Isabel let it wash over her, enjoying it, enjoying the flash of her needle, lightheaded with her private relief. But when the princess began to talk about marrying, she did look up.
“Not Henry Tudor?” she asked, trying to make a shared joke of him. The princess laughed, a light, brittle, social laugh. But she didn’t offer a name. All she said was, “Ah,” and there was an enigmatic look on her face as she played with the crucifix round her neck; then: “It would be foolish to make the same mistake twice, wouldn’t it?”
It was only on her way out of the abbot’s house that Isabel realized what had troubled her most about that moment. Elizabeth’s crucifix was decorated with a single small ruby. It was the double of the one Dickon had been carry ing the previous night.
Dickon's eyes were as empty as last time. But they made love.
He didn’t speak, just drew in a deep breath of need at the sight of her, closed his eyes, and put his lips to hers. Even when they were tumbled breathlessly on the bed together, sated, he didn’t smile or break his silence. But he went on holding her so close, so hard, that she could feel his heart beat and sense the depth of the loneliness he was trying to escape. It was enough.
“I worry for you,” she whispered. He kissed her, but she thought it might be to stop her talking. She felt he might just want to feel her skin on his today, not words. She’d do what ever he needed. She relaxed against his body; kissed his chest with butterfly kisses; willed him to find his eyes closing. Then she remembered the letter, and couldn’t stop herself voicing her gratitude.
“Elizabeth . . . ,” she whispered—she couldn’t call her either “Princess” or “Bastard” with Dickon—“Elizabeth was so happy with the letter from her brother.”
He might have brought the letter himself. But he only grunted.
He kept his eyes shut.
“I am too,” she breathed. “Thank you.”
She’d kept faith. She’d had doubts, but the darkness was fading.
As she settled herself blissfully against him, she looked at the ground where his crucifix lay. It was the usual big one with sapphires. The dead child’s cross had gone.
She lay with one cheek on Dickon’s chest, staring down at the shadows on the floor.
She didn’t know why, or what had changed. But she was no longer feeling happy.
15
When she asked about the crucifix, Dickon just sighed.
“It’s the same one,” he said wearily, pulling himself up and buckling on his sword belt. “I gave it to Elizabeth to remember him by.”
But Elizabeth had said she’d hardly known her cousin. Why would she want his cross?
Isabel went on looking at Dickon. He frowned. “They were cousins,” he said evasively.
She didn’t look away.
As irritably as if she were interrogating him and forcing a confession, Dickon added: “And I’ve been wondering about her as a possible wife. If Anne were to die.”
She stared.
Defensively, he said: “Well, it would stop Henry Tudor trying to marry her. She’d get a crown, even as a bastard. It would stop her mother wanting revenge on me. It would make sense.”
Then, into the silence, he snapped: “For God’s sake. Stop looking at me like that.”
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t even summon up the strength to pick up the sheet that had fallen away from her nakedness. She just went on sitting in the rumpled bed, with her chin on her knees and pale red hair flaming round her eyes, staring.
She’d accepted everything till now. She’d lived with her fears.
She’d heard the stories about Hastings being dragged kicking and screaming from the Council chamber and spread-eagled across a tree stump to be beheaded, while Dickon watched. She’d shut her mind to them.
But this felt worse. It was betrayal. She couldn’t say yes to this.
She couldn’t let him love another woman; and she couldn’t believe his only motive, if he were thinking of marrying Elizabeth, would be forming a good alliance.
She couldn’t shut her mind to the thought of his fastening that cross round Elizabeth’s long neck.
Mastering himself, he sat down again. Put his hand on hers.
“Look,” he said, but she sensed that his gentleness masked impatience. “My son is dead; my wife is dying. It’s my duty to think about this. I need an heir. This would be an alliance, that’s all.”
She said nothing. She was ashes inside. Had he only really come to London this time to see Elizabeth, to make marriage plans with her?
“Elizabeth’s a child,” he said, as if that would comfort her. “I don’t love her.”
She said nothing.
He said: “I have to go.” He was leaving for Nottingham and the North tomorrow.
She nodded.
He kissed her cheek before he went.
It would be two weeks before he got back: the end of summer.
She wouldn’t even think about what he’d said. She couldn’t. She threw herself even harder into her work.
She and Goffredo bought in weaving materials for the Italian teams, going at different times to the London markets and being careful to vary their suppliers. The slightly wobbly lengths of luminous cloth on the looms were getting bigger. It wouldn’t be more than a few months before the silkwomen could weave without guidance from the Italians. Soon they’d need to start planning how to announce the existence of the workshop at the Guildhall; from next spring, once the Mercery allowed them to trade, they’d be able to start making sales.
In London, where she went on Sundays to spend half of her week with the old women, she also made deals in the selds; wrote her sales into Alice’s ledgers; joined the older women to entertain their clients; and went to the Guildhall with Alice and William Pratte. No one else had Isabel’s eye for truth and falsehood, even Alice; Isabel was in constant demand on the commission, checking imported silk cloths for frauds. The mercers relied on her ability to open up a length of damask and, after feeling it and looking at it by the light of the window, pronounce it either properly finished or badly worked in places, or inconsistent, or with warps too thin and however many pounds light of the weft threads it would have needed to make it tighter; or, having sniff ed a suspect cloth, to say it had been artificially thickened, by a fraudulent exporter, with paste.
She remembered every foreign regulation, too, better than any clerk. When the foreign importer jumped angrily from his chair, shouting, “But it is perfectly honest to use gomma!” it was Isabel who knew, and replied without hesitation, that while you could use it honestly in light cloths, such as sandals and satins, to make the colors shine and give consistency, the Venetian government had made the use of paste in any heavy parangon cloths illegal in 1457 and had enforced the regulation strictly ever since. London followed Venice’s direction. There would be nothing for the importer to do but take his cloth and flounce away.
They were saying in the markets that the queen was dying and the king was being punished for his sins. But the Claver prof-its were up.
“You’re a marvel; you work so hard,” Robert Lynom said.
“But don’t you ever want to enjoy yourself? Go and stay with Jane. She’s lonely; Thomas is always away these days raising troops for the king.”
She shook her head. “Too much to do here,” she said briskly.
If she went to the country, how could she be at Westminster?
Isabel stayed up late at Westminster on her three days a week there. At the silk house she made the silk weavers teach her the rudiments of their craft by day and danced with the Lombards at night, very fast, very late.
Once a week she walked to the palace to the big bright apartment overlooking the river, where Princess Elizabeth now busied herself with hunts and preparations for the dances that would start again at the end of the summer. The princess didn’t want to finish the altar vestments that reminded her of those endless miserable months of sanctuary. They’d been sent off to the City for finishing. But s
he and her sisters did want dancing gowns. Isabel took a profitable commission from Lady Darcey, and subcontracted the job in the Mercery. Her patience with the princesses was paying dividends. Alice would be pleased.
But that was no longer the reason Isabel came. She came to torment herself by looking at Elizabeth from under her eyelashes: mea sur ing the smoothness of the princess’s sixteen- year- old skin and the tiny waist and the slim neck and the white hands and the prominent eyes that she’d once thought ugly but which now seemed to glow with secrets. She tried not to think of the fine lines around her own eyes; the pale streaks in her hair. But she couldn’t stop herself asking: How could Dickon not love this niece?
“That’s a beautiful cross,” she said, on one knee, pinning.
Elizabeth looked down her thin nose, squinting toward it.
“My cousin’s,” she said quietly, “God rest his soul. His Majesty gave it to me.” But she didn’t offer any more information.
Fishing for more, Isabel ventured, “How relieved you must be that His Majesty is so well disposed to your family . . .” But the princess only nodded, with a remote half- smile. She’d learned caution. It had been a long time since she’d confided in Isabel.
If only ore people were more cautious, Isabel thought angrily, catching up with her servant.
“Speta, dotor! Drio de vu! Vienlo a mesa?” Joan Woulbarowe was joyfully trilling. She was looking prettier these days than she had in all the years Isabel had known her. She’d lost her neglected air. Her hair was dressed under her kerchief and her lips were full and pink and her eyes were gleaming, and there was a pretty gold heart on a red ribbon round her neck. The other Westminster silkwomen spent their evenings putting bets on how long it would take timid little Andrea di Costanzo to pluck up the courage to ask his brother Gasparino to ask Goffredo to ask Alice Claver to allow him to marry Joan Woulbarowe at the end of her initial two- year silk training contract. No one expected him to rush, but everyone knew he’d do it eventually.
Still, happy or not, Joan Woulbarowe would always be a fool, Isabel thought severely, as she emerged blinking into the summer sun from the dark mouth of St. Thomas of Acre behind the fat doctor who’d been worshipping at the Italian chapel. What did Joan think she was doing, wandering round the City on a Sunday morning, warbling away in her fluent bad Italian to Lombards and drawing attention to herself? She was supposed to stay out of harm’s way at Westminster.
Isabel caught up and tapped Joan Woulbarowe on the shoulder, interrupting what ever cheerful comment she’d been making to the Italian. Dr. Gigli was a priest and medical man, not a merchant, so there was less immediate danger that Joan’s sudden display of knowledge of Italian would cause any market gossip, but it was best to send Joan on her way quickly in any case.
Joan looked startled—though, Isabel thought grimly, not half guilty enough at her own indiscretion.
“Did you have a message for Mistress Claver, Joan?” Isabel said, flashing a warning with her eyes.
“Oh, no, Mistress Isabel,” Joan answered innocently, “I was just going to visit my Auntie Rose in Lad Lane. She’s broken her ankle. She likes to see me on a Sunday.”
Isabel sighed. “Well, run along,” she said, and Joan fluttered anxious, uncomprehending eyes at her before turning away.
“Bexon’ ndar caxa,” she said politely to Dr. Gigli, bobbing as she went. “Ah, ła vita l’è na fraxe interóta. S-ciào vostro, ” he replied, equally courteously.
Isabel stood uncertainly, watching. Dr. Gigli stayed where he was, too, watching Joan’s back recede. “It is a long time I do not see Joan,” he said with warmth. “Her aunt used to work in my house.”
Isabel smiled in a very- interesting- but- I-must- rush way, but the plump Italian with the intrigued expression wasn’t letting her go that easily. He turned his potbelly her way.
“She has been learning Italian, I see.”
Isabel quailed inside. But she put a confiding, knowing, slightly leering look on her face. “She’s in love,” she said. “So I’ve heard.” He nodded, up and down, up and down, so that his double chins wobbled into one another. Gaining confidence—it was so nearly the truth of why Joan was learning Italian—she embroidered her story by adding, “with a Lucchese, they say,” at the same time as Dr. Gigli said something himself.
She only realized what he’d been saying, and how definitely he’d been saying it, when it was too late: “With a Venetian, I can hear. She’s talking Venetian.”
“El maestro de lengoa pi sicuro xe el uso,” he added thoughtfully.
“Usage is the best teacher of language.”
Isabel cursed herself. Why hadn’t she shut up? She was more of a fool than Joan. She smiled wider and shook her head innocently. “Oh, I wouldn’t know. A Lucchese—that’s just what I heard,” she gabbled, aware she was sounding foolish. “But maybe a Venetian. I won’t contradict you. I expect you can tell, can’t you?
different accents, words . . .”
He was looking at her again now, squinting against the sun.
“There are not so many Venetians in London,” he said consideringly. “Just the Conterini and their people. And me. And your friend Goffredo D’Amico, of course.” Isabel nodded, politely, desperate to move away. “Although,” he added, “there is always talk of others.”
“I must go,” she said, simpering uneasily.
“Perhaps you’ve heard the rumors yourself? That King Edward wrote a license for Italians to teach silk weaving here? Venetians? Signor Mancini has been saying for years that he heard that at court, from the scrivener of ”—he crossed himself—“the late Lord Hastings.”
She looked down. He gestured up at St. Thomas’s, still smiling. “Since your servant speaks my language so well, you may know the Venetian saying yourself: ła mé rełigion xe sercar ła verità ’nte ła vita e ła vita ’nte ła verità. My religion is to seek out truth in life and life in truth.”
She shook her head, trying to keep the smile on her face.
“We also say,” he continued urbanely, “a juteme a capire quel che ve digo e ve lo speigarò mejo: help me to understand what I am saying, and I will explain it better.”
He held her gaze. She looked blankly back. “There’s even a rumor that your Signore D’Amico has been importing looms from Venice,” he added. His chins rippled again. “Not that there’s any sign of any such thing actually happening. Still, you know what we Venetians are like—we love gossip. What would life be without a good rumor, eh!”
And he threw back his head and bellowed with laughter.
Isabel laughed too; bowed and walked away, still smiling prettily. It was only when she turned off Cheapside to walk through the market that she saw Dr. Gigli still standing outside the church. He wasn’t laughing anymore, but he was still looking her way.
But she put Dr. Gigle out of her mind when she got back to the quiet of Westminster. He was so far away. And she had too much else to worry about.
What she’d found herself thinking about, most of every day and even in the night, when she woke up, tossing and turning, was how to get the princess to discuss Dickon. She’d find something out that way, at least, wouldn’t she? She’d thought of so many ways to get that conversation going, but they all seemed contrived.
She knew—felt—there was something going on. The whispers she overheard, through half- closed bedchamber doors at the princess’s palace rooms, were quick and intent. She just couldn’t tell if they were connected with Dickon. Once she heard a doubtful mutter of, “You’d think ten drops of laudanum a day would fell an ox,” before the princess came out to the parlor to greet her.
It had been a female voice speaking, though so low- pitched she couldn’t be sure it had been the princess’s; but what could those words mean? Dowager Elizabeth Woodville had taken to flashing in and out of the fittings, inspecting Isabel’s sewing with her old queenly demeanor, breathing through a nose that, though beautiful, always had the white flecks of suppressed anger in it. S
he was waiting for something.
Isabel was tacking on a sleeve lace, miserably aware of Elizabeth’s elegant column of a neck just a few inches away, when she finally plucked up courage to find out more.
“Your lovely crucifix . . . your gift from His Majesty,” she murmured, and Elizabeth fluttered a hand toward it: a lovely hand with white, smooth skin, glittering with rings.
“. . . It reminds me of what I’ve heard people saying,” Isabel went on, and she was aware of Elizabeth’s sharpening of attention without needing to look up.
“. . . about His Majesty’s intentions if, God forbid, God takes Her Majesty the Queen to Himself . . .”
Elizabeth said nothing, but her narrow nostrils flared white; how like her mother she’d become.
Isabel blurted: “They’re saying he might take it into his head to marry you next.”
She was miserably aware that she hadn’t got her opening gam-bit right, even before she saw Elizabeth’s green eyes move down to fix consideringly on her own lowered head. There was a flicker of what she thought might be amusement on the princess’s face.
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