‘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.
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,