“They want us to identify the prisoners,” he said. She passed him some bread.
“We should say they work for the Conterini,” he added.
“Shouldn’t we?”
Deliberately she cut another slice for herself. It wouldn’t do to be too weak to think straight. No point in tears. She should eat something. And yes, she could imagine the pair of them doing and saying those things before they took the bodies of their friends back to London and organized their funerals. But none of it would do any good.
She didn’t need to be a soothsayer to know what would happen when this affray went to the Guildhall. The City would waver and grumble but make peace; men like her father would wring their hands and argue against off ending the foreign merchants who were so important to London’s economy. They might have been excited about London- made silk cloths a few days ago, when the merchandise was about to come on the market and the Clavers were about to be powerful, but they wouldn’t do anything to protect the interests of dead women with a dead industry against the powerful living Lombards. They’d be scared. It was the nature of merchants.
But Isabel would need to get justice for Alice and Anne and William and Goffredo and all the weavers whose bodies were out there. She’d need the help of men of the sword. The Claver house had been under contract to the king. She thought: I need Dickon.
“I’ve got to wash,” she muttered, and fled out and up the back staircase. She was too ashamed to let Will Caxton see her cry. She didn’t go to the room she’d slept in. Her feet took her instead to the door at the end of the corridor.
She opened it and slipped inside.
She was expecting nothing better than emptiness; a place to be alone; the cold comfort of memory. But Dickon was there, standing at the window in slept- in clothes, looking with vague eyes at the men digging where the burned-outhouse had been.
Gratitude swept through her, a great simplicity of love. She said, “You came,” and moved her weary limbs toward him. She was so tired. But he was here to comfort her.
Then he raised his eyes to her. And she saw they were empty.
He hadn’t noticed what he was looking at outside. He wasn’t even seeing the disarray of her dress.
He said, in a hollow, unearthly voice she’d never heard before:“Anne has died.” And he rushed forward, a dark wind, to sweep her up in his arms.
He wanted her to comfort him. He buried his head in her shoulder. She heard his muffled voice saying, disjointedly: “I couldn’t bear it . . . when I got the message. She’s been dead two nights . . . I came to you . . . I have to go back . . . the bells . . .
they’ll have to ring the bells . . .”
His head was so heavy. She stood straight under its weight, almost having to hold him up. She looked down at the black hair she’d always loved. Now she felt only numbness.
The people she really loved were out there, dead.
She’d let herself get caught up once too often in Dickon’s web; sat too late with the princess, listening to her hints about Dickon; lost herself trying to puzzle out what either of them might really want from her, or each other. If she’d got here an hour earlier, as she’d promised Alice, the silk house might have been empty by the time the men with their torches came.
She raised Dickon’s head. He let it go on hanging heavy in her hands. He still wanted her support. But she couldn’t give it. Not to a man who’d said he’d never hurt a woman, but let his doctors slip his wife murderous doses of laudanum. He might only be here now to display his grief so Isabel would naively spread word of it in London later. He might only have arranged this meeting with her after he’d heard news of his wife’s death. How could she tell what might really be on his mind? There’d been so many lies, so many tangles, so many maneuvers. And a man who couldn’t stop maneuvering couldn’t feel the simplicity of love. He’d never said he loved her. He didn’t know truth. He wasn’t the man to get justice for Alice.
The gray light outside was brightening. Isabel blinked, as if waking up at last.
“Why are you weeping for your wife?” she whispered. “When you poisoned her.”
He shook his head, but weakly. She didn’t believe him. Gently, she pushed him away.
“Go to your new wife,” she said.
She stopped in the doorway, and turned round. He was stand-3 ing very still, looking disbelievingly at her. She said, “I have always loved you,” for the first and last time.
She reached the bottom of the stairs and felt the quiet daylight on her skin. Will Caxton would be waiting.
“I thought . . . I was so worried,” Will mumbled, wrapping his bony arms tight around her. He was clinging to her like a mother to a child who’s been lost and found. “When you rushed off like that . . .”
“I’m all right, Will,” she said. He held her a little farther away and looked curiously at her. He must have been reassured by what ever he saw.
Isabel was surprised at how composed she felt.
She hadn’t lost quite everything. Will Caxton was still alive.
She had Jane and her family. And she had thirty cloths at Catte Street to remember the weavers by. Velvets as soft as fur; damasks whose patterns of birds and lilies and flowers and leaves shimmered like moonlight. The last cloth Joan Woulbarowe wove had been the colors of summer: blue and green and gold.
She’d started just by loving the beauty of the silk. She’d got lost in the more dangerous dream of the power it might bring.
She should have stayed making beauty out of silk.
There would be no more cloths now.
She’d have to get justice for her friends, and herself, on her own.
Still, she knew exactly where to begin.
A picture of Dickon flashed into Isabel’s mind, sitting in this tavern hall, long ago, with a chess piece in his hand. He was grinning wolfishly, like he used to; he was saying, “The aim of the game is to kill the king.” It had been his idea to teach her to play by his rules. That had amused him once. Isabel wasn’t a chess player, or a fighter. She would never have any weapon but her tongue. But she knew that was a good enough weapon for what she had in mind. She was a Londoner, raised in the markets, where every merchant’s worth was mea sured in gossip, valued in words. She knew how easily people could be destroyed by a rumor.
She didn’t have time for much talk as she and Will Caxton trudged round Westminster, formally identifying rioters, then trudged round London, filing depositions at the Guildhall with awkward officials who didn’t want to take them—“What can the servants of a draper mayor possibly understand about this?” Will Caxton said angrily as they came out. Then they went to St.
Thomas of Acre to arrange for the bodies to be buried and chantry priests to be hired to sing masses for the souls of the dead.
But Isabel spoke to a few friends along the way.
She didn’t tell many people that Princess Elizabeth thought the king had poisoned the queen so he could marry her.
She didn’t have to. It only took a few wagging tongues.
The innkeeper’s wife said, “I wouldn’t put it past him. He did away with her brothers, didn’t he? Poor little mites. That girl’s at his mercy. She must be terrified.”
Katherine Dore said, “It can’t be by chance that God took his son from him. I’m sure of that. Do you remember how they used to say he murdered Clarence? Drowned him in a barrel of drink in the Tower. And didn’t Anne once tell us she’d heard that he kidnapped Lady Oxford and stole her house and land?”
Isabel’s father came to Catte Street at once to pay his respects.
To Isabel’s touched surprise, he held her hand. He looked as distressed for her as if he loved her, which perhaps he did. He invited her to stay for as long as she wanted with him in Somerset. He kept searching her face for visible signs of her distress and seeming surprised by her brittle energy. When she told him of the rumor, he said wisely, “Ah . . . Never trust a man who calls his mother a whore. There’s always been bad talk about hi
m. He was at the Tower on the night poor King Henry died, wasn’t he? That’s what they say.”
And everyone she’d spoken to had a bright- eyed, busy look in their eyes as they rushed off about their daily business, keen to spread the word.
By the time the entire Mercers’ Company and their families packed into St. Thomas of Acre on Sunday—not for the funerals yet (the bodies were still being assembled, ready to be moved to London) and not even to see the Italians’ faces (the Lombards had found reasons to be in Southampton for a while, attending to their shipping contracts), just to watch Isabel and Will Caxton walk in, dignified in their black—all anyone was talking about was Isabel’s rumor about the royal poisoning.
19
Isabel didn't cry when they were loading up the coffins Hamo the innkeeper had ordered for her into the farm carts he’d found to take her cargo to London. She didn’t look at the charred wreckage next to the Red Pale while she was settling up with him; just kept her gaze on his big slab of a face. His eyes weren’t as bright and twinkling as usual. They were cloudy with sympathy, and he kept hushing himself and patting her shoulder.
He was a kind man. She probably wouldn’t see him again. She thought he might be expecting her to look sadder. She didn’t care.
Will Caxton had retreated to the Prattes’ house in Old Jewry as soon as the arrangements were made. He’d said he was tired, but she thought he didn’t want to let tears overwhelm him in front of her while she was so dry- eyed. Perhaps he was just shy about his emotions, although she thought he might still be angry with her. He would never forgive her now for letting him see that she’d once thought Alice and Anne and William less important than loving Dickon. She wished she could tell him she was free; she wished she could cry with him, but she couldn’t.
She didn’t cry when they laid out the coffins in the hall atCatte Street. She nearly laughed when she saw the cart men’s faces, hesitating over whether to open the lids. She could see from their expressions that the bodies inside were too terrible to linger over. She knew they weren’t all recognizable. Those of Goffredo and one of the weavers had not been found at all; there would be empty coffins. “Leave them open,” she said. She opened her purse, and took out more coins, and sent them to the kitchen for food.
It would be Lady Day tomorrow, she thought, lighting wax tapers at the head of each coffin, averting her eyes, going to and from the storeroom to fetch more as she ran out. Twenty- two coffins. Twenty- two lids. Twenty- two winding sheets. Lady Day: spring already in the chilly evening air. The quarter day; a new year. She didn’t want to finish that thought, to have to try and imagine new beginnings. She had so much still to do. She caught her breath. She hadn’t remembered to cancel her appointment at the Guildhall for the registration hearing; it had been for the day after Lady Day. She let the breath out, made a conscious effort to relax. The appointment didn’t matter anymore. It wouldn’t do to worry. She needed to keep a clear head for the job to hand now: the bodies. There were no other women in the house. She had to do it. But she couldn’t bring herself to start looking in the coffins.
All she could think of was the sheets. With so much linen already sent off to Westminster when the weavers came, would there be enough in the house?
She didn’t even cry when she heard the first knock on the door. Or when silkwomen she hardly knew began shuffling in,offering to help prepare the bodies for burial. Or when, before she knew it, the room was gentle with female voices humming spinning songs together; lifting buckets; rhythmically pulling apart strips of cloth for winding. There weren’t enough sheets; they’d make do. She hovered. Hummed along. It was the first time since it had happened that she’d been surrounded by so much womanly industry. She wondered why she felt so empty. Then she realized.
She had nothing left to do.
“You sit down there, love,” someone told her. She knew that rasping voice: Rose Trapp. “Go on. You look done in. I don’t want you looking in them coffins. And I’ve done my poor Joan. I’ll do your folk for you too if you like.”
Isabel nodded. She was so grateful, and so tired. But she couldn’t sit down.
Instead, she put her arm through Rose Trapp’s and led her out of the room, down the corridor, to the dark storeroom where, she now remembered, the weavers’ thirty cloths were stored. Rose Trapp didn’t ask questions. She just held the light, which lit her face from below, turning her cheery wrinkles into a witch’s mask of shadows. Isabel opened the chest. She picked up a careless armful of preciousness. It didn’t matter now if the cloths got crumpled. Not where they were going.
She took the light in her free hand. “You take the rest,” she said, and Rose Trapp scooped them up. The cloths glimmered between those swollen old fingers: spun sky and sea and moonbeams, the wild, tamed and civilized. Rose Trapp’s face softened in their reflection. Unexpectedly, she said, “Like liquid gold, aren’t they.”
They smiled at each other over the flickering light. They both understood the magic.
But then Rose Trapp did ask a question: “What are you going to do with them?” Her voice was abrupt, as if she was waking up from a spell and had come to her senses. Isabel saw the suspicion cross the old woman’s face.
“Use the cloths as winding sheets, of course,” Isabel said defiantly. “Bury them with them.”
Rose Trapp’s face went sullen.
Isabel said: “Weaving those cloths killed them. And it was my fault. I want to give them a good send- off . I have to. It’s a mark of respect . . . my apology.”
She could hear the pleading note in her own voice.
But Rose Trapp was still shaking her head. “What’s the point of that?” she said roughly. “It won’t help them, being dressed like kings and queens to meet their Maker. It won’t bring them back, will it now?”
Isabel sank onto a stool, with the silks rustling around her.
Rose knelt next to her, puffing a little as she squatted down. She put a comforting arm around Isabel, and her cloths shimmered away into a forgotten heap on the ground.
“You want to look out for the living, not the dead, Mistress Isabel,” Rose rasped, but there was kindness in her voice and on her wizened face. “That’s what your Mistress Claver would want, not some show to make you feel better. You’ve got four apprentices in this house—girls who are too scared to come out of their rooms, girls who don’t know what to do with themselves or what will become of them next. That’s who you should be thinking of.
You’ve got to make provision for them. And there are plenty of other people you could help. The Mercery is full of honest young women without a penny to their names. Women who can’t marry or set up a business because they’re too poor. Women who’ve lost their relatives and are facing old age alone. Me, for instance. You know that.”
She stopped and patted Isabel’s shoulder, apparently realizing it had begun to heave. “Now don’t go crying on that silk and leaving stains on it,” Rose Trapp added in a hoarse whisper. “You won’t get half the price for it . . . if it’s spoiled . . . when you sell.”
The old woman stood up, took the cloths, and began to fold them back into their chest. Isabel put her hands over her face and abandoned herself to her tears.
When they got back to the great hall, it was Rose who broke through the buzzing of voices. She’d brought one of the cloths with her.
“Girls,” she croaked. “We’re going to want you back on Monday. After the funerals. We’re going to sell these silk cloths at Mistress Claver’s stalls. We’re going to need help.”
Isabel nodded obediently, as unsurprised as if she’d agreed this with Rose beforehand. She’d muffled her tears, but she was so full of grief that she could only be dimly aware of the awe that was stealing into the room: the whispers, the lover’s touches as the women drew close to the cloth in the colors of the summer about to come that had been Joan Woulbarowe’s last work.
When they were finished, when every corpse had been washed and sprinkled with a mixture of rue and
rosemary and rose petals, and every still form covered in linen, even their poor blackened faces, the women left as quietly as they’d come. They touched her as they went: on the arm, on the shoulder. Rose Trapp shut the last cloth back in its chest. Then she sat with Isabel and held her while she wept, while the candles and the logs burned down, until there was silence.
Isabel could hear ragged breathing. It was nearly dawn. The last candle was guttering. For a moment it seemed to her that she was fifteen again, sitting in this hall over another corpse, her husband’s, watching a younger Alice Claver’s face twitch with a mother’s grief. Alice was muttering to herself about Thomas when he was little. How he’d howled with laughter when she’d swung him round in her arms. How she should have made more time. But it was already too late for those regrets.
Isabel got up from her stool. It was Rose Trapp snoring in the corner this time.
She could still make out her mother- in- law’s familiar bulk, in its coffin, underneath the casing of cloth.
“Good- bye,” she whispered, a little experimentally, trying to 4 believe men would come in an hour and nail the lid down over Alice’s stillness—over her face—and take the box away. Trying to imagine the quiet rush of panic she’d suppress when that happened. Or what the house would be like without Alice’s gruff voice and thump of a walk. To night.
She couldn’t, any more than she could touch or kiss any of the scented human- sized cocoons on the floor, lost hopes, about to be buried. She felt the beginning of something terrible inside her. But she pinched her fingers hard into her eyes. There was no time now.
The coffins went into the darkness first, a long line of them, wobbling into the church above the thin legs of apprentices. Other boys’ faces flickered behind their torches and tapers.
She went next. Then Will Caxton, with the marks of weeping on his face. Then Rose Trapp.
She thought the only other mourners might be the printers.
But others came out of the crowds and joined her shuffle to thealtar. Her father. Jane. ThomasLynom. Robert Lynom. A few of the silkwomen, though many more hung respectfully back, too shy to be sure whether they counted as bereaved.
Figures in Silk Page 38