She was astonished, and scornful. “Why should I! I can’t trouble myself with those matters. Anyway—there’ll always be more money where this came from, I warrant you.”

“But my dear, you won’t always be young.”

She stared at him, a look of horrified and resentful surprise on her face. For though the passing years filled her with terror and her twenty-sixth birthday was but two weeks away, she had never let herself think that he might know she was growing older. In her own mind she would never be more than sixteen to Bruce Carlton. Now she sat, thoughtful and quiet, till they arrived back at the Palace, and once alone she rushed to a mirror.

She studied herself for several minutes, giving her skin and hair and teeth the most ruthless scrutiny, and finally she convinced herself that she had not yet begun to deteriorate. Her skin was as smooth and creamy, her hair as luxuriant and ripe in colour, her figure as fine as the first day she had seen him in Marygreen. There was, however, a change of which she was only vaguely conscious.

Then her face had been untouched by vivid experiences, now it gave unmistakable evidence of rich and full and violent living. The same eagerness and passion showed in her eyes and seemed, if anything, to have heightened. Whatever the years between had been they had served neither to destroy her confidence nor to moderate her enthusiasm; there was in her something indestructible.

Nan came into the room and found her mistress staring at herself with almost morbid intensity. “Nan!” she cried, the instant the door opened. “Am I beginning to decay?”

Nan looked at her, flabbergasted. “Beginning to decay? You?” She ran over to Amber and bent down to peer at her. “Lord, your Grace, you’ve never been handsomer in your life! You must be running distracted to say a thing like that!”

Amber looked up at her uncertainly, then back into the mirror again. Slowly her fingers reached up to touch her face. Of course I’m not! she thought. He didn’t mean that I was growing old. He didn’t say that. He only said that someday—

Someday—that was what she dreaded. She tossed the mirror down, got to her feet and walked swiftly across the room to begin changing her clothes for supper. But the thought that one day she would grow old, that her beauty—so flawless now—would perish at last, invaded her mind more and more insistently. She pushed it back but still it crept in, an insidious determined foe to her happiness ...

The first party that Amber gave at Ravenspur House cost her almost five thousand pounds. She invited several hundred guests and all of them came, as well as several dozen more who had not been asked, but who got in despite the guards stationed in front.

The food was deliciously prepared and served by a great horde of liveried footmen, all of them young and personable. There was champagne and burgundy in great silver tubs, and in spite of his Majesty’s presence several gentlemen drank too much. Music and shouts and laughter filled the house, reaching into every corner. While some of the guests danced others gathered around the card-tables or knelt in excited circles about a pair of rolling dice.

King Charles and Queen Catherine were there, as well as the town’s reigning courtesans. Jacob Hall and Moll Davis performed and—more privately—some of Madame Bennet’s naked dancing-girls. But the coup of the evening was when a harlot, who for some months had been attracting attention about town and amusing the Court by her credible imitation of Lady Castlemaine, arrived late wearing an exact replica of Barbara’s own gown. Amber had found out, by bribing one of the Lady’s serving-women, what she would wear, and had hired Madame Rouviere to duplicate the gown. Furious and humiliated, Barbara appealed to the King to punish the outrage, or at least send the creature away—but he was as much amused as he had been by the practical joke Nell Gwynne had played upon Moll Davis.

Barbara Palmer, Lord and Lady Carlton, and some few others left rather early, but everyone else stayed on.

At three in the morning breakfast was served, a breakfast as lavish as the supper had been, and at six the last stragglers were engaged in a pillow-fight. Two excitable young gallants fell into dispute, pulled out their swords and might have killed each other in the drawing-room—Charles was gone by then—but Amber put a stop to that and all their friends accompanied them to Marylebone Fields to settle the issue. And finally, exhausted but happy, Amber went upstairs to her gold-and-green-and-black bedroom to sleep.

Everyone seemed agreed there had not been such a successful party in months.

CHAPTER SIXTY–FIVE