LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Two

      Blanche Pickford surveyed her granddaughter critically. At seventeen Amber was showing the promise of great beauty. She was only of medium height, but she was slender and fine-boned, with an elegant neck and porcelain skin. Her face, once it lost the last roundness of girlhood, would be perfectly heart-shaped, with her eyes widely spaced and thickly lashed.

      Blanche had not been pleased when her daughter – no doubt influenced by her husband – had announced that her child was to be named Amber, which Blanche had thought far too exotic. It was a tradition of the family that its daughters were given names that reflected the colours of silks. But there was no denying the fact that the girl’s eyes were indeed the honey-gold colour of that precious resin.

      Amber’s straight nose and the curve of her lips, like her blonde curls, almost exactly mirrored Blanche’s own looks at Amber’s age, but as yet there was no sign in her granddaughter of the smouldering sensuality that she herself had possessed at seventeen – nor any sense of the power of such a gift. By temperament Amber was kind and gentle; weak, where she had always been so very strong, thought Blanche critically. There was no fire to her, no passion, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t passion or sensuality on which the kind of marriage she wanted for her granddaughter was brokered. Quite the opposite.

      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’

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