to refer to that humiliation to her face.

She walked over to the window and stood looking out. She was sixty-one years old and not a day had gone by since Barrant had laughed at her and told her that he would never ever marry a mill owner’s daughter when she hadn’t weighed out on the scales of her life that insult and sworn she would make sure that one day those scales would weigh in her favour, even if she had to fill them grain by grain, retribution by retribution, to make sure they did so, and that Barrant would die sick to his heart with the knowledge of what his arrogance had cost him.

She hated him and she couldn’t wait for the day when her grandson and her granddaughter took social precedence over his – as she was determined they would do.

Jay Fulshawe saw Amber come running from her grandmother’s study in such obvious distress that he immediately guessed what had happened. His heart ached for her. So her grandmother had broken the news to her. Poor child, she would take it very hard.

She was still at the age where her feelings were open for all to see, mirrored in the dark golden eyes that were now so shadowed with her despair. Quick-witted and warm-natured, she was a great favourite with her grandmother’s household staff. Since she had come home from boarding school, Jay had found himself listening for the sound of her laughter, and smiling when he heard it. Unlike some, Amber’s mischievous sense of humour bore no malice or unkindness. She was so passionate about everything she believed in, and so very vulnerable because of that passion. Jay hoped that life would not punish her for it. She was still so very young.

‘Amber …’ He spoke her name gently, reaching out to her where she stood in tears in the hall, but she shook her head.

‘You knew, Jay,’ she accused him bitterly. ‘You knew what my grandmother was planning and yet you said nothing.’

How could Jay not have told her? Amber had known him virtually all her life, and thought of him more as a friend than her grandmother’s employee. He had been at Eton with Greg and he had spent many of his holidays in Cheshire. His parents lived in Dorset where his father, the third son of a ‘gentleman farmer’, was a clergyman. It was rumoured that once his wife had given birth to his son and heir, Barrant de Vries had lost all interest in his two daughters, and that he hadn’t cared who they had married, although some said that the reason they had not done better for themselves was because there had been no money. In the aristocratic circles in which the de Vrieses and their kind moved and married, a bride’s dowry was almost as important as her breeding.

Jay was more serious-natured than Greg; dark-haired, tall and leanly athletic, with a calm, measured way of speaking and a slightly quizzical smile that often made Amber itch for her sketchpad and her charcoal to try to capture it.

Jay wasn’t smiling now, though. ‘It wasn’t my place,’ he answered her quietly. ‘I’m so very sorry, but it may not be as bad as you fear.’

‘You mean that no one with a title will want to marry me and that I’ll be rejected like your grandfather rejected my grandmother?’ Amber retorted bitterly.

So she had finally heard that old story. Jay had wondered when she would. It was fairly common knowledge locally, after all. His cousin Cassandra had enjoyed regaling him with it when she had heard it from the Fitton Leghs, not realising he had already heard it, but then Cassandra had inherited that flawed de Vries pride, which he personally found so warped and destructive.

Jay put his hand on Amber’s arm, but she shook him off.

Amber ran up the stairs and along the landing until she had reached the welcome security of her bedroom. Her grandmother might consider it a form of punishment to say that she had to remain here, but she preferred to be here and on her own with her despair.

She tensed as she heard a brief knock on the door, but relaxed when Mary, the parlour maid, came in. Mary was twenty-five and courting a grocery assistant in Macclesfield. She had a bubbly personality and a warm smile, but now she was avoiding looking at her, Amber saw, as she went towards the desk and said apologetically, ‘The mistress says as how I was to come up and remove your drawing things, Miss Amber.’

Amber’s face burned hot with humiliation and grief. Her grandmother must have guessed that she would want to find solace in her drawing. Well, if she thought that she would apologise in order to get them back, she was wrong!

It was growing dark by the time Jay negotiated the rutted carriageway to Felton Priory in the shooting brake with which Blanche Pickford had provided him as her estate manager. She had informed him he may use the motor car ‘for a certain amount of private motoring, since I dare say you will want to see your grandfather, and he is not obviously able to visit you.’

Had those words been a kind gesture on Blanche’s part or an unkind underlining of the fact that Barrant was confined to a wheelchair? Jay knew which his grandfather would have chosen to believe.

Dusk cloaked the shabbiness of the house and its surrounding parkland. Unlike Denham Place, Felton Priory could never be described as an architectural gem, being a haphazard mixture of differing periods and personal styles, refronted by the fifth Viscount in a pseudo-Gothic style of outstanding ugliness.

With typical arrogance, or perhaps artistic blindness, Jay’s grandfather insisted on considering Felton the premier aristocratic residence in Macclesfield, if not Cheshire, and Jay was good-humoured enough to indulge him, although in truth Jay much preferred the handsome Dorset rectory where he himself had grown up.

Jay considered himself fortunate that the de Vries inheritance of pride and arrogance had passed him by.

He parked the shooting brake on the gravel forecourt, taking the steps to the heavy portico with lithe strides.

His grandfather’s butler opened the door to him. Jay had telephoned ahead to warn him of his visit, knowing that Bates, older than his grandfather by a good ten years, and rheumatic, found it increasingly painful to walk the long distance from the warmth of the butler’s pantry to the main entrance.

‘Good evening, Master Jay,’ Bates welcomed him, taking Jay’s driving coat, cap and scarf.

‘Good evening, Bates,’ Jay returned. ‘How is the rheumatism?’

‘Not too bad at all, thank you. Your grandfather has had a bad couple of days, though, I’m afraid.’

‘Thank you for warning me. His legs are playing up again, are they?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Despite the fact that both his legs had had to be amputated, Barrant suffered acute pain in what his doctor had described to Jay as ‘phantom limbs’. When the pain was at its worst the only thing that could relieve it was morphine, which had to be prescribed by Dr Brookes.

Jay’s grandfather vehemently objected to the fact that a law had been passed that meant that contrary to what had been common practice beforehand, morphine and all its derivatives could now only be obtained by doctor’s prescription. As Jay knew, his grandfather wasn’t the only one to feel that the government’s Dangerous Drugs Act had interfered in something over which they had no right. For many of the Bright Young Things of the twenties, as the newspapers had labelled a certain fast set of rich young men and women, the law had come too late. They were already, like poor Elizabeth Ponsonby, the young socialite whose wild ways had been referred to in the gossip columns, addicted to both drink and drugs, and as with prohibition in America, all the law had done was drive the supply and purchase of intoxicants and narcotics underground.

‘Your grandfather’s waiting for you in the library, Master Jay.’

Felton Priory’s library was a large rectangular room, which Jay’s grandfather had made his personal domain after his accident. A Chinese lacquered screen discreetly concealed the bed, which Jay had had brought downstairs so that his grandfather could ‘rest’ when he felt like doing so, instead of having to use the cumbersome dumb waiter to transport him and his wheelchair up to the second landing that gave access to his bedroom.

‘Ha, here at last, are you?’ Barrant greeted Jay. ‘I dare say that Blanche works you hard and wants her pound of flesh from you. Bates,’ he roared at the butler, ‘bring me a brandy – and make it a large one.’

Jay looked at his grandfather with concern. ‘I thought that Dr Brookes had forbidden you to drink brandy?’

Barrant gave his grandson a saturnine look. ‘No doctor tells me what to do. If I want a brandy I’ll damn well have one. Anyway, what does he know? Young fool. His father was bad enough. Thought he’d end up killing me before he retired, but the son’s even worse.’

The old man was obviously having a bad day.

His hair, once as thick and dark as Jay’s own, was white now. Pain had carved deep grooves in the flesh at either side of his mouth, and hollowed out the features beneath the high cheekbones. Fierce passions still glittered in the dark blue eyes, though driven, Jay suspected, by frustration and arrogance.

Barrant took the brandy Bates had brought him without any acknowledgement, waiting until the butler had left before saying sharply, ‘So the Pickford boy is putting himself up as a candidate to take over Barclay Whiston’s seat, is he? That will be Blanche’s idea, of course. He won’t get it. Too much of a lightweight, and no amount of money is going to alter that. He’s not the man his father was.’

A look Jay couldn’t interpret crossed his grandfather’s face. ‘Get on well with him, do you?’

‘Everyone gets on with Greg,’ Jay answered calmly.

‘Cassandra don’t think much of him.’

Though Jay didn’t say anything, Barrant still grunted and said, ‘You’re right, it’s time Cassandra found herself a husband. No looks to speak of, but she’s got de Vries blood in her veins. Too sharp in her manner by half, though. No man wants a wife with a tongue like vinegar. Don’t know where she gets it from. Certainly not from your grandmother. She was as meek as milk.

‘Cassandra was telling me that Blanche is sending the girl to London with some fool idea of thinking she can buy a title for her.’

‘Amber is to be presented at court, yes.’

‘Good-looker, is she?’

‘Yes.’

Barrant grunted again. ‘She’s still trade, though. Your grandmother was a Fitton Legh. Her ancestors came over with the Conquest, just like the de Vrieses. It’s good blood that counts in a marriage, not good looks. Like to like. You remember that when your time comes. Not that you’re a true de Vries, since it’s its father’s name a child carries and not its mother’s.’

The bitterness in his grandfather’s voice was as familiar to Jay as the reasons for it. Barrant de Vries had never got over losing his son and he never would. His grandfather would have valued him far more, Jay knew, if he had been born to Barrant’s son and not one of his daughters.

‘You’re getting bored with me, I know you are.’ Her voice was fretful, rising dangerously towards hysteria.

Greg wished he had not come. He had turned down an invitation to drive into Manchester to a new nightclub that had just been opened.

‘Of course I’m not.’

‘Yes you are. You didn’t even call me your dearest darling like you used.’ She was pouting now, tears swimming in her large blue eyes.

Greg could feel his heart sinking as fast as his irritation was rising.

The bedroom smelled of scent and sex, both of them somehow equally cloying. The feeling of being trapped in a situation he no longer wanted, which had been growing on him for several weeks, now intensified. He hadn’t realised in the first thrill of his lust for her that her extraordinary beauty cloaked such a clinging and possessive nature. His desire for her had blinded him to the dangers.

An affair with a married woman was something that a young man in his position did, so far as Greg was concerned. He had been momentarily obsessed by his lust for her, it was true, and in that moment he had perhaps made rash promises to her, but now Greg was bored and ready to move on. She, though, was making it clear that she was not ready to let him go.

Somehow their, to him, casual affair had in her eyes – and words – become something very different. Something that Greg had never intended and most certainly did not want.

‘You said you loved me, but you were lying,’ she accused him. ‘How can you be so cruel? Isn’t what I already have to bear enough? Must I be punished even more by having my heart stolen with false promises of love?’

She was pacing the floor of the bedroom now, her behaviour becoming wilder by the minute, the white marabou-trimmed silk peignoir she had pulled on when they had left her bed, swirling round her. The silk clung to her naked body beneath, but that knowledge no longer excited him as it had once done.

Her behaviour was making Greg feel on edge. He had never imagined at the start when she had been so cool with him, teasing and tantalising him, that she would become like this, practically begging him.

She stopped in front of him, reaching for the martini she had insisted he make for her earlier, even sending for her maid, whilst he had had to conceal himself in her bathroom so that she could bring up the ingredients and a cocktail shaker.

Greg had warned her then that she was taking too many risks but she had flown into a wild outburst of tears, accusing him of no longer loving her and reminding him that once he would have risked anything for her.

Now she drank greedily from the glass she was holding. Her face was flushed, her gaze unfocused.

‘I know,’ she told him brightly, ‘I’ll ring Nurse and she can bring Baby in.’

‘No!’ Greg couldn’t conceal his horror. ‘No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘Why not? After all, he’s—’ She broke off and flung herself down on the bed, its covers crumpled from their earlier lovemaking, remembering the first time he had made love to her here in this room, their passion for one another so intense that they hadn’t even made it to the bed. She had known that he would call and she had been so wildly excited. She had worn a softly draped dress by Chanel, over a silk satin chemise and matching French knickers, her stockings held up by silk garters, every item of clothing chosen for the speed with which it could be removed, although she had not told Greg that.

He had taken her in his arms the minute they were inside the room, leaning back against the door to close it and holding her against him, his hands stroking and kneading, exploring her with an avid hunger that had matched her own need. He had groaned out loud when she had teased his erection through the fabric of his trousers, shaping it and then running her fingertip along its length as though to measure it, pouting up at him, wanting to excite and torment him.

He had retaliated by nibbling the flesh just below her ear and stroking the soft curves of her breasts hidden from his view by the Chanel dress. When he had found the edge of her chemise bodice he had teased the flesh above it and then slowly eased it lower until her bare breasts were pressed against the fabric of her dress, her nipples swelling tightly when he pinched and toyed with them.

She hadn’t stopped him when he had pulled up her dress, and then lifted her in his arms, bracing her against the bedroom door, her arms and legs wrapped around him.

He had taken her quickly and fiercely, not even bothering to remove her knickers, simply pushing the loose legs to one side after he had unbuttoned himself.

She had screamed with excitement and pleasure, urging him deeper, panting and clinging to him as he thrust into her.

He had come too quickly for her, but she had pretended that she had had her own orgasm, putting him first – as she had done so many times since, she thought now, giving in to self-pity, before begging him, ‘Tell me you love me, Greg.’

‘You know that I do,’ he lied uncomfortably.

‘Say it. I want to hear the words.’

‘I love you.’

‘No, I want you to say it properly and mean it, like you used to.’

Her voice had begun to rise again. If she kept on like this someone would hear her. Greg began to sweat, the room felt like a prison and she his gaoler.

‘It’s late. I must go.’

‘No.’ She turned and ran to him, gripping the lapels of his jacket, clinging to him, pushing her body into his, grinding herself against him. ‘I want you to stay.’

‘You know that I can’t.’

‘Because of her: your grandmother. I suppose she has already picked out a wife for you.’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘But you wouldn’t mind if she had.’

‘This is silly talk …’

‘You think I’m silly? You didn’t think that when we first met. You loved me then. Remember? Tell me again what you thought the first time you saw me?’

It was a ritual he had enjoyed in the early days of their affair, but one that no longer held any appeal for him: a series of hoops through which he now had to jump before he could escape.

‘I thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,’ Greg told her obediently.

‘And what did you say to me?’

‘I said that I idolised and adored you, that I wanted you and loved you …’

‘And that you would love me for ever,’ she finished triumphantly. ‘You couldn’t get enough of me …’

It was true, Greg knew. There’d been times when he’d been so consumed by his own desire for her that he’d come almost the minute he was inside her. Hurried illicit couplings in dark corners and shadowy corridors, which their mutual lust had turned into fevered erotic encounters, like the time they’d been in the music room, whilst her husband attended to some business with his steward and she had gone to sit on the piano stool and told him to come and turn her music for her, waiting until he was standing next to her to lean over and unfasten his trousers, one hand expertly stroking his cock, the other picking out notes on the piano keys, whilst her tongue flicked busily against the tumescent shiny head.

‘I’ve always wanted to play on an organ,’ she had told him mock innocently.

He had taken her quickly and urgently, pushing up her skirts when she had arched over provocatively, presenting him with the rounded shape of her behind, plunging himself deep into the warm wetness of her waiting cleft, driving them both into a swift fierce orgasm whilst they heard the voices of her husband and his steward growing louder as they approached the music-room door.

Yes, there had been good times, but Greg did not want to be reminded of those now.

‘You said that, Greg,’ he could hear her insisting. ‘You said you would love me for ever and that you would never leave me.’

‘Well, I’m afraid I must leave you now, my sweet,’ he told her, taking refuge in a rueful smile and making the words teasingly light. ‘Because I certainly cannot stay all night.’