Figures in Silk

by Vanora Bennett

  Alice nodded, fiercely trying to absorb the weave detail she didn’t need to learn for herself, just because she so loved the way the cloth came out. All she really needed to know was that Gasparino’s family was teaching one group of apprentices to make damasks; that Marino was in charge of lampas; and that Alvise was showing the third group the secrets of velvet. Isabel had chosen the Londoners for their deft fingers and, almost as importantly, their lack of family: Joan Woulbarowe (“Silkbarowe now!” the fool kept lisping excitedly through her black teeth); Katherine Arnold, who without parents in the business or capital to set herself up had been a servant in the silk business all her life; the throwster widows Agnes Brundyssch and Isabel Fremely, who wanted a change and a better- paid skill; and, of course, John Lambert’s onetime best employees, Jane Cotford, from Derby, Mary Fleet, from Southwark, and Ellen, the widow of William Lovell, a vintner fallen on hard times. Alice sighed; she knew that the most practical way to behave would be just to let Jane Cotford and Ellen Lovell fret about the technicalities of how to pattern the velvet—whether to void it right down to its satin ground, have the pile cut or uncut, or work with cut pile of two or three different heights to add interest and complexity to the pattern; or how many warp face satin threads you needed for the ground before the interruption; or the ratio of pile warp ends to main warp ends.

  All Alice needed to do was marvel like a child at her dream coming true—to stare at the flying hands and muse, So this is how it happens. But it was the stubborn child in her that wanted to grab the shuttle and clack the frames and start learning to weave beauty for herself.

  This dinner had been Isabel’s idea. They couldn’t get an Italian priest to bless the house, she’d argued, since he’d only go back and blab to the Lombard merchants; but they could all dine together as an extended family. Eat the Venetians’ basil- scented salads. Make the new families and the new apprentices feel part of a home. And have them show their talents to Alice and Anne and William, who only came occasionally to Westminster, leaving Isabel and Goffredo to manage the house, and to Will Caxton, who supported them in spirit by dropping in at all hours from his house next door. Isabel had said: “It needn’t be expensive. A couple of chickens and a piece of beef and some salads and a couple of fruit pies. It would be a symbol. A new start.” Quite right. Isabel was a good girl. She hadn’t started off that way, maybe; but this was what a good training did for a girl.

  But where was Isabel? Alice looked at the darkness falling—not still in sanctuary with the princesses, surely? She tutted. It was all very well working her fingers to the bone, as the girl was doing now the weavers were here at last: rising before dawn, staying more than half the week in Westminster, and pulling off some big contracts in London, too, on the few days she spent there. But she should still have been here when she had guests waiting. When she hadn’t seen Alice and Anne all week. She should have hurried. It was a question of respect. There were still a few rough edges to knock off the girl.

  Isabel came into the room, patting at her hair. They’d started without her.

  One of the Italians was plucking slowly at a lute, and the rest were dancing the basse dance. Alice Claver, rather drunk, was whispering to William Pratte at the table. Anne Pratte was coming back from the loom room, looking impressed. Joan Woulbarowe was partnering Gasparino’s brother Andrea, dancing quite nicely. The other thin, wispy, spinster silkwomen had paired up with Lombard men too. It was lucky for them that there were only three wives among the incomers.

  With relief, Isabel realized no one seemed to be angry at her late arrival.

  But her heart went on beating too fast.

  She shouldn’t have met Dickon today, with this party to come to afterward. It took her hours, after each meeting now, to stop feeling shamed and dirty; to stop shying away from people, unable to stop herself believing they’d smell the rank sweat of the sheets—proof of her guilt. The lingering guilt she lived with all day long had stopped her inviting Jane here at all; Jane, whose new fragility looked to Isabel like innocence; whose gentle, grateful eyes she found so hard to meet. With the scent of damnation still on her now, she wasn’t yet ready to chat to Alice as if nothing was the matter.

  Alice didn’t see her, lingering in the shadows. But Will Caxton’s eyes lit up at the sight of her; so did Goffredo’s. She smiled but turned down both their offers to dance. She’d got shy of even the casual intimacy of the dance floor, even with these old friends.

  She told herself she was saying no because Will, whom she’d been avoiding, might ask her frankly whether she’d gone on meeting Dickon, and because Goffredo might try and pull her into a flirtation that was only half a joke. But she knew the truth. By choosing to make Dickon’s love, and her acceptance of what he was, the center of her reality, she couldn’t but distance herself from the other people she loved. She couldn’t let anyone else guess how the shame inside her was staining her soul. Still, she was relieved to sit quietly down with Will and Goffredo at the side of the table, and let them talk while she composed herself.

  Isabel couldn't hear what William Pratte and Alice were muttering at the top of the table. But she could guess from their defiant, childishly naughty expressions. Now it was actually happening, they were rattled beyond belief by their own cheek in setting up this business. The silkwomen had petitioned Parliament so often, throughout Alice’s working life, to stop the Italian merchants who traded in London from importing the worked silk goods that London silkwomen already made so beautifully, so there could be no damaging foreign competition. The last petition, which had become law only last year, had brought in fines not just for any Italian merchants who imported wrought goods but even for any Londoner foolhardy enough to buy from them.

  Isabel should know: she’d written in the new clause herself after seeing Queen Elizabeth Woodville carrying anItalian-made3 purse. The trade truce with the Italians that had evolved over time was this: Italians made the whole cloths and exported them either to trade fairs at Bruges and Antwerp or directly to London, while Londoners cut and sewed the cloths and worked the silk threads imported alongside. But the Claver venture was now breaking every rule on which that compromise was based.

  Isabel could imagine how frightening it must be to take this dangerous step, after a lifetime of keeping in with the sophisticated alien merchants who used their London shops to supply Alice and William and every other big mercer in town with the letters of credit they needed to buy whole silk cloths abroad, and to sell a few of the finest silk cloths directly, over the shop counter, to lesser merchants who couldn’t afford their own trade in the Low Countries. The Lombards were the heart of the silk trade.

  And the Lombards would destroy them if they found out about this before the apprentices were trained. After that, it would be too late. The Londoners would have the knowledge.

  Even for Isabel, who had spent so much less time being respectful to Italians, it was unnerving. She thought of the rich Lombards at the Lucchese chapel at St. Thomas of Acre: all those tall men with hook noses and velvet cloaks and dark stares, the ones the street boys hissed at if they dared for keeping the best of the English trade for themselves and seducing the wives of English mercers into the bargain. Mancini. Bonvisi. The Borromei bankers of Milan. The Conterini of Venice. And Jacopo Salviati of Florence, doing so well now that the rival Medici bankers had closed their shop and their former representative, Gherardo Canigiani, had married a London mercer’s widow and started calling himself Gerard. Isabel wasn’t quite like the youths who’d mutter “whore-son foreigners!” after them—though only once the Italians were safely out of earshot and wouldn’t turn back for a fight.

  Yet she had as much nervous respect as they did for the power that those expensive cloaks and formal manners and slightly sinister eyes represented.

  Still, she thought, turning her mind away from the danger, trying to stop her mind racing, trying to feel calm. In for a penny, in for a pound. It would all be worth it if it worked. It wasn’t just t
hat they’d be powerful and rich beyond their wildest dreams, though more money and power were always welcome. The truly important thing was that the English would be at the heart of the trade if they could make their own cloths, and the Claver house—a house of women—at the heart of the English trade; and she, Isabel, at the heart of the Claver house.

  If she was at the heart of everything, she told herself, she could protect the silkwomen.

  She could form them into a legal guild; she could force the mercers to recognize them; or she could separate them from the mercers altogether. The mercers had spent years firmly co- opting all small groups of men doing almost-mercer trades such as vestment- making, and forcing them to pay their dues to the mercers’ guild. The mercers’ guild was one of the biggest and most powerful in London, along with the princes of fish and wine at the fishmongers’ and vintners’ guilds. But the liverymen in blue velvet had been indulgent with the silkwomen they were allied with. They’d let them organize themselves almost as a guild of their own for as long as anyone could remember, taking apprentices for money, drawing up their own contracts, sometimes even trading independently of their men. They’d had to; so many of the silkwomen were their own wives, after all, and might chase them round the kitchen with the soup ladle if crossed.

  So the silkwomen didn’t have to pay for their privileges. They were left alone. And they were almost a force to be reckoned with. But, because they were unrecognized by law as an industry in their own right, they still had to go cap in hand to their mercer contacts—the indulgent William Pratte if they were lucky, or the less indulgent John Lambert if they weren’t—to negotiate with the outside world. They couldn’t hire lawyers as a group, or press an argument with the king or Parliament, except through the indulgence of mercers who supported them. They couldn’t earn the freedom of the City as silkwomen unless they had a father or husband who’d endorse their request to be Freewomen. They couldn’t even hold an annual dinner like the men did. They lived in the shadows. Isabel had fretted over the injustice of it ever since she’d first clashed with her father. Her business skills were as sharply honed as his; there was a whole younger generation of men like the Lynoms ready to back the silkwomen, and once she’d pulled off a big commercial coup like this silk- weaving project, surely no mercers would dare refuse formal recognition to silkwomen?

  And once she’d done so much good, surely she could allow herself to stop feeling so guilty?

  She caught herself; dreaming again. The important thing now was to stay calm; avoid getting rattled; take one step at a time.

  She was managing it all so far. Having Alice and the Prattes see the Italian workers today, for instance. Tomorrow, visiting the princess and sewing in her new laces for the violet silk gown. After that, snatching another hour with Dickon on the way back.

  Then innocently chatting with Will Caxton at his gate about her time with the princess. It was all possible, if you kept your head. It could all work.

  Goffredo was dancing with Joan Woulbarowe. The party was getting noisy. Caxton played servant, pouring wine into Isabel’s cup. Then he leaned forward, under cover of the yelps and singing on the floor. “I never know how to ask,” he said nervously,“about . . .” He hesitated. “What you once told me.”

  She looked away. But he’d been bound to ask about Dickon sooner or later.

  “Forgive me,” he said, cringing. But she couldn’t leave it like that, leave him wondering, and watching, when she was meeting Dickon right under his nose. So she plucked up her courage and looked him straight in the eye.

  “The important thing is to learn from our mistakes, isn’t it?”

  she said, not quite lying, but deliberately creating the impression that what they were talking about was firmly in the past. “I’m not proud of what I did.”

  She saw the relief brighten his eyes. “Yes,” he said, thinking he understood, “of course. After what he did to Jane, you couldn’t carry on as you were.” He patted her hand. “I respect you for that,” he said warmly. “I won’t mention it again.”

  She wasn’t proud of herself then, either. Will Caxton was a decent, straightforward man. But he had to be deceived. She thought, without remorse: One step at a time.

  14

  The princess’s peaky white face, which could be as still as marble, was full of life today. Isabel hadn’t seen her so excited in the whole five months since Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s daughters had shut themselves up in their voluntary prison.

  Elizabeth’s eyebrows were lifted high and alert. She clearly couldn’t wait for Lady Elizabeth Darcey to leave them alone. Isabel found it mildly alarming.

  One of the choices Isabel had had to make while making her peace with Dickon was to refine her attitude to the disinherited children of King Edward. She couldn’t allow herself any more of the pity that she’d felt so strongly at the start. Once she’d understood that Dickon must have stolen the royal status that was rightfully theirs, she’d necessarily become complicit. She’d had to harden her heart to the princesses.

  So now, although she knew it was selfish to hope that Princess Elizabeth’s expression wasn’t the first sign of more upheaval that might spread into her own life—just when things were getting back into a routine—that was what she found herself hoping anyway.

  She went to the sewing box in the corner. They’d stopped trying to get her to alter dresses. There was so little point, in sanctuary. All you could do while you were hiding from the world was to try not to look too frowsy and hope for better times when you got outside. So, for three hours every Friday morning, Isabel and the princess had started turning an unwanted French wedding gown of figured white damask with pearls into two sets of white cloths for the altar of the Virgin in the abbey—a thank- you to the abbot for keeping the Woodville females safe. Isabel had designed the embroidery: trees of red roses and red lilies on each set, along with a far more complex embroidery for the princess, who had so much more time on her hands: an image of the Assumption of the Virgin.

  Elizabeth felt at ease with Isabel; they’d spent so many hours together, quietly sewing. But the younger princesses no longer joined them. They’d sensed the change in Isabel and had found something else to do with their time. They’d stopped hoping she might bring news. No one had had any news of the princes since the summer. Isabel had told them what Dickon had told her to tell them: that the word in the markets was that they’d been quietly moved out of London, for their own safety. Perhaps they hadn’t believed that, any more than Isabel did. (“They’re in East Anglia,” Dickon had told Isabel, “though you needn’t tell Elizabeth that; with a man of mine who has sons their ages. Practicing their archery.” And he’d laughed; but he hadn’t met her eyes.) Isabel didn’t even ask about what people really thought had become of the boys when she was in London these days. She didn’t like to think of them. She tried not to look at the knucklebones, still on the window ledge, waiting for Richard’s return.

  Isabel picked up her piece of white damask. She threaded a needle. She sat under the window, facing the fire, and turned her back on the falling leaves and the rain. No more storms, she prayed.

  Elizabeth sat down next to her and picked up her own cloth.

  She began to sew as if nothing had changed. But Isabel noticed that Lady Darcey gave her charge a slightly longer look than usual before closing the door on them, leaving the guards outside.

  The two needles flashed quietly. Then Princess Elizabeth put her sewing down. “I know I can trust you,” she said.

  Isabel nodded without committing herself.

  She waited.

  Elizabeth said, enigmatically: “My mother is discussing a marriage for me.”

  Isabel didn’t think there would be many marriage prospects open to a girl now known, officially, as Elizabeth Bastard. She lifted one eyebrow a fraction on her humbly lowered face.

  “With the mother of the Earl of Richmond,” Elizabeth whispered.

  Isabel was aware of the princess’s slightly pr
otruding eyes fixed on her at the same time as realizing she had no idea of how to react. The Earl of Richmond was Henry Tudor, the new Lancastrian leader; the exile in Brittany. Surely Princess Elizabeth could never marry Henry Tudor unless the present King of England, who would never allow such a match, were dead? No one had ever before confessed to her that they were contemplating an act of treason.

  She kept her face tilted down; raised the second eyebrow. As slowly and coolly as she could manage, she raised just her eyes, too, to Elizabeth’s face.

  Why are you telling me this? Isabel’s eyes silently beseeched her. But the princess didn’t notice. She’d had no hope for so long.

  Now she was full of this possible escape.

  The more Isabel heard, the less she liked it. It was a full- blown plot.

  Queen Elizabeth Woodville had been approached with the idea of the marriage by the Duke of Buckingham, who’d sent a messenger; and he in turn had been approached by Henry Tudor’s mother on the road to Shrewsbury (Lady Margaret Beaufort was, as she innocently explained, going to pray at the shrine of the Virgin at Worcester).

  The idea, at the beginning, had been to resuscitate a marriage plan for Elizabeth and Henry of Richmond that had first been vaguely raised a year earlier, with old King Edward, after Elizabeth’s French marriage had fallen through: a harmless plan that would allow Henry Tudor back to England, return some of his forfeit estates, and let him live quietly in Wales, on his father’s ancestral lands, with his Plantagenet bride.