“Ye gods! Are you married?”
“No, of course not! But I’m not blind. I’ve seen a thing or two. What’s a wife, pray? The men use ’em worse than a dog nowadays. They think they’re good for nothing but to breed up their brats—and serve as a foil to a mistress. A wife gets a full belly every year, but a mistress gets all the money and attention. Be a wife? Pooh! Not me! Not for a thousand pound!”
“Well!” he said, obviously much relieved. “You talk like a woman of rare good sense. But you don’t seem very anxious to be a mistress, either. Surely you don’t expect to be that worthless object, a virgin, all your life? Not a woman like you.”
“Have I said I did? If a man I liked made me a fair offer, I assure you I’d do him the kindness to think it over.”
He smiled. “Well, now—we’re getting somewhere at last. And what’s your notion of a fair offer, pray?”
She leaned her elbow back on the mantelpiece and stood with her weight on one foot, the other bare knee sliding out of her satin dressing-gown; she began to count on her fingers. “I’d want a settlement of two hundred pound a year. I’d want lodgings of my own choosing, and a maid, and a neat little coach-and-four—and of course a coachman and footman—and leave to keep on acting.” She had no intention of quitting the stage, for she had met him there and hoped someday to meet another and more important man. As she saw what was possible for a young and beautiful and obliging woman, her ambitions soared.
“You set a damned high price on yourself.”
“Do I?” She smiled a little and gave a faint shrug. “Well—a high price, you know, serves to keep off ill company.”
“If I take you at that figure I’ll expect it to keep off all company, but mine.”
It took Amber several days to find the lodgings that suited her and she rattled all over town in a hackney, searching, whenever she could be free from the theatre. But at last she found a three-room suite on the third floor of the Blue Balcony, down at the fashionable Strand end of Drury Lane. The rent was high, forty pounds a year, but Captain Morgan paid it in advance.
Everything here was in the latest fashion, reflecting the light gay colourful taste of the new age. The parlour was hung in emerald-green damask. There were French tables and chairs of walnut, some of them gilt, and all very different from the heavy old oaken pieces she was accustomed to seeing in inns. A long walnut couch had thick green cushions, fringed with gold, and there were several green-and-gold lacquered mirrors. She decided immediately that she would have her portrait painted and sink it flush with the wall above the fireplace, like one she had seen in the apartments of another actress, who was in the keeping of a lord.
The walls of the dining-room were covered with hand-painted Chinese paper, flaunting peonies and chrysanthemums, all aswarm with brilliant-hued birds and butterflies. The chairs and stools had thick bright-green cushions tied to them. In the bedroom the hangings were also of damask, patterned in green and gold; there was a five-leaved screen, two leaves red and three green, and green-and-red-striped chair cushions.
“Oh!” cried Amber, when Captain Morgan went with her to see it and agreed that she might have it. “Thank you, Rex! I can’t wait to move in!”
“Neither can I,” he said. But she gave him a quick pout and then a smile.
“Now, Rex—remember what you said! You promised you’d wait.”
“And I will. But for God’s sake—not much longer.”
She insisted on having the whole of her allowance in advance and, when she got it, hunted out Shadrac Newbold—whose name, she remembered, Bruce Carlton had told her—and put it with him at six percent interest. In Cow Lane they found a second-hand coach which, though small, was freshly painted and in good condition. It was glossy black with red wheels and red reins and harness, and he bought four handsome black-and-white horses to draw it. The coachman and footman were named, respectively, Tempest and Jeremiah, and she ordered red livery trimmed with silver braid for them.
She hired her maid from an old woman Mrs. Scroggs recommended with the absolute assurance that the girl was honest, demure, and well-bred, that she could carve and sew and clean, would not sleep late or gossip to the neighbours or run about in slovenly dress. She was a plain-faced girl whose teeth had wide spaces between them and whose face was entirely covered with little pale freckles. Prudence was her name, which Amber did not like, for she remembered simple harmless Honour Mills who had been in league with a pair of thieves to rob her. But still the girl seemed anxious to please and looked so pitiful at the prospect of not being hired that Amber took her.
The first night at her new apartments she and Rex had an elaborate supper sent in from the Rose Tavern nearby and opened a bottle of champagne, but they scarcely drank a glass, for he picked her up impetuously and carried her into the bedroom. And yet for all his passionate fervour he was tender and considerate, as eager to give pleasure as to take it, and Amber thought that this was far more like a wedding-night than that wretched experience she had had with Luke Channell. For the first time in a year and a half she was wholly and completely satisfied, for Rex had the same combination of experience, energy, controlled violence, and instinctive understanding which Lord Carlton had also had.
There’s a world of difference, she told herself, between being a man’s mistress and his wife. And as far as she was concerned that difference was all for the better.
The next afternoon Amber found the women’s tiring-room buzzing like a swarm of angry hornets, and Beck Marshall was the centre of their chattering indignation. She realized instantly that they had heard about her and Rex. And though they all turned at once to fix upon her their cold wrathful stares, she sauntered into the room and pulled off her gloves with a great show of unconcern. Scroggs waddled over to her immediately, a self-satisfied grin on her ugly old face.
“Damn me, Mrs. St. Clare!” she said now, and her deep hoarse rough voice carried above all the noise of the room. “But it pleased me mightily to hear of your good fortune!” She leaned close, smelling strongly of brandy and spoilt fish, and gave Amber a jab in the ribs. “When ye asked me t‘other day where ye might hire a woman I says to m’self, ‘Aha! Mrs. St. Clare’s a-goin’ into keepin’, I’ll warrant you!’ But I’ll swear I never guessed the gentleman’d be Captain Morgan!” She leered and nudged, and jerked her thumb in the direction of the glowering group across the room.
Scroggs had taken Amber’s cloak and fan and muff and was helping her out of her gown. “Neither did anyone else, I see,” murmured Amber, glancing toward them with a significant lift of one eyebrow. She bent over to step out of her petticoats.
“Foh! Ye should’ve seen the look on the face of Mrs. Snotty-nose when she heard the news!” She laughed heartily, showing 250 the holes in her mouth where teeth had been, and slapped her great thigh. “Damn me! I thought she’d bust a gut!”
Amber smiled, taking the combs out of her side curls and giving her hair a shake. And then, as she looked at her, Beck’s head turned and their eyes met directly. For a long moment they stared, Amber exultant, taunting, Beck seething with rage, and then all at once Beck turned away, raising her right hand to show Amber the stiff middle finger. Amber laughed out loud at that and picked up the black wig she was to wear for her part as Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s tragedy, sliding it down over her own coarse bright silken hair.
She knew well enough herself that she was ill-suited to play the Egyptian queen—the part might much better have gone to Anne Marshall—but the idea had been Tom Killigrew’s and in her black wig with her eyes elongated by black pencil, a sleeveless sequin-spotted vest which just covered her breasts and a thin scarlet silk skirt slit to the knees in front, she had attracted an overflowing house for the past week and a half. Most productions were limited to three or four days, because so small a part of the London population attended plays, but some of the young men had been back four or five times to see this Cleopatra. They were used to a woman’s breasts being displayed in public, but not her hips and buttocks and legs. Every time she walked onto the stage there were whistles and murmurs and the most unabashed comments, but the boxes had been noticeably empty and the ladies were said to have protested they could not tolerate so lewd and immodest a display.