Silk

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 (#ue06af8bf-ced4-5ff5-9234-e9635c824cdb)

Chapter One (#ue06af8bf-ced4-5ff5-9234-e9635c824cdb)

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.