Figures in Silk Read online

  He leaned forward. Put his elbows on the table. She thought he might be going to touch her, comfort her. She blushed deeper and bent in on herself.

  He didn’t. He just joined his hands together, placing them thoughtfully under his chin, and went on looking calmly at her.

  “May I offer some advice?” he asked. His dignified simplicity made her feel ashamed of her own blurting.

  Attempting to match his formality, she nodded again, trying not to let the hope shine too obviously on her face that he would hit on some easy way out for her.

  “You have to marry as your circumstances demand,” he said, so gently she could hardly bear it. “I think from what you’ve told me that you know your father loves you. He’s saying he’s trying to do what’s best for your family. And it’s a father’s job to make good alliances for his children. Even if he hasn’t fully understood your feelings, perhaps he knows more about your family’s circumstances than you do.”

  “But,” she stammered, lost in disappointment. “But . . .”

  “I know,” he said sadly, “it’s not what you wanted to hear.”

  He lowered his eyes. So did she, concentrating furiously on the new batch of pork rinds and pink shards of flesh on their own platters, willing away the hotness in her eyes.

  “It can destroy a family if a father doesn’t think about how to marry his children, you know,” he was saying, somewhere behind the redness of her eyelids. “It nearly did mine.” She glanced up, surprised. His eyes were still on her, though they were unfocused now, far away, not so much looking into her soul as lost in a dark part of his own. “He spent his whole life at the war, my father, and he was a good soldier. But when we heard he’d been killed, there we were: a brood of orphans scattered around the country, without a single marriage that would have given us a new protector among the six of us. He never realized that making alliances for his family was just as important as winning battles; that you need friends to defeat your enemies—a strategy for living, not just for dying.”

  He laughed, with a tinge of real bitterness. Isabel kept quiet, less because she was artfully drawing him out at last, as she’d imagined she would, than because she didn’t know how to respond. She was realizing uncomfortably how little she knew of the world outside the Mercery, of the world where the war was.

  Trying to imagine what it would be like for your father to die, all that came to her mind was sounds: the snuffles of women weeping; the banging of a hammer, nailing down a coffin lid,nailing shut the door of her home; the chilly quiet of Cheapside by night, for those with nowhere to go; the scuttling of rats. Her mother had died too long ago for Isabel to remember her. But she couldn’t form a picture of a life in which her father wasn’t fretting in the silkroom, nagging a bit more work out of some sunken- eyed shepster, smiling even as he picked at a minutely off - kilter seam with his obsessively clean fingernails; or drawing in a noble client by singing out the beauty of his stock with his green eyes glowing; or counting out his piles of coin later with a sly laugh at how envious the noble client would be if she only realized by how much the servile merchant’s silk profits outweighed her rents and rolling acres. Isabel couldn’t imagine waiting, in some half- closed house in a field, for the rumor, or letter, or servant limping home in bandages, bringing word; those words, what ever this man must have heard. Yet even failing to envision it brought it closer. It had always been enough to know that the war happened to other people; but now she was talking to someone who had been touched by it, she felt herself, for the first time, weighed down with nameless possibilities. She didn’t know what the weak flexing in her gut was called, or the darkness seeping through her veins; but she thought it might be fear.

  She crossed herself. Filled with a sudden longing to be wiser and older, she thought, It’s ignorant to live in a city that’s about to be entered by a conquering army (King Edward’s army was at St.

  Albans, people said; it would be here any day, and the mayor had already given the order to let the soldiers in) yet be so innocent of disaster. Pig ignorant. I’ve grown up in a land where two families of kings have been fighting each other for the throne for as long as anyone can remember, and I know nothing about it. You don’t if you’re a Londoner. We hardly see it. Still, he’d think me a child if he knew.

  He didn’t notice her gesture. “Well, we survived. But we’ve been unlucky ever since with our marriage choices,” he was saying, with a twist to his mouth that made his face look pinched and hard. “My eldest brother ran away with a war widow, the stupidest possible love match, just when what family we still had was finally arranging a proper alliance for him. We’re only just seeing the end of the years of hatred that brought. And then a second brother married to spite the eldest brother, deliberately going against his wishes. And that’s meant more trouble . . .”

  He sighed and looked down at the neat meat squares his hands had been cutting as he talked, and pushed one gently toward himself with his knife. Then he stabbed it. Isabel took another sip of rough dark wine as it disappeared into his mouth, wondering which brother he’d been thinking of when he’d made that stabbing movement. “I’m glad it’s over now,” she ventured, glancing up, “your family trouble, I mean.”

  Perhaps it was the smallness of her voice that made his eyes gentle again.

  “Almost over,” he corrected, looking properly at her once more. “There’s still my marriage to arrange.”

  For a second, his voice was so tender that her heart leaped.

  She caught her breath, leaning eagerly forward behind her cup.

  Then she felt a sigh ebb out of her as he went on, more harshly:“And now it’s my turn, there’s nothing I want more than to make a marriage that will be good for my family—but my second brother’s trying to stop me. He’s fighting it so hard that I think even my trying to do the right thing might turn out to be the wrong thing.

  I’ve found myself thinking I should pull back . . . to satisfy him.”

  His jaw tightened, as it had in church. “I’m not going to, though,” he added firmly. “That wouldn’t help either. But I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever stop being orphans at war, willful children in men’s bodies, destroying each other while we try to sort out the things our father should have decided.” He sighed. “You can see why I believe there’s nothing more important than marrying in the best interests of your family, can’t you?” he added with more energy. “You have to work together, do your duty; or you’re lost.”

  “Oh,” Isabel muttered lamely. There was another long silence, broken from somewhere behind by a roar of male laughter.

  The girl cleared away their boards. Isabel noticed that the light was failing. The window was still bright, but his face was falling into shadow. She hadn’t heard the bell; but the markets must be closing.

  He was sitting very straight and apparently still on his stool.

  She felt, rather than saw, the tiny movement of his hand twitching at his sword hilt. She remembered peeping sideways at his hands in the church: they’d been brown and well- made, with thin fingers and bitten nails.

  She wanted to ask: “Do you love her?” But she sensed that was a question girls giggling in silkrooms might ask, and not for him.

  Instead, she faltered, “But don’t you ever wish . . . ?” and left the question hanging. She didn’t know herself how she’d have finished it.

  When his voice came out of the gloom again, it was wistful and there was no flash of eyes; he must be looking down.

  “Ah, wishes,” he whispered back. “If we could live by our wishes . . . please ourselves: live at peace, kill nothing but dragons . . . eat buttercups . . . ride unicorns . . . who knows what any of us would do?”

  She heard a quiet rumble of laughter. She could see the ghost of the evening star through a smeared windowpane. She put her cup down and left her hands spread on the table. She looked at the two pale shadows on the dark wood: fingers long and lovely enough to embroider church vestments with, as her father liked t
o say. The question flashed through her mind—Was he looking at them too?—as she thought, All I want is to go on sitting here in this darkness; not to talk; not to think; not to go home.

  “Of course, you don’t have to take my advice,” he said in the end. When she looked up, his eyes were gleaming quizzically at her again, his long eyes the only clearly visible part of his shadowed form. “If you have choices, that is.”

  “Choices?” she repeated dully, as reality came back like a sour taste in the mouth. Knowing that her father wouldn’t let her run away from marrying Thomas Claver by paying her dowry to a nunnery instead, since she’d never shown the least sign of having a vocation; wondering if she’d have the nerve to risk walking out of his great place, where she’d always been Miss Isabel, daintily perched on wallows of silk, sewing altar cloths, to become a withered, unregarded, unmarried house keeper in the house hold of the kind of wealthy wife Jane would become. Knowing she wouldn’t. Aware too that there were other, worse possibilities that her imagination was shying away from. “What choices?”

  He glanced over at the chessboard and grinned. “Strategic choices,” he said, with a return of the wolfish energy she’d glimpsed as they left the church. “You mustn’t think life is a romance; that some knight errant will come along and slay the dragon for you.

  Knights don’t really sit and pine at lovely ladies’ gates. They fight.

  That’s reality. War. Chess. All you can do is plan as many steps ahead as you can and position yourself for a good move next time.

  Know what your powers are and what you can do.”

  Briskly, he shook out a couple of pieces. “Look. Say I’m a king: I can move in several directions. If the way I want is blocked, there are others open to me. But let’s call you a pawn. You don’t have so many choices. All you can do is move forward, one step at a time. And I’d imagine your only forward movement now is to say yes.”

  She glanced up; down, at her fingers, plucking at each other; up again through her eyelashes, seeking his eyes but hiding hers when she met them; not wanting to acquiesce. How could he look so soft, but be so hard? Was that what the war had done to him, or just his nature? She didn’t want to accept that her dilemma could be reduced to this ruthless balancing of possible outcomes; this cold- blooded comparison of disadvantage. All she wanted was to come up with some way of talking her father out of his foolishness, she thought; ready to toss her head like an impatient pony, but restraining herself just in time, with the dawning awareness that there was no place left in her life for petulance. Her father wasn’t going to change his mind.

  “Well?” the man in front of her murmured. His voice might be soft, but there was no ignoring the challenge in it. “Do you have any other choices?”

  She shook her head, filling up inside with a darkness that crawled and churned.

  “You’re young,” she heard him add. She thought she heard sympathy. “Take the long view. This is only your first move. You’ll get more chances later.”

  The serving girl was lighting candles in the back vaults; people were crowding in from the markets. She couldn’t bring herself even to nod. Forever yawned ahead of her fourteen- year- old mind like a pit. She got up. Wished she had a cloak to wrap carefully around herself. It would be cold outside. There was nowhere to go but home.

  “Thank you for your company,” she muttered, staring at her feet, and turned to the door.

  He was on his feet in a dark whirl; beside her, a hand on her back. “It’s not easy, I know,” he whispered. “I was lucky we met today: you’ve helped me see what I should do. So thank you. And good luck. I hope I’ve helped you do the right thing too.”

  She was aware of his downturned face just above hers. From very close, she became conscious of his arm stretching around behind her; of long lean muscle and the dizzy moving together of bodies. Or did she misunderstand? Before she quite knew what was happening, it wasn’t happening anymore. He was striding off very fast toward the serving girl, in her pool of candlelight, feeling down his leg for a purse; glancing briefly back at her, still with those half- closed, intent eyes; muttering, “Goodbye, Isabel.”

  She stood there for a moment more. Astonished; still feeling the heat of his hand on her skin. Watching his retreating back. Then she braced herself for the evening chill, and walked out into the starlight. She thought she glimpsed him turning back round to watch the door swing shut behind her, but she couldn’t be sure.

  Every step she took back toward her home felt harder. Every dutiful footfall was heavier. That last moment was still with her, mixed up with the wind flapping at her skirts. It stayed with her like the eye’s long memory of flame: the man with the soft eyes and the hard mind looking back at her over a lean shoulder, then moving away so fast that the candles silhouetting his form shrank back as if a dark wind was blowing at them, murmuring good- bye in his black velvet voice. His hand on her back. She didn’t even know his name. She’d never see him again. It would have to be enough that for an instant they’d drawn so close she’d almost felt the heat of his body on hers. Even the possibility of one day feeling that radiance again, of being transformed like a wisp of silk lit up by the sun, might help to sustain her through the drab future her father was planning for her.

  2

  Isabel married Thomas Claver a week later, on a bright April morning, on the steps of St. Thomas of Acre.

  The little people squinting across Cheapside to the church door smiled at the sight while they filled up their buckets at the water conduit, or popping heads out from one of the many covered markets behind the Mercers’ thoroughfare and the cramped stalls lining the road, where low- ranking silkwomen doing needlework or weaving or throwing or twisting threads craned their failing eyes to watch the world go by as they worked. A couple of crones poked each other and cheered the little pro cession on to the door, with the mocking laughs of the old. But all they probably noticed was John Lambert, in his mercer’s blue velvet livery robes trimmed with fur, looking as magnificent and proud as a prince between the daughters whose future he was settling.

  Isabel’s heart was beating so loud she was breathless with the boom and thud of blood in her ears. It was all she could do to stop her own small, unimpressive, down- covered limbs, so like her dead mother’s had been, from trembling, and her freckled face from showing fear. When she’d looked into her mother’s beaten copper mirror before leaving, the dark blue eyes in the face that had stared back from it had been wiped of their usual intent, good- humored look. There was no sign in that face that its own er was usually chatty and bright and asked inquisitive questions about everything she saw. There was none of the charm in those neat, symmetrical features that often made people look at her with the beginning of a shared smile, even if she wasn’t trying to beguile them. The face looking back at her now didn’t seem pretty: just quiet, even placid. Her red- gold hair was smoothed neatly away under her veil. It was the best display she could manage in the circumstances.

  She couldn’t look at Jane, as slender and golden as ever. Jane was dressed exactly like Isabel in one of the yellow gowns embroidered with silk flowers in which John Lambert had displayed them on his retail stall in the biggest market, the Crown Seld, whenever he made them sit there, embroidering the heavy orphreys that would later border extravagant church vestments.

  (The sight of the two girls, so fresh and pretty, was supposed to draw in passing trade; Isabel had spent her life complaining that she wanted to do more than just sew while she was working in the seld, but her father had always been adamant—embroidering church vestments was the only suitable part of the mercer’s trade for a young lady of her stature.) Jane was her father’s daughter even now, down to the emerald- green eyes and noble profile and air of perfect composure under pressure. Isabel shrank into herself as she peeped at her sister, wished she could look so self-assured. Isabel couldn’t look at the bridegrooms—Will Shore, somewhere over there on the edge of her field of vision, behind Jane, a shy beanpole in violet ho
se, and Thomas Claver, thickset and reddish- haired, next to her. In Thomas’s case, though, she was at least aware of his eyes darting between the watchers and her father and his own tub of a mother, whose reddish face was cheerful above her serviceable dark clothes. John Lambert had wondered aloud more than once in the past few days whether Alice Claver—who was famously not one for ceremony—would have the decency to dress appropriately for the occasion. She’d lived down to his expectations, wearing only her usual market clothes with a bright blue cloak wrapped over them, as if she’d hastily borrowed some of her stock for the day, or was expecting rain. If anything in the assembly of people Isabel couldn’t look at now gave her comfort, it was Alice Claver looking scratchy and uncomfortable in that dressed-up cloak.

  There hadn't been much time for Isabel to get used to her situation, what with King Edward’s army entering the City and the curfew being moved to before sunset, just in case, and her father being called on to head one of the city patrols watching the soldiers to prevent outrages against the citizens. At the end of the first day, when people had begun to relax a little, as they saw that this army, now mostly camped outside the walls in Moorfields (with just a few hundred lodged in Baynard’s Castle, the riverside family home of the dukes of York), was not going to make trouble, and as eager vintners and fishmongers rushed to make contracts to supply the soldiers until they left to march north again, an agitated John Lambert had got the call to join the king and his generals at the thanksgiving Mass they were holding at St. Paul’s. His delight at that almost compensated for being left out of the farewell banquet at Baynard’s Castle last night, at which the mayor had been allowed to serve the king’s wine. And his preparations for being briefly in sight of the court had overshadowed the planning for the weddings.

  With so much going on, John Lambert had only had time to take Isabel once to the Claver house on Catte Street, a great place whose airy halls and parlors put to shame even the substantial Lambert family home round the corner on Milk Street, even if it wasn’t decorated with half so many tapestries and carpets as the Lambert house. It was in the morning of the day the gates were opened to the army. He was already in his harness, ready to ride out with the patrol. He’d hastily sorted out the business side of the marriage with Alice Claver, at one end of the great hall, in the space of an hour, while the betrothed couple had been given a brief chance to get to know each other, sitting awkwardly on benches drawn up across from each other, at the other end of the room.