Figures in Silk

by Vanora Bennett

  He stood for another minute, looking at the panorama, whistling through his teeth. Then he shook himself back into the moment, and smiled at Isabel. She could see the new respect in his gaze. “You’re an unusual young woman, Mistress Isabel Claver,” he said with determination, “and you mustn’t let anyone tell you any different. Alice should know it was you who set all this up. You deserve all the credit for it, not me. I’ve just been the adviser, nothing more. You don’t need to mention my having been here. I won’t say a word to Alice or Anne if you don’t want me to.”

  He was delighted with his offer; he knew how generous it was. As for Isabel, she was too overcome to speak.

  They all looked surprised when a messenger turned up at the house a day or two later to deliver a document for Isabel. It wasn’t her place to get documents. She was the girl learning purse- making. But no one asked who it was from when she rushed to the door to take receipt of it. They didn’t ask even when she came back into the storeroom a short while later, with her eyes down and pink cheeks and a bulge in her purse. They were merchants; they set store by good manners and privacy. They waited for her to tell.

  Isabel couldn’t speak all day. Her secret was like a vast bulge in her throat, keeping her apart. She waited till evening, after the day’s work was done and they’d all left the store house, before 14 presenting the contract to Alice as she took her place at the dining table. She even bowed her head submissively as Alice made a point of finishing tying the lace on her sleeve she’d noticed trailing before looking up.

  Finally, Alice held out a hand for what Isabel had to offer her.

  She started to read. She must have noticed the weight of the document as soon as she picked it up. It was stiff with wax seals, and Alice would have been blind not to see the king’s emblems on them: three blazing suns, and the royal motto, Confort et liesse.

  Comfort and Joy. Still, Alice didn’t say anything for a long while.

  She just stared at the words, as if they were dancing in front of her eyes.

  Alice’s face was perfectly still as Goffredo came into the room and sat down beside her at the table. The silkwoman passed the document to Goffredo, with just one word, “Read.” She still hadn’t deigned to look at her apprentice. But Isabel thought she’d spotted a gleam of satisfaction in the other woman’s eyes.

  Goffredo glanced down. He looked astonished. Then more astonished. Then he put the letter down and started to laugh. As Anne Pratte wandered in, picked up the document, and, wrinkling her nose, said fretfully to her husband, “Tell me what it means, dear,” and William Pratte started to translate for her, they too started to look astonished, then more astonished. Goffredo’s laugh got louder and louder, until he was slapping his thighs and clutching his sides.

  “Just like that,” he chortled. “He gave it to us, just like that.”

  They were all buzzing with it now, shifting and murmuring; unbelievable news. All looking at each other; all watching Goffredo’s mirth, not quite believing it wasn’t a joke.

  “No corners cut,” William Pratte said.

  Anne Pratte added: “No expense spared.”

  Then Goffredo stopped. Looked at Isabel without flirtatiousness—just with pure admiration.

  “Your name is on this,” he said warmly. “It was sent to you.

  Tell me. What did you do?”

  She was blushing furiously. Staring at her feet. Suddenly so surprised to have succeeded beyond her wildest dreams that she didn’t know where to put herself. She didn’t want Alice to think her boastful. She almost wanted to tell them that Will Caxton had struck the deal on her behalf, to take the eyes off her; but she stopped herself just in time. Will had said she could take the credit, hadn’t he? And it had been her daring that had got the deal, hadn’t it?

  “I was lucky,” she muttered. “I met the king. Through Jane. I asked him.”

  They all started laughing at that. Could life really be so simple? She looked hopefully up from under her lashes. They were beginning to believe it; passing the letter from hand to hand, shaking their heads in wonderment. “But I didn’t believe, until this came, that it had really worked,” she mumbled.

  “Look at her,” Goffredo marveled. “Sitting there so shy and sweet, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.” He leaned forward. Patted her on the knee. “Look happier!” he commanded boisterously. “You’ve just made the deal of all our lifetimes! You’re allowed to celebrate, cara!”

  And before she knew where she was he’d pulled her up and was dancing her up and down the room—she didn’t mind his touch this time—and everyone else laughed, and the torches dipped and flickered, and even Alice’s growl, “Goffredo, please!” didn’t sound half as grumpy as usual.

  But Isabel still couldn’t quite believe it herself; not even when the hippocras came out, and Goffredo’s sweetmeats, and William 14 Pratte had made the first toast of the evening to their future success. She only really knew she’d done something worth doing when Alice started smiling directly at her, as if she’d had an idea of her own, and said, with none of her usual gruff ness, with a respect that sounded almost shy, “Isabel—would you like to be the first to go and inspect the house at Westminster? You can have the day off . You deserve it.”

  8

  Isabel was walking past fields of pale green corn. She was too absorbed in her thoughts to look at the other people on the road. The smoke of London was behind her, even the forbidding Strand fortresses only a memory as long as she didn’t turn round. She was as free as the silver stretch of river on her left, Westminster a magical village just ahead.

  She was glad she’d walked. The exercise was clearing her head. She was almost beginning to believe her dream had come true. A part of her was already mentally hiring her favorite silkwomen, the ones who might, just possibly, be trusted with a secret on this scale.

  Perhaps I’ll hire away some of Father’s silk apprentices, she thought with a flicker of mischief. I know they’re well trained.

  Isabel also knew, from growing up in the Lambert house herself, which women had the neatest fingers and the sparsest private lives. How angry it would make him if they were to leave his service and vanish to Westminster.

  Mostly, though, it was Joan Woulbarowe she thought of. She couldn’t stop herself imagining Joan Woulbarowe staring at her, eyes like plates, her mouth gradually widening into a grin that showed every one of her black stumps of teeth, then beginning to stammer out rough words of gratitude. Joan Woulbarowe deserved a fresh start after all those penniless years in the courts fighting her ex- mistress’s accusations. Now, Isabel thought, feeling almost God- like in her generosity, I can give her that fresh start. She can start again here.

  Isabel was slower to articulate the rest of her thought to herself, but a part of her was also aware that it wouldn’t hurt, either, that the disgraced ex- apprentice throwster had no relatives (except a crazy aunt, Rose Trapp) and few friends among the silkwomen. By and large, they had prudently taken rich Katherine Dore’s side in the Mercery’s most public dispute. Joan Woulbarowe wouldn’t be missed in Soper Lane. And she had quick fingers. She’d learn fast. She’d be so grateful she’d work all hours.

  Isabel also knew—with the hardheaded instinct of the career spinster she could feel herself becoming—that there wasn’t much danger of Joan starting to dream of getting married or having children. Even if she was foolish enough to fall in love, she’d lived too hard for too long. Her ravaged face and ruined mouth would stop any nonsense. Someone like Joan would be a good worker for the rest of her days.

  Even as she enjoyed her Joan Woulbarowe fantasy, Isabel was also thinking about the Italian end of the bargain. Goffredo would have to set off at once to cut his deal with the government of Venice and start recruiting workers. She knew that would take time.

  The Provveditori della Seta he talked about so much would need persuading. She imagined many palms would need greasing before he got his documents and permissions. And he’d have to find devious
ways of smuggling the looms into England, bit by bit, in disguise, to stop the London Italians hearing what he was importing. Perhaps, she wondered lightheadedly, Will Caxton would help after his London break? She was so intoxicated with her success that she began to imagine Will, sitting in a ware house somewhere in the German lands, wrapping each segment of wood painstakingly into one of his consignments of textiles with his own hands. Shaking his head of thinning sandy hair in comical despair at the undisguisable shape and size of them. Wondering if he could describe them to the Customs men as parts of a printing press. Then laughing in his boyish way when he’d solved the puzzle and vanished the bits into his ship’s hold.

  She realized she must have been smiling when she noticed the men at the gate fall silent and give each other meaningful looks as she passed into the streets between palace and abbey. One nodded, deadpan, and the other tapped a finger against the side of his head and pulled a lunatic face. She composed herself, hastily, and slowed to a more decorous pace over the cobbles. They probably didn’t see many young ladies in yellow silk—she’d dressed in her best gown—coming from London on foot in the heat of midday, pink- faced and grinning like fools. She must stand out. Should she have dressed less conspicuously—faded into the background?

  She knew how. Then she grinned again and lifted a jaunty chin.

  She’d just been given her heart’s desire, after all. She couldn’t imagine being happier than on this perfect day. She could smile if she wanted. Wear yellow. Who cared if they stared, or thought she was mad?

  She didn't know her way around Westminster. The abbey precincts were bigger than she’d thought. And the tidy streets housing the craftsmen who serviced Benedictines and courtiers were quieter for this time of day than a Londoner would have expected.

  She stopped, baffled.

  “Which way is the Almonry?” she asked the first old woman she came across. She was shy of accosting a strange man in this unfamiliar place, even if half of them were monks. But the crone just stared back in feeble- minded alarm, shook her head, and shuffled hastily on.

  Isabel shrugged. She looked around for someone who might give proper directions.

  There was a horse man on the shady side of the road, giving his dusty mount a drink at the trough. He’d been fiddling with the horse’s harness while she looked around, knotting the reins and loosening the saddle girth as if he were about to take a rest after a long ride. Now, with his back still to her, he dipped his hands into the water too, raised a handful to his head, and splashed it onto his face. She saw drops gleam in the air. She heard him say a cheerful “Brrrr!” to his horse and saw him run both wet hands through his hair, then link his fingers and stretch his arms luxuriantly above his head.

  He sounded young. The clothes on his wiry back were dark and plain enough to blend into the shadows, but the hat he’d let drop by the trough was of good- quality black velvet. Not a foot-pad’s hat. He didn’t look dangerous. Anyway, what could go wrong today?

  “Sir,” she called boldly. “Can you direct me to the sign of the Red Pale, at the Almonry?”

  He turned round. There was water dripping off his hair into a drenched face; he was blinking it happily out of his eyes. He took two loping steps toward her, into the light. “Can’t see a thing,” he said, still shaking the water off of his head but now shading his eyes with his hand too. “So bright.”

  She knew that voice. It was as deep and soft and beautiful as the black velvet of his hat.

  She stared. Sallow skin; black hair; a wiry, muscled body; and a mouth that might have looked hard, if it wasn’t radiating such simple animal joy at being out of the saddle and dripping with cool water on a blazing summer’s day. At the plea sure of stretch-1 ing his arms and legs; at just being alive. She felt the hot air shimmer and change.

  Suddenly she was fourteen again, listening to that voice in the darkness of the Bush tavern as she fretted over her father’s choice of husband, feeling the deep warmth of his hand on her back. In that instant, everything that had happened to her since vanished, as if it had all been a loop she’d made in a braid, a stitch in time crafted with all the care it had needed while it was being furled and turned and knotted, but now cast off , with her braid just a fraction longer. She was back where she’d started, just better off .

  She was still staring when his vision cleared enough for him to stop shading his eyes. He came to a halt beside her. He hadn’t yet recognized her. He was so close now she could feel the heat of his body.

  “The Red Pale,” he was saying. He put a hand on her shoulder blade as if to whisk her round. She drew in breath, humbled by her plea sure. “You’re heading the wrong way.”

  She hardly dared look him in the eye. What if he didn’t remember her? But she couldn’t stop herself slowly turning to face him fully, head first, neck second, shoulders third, with what she thought might be an imploring look, but she didn’t really care. Her whole existence had shrunk, narrowed, shortened, until there was nothing but this moment: dazzling sunshine; the man in black beside her; his hand on her back. It was enough.

  He stopped talking. His hand went still, but stayed where it was.

  She loved the stillness of him.

  “Isabel Lambert,” he said.

  “Claver,” she replied quickly, relief making her grin and gabble. “I took your advice.”

  He held her gaze; shaking his head, beginning to smile too.

  Those soft, amused eyes.

  “A widow now,” she added, wishing as the words came out that the sight of him—this extra blessing on a day when she had thought God had already granted her every wish—wasn’t making her blurt like an over eager child, the way she had before.

  He moved. He raised his other hand, used it to cross himself politely, and murmured, “God rest Master Claver’s soul,” with a formal heavenward glance, before moving his eyes back to find hers, as if the only peace he could know would come from lock-ing gazes with her. This man would always see her, and know her, and seek comfort in her eyes, what ever she was wearing or doing; his look had nothing to do with status, or clothing, or the concerns of the world. It was simpler than that. And the extraordinary contentment that his stare brought her made her know for sure that all Goffredo’s flirtatious plays of eyes this summer had been just meaningless games.

  She couldn’t bring herself to look sad, though she crossed herself. “Some time ago,” she couldn’t help herself saying, as her hand dropped. “A year and more.” She gestured at her yellow silk, so glowing and celebratory. “I’m out of mourning.”

  He nodded, with the attentiveness she remembered. And kept nodding, and gazing. She realized, suddenly, with fear, that they had run out of pleasantries; that he would have to ride on now; that she might never see him again.

  “I’m going through the Almonry myself,” he said. Smiling as if he’d warded off the darkness. “I can show you the Red Pale.”

  And he strode back across the street, with those taut, eco nom ical movements, without breaking off his gaze, and unknotted his horse; and before she knew where she was, they were walking down the street together, with the horse clopping along beside them, chomping on its bridle, blowing through its teeth, as happy with its memory of the glittering sunlit water as either of the humans it was with.

  “Before . . . you know, last time,” she said, feeling her heart leap but speaking as casually as she dared over the easy rhythm of feet and hooves, “I never once asked your name.”

  She thought he paused before answering, though the rhythm of walking carried on. She watched her skirts billow out in front of her in what shade the midday sun allowed, felt warmth on her back. Waited.

  “Dickon,” she heard him say at last, and she felt the pet name sink in with a soft thrill of discovery. She let herself begin to hope that there would be more.

  She saw her house at once, over the road from the sign of the Red Pale, behind the well- made almoner’s offices tacked on to the edge of the Abbey. It was shuttered and ba
rred, but she could see even without reaching for the key in her purse that it was a more than respectable premises. From the pale gray stone frontage, two solid stories high, with a gate in the wall at the side, she could guess at the three spacious rooms on each floor and the light that would pour in through the solar windows above. The looms would go downstairs. The barn down the side of the courtyard would serve as a ware house. The solars above would be sleeping quarters. She’d need to make lists of things to buy: beds, kitchen equipment, linens.

  Dickon helped her pull open the shutters in the first empty room, letting a blast of sunshine in to dry the stale air and gild the dust. There were mildewed rags in one corner. Otherwise it was empty of all traces of the vestment maker who, she’d been told, had lived here in old King Henry’s time; empty of everything except the dreams she was already weaving. She showed Dickon round, her excitement at meeting him magnifying her pride at being the new house holder, flattered by the way he followed the story pouring out of her. He was absorbing it all with a mini-mum of words; narrowing his long eyes; nodding intelligently.

  Once or twice he burst out laughing, in what struck her as a pure, joyous celebration of her success. When she explained how she’d come to meet the king, twice, he looked surprised for a second. “Jane Shore,” he mused aloud, as if he might know her,“she’s your sister . . .” But he didn’t ask any more. Jane was well known now as the king’s lover. People had started repeating Anne Pratte’s story about the king, saying his three mistresses were the merriest, the wisest, and the holiest harlots in the land—and Jane the merriest. This man must have heard a story like that somewhere. She shrugged it off . Perhaps she was being reckless, talking so freely. It felt strange to go back to the girlish chattiness that must have been natural to her the last time they met; being Alice Claver’s apprentice had taught her more caution than she’d realized. But she was sure it wouldn’t matter what she told him. Not just because he wasn’t from the Mercery, and wasn’t a merchant, and so wouldn’t know who to tell her trade secret to if he were minded to give it away—but because, instinctively, she trusted him.