Figures in Silk

by Vanora Bennett

  Jane was no fool. She knew there must be some reason why her sister, who’d only wanted to twist threads on market stalls a few months before, suddenly wanted to go to court. “Just to see,”

  Isabel said innocently. She didn’t quite know herself, yet; she just knew that even if she hadn’t been the first to discover her sister’s relation with the king, she could at least be the first to explore the God- sent advantages it might offer. She didn’t think her sister was quite convinced of her innocence. But the subject lapsed.

  Instead, Isabel started praising Jane’s tan velvet gown. “Lucchese,” Jane simpered, pirouetting for her. Jane loved compliments. “Not cheap.”

  “If only we could make velvet here in London,” Isabel went on, letting a note of genuine wistfulness creep into her voice.

  “And other silks. At half the price the Italians charge . . . if only someone, the Mercers maybe, would put up the money to try . . .”

  But Jane just wrinkled her nose. “What money?” she said with a hint of scorn in her smile. “The king’s had it all from them in benevolences. Their pockets are empty. Anyway, I’m very happy with Lucchese velvet.” Lovingly, she smoothed down her glowing skirts. Isabel sighed.

  Isabel didn’t mean to do what she did next, either, but on her way home she found her footsteps taking her by John Lambert’s main stall in the selds. It was only when she was in sight of it, being jostled by boy apprentices, that she allowed herself to recognize what she was preparing to do: approach him and suggest he put up funds to set up a silk- weaving business, bringing in other wealthy mercers to help if need be.

  She took a deep breath, already hearing the persuasive words in her head: “This is how we could do it . . .” But, she thought, her courage already ebbing, before she could say that, she’d have to make peace; look him in the eye, knowing he’d disinherited her; hope for softness in a face better suited to hardness. He’d be bound to say no. She could imagine him pronouncing unforgivable words: You should stop worrying your head about business. Or: You should be more like Jane. The stall was ten yards away, but there were too many people between her and it for her to see it clearly.

  It was almost a relief when, as the crowd thinned, she realized it was packed up. Her father was away.

  Alice Claver had been right, she thought, turning disconsolately toward Catte Street, trying to banish the image of John Lambert’s scornful face from her mind. They’d never get the mercers of London to fund a silk- weaving industry.

  Three weeks later, Jane and Isabel sat shaded from the sun in a lodge made of green boughs and hung with scarlet and blue silk flags. There was wine in front of them, and a flutter of pages rustling in and out to replace one dish of untouched refreshments with another. All around were dozens of other make- believe lodges, with the old royal palace of the Bower rearing up behind them, half hidden by Waltham Forest. In each lodge sat more fairy- tale ladies with necklines plunging as low as their headdresses rose into the sky. Each lady had more impossibly white skin, pale, pampered hands, and pink cheeks than the last. The picnic had gone on since six in the morning. It was nearly ten now, time for the hunt to return. Isabel could feel the cooking fires being lit, adding to the heat.

  She was wearing a borrowed robe provided by Jane—a more magnificent piece of gold- shot green than she’d ever seen outside Alice Claver’s storeroom, over a kirtle of the finest lawn, embroidered with tiny scarlet strawberries. She was trying her best not to look overawed. She was sweaty. There were prickles of moisture in her hair, and the inside of her bodice was soaked. She didn’t know how Jane, wasp- waisted in a flowing scarlet ensemble so tight it must be unbearably hot, could manage to appear so composed and effortlessly cool. Only her fingers, quietly turning her rings round, as if to unstick them from her skin, suggested any kind of discomfort.

  It had been beautiful to ride sidesaddle through the coolness of the dawn, and a thrill to watch the falcons rise off the wrists of accomplished hunters, and later a plea sure to lie back on the cushions and listen to the horns and the hounds in the dense clouds of green that now hid the hunting party. Part of her felt hazily that she had somehow stepped inside a tapestry; that if she looked more carefully, she might see that the grass underfoot was scattered with pearls, or spot centaurs trotting by.

  But Isabel was also stiff and bored; she was uncomfortably aware of being not nearly as elegant as the ladies of the court, and, except for Jane, alone. It hadn’t been so bad before the men rode out. Jane had other admirers as well as the king, and the two most important of them had spent the first part of the morning vying for her attention. Lord Hastings (dark, bowing, fine- featured, and supremely affable) had escorted them from the palace, laughing, picking buttercups for Jane to put in her hair, telling mischievous stories about the dogfights in the kitchen when they’d changed the animals at the spit, and encouraging Jane to take his falcon.

  Then Lord Dorset (blond, bowing, fine-featured, and also supremely affable) had brought them two jeweled cups of wine and plumped their cushions and amused them with a slightly crueler story about Lord Hastings being bucked off his new horse into a puddle in full sight of the queen. It was only after the hunters had cantered off into the trees that Isabel had begun to feel really uneasy: every time they stepped outside their bower to try and create movement in the still, stifling air, they came across more of the perfect ladies, each one laughing and murmuring to a companion; each one, as far as she could tell, quite unable to see either her or Jane. It made her feel even more invisible than her first days of apprenticeship had; spectral. Jane squeezed her arm encouragingly when she saw Isabel look first surprised, then downcast, at the snubs. “Don’t pay any attention,” she whispered, and there was a brave edge to her smile. “That’s Elizabeth Lucy. She doesn’t like me.” And she drew Isabel farther into the edges of the forest, where, if the air still didn’t move, at least there was more shade, and pointed out the children playing nearby. “The king’s children,” she muttered. Nearest was a little girl of maybe five or six, with hair as startlingly copper- colored as the queen’s, much redder than Isabel’s gentle strawberry blond, though this flame hair graced an ordinary, round, solemn child’s head that wasn’t much like the extraordinary, bewitching, heart- shaped face of the beauty Isabel had glimpsed riding proudly ahead on the way to the forest. Three or four smaller girls, all with the same flaming hair and placid faces, sat quietly nearby, as if the heat had sapped their will to move. A toddler—a boy—was crawling toward a carved wooden horse on an enormous carpet so padded and plumped with cushions that Isabel couldn’t imagine how he could make progress; and watching him, sitting on a stool, nursing a baby, sat a strapping young woman in the queen’s colors. Jane smiled, as if fondly, but she didn’t move any closer. Isabel saw that, after all, she hadn’t really stepped inside the tapestry. Neither had Jane. They were still outside, watching, as if from behind glass.

  Her spirits only lifted when she heard the thunder of hooves; when, after the cavalcade emerged from the trees followed by men carry ing two bucks and several hares, the ladies swayed decorously to the purple- draped wooden platform to have the morning’s sport reenacted for them, with many blood- curdling cries, before being ushered, half fainting from the heat, into the still hotter enclosed space of the royal pavilion to toast the king’s success and taste the meat that had been cooked while they watched.

  Isabel’s heart sank for a moment when Jane pulled her aside, not letting her into the pavilion with the first surge of the crowd.

  “What?” she whispered. “Why not?” But Jane just shushed her with an urgent shake of the head. They scuff ed their feet as ladies streamed past; but a minute or two later, to Isabel’s relief, Jane let them join the forward movement after all. “I saw the Duke of Gloucester up ahead,” Jane whispered, with more dislike than Isabel had seen her showing for anyone; as if she’d been humiliated by him. “The king’s brother. The one they say murdered the Duke of Clarence; the other brother. Let’s give him a
chance to get ahead. He gives me the shivers.” She shuddered eloquently. “A horrible man. Rat face; cold eyes.”

  But Jane smiled joyfully when Lord Hastings, tousled and sweaty and even handsomer than before, spurred toward them.

  She fumbled in her right sleeve as he drew up and pulled out a green kerchief; his token, which she must have accepted in private on the ride to the woods, and which she now handed back. She laughed at him, so invitingly and intimately that Isabel, relieved at a moment of real human contact, couldn’t help joining in.

  “I prayed for you to take the buck,” Jane dimpled, breathy and baby- voiced, “and see how God answered me.”

  He touched the kerchief to his lips, grinned, and trotted off .

  So Isabel was confused when Lord Dorset, tousled and sweaty and also handsomer than before, spurred his horse toward them a few moments later, and Jane, smiling very sweetly at him, fumbled in her left sleeve and pulled out a mulberry kerchief, his token, which she handed back.

  “I knew you’d get the hares,” she breathed at him. “With your sharp eyes. I was praying for your success.”

  And this time Isabel just watched, gape- mouthed, as Dorset put the mulberry kerchief to his lips in a gesture identical to Hastings’s, and trotted off back toward the King, straight- backed and successful.

  “Jane,” she whispered, not knowing whether to be shocked.

  Jane only giggled. “Well, it made them both happy,” she whispered back. Jane never really felt guilty when caught in one of her pieces of guile. Her voice sounded pleading, but her smile was so merry and infectious that Isabel began to laugh again, out of sheer relief at this naughtiness amid the dignity and blank stares.

  Jane added, through Isabel’s laughter, “And they hate each other so much; they’d have been miserable if I’d turned one of them down for the other. I couldn’t have taken one token without taking the second, now, could I?”

  So this was how Jane bore the lonely dullness, Isabel thought, feeling a little happier for her sister. If, that was, Jane even found this boring or lonely. Perhaps she didn’t. Jane had always known how to amuse herself with some almost innocent bit of mischief. Isabel was less surprised this time when, once they’d arranged themselves somewhere low down the table in the tent and were eating in silence, and the big, casual king loped up to them, as golden and tousled as a lion, crunching at the piece of meat speared on the knife in his hand, Jane gave him a dewy look full of promise and pulled an embroidered crimson kerchief from her bodice. “I knew you’d take the biggest buck,” she breathed invitingly. “No one else can compare to the Sun in splendor . . .”

  He laughed, a long, lazy chuckle that suggested to Isabel he knew perfectly well what Jane had been up to but didn’t mind her minxiness in the least. After taking back the token, he leaned down, touched Jane affectionately on the tip of her nose with his finger, and murmured something in her ear.

  Isabel politely looked away. She was expecting to be ignored.

  But the king, unlike his courtiers, wasn’t a man for discourtesy.

  “The second lovely Lambert daughter,” he said, startling her, lighting her up with a long gaze. It was the kind of look that made her feel not only that he knew her well and admired her, but also that she was the loveliest and wittiest person in the room, and that he was about to laugh heartily when she made her next brilliant pleasantry. She’d heard he always had this illuminating effect. Anne Pratte, her guide to what people said, was clear on this point: King Edward could be relied on to know the title, acreage, and rental income of every knight in every remote corner of the land. This might, Anne Pratte was careful to add, just be because he needed to know how much he could count on when he stung them for loans, which he often did. And the reason he was also said to know the name of every knight’s and merchant’s wife might be because he had slept with them all. But that was just gossip, Isabel thought, dazzled. He said, “I was the unexpected guest at your wedding,” as if politely reminding her of something she might have forgotten. He continued, just as easily, “I’m sorry for your loss, Mistress Claver. Your husband died with courage.”

  She bowed her head. So, respectfully, did he. So, after a second, did Jane. “Thank you, Sire,” Isabel whispered.

  A pipe and viol started playing a jig behind them. Following the rhythm, the king waved a hand and raised merry eyebrows.

  The sad moment was over.

  “If I may say so,” he went on, his eyes gleaming with the pleasure of the compliment he was clearly about to pay, “that is a very beautiful silk you’re wearing.” He leaned over to touch the green- and- gold overskirt Jane had lent Isabel. The gesture brought his face level with Isabel’s and his big body so uncomfortably close that she nearly jumped back.

  Grinning rather wolfishly at her, with his eyes now only a few inches from hers, he added, in a husky growl that, in someone else, might pass for a whisper, “One of the Claver house’s elegant imports from Italy, perhaps?”

  He must know where it was from, she thought, in a daze.

  He must have bought it for Jane himself. It must have cost . . .

  Suddenly, she almost laughed at herself. Kings didn’t have to notice details, or refrain from flirting with their mistresses’ sisters, any more than Jane had to wear only one knight’s token. Why was she being so solemn? Perhaps it was going to be easier than she’d realized to bring the conversation round to the subject she wanted to discuss.

  She grinned cheekily back and shook her head. Somewhere in her head she could feel the first glimmer of an idea. She raised a storyteller’s finger.

  “Ahh, no; it’s not from Italy,” she said playfully, making sure to catch the king’s eyes and hold them. “Not this cloth. But it is beautiful, isn’t it? It’s from the newest manufacture of Italian silk cloth in Europe—from Tours.”

  Don’t give me away, she silently prayed to Jane; she’d felt Jane start at her lie. Then, gratefully, she sensed her sister’s shoulders rise in acquiescence. Jane was always playing this sort of joke on people, after all. She’d give Isabel the benefit of the doubt for now; she’d go along with the story.

  “Tours?” the King asked. “They make silk in France now?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, with an extraordinary external calm matched only by the extraordinary turmoil inside. “In his wisdom, the king of France is doing all he can to encourage the weaving of silk cloths at Tours—”

  She fixed him with her most persuasive gaze.

  “You may wonder why?” she went on.

  The king paused. Isabel was aware of Jane at her side, scarcely breathing.

  She could imagine what Jane must be thinking. The king was good- natured, but how good- natured would even the most tolerant of kings go on being if he got bored? Then, to both girls’ combined relief and terror, he smiled and began to look at least a little intrigued. “Why?” he asked.

  “Because,” Isabel continued, not missing a beat, “he understands that establishing a silk industry in France is going to give an honest and profitable occupation to ten thousand people.”

  She’d forgotten Jane now. But Jane’s whole attention was still fixed, in utter astonishment, on her odd little sister. Isabel was almost singing, Jane was thinking; as if she were wooing him. She wasn’t having a little joke, bending reality to amuse herself, as Jane might do; it looked for all the world as though she was about to start selling him something. “Ten thousand people,” Isabel went on, “all ranks and sorts of people, from clergymen to noblemen to religious women to others—all the people who’d sat idle before. Ten thousand people—imagine. That’s a fifth of the population of London.”

  Edward wasn’t angry; in fact, his eyes were glinting at Isabel with what Jane thought might be amusement at this thin young girl- widow’s eloquence.

  “That’s why silk manufacture has been spreading out of Italy for twenty years. To Spain. To Flanders. To France. Because rulers of countries all over Christendom are coming to realize that establishing a
silk industry helps everyone in a community,” Isabel intoned. Really, Jane thought, almost shocked, she was staring at him like a snake hypnotizing its prey. But Edward seemed willing to be hypnotized. At least, he sat down on the bench and gestured Isabel to sit next to him.

  “How so?” he asked. Jane was left standing.

  “Because,” Isabel answered coolly, sitting down beside the king without for a moment letting her voice stop caressing his ears, “there are so many crafts in silk. Children and women can raise the silkworms, and reel and wind the silk they produce. The poor and the old can sort the silk, dress it, weave it, and dye it.

  Merchants can run silk shops. And any citizen can plant mulberry trees or make partnerships with merchants.”

  She smiled confidently at Edward. “And, of course, getting so many people into their honest and profitable new occupation can only be good for their king,” she went on. “As Your Majesty will appreciate.”

  He lifted an eyebrow and leaned closer. “Go on,” he said seriously. Even Jane, whose fearful heartbeat was now slowing to a rate at which she could breathe almost normally, recognized this as an unambiguous signal to continue.

  Isabel said purposefully: “A new manufacture attracts more outsiders into the City—like the five thousand newcomers who have come to Tours. That means bigger revenues—from taxes on grain and wine and salt and food and clothing—and also from tolls on merchandise entering and leaving the City, which obviously all go up too, because all those new people need new houses and shops and looms and workshops built for them.” She was rattling her figures off with glib expertise. She was smiling more intently than ever at the hypnotized Edward. “And don’t forget that once the business is established, the king will also be able to earn much more than before in dues for exporting textiles—because there will be many more textiles to export.”