Figures in Silk

by Vanora Bennett

  But when Elizabeth did turn round, her green eyes were glittering.

  She didn’t mention the bells. She just said: “Come in, come in,” without surprise, and sat down on the cushions of the window seat, patting the place next to her with something close to warmth. “I’ve been hoping you’d come back. I was sad to hear of your loss.”

  Isabel bowed acknowledgment. But she couldn’t sit. The young woman in front of her seemed a stranger. Isabel couldn’t imagine what they would talk about.

  Awkwardly, Isabel nodded her head at the window, and said:“I’m sorry for your grief now.” The words brought the beginning of shame. Even more awkwardly, she reached down for her big sewing bag and fumbled out the princess’s valuables. They were lying on top of Joan Woulbarowe’s silk cloth, which nearly filled the bag. With her eyes still down, Isabel held out the green cloth and the little purse with the emeralds.

  But no one took them.

  When Isabel finally looked up, she saw the princess smiling at her, very calmly, and shaking her head. Her hands were folded in her lap.

  “No, you keep them,” Elizabeth said. “As a token of my gratitude. You’ve served me well.” She smiled more broadly. “Better than you know, perhaps,” she added. “Are you really selling up and leaving London?”

  Isabel nodded. She went on holding the cloth and purse out, as if someone might still relieve her of them. She said, as if wishing her safe future into existence, “I’m going to marry; live in Hertfordshire; at Sutton on Derwent.”

  The princess nodded once or twice.

  “Well,” she said, after a while. “It’s a pity. I’d hoped you might make my wedding gown.”

  The bells rang louder.

  “Because it seems . . . ,” the princess added quietly, “from those bells, that Henry’s won.”

  She smiled again, a curved, private, self- satisfied cat- smile.

  “Or that I have,” she added, and she tinkled with laughter.

  Isabel stared. Demurely, the princess explained. “Henry Tudor pledged last Christmas Day, in front of his court, to marry me as soon as he’d defeated my uncle. He’s been my betrothed, in the eyes of God, ever since.”

  Isabel stuttered: “Christmas?”

  She was counting back. Yes; it was only after Christmas that the princess had told her she was afraid the king was poisoning his wife.

  She stared at Elizabeth, too astounded to speak. Was this why?

  Elizabeth’s green eyes glittered again. Gently, she nodded.

  “Of course, I had to stop my uncle Gloucester trying to marry me in the meantime,” she added. “The match my mother wanted . . .”

  “But,” Isabel said. She was imagining Dickon’s body, bloodied and stripped naked, hanging over the back of a donkey. She was remembering his velvet voice saying, long ago, “We all end up equal in the bottom of a bag.” The pity of it overwhelmed her.

  There was no point in asking directly whether the princess had just made up the story of the poisoning. Isabel could imagine the elegant shrug, the shoulders turning away.

  “But why?” she stammered instead. “When you could have been his queen . . . when he loved you?”

  Elizabeth didn’t flicker at the word love. Lightly, far too lightly, she said, “Oh, he wanted me all right. But why would I want a husband who’d declared me a bastard? I’d never have escaped that stigma, even if he’d let me wear a crown.”

  She laughed.

  “Henry, now—Henry’s different. Henry needs me. I never stopped being a royal princess in his eyes: he sees me as the senior surviving member of the House of York. And he’s not so royal himself—he’s just the last man left standing with a drop of Lancastrian blood in his veins. He’ll be grateful to have me.” She looked dreamily up at Isabel: “Yes, it was well worth taking the risk of waiting to be the Tudor queen.”

  She stood up. As if surprised that Isabel was still holding out the piece of gold cloth and the bag of emeralds, and not rushing to pack them back into her bag, the princess made a pretty shooing motion with her hands. “So take your gift; go on,” she said, a little impatiently. “I’m grateful to you.”

  She began walking toward the door. Isabel knew she was being dismissed. She wanted to go. She had no place in this palace.

  She’d never be enough of a strategist to play these games. It had taken her a long while to understand.

  “What about your brothers?” Isabel asked breathlessly, trot-4 ting after the princess. “You said they were alive. You said you knew where they were . . .”

  “Oh, they’re safe enough,” Elizabeth said. She opened the door. “Henry will never find them. It’s as well for them that he won’t; he’d kill them if he knew where to look.” In the uncertain sunshine, her eyes were glittering harder than diamonds. “But I’m the firstborn child of a king. It’s my destiny to be Queen of England.”

  The door shut. The guards moved into place as if they’d heard nothing. Feeling stunned, Isabel allowed herself to be led off down the corridor. It was only when she reached the next door that she realized her hands were still stiffly holding out the piece of cloth of gold and the bag of emeralds the queen- to- be had given her: her reward, apparently, for the job she’d never realized she was doing.

  Blankly, she looked at them, then, shaking herself back into the here and now, signaled to the guards to wait, put down the work-basket on her arm, and folded the treasures carefully away.

  LOVE

  22

  It was another bright August day when Isabel came back to Westminster. She tried not to look at the burned- out space where a house had once stood beside the tavern; but she couldn’t help noticing that most of the gaunt, charred timbers were already peacefully overgrown. All you could really see, so late in the summer, were the drifts of tangleweed and cow parsley and bright meadow flowers, nodding in the breeze. She could hear the buzzing of bees. She pushed open Will Caxton’s gate.

  He was inside, in a knot of men wearing smudged aprons, all staring at one of his machines and scratching their heads as they talked. He had his stooped back to her. There were other men in the interior shadow beyond, sitting on stools, clicking tiny metal blocks of type. She liked the busyness of it, the quiet hum. He hadn’t heard her.

  She stepped forward.

  He looked up. His whitish eyebrows rose. Excusing himself from his men, he walked quickly toward her. He was smiling, but she could see his eyes were wary.

  “It’s going well, then,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “You built the new house quickly.”

  He nodded again.

  “I’ve sold up,” she said. “My business was worth quite a lot of money; the houses too.”

  He waited.

  “But it won’t be the House of Claver anymore. So I’ve come to talk to you about setting up a memorial for Alice and Anne.

  Something people will be happy to remember them by.” She clasped Will Caxton’s dry hand. “You were right, Will. They were the most important people in my life.”

  He only nodded again, but she could see his shoulders relax

  He sighed. Then, impulsively, he put a shy arm around her.

  “You look . . . better. Calm,” he said, and she could see the old friendly light in his eye. It was time for the two of them to make peace. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Well, Robert Lynom has asked me to marry him,” she said.

  His eyes moved, reflecting the blue sky drifting by behind her.

  “He wants to settle down near Jane and Thomas, in Hertfordshire. It’s a good life. Jane’s happy being a country gentlewoman.

  My father will be pleased.”

  Will said, still squinting at the sky: “Robert’s a good man.”

  Then he said: “But won’t you miss the silk?”

  And then: “Goffredo does.”

  Goffredo was round the back of the house. He was sitting on a bench under an apple tree, with a stick propped up next to him, enjoying the sun.
He was watching the serving boy putting down the bread at the table in front of him, and humming.

  Isabel knew the chirpy tune and the bittersweet Venetian words. The weavers had danced to that song, sometimes.

  Damn the loot!

  I am right here, in safety,4 and almost can’t believe I am.

  And if I were not me?

  And if I had been killed in battle?

  And if I were my ghost?

  That would be just great.

  No, damn, ghosts don’t eat.

  She crept up behind him and put her hands round his eyes. She sang the last line, very quietly, into his ear: “No, càncaro, spiriti no manga. “

  Goffredo always had smelled like this: of spices and sandalwood. He didn’t wriggle in panic at having his eyes covered up, as Will Caxton might have. He just turned his head, gently but firmly, until his eyes were free of her hands and he was looking up at her. “I knew it,” he breathed, and she saw his powerful dark face—miraculously restored after the fire—was already creasing into a laugh. “Isabel.”

  “ Well, I don't have to say yet,” she said, munching on a bit of cheese. “It’s a big decision. I’ve been a widow for years. I don’t need to worry about money. I can take my time.”

  Will began cutting up an apple. Goffredo was flicking his kerchief at the midges. She hadn’t felt as lighthearted for months as she did now, with her Italian friend here. He’d laughed for sheer joy just before, when she’d said she’d sent Joan Woulbarowe’s cloth as a gift to the princess, with a request that she use it in her wedding wardrobe if she liked it. “Think how thrilled Joan would have been,” he’d chortled, without a hint of sentimentality.

  “Weaver to the Queen of England.” Now he was humming again.

  “What about you?” she asked him.

  Goffredo swept his arms apart in the ironic full- body shrug she remembered so well. He smiled, but he was shaking his head at the same time.

  “I’m not sure,” he said ruefully, “but I should be off . I’m well again. There’s nothing for me in London anymore.”

  No one in London knew Goffredo was here. He didn’t want the Conterini to find him. Will had kept quiet, and kept him safe.

  But Goffredo wanted to get back to work. “I sit under my tree every day, and look at our friend here,” he said, stroking Will’s shoulder so fondly it made Will wriggle with embarrassment, “as happy as a flea with his machines and his ideas, and I envy him. I wasn’t made for idleness.”

  He had ideas, of course. Goffredo always had ideas. And he always waved his arms like this when he got so excited about them that his big black eyebrows started dancing.

  Maybe he’d just go home to Venice. But there’d be huge fines to pay if he came back without his teams and without the Venetian government’s cut from his English venture.

  So, maybe Spain. The glorious old Moorish silk production there had been in decline since the Castilian queen started turning all of Spain Catholic. The Christians and Moriscos and conversos who’d taken over the looms in Valencia and Barcelona only knew how to make cheap haberdashery, low- quality stuff mixed with second- choice silk and flax and cotton. Italians were moving in to compete. There were Tuscans and Ligurians in Barcelona.

  There was a guild of Italian velvet weavers in Valencia.

  Or perhaps the Orient. Goffredo’s father had been one of the Venetian merchants who used to travel the Black Sea to buy Persian silk in Tana and Trebizond and Constantinople. That market had been closed off in Goffredo’s lifetime by the Turkish conquest of Byzantium. But the silks had gone on coming west, by caravan, from Persia to Syria, bypassing the Turks. The markets of Damascus and Aleppo were booming. The profits were easy. Goffredo could make himself understood in Persian.

  “Just think,” Goffredo breathed, “I could be in Tripoli, with the sun on my back, loading up a cargo of silks lovelier than anything in Christendom . . . doing what God intended.”

  His handsome eyes were glowing. Listening to him, Isabel could almost smell salt on the wind; almost hear the wood of the galleys creaking, the ropes flapping; almost see the oiled, weathered skin of the sailors.

  “Silks from the Caspian,” she breathed in reply. “Ghilan, Shiraz, Azerbaijan.”

  Even saying those words made her feel alive again, gave her the sense of inspiration she remembered from the old days.

  She went on, more excitedly: “You know the ports, the people, the markets over there as well as here. You know both ends of the silk trade. Who else knows everything you do?”

  She stopped. She could feel a new idea take shape. “Goffredo,” she said, feeling dizzy with it. “You’d know how to import silk directly, from the East to London . . .

  without needing to go through the authorities in Venice . . . wouldn’t you?”

  He was nodding. He was caught up in her excitement. His eyes were glowing.

  She caught her breath; added: “You could do it: cut out the middleman. Cut out Italy. How Alice would love that. All you’d need would be some capital.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Will Caxton’s head move. But she paid no attention. “Just think of the profits,” she murmured, looking into Goffredo’s eyes, feeling the corners of her mouth lift. “If it worked.”

  Goffredo was smiling back, and although his lips were saying,“Madness, sheer madness,” there was delight in his eyes and he was nodding his head.

  As she watched him, a memory came unbidden to Isabel’s mind. A memory of Alice Claver, lit up by a dusty sunbeam in a silkroom strewn with the glories of the East, teaching her the names of threads from Persia and Syria. Rolling the names joyfully over her tongue— ardassa, rasbar, castrovana, safetina—and nodding her big head as she conjured each treasure into words.

  Suddenly Isabel knew what Alice would have wanted for her. It was all simpler than she would have believed possible, she realized, feeling as gloriously illuminated as if she was bathing in that same ray of sunlight. She knew what she wanted for herself, too.

  There was only one possible right use for the money she’d made from Alice Claver’s business. It had to go back into the silk trade. So did she; and she had to go in again with Goffredo. Setting up a new trade would be risky, and maybe dangerous. She didn’t know what the East was like; she’d never traveled farther than Bruges. But she could trust her own wits, and Goffredo’s.

  They were two of a kind. She knew his memories, just as he knew hers. She knew how his mind worked. And he knew how to be happy. She’d always want to be sharing adventures with this man, enjoying the assurance of his movements and the ready way his powerful features broke up into a mischievous laugh under a great sweep of black eyebrow; laughing along with him.

  She put her hand on Goffredo’s. She wouldn’t want a life in which his hands—lean, elegant, and capable, even now their backs bore the pale marks of the fire—weren’t within reach.

  Goffredo looked at her fingers for a moment, then cupped them with his scarred second hand. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. He waited, looking brightly at her, half laughing, perhaps wondering if she’d push him away.

  But Isabel was too lost in wonder at the tingle of skin brushing against skin to take away her hand. She stayed where she was, breathing in spices and sandalwood: the smell of adventure; the smell of happiness.

  A quiet came on them both. But he was beginning to grin again even before Isabel spoke, as if he’d already guessed that the next thing she’d say would be: “Take me too.”

  I NSPI R AT ION

  I started this book with the idea of writing about Elizabeth, the sister of the princes in the tower and the niece of Richard III.

  Richard III is widely believed to have killed the princes, and he certainly declared them and Elizabeth herself illegitimate in the final act of the Wars of the Roses. Yet Elizabeth wanted to marry her uncle. A letter from her expressing this wish and looking forward to the death of Richard’s wife survived until the seventeenth century. I was fascinat
ed as to why she would be so keen to marry an uncle she believed to have murdered her brothers. The violent, scheming Plantagenets were always what modern analysts might call emotionally dysfunctional; but even for a Plantagenet, this seemed unusually cold- blooded. Elizabeth’s eventual choice of the Tudor Henry VII as a husband, instead of Richard, was well made. When Henry’s army beat Richard III’s army at the Battle of Bosworth, she was on the way to becoming the first Tudor queen of England. She also became the mother of Henry VIII.

  Writing about silk was not part of this original plan. But then, in a journal of studies of Richard III, I happened upon an article called “Two Dozen and More Silkwomen of Fifteenth- Century London”—and was instantly hooked.

  “Medieval London was the centre of the English silkwomen’s trade,” read the article by Anne F. Sutton, present- day historian of the Mercers’ Company.

  Young girls came from all over England to be ‘maydens in Chepeside and Soper Lane that be prentees [apprentices] . . . prentees which mercer wifes have.’ The Mercery stretched east along Cheapside from St Mary le Bow to opposite the frontage of the present Mercers Hall and back as far as the east- west line of St Pancras Lane; it included and was divided by Soper Lane (Shop keep ers’ Lane) now under Queen Street. It was a mass of small shops, selling stations and covered markets called selds, of which one of the best known was the Crown Seld, owned by the Mercers’ Company from 1411. There a mercer maiden might sit sewing in a window and inspire a poet soon after the accession of Edward IV: Erly in a sommeristide Y saw in London, as y wente, A gentilwoman of chepe- side Working on a vestiment.

  She sette xij letters on a Rowe, And said, if that y myght it understond, Thorough the grace of god, ye scule it knowe, This letters xij schall save mery Englond . . .

  The twelve letters included three Rs for the three Richards who had saved England: Richard of York, Richard of Salisbury and Richard of Warwick, and another ‘R for the Rose that is frische and wol nat fade.’ This was one of several poems celebrating the Yorkist victory that circulated in London in the 1460s.