Silk

‘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.

Amber struggled desperately to hold back her angry tears. ‘If my parents were alive they wouldn’t let you do this.’

‘That is quite enough.’ Her grandmother stood up. ‘I don’t want to hear another word about your father or this nonsense about art school. I am the one who will decide your future, Amber. No one else.’

‘You’re a snob! You’re only doing it because of Barrant de Vries, because people laughed at you because he wouldn’t marry you …’

Amber recoiled as Blanche stepped forward, striking her across the face, the shock of the blow silencing her into horrified awareness of what she had done. Her cheek stung and her heart was racing.

Two red coins of angry colour burned on her grandmother’s face and her breathing was rapid and shallow.

‘How dare you speak to me like that? In my day you would have been whipped for your insolence. You will go to your room and you will stay there until I give you permission to leave it.’

Half blinded with tears, Amber fled, leaving Blanche alone in the room.

For several minutes after Amber had gone Blanche didn’t move. Anger, seared with pride, burned inside her that her granddaughter, a child she believed to be so much less than she herself had been at her age, should have dared to speak to her in such a way and of something so intimately connected with her own past.

Blanche stiffened. For forty-four years she had lived with the memory of Barrant’s humiliation and rejection of her and not once in that time had anyone ever dared to refer to that humiliation to her face.

She walked over to the window and stood looking out. She was sixty-one years old and not a day had gone by since Barrant had laughed at her and told her that he would never ever marry a mill owner’s daughter when she hadn’t weighed out on the scales of her life that insult and sworn she would make sure that one day those scales would weigh in her favour, even if she had to fill them grain by grain, retribution by retribution, to make sure they did so, and that Barrant would die sick to his heart with the knowledge of what his arrogance had cost him.

She hated him and she couldn’t wait for the day when her grandson and her granddaughter took social precedence over his – as she was determined they would do.

Jay Fulshawe saw Amber come running from her grandmother’s study in such obvious distress that he immediately guessed what had happened. His heart ached for her. So her grandmother had broken the news to her. Poor child, she would take it very hard.

She was still at the age where her feelings were open for all to see, mirrored in the dark golden eyes that were now so shadowed with her despair. Quick-witted and warm-natured, she was a great favourite with her grandmother’s household staff. Since she had come home from boarding school, Jay had found himself listening for the sound of her laughter, and smiling when he heard it. Unlike some, Amber’s mischievous sense of humour bore no malice or unkindness. She was so passionate about everything she believed in, and so very vulnerable because of that passion. Jay hoped that life would not punish her for it. She was still so very young.

‘Amber …’ He spoke her name gently, reaching out to her where she stood in tears in the hall, but she shook her head.

‘You knew, Jay,’ she accused him bitterly. ‘You knew what my grandmother was planning and yet you said nothing.’

How could Jay not have told her? Amber had known him virtually all her life, and thought of him more as a friend than her grandmother’s employee. He had been at Eton with Greg and he had spent many of his holidays in Cheshire. His parents lived in Dorset where his father, the third son of a ‘gentleman farmer’, was a clergyman. It was rumoured that once his wife had given birth to his son and heir, Barrant de Vries had lost all interest in his two daughters, and that he hadn’t cared who they had married, although some said that the reason they had not done better for themselves was because there had been no money. In the aristocratic circles in which the de Vrieses and their kind moved and married, a bride’s dowry was almost as important as her breeding.

Jay was more serious-natured than Greg; dark-haired, tall and leanly athletic, with a calm, measured way of speaking and a slightly quizzical smile that often made Amber itch for her sketchpad and her charcoal to try to capture it.

Jay wasn’t smiling now, though. ‘It wasn’t my place,’ he answered her quietly. ‘I’m so very sorry, but it may not be as bad as you fear.’

‘You mean that no one with a title will want to marry me and that I’ll be rejected like your grandfather rejected my grandmother?’ Amber retorted bitterly.

So she had finally heard that old story. Jay had wondered when she would. It was fairly common knowledge locally, after all. His cousin Cassandra had enjoyed regaling him with it when she had heard it from the Fitton Leghs, not realising he had already heard it, but then Cassandra had inherited that flawed de Vries pride, which he personally found so warped and destructive.

Jay put his hand on Amber’s arm, but she shook him off.

Amber ran up the stairs and along the landing until she had reached the welcome security of her bedroom. Her grandmother might consider it a form of punishment to say that she had to remain here, but she preferred to be here and on her own with her despair.

She tensed as she heard a brief knock on the door, but relaxed when Mary, the parlour maid, came in. Mary was twenty-five and courting a grocery assistant in Macclesfield. She had a bubbly personality and a warm smile, but now she was avoiding looking at her, Amber saw, as she went towards the desk and said apologetically, ‘The mistress says as how I was to come up and remove your drawing things, Miss Amber.’

Amber’s face burned hot with humiliation and grief. Her grandmother must have guessed that she would want to find solace in her drawing. Well, if she thought that she would apologise in order to get them back, she was wrong!

It was growing dark by the time Jay negotiated the rutted carriageway to Felton Priory in the shooting brake with which Blanche Pickford had provided him as her estate manager. She had informed him he may use the motor car ‘for a certain amount of private motoring, since I dare say you will want to see your grandfather, and he is not obviously able to visit you.’

Had those words been a kind gesture on Blanche’s part or an unkind underlining of the fact that Barrant was confined to a wheelchair? Jay knew which his grandfather would have chosen to believe.

Dusk cloaked the shabbiness of the house and its surrounding parkland. Unlike Denham Place, Felton Priory could never be described as an architectural gem, being a haphazard mixture of differing periods and personal styles, refronted by the fifth Viscount in a pseudo-Gothic style of outstanding ugliness.

With typical arrogance, or perhaps artistic blindness, Jay’s grandfather insisted on considering Felton the premier aristocratic residence in Macclesfield, if not Cheshire, and Jay was good-humoured enough to indulge him, although in truth Jay much preferred the handsome Dorset rectory where he himself had grown up.

Jay considered himself fortunate that the de Vries inheritance of pride and arrogance had passed him by.

He parked the shooting brake on the gravel forecourt, taking the steps to the heavy portico with lithe strides.

His grandfather’s butler opened the door to him. Jay had telephoned ahead to warn him of his visit, knowing that Bates, older than his grandfather by a good ten years, and rheumatic, found it increasingly painful to walk the long distance from the warmth of the butler’s pantry to the main entrance.

‘Good evening, Master Jay,’ Bates welcomed him, taking Jay’s driving coat, cap and scarf.

‘Good evening, Bates,’ Jay returned. ‘How is the rheumatism?’

‘Not too bad at all, thank you. Your grandfather has had a bad couple of days, though, I’m afraid.’

‘Thank you for warning me. His legs are playing up again, are they?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Despite the fact that both his legs had had to be amputated, Barrant suffered acute pain in what his doctor had described to Jay as ‘phantom limbs’. When the pain was at its worst the only thing that could relieve it was morphine, which had to be prescribed by Dr Brookes.

Jay’s grandfather vehemently objected to the fact that a law had been passed that meant that contrary to what had been common practice beforehand, morphine and all its derivatives could now only be obtained by doctor’s prescription. As Jay knew, his grandfather wasn’t the only one to feel that the government’s Dangerous Drugs Act had interfered in something over which they had no right. For many of the Bright Young Things of the twenties, as the newspapers had labelled a certain fast set of rich young men and women, the law had come too late. They were already, like poor Elizabeth Ponsonby, the young socialite whose wild ways had been referred to in the gossip columns, addicted to both drink and drugs, and as with prohibition in America, all the law had done was drive the supply and purchase of intoxicants and narcotics underground.

‘Your grandfather’s waiting for you in the library, Master Jay.’

Felton Priory’s library was a large rectangular room, which Jay’s grandfather had made his personal domain after his accident. A Chinese lacquered screen discreetly concealed the bed, which Jay had had brought downstairs so that his grandfather could ‘rest’ when he felt like doing so, instead of having to use the cumbersome dumb waiter to transport him and his wheelchair up to the second landing that gave access to his bedroom.

‘Ha, here at last, are you?’ Barrant greeted Jay. ‘I dare say that Blanche works you hard and wants her pound of flesh from you. Bates,’ he roared at the butler, ‘bring me a brandy – and make it a large one.’

Jay looked at his grandfather with concern. ‘I thought that Dr Brookes had forbidden you to drink brandy?’

Barrant gave his grandson a saturnine look. ‘No doctor tells me what to do. If I want a brandy I’ll damn well have one. Anyway, what does he know? Young fool. His father was bad enough. Thought he’d end up killing me before he retired, but the son’s even worse.’

The old man was obviously having a bad day.

His hair, once as thick and dark as Jay’s own, was white now. Pain had carved deep grooves in the flesh at either side of his mouth, and hollowed out the features beneath the high cheekbones. Fierce passions still glittered in the dark blue eyes, though driven, Jay suspected, by frustration and arrogance.

Barrant took the brandy Bates had brought him without any acknowledgement, waiting until the butler had left before saying sharply, ‘So the Pickford boy is putting himself up as a candidate to take over Barclay Whiston’s seat, is he? That will be Blanche’s idea, of course. He won’t get it. Too much of a lightweight, and no amount of money is going to alter that. He’s not the man his father was.’