Figures in Silk

by Vanora Bennett

  She felt as she said it that she must be saying something stupid. But her question seemed to have opened the way to Alice Claver’s heart.

  Alice Claver’s eyes were full of enthusiasm, but she shook her head. “Far more complicated,” she said decisively. “Finer, for one thing. Venetian export damasks have 9,600 silk threads in a single arm’s-width, a braccio. Even cloth of gold and plain velvets have 7,200 threads. And to get the patterns in the cloth, you need far more than one line of warp threads and one line of wefts; you might have half a dozen of each in a single cloth, each needing something different done to it. Considering what silk costs, no one could afford to just start experimenting. You’d need to know the secret before you even thought of trying to build, or thread up, a full- size loom—as long as two men and as wide as another—with good- quality silk. It would bankrupt a king to start working it out from scratch.

  “And it’s not just the number of threads. It’s knowing how to mix the different imports. Look,” she went on. It was clear she’d thought about this many times. She started pulling out bolts of stuff to show Isabel how threads from different lands could be mixed together in the same piece of silk cloth; how a single bolt could be made of Spanish silk warp and Persian silk weft for a satin; or a Syrian silk warp and Greek silk weft for a damask; how two kinds of silk from different regions could be put together and thrown to form a single thread. She said some silks, such as orso-gli, were especially suitable for warp threads; that all types of cloth could use weft threads of Persian legg ibenti, catangi, or talani; that velvetlike satins needed weft threads of the calabrese, the cat-anzana, and the crespolina productions; that the siciliana was right for heavy satins and that medium- thick silk threads, for slightly lighter cloths, were called di donna and granegli. Isabel learned that silk from Almeria was used for taffetas and satins, and silk from Abruzzi for zetani, fabrics made with a satin weave and sometimes with a velvety pile.

  “These are just the odds and ends of knowledge I’ve picked up over the years from buying silk,” Alice Claver said modestly. “But to weave a silk cloth that would be distinctive, and saleable, you’d need to have mastered all this and more. Much more.”

  Isabel surprised a yearning look on her mistress’s face.

  “To have a hope of succeeding, you’d need a three- way deal on a scale no one has ever done in London,” Alice Claver went on.

  She’d thought about it a lot, Isabel could see. Alice Claver couldn’t shake off her longing to do this vast deal, however impossible she was making it sound. “First, you’d need an Italian master willing to share his secrets with you,” she said briskly, lifting up one finger. “And that’s a rare beast, let me tell you. It would be easier to catch a unicorn.”

  She lifted a second finger. “Next, he’d need to get permission from his city government in Italy to import a full workshop of craftsmen here to set up. And the Venetian silk boards hate letting good people go. So you’d have to factor in years of bribing bureaucrats. Nothing happens fast in Italy.”

  Isabel nodded, reluctantly. It did sound intimidating.

  “But the biggest problem would be the third one,” Alice said, looking gloomily at the third finger she was raising to wave in Isabel’s face. “Money. Even if you had the other parts of the deal in place, who would pay? You’d need a rich backer at the London end. A very rich backer. Someone willing to lose vast amounts of money every year for decades while an entire industry was set up. You might not see a return for twenty years. But there’d be wages and houses and materials and costs to cover all the while.

  Silk doesn’t come cheap. It would be beyond the means of anyone I can think of, except the king, unless by some miracle the entire guild of mercers joined forces to back it instead.”

  The silkwoman laughed mirthlessly. “They certainly never would. They’d be too scared. The Lombards here make half their money out of importing silk cloths to sell to us, and the rest from banking for London merchants. They wouldn’t take kindly to Londoners trying to set up a business that competed with theirs.

  And since our mercers do their banking with the London Italians, they couldn’t cross them without having their trade accounts cut off ”—she snapped her fingers—“just like that. No one would run that risk. You might get rich in twenty years by weaving silk cloths, but how would you buy your ready- made silks at Antwerp and Bruges until then, without those accounts?”

  She shrugged. She looked down at the silks she’d pulled out, tutted, and began resignedly to fold them away, as if she were packing away the impossible dream at the same time.

  Then she stopped again; she couldn’t quite bear to drop the subject. She gave Isabel a hard look. “And while we’re talking about impossible, there’s this too,” she said. “Gossip. Even if you did manage to find a way to get going, you’d have to spend all those years of setting up keeping your plans a complete secret from every Italian merchant in London. But can you imagine starting something so big, which would employ so many people, without the markets being full of it?” She grunted. “There’d always be talk. It’s all impossible.”

  She sighed. Looked at the greens and golds still spread around her, blazing in the sunset; the colors of dreams.

  Isabel said stubbornly: “The money’s the real thing, though. Wouldn’t the king pay?”

  Alice Claver snorted. “Him?” she answered succinctly. “Broke. Too many wars.”

  Isabel sighed. Alice was right, she realized; the king was always borrowing money from the City. “Someone will work out how, sooner or later, though,” she said wistfully.

  Her mistress’s face brightened. “Yes, and make a fortune,” she agreed robustly. “At least I hope so. London silkwomen are the best in Christendom. It’s against nature for us to let the Italians have the best of the market. There must be more for us in the future than fiddling around with tassels and braids and bits of ribbon!”

  She guff awed as if she and Isabel were old friends. Astonished to have been given a glimpse of Alice Claver’s heart’s desire, Isabel hesitantly joined in.

  6

  "So is it true?” Anne Pratte asked, eyes coquettishly down on her flying fingers. “What they’re saying about your sister?”

  Isabel had her fingers awkwardly up in the air, each with a bow of blue silk around them, and the other end of the blue threads tied, six feet away, to a nail in the wall. The braiding technique involved swapping bows from one finger to the next, using four fingers on each hand in a complicated chain of movements, each round of which created an elaborate knot that lengthened the fingerloop braid by a fraction. She’d been hoping to astonish her new teacher with her skill.

  She had no idea what Anne Pratte could have heard about Jane. She should have known, though. She was coming to appreciate how important it was to know what people were saying. A rumor might mean a concealed truth; guessing a secret might give inside information that might then translate into a deal on advantageous terms. So the question made her drop one loop, then another. She hissed in a breath.

  “Pick it up, dear, quickly,” Anne Pratte said calmly, taking in the tangle of threads and instantly understanding what was going on with them. “You’re on bow reversed; pick up the side below, not the side above; then lower the bows.” Without for a second pausing the lightning rhythm of her own hand movements, in and out, with a haze of blue loops whisking on and off her fingers, and the cord, which would be used as the drawstring for a purse, already at least a foot long, she went on, in the same meditative tone: “They say Jane Shore is going to divorce her husband.

  “Oh, dear,” Anne Pratte added fretfully a moment later, looking across again. “What ever have you done with that braid now?”

  Anne Pratte let Isabel out early when Isabel said she wanted to visit her sister. She softened visibly when Isabel told her she’d been meaning to tell Jane she’d moved inside the Claver house to start learning fine silkwork.

  There was no one at the Shore house on Old Jewry. It was shut
up. Isabel found Jane in the garden of John Lambert’s house instead, even though their father was away in the Low Countries.

  She was sitting on a bench, bareheaded, with the sun turning her waist- length blond hair to a white- gold flame. She was reading a French romance, one of the new printed ones from Gutenberg.

  She was wearing a green velvet robe, with an emerald- in- the- heart pendant round her neck. There was a little smile on her face, and she was humming.

  “You probably know more than I do,” she said coyly, in answer to Isabel’s abrupt question. She didn’t seem surprised by it, any more than she did by Isabel’s sudden appearance at the Lambert house for the first time in months. It all seemed quite natural to her. She was used to people wanting to know her business.

  “What are they saying?”

  It took Isabel what seemed like hours to drag it out of her sister, in a welter of embarrassment and euphemism. Will Shore had never beaten his wife, or neglected her (except for his ledgers), or been cruel in any worse way than to bore her. But he couldn’t perform 1 the act of love. “We’ve never . . . never . . . you know,” Jane muttered, and Isabel first nodded, then shook her head, with the smell of Thomas’s body suddenly filling her nostrils. She shut her mind to it; pursed her lips to keep memory away. Jane was giggling in what sounded like girlish embarrassment.

  The four-year age gap between them used to mean that Jane always seemed grown- up and sophisticated to Isabel, what ever she did. But when Isabel heard that pretty tinkle of a laugh she suddenly felt older than her elder sister. Jane didn’t seem to know the meaning of pain. A divorce would publicly shame Will Shore forever, Isabel thought. She hardly knew him, but he seemed harmless enough: skinny and hardworking and dull. And she could just imagine the market ladies Katherine Dore and Agnes Brundyssch’s response to the gossip. The delight. The catcalls.

  The gestures. He’d be destroyed.

  “Why a divorce?” she asked. “Why can’t you just quietly get an annulment? If the marriage hasn’t . . . hasn’t really . . .” She collected herself. “It seems cruel.”

  Jane’s answer was strangely light. “Well, he’s gone to Bruges to hide his blushes,” she said casually. “Anyway, he refused to talk about an annulment. I did ask. I think he thought I’d just shut up if he said no. But I won’t.” She tilted her chin up; Isabel thought she had all the confidence of an indulged child that things would go her way. She went on, a little defiantly: “Why should I? Non-consummation of a marriage is grounds for divorce. It’s the purpose of holy wedlock to allow women to bear children; to settle for less is to deny God’s will.”

  Isabel gaped. Those sounded like someone else’s words. Jane wasn’t usually hard. Whose advice was she taking?

  “Who’s paying for the hearing?” she asked, groping for the truth. Not Will, surely? And not their father. He must be furious, however gentle he’d always been with Jane. It would cost a for-1 tune, and he’d be humiliating himself. He’d arranged the marriage in the first place.

  The question made Jane shift in her seat and pleat the cloth of her dress. Isabel looked hard at her. Jane wasn’t good at secrets.

  She was definitely hiding something. “Father,” Jane said eventually. But she blushed as she said it.

  “Why?” Isabel asked blankly. Jane only looked demure and shrugged, like a cat getting a speck of dirt off its gleaming coat.

  “Of course, he’s not happy . . . ,” she offered. And she put her hand on Isabel’s arm, cajolingly. “I’m not either.”

  Jane Shore didn't know how to sound serious. Everything always came out with a giggle and a shrug, as though she didn’t quite believe in what she was saying. It had been like that since she’d grown so tall and men had started hanging on her every word, looking foolishly happy, then, equally inexplicably, getting angry with her. They all seemed to assume she must be deliberately exerting some sort of influence over them, that she was in control of the effect she had, when the reality was that she understood neither the openmouthed, moonstruck beginnings of their overtures nor the bitterness that followed; she just felt guilty, as if she agreed with them that she must, in some way she didn’t understand, be to blame. Which made her giggle, and shrug, as if she was perpetually excusing herself. Which she was. She could see from her sister’s unsympathetic face now that she was failing to convey the miserable reality of her marriage. She couldn’t blame Isabel for not understanding, exactly. She just wished she was better at explaining herself.

  It had started with the wedding night. Will’s big eyes, with the black smudges underneath, opened wide and accusing; his little mouth pursing up small and round and ugly. Like a cat’s behind, she thought, with a miserable giggle. Sneering at her. The remarks. That first night it had all been about dancing with the king. “If you could have seen yourself. No one knew where to put themselves. You were panting over him like a dog on heat.” But what else could she have done but dance with the king if he asked her? If he came to her wedding party? She didn’t ask, and Will didn’t offer an explanation. After all the happiness and energy of the party, she felt as shamed as if he’d poured dirty water on her.

  After that, there was always something she seemed to be doing wrong, and what ever she did to try to put things right only seemed to make things worse. It wasn’t that he couldn’t make love to her; the problem was that he wouldn’t. When she’d first tried to kiss him, twining her legs through his, he’d pushed her away.

  She’d felt like a whore. When she’d tried to sleep quietly at his side and not disturb him, he’d woken her up, repeatedly, through the night, shaking her spitefully, mouthing at her, “You’re snoring!”

  “But Isabel never told me I snored,” she’d stammered, trying to defend herself but not knowing how. He only pursed his mouth up again and took himself, wrapped in a sheet, off to another room.

  She felt uglier every time he moved his arms or legs another fastidious inch away from her, as if she smelled or her breath were rank; his face took on a pained look at the sight of her that cut her to the quick. Once he’d brought home a basket of pomegranates, and she’d burst into delighted laughter. It must be a peace token, she’d thought.

  “Are those for me?” she’d asked, looking at him with hope.

  “Shall we share them? Shall I peel you one?”

  And he’d smiled like cold steel before answering: “Well, dear wife, I don’t know that you’ve done anything to deserve treats,” and, laughing, had taken the basket away.

  Sometimes he’d end a conversation in which she was trying to suggest a visit or a dinner or an outing with the casual line, “That 1 might be good—if I loved you”; sometimes he’d tell her she broke her bread too aggressively, or cut her meat like a peasant; or that she walked clumsily, or drank too much, or was a slattern in the house; or he’d just remark on how different the two of them were, as if inviting her to ask in what way (she quickly learned not to, if she wanted to avoid being hurt). And sometimes he’d give a long-suffering sigh and ask her to stop caterwauling, and she’d realize she must have been singing under her breath while she sewed.

  She had tried; she really had. At least for a while. But it had so quickly all come to seem hopeless. And when her father had asked her to go with him to one or two of the court functions he’d started being invited to, she’d been thrilled to discover how easy it was, as soon as she got out of the poisonous atmosphere of her new house in Old Jewry (she couldn’t think of it as a home), to sparkle and laugh again.

  But even that had only made things worse. When her husband got it into his head that she was sleeping with the king, there was no appeasing him. “You slut, you whore, you dog,” he’d say conversationally—it was the chatty ordinariness of his voice that most frightened her—“have you no shame?” It made no difference what words she used to deny it; how many times she widened her eyes, put a pleading hand on his arm, and said, “But it was just a hunt,” or, “I was with my father all day.”

  So Jane was gratefu
l beyond belief that the hearing at the Court of Arches was set for just two weeks hence. Will would be back from Bruges by then. She could only pray that he would actually turn up.

  She was desperate for it to be properly over. She didn’t want to have to giggle and shrug apologetically and submit to any more hard stares from people who seemed to think it must be all her fault. Even Isabel, who she knew had a kind heart, but whose way of listening to news was so unnerving; who was sitting now as Jane remembered her always having done while she thought about things: tucked up on herself like a little ginger cat, knees under chin, hands round knees. Her eyes, looking hard and cold.

  Not blinking. Not touching. Not saying a word.

  “ Isn't there anything else? ” Isabel asked in the end. She still didn’t understand. “Anything you’ve forgotten to tell me?” It was Jane’s way sometimes to forget things.

  Jane ran long fingers through messy blond hair. There was a tiny frown threatening between her perfect eyebrows. But fretfulness only made her look more adorable.

  “Oh . . . ,” she said disconsolately. “So many things; I don’t know where to begin. I don’t want to complain about him, you know. I just want it to be finished.”

  And she looked so imploring that Isabel found herself feeling sorry for her, and melting, and smiling, and doing what she knew Jane would want: opening her arms to offer comfort. But even in the tangle of arms and blondness and prettily tearful smiles that ensued, Isabel went on worrying over whether there wasn’t more to this than met the eye. It didn’t add up.

  Isabel could feel the story taking on its own life in the markets, even on her brief walk home. Speculative eyes burned into her back. On the corner of Milk Street and Catte Street, two boys who caught sight of her started rhythmically grinding their pelvises and wrapping their arms round invisible women, then looking down, miming horrified disappointment, and bursting into comical boo-hoos. She sped up, with her cheeks burning.