Jane and Thomas Lynom arrived in London in early April, a year into Dickon’s reign. It was the first time they’d left their new manor house at Sutton. Alice Claver prepared a feast.
The Lynoms, husband and wife, were already at Catte Street when Isabel walked in—the center of attention, both smiling radiantly, both as golden as summer apricots, being plied with wine and refreshments after their morning’s ride.
Jane had stopped wearing nunlike grays and browns since she married, but she hadn’t gone back to her old peacock finery either.
Today she was wearing a fine yet modest patterned damask robe in tans and browns and grays. The sprays of foliage shone as she moved, yet so discreetly that even Alice Claver couldn’t really disapprove. “Being a country gentlewoman seems to be suiting you,” Alice Claver barked, glaring down at Jane’s hands, which were conspicuously unroughened by her new rustic life; but despite the snap in the mistress of the house’s gruff voice, they all knew that, somehow, Jane had sneaked herself into Alice Claver’s heart. So no one worried.
“How well you look, my dear,” William Pratte said affectionately, deftly stepping past Will Caxton to embrace the bride. Caxton had glued himself to Jane since he’d arrived, fussing and grinning like a devoted dog refusing to be parted from its long- lost mistress. He’d hardly said a word to ThomasLynom, but the young husband was taking the prickliness of Jane’s long- term admirer in good part.
“More beautiful than ever,” declaimed Goffredo, with something of his old flirtatiousness. Goffredo had been very quiet recently. Since the Londoners and Venetians at the silk house had learned enough of each other’s languages to talk properly, it had emerged that Goffredo had had a wife in Venice for twenty years, but had never mentioned her to Alice Claver and her friends. The childless wife had been carried off last spring by a bout of fever, so he was now, officially, a widower at last. But Alice and Anne were teasing him so brutally about his lengthy, half- joking flirtation with Isabel that he’d stopped daring to answer back or proposing almost lightheartedly to her several times a day. “A woman in every port,” they’d cackle to each other; or, “You know the punishment for bigamy is eternal damnation, don’t you?” And poor Goffredo’s eyes would flicker and his smile would grow uncertain. Isabel was partly relieved that he was fighting shy of her, as a result, but she missed Goffredo’s old exuberance too. So she was happy to see a more cheerful gleam in his eyes now.
“Yes; you’re blooming, dear,” Anne Pratte said from just behind her husband. Isabel noticed Thomas give Anne Pratte a single quiet look, and Anne Pratte smiled innocently back before she lowered her eyes. But no one else noticed, because Robert Lynom walked in at that moment. He’d become a friend as well as their lawyer; he’d even been entrusted with the secret of the silk- weaving venture at Westminster, with much significant lowering of voices and tapping of noses on Anne Pratte’s part. So there were more embraces and joy and long blond limbs clapping each other on the back, and deep brotherly voices booming affectionately at each other.
They all settled at table, and while the goose was carved up and the pies and vegetable dishes sampled, Thomas, who, as the husband of a formerly treasonable person, had been tickled to be appointed to a royal commission investigating other treasonable persons in Essex, told stories about his work. The king had just given him another manor, at Colmworth in Bedfordshire, for his pains; he and Jane were on their way to visit it for the first time.
There was a possibility he’d be transferred again to run a section of the elaborate, expensive new coastal defenses. “I seem to count as an honorary northerner these days, luckily,” he said comfortably, not quite mocking a monarch who so distrusted the southern gentry that he’d started importing hundreds of sheriff s and other officials to run the administration of the South. “I had no idea when I went to work in York five years ago what a good choice I was making.”
He was so comfortable, ThomasLynom; so at ease. So unlike Dickon.
How cozy everything has become here; how calm, Isabel thought gratefully.
When Jane, putting a hand on her husband’s arm, said shyly,“Thomas and I have news,” and there was a burst of excited chatter about when the Lynom baby would be born and what it should be called, Isabel let herself be swept up as much as everyone else by the hope lighting up the table. She raised her glass: “To new beginnings,” she said, “for all of us.” And they all laughed and banged the table with their hands, while ThomasLynom blushed and kissed his wife.
Isabel's happiness flickered and faded when she and Will Caxton landed at Westminster, toward evening, and heard bells.
Someone was dead.
She saw the alarm in Will’s eyes. Her heart was thudding.
Without a word, they half walked, half ran through the mournful din to the nearest tavern to find out who. The tavern was called the White Boar, like Dickon’s badge. Inside, there was a heaving ant heap of turmoil.
“It’s a sign from God,” a stout elderly woman in tight black was saying, crossing herself. “It must be.”
The monk she was with nodded. He had the same snub nose and pig cheeks as her, and was near the bottom of a tankard of ale.
He drained it before replying, with foam on his face and gloomy relish in his rough voice: “Mmm. A year to the day. Struck down by the Good Lord in His righteous anger. It’s the only explanation.”
Staring at them, Isabel thought, stupidly, slowly: It’s the ninth of April. It took her a moment to remember what had happened last April ninth. Then she did. It was the day King Edward had died. The day she’d first heard this head- splitting clangor of bells.
When the fear came, it was like drowning in black water. She gasped with it. Dickon?
“But who is dead?” Will Caxton was asking.
“The Prince of Wales,” the monk said. “The boy.”
“God rest his soul,” Will whispered, crossing himself. She crossed herself too, but the sensation sweeping through her limbs was the sweetest relief imaginable. It was only when she looked up, and found a whole circle of bystanders turning astonished eyes on her, that she realized what she’d been muttering as her hand moved: “Thank God.”
Will said: “She means, she was afraid you might be talking about the king.” He spoke quickly and protectively, before the surprise turned to hostility. She nodded.
“But this is worse,” the White Boar’s innkeeper called out, hands full of tankards, wiping the sweat from his forehead onto a forearm. The crowd nodded, and there were rumbles of “wicked-ness” and “divine punishment.” “There are no other children. No heirs. No daughters. Hardly a nephew left alive. He says they’re all bastards, doesn’t he? We all know what that means for us.
When he dies, we get more war. And my question is: What bloody good is a living king to any of us if his dynasty’s dead?”
“ They say the queen’s gone mad with it,” Anne Pratte said.
“Grief.”
Alice sighed gustily. Their needles flashed in rhythm.
“Anne, really,” William Pratte remonstrated.
There was only one legitimate York heir left. King Edward’s children were bastards. The Duke of Clarence’s son was barred from the throne because his father had died a traitor. That left a cousin: John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln. Another nine- year- old.
“The king, too,” Anne Pratte went remorselessly on. “They say he bangs his head against the wall and tears his hair out. In handfuls.”
Isabel winced inside. “Anne,” William Pratte said.
She fixed him with a cold look. “I don’t know why you’re being so squeamish about this, dear,” she said. “It’s not as if I’m just gossiping. I’m not calling it God’s punishment, what ever anyone else says. I just say we have a right to worry. They say there are three hundred rebel lords in Britanny now. They will have been waiting for something like this. How long will it take them to start making trouble? And what will become of us then?”
It was a rhetorical ques
tion. They’d told Isabel often enough exactly what would become of them if there was war again: the contracts vanishing, the foreigners too, the wine fleet stopping, food prices rising, crazy war taxes, the law courts clogging up with unheard cases, the roads filling up with brigands, the seas filling up with pirates. She knew the answer. But they’d lived it.
She could see the fear in their eyes.
Isabel didn't expect to see Dickon soon. The body had to be buried; the kingdom’s defenses shored up. She’d wait.
But he came. She was out in the little garden, picking gillyflowers for the table, feeling the sun on her back, knowing that to night would be full moon, when she heard the low whistle from behind the hedge. She hadn’t even noticed the fall of hooves until then. She went to the gate to see who could be whistling her out.
“You,” she said, feeling a great slow breath of happiness fill her, somehow not surprised after all.
He looked dusty from the road and marked by his pain—thinner, somehow shrunken, with dark under the eyes and sadness dragging at his face.
They hadn’t ever spoken on the street. It was too overlooked, too public. Their tacit agreement was that once she saw his horse, she’d slip over the road and up the tavern’s back stairs to find him in the room. If she was careful, no one need ever see her.
But he did speak now, under the windows that might be full of eyes, as if he didn’t care anymore who saw him. He dismounted and walked straight to her, before even tethering the horse, so that human and animal faces came at her together over the gate.
He kissed her in a sour cloud of horse sweat and leather, a strangely nostalgic, uncertain kiss.
When they drew apart, she said, a little frightened by this new simplicity: “I’ve been so sad for you.”
He said, with that unearthly calm that never seemed to desert him, “Can you imagine how much I loved him?” and she nodded.
If her imagination could conjure up no greater love than the bittersweet plea sure she was feeling here, now, at being with Dickon, at being needed in this moment, it would be enough. Eyes on eyes: a long silence. She never wanted to look away. “You can’t know how much I’ve missed you,” he said, and her heart turned over. “I know I can trust you. Come and talk.”
She was still holding the gillyflowers. She opened the gate and walked straight over the road, behind him, to the Red Pale’s back door.
The pale walls and the straw still held a memory of happiness. But now she was fully clothed and holding the hand of a man hunched on a mattress in dusty clothes who’d said he needed her but hardly seemed to know she was there. Who was talking about pain, as if to himself. She was watching a ravaged living face appear to age before her eyes as he described the radiance his dead child had lost. The slight fever; the rash; the lethargic tears. Nothing. A brief bad dream. But Edward had been dead by morning.
She could imagine how Dickon would have held his sorrow in—using his miraculously deep, reassuring voice to calm others; being dignified, prosaic, and practical. But shutting himself away in prayer, or taking himself off for the fierce lonely gallops he loved, trying not to give way to emotion however much he wanted to howl out his grief.
“There was a silkwoman who worked for us once,” she whispered, her eyes swimming with pity, hoping he would not guess how full her heart was with its own muted radiance at being here, chosen, talking with this man about things so close to his heart.
“Her little boy died. She just disappeared. They didn’t find her for a week. She’d gone right out to the woods and dug herself into a foxhole. As if she was trying to bury herself. They dug her up and brought her back, but she didn’t want to come. She kept saying,‘Let me die, let me die.’ They said she’d gone mad; put her in Bethlem for three months. She’s never been right since . . .” She stopped. “But you; you’ve been strong.”
Dickon looked straight at her for the first time since they’d shut the door. He was so tired his face was gray. There was gray in his hair too. He crunched his hands together until his knuckles cracked.
“You know,” he said. “Don’t you? What Anne’s been like.”
His wife; the Queen of England. She flinched, but he didn’t seem to notice. He went on talking. Anne Neville wanted to die.
She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. Her bones stuck out and her eyes stuck out. She howled and tore down draperies. She fell down stairs; slashed at her wrists; beat her head against walls.
There were no other children.
Hollowly, he said, “It’s as if she’s possessed. I can’t be with her.
I can’t let her go either.” Isabel made herself small and still and said nothing. His face was twitching. He went on urgently, a whisper with a suppressed howl in it: “She wants to die. But I can’t let her. She remembers Edward like I do.”
What comfort could she offer? She squeezed at his dry hand; he squeezed hers back. He sat in silence for a while. He composed himself; fingered the crucifix he’d taken off and laid on the floor as he entered the room; muttered a prayer. It wasn’t his usual crucifix. It was smaller and more delicate, decorated with a single chip of ruby. He caught her looking at it. Uncomfortably, he said:“It’s his. Edward’s.” Then: “Was Edward’s.” He didn’t look at her as he went on, “They’re expecting me. I have to go.”
She sat on by herself after he left. She watched the full moon come up, alone, before letting herself out to cross the road home.
She took the wilted gillyflowers.
Will Caxton looked out of an upstairs window as her gate creaked. He was in his nightshirt, stretching and smiling while he reached for his shutters. “You’re out late,” he said.
She held up the flowers. He was too far away, and even in the moonlight, it was too dark for him to see how faded they’d got.
He’d think she’d been out picking them at night, maybe.
He nodded. “They’re pretty,” he said kindly; then, “Isn’t it beautiful out to night? This magical light. I love the full moon. Don’t you?”
Liking Will Caxton, Isabel said, “I do.” As she padded up the path and lifted the latch to her own door, she added, “Though sometimes it seems sad. So pale and quiet.”
With Will’s murmur still in her ears, Isabel stopped just inside the door. She could hear the usual evening dancing and music and hubbub coming from behind the closed doors opposite. Perhaps, in a while, she’d join the weavers.
There was so much sadness in the world. Dickon was in grief.
But he’d brought his grief to her, no one else. When she thought of that, she could bear anything. She might even dance.
“Did you see the boxes outside? ” Princess Elizabeth said, and her voice seemed to have got faster and sharper. “Have they started taking them away yet?”
Isabel shook her head. “Boxes . . .” She was baffled. Elizabeth had been so quiet, so correct, so hopeless, since the failure of Henry Tudor’s rebellion—as if the life had been snuff ed out of her.
“We’re going,” the princess said impatiently, as if Isabel were being slow. “Home. Back to the palace. To court. Didn’t you know?”
More kindly, she added: “It’s been chaos in our bedchambers for hours, packing and folding and pinning and I don’t know what. Chests everywhere. I thought you’d have seen some outside already.”
Elizabeth was starting to share the cream- and- copper beauty of her mother. Her face had points: cheekbones and a straight, neat nose. Her father’s small mouth had become a pretty Cupid’s bow on her. And there was a glow about her that Isabel hadn’t seen before.
“But . . . why?” Isabel asked, in the end. She couldn’t think how to phrase the question more delicately. Prudently, she added:“If I may ask?”
The princess didn’t mind answering. “Because of the letter,” she said, sitting down on a cushion, invitingly patting the stool next to her. “My mother feels safer now.”
“Letter?” Isabel repeated. She was beginning to feel she really was getting stupid. W
hat letter could possibly persuade Dowager Queen Elizabeth Woodville to leave sanctuary?
“From my brother,” the princess said, in the slow voice of one dealing gently with the simpleminded, and when Isabel continued to stare blankly at her: “Richard. You know him. You saw him, didn’t you? Here, before they took him off ?”
A letter from one of the vanished princes. Isabel’s head swam.
So they really were alive. She sat down rather suddenly, full of a greater tenderness for Dickon than she’d ever known. She hadn’t thought till now that it would be possible for her to love him more than she already did, and this extra tide of happiness, sweeping away the doubts she hadn’t wanted to have, restoring the innocence she’d lost, took her by surprise. He’d told the truth. She should have known. She should have trusted him.
“Oh,” she said.
The princess was laughing at her stunned look. But the princess had had longer to get over the shock. “Yes,” Elizabeth said, as happy and relaxed as an ordinary girl. “He wrote to us. Just like that. All those months of being so scared, and now,” a softness stole across her royal face, “it turns out that there’s been nothing to fear all along.”
Men came. Two chests were dumped on the floor. Isabel packed the altar cloths into sacking covers and sewed them carefully into parcels. She made separate sacking packets for the pearls and red and green silk threads and the Venice gold, and sewed them onto the biggest of the main parcels. And then she packed each rough parcel into the chests, between layers of straw to stop them being crushed. And all the time she worked, she smiled.
And all the time she worked, the princess sat on her cushion and talked.
“They left London last October . . . my uncle said they’d be safer away . . . Suffolk . . . Little Gipping . . . very remote . . . they’re in good health, at least Richard is, but he says Edward’s been ill . . . they’re with a family . . . other boys . . . Tyrrell . . . they ride . . . get about . . . the servants don’t know who they are . . . they call them ‘Lord Edward’ and ‘Lord Richard’ . . . which isn’t bad; better than ‘Edward Bastard’ anyway . . . I suppose I’m going to have to get used to being ‘Elizabeth Bastard’ myself . . . but at least I’ll be back at court again, not cooped up in here . . . It’s funny, isn’t it; we’re only moving over the road, really, a few hundred yards, but everything changes once you cross the road, everything . . . There won’t be dancing for a few months, though; because of the mourning. I didn’t know my cousin Edward . . . though I’m sad, of course . . . We won’t get the same apartments but they’ll be good ones . . . I’ll be able to ride again . . . Do you think it’s time to start work on my wedding gown? Because perhaps I’ll be able to make a good marriage now, after all. Live happily ever after.”
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