Figures in Silk

by Vanora Bennett

  The unfairness of it cut at Isabel’s heart. The child in her wanted to wail, as she’d always wailed when Jane got off without punishment while she was beaten for some shared misdemeanor, that the grown- ups had got it terribly wrong. But she was grown up herself now. She scuff ed one toe against another and pursed her lips.

  She stayed in her room that evening. The Prattes stayed downstairs with Alice Claver.

  She sat very straight, not moving, intent on working out what to do and how. Even when she remembered Thomas,lying on the bed watching her think something out before, laughing and saying, “You’ve gone like a cat watching a mouse; are you going to pounce?” she wouldn’t let the thought in or the tears out. This wasn’t the time for crying.

  He’d wanted her to be proud of him. And if he hadn’t been killed he’d have sorted his troubles out somehow, so she could have been. But she could still protect his memory.

  So much of what was on her mind was so painful that it was a relief, from time to time, to let her thoughts wander back to the dark man in the church, with his soft eyes and hard- nosed advice.

  There was no point in dreaming of that man; no point in taking refuge in girlish musings about how, if she’d been married to someone with that man’s capacity for clearly understanding a problem, she’d never have been in this trouble in the first place.

  She just had to take the best from that memory. He’d had more foresight than she’d realized when he’d said, “This is just your first move. There’ll be others later.” She hadn’t expected the next move to come within weeks. But now it was here. And she had to make it a good one. She had to think it through as carefully as a general planning a battle.

  By morning, she’d worked out the best thing to do in the circumstances. It wasn’t going to be easy. But it would be right. She thought the man in the church would approve.

  She rose early enough to clean her face of its stains, dress soberly, and catch her mother- in- law alone, heading out to Mass with a terrible loneliness on her face.

  Lonely or not, she could see Alice Claver would rather go without her. But she didn’t give her the opportunity. “May I come with you?” she asked, and determinedly linked arms. After a moment’s rigid surprise, she felt her mother- in- law’s arm relax.

  Alice Claver didn’t seem to notice the tears running down Isabel’s cheeks in the chapel. She came out calm and quiet, cleansed.

  But she didn’t say a word to Isabel.

  Isabel waited till they’d got back into the great hall. She settled Alice Claver onto a bench. Fetched her leftover bread and cheese. Set it out neatly. Her heart was thumping.

  Alice Claver was staring unseeingly out of the window. Her expression wasn’t promising.

  “I wanted to ask,” Isabel began, hesitantly.

  Those dark eyes came reluctantly to rest on her. It struck Isabel, for the first time, that Alice Claver was too uneasy with her.

  She couldn’t really go on choosing to blame Isabel for leading her son astray; not for long. It was just possible, instead, that Alice Claver was feeling embarrassed at Isabel being left a penniless widow as a result of marrying a Claver. The thought gave her courage.

  “. . . I want to stay here,” she finished. “Live with you.”

  Now she had Alice Claver’s attention. Hostile attention, perhaps; but that was better than nothing.

  “Why?” the older woman barked.

  “I can’t go home,” Isabel said, rushing into her argument. “My father will want to marry me again. But I won’t have a dower now. And I don’t want them to find out why.”

  She paused to let the idea sink in. The older woman turned away. Isabel could see her thinking. Alice Claver didn’t want the Lamberts to find out there was no dower either. They could both imagine the destructive buzz in the markets. It would ruin Isabel’s chances of marrying again, if she ever wanted to, but it would also blacken Thomas’s name forever. It wouldn’t be good for Alice’s business, either.

  “I don’t want people to think badly of Thomas,” Isabel went on, as persuasively as she knew how. “And if I stayed with you, there’d be no need for anyone to know what he left me. Not unless I were to get married again, anyway.”

  She could feel Alice Claver softening. She knew the woman was a swift weigher- up of realities, so must understand that Isabel was offering her a chance to save face. The next answer, another bark, was less fierce. “You’d have to work, you know. There’s no room for merry widows here. You can’t just sit around having picnics all your life.”

  Isabel nodded, refusing to be nettled; she knew she was winning. “Oh, I’ll work all right,” she replied, with all the enthusiasm she could muster. “You know I will. I’ll need to, now; I have a dower to earn back.” And although she kept her voice soft, she felt a quiver from the older woman that she hoped might be shame at her own ungraciousness. “I’ve thought it all out. You don’t even have to take my word for it. We could make a contract if you’d rather. You could take me on as a proper apprentice.”

  Alice Claver nearly stared. An apprentice? She’d be getting ten years of unpaid labor out of a deal like that.

  Isabel knew it was a good offer. But Alice Claver was too canny a market woman to show surprise. Raising a hand to her mouth to cover her expression, she said, deadpan: “I could.” And, several seconds later, “I suppose.”

  Isabel could hardly contain her impatience.

  “So . . . will you?” she said.

  Alice Claver dragged out her pause for longer than Isabel would have thought possible. But when, finally, making a show of reluctance, she did nod agreement—then leaned forward, with a shadow of her usual market manner, and shook Isabel’s hand as if to close the deal—Isabel thought she could see a gleam of satisfaction in those puffy dark eyes.

  4

  But I want to stay with her,” Isabel said wearily. The conversation seemed to have gone on for hours.

  “But you can’t,” her father said again. “Not as an apprentice.”

  She knew his style of argument. It was merchant style: repeating himself, without raising his voice, until the sheer boredom of the discussion wore whoever he was arguing with into reluctant agreement. He called it consensus. And what he’d been saying today was: You could marry anyone in the City with your dower.

  And: No daughter of mine need ever work; I’ve given you the best opportunities in life; what will people think? And: Just look at your hands, lady’s hands; think what they’re going to look like once your new (eyebrows raised, shoulders raised) mistress gets you throwing raw silk or dunking yarn into pots of dye.

  John Lambert glanced round his great hall, as if trying to draw inspiration from his lavish tapestries and his cupboard full of gleaming silverware. He was visibly longing to go back to their more pleasurable earlier conversation, in which he’d been able to boast that Lord Hastings and the Duke of Gloucester had paid him a personal visit at the Crown Seld that morning—“Just sauntered in; His Grace was gracious enough to remember me from the Lord Mayor’s banquet; two of the greatest men in the land . . .”—and they’d looked at his imported Italian silk cloths, and Hastings had ended up shaking hands on a promise to buy a length of green figured velvet. He poked at the remains of his meal.

  “Look,” Isabel said impatiently, “I didn’t want to marry a Claver in the first place, but you insisted. You said it would be good for your business to make a relationship with the Clavers.

  Now I want to stay; but you’re saying I shouldn’t. It’s only a month later. Tell me this: what’s changed?”

  “That was a marriage,” her father said, sounding impatient at last. “This is”—he wrinkled his nose—“business. And an un-suitable business for a young lady of your accomplishments, if I may say so. A waste of your French . . . your Latin . . . your lute playing.”

  Isabel bared her teeth at him in a grin so angry it felt almost like a snarl. “Well, why shouldn’t I learn the business?” she said.

  “You do
it; and a lot of girls I know learn it too. We Lamberts are the only ones who think we’re too grand. But what’s wrong with doing something useful? What if I actually want to be a silkwoman? What if I want to be”—she lingered—“independent? Of other people’s whims?”

  “You can’t do it,” he said hotly. Both hands clutched at the table edge.

  “Why?” she replied, eyeing him insolently back.

  “Because I forbid you to!” he yelled, startling her as he leaped to his feet. “I forbid you to humiliate the Lamberts, and drag our family name down!”

  “You can’t forbid me to!” she cried back, standing up too. “I don’t have to obey you anymore! I’m a widow! Widows are legally responsible for themselves! I’m not a Lambert now—I’m a Claver!

  And I can choose my own future!”

  They eyeballed each other like fighting dogs. There was a long, ominous silence. She’d never disobeyed him before; not like this. He didn’t look as though he’d forgive her easily for betraying him into this undignified shouting match—for losing his temper again, like he had at the Guildhall.

  He turned and walked out, without a backward glance.

  Isabel had thought Jane would be contemptuous of the idea of working in the markets. But when she first told her older sister, Jane was endearingly practical. “Ten years,” she said gently, wrinkling her nose but trying to understand, not sneering. “That’s a long time. What if you hate it in a month?”

  Isabel nearly cried at her sister’s sympathetic tone. She was moments away from confiding in Jane; but she couldn’t. She didn’t know if Jane—who was glowing even more beautifully than before now she was married—would tell her husband; if word would get out. So she shrugged and tried to look unconcerned.

  “There’d be no going back,” she said laconically.

  Jane tried again. She put a hand on Isabel’s arm and looked very sweetly into her eyes.

  “I know you’re in mourning,” she murmured. “I can imagine how terrible it must feel . . .”

  Isabel nodded mutely, looking away, looking down, willing herself not to weep.

  “But, Isabel,” Jane went on, in the same sweetly reasonable voice. “It was just an arranged marriage. Don’t you remember? A month ago, you didn’t want Thomas Claver for a husband. You can’t really believe you’re heartbroken enough now to sign away half your life to his mother.”

  Isabel flinched. She’d known, really, that Jane wouldn’t understand.

  “Even if you really do think now that you’ll always feel like this, you must know it will pass,” Jane said, and now Isabel could hear the familiar patronizing big- sister note creeping into the voice in her ears. “What if a year goes by and you want to marry again? If you’re an apprentice you’ll have to wait till you’re twenty- four. And you’ll be even older before you can have a baby.”

  Twenty- four, Isabel thought, before her defenses came up against that tone of voice. An eternity. Then, with startling simplicity, it came to her that she didn’t want to marry again and become a hostage to someone else’s fortune. It wasn’t just something to say defiantly to her father. It wasn’t just that she had no choice but to apprentice herself to Alice Claver if she were to protect Thomas’s memory. This future might actually be for the best.

  Widows were legally free; their fathers couldn’t control them; they could make their own money and spend it as they chose. Alice Claver was robust. She’d used the freedom of widowhood to make a good life. Maybe she’d teach Isabel to do the same thing.

  With a flash of defiance, Isabel thought, I won’t marry again. Not unless I’m free to choose someone who makes me feel . . . She didn’t know what she would want to feel; the nearest she could come to it was something like that brief moment, before all this, in the tavern, when the touch of a man who was not Thomas Claver had sparked through her like lightning. So she smiled, tightly, crossed her arms against her sister, and repeated: “No going back.”

  Jane sighed. “Well,” she said, rather sadly, “I suppose we all find our own escapes.”

  Isabel could see that her sister had given in. She thought, suddenly, that she might have judged Jane’s intervention too harshly.

  Jane was only doing her best in uncertain circumstances. She hadn’t meant to give offense.

  Jane started pinning a dark gown from the wardrobe against Isabel. “You’ve lost weight,” she said, with a mouthful of pins.

  Then: “You must have found something better than you expected in Thomas Claver . . .” There was a question in her eyes.

  Isabel pressed her lips together and nodded. She felt tears near. To stave them off , she answered with her own question:“Doesn’t everyone?” She hadn’t even asked Jane how things were turning out with Will Shore, she realized. Hastily, she added:“Isn’t living with Will better than you expected?”

  It seemed a safe question. Jane had given no sign of being unhappy. If anything, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever; her skin glowed gold.

  Jane laughed. It was such a joyful laugh that Isabel thought she must be agreeing. It was only later, going back to Catte Street, with one dark gown on her back and another in a basket, that Isabel realized she hadn’t paid attention to what Jane Shore’s words had been: “Will is exactly what I expected.”

  It wasn’t the glowing endorsement of life with a husband that Jane’s air of barely suppressed plea sure in living led you to expect.

  Lord Hastings and the Duke of Gloucester were strolling through the Broad Seld after the leisurely meal they’d taken at the Tumbling Bear. They were side by side, talking quietly and occasionally laughing at remarks no one else could hear. Unlike most strangers, who tend to think themselves unobserved when on unfamiliar terrain, not realizing how sharply they stand out to everyone else, these two noblemen—soldiers by instinct and experience—were aware of the eyes on their backs, on their swords and spurs. But they didn’t mind.

  Hastings was saying, with a touch of self- mockery: “Blond . . . sings like a nightingale . . . witty, too . . . and dances like thistledown. You should see her dance. And her eyes . . .” Then: “The same green as that velvet. She’ll look beautiful in it. I’ll send it to her as soon as I get it.”

  His long limbs were made for war, but the troubadour words made his voice sound made for love. The thought of Jane Shore’s skin and smile had filled him with sunshine for weeks. He looked cheerfully down at his companion, a few inches shorter than him and twenty years younger: his battle companion, his dearest friend’s brother, a boy now grown to manhood and fast becoming a friend in his own right. He wanted to share the irony of buying a rich cloth from a merchant and giving it to the merchant’s lovely daughter.

  But Dickon wasn’t really listening or meeting Hastings’ eyes.

  There was a polite half- smile on the younger man’s thin, sallow face, but his eyes were wandering: from stall to stall, from one white- fingered embroiderer to the next, as if he were looking for someone.

  “Looking for someone?” Hastings asked lightly; a question not meant to be taken seriously.

  Dickon came to; for a moment he looked almost startled.

  Then he grinned his wolf- grin and shook his head. “We’re not all hankering after merchants’ daughters, Will,” he said breezily.

  Then, with his grin turning into a laugh, “Though enough people seem to be hankering after yours.”

  He looked around again (for a second, William Hastings thought he glimpsed the questing look in those narrow dark eyes again), and added, even more breezily: “And there are plenty of pretty girls here, of course.”

  Dickon’s eyes never looked lost. Dickon’s decisiveness was one of the qualities Hastings admired in the duke. Hastings knew there was a fatal softness in his own soul that might, one day, do him in; it made him appreciate the cheerful ruthlessness of Dick-on’s approach to life even more. Dickon’s flintiness had saved him once already, on that night they’d been half- walking, half- running across the Wash after everything ha
d gone so wrong at Doncaster; when the tide had come rushing treacherously in on them and some of his men, with mud and sand gluing their wet boots down, hadn’t had the strength to pull up their exhausted legs to sprint to the tussocks of grass that suddenly meant safety. It was the knight right behind Hastings who’d been swept back into the boiling water—Thomas de Teffont, a Wiltshireman; Hastings still remembered the young man’s look of terror as he was pulled back, wide eyes and mouth open in a soundless scream, teeth glittering in the moonlight. Hastings had been about to release his own hold on the grasses to stretch back for Teffont, who was hardly more than a boy, who shouldn’t die there, when Dickon had stopped him. Dickon, one hand grabbing into the heart of a spindly bush, the other hand hard on Hastings’s soaking brigandine. Dickon: a voice as cold as hell frozen over, grating: “Leave him. It’s more important to save yourself.”

  So Hastings was surprised to find he didn’t completely believe in Dickon’s breeziness today. The voice of the man who never dissembled didn’t, for once, ring quite true; it carried a different message from the one in his eyes. Hastings listened with the beginning of curiosity as the duke went on, still casually, but with hungry eyes: “Wasn’t Lambert marrying off two daughters, anyway? The blond one we’ve been hearing so much about ever since, but another one too—a redhead?”