Читаем Forever Amber полностью

He laughed. “I’ll try!” He gave her a wave and turned to go back onto the ship. The coach moved on and the crowds closed between them; he disappeared from her sight.

Amber entered her apartments, still too full of the warm luxuriant afterglow of Bruce’s love-making to have begun thinking of Jemima again. It was an unpleasant shock to find the girl there, waiting for her.

Jemima was tense and excited. “May I see you alone, Madame?”

Amber felt very superior; triumphant. “Why, of course, Jemima.”

Nan herded the other servants out of the room, all but Tansy who stayed where he was, sitting cross-legged on the floor absorbed in working a Chinese puzzle which Samuel had brought him more than a week ago. A servant took Amber’s muff and fan and gloves, one of which Amber had lost. She was careless with her belongings, they were so easily replaced; and if she lost something it gave her an excuse to buy another.

Amber turned and faced her step-daughter. “Now,” she said casually, raising her hands to her hair. “What d’you want?”

The two women, both of them beautiful and expensively dressed, with well-bred features, presented a strange contrast. For one was obviously unsophisticated and essentially innocent, while the other was just as obviously the reverse. But it was not the way she looked, nor was it anything in her manner. It was rather a certain indefinable aura which hung about her, like a wickedly fascinating perfume, redolent of passion and recklessness and a greed for living.

Jemima was too overwrought, too disappointed and unhappy and angry to try to be subtle. “Where ’ve you been!” It was no question, but an accusation.

Amber gave her eyebrows a lift, and twisted around to straighten the seams in her stockings. “That’s none of your business.”

“Well, whether it’s any of my business or not, I know! Look at this—it’s yours, isn’t it!” She held out a glove.

Amber glanced at it and then her eyes narrowed. She snatched it away. “Where’d you get that!”

“You know where I got it! It was lying on the floor in the master-cabin of the Dragon!”

“Well, what if it was? I hope I can visit a man who’s gone to sea to fight the Dutch!”

“Visit him! Don’t try to put that upon me! I know what kind of visiting you do! I know what you are! You’re a harlot—! You’ve cuckolded my father!”

Amber stood and stared at Jemima and her flesh began to crawl with loathing and hatred. “You whining little bitch,” she said slowly. “You’re jealous, aren’t you? You’re jealous because I got what you wanted.” She began to mimic her, repeating exactly the words and tone Jemima had used scarcely an hour before, but giving to them a savage twist that mocked and ridiculed. “Then now! Oh, Bruce, please! Just this once more—” She laughed, enjoying the horror and humiliation that came onto Jemima’s face.

“Oh,” said Jemima softly. “I never knew what you were like before—”

“Well, now you do but it won’t do you any good.” Amber was brisk and confident, thinking that she would settle Jemima’s business for her now, once and forever. “Because if you’re thinking to tell your father what you know about me, just stop long enough to consider what he’d say if he knew that his daughter had been sneaking out of the house to meet a man at public taverns! He’d be stark staring mad!”

“How do you know that!”

“Lord Carlton told me.”

“You couldn’t prove it—”

“Oh, couldn’t I? I could call in a midwife and have you examined, remember!”

Amber had been about to order Jemima triumphantly from the room, when her next words came with the unexpected shock of a mid-summer thunderclap. “Call in anyone you like! I don’t care what you do! But I can tell you this much—either you make Father stop my-wedding to Joseph Cuttle or I’ll tell him about you and Lord Carlton!”

“You wouldn’t dare! Why it—it might kill him!”

“It might kill him! Much you’d care! That’s what you want and you know it! Oh, the rest of them were right about you all along! What a fool I was not to see it! But I know what you are now—you’re nothing but a whore.”

“And so are you. The only difference between us is that I got what I went for—and you didn’t.”

Jemima gasped and the next instant lashed out with the palm of her right hand and smacked Amber on the cheek. So swiftly that it seemed to be part of the same movement Amber returned the slap, and with her other hand she grabbed a fistful of hair and gave a jerk that snapped Jemima’s head back like a chicken’s. Jemima screamed in sudden fright and viciously Amber slapped her again. Her self-control had slipped away and she was not even wholly conscious of what she was doing. Jemima began to struggle to free herself, now genuinely terrified and screeching for help. The sight of her scared eyes and the sound of her cries infuriated Amber; she had a sudden savage determination to kill her. It was Nan, who rushed into the room and threw herself between them, who saved Jemima from a serious mauling.

“Mam!” she was shouting. “Mam! For God’s sake! Are you mad!”