Figures in Silk (16 page)

Isabel nodded, but she wasn’t really listening. Behind Anne Pratte, she could see Goffredo standing; leaning over the table, holding the edges with his hands. He was towering over Alice Claver. He looked more serious than usual. And he was speaking more forcefully. “We should do it too,” he was saying. “You know we should. It can’t be
that
hard to import looms, teachers. The Provveditori would give me permission. I’m sure they would. If they can do it in Tours, why not here?”

But Isabel could see from Alice Claver’s shoulders what her face must be like. Even if setting up a silk- weaving manufacture like the Italian venture in Tours was her heart’s desire, she wasn’t one to rush into anything foolhardy. Isabel strained her ears, and heard bits of the exasperated answer: “Can’t be done” and “Would cost a fortune” and, rather louder, “. . . need big backing, and where on earth do you think that’s going to come from?” She saw Goffredo shush Alice Claver with gentling downward hand movements and his most charming smiles. But Alice Claver overrode him: “. . . and you’d be a fool to think you’ll get any help from the Mercers’ Company. You’d be astonished at how short on vision and foresight they can be if they think you’re planning to do anything that might annoy their favorite Lombards.” Another calm-ing baritone rumble, broken by her strident laugh. “Straight to the Borromei? Now you really
are
being a fool. You think they’d lend to you so you could put every other Italian in town out of business? I’m telling you: if you give just one Italian in London just one hint that you want to set up silk looms here, they’ll all want to eat you alive.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Isabel could see Goffredo looking crestfallen.

“That braid’s long enough now,” Anne Pratte said from close up, bringing her out of her daydream. “You can knot it up; I’ll start showing you how to make tassels today.”

She held out a knife. As Isabel carefully transferred the loops to the fingers of one hand, and Anne Pratte showed her how to complete the braid so it wouldn’t unravel, then cut each tied bow neatly into the finished product, she looked brightly up at the apprentice silkwoman.

“You remember what they’ve been saying about the king’s three mistresses?” she began. It was a story Anne herself had energetically spread through the markets as soon as she’d heard it at her last fitting with Sir John Risley, the newish Knight of the Body she’d got so friendly with. The king had apparently told Risley he had three mistresses: one the wisest, one the merriest, and one the holiest harlot in the land. It had kept Anne and half the women in the selds happy for days attaching names to those descriptions.

Isabel enjoyed Anne’s gossipiness. She nodded. “Mmm,” she said, admiring her finished braid, aware of Goffredo’s and Alice’s heads bent over the books. “So, have you worked out who all three of the ladies are yet?”

“Oh, yes, dear,” Anne said. “Well, mostly. Eleanor Butler’s the holy one, of course; that’s not hard to guess. And they say Elizabeth Lucy is the wise one, though frankly—” She shook her head, as if she knew these court ladies personally and her experience made her doubt Elizabeth Lucy’s claim.

She gave Isabel another bright, inquiring look. “And of course, no one really knows about the third one, the merry one,” she added, with just the right amount of doubt creeping into her voice, “but I’ve heard people saying . . . it might be your sister?”

7

Jane only giggled ruefully when Isabel sneaked another illicit hour off work to ask whether the king was helping her pay to take her now- rejected divorce suit to Rome.

“It’s supposed to be a secret,” she murmured. But her blush said it all.

Isabel didn’t even ask whether the rest of the rumor was true.

It explained everything, from Jane’s expensive new wardrobe to the way Jane had said, when Isabel had first taken it into her head to apprentice herself to Alice Claver rather than go home to her parents, “Everyone chooses their own way of escape,” to their father’s complaisance. Isabel tried not to feel angry with John Lambert for accepting Jane’s way of escape from marriage so much more easily than he had his younger daughter’s (the sin of adultery must seem less sinful when it brought a monarch into the family; and anyway it was hard to think of sin and Jane’s breathy, laughing innocence at the same time). If Isabel tried, she could see why her father would quietly prize a king’s favor more highly than her own virtuous industry. But she couldn’t turn the other cheek and forgive. After all, she’d been disinherited.

Apparently vaguely aware of a need to make up for having been eco nom ical with the truth earlier, Jane put a soft hand confidingly on Isabel’s sleeve. “He’s so . . . ,” she whispered, and though her voice trailed away without completing the sentence, Isabel could tell, from the blissful expression on her sister’s face, that she was not referring to her husband. “It’s all so . . . ,” she went on, in the same breathy, wondering tone. “Sometimes I’m at court and I look around and I just don’t believe it’s all really happening to me . . .” She smiled down at her toes. With a hint of defiance strengthening this wispy performance, she added: “And he: so kind, so gracious.”

Isabel was struggling to be pleased for her sister. She remembered how the king’s charisma had overwhelmed her, too, when he’d looked into her eyes. How could Jane have resisted? And Jane couldn’t know how foolish Isabel had felt confronting the near- reproach in Anne Pratte’s gaze. Jane had no idea how it would have helped establish Isabel’s reputation to have been better informed. So she turned her lips up, dutifully, trying to smile. But she couldn’t help also saying, rather sourly, “I just wish you’d told me sooner.” Then, a split second later, the beginning of a thought flashed through her head which put a real smile on her face. “Jane,” she breathed, suddenly excited, “would you take me with you to court, one day?”

Jane was no fool. She knew there must be some reason why her sister, who’d only wanted to twist threads on market stalls a few months before, suddenly wanted to go to court. “Just to see,”

Isabel said innocently. She didn’t quite know herself, yet; she just knew that even if she hadn’t been the first to discover her sister’s relation with the king, she could at least be the first to explore the God- sent advantages it might offer. She didn’t think her sister was quite convinced of her innocence. But the subject lapsed.

Instead, Isabel started praising Jane’s tan velvet gown. “Lucchese,” Jane simpered, pirouetting for her. Jane loved compliments. “Not cheap.”

“If only we could make velvet here in London,” Isabel went on, letting a note of genuine wistfulness creep into her voice.

“And other silks. At half the price the Italians charge . . . if only someone, the Mercers maybe, would put up the money to try . . .”

But Jane just wrinkled her nose. “What money?” she said with a hint of scorn in her smile. “The king’s had it all from them in benevolences. Their pockets are empty. Anyway, I’m very happy with Lucchese velvet.” Lovingly, she smoothed down her glowing skirts. Isabel sighed.

Isabel didn’t mean to do what she did next, either, but on her way home she found her footsteps taking her by John Lambert’s main stall in the selds. It was only when she was in sight of it, being jostled by boy apprentices, that she allowed herself to recognize what she was preparing to do: approach him and suggest he put up funds to set up a silk- weaving business, bringing in other wealthy mercers to help if need be.

She took a deep breath, already hearing the persuasive words in her head: “This is how we could do it . . .” But, she thought, her courage already ebbing, before she could say that, she’d have to make peace; look him in the eye, knowing he’d disinherited her; hope for softness in a face better suited to hardness. He’d be bound to say no. She could imagine him pronouncing unforgivable words:
You should stop worrying your head about business
. Or:
You should be more like Jane
. The stall was ten yards away, but there were too many people between her and it for her to see it clearly.

It was almost a relief when, as the crowd thinned, she realized it was packed up. Her father was away.

Alice Claver had been right, she thought, turning disconsolately toward Catte Street, trying to banish the image of John Lambert’s scornful face from her mind. They’d never get the mercers of London to fund a silk- weaving industry.

Three weeks later, Jane and Isabel sat shaded from the sun in a lodge made of green boughs and hung with scarlet and blue silk flags. There was wine in front of them, and a flutter of pages rustling in and out to replace one dish of untouched refreshments with another. All around were dozens of other make- believe lodges, with the old royal palace of the Bower rearing up behind them, half hidden by Waltham Forest. In each lodge sat more fairy- tale ladies with necklines plunging as low as their headdresses rose into the sky. Each lady had more impossibly white skin, pale, pampered hands, and pink cheeks than the last. The picnic had gone on since six in the morning. It was nearly ten now, time for the hunt to return. Isabel could feel the cooking fires being lit, adding to the heat.

She was wearing a borrowed robe provided by Jane—a more magnificent piece of gold- shot green than she’d ever seen outside Alice Claver’s storeroom, over a kirtle of the finest lawn, embroidered with tiny scarlet strawberries. She was trying her best not to look overawed. She was sweaty. There were prickles of moisture in her hair, and the inside of her bodice was soaked. She didn’t know how Jane, wasp- waisted in a flowing scarlet ensemble so tight it must be unbearably hot, could manage to appear so composed and effortlessly cool. Only her fingers, quietly turning her rings round, as if to unstick them from her skin, suggested any kind of discomfort.

It had been beautiful to ride sidesaddle through the coolness of the dawn, and a thrill to watch the falcons rise off the wrists of accomplished hunters, and later a plea sure to lie back on the cushions and listen to the horns and the hounds in the dense clouds of green that now hid the hunting party. Part of her felt hazily that she had somehow stepped inside a tapestry; that if she looked more carefully, she might see that the grass underfoot was scattered with pearls, or spot centaurs trotting by.

But Isabel was also stiff and bored; she was uncomfortably aware of being not nearly as elegant as the ladies of the court, and, except for Jane, alone. It hadn’t been so bad before the men rode out. Jane had other admirers as well as the king, and the two most important of them had spent the first part of the morning vying for her attention. Lord Hastings (dark, bowing, fine- featured, and supremely affable) had escorted them from the palace, laughing, picking buttercups for Jane to put in her hair, telling mischievous stories about the dogfights in the kitchen when they’d changed the animals at the spit, and encouraging Jane to take his falcon.

Then Lord Dorset (blond, bowing, fine-featured, and also supremely affable) had brought them two jeweled cups of wine and plumped their cushions and amused them with a slightly crueler story about Lord Hastings being bucked off his new horse into a puddle in full sight of the queen. It was only after the hunters had cantered off into the trees that Isabel had begun to feel really uneasy: every time they stepped outside their bower to try and create movement in the still, stifling air, they came across more of the perfect ladies, each one laughing and murmuring to a companion; each one, as far as she could tell, quite unable to see either her or Jane. It made her feel even more invisible than her first days of apprenticeship had; spectral. Jane squeezed her arm encouragingly when she saw Isabel look first surprised, then downcast, at the snubs. “Don’t pay any attention,” she whispered, and there was a brave edge to her smile. “That’s Elizabeth Lucy. She doesn’t like me.” And she drew Isabel farther into the edges of the forest, where, if the air still didn’t move, at least there was more shade, and pointed out the children playing nearby. “The king’s children,” she muttered. Nearest was a little girl of maybe five or six, with hair as startlingly copper- colored as the queen’s, much redder than Isabel’s gentle strawberry blond, though this flame hair graced an ordinary, round, solemn child’s head that wasn’t much like the extraordinary, bewitching, heart- shaped face of the beauty Isabel had glimpsed riding proudly ahead on the way to the forest. Three or four smaller girls, all with the same flaming hair and placid faces, sat quietly nearby, as if the heat had sapped their will to move. A toddler—a boy—was crawling toward a carved wooden horse on an enormous carpet so padded and plumped with cushions that Isabel couldn’t imagine how he could make progress; and watching him, sitting on a stool, nursing a baby, sat a strapping young woman in the queen’s colors. Jane smiled, as if fondly, but she didn’t move any closer. Isabel saw that, after all, she hadn’t really stepped inside the tapestry. Neither had Jane. They were still outside, watching, as if from behind glass.

Her spirits only lifted when she heard the thunder of hooves; when, after the cavalcade emerged from the trees followed by men carry ing two bucks and several hares, the ladies swayed decorously to the purple- draped wooden platform to have the morning’s sport reenacted for them, with many blood- curdling cries, before being ushered, half fainting from the heat, into the still hotter enclosed space of the royal pavilion to toast the king’s success and taste the meat that had been cooked while they watched.

Isabel’s heart sank for a moment when Jane pulled her aside, not letting her into the pavilion with the first surge of the crowd.

“What?” she whispered. “Why not?” But Jane just shushed her with an urgent shake of the head. They scuff ed their feet as ladies streamed past; but a minute or two later, to Isabel’s relief, Jane let them join the forward movement after all. “I saw the Duke of Gloucester up ahead,” Jane whispered, with more dislike than Isabel had seen her showing for anyone; as if she’d been humiliated by him. “The king’s brother. The one they say murdered the Duke of Clarence; the other brother. Let’s give him a chance to get ahead. He gives me the shivers.” She shuddered eloquently. “A horrible man. Rat face; cold eyes.”