Silk

‘Well, yes, I don’t doubt she did, but she was a great beauty, of course, and Great-grandfather was pretty well-to-do. I’d wager she convinced herself that she would land him. She was accepted socially by the county set, from what I’ve been told, and that must have made her think that she stood a good chance of becoming Barrant’s wife.’

‘The county set?’ Amber queried. ‘Like the Fitton Leghs and the Bromley Davenports?’

‘Well, the Bromley Davenports, certainly; I’m not so sure about the Fitton Leghs, seeing as Barrant de Vries eventually married a Fitton Legh.’

‘But Grandmother socialises with the Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley now. They are on the same charitable committees, and—’

‘There is a vast difference, my dear Amber, between socialising with a person and allowing them to marry into one’s family,’ Greg told Amber in such a good imitation of their grandmother’s voice and manner that Amber couldn’t help but smile.

‘One day Grandmother will hear you doing that and then you’ll be in trouble.’

‘You’ll be the one in trouble if you go downstairs talking about art school.’

‘But I still can’t see what Barrant de Vries not wanting to marry Grandmother has to do with her wanting me to be presented, Greg.’

‘Well, you should. She’s not the kind to forget a slight or an insult, is she?’

Amber shook her head. What Greg was saying was true. Their grandmother could be ruthless when it suited her. She had certainly never forgiven Amber’s own mother for marrying Amber’s father against her wishes.

Amber gave a small shiver.

‘Knowing what I do now, it’s my belief that Grandmother only bought this estate because it’s right next to the de Vrieses’ lands, and to let Barrant de Vries know that she owns more land and a bigger house than he does,’ Greg went on. ‘She’s even employing his grandson as her estate manager. It’s her way of humiliating Barrant for humiliating her. Everyone knows that Barrant de Vries lost virtually everything after the war, including his only son – who died without producing an heir. But that’s not enough for Grandmother, Amber. She wants us to get for her what she could not get for herself. Especially you. I cannot, after all, marry a title, but you can. The war has beggared any number of aristocratic families. You only have to think of how many of them are marrying off their sons to the daughters of American millionaires to know that.’

Amber did know it. After all, their neighbour, Lord Fitton Legh, had married an American heiress the previous year, and it was widely accepted that the marriage had been brokered to provide him with money and the bride with a title.

As though he had read her mind Greg teased her, ‘You should think yourself lucky that Grandmother obviously didn’t think the Fitton Legh title good enough. But then, of course she’ll want one that outranks the de Vries title, you can bet on that, and that’s why she’ll want you to be presented at court.’

Before Amber could say anything Greg went on, ‘Grandmother may have the money to buy a title for you, but it ain’t that easy. What I mean is, you’ll need to be mixing with the right people, and you can’t do that unless you’ve got the right credentials, and for a girl that means a court presentation. What Grandmother wants is a granddaughter who will have a title far, far better than the one that Barrant de Vries denied her, and that she can flaunt in front of everyone who laughed at her behind her back when Barrant rejected her.’

It was almost too much for Amber to take in.

‘Greg, please don’t say things like that. It isn’t nice,’ she begged her cousin. ‘I know you like to play jokes on me but—’

‘Amber, I’m not joking.’

‘Has Grandmother told you that this is the case?’

‘No.’

‘So you’re just guessing, Greg. I’m sure you’re wrong. For one thing—’

‘I’m not wrong, Amber. If you must have the truth I happened to be outside her study when she was talking to Jay Fulshawe about it. Something to do with making a payment to some Lady somebody or other to bring you out.’

‘Jay knows?’ It seemed like a double betrayal. She liked Jay, and had even felt sorry for him, obliged to work so very hard for her grandmother, whilst Greg, who had been at Eton with him, enjoyed a life of leisure.

Amber had to sit down, she was trembling so much. It couldn’t be true. It mustn’t be true.

‘I don’t want a titled husband. I don’t want to get married yet and when I do—’

‘It’s what Grandmother wants that counts. Not what we want.’

Greg wasn’t joking now. In fact he looked more serious than Amber could ever remember seeing him before.

‘There’s no doubt about that,’ he warned her. ‘She always gets what she wants.’ He looked at her and smiled wryly. ‘Remember the way she got this house and the estate. Lord Talbot’s trustees didn’t really want to sell Denham Place to her, but in the end they had no choice, not with the death duties the estate had to pay after Lord Talbot died without an heir.’

Greg’s mention of Denham Place momentarily diverted Amber. She loved the beautiful Vanbrugh-designed house, with its classical lines and its famously elegant row of rooms on the first floor. Not that Denham would ever be hers.

‘Denham is beautiful, Greg,’ she told her cousin dreamily. ‘It’s supposed to be among Vanbrugh’s own favourites, even though it’s one of the smallest houses he designed.’

Greg shrugged. He wasn’t in the least bit interested in architecture or design.

The clock struck three. ‘Grandmother will be waiting for you.’

And Greg had an appointment to keep, although the truth of the matter was that he was not so sure that he really wanted to keep it. What had begun as exciting had recently started to become burdensome. Greg didn’t particularly care for intense emotions, and he certainly did not like tearful scenes, but the devil of it was that he was now in a situation from which he was finding it damnably difficult to extricate himself.

Given half a chance he would have leaped at the opportunity to go to London, with its private supper clubs and the louche living available to those of privilege. Drinking, gambling, flirting with pretty women who knew the rules of the game – these were far more to his taste than dull meetings with members of the local Conservative Party committee.

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.