She didn’t get up when her eyes fell on Isabel. But she raised her head. The leading had imprinted her cheek with a red lattice of diamond marks. She must have been there for hours, ever since the bells began.
Jane smiled vaguely. “Just like that,” she said. She clicked her fingers, then looked surprised at them for making their loud sharp sound. “Gone.”
It was unbearable. Isabel rushed to her, enfolding Jane’s unresisting limpness in her own arms. They swayed together like that for a while; for long enough that Isabel noticed the first raindrops begin to batter against the glass; for long enough for her to realize Jane was still staring over her shoulder through the window; for long enough for her to realize Jane wasn’t going to cry.
“Look at them,” Jane said. “Running about. Everyone so scared.” She was still smiling. Her voice was hollow. “But no one knowing what to be scared of.”
Isabel didn’t know how to be of comfort. After a pause, she pulled up a stool and sat down.
“How can I help?” she asked. But Jane only said, kindly, but as though from a great distance: “You mustn’t worry about me, Isabel. I don’t need anything. I’ve been lucky.”
“But do you have money?” Isabel asked. She knew the house was Jane’s, and that Jane had an allowance, but she’d never thought about the mechanics of it. If the king was dead, would it stop?
Jane shook her head as if she didn’t want to think of such things now. “I’m fine, honestly. I’m quite rich, I think. I have rents, shops, I don’t even know what. Father administers it all; he set it up so I’d never have to worry; he pays my allowance.” She laughed, plucking at her rings. “He’s always said how bad Edward is with money,” she added. She opened her eyes wide at what she’d said, but didn’t stumble or sob as she corrected herself: “Was.”
“What will you do?” Isabel asked, trying to force Jane to acknowledge the reality of King Edward being gone, of being left alone here: to organize herself for an uncertain future in some new way. “Do you want to stay with me?” But she knew as she said it that that was a bad idea. Alice Claver wouldn’t be able to behave. Perhaps Jane should go for a while to their father’s, in Somerset?
Jane only shook her head. “Why would I go away?” she said blankly. “There are memories here, in everything I touch and see.
This is my home. Where would I go?”
There was a bang at the door. Footsteps.
Jane was up off her stool and running across the room.
From the shadows out of sight, beyond the doorway, Isabel heard Jane’s voice cry, “I thought you’d never come!” and a deep voice she thought she knew from somewhere answer with a murmur of comfort.
She sat absolutely still on her stool, hardly daring to breathe.
When Jane came back into the room, Isabel noticed tears glistening on her face. Not enough to blotch her skin or make her ugly; just a couple of dewdrops on her cheeks and squeezing from her green eyes. But she looked relieved; less frozen. And behind her was Lord Hastings—razor- cheek-boned, straight- nosed, 21 bareheaded, and tousled from the ride, with his dripping hat in his hand and his long, dark eyebrows making a single slash of a line across his forehead. He still looked young; unlike the king, he’d stayed slim and fighting fit. It took Isabel a second or two to notice that the dead king’s best friend had his arm around Jane’s waist.
Hastings nodded at Isabel with a glimmer of acceptance that came close to a smile. She’d always liked his straightforwardness.
“Mistress Claver,” he said, by way of greeting.
She nodded back. Avoided Jane’s eye. “My lord,” she answered, with all the poise she could manage; then, neutrally, to Jane’s shoulder, aware of Jane’s hand settling on Will Hastings’ arm on Jane’s waist; of the moist, hungry look in her sister’s eyes: “I should get back to Catte Street. My old ladies need me.”
She was astonished when Jane’s lips began to twitch. “I think you’ll find Anne Pratte outside,” she said, not unkindly. “She’s been sitting at her window watching us ever since you got here. Look at her. Eating us up. She’s waiting for you. She’s worried.”
Isabel glanced over at the window as she backed toward the door. It was true. There was a shadow in the window of the house opposite. Jane had guessed it was Anne Pratte; she was more ob-servant than Isabel even now. Why had Isabel thought she’d need protecting?
She didn’t have to turn round as she left the room to know Jane was already kissing Lord Hastings.
“ Oh, there you are, dear,” Anne Pratte said cozily as Isabel trudged miserably out to the wet street. She looked supremely unconcerned by the coincidence of being there as Isabel emerged.
She had a bundle in her hand and a piece of sacking over her head.
“We can walk back together, then. I’ve just been picking up a few things from home . . .”
Isabel sighed and took the bundle. Her mind was churning with so many new thoughts that there was no space for annoyance. But she wasn’t letting Anne Pratte have her own way in everything. When the older woman asked, casually, as they began to move forward, side by side, both heads under the sacking,“Wasn’t that Lord Hastings going into your sister’s house?” Isabel pretended not to hear.
She walked on, feeling her clothes get wetter, ignoring the rain funneling down the frayed threads edging the sack and dripping into her eyes. But she was aware of Anne Pratte’s sideways looks.
“You look shocked,” she heard the thin little voice say. She walked on. “Don’t be.” She kept walking. “She needs a new protector.” Isabel carried on walking, as if she hadn’t heard the voice, wondering why the raindrops on her face felt hot and salty.
“Girls your age usually don’t understand. You didn’t grow up in the war; how can you? But she’s no fool,” Anne Pratte was saying, almost as if she were talking to herself. Gradually, without looking, Isabel found herself listening. “I understand her. I’m old; and all us old people grew up with fear. When the war was on you could be swallowed up by the unknown at any moment, and you never forgot it. I was a grown- up girl the year you were born, when King Henry’s garrison in the Tower turned their guns on us to force London to be Lancastrian. Of course it turned us Yorkist instead. To a man. To a woman. We’d had enough: ships not coming in; the courts full of bully boys; the roads full of robbers. So we all came out to fight for the Duke of York. My old father was one of the men blockading the Tower. And when the French queen brought her army to the gates—they were northerners; people said they howled instead of talking, like the hounds of hell—my father was one of the Londoners who went out and told them we weren’t opening the gates to that woman. No one knew what would happen. It was terrifying; but not like giving in to the war had been before. We weren’t just waiting for death anymore; we were doing something. It was them who gave up in the end, not us: the northern men and the French queen. They went away. We won—the little people of London. That’s how brave we were. And when the Duke of York came with his army at the end of the summer, we let him in. We chose him. That’s how we ended up with good King Edward, God rest his soul, and all these years of peace and prosperity we’ve enjoyed till now.” She crossed herself.
“And it’s how I know about being afraid unless you act to protect yourself.”
Isabel stole a glance at Anne Pratte. The little old woman’s face was as calm as her voice, but her eyes were strangely full of fire. “I was never supposed to be a silkwoman, you know,” Anne Pratte added unexpectedly. “My father had me down for a nunnery—the Minories. But then my sister died. Alice, she was called; she got hit by the wildfire they started pelting us with. The Lancastrians. It stuck to her arm, stuck and burned. You couldn’t wash it off . We tried, but water only made it burn harder. I’ll never forget the way she screamed. All night long. It was after she died, God rest her, that my father went out and started helping the men at the Tower. They got the garrison commander in the end: Lord Scales. Caught him trying to escape down the Thames disguised a
s a woman. The boatmen recognized him. They left his body at St. Mary Overy. My father took us to see. Stab wounds everywhere. Flies. People spitting. My mother spat. I was the only child they had left. So he sent me to be an apprentice at John Large’s instead of a bride of Christ. And I married William.” She smiled, but there was sadness in her face. “And I’ve been happy with him.”
She added, “They say war is like the wind. It brings on the storm clouds, but it brings the silver linings too. You feel more 21 alive in the shadow of death. You seize your chances; you don’t think twice. And things change so fast that, even if everything you thought you had disappears just like that, other dreams come true. If you’re quick on your feet.
“Your Jane’s quick on her feet,” she finished, slipping an arm through Isabel’s. “She’s always had a kind heart. She’s helped you with your dreams. All of us. Maybe this is her time to have her dreams come true.”
Isabel’s head nodded rhythmically as she walked, eyes still fixed ahead; finding the warmth of Anne Pratte’s arm a comfort.
Thinking about dreams coming true.
William Hastings closed his eyes for a moment, shutting out everything but Jane’s mouth gently on his chest and her long hair under his mouth, the astonishing sensation of skin on skin; his arms around her; the quiet that no one now had a right to break.
He’d galloped here all the way from Westminster, his men lost behind him. He was drenched in sweat when he walked through her door, pacing and flashing with the memories of the morning.
He hadn’t said a word as he’d carried her upstairs. But he hadn’t needed to. It was the moment they’d both waited years for.
He opened his eyes. She was still there, soft as swan down.
Not a dream, then, he thought with a brief return of the humor that had deserted him earlier. But that meant the rest of what had happened wasn’t just a nightmare either.
He sat bolt upright, abruptly, bringing her up with him so she was straddling him again, so one of his hands brushed her white-peach thigh, so her hair fell over his shoulders. She made a little sound; somewhere between indrawn breath and giggle. But the eyes she turned on him were serious.
“What is it?” Jane was murmuring now, giving his lips butterfly kisses. She smelled of flowers. “What are you thinking?”
It was all flooding back now: why he was here. He clenched jaw and fists, trying to keep down the tide of fury, or fear, it made no difference which, that was rising in his throat.
The king was dead—the king he’d shared so many battlefields and beds and mistresses and misfortunes with, the red hazes of war and lust, since long before Edward was a king or hoped to be, since Will Hastings, a not very rich distant cousin, had first been made his boyhood gentleman in waiting. His dearest friend.
Worse. Edward’s death threatened the peace that had held for twelve years.
The Prince of Wales—the new King Edward V—was only twelve years old, not a good age for kingship at the best of times.
The boy was at Ludlow, where his separate court on the Welsh border was headquartered. What with all the solemn Masses they’d have to get through in every town they passed, it would take them weeks to get here. And until he reached London, the younger Edward would remain in the clutches of his tutor, Earl Rivers, that sly, prayerful, perfumed man of letters, with his almond eyes and suspiciously elegant turn of phrase: Queen Elizabeth’s brother—and a Woodville.
Woodvilles had already insinuated themselves into every nook and cranny at court. They’d crept in behind their queen, like spiders or scorpions. From now on, they’d be greedier still.
They’d want complete control of the new king, who was young and weak and easily influenced, whose blood ran in their veins.
That could lead only to one thing: a deadly struggle between the relatives of the queen and the relatives of the king—England’s true nobility.
Hastings was the only one of the king’s men in London.
And the entire loathsome swarm of Woodvilles, led by his old enemy Dorset, was here, coming after him. He’d be as loyal to the new King as he’d been to the old; but what if the new king was in the sway of the Woodville Dorset, who wanted him dead? He thought, I’m in danger, then realized he must have said it out loud.
Jane was staring at him. He squeezed her shoulders, added, while trying to keep panic out of his voice: “Considerable danger.”
“What do you mean?” she whispered.
“Woodvilles,” he replied, getting up, squeezing his hands hard over his eyes as if that would stopper up his panic.
Hastings had only called the council session that morning for administrative purposes: to organize how to bury one king and crown the next. But as soon as he’d seen the smug Woodville eyes at the table, glittering in the knowledge that they weren’t just unwanted in- laws anymore, but the new king’s blood relatives, he’d sensed trouble. Dorset’s were most openly full of fight. But even fat little Dr. Morton, who these days was Dowager Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s creature, had strutted to his seat with an impertinent grin. Morton hated Hastings and didn’t bother to hide it.
Morton would never forget that it would have been Hastings’s job to find him guilty of treason after the Warwick rebellion, when Morton had been caught on the losing Lancastrian side. Luckily for Morton, he’d somehow escaped from the Tower and saved himself; and he’d remade himself since as a Woodville fancier.
Hastings had thought, looking grimly at the blob of wobbling malice in priest’s robes in front of him: I should have finished him faster. Another mistake.
Hastings had asked Council to name Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as Protector of England until Edward turned fifteen and could rule in his own right. That would have been right. Dickon was the boy’s uncle; the senior prince of the York blood.
But they’d said no. They’d voted instead for some sort of regency council—controlled by Woodvilles, naturally.
When Hastings kept his temper, Dorset, unnervingly, began to stare at him. Jutting his jaw out. Leaning forward over clenched hands. Trying to stare Hastings down; the stare of a man with death in mind; holding the eye- lock for so long Hastings had thought he might pull out a sword then and there.
All Dorset actually said was: “Now let’s set a date for the coronation.” Then, still eyeballing Hastings: “I propose midsummer. St. John’s Eve.”
“We can’t decide that,” Hastings objected. “Not without Gloucester.”
But Dorset had only glittered malice back at him. Hastings thought the onetime country squire might actually have been pleased to be given the chance to sneer out his ill- bred impertinence. He’d curled his lips back and said, biting off each word:“We are quite important enough to take decisions without the king’s uncle.”
Now Jane was in front of him, peeling his hands off his eyes.
He was surprised to find how tight his muscles were clamped.
He told Jane: “Dorset wants to control the king; and he wants my blood.”
She murmured, uneasily. But she’d chosen him, not Dorset; he could trust her.
He went on: “I shouted at him in Council. I told him he was insolent and vicious. I said the Woodvilles’ blood was too base to rule England. And I walked out.”
Her eyes opened wide.
Hastings didn’t even tell her the worst. He’d been full of rage when he’d slammed the door on the Council meeting. But he’d only felt the prickle of real danger when, in the antechamber, a scrivener quietly showed him the order Dorset had wanted a fair copy of. The document—which Dorset planned to sign, “half brother to the King”—authorized Sir Edward Woodville to take the royal fleet to sea. If a Woodville seized control of the fleet, Hastings would be cut off from his power base at Calais. He’d be lost. “Thank you,” he said to the sweating scribe. He tore up Dorset’s page and dictated his own counter- order to the fleet— Don’t leave port. The man scuttled back to his desk with Hastings’s coin in his hand and a mixture of relief and fear in h
is eyes. Hastings waited, fiddling with his sword. He signed. Then he took the fastest horse he could, at a gallop, to London, to be near the port.
He’d come here because Jane was here; but he also knew, if he were honest, that he hadn’t wanted to go to his own house on Paul’s Wharf. Even the idea of it made him feel trapped; made his flesh creep. He’d sent his retinue there. He was safer with Jane.
But those weren’t thoughts to share. All he said was, “I can’t fight all of them. I’m alone. I need to send word to Dickon.”
She must feel as alone against enemies without Edward as he did; as willing to jump at shadows. He gazed at her, wishing he could shut the world out and stay here with her forever. The sight of her made him feel suddenly old: tired of office, tired of soldier-ing, tired of caring, tired of the treachery that seemed to shadow anyone born to bear arms. They said there was no good to be found in the service classes; but he’d found the merchants of the staple at Calais to be honest and congenial sorts. And there was no one like Jane. Hastings’s wife, long dead now, had been just a marriage: a girl with good bloodlines and £400 a year, the fifth sister of the Earl of Warwick—a way for him to become Edward’s first cousin by marriage. He hardly remembered her. She hadn’t had hair that shimmered like spun gold, or looked at him with happy emerald eyes. She’d never sung like an angel. Made jokes that amused without hurting. Laughed like a goddess; danced like a lark on the wing. Nor had the other women. Just Jane, his second spring. He wouldn’t have been unhappy if fate had made him the humblest of merchants, he thought, if that had meant he could have married her and been free, for good, of the shadow of the sword.
Softly, Jane said: “I’ll find you paper and pen.” Her voice was steady. He took strength from it. She handed him his linen; slipped hers on too. “You can write your letter now.”
Isabel woke in the night.
The dread that had woken her wouldn’t go away.
Figures in Silk Page 21