Amber shut her teeth and refused to be goaded. For a long moment they faced each other. At last she repeated: “Will you please send him to Almsbury’s?”
He smiled faintly, pleased to have her in this humiliating predicament. “Very well. I’ll send him tomorrow.” The favour, though granted, was like a slap.
Amber’s eyes lowered.
“Thank you, sir.”
Someday, she was thinking, I’ll slit your gullet, you damned old cannibal.
On the ist of February Charles returned to Whitehall. There were deep snows on the ground, the church bells pealed out merrily, and at night great bonfires lighted the black winter sky, welcoming the King home. Her Majesty, however, and all the ladies had remained at Hampton Court. Castlemaine had recently given birth to another son; the Queen had miscarried again. And York was not speaking to his Duchess because he thought—or pretended to think—that she had been having an affair with handsome Henry Sidney.
Radclyffe went to wait upon the King, but Amber could not go to Court until the women returned, when she might be presented at a ball or some other formal occasion. However, having once paid his respects, Radclyffe did not go often to Whitehall. He was not the sort of man King Charles would take for a confidant and his religion barred him from ever holding an office. Furthermore, he had been too long away from Court. A new generation was setting the pace, and it was not the pace at which his own had moved. There was a new way of living, which he considered to be shallow, frivolous, lacking in grace or purpose. Most of the men he judged either knaves or fools or both and the women he thought a pack of empty-headed sluts. He included his wife in this category.
To Amber it seemed that time passed more slowly than ever before. She spent hours with Susanna, helping her learn to walk, building block castles and playing with her, singing her the dozens of nursery rhymes she remembered from her own childhood. She adored her—but she could not build a whole life around her. She longed for that great exciting world to which she had bought and paid her admission and which she might now enter proudly by the front door, not sneak into like a culprit through some back passageway. She was glad that Radclyffe was not interested in the gay life at the Palace, for that would leave her all the more free to enjoy it herself.
She wanted nothing so much as to get away from him. She felt as though he was casting some evil spell over her, for though she did not actually see him often he seemed to hang forever at her shoulder, to lurk in her mind—sombre and dreaded. Alone in the house as she was and with few diversions, everything that was said or done by either of them assumed a magnified importance. She mulled over each word spoken, each glance exchanged, every action, worrying it like a dog with a bone.
Once, out of boredom, she ventured into his laboratory.
She tried the door, found it open, and went in quietly, so as not to disturb him. Great stacks of books and manuscripts, recently sent down from Lime Park, were piled on the floor. There were several skulls, hundreds of jars and bottles, oil-lamps, pottery vessels of every shape and size—all the paraphernalia of alchemy. He was engaged, she knew, in the “Great Work”—a tedious, complicated process of seven years which had as its goal the discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone—a search that was occupying some of the best minds of the age.
As she entered he stood before a table, his back to her, carefully measuring a yellow powder. She said nothing but walked toward him, her eyes going curiously over the loaded shelves and tables. All at once he gave a start and the bottle dropped from his hands.
Amber jumped backward to avoid spotting her gown. “Oh! I’m sorry.”
“What are you doing in here!”
Her anger flared quickly. “I just came in to look! Is there any harm in that?”
He relaxed, smoothing the scowl from his face. “Madame, there are several places where women do not belong—under any circumstances at all. A laboratory is one of them. Pray don’t interrupt me again. I’ve spent too many years and too much money on this project to have it ruined now by a woman’s blundering.”
After alchemy his greatest interest was his library, where he spent many hours of each day. For most of his life he had been collecting rare books and manuscripts, which he kept all in precise order, listing each one carefully and with a full account of everything that pertained to it. But his interest in books was more than mere pleasure in possession, in the look and feel of fine leather and old paper. He read them as well. There were Greek plays; Cicero’s letters and the meditations of Marcus Aurelius; Plutarch and Dante; Spanish plays; French philosophers and scientists—all in their original languages.
He did not forbid Amber the library, but it was not until they had been married for several weeks that she went into it. She had now become so desperate for entertainment that she was finally willing to read a book. But she had not realized that he was there and when she saw him, sitting beside the fireplace with a pen in his hand and a great volume lying open on the writing-table, she hesitated a moment, then started out again. He glanced up, saw her, and to her surprise got politely to his feet, smiling.
“Pray come in, madame. I see no reason why a woman may not enter a library—even though she isn’t likely to find much in it to her taste. Or are you that freak of man and nature—a learned female?”
His mouth, as he spoke the last sentence, turned ironically down. In common with most men—no matter what their own intellectual interests and acquirements might be—he considered education for women absurd and even amusing. Amber ignored the jibe; it was not a subject on which she could be easily offended.
“I thought I might find something to pass the time with. Have you got any plays written in English?”
“Several. What do you prefer—Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve acted ’em all.” She knew that he did not like any reference to her acting and mentioned it frequently to annoy him. So far he had refused the bait.
But now he looked at her with obvious displeasure. “Madame, I had hoped your own sense of shame would prevent you from making any further reference to so unfortunate an episode in your life. Pray, let me hear no more about it.”
“Why not? I’m not ashamed of it!”
“I am.”
“It didn’t keep you from marrying me!”
From across the dozen or so feet that separated them they eyed each other. Amber had long felt sure that if once she could break through his coldness and composure she would have him at her mercy. If I ever hit him, she had told herself a dozen times, I’d never be afraid of him again. But she could not quite bring herself to do it. She knew well enough that he had a strong streak of cruelty, a malevolent savagery—highly refined, as were all his vices. But she had not found any restraining rein of conscience or compassion. Therefore she hesitated out of fear, and hated herself for the cowardice.
“No,” he agreed at last. “It didn’t keep me from marrying you—for you had other attractions which I found it impossible to resist.”
“Yes!” snapped Amber. “Sixty-six thousand of ’em!”
Radclyffe smiled. “How perceptive,” he said, “for a woman!”
For several seconds she glared at him, longing violently to smash her fist into his face. She had the feeling that it would crumble, like a mummy’s, beneath any hard and sudden blow, and she could picture his expression of horror as his face disintegrated. Suddenly she turned toward the book-shelves.
“Well, where are they! The plays!”
“On this shelf, madame. Take whatever you want.”
She picked out three or four at random, hastily, for she was anxious to get away from him. “Thank you, sir,” she said without looking at him, and started out. Just as she reached the door she heard his voice again.