Figures in Silk (2 page)

Her father didn’t like the sight of the fierce, treacherous earl masterminding the feebleminded Henry’s every move. Nor did he have much stomach for Edward’s younger brother, the Duke of Clarence, also in rebellion against his own blood; a lesser traitor hanging on Warwick’s coattails, hoping in vain that he might get to be Yorkist king of the Lancastrian rebels. He had been right, really. It had been ugly. And London was Yorkist to a man, had been for years. Every merchant knew that King Edward, who was strong and young and intelligent, and had been on the throne for ten years already, was a better king for supporting their trades than Henry, who had let lawlessness rule the land for more than twenty years before Edward first seized the throne. But the Lancastrian army had been here at the gates, and the consensus of the meeting had been “anything for a quiet life.” So Her father’s out-burst had not only been disregarded but had turned the rest of the merchants against him. They set such store by dignified agreement, they couldn’t forgive him for ranting the way he had.

She found herself describing her father’s stricken look when the mayor’s men came and took away the striped pole outside the Lambert house—his alderman’s post, his treasured symbol of office, the pole on which aldermen posted their proclamations. She told him how her father had then fixed on the idea of mending his quarrel with the City’s great men by marrying off her and her sister; the way he’d suddenly announced she and Jane were to be betrothed to the outlandish suitors he’d picked for them, as soon as he’d heard King Edward’s army was winning and moving on London, as soon as he could be reasonably sure that the merchants would bow to circumstances and remember they’d been Yorkist all along and open the gates to King Edward; as soon as they might be persuaded to think her father hadn’t been so wrong after all.

Isabel thought her father had been rubbing his nose in his storeroom and plotting the whole thing for months beforehand.

Bitterly, she told the stranger how she and her sister were being sacrificed to her father’s ambition. It wasn’t fair, she said. He’d promised his daughters all their lives that, within reason, they’d have the freedom to marry as they chose. But when it came to it, he was breaking that promise.

“I know it makes sense to him,” she finished. “Half his old friends in the City are coming after him with court cases. They think he’s finished. They’re kicking him while he’s down. And he wants to show them he’s still got the power to make good alliances. He’s imagining a wedding banquet that will put every trading company’s summer feast into the shade—he loves parties; I just know he’s already envisioning those tables groaning with honeyed peacocks and blancmanges of asses’ milk. He wants to try and impress everyone with the idea that the Lamberts are still on top of the world. He thinks a couple of weddings will win them all back.

“But he doesn’t seem to see it won’t help him. They’ll still remember him as the man who shouted at the mayor. And we’ll be married to those clowns forever. It’s wrong. I’m too young to be married. I’m only fourteen. And anyway, the last person I’d choose, ever, would be Thomas Claver.”

The dark man from the church was easy to talk to. He kept steady eyes on her throughout her passionate monologue. He nodded understandingly when she looked sad and his eyes crinkled in amusement when, in the hope of entertaining him, she started using fanciful turns of phrase she wouldn’t normally have attempted. Yet when she came to a halt, Isabel had the uneasy feeling she’d got it wrong. He didn’t look fired up with any of her indignation. He just looked thoughtful.

He’d been cutting up bits of meat with his knife while she was talking. He looked down at the red squares on his board now she’d fallen silent and seemed almost surprised they were all still there. He speared one and began chewing on it, looking at her again, still reflecting, until, in an agony of self- consciousness, she began to wish she’d kept quiet, or at least asked him more about himself before telling all her woes.

“I can see why you’re unhappy,” he said in the end, and she glowed at the warmth in his voice. He wasn’t good- looking, quite.

His thin features weren’t as bold and regular and noble as her father’s, say, or the godlike, goldenLynom boys—the handsomest merchants’ sons in the City; the young men every City maiden dreamed of marrying. This man’s face was thin and serious; made to be worried. If he hadn’t sat so straight and used his wiry body so fluidly, if he wasn’t gazing at her with such unwavering attention, she might have found him rat- like. Mean- looking. But the richness of his voice vibrated through her, making him magical.

“You’re in a difficult position,” he was saying. “You think your father is making a bad judgment.”

She nodded, and took a sip from her cup of wine to hide the gratitude she could feel staining her face pink.

He leaned forward. Put his elbows on the table. She thought he might be going to touch her, comfort her. She blushed deeper and bent in on herself.

He didn’t. He just joined his hands together, placing them thoughtfully under his chin, and went on looking calmly at her.

“May I offer some advice?” he asked. His dignified simplicity made her feel ashamed of her own blurting.

Attempting to match his formality, she nodded again, trying not to let the hope shine too obviously on her face that he would hit on some easy way out for her.

“You have to marry as your circumstances demand,” he said, so gently she could hardly bear it. “I think from what you’ve told me that you know your father loves you. He’s saying he’s trying to do what’s best for your family. And it’s a father’s job to make good alliances for his children. Even if he hasn’t fully understood your feelings, perhaps he knows more about your family’s circumstances than you do.”

“But,” she stammered, lost in disappointment. “But . . .”

“I know,” he said sadly, “it’s not what you wanted to hear.”

He lowered his eyes. So did she, concentrating furiously on the new batch of pork rinds and pink shards of flesh on their own platters, willing away the hotness in her eyes.

“It can destroy a family if a father
doesn’t
think about how to marry his children, you know,” he was saying, somewhere behind the redness of her eyelids. “It nearly did mine.” She glanced up, surprised. His eyes were still on her, though they were unfocused now, far away, not so much looking into her soul as lost in a dark part of his own. “He spent his whole life at the war, my father, and he was a good soldier. But when we heard he’d been killed, there we were: a brood of orphans scattered around the country, without a single marriage that would have given us a new protector among the six of us. He never realized that making alliances for his family was just as important as winning battles; that you need friends to defeat your enemies—a strategy for living, not just for dying.”

He laughed, with a tinge of real bitterness. Isabel kept quiet, less because she was artfully drawing him out at last, as she’d imagined she would, than because she didn’t know how to respond. She was realizing uncomfortably how little she knew of the world outside the Mercery, of the world where the war was.

Trying to imagine what it would be like for your father to die, all that came to her mind was sounds: the snuffles of women weeping; the banging of a hammer, nailing down a coffin lid,nailing shut the door of her home; the chilly quiet of Cheapside by night, for those with nowhere to go; the scuttling of rats. Her mother had died too long ago for Isabel to remember her. But she couldn’t form a picture of a life in which her father wasn’t fretting in the silkroom, nagging a bit more work out of some sunken- eyed shepster, smiling even as he picked at a minutely off - kilter seam with his obsessively clean fingernails; or drawing in a noble client by singing out the beauty of his stock with his green eyes glowing; or counting out his piles of coin later with a sly laugh at how envious the noble client would be if she only realized by how much the servile merchant’s silk profits outweighed her rents and rolling acres. Isabel couldn’t imagine waiting, in some half- closed house in a field, for the rumor, or letter, or servant limping home in bandages, bringing word;
those
words, what ever this man must have heard. Yet even failing to envision it brought it closer. It had always been enough to know that the war happened to other people; but now she was talking to someone who had been touched by it, she felt herself, for the first time, weighed down with nameless possibilities. She didn’t know what the weak flexing in her gut was called, or the darkness seeping through her veins; but she thought it might be fear.

She crossed herself. Filled with a sudden longing to be wiser and older, she thought, It’s ignorant to live in a city that’s about to be entered by a conquering army (King Edward’s army was at St.

Albans, people said; it would be here any day, and the mayor had already given the order to let the soldiers in) yet be so innocent of disaster. Pig ignorant. I’ve grown up in a land where two families of kings have been fighting each other for the throne for as long as anyone can remember, and I know nothing about it. You don’t if you’re a Londoner. We hardly see it. Still, he’d think me a child if he knew.

He didn’t notice her gesture. “Well, we survived. But we’ve been unlucky ever since with our marriage choices,” he was saying, with a twist to his mouth that made his face look pinched and hard. “My eldest brother ran away with a war widow, the stupidest possible love match, just when what family we still had was finally arranging a proper alliance for him. We’re only just seeing the end of the years of hatred that brought. And then a second brother married to spite the eldest brother, deliberately going against his wishes. And that’s meant more trouble . . .”

He sighed and looked down at the neat meat squares his hands had been cutting as he talked, and pushed one gently toward himself with his knife. Then he stabbed it. Isabel took another sip of rough dark wine as it disappeared into his mouth, wondering which brother he’d been thinking of when he’d made that stabbing movement. “I’m glad it’s over now,” she ventured, glancing up, “your family trouble, I mean.”

Perhaps it was the smallness of her voice that made his eyes gentle again.

“Almost over,” he corrected, looking properly at her once more. “There’s still my marriage to arrange.”

For a second, his voice was so tender that her heart leaped.

She caught her breath, leaning eagerly forward behind her cup.

Then she felt a sigh ebb out of her as he went on, more harshly:“And now it’s my turn, there’s nothing I want more than to make a marriage that will be good for my family—but my second brother’s trying to stop me. He’s fighting it so hard that I think even my trying to do the right thing might turn out to be the wrong thing.

I’ve found myself thinking I should pull back . . . to satisfy him.”

His jaw tightened, as it had in church. “I’m not going to, though,” he added firmly. “That wouldn’t help either. But I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever stop being orphans at war, willful children in men’s bodies, destroying each other while we try to sort out the things our father should have decided.” He sighed. “You can see why I believe there’s nothing more important than marrying in the best interests of your family, can’t you?” he added with more energy. “You have to work together, do your duty; or you’re lost.”

“Oh,” Isabel muttered lamely. There was another long silence, broken from somewhere behind by a roar of male laughter.

The girl cleared away their boards. Isabel noticed that the light was failing. The window was still bright, but his face was falling into shadow. She hadn’t heard the bell; but the markets must be closing.

He was sitting very straight and apparently still on his stool.

She felt, rather than saw, the tiny movement of his hand twitching at his sword hilt. She remembered peeping sideways at his hands in the church: they’d been brown and well- made, with thin fingers and bitten nails.

She wanted to ask: “Do you love her?” But she sensed that was a question girls giggling in silkrooms might ask, and not for him.

Instead, she faltered, “But don’t you ever wish . . . ?” and left the question hanging. She didn’t know herself how she’d have finished it.

When his voice came out of the gloom again, it was wistful and there was no flash of eyes; he must be looking down.

“Ah, wishes,” he whispered back. “If we could live by our wishes . . . please ourselves: live at peace, kill nothing but dragons . . . eat buttercups . . . ride unicorns . . . who knows what any of us would do?”

She heard a quiet rumble of laughter. She could see the ghost of the evening star through a smeared windowpane. She put her cup down and left her hands spread on the table. She looked at the two pale shadows on the dark wood: fingers long and lovely enough to embroider church vestments with, as her father liked to say. The question flashed through her mind—Was he looking at them too?—as she thought, All I want is to go on sitting here in this darkness; not to talk; not to think; not to go home.

“Of course, you don’t have to take my advice,” he said in the end. When she looked up, his eyes were gleaming quizzically at her again, his long eyes the only clearly visible part of his shadowed form. “If you have choices, that is.”

“Choices?” she repeated dully, as reality came back like a sour taste in the mouth. Knowing that her father wouldn’t let her run away from marrying Thomas Claver by paying her dowry to a nunnery instead, since she’d never shown the least sign of having a vocation; wondering if she’d have the nerve to risk walking out of his great place, where she’d always been Miss Isabel, daintily perched on wallows of silk, sewing altar cloths, to become a withered, unregarded, unmarried house keeper in the house hold of the kind of wealthy wife Jane would become. Knowing she wouldn’t. Aware too that there were other, worse possibilities that her imagination was shying away from. “What choices?”

He glanced over at the chessboard and grinned. “Strategic choices,” he said, with a return of the wolfish energy she’d glimpsed as they left the church. “You mustn’t think life is a romance; that some knight errant will come along and slay the dragon for you.