Silk

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are

the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 2008

Copyright © Penny Jordan 2008

Penny Jordan asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781847560735

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780007281480

Version: 2018-05-22

Teresa Chris, my agent who gave me hope.

Maxine Hitchcock, my editor for this book.

Yvonne Holland, for her ‘beyond excellent’ copy editing.

Everyone at Avon and HarperCollins who made the

publication of this book – which is so very special to me

– possible.

My editors at Richmond, for their long years of support

for Penny Jordan.

Tony who has always ‘been there’, to listen and research

and drive me all those places I have needed to go in

order to make this book possible.

For my readers – those who have read me as Penny Jordan for so many years and those who I hope will read this book and become as entranced by the fabric that is silk as I am.

Contents

Title Page Copyright Prologue Part One Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Part Two Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Part Three Chapter Thirty-Eight Chapter Thirty-Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty-One Chapter Forty-Two Chapter Forty-Three Chapter Forty-Four Part Four Chapter Forty-Five Chapter Forty-Six Chapter Forty-Seven Chapter Forty-Eight Chapter Forty-Nine Chapter Fifty Chapter Fifty-One Chapter Fifty-Two Chapter Fifty-Three Chapter Fifty-Four Epilogue An Interview With Penny Jordan About the Author About the Publisher

Prologue

21 November 2002

Late November always had such a haunting melancholic feel about it; the best of the autumn gone, the glory of the leaves only a memory when the wind rattled the skeletal branches of the trees. Did trees have memories, Amber wondered as she looked through the window and out into the parkland of Denham Place. Did they, like her, remember the urgent joy of spring with all its budding promise? Did they still feel in the dreary grey an echo of the heavy, heady, sensual warmth that had been summer? A reminiscent smile touched her lips, thinner now than they had been when she had been in her own summer, but her smile still lifted her high cheekbones and shone in the faded beauty of her eyes. Spring and summer; they had been so long ago for her, and autumn too, patterned with its rich colours as vibrant as her beloved silk.

Winter held her now, bare and sometimes bleak but still beautiful.

There had been frost during the night, riming the grass, showing the tracks of the muntjac deer her own grandmother had installed at Denham. She had been dreaming of Blanche recently, and all those others whom she knew would be waiting for her. Time passed so slowly now and she grew impatient to be with them.

But not today.

‘Are you really ninety years old today?’

The solemn question, from her youngest-but-two great-great-grandchild, made her smile and place her hand on his dark head.

‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘I really am.’

‘Harry! I’m sorry, Great-grandmother. He didn’t wake you, did he?’

‘No, dear. Don’t worry.’

The young woman – the wife of one of Amber’s great-grandsons – looked harassed and tense. Amber felt sorry for her. They didn’t have an easy time of it, the young women of this modern age.

She had lived almost a whole century, a time during which there had been so many changes. Did her great-granddaughter-in-law, who complained about the demands made on her by her husband’s political career, realise that when she, Amber, had been born women had not even had the vote? Did she care? Would Amber have cared in her place?

Ninety years. An eternity. Amber suspected that many of her relatives who had come here today to celebrate the event with her would think so, anyway.

Yet to her in some ways it was no longer than the length of a small sigh, a single breath in the heartbeat of time.

Life was no more than a clever game of smoke and mirrors, which now, at this stage of her life, had become so transparent for her that the past, and those with whom she had shared it, had become as accessible as a series of open doors through which she could walk freely. No longer did her memories come only as shadows in her dreams. They were as real as she was herself, sharing her joy now in what they had played a part in creating. She could hear her father’s great shout of laughter and feel the bear hug of joy with which he would hold his great-great-great-grandchild.

Amber had asked for her chair to be placed where she could both see the room and look out of the window so that she could view both the past and the present.

She had always loved Denham, and the house in turn loved her. They shared secrets that were theirs alone.

As though she were there in the room, Amber could almost feel the icy disapproval of her grandmother, whose pearls were now ornamenting the slender neck of her eldest great-grandchild, Natasha, to whom Amber had given them, in part because her looks reminded her so much of Blanche. Natasha’s looks might be Blanche’s, but her nature was not, and with a shudder Amber prayed that her life would not turn out like Blanche’s either.

So many memories: some of them of things that had brought her great joy and others that had brought her unbearable pain, but all of them precious in their own way.

The November day was bright, with that sharp sunshine that late autumn sometimes brings. The cake had been brought in and so had the champagne.

The house was older than she by two hundred years, and the room settled easily into the expectant silence – it had witnessed many celebrations, after all, some public and some very private. A small smile touched her mouth; a very private memory revived. She could almost feel the warmth of the gust of laughter of the man who had made that memory with her.

Her gaze went to the painting newly hung for the occasion.

The Silk Merchant’s Daughter had been on loan to one high-profile gallery after another for so many decades now that seeing it again was like welcoming home an old friend. But silk merchant’s daughter that she was, the girl in the painting didn’t look at her; she was too absorbed in the roll of silk she was coveting.

Silk. As a young woman she had thought she had known all there was to know, both about the fabric and life itself, but all she had understood had been what was on the surface. She had been ignorant then of what was beneath; of the weft and warp of the tightly woven pattern that was the fabric of human life.

In the shadows those she had loved pressed closer, their presence felt only by her.

The honour of giving the toast fell to the great-grandchild whose birthday fell on the same day as her own and who today would be seventeen.

Seventeen.

The room shimmered with the painful jolt to her heart. Some years remained burned in the memory for ever by the acid sharpness of their pain. The year that had begun with her own seventeenth birthday had been one of them. The arthritic hands she had folded in her lap beneath one of the special handmade padded silk throws that accompanied her everywhere trembled. She looked towards the window, her gaze bright with the sharp clarity of her memories.

Part One

Chapter One

Cheshire, Late November 1929

In less than an hour’s time Amber was to go downstairs to her grandmother’s study to receive the very special birthday gift her grandmother had promised her. Seventeen! She was almost a woman now. Grown up at last.

The fever of her anticipation had Amber dancing rather than walking across her bedroom. She knew what the ‘very special gift’ was, of course. How could she not?

Art school – where she would begin the training that would ultimately enable her to follow in her father’s footsteps. It was all she had wanted for as long as she could remember, and now at last her dreams could start to come true. And not just her dreams.

There had been cards at breakfast from her grandmother and her cousin, Greg; from Jay, her grandmother’s estate manager; from the household servants; from the manager of the family-owned silk mill in Macclesfield, and from Beth, her best friend at school. But, as had been the case for the past four years, there was no card from those she loved the most. Her parents.

Her emotions, mercurial today and unfamiliarly intense, turned her mood from excitement to sorrow as swiftly as the wind turned the November sky beyond the windows of her bedroom from clear autumn blue to grey.

On the desk that had been her mother’s, and in which she kept her sketchbooks, there was a photograph of Amber with her parents, taken on her twelfth birthday, just three weeks before their deaths. In it, they were all smiling, her father’s arm around her mother. Her mother was looking at her father with sheer adoration and he was looking back at her. Amber was standing in front of them, her mother’s arm sheltering her, her father’s free hand holding hers.

They had been so happy, the three of them – not wanting or needing others, their lives filled with their love for one another and for silk. Its delicate yarn had spun a web around them, like a special kind of magic that had bound them securely together, and made everything in their lives special. Amber missed them dreadfully. She could still remember how happy her parents had been on the day they died when they set out for the political rally. Her mother had kissed her lovingly and her father had seized her in one of his bear hugs, swinging her round until she was giddy with delight.

They had both been so full of life that even now there were times when she found it almost impossible to accept that they were dead.

It had been her grandmother who had coldly delivered the news of their deaths; and her cousin, Greg, who had later smuggled to her a newspaper article describing how the wooden floor of the building they were in, packed tight with those who, like them, had rallied to champion the cause of the working man and to demand better wages and conditions, had collapsed, plunging Amber’s parents and twenty-six other people to their deaths.

Amber moved away from the window and back to her desk, looking down at the design on which she had been working: an interweaving of mauve and silver in the form of a Celtic knot, which would ultimately form part of a border.

Her father had been a gifted designer, a Russian émigré who had been working for a small silk manufacturer in London when he and her mother had first met and fallen in love, defying her mother’s mother to be together.

Amber had always loved hearing the story of her parents’ romance. She remembered sitting in bed, her mother brushing Amber’s long golden hair with her antique silver brush and telling her about the day they had met.

They had both been attending a fabric fair in London, her father as a designer, and her mother as a representative of Denby Mill, the famous Macclesfield silk mill that belonged to Amber’s grandmother Blanche.

Silk had been the thread that had bound them together, her mother had often said to Amber, and silk was the strongest and best of all threads, as pure and strong as love itself.

Amber’s father had been in the first rank of a new wave of forward-thinking designers, and her mother had loved to tell her of the praise that had been given to his work.

It was their hope that Amber would follow in his footsteps, they had both always told her. They had passed to their daughter their passionate desire to combine silk and design to produce fabrics that were in their own right works of art. That had been their gift to her, and she was determined that hers to them would be her fulfilment of their dreams.

From the first moment she could hold a pencil, from the first moment she had been able to understand the concept of beauty and design, Amber’s father had guided and taught her, just as her mother had shown her how to recognise the unique splendour that was silk.

Whilst other young children learned their dull lessons, Amber’s parents taught her the history of silk, and with it the history of life, and how it bound together so many cultures and civilisations; how it stretched in the longest of journeys across deserts and seas, and how it inspired in humankind the greatest of passions, from love to greed.

The story Amber had loved best was of how the manufacture of silk had been brought out of China, firstly to Khotan, so it was said, via the silkworm eggs concealed in the headdress of a Chinese princess who had married a prince of Khotan, and then to the Byzantine Empire when the Emperor Justinian had persuaded two monks to journey to Khotan to steal the secret of sericulture. The monks had returned first with mulberry seeds and then with silkworm eggs concealed inside hollow bamboo sticks.

‘See how it mirrors life,’ Amber’s mother had told her, the child on her knee as she let the fabric slip richly through Amber’s tiny hand. ‘It runs through the fingers like water, yet stretched tight it has such strength, and yet that strength is so supple that it escapes capture. The human spirit is like silk, Amber,’ she had declared. ‘It too cannot be captured; it too has great strength, and great beauty for those with the gift to see it. Always remember that, my darling …’

‘Amber? Are you in there?’

The sound of her cousin Greg’s voice brought her back to the present.

Greg was twenty-three years old, and a year down from Oxford, a handsome young man with broad shoulders and thick wavy fair year, confident in that way that a certain type of indulged young man from a wealthy background often was. He was his grandmother’s favourite just as his father, Marcus, had been her favourite child.

Greg’s father had died when Greg had been a child, killed in action in the trenches during the Great War, and his mother had died giving birth to her stillborn much-longed-for second child when the news had reached them of her husband’s death, leaving Greg to be brought up by their grandmother.

Athletic and extrovert, always ready to have a joke and eager to have fun, Greg had got over the initial boredom he had felt leaving Oxford and his friends behind to return home to Macclesfield, by becoming friends with a group of young men, like himself from moneyed backgrounds, who spent their time indulging in the pleasures of racing cars, learning to fly, playing tennis and attending house parties to flirt with pretty girls. Financed by family wealth, and not required to work for a living, Greg and his set were determined not to look back over their shoulders to the terrible war that had taken so many of those born a generation before them, young men dead before they had properly lived. That was never going to happen to them, and the hectic pace of their lives was proof of their determination to make sure that it didn’t. If they were haunted by the horror of what they had been spared it was never spoken of. Life was for living and that was exactly what they intended to do. The only thing they took seriously was ‘having fun’.

Amber looked on Greg more as an older brother than a cousin. He was good company, and he had always been kind to her.

In addition to inheriting Denby Mill, Greg would also inherit Denham Place, its lands and the bulk of the vast fortune their grandmother had inherited, first from her father and then later from her maternal uncle, a Liverpool ship owner. Amber, meanwhile, had her own dreams. She’d make her own way.

‘Happy birthday,’ Greg grinned, handing her a small, prettily wrapped box, before walking over to the fireplace with a confident swagger.

Amber had seen him drive off earlier in his new roadster and, knowing Greg as she did, she suspected that her birthday gift had probably been a spur-of-the-moment purchase, bought in Macclesfield that morning whilst he had been in the town attending a Conservative Party meeting. Greg was to become a Member of Parliament when the existing Member stepped down in six months’ time, or at least that was what their grandmother said.

‘Oh, Greg,’ she thanked him, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him on the cheek. ‘But I can’t open it yet. I’ve got to go and see Grandmother about my birthday surprise.’

Amber couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. She had longed so much for this moment, talking about it, and dreaming about it even before she had left her select boarding school in the summer.

‘I can hardly believe that in a few weeks’ time I’ll be going to London to study art. Which art school do you think Grandmother will have chosen? I do hope it’s the Slade, although I’m not sure I’d be good enough. She never asked me for any of my art work to show them, but I suppose she will have asked Monsieur Lafitte at school to vouch for me. He always said that he would. Greg, I’m so excited, it’s all I’ve ever wanted, and my parents—’

‘Steady on, old girl. I don’t want to spoil your fun, but I don’t think you should get your hopes up too high.’

Amber frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

Greg cursed himself under his breath. He wished now that he hadn’t said anything. The trouble with Amber was that she just wasn’t the smart sort of girl who knew what was what. If she had been then she’d have known what he was trying to hint. But then, of course, if she had known he wouldn’t have needed to do any hinting – or any warning.

‘Dash it all, Amber,’ he protested uncomfortably, ‘you can’t really think that Grandmother would let you go to art school. You know what she’s like.’

‘But she said she had a special surprise for me. Something that will change my whole life and that I’m very lucky to have.’

‘I dare say she did, but it ain’t art school she’s talking about, Amber. I know that for a fact.’

‘Then what is it?’

Greg shook his head and turned towards the door, but Amber moved faster, getting there first, closing it, leaning on it and looking determinedly at him.

‘You’re not leaving this room until you tell me, Greg.’

‘You won’t like it,’ he prophesied. ‘I know I wasn’t keen when she told me that I’ve got to be an MP, but you know Grandmother, and she holds the purse strings.’

Their grandmother made no secret of her preference for her grandson, and Amber had always assumed that Greg got everything he wanted. It was a new idea to her to realise that that might not be the case, and a disturbing one, like suddenly finding that the calm waters of the estate’s pretty lake concealed dangerous currents.

‘But if you don’t want to be a Member of Parliament then why—’

‘It isn’t as simple as that, Amber – nothing ever is.’

Greg sighed and sat down on one of the elegant Sheraton chairs set either side of the fireplace, the sharp sunlight cruelly picking out the faded chintz cushions.

‘Come and sit down,’ he told her, leaning forward to pat the seat of the chair opposite, then stretching his long legs out in front of him. ‘We’ve got a few minutes yet before you have to go down and see Grandmother.’

Obediently Amber did as he asked.

‘Grandmother isn’t sending you to London to go to art school. She’s sending you there to be finished.’

‘Finished?’

‘Yes, as in prepared to make your social entrance as a débutante, and find yourself a titled husband.’

It took several seconds for Amber to absorb the meaning of his words, but once she had, she shook her head in denial.

‘No. She can’t do that. It’s impossible. I don’t want … I won’t …’ She had left her seat without even being aware that she had moved, and was standing in front of Greg, her hands bunched into small fists. ‘You’re wrong, Greg. She can’t mean to do that. She couldn’t, anyway, since there is no one in the family who could present me.’

Amber had learned all about the arcane process of becoming a débutante, and the rules attached to it, at boarding school, where it had been impressed on her that the granddaughter of a mere mill owner, no matter how wealthy, did not have the right kind of pedigree to be accepted as a member of the exclusive club that was the aristocracy. That was fine by her. She couldn’t think of a worse fate than being forced into the kind of dynastic marriage she knew would be the fate of most of the girls with whom she had been at school.

‘Grandmother will always find a way to do whatever she wants to do, Amber.’

‘But why would she want to?’

Greg shrugged. He felt sorry for Amber, but he had not intended to get involved in this kind of discussion. Now, though, it was too late to wish he had left well alone.

‘Barrant de Vries,’ he told her succinctly. ‘That’s why.’

‘Jay’s grandfather? I don’t understand.’

‘It’s a long story, and one I’ve only heard pretty recently myself, but from an impeccable source.’ Greg paused, wondering how much he should say. Amber was naïve and trusting, and he didn’t want to take unnecessary risks. Amber did not need to know the source of his information.

‘When she was a young girl Grandmother set her sights on marrying Barrant de Vries and she didn’t make any secret of it either.’

Amber gasped, but Greg ignored her reaction and continued hurriedly, ‘Of course, the fact that the whole county knew that Barrant and his father thought she wasn’t good enough or rich enough to marry into the de Vries family would be a bitter blow to Grandmother’s pride. I dare say there were plenty to laugh at her behind her back for her ambitions.’

‘But she must have known? I mean, everyone knows that Barrant de Vries is obscenely proud.’