Figures in Silk (40 page)

“We’re going to marry at the end of the month. I’m going to move to the country,” Jane murmured breathily, and her eyes, as clear as summer skies, invited Isabel to celebrate her joy.

For the first time in a long time, Isabel found herself bursting out laughing. Alice was guff awing, too; and Isabel was able to meet her mistress’s relieved eyes and share the moment. She needn’t have worried about Jane, after all. Jane hadn’t lost her re-silience, any more than she’d lost her old knack of casting spells over men. But marrying her interrogator; now that was a masterstroke. What ever was Dickon going to say?

She didn’t care. It would be all right now Jane was going to be all right. She couldn’t believe Dickon would punish her sister for falling in love. So she rushed to her sister and Thomas; embraced them both; let her gratitude to her sister’s unexpected savior shine on her face. Still, she couldn’t quite stop herself dissembling. She didn’t say any of the things she’d actually been thinking. Instead, with a light laugh that didn’t altogether hide her sympathy for the oldest fool for love she knew, she just asked: “What ever will poor Will Caxton say?”

15

Isabel had never felt the need to be cautious with her lover before he was king. But now Dickon dreamed of invading armies coming to get him, and his dreams pursued him into his waking life. He had early- warning patrols man the cliff s of England’s southern coasts with torches and ponies, watching for ships from Britanny. The new king preferred sleeping in Nottingham, in the middle of England, to Westminster and London; he said he’d be better able to muster his northern armies from the Midlands when the enemy came.

Isabel saw him less than she had before. In the South, he slept fitfully. He startled awake if he heard a mouse scuttling or a floorboard creaking in the night. He woke, pale and dazed, with anxiety lines etched across his forehead that Isabel couldn’t smooth away.

But he could still be cheerful—reckless, even—when the mood took him.

When Isabel told him that the interrogator he’d sent to correct Jane Shore and show her the error of her sinful ways had fallen in love with her instead, he laughed.

He laughed so much he had to sit down on the bed and hold his sides. He laughed till he had tears in his eyes, and rolling down his cheeks, and the tension lines marking his face had vanished.

“What a woman,” he wheezed. “I take my hat off to her. She never gives up, does she?”

There was a glint of real admiration in his wet eyes.

He laughed even more when Isabel said ThomasLynom was agonizing over a letter to him, to ask his permission to marry.

“Well, I did tell him to make an honest woman of the king’s whore,” he gulped, “but I never intended him to take me so literally.”

She’d been planning to beg him not to punish Thomas or his betrothed. She hadn’t expected this stormy amusement.

“So will you, might you,” she breathed, encouraged, “say yes?”

He had to struggle to get enough air in his lungs to reply. He took a couple of deep breaths, closed his eyes. But even when his body stopped shaking with merriment, he couldn’t take the impish grin off his face.

Trying to compose himself, he said ruefully, “Well, I’ll have to talk to my errant servant, of course. But once I’m certain that there’s no talking him out of this foolishness—and I can see already that there won’t be—I don’t see any alternative but to let him have his head.”

Then he went back to chuckling. Slowly, Isabel began to grin too.

It was a quiet winter wedding—just the couple and theClaver family at the church door—but it gave Isabel hope.

She’d lived all year with the loneliness of shame. If Dickon had murdered for power, and she knew it but couldn’t stop loving him, she was guilty by association.

But now a new idea took root in Isabel’s heart. Perhaps Dickon’s crimes weren’t as unforgivable as she’d thought them at first.

What ever he’d done during that grab for power, she was beginning to believe again that Dickon wasn’t cruel at heart. He couldn’t be, could he, now he’d set Jane free and resignedly laughed off her marriage? He’d let Lady Margaret Beaufort off lightly for the Tudor rebellion, too; and he’d left the Woodville women untouched.

He hadn’t been wrong to get rid of the Woodville uncles, either. They’d wanted to kill him. He’d said so.

It was only when she came to the death of Lord Hastings that Isabel’s heart sank, or when she remembered little Prince Richard’s thin, warm little arm under her hand, as soft and vulnerable as a bird’s, his frightened child’s eyes on her.

She wanted to believe he and his brother were being brought up incognito in the Suffolk countryside, as Dickon said. She wanted to believe Lord Hastings had done . . . something.

It stretched belief. But when she couldn’t bring herself to have faith, she told herself instead that she couldn’t hope to understand the temptation that the possibility of royal power must have represented to someone so close to the crown; that if she didn’t know, she couldn’t judge. And sometimes she so nearly succeeded in believing what she was telling herself that she felt something close to peace of mind stealing back into her heart.

Jane and Thomas Lynom arrived in London in early April, a year into Dickon’s reign. It was the first time they’d left their new manor house at Sutton. Alice Claver prepared a feast.

The Lynoms, husband and wife, were already at Catte Street when Isabel walked in—the center of attention, both smiling radiantly, both as golden as summer apricots, being plied with wine and refreshments after their morning’s ride.

Jane had stopped wearing nunlike grays and browns since she married, but she hadn’t gone back to her old peacock finery either.

Today she was wearing a fine yet modest patterned damask robe in tans and browns and grays. The sprays of foliage shone as she moved, yet so discreetly that even Alice Claver couldn’t really disapprove. “Being a country gentlewoman seems to be suiting you,” Alice Claver barked, glaring down at Jane’s hands, which were conspicuously unroughened by her new rustic life; but despite the snap in the mistress of the house’s gruff voice, they all knew that, somehow, Jane had sneaked herself into Alice Claver’s heart. So no one worried.

“How well you look, my dear,” William Pratte said affectionately, deftly stepping past Will Caxton to embrace the bride. Caxton had glued himself to Jane since he’d arrived, fussing and grinning like a devoted dog refusing to be parted from its long- lost mistress. He’d hardly said a word to ThomasLynom, but the young husband was taking the prickliness of Jane’s long- term admirer in good part.

“More beautiful than ever,” declaimed Goffredo, with something of his old flirtatiousness. Goffredo had been very quiet recently. Since the Londoners and Venetians at the silk house had learned enough of each other’s languages to talk properly, it had emerged that Goffredo had had a wife in Venice for twenty years, but had never mentioned her to Alice Claver and her friends. The childless wife had been carried off last spring by a bout of fever, so he was now, officially, a widower at last. But Alice and Anne were teasing him so brutally about his lengthy, half- joking flirtation with Isabel that he’d stopped daring to answer back or proposing almost lightheartedly to her several times a day. “A woman in every port,” they’d cackle to each other; or, “You know the punishment for bigamy is eternal damnation, don’t you?” And poor Goffredo’s eyes would flicker and his smile would grow uncertain. Isabel was partly relieved that he was fighting shy of her, as a result, but she missed Goffredo’s old exuberance too. So she was happy to see a more cheerful gleam in his eyes now.

“Yes; you’re blooming, dear,” Anne Pratte said from just behind her husband. Isabel noticed Thomas give Anne Pratte a single quiet look, and Anne Pratte smiled innocently back before she lowered her eyes. But no one else noticed, because Robert Lynom walked in at that moment. He’d become a friend as well as their lawyer; he’d even been entrusted with the secret of the silk- weaving venture at Westminster, with much significant lowering of voices and tapping of noses on Anne Pratte’s part. So there were more embraces and joy and long blond limbs clapping each other on the back, and deep brotherly voices booming affectionately at each other.

They all settled at table, and while the goose was carved up and the pies and vegetable dishes sampled, Thomas, who, as the husband of a formerly treasonable person, had been tickled to be appointed to a royal commission investigating other treasonable persons in Essex, told stories about his work. The king had just given him another manor, at Colmworth in Bedfordshire, for his pains; he and Jane were on their way to visit it for the first time.

There was a possibility he’d be transferred again to run a section of the elaborate, expensive new coastal defenses. “I seem to count as an honorary northerner these days, luckily,” he said comfortably, not quite mocking a monarch who so distrusted the southern gentry that he’d started importing hundreds of sheriff s and other officials to run the administration of the South. “I had no idea when I went to work in York five years ago what a good choice I was making.”

He was so comfortable, ThomasLynom; so at ease. So unlike Dickon.

How cozy everything has become here; how calm, Isabel thought gratefully.

When Jane, putting a hand on her husband’s arm, said shyly,“Thomas and I have news,” and there was a burst of excited chatter about when the Lynom baby would be born and what it should be called, Isabel let herself be swept up as much as everyone else by the hope lighting up the table. She raised her glass: “To new beginnings,” she said, “for all of us.” And they all laughed and banged the table with their hands, while ThomasLynom blushed and kissed his wife.

Isabel's happiness flickered and faded when she and Will Caxton landed at Westminster, toward evening, and heard bells.

Someone was dead.

She saw the alarm in Will’s eyes. Her heart was thudding.

Without a word, they half walked, half ran through the mournful din to the nearest tavern to find out who. The tavern was called the White Boar, like Dickon’s badge. Inside, there was a heaving ant heap of turmoil.

“It’s a sign from God,” a stout elderly woman in tight black was saying, crossing herself. “It must be.”

The monk she was with nodded. He had the same snub nose and pig cheeks as her, and was near the bottom of a tankard of ale.

He drained it before replying, with foam on his face and gloomy relish in his rough voice: “Mmm. A year to the day. Struck down by the Good Lord in His righteous anger. It’s the only explanation.”

Staring at them, Isabel thought, stupidly, slowly: It’s the ninth of April. It took her a moment to remember what had happened last April ninth. Then she did. It was the day King Edward had died. The day she’d first heard this head- splitting clangor of bells.

When the fear came, it was like drowning in black water. She gasped with it. Dickon?

“But who is dead?” Will Caxton was asking.

“The Prince of Wales,” the monk said. “The boy.”

“God rest his soul,” Will whispered, crossing himself. She crossed herself too, but the sensation sweeping through her limbs was the sweetest relief imaginable. It was only when she looked up, and found a whole circle of bystanders turning astonished eyes on her, that she realized what she’d been muttering as her hand moved: “Thank God.”

Will said: “She means, she was afraid you might be talking about the king.” He spoke quickly and protectively, before the surprise turned to hostility. She nodded.

“But this is worse,” the White Boar’s innkeeper called out, hands full of tankards, wiping the sweat from his forehead onto a forearm. The crowd nodded, and there were rumbles of “wicked-ness” and “divine punishment.” “There are no other children. No heirs. No daughters. Hardly a nephew left alive. He says they’re all bastards, doesn’t he? We all know what that means for us.

When he dies, we get more war. And my question is: What bloody good is a living king to any of us if his dynasty’s dead?”

“ They say the queen’s gone mad with it,” Anne Pratte said.

“Grief.”

Alice sighed gustily. Their needles flashed in rhythm.

“Anne, really,” William Pratte remonstrated.

There was only one legitimate York heir left. King Edward’s children were bastards. The Duke of Clarence’s son was barred from the throne because his father had died a traitor. That left a cousin: John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln. Another nine- year- old.

“The king, too,” Anne Pratte went remorselessly on. “They say he bangs his head against the wall and tears his hair out. In handfuls.”

Isabel winced inside. “Anne,” William Pratte said.

She fixed him with a cold look. “I don’t know why you’re being so squeamish about this, dear,” she said. “It’s not as if I’m just gossiping. I’m not calling it God’s punishment, what ever anyone else says. I just say we have a right to worry. They say there are three hundred rebel lords in Britanny now. They will have been waiting for something like this. How long will it take them to start making trouble? And what will become of us then?”

It was a rhetorical question. They’d told Isabel often enough exactly what would become of them if there was war again: the contracts vanishing, the foreigners too, the wine fleet stopping, food prices rising, crazy war taxes, the law courts clogging up with unheard cases, the roads filling up with brigands, the seas filling up with pirates. She knew the answer. But they’d lived it.

She could see the fear in their eyes.

Isabel didn't expect to see Dickon soon. The body had to be buried; the kingdom’s defenses shored up. She’d wait.

But he came. She was out in the little garden, picking gillyflowers for the table, feeling the sun on her back, knowing that to night would be full moon, when she heard the low whistle from behind the hedge. She hadn’t even noticed the fall of hooves until then. She went to the gate to see who could be whistling her out.

“You,” she said, feeling a great slow breath of happiness fill her, somehow not surprised after all.