Figures in Silk (7 page)

She leaned forward to catch Isabel’s eye. She was enjoying the younger woman’s attention. Isabel was imagining the Duke of Gloucester bullying the old countess, and in her mind’s eye the duke was dark and thin, with a scowling face as hard as the man’s she’d met in the church might, perhaps, sometimes be, while the old lady looked like a frightened, thin Alice Claver. Isabel had her sewing with her—a piece of embroidery she planned to turn into a purse for Thomas when he got back, with hearts and flowers in blues and greens, and their initials twined together—though it was so dark in here that she’d hardly touched it. Still, a truce between Isabel and Anne was definitely taking shape on the bench they were sharing, even if Alice Claver, in her own corner, was doing no more than grunt every now and then in response to her friend’s nonstop talk. Isabel knew Alice Claver must be too frightened to reply. She couldn’t feel sorry for her mother- in- law, not after all those rows and glares; even now, even here. But she could see Anne Pratte wanted, tactfully, to comfort her friend.

Over in the other corner, a throat was cleared. Then Alice Claver’s voice boomed out of the darkness, so loud and so ordinary that Isabel almost jumped: “Disgraceful. Almost makes you proud not to be one of them, doesn’t it? Men of honor, my eye.”

There was triumph in Anne Pratte’s eyes at having brought her friend back from the darkness. “Yes, indeed, dear,” she answered gently. “I always say all the fighting these great lords enjoy so much is really just an excuse to go out and grab someone else’s land, isn’t it?”

Alice Claver began to laugh. A single hoot at first, then more hoots; then gales of relief. It was infectious. Before Isabel knew where she was, she and the others had joined in too. When she turned round somewhere in the middle of a gust of laughter, and met Alice Claver’s creased, weeping eyes for the first time in a long time, she realized the black, hateful look had gone from them. From relief as much as anything else, she started laughing even harder, until she, like Alice Claver, was holding her sides and groaning with it.

“Ooh,” Alice Claver said, what seemed like much later, sounding almost her usual self. Anne Pratte was watching her from over her flashing needle with quiet satisfaction. “It hurts. I tell you what, Anne. You’d better give us all some of your sewing to do. It’s keeping you calmer than the rest of us put together.”

All Anne Pratte had in her pile was sheets for turning. Nothing you needed strong light to see. Alice Claver got up, took one off the pile, and sat down again to thread a needle.

She turned and looked at Isabel with triumph, as if she’d hit on a new reason to find fault with her. “Don’t just sit there,” she snapped. “Get yourself a sheet too. Do some work. Go on.”

She must be feeling better. She was turning nasty again. Isabel blinked away the tears prickling behind her eyes. Hadn’t Alice Claver seen she already had work in her lap? Silently, with as much dignity as she could muster, she held up her little rectangle of silk embroidery in self- defense.

Alice Claver got up and with a single dark swoop snatched it away and pushed a sheet at her instead. “Waste of silk,” she said gruffly. “You’ll only make a mess of it in this light.”

Isabel lowered her head. Without comment, as if she were also a little frightened of her friend’s rage, Anne Pratte passed Isabel a needle.

But as Alice Claver sat down, Isabel was aware of her mother- in- law looking closely at the confiscated piece of embroidery as if to find something in it to sneer at; then peering closer, then holding it up to the light. She could almost swear Alice Claver looked surprised. Well, she was good at embroidery. Everyone had always said so. She kept her eyes firmly on the needle she was threading, her back tense, waiting for a new attack once Alice Claver had worked out what to say. But it didn’t come. They sewed in silence.

“ He wasn't with me,” William Pratte said. “I never saw him.”

William Pratte was filthier than Isabel could have imagined.

But he looked happy and healthy too, leaner and more muscled than he’d been a fortnight before, with his bald patch freckled a pinky brown and the sun still warm on his cheeks.

The relief of knowing that it was over, and that the Bastard’s head, along with those of the Mayor of Canterbury and the pirate captains, was safely on London Bridge, was making everyone feel drunk with the plea sure of being alive. The serving girls were opening the shutters, letting air and sun in with a series of joyful bangs. After a twirling embrace with her husband, Anne Pratte had rushed straight out to the garden to see what salad leaves there were. “I’ve been thinking for days, I could murder a nice dish of sorrel,” she’d shrilled, waving her arms.

“Perhaps he went with your father,” William Pratte said, scratching himself. Isabel breathed: “Did you see
him
?” He nodded kindly. “Oh, yes, don’t worry about him, I saw him on Tower Hill just yesterday. He had Will Shore with him. Hugh Wyche.

The Chigwells. I didn’t see Thomas. Then again, I didn’t stop to ask. Just waved. But Thomas will be somewhere.”

Alice Claver was beaming so hard at being let out of the darkness that nothing could dash her spirits. “Well, all I can say is thank God we have the daylight back,” she said happily, including Isabel in her smile. “Thomas has always been a law unto himself. He’ll turn up in his own good time. And we’d better get you bathed before he does, William. I’ve never seen so much dirt on one body.”

No one worried too much when Thomas didn’t show up that night either. Half the patrols were still out celebrating. The taverns were heaving.

A little hesitantly, Isabel went along when, just before sunset, William Pratte took the two silkwomen to explore the damaged riverside zone beyond Cordwainer Lane. She didn’t want to be out when Thomas arrived, but Alice Claver gave her a warmish look and said, “We’ll get back before he does,” and she gave in.

Women were walking along the Strand through summer clouds of gnats, looking in astonishment at the fallen masonry and the burn marks or listening to their dirty, proud men gabbling, very fast and excited, “This is where we were when they started shoot-ing”, or “This is where I hid from the wildfire.”

The pirates had been beaten back from London Bridge. They’d gone downriver to Kew and tried to land there. They’d come back. But the defenses had held. There was drunken singing everywhere, and a lot of woozy yelling: “God save King Edward!”

Seeing Isabel glancing around in case Thomas suddenly came out from some corner, Alice Claver told her: “It would be unusual for Thomas to come straight home,” and laughed, not unkindly, in the direction of the Tumbling Bear. Isabel tried not to feel disappointed that her husband hadn’t rushed back to her side. But since no one had word of him being hurt, and William Pratte said there’d been surprisingly few men killed, he must just be out drinking somewhere. For the first time, the memory of all those shady men he knew in all those taverns came back to her, replacing the pictures she’d called to mind so often in the darkness that they now seemed threadbare and soiled from overuse: his soft look back at her as he’d slipped out the door on the day the ships came in, his parting murmur, “I want you to be proud of me.”

“I love you,” she muttered under her breath, to keep her spirits up, as she’d done a million times during the siege. “I love you.”

But she could feel doubt creeping in. She knew Thomas found home difficult and work difficult. Perhaps, now he’d discovered the pleasures of fighting, he’d seen a more exciting way of keeping out of his mother’s hair than sheltering behind his new wife?

Perhaps her novelty had worn off ?

Isabel felt suddenly so alone that she shivered. The heat was going out of the evening air. It was nearly curfew. He wouldn’t come to night. Anne Pratte put her shawl round Isabel’s shoulders without comment; Isabel looked gratefully at her.

“We kept our spirits up by turning sheets while you were out there fighting,” Alice Claver boomed at William Pratte, back at Catte Street, over the evening meal. “And Anne kept our spirits up with gossip.” She turned to Isabel for confirmation. “Didn’t she?”

And, seeing those eyes on her again with this new expression of wary near- warmth, it was suddenly clear to Isabel what she had to do before Thomas got home. She didn’t want to be enemies with Alice Claver. And to night, Alice Claver didn’t look as though she wanted to be enemies either. There was no need. The half- truce that had set in might just hold if she helped it along. It was Thomas’s stubbornness that had made things go wrong. Now was her chance to put things right. If she wanted to be happy as a Claver, she was going to have to get up at dawn and offer to start working for her mother- in- law.3

Alice Claver had the same idea. When she saw Isabel in the morning, she didn’t even comment on Thomas’s nonappearance. She just said: “Shall I show you the storeroom?”

Isabel nodded, trying to match that matter- of- factness. She’d hardly ever been in her own father’s storeroom. It was his holy of holies; too precious for children, he said.

She padded down the corridor behind her mother- in- law, secretly impressed; willing Alice Claver, now fiddling with keys at the door, to learn to like her.

Alice Claver’s ware house stretched all the way along the side of her house: a vast barn of a place, its high rafters lit up by slant-ing early sunlight from window slits.

It took a few moments for Isabel’s eyes to adjust. Then she gasped.

She’d never seen so much luxury in one place. It was as if she was in the middle of a snowfall, but an unimaginably lovely and costly snowfall that gleamed and glowed in every rich color possible. There were wafts and drifts of it wherever she looked, piled up against walls, soft on the stone floor. She glided forward, swept away by the magic of it, to touch as well as look. She’d seen plenty of velvets like these, in the dark colors of Lucca or the brighter hues of Siena; but never anything like the piece glittering stiffly with gold embroidery under her hand, or the green silk cloth underneath it, figured with peacocks shimmering blue and purple, or the unicorns and leaping harts prancing across the red and gold satins and damasks and taffetas. Nothing like this.

She twirled and turned in the dusty shafts of light, pulling at one bale, holding up another. Lost in the moment. Astonished.

She only remembered Alice Claver was there when she became aware of the older woman looking at her, with a slow half- smile on her lips, as if she understood Isabel’s enchantment.

She must feel it herself. In this shadow world, lit up by one of the sideways rays of light from on high, with the ground around her a tumbling mass of scarlets and purples and silvers, Alice Claver had stopped looking as barrel- like and brutally commonsensical as she did elsewhere; she seemed suddenly taller and more mysterious, like an angel in a halo of gold, or a rustic wise woman summoning spirits from the woods.

Now Alice Claver was sweeping Isabel around, poking into corners, pulling things out, energetically talking. The silkwoman poured out information at a speed Isabel could hardly keep up with, giving her stern looks if she felt Isabel’s attention flagging.

Isabel nodded, and tried to absorb as much of the flood of knowledge as she could. She was learning more in her first hour in this storeroom than she had in a lifetime as John Lambert’s daughter.

It was exhausting. But it was exhilarating too; so absorbing it kept her returning thud of anxiety—“Where is Thomas?”—at bay.

Alice started with reels and skeins and loops of silk threads: dyed, twined, thrown, boiled, raw; all glowing with the sun and scents of faraway places Isabel could hardly imagine. She learned that Persian silk came from the mysterious regions near the Caspian Sea: Ghilan, Shilan, Azerbaijan; that since Constantinople had fallen to the Turks, Venetian merchants hadn’t been able to buy in their old Black Sea markets, but that the Persians were sending more and more silk—both cloth and threads—by caravan to Syria, outside the control of the Turks, and that the Venetians were now getting their Persian silk supplies in from the markets of Damascus and Aleppo. She saw Persian silk threads called
ablaca
,
ardassa,
and
rasbar
. She saw Syrian silk threads called
castrovana
,
decara
, and
safetina
. She saw Romanian silk threads called
belgrado
,
belladonna
, and
fior di morea
. (“Most of my supplies come from Venice,” Alice Claver said by way of explanation of the Lombard- sounding names; “it’s still the greatest center in the world, where East meets West . . . and the quickest way for you to pick up some Italian, which you’ll need to do—and Flemish, of course, that’s vital too—is going to be by learning these Venetian names.”) She rolled the names on her tongue as though they were poems; Isabel imitated her as best she could. Spanish silk threads:
spagnola
,
cattalana
. Threads from southern Italy:
napoletana
,
abru-zzese
,
pugliese
,
calabrese
,
messinese
. The homegrown silks from the forests of mulberry trees cultivated by old ladies in black in Tuscany:
nostrale
. The homegrown silks from the forests of mulberry trees cultivated by old ladies in black in Venice’s own hinterland:
nostrane
.

They were both so absorbed that they jumped when Anne Pratte’s round face came into view at the door. She was illuminated by the sunlight, too, but she had none of the skittish cheerfulness of yesterday. She looked gray, stricken. “Alice,” she said quietly to her friend. She didn’t even seem to notice Isabel. “Alice. I’m sorry. They’ve found Thomas.”

Isabel didn’t understand the look, but she felt faint with fore-boding. She stole a timid glance at Alice, looking for guidance.

Alice was clutching very hard at the skein of stuff she’d been showing her daughter- in- law. It was indigo- colored, Isabel remembered afterward, the darkness of widow’s weeds, and now it had tightened painfully against Alice’s blotchy hands. Alice wasn’t one to waste words, and she could see that Anne’s face made it pointless to ask whether Thomas was alive.