The king called a meeting at the hall of the Knights of St. John at Clerkenwell the next day at noon to address Mayor Stokker and the citizens of London.
The room was packed, and buzzing. There’d never been an occasion like this. There was only one thing King Richard could be going to talk about—his marriage plans.
Jane and Isabel and Robert Lynom squeezed between the liverymen in their furred robes of office and wives in their finest silks. There were apothecaries and armorers and bakers and barbers and basket-makers and blacksmiths and brasiers and brewers and butchers and carpenters and chandlers and cordwainers and curriers and cutlers and dentists and dyers and farriers and fishmongers and girdlers and goldsmiths and loriners and masons and mercers and needlemakers and patternmakers and plasterers and plumbers and poulters and saddlers and salters and skinners and surgeons and upholders and vintners and weavers and wheelwrights and woolmen. There were a few silkwomen too, around the edges of the room: the ones with fathers or husbands whose status guaranteed them entry to this hall; or the few, like Isabel, who were registered as femmes soles, responsible for their debts. They’d tell the others what happened later.
When Dickon walked in, almost alone, with an entourage of three men bobbing anxiously behind, the crowd bowed and bobbed and fell silent.
You couldn’t fault his bravery. He was pale, so pale. His lips were tight. But he was composed.
He came straight to the point. “Since the death of my beloved wife, Anne, a week ago,” he said clearly, “you, the worshipful citizens of London, have naturally been concerned by an ugly rumor.
That I had already chosen as my next wife Elizabeth, the daughter of my brother Edward. And that I was hastening the death of the Queen of England to bring this new marriage about.”
There was a rush of indrawn breath. A note of reluctant admiration in the whispering. Who’d have expected the king to talk so straight?
“I’m here to tell you—that rumor is false,” Dickon went on.
Hubbub. He didn’t mind. He knew how to talk to a crowd. He nodded and waited out the noise. Then he gestured for quiet with downturned hands.
“I am not—have never been—could never be—glad of my wife’s death,” the king said. He crossed himself.
Most of the audience crossed themselves too. The man in black velvet before them was so pale, so clearly in grief.
“And”—he paused, to be sure there was complete silence—“I have never—intended—to marry—my niece.”
Liar, Isabel thought savagely. But she was unsettled to hear more than a few satisfied grunts from around her.
“He’s got guts, that’s for sure,” a man in the crowd said behind her as the merchants began pushing for the door. “But I still say he killed her.”
Isabel kept quiet. She was hugging one last memory of Dickon to herself.
She’d felt numb at the sight of him, or she’d thought she had.
No shock, no pain; just a coldness in her heart. She told herself: he’s a stranger to me; always has been. Still, she hadn’t been able to stop herself catching his eye as he looked around the hall before leaving. She’d held his gaze until he’d turned away. But she’d seen the acknowledgment of defeat in his face. He’d lost. He’d lied, and he knew she knew. That was enough. She wanted to get away.
“Tomorrow,” she said, turning to Jane. “Let’s leave London tomorrow.”
She was packing. She was wondering at the foggy emptiness inside her. It took her a while even to notice the scuffle at the door. Then Will Caxton burst into her room. She realized he’d just torn past Rose Trapp, ignoring her agonized cry of, “Here, you can’t just burst in! On a lady! She’s not even dressed proper!”
She looked down in mild surprise—it was true, she was only in her kirtle; she’d been going to change gowns. Will was gulping in air as if he’d ridden at a gallop, or run, all the way from the Red Pale. He rushed straight to Isabel’s side and began shaking her shoulders. He was indescribably dirty. There was earth and ash caked into his nails and eyes and clothes. His last few sandy hairs were rumpled up. His caved- in face was red and sweaty. There was a wild gleam in his eye.
“Will!” she exclaimed, dropping the linen she’d been packing into her trunk. She didn’t understand. If he was too excited even to notice the impropriety of his behavior, he couldn’t have come to make his peace with her.
“I came myself . . . ,” he panted, “fetch you . . . important . . .
take you back . . . hurry now.”
She stared.
His impatience was making him stutter. “Goffredo, they’ve found Goffredo,” he finally got out. She was rushing into her gown even before he said: “A-a- a-alive.”
But Goffredo was only just alive. They’d found him that morning in the collapsed cellar of the silk house. The ruins had shifted overnight; the cellar roof had caved in, leaving an open pit. When the print workers looked down to see if there was anything they could salvage, they saw feet in the pit. A beam had fallen over Goffredo’s legs.
He was unconscious. Only his hands were burned, but his legs were smashed and he’d been down there for more than a week. They put him on a plank and carried him to the tavern.
Hamo called in a surgeon and a priest.
The surgeon had cut away his clothes and washed him and splinted his legs by the time Isabel and Will half- fell off their horse and dashed inside. The priest was muttering the last rites over a knobbly mound in white.
Hamo, standing in a corner, watching, looked somber when he saw Will and Isabel. “The surgeon’s coming back with a poultice,” he muttered. “But . . .” He shook his head.
The terrible burning hope in Will’s eyes flickered. Goffredo was his last friend from the old days. He let air slowly out of his lungs, with a piteous noise he didn’t seem aware of.
He knelt next to the priest. “Thirty years I’ve known you,”
Isabel could hear Will mutter; a prayer as fervent as any priest’s Latin. “Thirty years.” There were tears on his cheeks.
Isabel knelt next to him. They were in Dickon’s room, she noticed, without minding.
She leaned forward and looked into Goffredo’s gashed, bruised mash of a face. There was nowhere she could safely touch that bloody mask. She started muttering her own prayers, too, but she didn’t think he’d survive the night. She was saying good- bye.
“ You should go,” Hamo said quietly. “Your people are waiting. There’s nothing to hope for here.”
She nodded.
Will looked up from beside the bed. Blindly, he nodded too.
He’d thought this rescue would turn out well, but it wasn’t going to. She thought: He doesn’t want me here, watching Goffredo die.
“He’ll let you know,” Hamo said, “when . . .”
His face said: When there’s a burial to come back for.
She nodded. She couldn’t speak.
She knelt by Goffredo once more. She wouldn’t have another chance. “I used to think this room was the color of happiness,”
she whispered, wishing she could at least touch his oozing hands.
“But it was the wrong kind of happiness. I wish I’d chosen yours.”
21
The merciful fog came down over Isabel again at Sutton. London and the past seemed so far away that Isabel’s grief for her lost friends could be contained within a comforting timetable of moments of wistfulness, unfocused eyes in a church candle flame, the comfort in the chantry priest’s mumble of prayers. That would do, for now. She knew the real pain was there, waiting until she was ready.
It was important to do the right things, in the right order. She wrote to the princess, a short letter explaining there’d been a tragedy in her family and that she would be returning to London later in the year to sell up. She’d return the princess’s goods—three emeralds and a piece of green cloth of gold—as soon as she wound up her affairs. But she couldn’t complete the commission, or go on sewing for her.
She
didn’t think of Dickon. Her heart was empty.
She didn’t hear from Will Caxton. There was no reply to the two letters she wrote, asking for news of his new house and of Goffredo. In this new, numb, passive mood, she accepted the loss of the printer with the same vague sadness she felt about everything else. He’s buried Goffredo and not wanted to ask me, she realized. He can’t make his peace with me now they’re all gone.
What’s done is done. Perhaps he was right to think I didn’t value my real friends enough while I still had them.
She thought she was numb because she was so idle, caught between worlds.
She knew she was idle because, as spring turned into summer, Jane took to bringing Isabel with her on her rounds of her house hold, and Jane was always busy now. Jane spent her days running the brewing of beer in the brew house and the baking of bread in the bake house and the production of butter and cheese and eggs in the dairy. She supervised the home farm and the spinning of wool from the sheep and the weaving of woolens and the making of clothes. She checked on the apples and pears and quinces in the orchard, and the vines growing against the side of the house. She watched her bees gather nectar from a flower garden filled with marguerites and early roses and lavender bushes just coming into bloom. She tended her herbs, which she used both for medicine and cooking, overseeing the planting of vegetable and salad shoots grown from seed earlier in the year. She watched the baby melons fattening.
Jane chose the meals, did the marketing, and coordinated her underlings. She charmed the gardeners and laborers and dairy-maids and brewers and bakers and cooks and spit boys and servants whose work she oversaw into doing their best. She settled disputes. She hired and fired. She was a businesswoman on a surprisingly impressive scale. When Thomas was away, she was even supposed to deal with legal disputes and draw up wills.
“How did you learn all this?” Isabel asked. Jane had never before done anything more demanding than play the lute and shuffle her pack of cards and look beautiful. The new, bustling, aproned, unflappable, pink- cheeked Jane with dozens of keys at her belt laughed, remembering. “MistressLynom, of course,” she said briskly. “She came from Dorset to teach me. She was brought up there; she’s a gentleman’s daughter. She’s a terror. Still, it isn’t so hard. I enjoy it.”
“But you were always the lazy one.”
“This is nothing,” Jane said, and her cheeks went pinker still.
“It’s quiet now. You should see what it’s like in autumn. I couldn’t believe how busy we were then, when we were killing pigs and salting down meat and curing bacon and smoking out the bees for the honey and making candles and boiling up berries for the jam—as well as all this.”
She leaned forward. Put her hand, rougher now, on Isabel’s arm. Smiled, as though she wanted to draw a confidence out of her sister. “Perhaps, once you’ve sold up, you’ll be doing all this too . . . see for yourself . . . I know Robert’s ready to settle down . . .”
Jane was dropping hints almost every day about Robert, who, in London, was organizing the sale of Isabel’s inheritance. But Isabel only blinked. She couldn’t think of Robert. Not yet.
Avoiding a direct reply about Robert, Isabel said: “But you used to spend your days lolling round on silk cushions, and going hawking . . . Don’t you miss all that?”
Jane shook her head. “Oh no,” she said firmly. “I just didn’t know then how bored I was.”
On the hot august day when Robert finally came to collect her to ride to London and sign the documents selling Alice’s effects to the various buyers he’d found, he brought the first news Isabel had had in months of Dickon.
“You won’t have heard it here, but London’s full of the talk.
They say Henry Tudor’s invaded again; they say his army’s marching on the king’s garrison at Nottingham.”
Isabel couldn’t really take in the idea of armies. Nottingham was so far away. Her mind was on matters closer at hand. She’d tried not to think of this day coming for so long; she’d dreaded the trip to London and the memories it would awaken. But now Robert was actually here, and it was beginning, she found her worries receding. He was so matter- of- fact. He was good- looking, too.
She’d forgotten how elegantly chiseled his features were, under that look of calm amusement; she hadn’t remembered his long, blond ease of movement or his kindness clearly enough.
Jane crossed herself at his news, then clucked at her daughter.
Nottingham was far away from her mind, too; too remote for everyone. Julyan laughed, and pulled at Robert’s hair. Robert cooed at her, catching Isabel’s eye and inviting her to laugh too. There was affection in the look he flashed at his sister- in- law.
Robert was saying something about business, trying to catch Isabel’s eye again. She looked up and smiled at him; he was so kind; she should be as courteous back.
“. . . and I’ve had a letter from Lady Darcey; she says you still have some materials here that you’ve promised to return to the princess,” he said. “She says the princess would like you to deliver them in person on your return. If you like, we could do that on this trip?”
Isabel’s heart sank. But she knew she should. “Of course,” she said, trying to sound warm.
Jane beamed. “Yes, do sort everything out,” she said happily.
“It’s time . . .”
Isabel could predict exactly how the London trip would end.
That was the beauty of the Lynoms: you knew where you stood with them. Robert would reassure her through the painful business of signing. The money would be counted out. Then, once he was sure Isabel knew where she stood in the world, and what her choices were, he would offer her his hand in marriage. Jane had already mentioned the vacant manor near her home at Sutton that Robert might be interested in buying, once he was settled. So Isabel even knew where she’d be living. All she needed to do was let her decorous future unfold.
Most people would consider it a happy ending to make a fortune, marry well, enter the gentry, and live happily ever after.
But Isabel couldn’t quite restrain a sigh.
She took the lead when they got to Westminster. She didn’t want to go through her old streets. Robert was too sensitive to ask why she was taking this unfamiliar route. He knew they’d find a tavern somewhere along this road, too, where he could wait.
Sensing aimlessness, the horses eventually took matters into their own hands and plunged their heads into the first trough they saw. “Let’s stop,” Robert said. There was a tavern opposite.
“That’ll do for us. I’ll order some food while I wait for you.”
It was a sprawl of a building, with overhanging solars and big stables stretching back off the courtyard. Isabel thought she remembered it. She was almost sure she recognized the beefy innkeeper, who was up a ladder with a paintbrush, touching up the sign. The boy with him was holding a bucket of blue paint.
She didn’t understand what they were doing. Her stomach was too full of butterflies at the prospect of seeing the princess again. She didn’t want to think that the princess would know it was Isabel who’d betrayed her secret fear about the king poisoning the queen; she didn’t want Elizabeth to hate her.
Robert understood the repainting straight away. He stepped forward, took off his hat, and asked the innkeeper: “Blue?”
It was only when all other eyes were raised to the sign that hers followed. The innkeeper had painted roughly over the silhouette of a white boar that his sign had shown until an hour before—King Richard’s badge—with blue paint that was still glistening and wet. There were still traces of white showing through the new blue boar’s body. The innkeeper had a splodge of blue paint on his nose.
The innkeeper scratched his head; he had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “The Earl of Oxford’s badge,” he mumbled.
The Earl of Oxford: Henry Tudor’s man. Robert laughed.
“You’ve gone over to the House of Lancaster, then,” he said, and waited.
The man
wriggled uneasily on his ladder. But Robert went on looking inquiring. Finally, as if sensing this stranger wouldn’t just go away, but didn’t represent a threat, the innkeeper laughed too, and began getting down, leaving the sign unfinished. “Look, I know I can’t draw,” he said, picking up his ladder. “I’m all thumbs with a paintbrush. This was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment.”
There were no bells ringing, Isabel thought numbly. If this innkeeper wanted to paint over the traces of his earlier loyalty to King Richard and the House of York in such a hurry, with his own clumsy hands, he must have heard something. But if there was news, why weren’t there any bells? Then her head cleared. The messenger would have stopped here, maybe changed horses.
The innkeeper would be the first to know.
Robert cut through her slow thoughts. Still sounding no more than cheerfully interested, he said to the innkeeper: “So there’s been a battle . . .”
“Market Bosworth,” the man answered, readily enough. “Yesterday. A rout. He’s dead. They cut him down. Stripped him naked. Carried his corpse into town on a donkey.”
There was no need to ask who the innkeeper was talking about.
The man spat, but not angrily; just in quiet, all- purpose disgust, his stock- in- trade.
“God’s punishment,” he added reflectively. “It was only a matter of time.”
The bells had started pealing by the time Isabel was shown into the princess’s parlor: a cascade of joy; a new tomorrow.
Elizabeth was standing at the window, listening to the bells.
She was perfectly still.
Isabel had stood outside for several minutes, relieved to be alone but for the sentries’ frightened eyes while the quiet sadness of things lost forever deepened in her. She’d thought she might see a reflection of that softness in Elizabeth. She’d been almost glad they would be together in this moment, to share their loss.
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