Figures in Silk (21 page)

She found the purse, clutched at it. “Children?” she whispered, tensing, ready to rise.

He shook his head. “Poor girl,” he said lightly. She thought he meant his wife. “No.”

She stood up and bowed, smiled formally. “Thank you for inviting me,” she said. “I should be getting back.”

He looked downcast. Picked up the jug. “There’s still some wine?” he said, asking a wistful favor.

She shook her head and gave him the same regretful smile.

Took a first step away.

A voice in her head was telling her there was no need to behave like a jilted bride. Nothing untoward had happened. She’d eaten; she’d enjoyed a conversation. She spent half her life talking with married men like William Pratte and widowers like Will Caxton. There was nothing wrong with that; it was the point of in dependence. And this was someone she’d wanted to meet again. A stranger she had struck up an instant friendship with. It was part of the strange good fortune of today that she’d found him now.

She paused. Felt radiant relief at the simplicity of it. This didn’t have to be all. Turned back to where he was still sitting, still looking at her.

“I’ll be here a lot,” she said. “Perhaps we could have dinner again, next time you are?”

He nodded. “I’d like that,” he said slowly, and she could hear the plea sure in his voice. “Tell each other our stories. . . . I’ll walk you out.”

In half a dozen steps they were outside, blinking in the1 sunlight, standing next to the open side door, through which she could see a staircase. They paused; perhaps both thinking of how to say good- bye. It was Dickon who put a hand on her arm, but it was Isabel who acted. She felt a jolt like fire go through her flesh.

She shivered. She couldn’t stop herself. She whispered, “Come,”

and pulled him through the door, looking back at him and laughing, and he was laughing back at her, and before she knew what was happening they were in interior shadow again, behind the door, on bare boards, with stairs leading up and a shaft of light beaming down, and he was kissing her.

She was looking for her linen. The bare room—just a bed and plaster walls and pale oak beams and Dickon’s bundle against the wall—had been neat an hour before. They’d turned it into a wild rumple of sheets. She could smell new straw in the mattress.

She smiled, remembering. The heat of it half embarrassed her now. She’d had no idea, no idea, she thought tenderly; it hadn’t been like this before. She picked her shift out of the mess and pulled it on. Dickon was asleep. She softened at the sight of him, loving the dark line of muscle and skin against the cloth.

“Soon, again,” he’d murmured, sliding off her. “My kindred spirit.”

“You’re married,” she’d whispered back, snuggling into him.

“We can’t. I shouldn’t have.”

They’d both known she meant yes.

Lives changed, she thought now, without being shocked at herself: people died; wives changed. No one need know for now.

There was always hope for tomorrow.

She’d wake him up. She looked around. With delight she saw his knife lying on the floor, by the crucifix he’d found time to take off in the rush for the bed, on his open missal.

She lifted up the knife. The handle was metal and cold: metal inlaid on bone. She laid it flat on his forehead.

He came awake, startled; then, seeing her so close, leaning over him, pale red- gold hair falling over his face, laughing at his shock, his face melted into relieved happiness. He pulled her down on him. “No surprises,” he muttered, kissing her ear as he whispered into it, “you had me worried for a moment.” But he didn’t sound angry to have been teased; and now he was too absorbed in touching her skin with his lips, sliding his mouth slowly down her neck, to talk at all.

She leaned over his head to drop the knife back, still laughing.

His tongue was exploring her collarbone. She shivered in anticipation.

But she couldn’t just let the knife go; not onto an open book. It was plain, but it must be expensive. It would get damaged lying open. So she let the knife clatter onto the boards; she reached a hand down to shift the crucifix and close the book. And she saw the three words written on the open page:
Loyaute Me Lie
.

Loyalty Binds Me. She knew that motto. She embroidered regalia; she knew them all. Dickon’s tongue was teasing at the edge of her shift now, but she pulled away. Sat up.

He looked surprised. “I know,” he breathed, “you have to go.

But not just yet . . .”

“Your prayer book has the Duke of Gloucester’s motto written in it,” she said baldly.

His eyes flickered. He sat up too.

“Yes,” he said, equally baldly. “It would.”

He hadn’t really hidden anything, she thought, with her head whirling. She’d seen the purse with the badge. She knew he was here, not at the palace, enjoying a moment of anonymity. She knew he owned land in the North. She knew his name was Dickon.

She just hadn’t guessed that made him Richard of Gloucester. The king’s brother.

He should have told me, she thought hotly. Then: Why? He didn’t have time. I seduced him.

The next thought that came clear from the whirl pool in her head was pure sadness. It was only a few minutes since she’d been putting on her shift and hoping, sinfully, as she now realized, that his wife might die; that, having inherited her estates, Dickon might . . .

She shook her head. She couldn’t even finish the thought. The foolishness of that hope, remembered now, made her close her eyes and feel sick and hot.

Then came shame. She could hear his voice, when they’d been downstairs, and it was saying, mockingly, “Look at all the pawns rushing at the king now: all those mistresses, running round court, sucking up favors,” and “Your sister’s one . . . The merry one, I believe.”

She didn’t want him to think she was one of them. However cringingly pleased her father might secretly be at his daughter’s relationship with the king, Isabel despised the easy life it allowed Jane to lead. She always would. It had nothing to do with the Bi-ble’s strictures against fornication; it was more that Isabel couldn’t respect or understand idleness. She didn’t want to be known as a woman whose life’s work was charming favors out of important people so she could go on prettily doing nothing. She didn’t want to be like Jane.

To her horror, her eyes filled with tears. “You’ll think I’m . . . ,” she muttered. She couldn’t go on for a minute. “I’m not a mistress,” she said, blinking blindly. “I wasn’t looking for a protector.”

She felt his hand on hers.

“I know,” he said; very soft, very low. “You’re an honest woman, with a plan in life. I admire it . . . and you. I understand.”

She stared at his hand, memorizing it; she might never see it again.

“I do,” he went on. “You wouldn’t want to be hanging round on the fringes of court waiting for me, fretting, gossiping . . . being snubbed . . . begging for gowns and jewels . . . all the rest of it . . . any more than I’d want you to. We each have our lives. We can’t change them.”

She looked up, partly comforted by his voice, partly waiting for the dismissal she could feel about to come. She managed a watery smile.

“But I want to see you again,” he went on, begging her with his eyes. “When I can; when you can. And we could. Sometimes.

No one need know. It could be here.”

The room’s soft plaster and oak glowed again; the color of happiness.

Weakly, she said: “But people would talk. It wouldn’t be good, for me or for you.”

“Who has to know?” he replied, and she could see laughter beginning in his eyes. “Weren’t we just talking about this? It’s good to fade into the background from time to time, didn’t we agree?

“You didn’t mean this to happen,” he went on, and his voice was stronger, deeper, more persuasive with every word. “I didn’t, either. But we couldn’t help it. We’re two of a kind. We recognized each other. I’m glad.”

She was drawing strength from his words. She recognized this. If he’d been a merchant, she’d even have known what to call what she could hear him doing: striking a deal.

“You don’t meet much honesty as a prince,” he said somberly.

“And most of the ambition you see is ambition to do you harm. I don’t trust many of the people around me.” He pulled her to him with both arms, pinioned her to him. “But I trust you.”

He took a deep breath. He finished: “So—will you trust me?

Let me be just Dickon; just your love? And come to me again, when you can, here?”

She didn’t hesitate, not for a moment; not even to savor the scent of him in her nostrils, the press of skin on skin, and know it wasn’t the last time she’d feel this.

She knew. This was what she wanted. She nodded.

COUP

9

spring 1483

It was ten years since Isabel had last been inside the Palace of Westminster. Yet, however much of a queen of silk she knew herself to have become in that de cade, she was still overawed on this cold February morning by the sheer size of the city in stone; by the waiting, and the corridors, and the slow whispers of the men- at- arms.

She tried to put all that aside as she knelt in front of the plump girl with the pallid face and swollen eyes and flaming red- gold hair whom she’d come to serve. In businesslike fashion, she lifted a flap of red cloth of gold from one side of the girl’s gown, folding her lips round her mouthful of pins, trying to work out where best to cut.

Princess Elizabeth, King Edward’s eldest daughter, was sixteen to Isabel’s twenty- six. But she looked far younger. She was stiff and owlish; her dignity was indistinguishable from a child’s awkward silence.

The child had good reason to look solemn, Isabel thought, without particular compassion—there hadn’t been a trace of warmth yet from the young royal person in front of her, standing so on her dignity, and Isabel saw no reason for personal sympathy. Princess Elizabeth had just failed to become the Queen of France. Her father’s English alliance with France had collapsed now that the sly French king had decided not to bother with the English wedding and, instead, had married his son to the Duke of Burgundy’s daughter. The princess’s glittering future had turned to dust in a day. King Edward was furious for many reasons, one being that the King of France had also stopped paying him the fat pension he’d been living on for years, and a king as poor as Edward couldn’t easily handle any loss of income. So Isabel had been called in to unpick the princess’s trousseau, sewn in the now suddenly violently disliked French style, and to decide which silk pieces could be reworked in a fashion less painful to observers, which could be reused for more down- to- earth purposes later. That was King Edward’s way of venting his anger and saving money at the same time. Jane Shore had suggested it to him, and while he was laughing in his easygoing way at his mistress’s idea, she’d also suggested Isabel be chosen to do the work.

It was Elizabeth who’d bravely said to Isabel that they should start with the wedding gown itself—a magnificent confection of cloth of gold embroidered with a latticework of gold thread and pearls so stiff it seemed to be standing up by itself. She was wearing it now. But even with all that splendor on her back, she was nothing much to look at herself, Isabel thought; the red hair she’d inherited from her beautiful mother was lovely enough, but she’d also got her father’s tight little rosebud lips and a pair of green eyes that might, in happier times, have been pretty, but were puff y and pinkish today, probably from crying. In the quiet of the antechamber, she looked all set to cry again.

Isabel was trying not to look up at the princess’s trembling lower lip when she became aware of a small sound behind her.

She froze. She’d heard this might happen: this creeping, no-warning, hackle- raising manifestation of a new presence in the room, right behind your back. It meant the queen was here: King Edward’s wife, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, the striking redhead hated by everyone in England, the woman whose pointy beauty hid the temper of the dev il himself.

Isabel shifted on her knees. She was aware of the queen only as a swish of color somewhere behind her, a prickling down her spine. She guessed the queen was pacing, on kid slippers that made no sound, along the thick arras of this small, hot room, which was so filled with valuable clothing of almost miraculous design that you could practically feel pearls and gold thread in the dust tickling your throat. The princess had starting breathing shallowly, as if afraid, and she’d stopped moving. There was panic in her swollen eyes. Isabel was glad she’d been already on her knees when the queen entered.

She’d heard the stories about the queen keeping the ladies of the court standing for three silent hours a day while she dined. It wasn’t hard to see that England’s only ever commoner queen would be just as eager to impose humiliating rules on servants.

Rules that emphasized the grandeur of a queen who’d come from nowhere. Who’d come to the attention of the kingdom at large nineteen years ago, when the young King Edward—gloriously descended from Japhet, son of Noah, through the kings of Troy, the founders of Rome, and Brutus, the first king of Britain—had sneaked off and secretly married her while out hunting. Back then, she’d just been the impoverished widow of Sir John Grey, a Lancastrian who’d been killed fighting on the wrong side at the second battle of St. Albans; she’d had nothing but her red- gold hair to help her make her way. People said the king had drawn a dagger on her to force her into his bed, but she’d just stared him down with her cool green eyes and said, “I might be too base to 1 be a king’s wife; but I’m too good to be your harlot.” So he’d married her instead, and she’d stayed queen even though the marriage had caused another war.

King Edward's strongest lord, the Earl of Warwick, had been so furious he’d brought back old, defeated King Henry from the shadows, and tried, for a year, to be Lancastrian. But Edward had won through in the end, and returned to London after a year to reclaim his queen from sanctuary at Westminster. Queen Elizabeth Woodville had given birth to his son, little Prince Edward, at the abbot’s house there. She was fearless all right, but she’d never be royal enough to relax. She’d always need fantastical displays of obeisance to help her believe she’d risen so far in the world. Isabel wanted to avoid humiliation by staying safely out of her way.