Читаем Forever Amber полностью

It was a handsome new building in St. Martin’s Lane, between Holborn, Drury Lane, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where she would be surrounded by persons of the best quality. The house was four stories high with one apartment on each floor and there was a top half-story for the servants. Amber’s apartment was on the second floor; a pretty young girl just in from the country with her aunt to find a husband was above her, and a rich middle-aged widow occupied the fourth. The landlady, Mrs. de Lacy, lived below Amber. She was a frail creature who sighed frequently and complained of the vapours, and who talked of nothing but her former wealth and position, lost in the Wars along with a husband whom she had never been able to replace.

The house was called the Plume of Feathers and a large wooden sign swung out over the street just below Amber’s parlour windows—it depicted a great swirling blue plume painted on a gilt background and was supported by a very ornate wrought-iron frame, also gilded. The coach-house and stables were up the street only a short distance. And the narrow little lane was packed with the homes and lodgings of gallants, noblemen, titled ladies and many others who frequented Whitehall. Red heels and silver swords, satin gowns and half masks, periwigs and feathered hats, painted coaches and dainty high-bred horses made a continuous parade beneath her window.

The apartments were the most splendid she had ever seen.

There was an anteroom hung in purple-and-gold-striped satin, furnished with two or three gilt chairs and a Venetian mirror. It opened into one end of a long parlour which had massed diamond-paned windows overlooking the street on one side and the courtyard on another. The marble fireplace had a plaster overmantel reaching to the ceiling, lavishly decorated with flowers, beasts, swags, geometrical figures and nude women. The chimney-shelf was lined with Chinese and Persian vases, there was a silver chandelier, and the furniture was either gilded or inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. Nothing, Mrs. de Lacy explained proudly, had been made in England. The emerald-and-yellow satin draperies were loomed in France, the mirrors came from Florence, the marble in the fireplace from Genoa, the cabinets from Naples, the violet-wood for two tables from New Guinea.

The bedroom was even more sybaritic. The bedstead was covered with cloth-of-silver and all hangings were green taffeta; even the chairs were covered with silver cloth. Several wardrobes were built into the walls and there was a small separate bench-bed with a canopy and tight-rolled bolster for lounging, surely the most elegant little thing Amber had ever seen. And there were three other rooms, nursery, dining-parlour and kitchen, which last she did not expect to use.

The rent was exorbitant—one hundred and twenty-five pounds a year—but Amber had the merest contempt for such small change and paid it without a word of protest, though she hoped and expected that she would not be there even half that long. For Bruce should be back soon; he had been gone now more than eight months and the Pool was crowded again with captured merchant-shipping.

She moved her belongings from Dangerfield House before she herself left, and though the process took three or four days no one came near or commented on what she was taking, not all of which strictly belonged to her. She had hired a wet-nurse and a dry-nurse for the baby, and now she hired three maids, which completed the equipage necessary to a woman of fashion living alone. The day she left, the great house was perfectly silent; she scarcely saw a servant and not even one of the children appeared in the hallways. Nothing could have told her more plainly than this silent contempt how they hated her.

But Amber did not care at all. They were nothing to her now—those stiff precise formal people who lived in a world she despised. She sank back onto the seat of her coach with a sigh of relief.

“Drive away! Well—” she turned to Nan. “That’s over-thank God.”

“Aye,” agreed Nan, softly but with real feeling. “Thank God.”

They sat quietly, looking out the windows as the coach jogged along, enjoying everything they saw. It was a dirty foggy day and the moisture in the air made stronger than ever the heterogeneous and evil smells of London. Along one side of the street swaggered a young beau with his arm in a sling from a recent duel. Across the way a couple of men, obviously French, had been caught by a group of little boys who were screaming insults at them and throwing refuse picked up out of the kennels. The English hated all foreigners, but Frenchmen most of all. A ragged one-eyed old fish-woman lurched drunkenly along, holding by its tail a mouldering mackerel and bawling out her unintelligible chant.

All at once Nan gave a little gasp, one hand pressed to her mouth and the other pointing. “Look! There’s another one!”

“Another what?”

“Another cross!”