It was two hours later as they sat on her long green velvet-cushioned settle, empty wine-glasses in their hands and staring into the last glow of the sea-coal fire, that Almsbury drew her into his arms and kissed her. For a moment she hesitated, her body tense, thinking of Rex and how furious he would be if another man kissed her, and then—because she liked Almsbury and because he meant Bruce Carlton to her—she relaxed against him and made no protest until, at last, he asked her to go into the bedroom.
Then suddenly she shook back her hair and pulled the front of her gown together. “Oh, Lord, Almsbury! I can’t! I should never have even let you think I would!” She got up, feeling a little dizzy from the wine, and leaned her head against the mantelpiece.
“Good God, Amber! I thought you were grown up now!” He sounded exasperated and more than a little angry.
“Oh, it isn’t that, Almsbury. It isn’t because I’m still—” She was about to say “waiting for Bruce,” but stopped. “It’s Rex. You don’t know him. He’s jealous as an Italian uncle. He’d murder you in a trice—and turn me out of keeping.”
“He wouldn’t if he didn’t know anything about it.”
She smiled, skeptically, turning her head to look at him, though her hair fell forward over her face. “Was there ever a man yet who could lie with a woman and not tell all his acquaintance within the hour? The gallants say that’s half the pleasure of fornication—telling about it afterwards.”
“Well, I’m no gallant, and you damned well know it. I’m just a man who’s in love with you. Oh, maybe I shouldn’t say that. I don’t know whether I’m in love with you or not. But I’ve wanted you since the first day I saw you. You know now that what I told you that night is true, so don’t put me off any longer. How much do you want? I’ll give you two hundred pound—put it with your goldsmith, toward the day when you’ll need it.”
The money was a convincing argument, but the thought that someday Bruce Carlton might hear about it—and be hurt—was even more so.
It was true, as Amber had told Almsbury, that Rex Morgan wanted to marry her. During the past seven months they had been happy and content, leading a life of merry companionable domesticity. They took an instinctive pleasure in doing the same things, and it was heightened always by a warm suffusing glow of happiness at the mere fact of being together.
The summer just past they had been together most of the time, for with the King out of town Rex had no official duties and the theatres were always closed for a vacation period of several weeks—though twice Amber had gone down with the rest of the Company to perform before their Majesties at Hampton Court. With Prudence or Gatty or whomever she might have in service, they would pack a hamper and ride out Goswell Street on warm June evenings to eat a picnic supper at the lonely, pretty little village of Islington. Several times they found a quiet spot in the river and pulled off their clothes to go swimming, laughing and splashing in the cool clean water, and afterwards while she dried her hair Rex would catch a few fish for them to take home.
Or they rowed up the river in a hired scull, Amber with her shoes and stockings off and her ankles trailing in the water, screaming with delighted laughter to hear Rex bandy insults and curses with the watermen—caustic-tongued old ruffians who amused themselves by hooting and jeering obscenely at everyone who ventured upon the river, whether Quakeress or Parliament man. At Chelsea they would get out to lie dreamily in the thick meadow grass, watching the clouds as they formed and passed overhead, and Amber would fill her skirt with wildflowers, yellow primroses, blue hyacinths, white dogwood. Then she would open the hamper and spread a clean white linen cloth, laying on it the potted neat’s tongue, the salad which the celebrated French cook at Chatelin’s had made for her with twenty different greens, fresh ripe fruits, and a dusty bottle of Burgundy.
They seldom quarrelled—only when, rightly or wrongly, Rex’s jealousy was aroused, though before she had seen Almsbury she had never been unfaithful to him. But she did drive out to Kingsland to see the baby once a week. For a long while she contrived to keep her visits secret from him, but one day, to her astonishment, he accused her of having been with another man. During the violent quarrel which ensued she told him where she had been—and told him also that she was married.
For two or three days he was angry, but no matter what lies he caught her in he did not seem to love her less, and even after that he asked her again to marry him. She had refused before, pretending that she thought he was only joking, but now she objected that it was impossible. Bigamy was punishable by death.
“He’ll never come back,” said Rex. “But if he does—well, you let me alone for that. I’ll see to it you’re a widow, not a bigamist.”
But Amber could not make up her mind to do it. She still had a lingering horror of matrimony, for it seemed to her a trap in which a woman, once caught, struggled helplessly and without hope. It gave a man every advantage over her body, mind and purse, for no jury in the land would interest itself in her distress. But neither that horror nor the greater one she had of being prosecuted for bigamy was the real reason behind her refusal. She hesitated because in her heart she still nursed an imp of ambition, and it would not let her rest.
If I marry Rex, she would think, what will my life be? He’d make me quit the stage and I’d have to start having babies. (Rex resented the child she had had—he thought by her first husband—even though he had never seen the little boy, and had a sentimental desire for her to bear him a son.) And then most likely he’d grow more jealous than ever and if I so much as came home a half-hour late from the ’Change or smiled at a gentleman in the Mall he’d tear himself to pieces.
He probably wouldn’t be as generous as he is now, either, and if I spent thirty pound for a new gown there’d be trouble and he’d think last year’s cloak could do me again. First thing you know I’d grow fat and pot-bellied and dwindle into a wife —and before I was twenty my life would be over. No, I like it better this way. I’ve got all the advantages of being a wife because he loves me and won’t put me aside, and none of the disadvantages because I’m free and my own mistress and can leave him any time I like.
She had heard that King Charles had remarked more than once he considered her to be the finest-woman on the stage, and that in particular after her last performance at Hampton Court he had told someone he envied the man who kept her.
A fortnight or so after Almsbury’s return to town Amber got a new maid. She dismissed Gatty one day when the girl surprised her taking a bath and talking to his Lordship, sending her away with the warning that Almsbury had a great interest at Court and would order her tongue cut out if she spoke to anyone at all of what she had seen. She told Rex that she had turned the girl away because she was pregnant, and sent Jeremiah to post a notice for a serving-woman in St. Paul’s Cathedral, where a good deal of such business was done.
But that same morning as she was riding from the New Exchange to a rehearsal, her coach stopped at the golden-crowned Maypole, and while Tempest was bellowing abuse at the driver and occupants of the coach that blocked his way, the door was flung open and a girl leaped in. Her hair was dishevelled and her eyes looked wild.
“Please, mam!” she cried. “Tell ’im I’m your maid!” Her pretty face was intense and pleading, her voice passionate. “Oh, Jesus! Here he comes! Please, mam!” She gave Amber a last imploring look and then retreated far back into one corner, pulling the hood of her cloak up over her red-blonde curls.