Her grandmother was still talking but Amber had stopped listening. She had thought when her grandmother had first told her why she was sending her to London that things couldn’t get any worse, but she had been very wrong.
It was a relief to be on her own as she walked along the trellised pathway across the shadowy formal garden of her grandmother’s house. During the summer the trellising was smothered in richly scented roses, but now it was the crisp smells of winter that perfumed the dark evening air.
The sound of someone walking swiftly along a second gravel pathway, bisecting her route, had her stopping apprehensively, only to relax when the other person stepped out of the shadows and into the moonlight. Jay.
He was taller than Greg, with grey eyes that lightened when he was amused, but which Amber had on occasions seen darken to the colour of wet slate. Jay was only two years older than Greg, but there was something more mature about him.
The sturdy plainness of Jay’s workmanlike plus fours and tweed jacket suited him, even though Amber knew that Greg would have raised an eyebrow to see such clothes being worn out in the evening. But somehow Jay wasn’t the kind of man she could envisage wearing a fashionably cut dinner jacket. With Jay, Amber was always aware of a sense of quiet purposefulness and dependability that drew her to him in a way she didn’t really understand.
‘I just came out for some fresh air and to … to think,’ she told him, even though he hadn’t asked for an explanation of her presence in the garden.
He inclined his head towards her and as Amber looked up at him she saw that his eyes looked dark.
Her voice trembled. ‘Jay, have you ever wished for something so much that it hurts? I want to learn to be a designer, so that I can work at the mill with our silk. That has always been my dream.’
‘We all have dreams.’ His words, quiet but somehow heavy, checked her.
‘What are your dreams?’ she asked him curiously. ‘I suppose you must wish that you could inherit your grandfather’s title.’
‘No, I do not wish for that.’ His voice was firm and sure. ‘My love is the land, Amber.’ He bent down, scooped up some earth from the flowerbed and let it trickle through his fingers. ‘This is life, Amber, this humble soil. We walk on it and ignore it, and take it for granted, but in reality it is a miracle. When we nourish it with love and care it pays us back tenfold. My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a farmer, and I have, I think, inherited his nature. I am far happier with that inheritance than I could ever be with the de Vries title.’
‘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.
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