Читаем Forever Amber полностью

“Well—” Bruce tossed the manuscript onto a table just behind him. “I would never have taken you for a book-collector.” His eyes narrowed. “How the devil did you get here?”

She ran toward him. “I had to see you, Bruce! Please don’t be angry with me! Tell me what’s happened! Why have you been avoiding me?”

He frowned slightly, but did not look away. “I didn’t know any other way to do it—without a quarrel.”

“Without a quarrel! I’ve heard you say that a hundred times! You, who made your living fighting!”

He smiled. “Not with women.”

“Oh, I promise you, Bruce, I didn’t come to quarrel! But you’ve got to tell me what happened! One day you came to see me and we were happy together—and the next you’d scarce speak! Why?” She spread her hands in a gesture of pleading.

“You must know, Amber. Why pretend you don’t?”

“Almsbury told me, but I wouldn’t believe him. I still can’t believe it. You, of all men, being led by the nose by your wife!”

He sat down on the top of the table near which they were standing and braced one foot on a chair. “Corinna isn’t the kind of woman who leads a man by the nose. I decided myself—for a reason I don’t think I can explain to you.”

“Why not?” she demanded, half insulted at that. “My understanding’s as good as another’s, I’ll warrant you! Oh, but you must tell me, Bruce. I’ve got to know! I have a right to know!”

He took a deep breath. “Well—I suppose you heard that Castlemaine showed Corinna the lampoon—but she said she’d known we were lovers long before that. She’s gone through a kind of agony these last weeks we don’t know anything about. Adultery may seem no serious matter to us, but it is to her. She’s innocent, and what’s more, she loves me—I don’t want to hurt her any more than I have.”

“But what about me?” she cried. “I love you as much as she does! My God, I think I know a thing or two about agony myself! Or doesn’t it mean anything to you if I’m hurt?”

“Of course it does, Amber, but there’s a difference.”

“What!”

“Corinna’s my wife and we’ll live together the rest of our lives. In a few months I’ll be leaving England and I won’t come back again—I’m done travelling. Your life is here and mine is in America—after I go this time we’ll never see each other again.”

“Never—see each other again?” Her speckled tawny eyes stared at him, her lips half-parted over the words. “Never—” She had said that to Almsbury only an hour before, but it sounded different to her now, coming from him. Suddenly she seemed to realize exactly what it would mean. “Never, Bruce! Oh, darling, you can’t do this to me! I need you as much as she does—I love you as much as she does! If all the rest of your life belongs to her you can give me a little of it now—She’d never even know, and if she didn’t know she couldn’t be hurt! You can’t be here in London all these next six months and never see me—I’d die if you did that to me! Oh, Bruce, you can’t do it! You can’t!”

She threw herself against him, pounding her fists softly on his chest, sobbing with quiet, desperate, mournful little sobs. For a long while he sat, his arms hanging at his sides, not touching her; and then at last he drew her close against him between his legs, his mouth crushing down on hers with a kind of angry hunger. “Oh, you little bitch,” he muttered. “Someday I’ll forget you—someday I’ll—”

He rented apartments in a lodging-house in Magpie Yard, just about a mile from the Palace within the old settled district which had been missed by the Fire. They had two large rooms, furnished handsomely in the pompous heavy style of seventy years before. There were bulbous-legged tables, immense boxlike chairs, enormous chests, a high-backed settle next the fireplace and worn tapestry on the walls. The oak bed was of majestic proportions with carved pillars and head-board, and it was hung with dark-red velvet which, though faded by the years, showed a richer, truer colour deep in the folds. Diamond-paned windows looked down three stories into a brick-paved courtyard on one side and the noisy busy street on the other.

They met there two or three times a week, usually in the afternoons but sometimes at night. Amber had promised him that Corinna would never know they were still seeing each other and, like a little girl put on her good behaviour, she took the most elaborate precautions to insure perfect secrecy. If they met in the afternoon she left Whitehall in her own clothes and coach, went to a tavern where she changed and sent Nan out by the front door in a mask and the garments she had been wearing—while she left in her own disguise by some other exit. At night she took a barge or a hackney, but then Big John was always with her.

She went to a great deal more trouble than was really necessary to conceal herself, for she enjoyed it.