Figures in Silk (12 page)

Right here. If this was a hundred years ago, you’d have seen dozens of people here. Working, praying, eating, raising children.

Our blood. And none of them with the least idea they were all about to be wiped out. God rest their souls.”

It was lucky for her, she’d been told, that people today still lived with those ghosts and that the gravestones in the churchyards danced with skeletons; that everyone still reminisced over the warmer, richer, safer days when the land was full of fields and the fields were full of people. It was because the world had shrunk into this modern twilight of specters and memories—and later, within her own memory, because the war had also begun taking its toll on the young men of Derby—that so many girls were encouraged to train in the guilds. Looking back, Alice knew that getting a trade had saved her. Her parents, stubbornly struggling to live in Normandy while their daughter was raised at home, went missing during the fall of France. There was no way of knowing whether they’d become part of the army of vagrants that straggled back to England or begged in the streets of Calais, or survived, for a while, in the forests. But by then, in her twenties, she’d established herself as a Londoner. Her parents were shadowy half- memories. Her real family had become the Large establishment at Catte Street: the other apprentices her brothers and sisters, as proud as Alice to be part of one of the best businesses in the Mercery. If she hadn’t been a trained silkwoman, if she hadn’t married Richard Claver out of the Large house hold and worked with him on making their business even bigger than Robert Large’s, she’d have been lost too.

No, I’ve never been afraid of hard work, and it’s made me who I am, she thought complacently, letting her mind dwell with irritation on the lounging, indolent, grinning Shore girl, who’d have been lost if she’d ever been called on to do an honest day’s labor.

Who’d never had to do such a thing, like so many children of the London rich. They were all the same: spoiled and idle, thought they were too good for it . . .

Alice Claver pulled herself up, feeling those certainties fade as she tried not to think of Thomas. She looked at the smaller, browner sister of that girl, with her face carefully wiped clean of expression; at the scars of work on those younger hands. A girl who hadn’t been brought up to fear the emptiness of birdsong. A girl who’d grown up with expectations of wealth and ease. A girl who’d lost all that and yet taken on Alice Claver’s hard apprenticeship without complaining.

“You’ve learned all you need to know from the markets,” Alice Claver said, feeling her lower jaw clamped to her head so that it was hard for the words to come out.

Isabel looked carefully up.

“You can start with Anne tomorrow. It’s time for you to learn to make manufactured goods. Do the skilled work.”

Isabel looked down again. But Alice Claver had seen the light gleam in her eyes.

“You’ll meet my Venetian supplier this week. Goffredo D’Amico. It’s an important relationship,” she went on. “He and another old friend of mine are staying with the Prattes. They’ll eat here. I’d like you to join us . . .”

Alice could see Isabel realize there was more to come. The girl looked up, trying to puzzle out what she’d be asked.

“I wanted to get Thomas’s obit behind us before starting work with D’Amico,” Alice Claver said. “But there’s one thing I’ve already talked over with him. I’ve arranged a loan.”

She looked almost beseechingly at Isabel. She didn’t want the girl to take this as some sort of apology. “For five hundred pounds.

The sum your dower would have been.”

Isabel’s eyebrows were beginning to rise.

“It’s time for us both to take stock.” Alice Claver hurried over the words. She didn’t want to mention Thomas’s name. Thomas would have sorted himself out if God hadn’t taken him back. She knew that Isabel knew that. “There’s no room for shirkers in my house. I’ll need someone who can become a partner, once they’re trained. So I want you to know now that you’re provided for. I’m going to make over the five hundred pounds to you as a dower. If you want to go off to your family, get married, you’re free to.

You’ve got the money. I can dissolve our contract. But you can still”—and now she was looking down at her own rough hands—“choose to stay.”

There was a long silence. Alice Claver plaited her fingers, waiting.

“And work,” she added gruffly. “Hard.”

When she did dare raise her eyes, there were no embarrassing transports of joy on the little heart- shaped face in front of her. Isabel was looking up at her, very seriously, with her eyes slightly narrowed. It was the look Alice Claver put on her own face when she was considering an offer. With a shock of what she thought might be gratitude, Alice Claver realized Isabel must have learned that look from her.

She was almost surprised to see Isabel’s lips form the words:“I would like to stay.”

Alice Claver felt the wide grin she reserved for the Prattes and her other old friends break out on her face; she was suddenly strangely short of breath. I’ve gotten used to having her around, she told herself. That must be why. Somewhere in the confused back- clap that followed, the bustle of sitting down and pouring out two cups and starting to describe tomorrow’s work in something much closer to an everyday voice, then the move to the silk storeroom, Alice Claver felt the beginning of the same comfort she’d drawn from making friends, back in those first days at Catte Street, with Anne and William and the others; the smoothing out of differences, mistakes, flaws in the weave; the tying of bonds that might be strong enough to take the place of family.

Isabel could see the Alive Claver was reassured to be in her storeroom. The diagonals of pink- and- gold light from the windows made her wares shimmer. They transformed her too. She lost her gruff ness. Her eyes sparkled. There was love in her voice.

She set out a brisk timetable for the rest of Isabel’s voluntary apprenticeship. Two years to learn to sew each of the delicate small items that made manufactured silkwork London’s glory—from transparent cauls for the hair, decorated with jewels and gold thread, to the laces and points needed to fit together the elaborate items of clothing made by the vestment makers, to tasseled and embroidered and jeweled purses pulled tight by drawstrings and tied to the belt by purse strings, to the heavy strips of glittering embroidery, to orphreys for edging ecclesiastical robes, to ribbons, woven on a miniature narrow- loom, a box so small you could clamp it to the edge of a table—the only piece of equipment more complicated than a needle in English silkwork.

During those two years Isabel would also accompany Alice Claver to meetings with foreign silk merchants and aristocratic clients; she would go to the Royal Wardrobe when Alice Claver had a contract to supply royalty, and learn how to tender for work and the formalities for delivering it. She would learn some of the faces and the names of the most powerful people in the business.

Once the two years were up, she’d start going with Alice Claver to the trade fairs at Bruges and Antwerp. There, she would begin to see how to make the large- scale wholesale deals considered the pinnacle of achievement for a silk merchant—choosing and buying the trade’s greatest luxury, the whole silk cloths woven in the East and in Italy on full- size broadlooms, a skill not known in England. She’d learn how to import these cloths, each worth a substantial portion of a prince’s annual rents, to make garments for the richest people in England.

“Why do we have to go abroad to buy whole silk cloths?” Isabel ventured, feeling ignorant. “Or pay the margins the Italians here take? Can’t they be made in London?”

Alice Claver darted a bright, intense look at her, as if Isabel had intuited something extraordinary.

“We don’t have the knowledge,” she answered, after a pause.

“Why?” Isabel asked. “Surely it’s just the same as weaving wool?”

She felt as she said it that she must be saying something stupid. But her question seemed to have opened the way to Alice Claver’s heart.

Alice Claver’s eyes were full of enthusiasm, but she shook her head. “Far more complicated,” she said decisively. “Finer, for one thing. Venetian export damasks have 9,600 silk threads in a single arm’s-width, a
braccio.
Even cloth of gold and plain velvets have 7,200 threads. And to get the patterns in the cloth, you need far more than one line of warp threads and one line of wefts; you might have half a dozen of each in a single cloth, each needing something different done to it. Considering what silk costs, no one could afford to just start experimenting. You’d need to know the secret before you even thought of trying to build, or thread up, a full- size loom—as long as two men and as wide as another—with good- quality silk. It would bankrupt a king to start working it out from scratch.

“And it’s not just the number of threads. It’s knowing how to mix the different imports. Look,” she went on. It was clear she’d thought about this many times. She started pulling out bolts of stuff to show Isabel how threads from different lands could be mixed together in the same piece of silk cloth; how a single bolt could be made of Spanish silk warp and Persian silk weft for a satin; or a Syrian silk warp and Greek silk weft for a damask; how two kinds of silk from different regions could be put together and thrown to form a single thread. She said some silks, such as
orso-gli
, were especially suitable for warp threads; that all types of cloth could use weft threads of Persian
legg ibenti
,
catangi
, or
talani
; that velvetlike satins needed weft threads of the
calabrese
, the
cat-anzana
, and the
crespolina
productions; that the
siciliana
was right for heavy satins and that medium- thick silk threads, for slightly lighter cloths, were called
di donna
and
granegli
. Isabel learned that silk from Almeria was used for taffetas and satins, and silk from Abruzzi for
zetani
, fabrics made with a satin weave and sometimes with a velvety pile.

“These are just the odds and ends of knowledge I’ve picked up over the years from buying silk,” Alice Claver said modestly. “But to weave a silk cloth that would be distinctive, and saleable, you’d need to have mastered all this and more. Much more.”

Isabel surprised a yearning look on her mistress’s face.

“To have a hope of succeeding, you’d need a three- way deal on a scale no one has ever done in London,” Alice Claver went on.

She’d thought about it a lot, Isabel could see. Alice Claver couldn’t shake off her longing to do this vast deal, however impossible she was making it sound. “First, you’d need an Italian master willing to share his secrets with you,” she said briskly, lifting up one finger. “And that’s a rare beast, let me tell you. It would be easier to catch a unicorn.”

She lifted a second finger. “Next, he’d need to get permission from his city government in Italy to import a full workshop of craftsmen here to set up. And the Venetian silk boards hate letting good people go. So you’d have to factor in years of bribing bureaucrats. Nothing happens fast in Italy.”

Isabel nodded, reluctantly. It did sound intimidating.

“But the biggest problem would be the third one,” Alice said, looking gloomily at the third finger she was raising to wave in Isabel’s face. “Money. Even if you had the other parts of the deal in place, who would pay? You’d need a rich backer at the London end. A very rich backer. Someone willing to lose vast amounts of money every year for decades while an entire industry was set up. You might not see a return for twenty years. But there’d be wages and houses and materials and costs to cover all the while.

Silk doesn’t come cheap. It would be beyond the means of anyone I can think of, except the king, unless by some miracle the entire guild of mercers joined forces to back it instead.”

The silkwoman laughed mirthlessly. “They certainly never would. They’d be too scared. The Lombards here make half their money out of importing silk cloths to sell to us, and the rest from banking for London merchants. They wouldn’t take kindly to Londoners trying to set up a business that competed with theirs.

And since our mercers do their banking with the London Italians, they couldn’t cross them without having their trade accounts cut off ”—she snapped her fingers—“just like that. No one would run that risk. You might get rich in twenty years by weaving silk cloths, but how would you buy your ready- made silks at Antwerp and Bruges until then, without those accounts?”

She shrugged. She looked down at the silks she’d pulled out, tutted, and began resignedly to fold them away, as if she were packing away the impossible dream at the same time.

Then she stopped again; she couldn’t quite bear to drop the subject. She gave Isabel a hard look. “And while we’re talking about impossible, there’s this too,” she said. “Gossip. Even if you did manage to find a way to get going, you’d have to spend all those years of setting up keeping your plans a complete secret from every Italian merchant in London. But can you imagine starting something so big, which would employ so many people, without the markets being full of it?” She grunted. “There’d always be talk. It’s all impossible.”

She sighed. Looked at the greens and golds still spread around her, blazing in the sunset; the colors of dreams.

Isabel said stubbornly: “The money’s the real thing, though. Wouldn’t the king pay?”

Alice Claver snorted. “Him?” she answered succinctly. “Broke. Too many wars.”

Isabel sighed. Alice was right, she realized; the king was always borrowing money from the City. “Someone will work out how, sooner or later, though,” she said wistfully.

Her mistress’s face brightened. “Yes, and make a fortune,” she agreed robustly. “At least I hope so. London silkwomen are the best in Christendom. It’s against nature for us to let the Italians have the best of the market. There must be more for us in the future than fiddling around with tassels and braids and bits of ribbon!”

She guff awed as if she and Isabel were old friends. Astonished to have been given a glimpse of Alice Claver’s heart’s desire, Isabel hesitantly joined in.