PENNY JORDAN - Silk

And at least the girl had looks, unlike her mother. Blanche had been furiously angry when she had realised how plain her daughter was going to be, so very much Henry Pickford’s daughter, with her attachment to the mill, and her leanings towards the labour movement and equality for the workers. However, that anger had been nothing to the fury she had felt when the plain twenty-five-year-old Blanche had assumed would remain a spinster had defied her to marry a Russian émigré, using her small inheritance from her father to do so. Not that that had lasted very long. And, of course, ultimately, just as she had known she would, her daughter had had to come begging to her.

Yes, all in all she was not entirely displeased with the raw material she had to work with. The girl’s looks would certainly count in her favour, but it was Blanche’s money that would bring into the family the title that Blanche craved.

‘Sit down, Amber,’ Blanche instructed her granddaughter. ‘We’ve got something important to discuss.’

Amber could never remember seeing her grandmother wearing anything made from silk. Instead she favoured clothes from the French designer Chanel, and today she was wearing one of her signature jersey gowns, the bodice cleverly draped to fasten on the hip with a large brooch studded with crystals, which caught the light with every movement of her body.

Slender, and with an upright bearing, her grandmother had the figure for such clothes. Amber had inherited her slenderness, although her shape was concealed by the schoolgirlish lines of her own woollen pinafore worn over a plain cotton blouse. Beneath that blouse Amber’s heart was beating anxiously. Surely what Greg had told her couldn’t possibly be true?

She looked at her grandmother, waiting apprehensively. As always Blanche was wearing her pearls, three long strands of them, their lustre possessing far more warmth than the woman herself.

‘I promised you that since this is your seventeenth birthday you are to have a very special gift. This gift concerns your future, Amber. You are a most fortunate young woman, and I hope you realise that. As my grandchild you will have opportunities and benefits beyond the reach of many young women of your age and station, and whilst you are enjoying them I want you to remember just why you have been given them and what your responsibility is to them and to me. Now,’ Blanche permitted herself a slight smile, ‘in January you will be travelling to London to prepare for your presentation at court. I have made arrangements—’

So it was true. Greg had been right. Amber felt sick with despair.

‘No,’ she protested frantically. ‘No, I don’t want to be presented. I want to go to art school.’

Blanche looked aghast. The girl’s parents had done more damage with their irritating and worthless talk of art and design than she had realised. The Russian was to blame for that. He may have filled his daughter’s head with his own folly, but Blanche had no intention of allowing such ridiculousness to remain there.

Amber was seventeen, crying for a life she knew nothing whatsoever about – at thirty-seven she would be thanking her for saving her from it. It was ludicrous even to think of comparing the drudgery of making her own way with the status and comfort that would be Amber’s if she did as she was told.

Not that it mattered what Amber thought or how much she protested. Blanche would do what she had decided she would do.

‘Art school?’

Amber could feel her grandmother’s steely gaze virtually pinning her into the uncomfortable chair in which she was struggling to sit bolt upright.

Amber hated the décor of this room. Everything about its Edwardian heaviness was overpowering and intimidating, from the puce-coloured wallpaper and matching velvet soft furnishings to the polished mahogany furniture.

‘Formidable’ was how most people described her grandmother, but Amber could think of other words: formal; forbidding; frightening . Her mother and father wouldn’t have been frightened, she reminded herself. She took a deep breath.

‘It’s what I’ve always wanted.’

Her words, more anguished than defiant, seemed to fall through the cold silence that chilled the room, despite the good fire burning in the marble fireplace: Carrara marble from the famous quarries in Italy, chosen for its perfection, just like everything else in her grandmother’s life. Not that she seemed to gain pleasure from the craftsmanship. It was just the status that owning it conferred on her that mattered.

‘You are seventeen years old, Amber, far too young to know what is right for you.’

Her grandmother’s words spiked fear into Amber’s heart, panicking her into bursting out, ‘It is what my parents wanted for me. My father talked about it often, and when I do marry, I shall marry someone whom I love and who loves me as much as my father loved my mother.’

Too late she realised her mistake. Her grandmother’s face had set into an icy cold mask.

‘Your father? Your father, Amber, was a penniless immigrant who married your mother for her money – or rather, for my money.’

As always when she was angry, her grandmother’s voice had quietened to a barely audible whisper that still somehow hurt the ears.

For her father, though, Amber was determined to overcome her fear of her grandmother’s anger, and defend him.

‘That’s not true. My father loved my mother.’

Ignoring her, Blanche continued remorselessly, ‘I warned her what would happen when she defied me to marry him, and I was right. When he lost his job she had to come begging to me, pleading with me to give him work. Your father didn’t love my daughter. Your father loved my money and my mill.’

‘He did love her. They were so happy together. My mother said so. She said my father was gifted, a true artist.’

‘He was nothing but a third-rate failure, who would have ruined the mill with his ridiculous ideas, if I had allowed him.’

Amber felt as though she was choking, all too conscious of her own overheated emotions whilst her grandmother remained calm and cold. Her parents had loved one another, she knew that. Before the factory where he had worked in London had closed down, their small house had been filled with the sound of her parents’ laughter. Amber could remember how her father would bring home his friends, fellow artists who would sit around her mother’s kitchen table, drinking her soup and talking. Those had been such happy times and Amber treasured their memory.

There had been less laughter when her parents had been forced to move back to Macclesfield, but there had still been warmth and love in the house her parents had insisted on renting rather than live in Denham Place with her grandmother. Her father had loved reading, and on winter evenings they would gather round the fire and he would read aloud, very often from one of Charles Dickens’s wonderful books set against a background of the dreadful circumstances in which the poor lived. How could her grandmother try to destroy the memory of their love by denying its existence?

Her grandmother was wrong too when she said that Amber’s father would have ruined the business. He was the one who had saved it. Amber knew that. It was because of his designs that Denby Mill’s agents in London were able to report that their new silk had sold out within days of being available, with repeat orders for more. There had been fierce arguments about his designs and his desire to follow the direction of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and her grandmother’s dislike of change and innovation. It was through her father that the mill had secured its valuable contracts with that movement and with the Church of England to supply it with the rich ecclesiastical silks that were especially woven.