Figures in Silk

by Vanora Bennett

  To her horror, her eyes filled with tears. “You’ll think I’m . . . ,” she muttered. She couldn’t go on for a minute. “I’m not a mistress,” she said, blinking blindly. “I wasn’t looking for a protector.”

  She felt his hand on hers.

  “I know,” he said; very soft, very low. “You’re an honest woman, with a plan in life. I admire it . . . and you. I understand.”

  She stared at his hand, memorizing it; she might never see it again.

  “I do,” he went on. “You wouldn’t want to be hanging round on the fringes of court waiting for me, fretting, gossiping . . . being snubbed . . . begging for gowns and jewels . . . all the rest of it . . . any more than I’d want you to. We each have our lives. We can’t change them.”

  She looked up, partly comforted by his voice, partly waiting for the dismissal she could feel about to come. She managed a watery smile.

  “But I want to see you again,” he went on, begging her with his eyes. “When I can; when you can. And we could. Sometimes.

  No one need know. It could be here.”

  The room’s soft plaster and oak glowed again; the color of happiness.

  Weakly, she said: “But people would talk. It wouldn’t be good, for me or for you.”

  “Who has to know?” he replied, and she could see laughter beginning in his eyes. “Weren’t we just talking about this? It’s good to fade into the background from time to time, didn’t we agree?

  “You didn’t mean this to happen,” he went on, and his voice was stronger, deeper, more persuasive with every word. “I didn’t, either. But we couldn’t help it. We’re two of a kind. We recognized each other. I’m glad.”

  She was drawing strength from his words. She recognized this. If he’d been a merchant, she’d even have known what to call what she could hear him doing: striking a deal.

  “You don’t meet much honesty as a prince,” he said somberly.

  “And most of the ambition you see is ambition to do you harm. I don’t trust many of the people around me.” He pulled her to him with both arms, pinioned her to him. “But I trust you.”

  He took a deep breath. He finished: “So—will you trust me?

  Let me be just Dickon; just your love? And come to me again, when you can, here?”

  She didn’t hesitate, not for a moment; not even to savor the scent of him in her nostrils, the press of skin on skin, and know it wasn’t the last time she’d feel this.

  She knew. This was what she wanted. She nodded.

  COUP

  9

  spring 1483

  It was ten years since Isabel had last been inside the Palace of Westminster. Yet, however much of a queen of silk she knew herself to have become in that de cade, she was still overawed on this cold February morning by the sheer size of the city in stone; by the waiting, and the corridors, and the slow whispers of the men- at- arms.

  She tried to put all that aside as she knelt in front of the plump girl with the pallid face and swollen eyes and flaming red- gold hair whom she’d come to serve. In businesslike fashion, she lifted a flap of red cloth of gold from one side of the girl’s gown, folding her lips round her mouthful of pins, trying to work out where best to cut.

  Princess Elizabeth, King Edward’s eldest daughter, was sixteen to Isabel’s twenty- six. But she looked far younger. She was stiff and owlish; her dignity was indistinguishable from a child’s awkward silence.

  The child had good reason to look solemn, Isabel thought, without particular compassion—there hadn’t been a trace of warmth yet from the young royal person in front of her, standing so on her dignity, and Isabel saw no reason for personal sympathy. Princess Elizabeth had just failed to become the Queen of France. Her father’s English alliance with France had collapsed now that the sly French king had decided not to bother with the English wedding and, instead, had married his son to the Duke of Burgundy’s daughter. The princess’s glittering future had turned to dust in a day. King Edward was furious for many reasons, one being that the King of France had also stopped paying him the fat pension he’d been living on for years, and a king as poor as Edward couldn’t easily handle any loss of income. So Isabel had been called in to unpick the princess’s trousseau, sewn in the now suddenly violently disliked French style, and to decide which silk pieces could be reworked in a fashion less painful to observers, which could be reused for more down- to- earth purposes later. That was King Edward’s way of venting his anger and saving money at the same time. Jane Shore had suggested it to him, and while he was laughing in his easygoing way at his mistress’s idea, she’d also suggested Isabel be chosen to do the work.

  It was Elizabeth who’d bravely said to Isabel that they should start with the wedding gown itself—a magnificent confection of cloth of gold embroidered with a latticework of gold thread and pearls so stiff it seemed to be standing up by itself. She was wearing it now. But even with all that splendor on her back, she was nothing much to look at herself, Isabel thought; the red hair she’d inherited from her beautiful mother was lovely enough, but she’d also got her father’s tight little rosebud lips and a pair of green eyes that might, in happier times, have been pretty, but were puff y and pinkish today, probably from crying. In the quiet of the antechamber, she looked all set to cry again.

  Isabel was trying not to look up at the princess’s trembling lower lip when she became aware of a small sound behind her.

  She froze. She’d heard this might happen: this creeping, no-warning, hackle- raising manifestation of a new presence in the room, right behind your back. It meant the queen was here: King Edward’s wife, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, the striking redhead hated by everyone in England, the woman whose pointy beauty hid the temper of the dev il himself.

  Isabel shifted on her knees. She was aware of the queen only as a swish of color somewhere behind her, a prickling down her spine. She guessed the queen was pacing, on kid slippers that made no sound, along the thick arras of this small, hot room, which was so filled with valuable clothing of almost miraculous design that you could practically feel pearls and gold thread in the dust tickling your throat. The princess had starting breathing shallowly, as if afraid, and she’d stopped moving. There was panic in her swollen eyes. Isabel was glad she’d been already on her knees when the queen entered.

  She’d heard the stories about the queen keeping the ladies of the court standing for three silent hours a day while she dined. It wasn’t hard to see that England’s only ever commoner queen would be just as eager to impose humiliating rules on servants.

  Rules that emphasized the grandeur of a queen who’d come from nowhere. Who’d come to the attention of the kingdom at large nineteen years ago, when the young King Edward—gloriously descended from Japhet, son of Noah, through the kings of Troy, the founders of Rome, and Brutus, the first king of Britain—had sneaked off and secretly married her while out hunting. Back then, she’d just been the impoverished widow of Sir John Grey, a Lancastrian who’d been killed fighting on the wrong side at the second battle of St. Albans; she’d had nothing but her red- gold hair to help her make her way. People said the king had drawn a dagger on her to force her into his bed, but she’d just stared him down with her cool green eyes and said, “I might be too base to 1 be a king’s wife; but I’m too good to be your harlot.” So he’d married her instead, and she’d stayed queen even though the marriage had caused another war.

  King Edward's strongest lord, the Earl of Warwick, had been so furious he’d brought back old, defeated King Henry from the shadows, and tried, for a year, to be Lancastrian. But Edward had won through in the end, and returned to London after a year to reclaim his queen from sanctuary at Westminster. Queen Elizabeth Woodville had given birth to his son, little Prince Edward, at the abbot’s house there. She was fearless all right, but she’d never be royal enough to relax. She’d always need fantastical displays of obeisance to help her believe she’d risen so far in the world. Isabel wanted to avoid humiliation by staying safely out
of her way.

  The wildcat footsteps stopped. Isabel’s head was bowed, so all she could see was her own torso and knees, but every fiber of her body could feel the eyes burning into her.

  Suddenly a hand was thrust in front of her: white, elegant, glittering fingers. Isabel stared. She didn’t know what to do with it. Then, gingerly, hoping she wouldn’t wobble if she moved, she reached for it with her right hand and kissed the fingertips.

  She didn’t dare raise her head. She wasn’t invited to, either.

  “They say you have nimble fingers, Mistress Claver,” she heard. Isabel squinted up as far as she could without being impertinent enough to raise her head. The queen—with the most perfectly beautiful cat-face over her perfectly beautiful cat-body—knew she was peeping. Isabel realized the other woman was looking straight back into her eyes, with one corner of her lovely mouth lifted. Isabel wouldn’t call it a smile. But she did realize, from that look, that what ever it was that was making the 1 queen almost vibrate with suppressed rage, it wasn’t Isabel. She breathed. Looked up more boldly.

  The queen flicked a dismissive hand toward the great armory of clothing that had been designed to awe two kingdoms and celebrate God’s blessing of the princess as His own anointed Queen of France. Said, with a twist of her lips so fastidious that she might have been looking at rotting corpses: “Well, do what you can with that,” and, turning away with lithe, liquid movements, stalked off to the door. From there, beside the guards, without turning round, she dropped three final words. “You may stand.”

  But both Isabel and the princess stayed frozen where they were for a few more moments, listening to her departing footsteps. Isabel got the impression that everything inside this palace would always be done with the same caution. She wondered if everyone who survived a possible mauling by the queen felt the same surge of warmth for their fellow survivors as she was now feeling for the miserable- looking lump of a girl slouched in front of the arras. Growing up with that tiger of a mother must be every bit as frightening as Isabel’s first dealings with Alice Claver had been.

  Finally, she raised her head and dared to look at the princess.

  For the first time, Princess Elizabeth deigned to look directly back at her, and Isabel was surprised to see that there was, after all, nothing childish in the girl’s eyes. Elizabeth was no stranger to the curdling effects of humiliation and didn’t expect Isabel to be; for all her trappings of finery, the princess was someone who didn’t expect much from life. The princess nodded dejectedly. “Let’s go on,” she said. “She won’t be back for a while.”

  Isabel pinned in silence for a few more minutes. But she couldn’t get those eyes, as watchful as hers had been every moment of her year in the selds, out of her head, or shake off her new awareness of the princess as someone as helpless as Isabel had once been: someone waiting, and soaking up knowledge that might be useful later, biding her time, living through her period of powerlessness, just waiting for her chance to strike out for herself. So the silence grew warmer.

  Eventually, Isabel ventured to speak. “This must be very strange for you,” she mumbled through her pins, and she was rewarded with just the kind of careful look she herself might have given one of the silkwomen she’d eventually grown close to, at the first sign of warmth. Elizabeth nodded, cautiously. “It seemed so definite, my wedding,” she said. “For so long. We used to act it out in the nursery, even; my little brother Edward would play being the King of England, giving me away at the altar to become Queen of France.”

  Her eyes slid away. “And now . . . nothing,” she added. There was a hint of bitterness in her voice as she added, “I mean, for me. Though Edward will still be king one day.”

  There was nothing Isabel could safely say to that. Carefully, she took out the remaining pins from her mouth and put them back in her box; then, thanking God for pins, called the two guards. While Elizabeth stepped out of the gown in one room, she oversaw the men carry ing out the separated sleeves and train that made up the rest of the ensemble, each in a different padded velvet bag, from the outer room. The valuable garments would be taken under escort to Catte Street. It was a good first day’s work.

  The men returned to take away the pinned gown. Elizabeth stood in the doorway in her kirtle, listlessly watching. Trying again to comfort her, Isabel said: “I expect there’ll be a new marriage arranged for you before we even have time to take any of these apart.”

  The Princess smiled a wintry smile in return, acknowledging 1 Isabel’s efforts at optimism even if she didn’t pretend to be reassured by them.

  “If I may,” Isabel said, feeling sorrier than ever for the girl, though still not sure whether that was the same as enjoying her company, “I’ll take my leave now, until next week. I don’t want to tire Your Highness out.” She raised an eyebrow, to signify, May I be dismissed?

  To her surprise, that gesture made Elizabeth smile properly for the first time, like the child she’d so recently been. “You can lift one eyebrow by itself!” she said, with unexpected childish joy.

  “Like my uncle! We’re always trying, but none of us can.”

  “Oh,” Isabel said, touched, suddenly able to imagine all those young princesses with time hanging so heavy on their hands, realizing that their easiest refuge would, naturally, be in the innocence of childish games that kept dangerous adult eyes away from them. “Well, I’ll show you the secret next time, then. We can practice.”

  Was that really all it took to break the ice? Maybe they’d begin to have a real working relationship from now on, one that would bring Isabel more jobs in the future.

  Isabel was smiling inside at a private joke, too: at how much more truth there was in the princess’s words than she could know.

  Dickon was always comically lifting one eyebrow. Had Isabel copied the gesture from him? Or he from her? She didn’t know. But just that chance reminder of Dickon’s existence—the memory of the muscles of his lively face working; the texture of his skin; his smell on the sheets—was enough to touch her with grace. It reminded her that, if she got out of the palace within the hour—and she would now—she’d catch him at the inn before he went back north tomorrow.

  She kept her dignity right through the process of leaving the palace—one corridor, then a wait with the guards, smoothing down her skirts; another corridor, another escort, another wait until the next keys and spurs began jangling; right to the gates.

  But once she got outside, onto the street, she couldn’t stop herself rushing. The air suddenly felt warm and wild with the promise of spring. She picked up her blue satin skirts so she could move faster. By the time she reached the abbey, she was running.

  He was waiting in the street. The impatient wind was flapping his cloak around his ankles. It was nearly dark.

  “Come on,” he said, rough- voiced over the bluster of air. His eyes were gleaming. “We’re not staying here. It’s late. I’m going to take you back to London. Your Alice Claver will worry about you otherwise.”

  She laughed. “What do you mean?” she asked. She had to almost shout; the wind blew away her words. “There’s still an hour; more.” But he just began pulling her along, the way she’d come, grinning. He had an idea. There was nothing for her to do but go along with it. She could never be sure what Dickon would do next.

  Last time he’d been south had been for Twelfth Night, a month or more earlier. They’d had a snatched, intent hour’s walk along the river, in the dark of London, on a colder, frostier version of this evening. The streets had been still full of debris from the previous night’s madness. He’d been on his way to the Tower, where Lord Hastings, his friend as well as Jane’s, had been waiting to show him the latest coin he was in charge of minting, the new angelet. In their dark cloaks that night, she and Dickon had looked like any other couple who might have drunk too much in the revels the night before, clinging to each other, feeling each other’s heat: lovers with nowhere to go. It had been too painful, that visit; so short, so unfulfilled. She
’d plucked at the quiet cloak 1 at his neck with both hands. “Your cloak of invisibility,” she’d said sadly. “Who’d ever think you were a prince, kicking at old bottles on the wharves?” And he’d looked at her with the same longing she felt. Said nothing; kissed her a last time in front of All Hallows by the Tower, and walked away briskly, whistling, but still looking lonely, with the horse he was leading jingling its harness and blowing great clouds of white behind him.

  He must have thought of something better for this evening—though she couldn’t imagine what could be better or easier than the warm quiet of his tavern room, a haven she so seldom managed to visit. At the jetty, with one hand holding his dark cap down on his hair and the other around Isabel’s waist, Dickon pulled out a purse and gave the first boatman he saw a gold coin and a wink. The stubbly old man stared doubtfully at it as the first stars made their pinpoint appearances in the sky. His creaking six- seater rowboat wouldn’t be worth that much if he sold it.

  Was the gentleman drunk?

  “Pick your boat up from the moorings below the bridge in the morning,” Dickon said blithely. “I’ll take it till then.” The man began to protest. But Dickon cut through his wheezing my-livelihood- my- dearest- possession- as- God- help- me- I’m-a- father- of- six talk with another gold coin and a wave of the hand. “Have a drink on me,” Dickon added.

  The man’s eyes opened very wide. As if scared Dickon might change his mind, he pocketed both coins and scuttled off , very quickly, up the jetty. Dickon threw his head back and laughed at the greed in those rheumy eyes. “Like a crab,” he spluttered; “he just couldn’t believe it, could he?”