Figures in Silk Read online

  Hastings nodded, suddenly swept away by the memory of his first sight of Jane Shore in Lambert’s great hall at that wedding feast: Edward dancing with her until her cheeks flushed with roses and her teeth flashed in the smile that had swept him away.

  Hastings had poured her a goblet of wine as Edward sat her down next to him. He’d leaned forward and given it to her himself, and she’d touched his hand for a fraction longer than she’d needed to, and looked at him with soft, shining eyes.

  “Well,” Dickon’s voice went on, with a hint of impatience,“where is she now?”

  “Who?” Hastings said blankly. Then, with slight embarrassment: “Ah—the redhead.” He spread his arms wide in a parody of bewilderment and shook his head and let his courtier’s smile—a smile of great charm—spread over his face. “Married,” he replied, and shrugged a little more. “So who can say?”

  They walked out into Cheapside. Hastings could hear Dickon humming under his breath.

  “Didn’t you want to buy something too?” he said awkwardly, as they reached their horses. “I thought you said . . .”

  Dickon’s eyes glinted at him with characteristic dry amusement over the knotted reins, as if relieved Hastings wasn’t too love- struck to have noticed his friend had come away empty-handed. “Nothing caught my fancy,” he answered easily.

  Isabel wouldn't wait any longer. She knew her father would sulk for months. She was past caring. She called in a notary from Guildhall the very next morning to draw up the apprenticeship agreement, as soon as she’d taken in the two dark robes. She didn’t want to be dissuaded. It would be too easy to give in and go home.

  The young man who turned up at Catte Street was the younger of the two Lynom boys; the tall, clean- cut sons of Hugh Lynom, silk merchant of Old Jewry, the Prattes’ and the Shores’ closest neighbor; the boys every girl in the Mercery had always dreamed of marrying. They were twins, so alike Isabel had never been able to tell them apart, though she thought this one was called Robert. But the sight of his eyes (topaz, she remembered Elizabeth Marchpane calling the color of the Lynom boys’ eyes; no, manticore, Anne Hagour had dreamily contradicted her: man-tiger) reminded her of the one definite thing she knew about them: that they’d both chosen not to go into their father’s business but to train as lawyers instead. Their father had gone round telling people, with wistfulness in his voice and hurt in his eyes,“They say there are opportunities I’m too old to understand in government; they’ll see the world and better themselves faster outside the Mercery, they say.” Thomas had told his father that with all the redistribution of lands and estates that the wars had brought, he’d get richer faster if he went into drawing up property transfer agreements. Robert had told his father he’d get richer faster if he stayed in the City but went into representing City merchants and the Guildhall in negotiations with the Royal Wardrobe. They weren’t the only young men to see new horizons beyond the City walls, and everyone knew their father was longing to amass a big enough fortune to buy his way into the gentry anyway, but the fact of both sons leaving the Mercery had aroused comment. The selds had buzzed with it for weeks.

  Isabel gritted her teeth. It was just her luck. A Lynom wasn’t going to sympathize with her decision to sign up for a ten- year silkworking apprenticeship. If she wasn’t careful, he might even delay things; let her father know before the papers were signed and sealed.

  For once she was grateful for Alice Claver’s war horse ways.

  “Sit down, young man, and take down the terms,” her mother- in-law rattled out, breaking through the visitor’s formal regrets over the death in the family; and the Lynom boy sat obediently at the table and began unpacking his box of pens and parchment. If Isabel hadn’t felt certain nothing could make Alice Claver nervous, she might have thought the silkwoman was in even more haste than she was. “Term, ten years. Premium, five pounds.”

  The Lynom boy’s good-humored eyes were laughing. He could feel her haste too. And he was intrigued. Isabel thought for a moment he must sense a story to tell the selds—at least until she remembered that he’d changed his own life to get away from the selds. Perhaps, she thought, reassured, he was the right person to be making this document after all.

  As it turned out, he didn’t try to delay. He’d become a lawyer through and through. He wrote the usual promises into the document: that Isabel would cherish her mistress’s interests, not waste her goods or trade without her permission, behave well, and not withdraw unlawfully from her service; that Alice Claver would“teach, take charge of, and instruct her apprentice” in her craft, chastise her in meet fashion, and find her footwear, clothing, a bed, and all other suitable necessities.

  Alice Claver looked over his shoulder. “What’s this?” she said sharply as he carried on writing. He stopped, looking confused, and ran his hand through his tawny blond hair. He’d started to add the final boilerplate phrase of contracts involving girl apprentices—that Isabel should be treated pulchrior modo, more kindly than a boy. “She’s my family,” Alice Claver said brusquely.

  “How else would I treat her?” She barked with laughter. After a pause, Isabel laughed too. the Lynom boy looked from the older woman to the younger, both in their black gowns. Then he smiled and crossed out the off ending line. But Isabel felt his gaze linger curiously on her as he packed up his pens.

  “My fee for drawing up the indentures and registering them with the Mercers’ Company clerk is one shilling,” the Lynom boy said, sanding what he’d written with fluid muscles.

  Alice Claver nodded. “Do it today,” she said.

  The Lynom boy brought copies of the documents back two days later, duly registered. Isabel received him, wondering at the discreet sympathy in his eyes until he gave her the other letter he was also carry ing for her.

  It was a cold, brief letter from her father: formal notice that he was rewriting his will to leave his estate to Jane, “my one dutiful daughter.” Isabel could see from Robert Lynom’s expression that he knew what it said.

  She glanced over it. Nodded curtly. Let the hand holding the letter flutter down to her side. Kept the anger and contempt and hurt boiling inside her tightly shut down. She knew what her father would want her to do, but she wasn’t going to weep or run begging to him to change his mind. She wouldn’t let herself be bullied. She was learning not to let her face show her feelings.

  Alice Claver and Anne Pratte swept in. When Alice Claver saw the young lawyer, she held her hand out for the documents she was expecting. He smiled, bowed courteously, and passed them over. She gave them a careful reading, then grunted with satisfaction. She tucked them into her large purse. She didn’t look at Isabel or ask what the letter still held loosely in her apprentice’s hand was.

  Alice fixed Robert Lynom with a sudden, fierce smile. Now the business was done, she had time for conversation. “I hear Lord Hastings has been buying in the selds. In person. From”—she gestured sideways at Isabel without catching her eye—“my new apprentice’s father.”

  Isabel looked away; perhaps she should have told Alice Claver about Lord Hastings’s visit herself, but her quarrel with her father had made her forget it. However, Robert Lynom knew enough to satisfy the silkwoman. He nodded easily. “He has indeed,” he said, including Isabel in his answering smile, putting away his papers in his box. “A cloth of green figured velvet. From Lucca, if I remember rightly. They say he paid a good price for it too.”

  It was natural to discuss this new phenomenon. It was unusual for noblemen to visit the markets themselves. If they were of the blood royal, they usually placed orders through the King’s Wardrobe in Old Jewry, and administrators such as Robert Lynom would find merchants to meet their requirements. Otherwise lords might send representatives to the markets to bargain for luxury goods in their place.

  But unusual things had been happening since King Edward had come back, and Lord Hastings, his closest adviser, was an unusual nobleman anyway. He’d survived the times of exile and poverty by living on his co
nsiderable wits; he’d gradually turned the meager estates of his inheritance into a magnate’s fabulous wealth. Now that his lord was back on the throne, Hastings was showing he wasn’t the kind to stand grandly on his aristocratic dignity, willing only to live by the sword. As a mark of the king’s trust, he’d recently been named governor of Calais, and the markets were full of the rumor that he planned not just to run the garrison there but to take a personal interest in the port’s trade as well. There was even talk that Lord Hastings was courting the staplers of Calais, who controlled all the exports of raw wool from England, by becoming a merchant of the staple himself. They said he had the wit and imagination to find common ground with anyone, noble or not. Remembering his merry, kindly eyes from the wedding feast (before he started staring so hungrily at Jane, at least), Isabel could believe it.

  Alice Claver wanted to know more, but she didn’t want to show her envy of John Lambert’s deal too openly. She didn’t ask the price her competitor had charged for his cloth. Instead, she asked casually: “And did his lordship say what he was going to do with the velvet?”

  Isabel was trying to think of nothing more than enjoying the story. She would have time enough later to fret about her father; there was nothing she could do about him anyway. She leaned encouragingly toward Robert Lynom.

  “He didn’t,” the Lynom boy said briefly.

  But Anne Pratte knew more. She always did. She’d quietly taken up a seat on a little footstool by the window; she had a piece of work in her hands; but she was following everything like a small bloodhound. She picked up the narrative by piping up, with gusto: “But there’s talk, of course. They say he sent it as a gift to a lady, don’t they?”

  At her voice, Robert Lynom suddenly started to look excruciatingly uncomfortable. He stopped, bit his tongue, blushed. Isabel couldn’t understand what was going through his head. “Well,”

  Alice said impatiently. “Who to? You must know. You’ll have done the paperwork, won’t you? Spit it out, man.”

  He mumbled something. Even his scalp was on fire. He picked up his box.

  Alice Claver planted herself one step in front of him, her smile half a threat.

  “Don’t leave us hanging,” she said, more command than plea.

  “Who was the cloth for?”

  He composed himself. Decided upon his choice of who to offend, and made himself smile at Alice Claver. Turning sharply away from Anne Pratte and slightly away from Isabel, he said:“They say—though I can’t be sure they’re right—to your new apprentice’s sister, Mistress Shore.”

  Alice Claver almost choked. “No,” she said, with a mixture of shock, disbelief, envy, and amusement. “Really?” Then, as if remembering Isabel’s presence, she clapped a friendly hand on Robert Lynom’s back and ushered him out toward the door.

  Twittering excitedly, Anne Pratte followed; she wasn’t an unkind woman usually, but the thrill of that story had eclipsed any worries she might otherwise have had about Isabel’s feelings.

  Isabel thought he wouldn’t dare even glance back at her. He disliked market gossip, and he’d known what was in the letter her father had written her; he’d be miserably aware of having added to her worries about her family with the story they’d bullied out of him.

  But he did look back, from the doorway. “Good day, Mistress Claver,” he said bravely; and, in a rush, “My apologies. I shouldn’t have . . .”

  She met his eyes and nodded, forgiving him. And it was the memory of that moment of mutual bravery, and the gratefulness on his face, that gave her the courage to decide, once she was alone with the letter, not to think about it anymore, or rage against her father, or envy Jane’s beauty or aristocratic admirers.

  She was a Claver now. Her life was here.

  If Isabel thought she'd be taken straight back to Alice Claver’s inner sanctum, the silk storeroom, as soon as she’d apprenticed herself, she was undeceived that night over dinner.

  The apprenticeship timetable Alice Claver outlined, with a hard look, had no space in it for musing over the finest luxuries of civilization, or for planning vast wholesale purchase strategies. It involved mastering all the eye- straining, low- grade, repetitive, menial tasks of retail silkwork first—the jobs Alice Claver put out to the wrinkled, skinny shepster and throwster women who worked from five- foot- wide stalls huddled outside the biggest selling markets, the Crown and Broad Selds, along their frontages on Cheapside, and down their side doors on Soper Lane. Not just twisting imported raw silk into threads; but throwing it into yarns ready for use, and spinning, and dyeing, and turning seams. She was to learn every stage of the process from taking the strands of raw silk gathered by Italian reelers from silkworm cocoons to selling manufactured silk, on the street, by the ounce or the pound, as sewing silk, open silk, twine silk, or rough web silk, the stuff used to make loops on which to attach warp threads while weaving, so they could be separated into two sets to let the weft thread pass between them. And she wasn’t just to learn these humble jobs, but to sit outside in all weathers with the hunched shepsters and throwsters and dyers, learning from them, and about them.

  The Prattes sneaked a look at each other. Isabel knew it was a test. Alice Claver must be doing this deliberately. She could imagine her mother- in- law’s voice saying, with grim satisfaction, “Let’s knock the nonsense out of her.” She must think Isabel would protest. Isabel wasn’t going to. She kept her eyes humbly down on her untouched food and nodded.

  “It’s only for a year,” Anne Pratte said reassuringly, in her papery little voice, as if trying to soften Alice Claver’s blow. “The next stage is embroidery. But we already know how good you are at that. So it won’t be long before you can move on to the real thing and start learning weaving. Narrow- loom work. Ribbons.

  Cauls. Laces. London’s glory. The finest silk piecework in Christendom. And”—daringly, flinching from Alice Claver’s cold gaze, she leaned forward and patted Isabel’s hand—“I’ve asked Alice if I can teach you that.”

  Isabel looked up, surprised and touched. Four Pratte eyes were on her, brimming with kindness. The Prattes were both ignoring Alice Claver, still glowering behind them.

  She rose in the dark all winter. She went to work holding a candle in chapped, raw hands, like all the other poor girls in brown and gray woolens working in the selds, whose existence she’d never been more than half aware of until now. Like them, in those clothes, she’d become invisible to everyone from the Mercery’s richer, gayer families—even her own father. He walked straight at her in the street—she sometimes felt, as she jumped out of his way, that if she didn’t move he’d walk straight through her. The pretty merchants’ daughters she’d grown up with didn’t mean to snub her. They just wafted by the quiet dun mouse of a girl on their way to sit embroidering at their fathers’ stalls in their spring- colored puff s of satin. They couldn’t see her.

  Sometimes she felt like a living ghost—transparent to everyone she’d ever known. No one minded nowadays if, while she was throwing or twisting silk or turning a seam, her eyes filled with hot tears that crept down her face until, in the autumn winds, her cheeks became as raw and chapped as her fingers. No one minded, because no one noticed, as long as she turned out the required number of threads or piles of fluffiness or bright twisted yarns, when she would be rewarded with a rough pat, or a grunt, from whichever shabby mistress she was being loaned to for the day. And she found the hotness of her own tears a comfort—a proof to herself that she was there, after all; not quite transparent and emptied of the fluids of life; not quite invisible.

  The tears were for Thomas, she told herself. So was the shriveling pain she always felt under her heart, always, as if her body were being drained away by a tide that was pulling her off into the darkness. But sometimes, as her hands moved through the silk with a deft life that felt in de pen dent of her mind, she thought the tears, and the pain, might after all be just for herself.

  She talked to Thomas in her head. Or she tried. Tried to keep
him alive; tried to take comfort in remembering his look of fuzzy astonishment when he woke up to find her next to him, his delighted snugglings and the little kisses he’d place, shyly, like acts of worship, on her hands or forehead. But all she had to tell him, apart from how she missed him, missed the warmth of a time when someone needed her, was about the detail of her days drudging in the selds. And what would he have understood of any of that?

  Sometimes, when it felt too hard to explain to Thomas why she’d kept submissively quiet when Alice Claver or one of her underlings pulled a piece of work apart and told her to start again, when she couldn’t even begin to imagine the look on his face, she’d talk in her head to the man from the church instead. He’d have understood why she gritted her teeth through the cold that went into her bones, took the telling- off and the false starts so patiently. Gradually his became the face she conjured up to talk to in what ever corner she was working in; a stranger, really, but someone who knew about purposefulness, who could coolly plan ahead. “He’d be proud of me if he saw me now,” she thought stoutly sometimes, “doing the right thing by Thomas, and helping fate to bring me a better future into the bargain.” Though at other times, in the moments of despair when her guts felt full of ground glass, when she stopped believing she was anything but a pair of hands twitching outside a gray dress, when the darkness seemed to be going to last forever, she’d sometimes also think:“No, he’d be horrified. I’ve taken the wrong way. I’m lost.”