PENNY JORDAN - Silk

‘I wish my grandmother could be more like you. To her, having a title is all that matters.’

Jay looked at her. ‘Never fear, Amber, one day you will be able to tread your own path and make your own decisions.’

The smile he gave her illuminated his whole face, turning his eyes the colour of molten silver, and for no reason she could think of, Amber’s heart started to beat far too heavily and fast. She felt as though she was standing on the brink of something very important. Something she wanted to reach out for but at the same time feared. Without quite knowing what she was doing she took a step towards him, and then very quickly two steps back, half stumbling as she did so, so that Jay reached out to steady her, his hand on her arm. His fingers were long, and his nails clean and cared for. A gentleman’s hands. The words slipped through her head. She looked up at him, studying his face. The shadowy semidarkness threw into relief the strength of his bone structure, drawing him in light and shade, planes and hollows. He was looking back at her just as intently, the silence between them intense and compelling.

Amber had an extraordinary yearning to reach out and touch him; to trace the shape of his jaw and the curve of his cheekbone. She was breathing too fast, both shocked and excited by her own feelings.

‘Jay …’

The moment she spoke his name he released her and stepped back.

‘You had better go in. It’s getting cold and your grandmother will be wondering where you are.’

‘Yes.’

He was turning away from her.

‘Jay!’

He stopped and looked at her.

‘I just wanted to say that I hope whatever your dreams are that they will come true for you.’

He hoped that they would – for her sake – but he feared that life might not be that kind.

Chapter Five

January 1930

Amber and her grandmother arrived in Cadogan Place late in the afternoon, when the trees were a dull silver grey with a combination of frost and icy fog, their poor skeletal branches reaching upwards like the hands of the children the new arrivals had seen begging as they had driven through the streets from Euston Station.

A butler, bent over with age and with a drip at the end of his nose, let them into a hall that, whilst elegantly proportioned, was so cold that Amber shivered inside her winter coat, although she noticed that her grandmother did no more than discreetly draw her furs closer to her body. Since Amber was too young, in her grandmother’s view, to carry proper furs as they should be worn, her coat collar was merely trimmed with mink.

Lady Rutland received them in her private sitting room on the first floor, which smelled faintly of old furniture and damp. It was not Louise’s mother, tall and thin, with a rigidly straight back and a voice as chilly as the room, who took control of the conversation though, but Amber’s grandmother, with her cut-glass accent and her cool demeanour.

It had been arranged that Blanche would stay in London for one week in order to ensure that everything was properly in place for Amber’s eventual presentation, at one of the late April drawing rooms, and Amber was not really surprised, knowing her grandmother as she did, that when the end of the week arrived and her grandmother was stepping out of the house in Cadogan Place and into the chauffeur-driven Bentley she had hired for the duration of her visit, not only had a lady’s maid been engaged for Amber and Louise to share, but also appointments been made and undertaken at couturiers and a court dressmaker, and every detail of Amber’s new wardrobe meticulously discussed with them. Both girls had been enrolled at the Vacani School of Dancing for deportment and formal presentation curtsy lessons, and with the Comtesse du Brissac for conversational French, etiquette, and ‘the social graces’. Her grandmother had also managed to transform the icy-cold house they had walked into only a matter of days earlier, where unappetising food was served and the bed linen always felt damp, into one in which fires burned in every room, including the girls’ bedrooms, meals appeared on time and were delicate enough to tempt the smallest of appetites, extra servants had been engaged with a proper smartness and briskness about them, and a brand-new furnace had been installed to ensure that in future the ladies of the household could enjoy proper hot baths. A chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce had also been hired for the duration of the season, and accounts opened for Amber at those stores where she might need to purchase small personal necessities during her stay.

Now as her grandmother prepared to leave, she looked sharply at Amber and reminded her, ‘You will remember, I hope, that you are my granddaughter and that I expect you to behave accordingly. You will obey Lady Rutland at all times. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Grandmother,’ Amber replied obediently. What after all was the point of her saying anything else?

When Blanche embraced her she dutifully kissed her grandmother’s cheek. She could sense that her lack of enthusiasm and gratitude irritated her grandmother but she was not going to pretend that she wanted the future her grandmother had planned for her.

Blanche released her and stepped back, warning briskly, ‘Remember what I have told you, Amber. I have no wish to receive any complaints about your behaviour from Lady Rutland.’

‘No, Grandmother.’

Amber could hear the impatience in her grandmother’s exhaled breath, as she indicated that the waiting servant was to open the door.

Amber watched until her grandmother’s car was out of sight. She wasn’t going to miss her – not one bit – but she did feel unexpectedly alone.

Blanche had been gone just minutes when Louise launched her first attack on Amber, following her upstairs to her bedroom, and standing in the doorway, blocking Amber’s exit.

‘You needn’t think that I’m going to pretend that I want you here or that I like you,’ she informed Amber nastily, ‘because I don’t. No one will speak to you or have anything to do with you. You know that, don’t you? I shall tell everyone what you really are.’

‘And shall you tell them also that my grandmother is paying your mother to bring me out?’ Amber asked her quietly.

Louise’s cheeks burned bright red, revealing to Amber that she had scored a hit, and to Amber’s relief Louise turned on her heel without another word.

That exchange was to set the tone for the whole of their relationship.

If Lady Rutland knew of Louise’s hostility towards Amber she gave no sign of it. Lady Rutland was not what Amber would have called a loving mother or partisan in any way on her daughter’s behalf, and it seemed to Amber that she treated Louise every bit as coldly as she treated Amber herself. Not that Louise seemed to care about that, or the fact that her mother was scarcely ever there since she had a busy social life of her own. Louise’s mother certainly didn’t ensure that the two girls were chaperoned as carefully as Amber knew her own grandmother would have done.

Amber longed to be able to go home to Macclesfield. She missed Greg’s teasing and his silly jokes, and she missed Jay too. She had been dreadfully homesick when she had first been sent away to school, but this was different. When she had been at school she had believed she had something to look forward to, a future she could choose for herself. Now she dreaded what lay ahead.

A maid had been hired to escort the girls to their various lessons, but it seemed that Lady Rutland had found her something else to do because within a week of her grandmother leaving, Amber found that she was having to make her own way to the comtesse’s small house down behind Harrods, and without Louise, who had declared that she had no need of any instruction in conversational French or ‘the social graces’.