Figures in Silk (24 page)

Her voice sounded forced, even to herself; her smile was strained.

Dickon drew her into his arms and touched his nose to hers. She felt the whole length of his body against hers in the pause that followed. She never wanted him to go. “Passiontide, eh?” he murmured, and the lopsided smile on his face was one of farewell. “It would be good if you were in Westminster often by then. I might be, too.”

And he was off . A flash of eyes; then just a shadow flitting along the wall.

It always took a moment to shake off one world and enter another—a moment of dizziness. But she could hear women’s conversation in the great hall, where there’d be a fire by now, where they would have eaten already. The old silkwomen were waiting for her.

Sometimes the sound of those voices stripped Isabel of all the sleek self- assurance she’d assumed as she learned to make trades with the greatest merchants of Eu rope; sometimes they made her feel, again, like a shy young apprentice. To night was like that.

Sighing, Isabel reentered her own reality and pushed open the door.

Anne Pratte’s lip quivered when Isabel reported back on her successful first encounter at the palace, and told them plainly what she’d just decided at the front door—that if she was going to go back to Westminster once a week for the rest of the fittings, she’d stay a night there at the silk house once a week too. “It will avoid this late return,” she said, as the curfew bell began ringing outside the window, “in the dark.”

Alice Claver looked thunderous. But, as Isabel inspected her mistress’s face to see how bad the impending storm might be and what protective measures she should take, she found herself caught instead in the regretful thought: How old she looks. Iron- gray hair, so many tones darker than Anne Pratte’s gentle white that Isabel, who looked at both women every day, had somehow not been aware of it until now. A heavily corded throat. Lines dragging her cheeks down past her mouth; more lines between nose and mouth from her habit of wrinkling her lips into a small, tight O at the same time as she narrowed her eyes. Blotched, heavily veined hands.

“But,” Anne Pratte faltered, “you can’t. You’ll be away for half the working week.”

“Quite impossible!” Alice Claver barked. “You spend far too much time gadding about as it is. We need you here.” She paused.

Considered. Added, “I,” and nodded, more decisively, “need you here.”

Touched, Isabel said: “But I’ll still be here.” It was a new idea to her that her formidable teachers might be lonely without her, but Alice Claver’s jutting lower lip made it wrenchingly plain how much they must now depend on her to be their child, their hope, their entertainment. She made her voice gentle. “It’s only one night a week.”

In principle, they should have been excited; let her do what she needed to make the contract work. Most people in the Mercery would have killed for this contract. Once Isabel had been to the palace for measurements and fittings, she could subcontract the agreed alterations through the Claver house. The money would be excellent. And the prestige of working directly for the royal family, without having to bow and scrape to the officials at the Royal Wardrobe in Old Jewry, was beyond price.

Suddenly Isabel recalled Jane’s bright, encouraging gaze when she’d told her sister about the promised work. “It’s up to you,”

Jane had said kindly, “to make yourself so indispensable that you go on being called back to Westminster to do more.” Remembering the kindness in those beautiful eyes made Isabel prickle uncomfortably, when she knew she was so often so uncharitable toward her sister. Thanks to Jane, there need be no more of the subterfuges she’d had to enter into until now, whenever Dickon sent word in his peculiar way—“There’ll be cured pork for sale at 1 the Almonry tomorrow at noon,” or “Firewood on Friday”—to signify he was on the road south.

It had always been so hard for her to get away from Alice and Anne; she’d run out of excuses. Once she’d had to return to London before Dickon even got to Westminster. He’d been delayed; she’d been pretending to equip the kitchen at the Westminster silk house with pans; to have stayed a second night would have meant worrying Alice. Another time, after another delay on the road from Middleham, she’d had to throw herself on Jane’s incurious mercy and pretend to be staying with her sister while, in reality, she was sneaking back to Westminster to wait again in the empty silk house, stuffing rags around the shutters so her candle flame wouldn’t show, slinking into cook- shops, buying pies with her face half covered by veils, or just going hungry, too consumed by the hope he was at the door, or would be soon, to care. Now, the work Jane had found her would make it possible for Isabel to be nearby when Dickon was there; Isabel’s faith and planning would do the rest. Jane’s done me a big favor, she thought guiltily.

“But, dear, you can’t do the job properly anyway; you’re not a real vestment maker,” Anne Pratte was saying plaintively.

From behind her, her husband, sitting so quiet and still that Isabel had almost forgotten he was there, rumbled into life. Sympathetic life, Isabel was relieved to hear.

“But, dear, that doesn’t matter,” William Pratte said, with exaggerated patience. “It’s not a problem to find craftswomen. That’s not what we’re talking about. This is a great opportunity for Isabel. Of course she must do what ever she needs to make a good fist of it.”

“Well, what about the petition?” Anne Pratte wailed back at her husband. “We can’t finish that without her.”

Isabel smiled. That, at least, was clearly not true. William Pratte had the next draft petition to be presented to Parliament under his hand. They’d been discussing it before they ate. Even now the light had all but gone, Isabel could still make out phrases from the front- page preamble, written out in his crabby old- man’s hand:
“Sylkewymmen and Throwestres of the Craftes and occupation of
Silkewerk . . .” “. . .lyved full honourably, and therewith many good
House holdes kept, and many Gentilwymmen and other in grete noum-bre like as there nowe be more than a M, haue be drawen under theym in
lernyng the same Craftes and occupation ful vertueusly . . .”
He could be long- winded on paper. But he wasn’t now. He just picked up the papers and waved them at his wife. She looked damply down.

“Don’t be a fool, Anne,” Alice Claver said. “That’s not the point.” She fixed Isabel with an accusing stare. “It’s Goffredo.”

Now they all turned to look at Isabel.

Goffredo’s current trip to Venice was supposed to be the very last of the dozens he’d made, over the years, to set up the business. When he came back, he’d have the Venetian master weavers he’d contracted with him: Gasparino di Costanzo, Alvise Bianco di Jacopo, and Marino da Cataponte. Their families would come too. Once they reached England, they’d need to be set up; brought to the Westminster house, have servants hired, be taught enough English to survive in the street, and be provided with food, firewood, silk thread, and the discreet, handpicked apprentices from London whom Isabel had already sounded out. It would be pandemonium for months; the time they’d been waiting on for so long. It could start any day now. They were ready and waiting for Goffredo: debts settled, Venetian travel permits issued, bags practically packed.

At least, they were supposed to be. But Isabel surely wasn’t the only person in the room to realize that, even if Goffredo didn’t run into storms on the journey, there were bound to be more last- minute hitches and hiccups once he was there. There was only a month and a half before Passiontide. “Passiontide at the latest!” he’d promised, joyful and optimistic as ever. But they all also remembered that Isabel had raised an eyebrow at him over the table. And that he’d blushed and shrugged as if she’d caught him out in a lie, and spread his big hands out so wide that the jewels on his fingers had glittered, and added, “If I possibly can,” in a shamed little- boy way. Personally, Isabel doubted he and his teams would get to England before the end of summer.

Michaelmas. Or, just possibly, if things went unusually smoothly, by Lammastide in August. Meanwhile, she reasoned, there was no point in turning down lucrative work.

She hesitated, feeling her way into words that would persuade, not off end, Alice and Anne. Refusing to feel panic that this gift, this freedom that her sister had won her, could be snatched away. Wondering how Dickon would have handled the old women’s resistance. Letting her tongue and her instinct take the lead.

In the end, staring at the expectant eyes, all Isabel did was to smile and spread her hands out wide. “This is only for a few months,” she said firmly. “It’s a question of putting out the work, and getting it back in. It’s a wonderful relationship to nurture; and, anyway, do we really know when Goffredo is coming?”

She added, sarcastically: “Passiontide at the latest!” Then: “
Eef
poss- ssible! May Day eef not a-poss- ssible! Or St. John’s Eve, or Lammastide! Or Michaelmas! Or Christmastide eef my ship a-sinks
!”

She wasn’t really that good at Goffredo’s Venetian braggadoc-cio. But her imitation made William Pratte laugh—a big snort of relief. Then, with silent women on either side giving him their most terrifying stares, he snuffled and stopped. “Well,” he said,looking hunted, “she’s right, you know. It will take him months. Venice always does.”

Two more deadly looks struck him. But he went defiantly on: “Look, even if he does get here by Passiontide, or Lady Day, it’s surely not a problem. Isabel will already be spending one night a week at Westminster. She’ll be right where she’s needed.”

There was another awful silence. Finally, slowly, reluctantly, Anne Pratte muttered, “I suppose you’re right, dear,” and turned up the corners of her mouth in something not far off a smile. The ice and fire went out of the spring air. And although Alice Claver continued to say nothing, just to give William Pratte the kind of looks that Christ in His goodness had forborne to give Judas Iscariot, her furious distress at the planned change in their routine somehow didn’t matter. The decision Isabel wanted had been taken without Alice Claver’s consent: a sign of the shift in power in the house hold that they all, without speaking, recognized. Full of relief and sunshine, Isabel found herself thinking of the older woman’s thwarted rage with something like sympathy.

In the morning, Isabel went to Old Jewry to thank Jane. She knew it was right to visit her sister. And she was grateful to her. But there were butterflies in her stomach all the same.

She didn’t know why she still found it so hard to be affectionate and gracious with her sister. She should feel easier with Jane, she thought, now that her own income had become substantial enough to take the sting out of having been disinherited. Isabel’s profits from trading had allowed her to invest about a third of her capital in three small rental houses, six shops in the Crown Seld, a block of stalls down Soper Lane, and the tenement in which Joan Woulbarowe’s old aunt Rose Trapp lived. Her rents alone must equal anything John Lambert’s inheritance would bring Jane, especially now that he’d chosen the precarious route to wealth of relying on rents from country property, and since he had (foolishly, in Isabel’s view) allowed the king to repay all those vast cash loans with manors of dubious provenance, estates confiscated from exiled Lancastrians and scattered around the West Country.

John Lambert lived in Somerset now. Isabel didn’t see him. Jane said he had aspirations to buy or earn himself a knighthood, enter the gentry. Still, he must worry: What if, one day, the Lancastrians he’d displaced out there came back to claim their lands? Jane had the house in Old Jewry that had been her portion after Will Shore had finally seen sense and accepted the annulment the king arranged. She had the king’s gifts and jewels. Still, Isabel was certainly richer.

It didn’t make any difference. Being with Jane still made her feel all thumbs and elbows. An afterthought. Second best.

It didn’t help that as she turned the corner into Old Jewry, she bumped, literally, into Will Caxton, who’d stopped in the street to brush worriedly at himself before what must be an important meeting. As soon as they’d disentangled themselves, he went back to picking imaginary specks off his carefully brushed baldekin doublet, not seeming to realize his sleeves were so worn they’d gone threadbare at the elbow. “Isabel, in London, what a pleasure,” he said at the same time, peering affectionately at her, then bowing with the dignified mercer’s formality he’d maintained long after leaving the guild. “I was just going to pay a call on your sister. Are you?”

She smiled a little sadly and nodded. “I suppose I should have expected to find you heading this way too, Will,” she said, wishing Jane’s magic didn’t work so reliably on every man she met, even this one, Isabel’s dearest old friend.

Ever since Caxton had come back to England, and really had set up his print shop, and his home, at Westminster, right next to Isabel’s silk house, she was in and out all the time. She relied on him to keep an eye on her house, to light the occasional fire in winter and open the occasional window in summer. She turned to him for advice about how to store and stack the machines Goffredo was sending, and for keys and pans and the occasional loan of servants. But their friendship was closer than that. Will Caxton, with his new printing venture, was already living the dream Isabel had for her own future. She drank in every one of his stories about the ups and downs of his business. She kept his secrets.

She sympathized with the loneliness and worry of his work. She trusted his judgment. She’d come to think of him like family; like a rather old brother.

But she couldn’t quite respect his feelings for Jane. It had been five years since the elderly widower first declared his love for Jane Shore by dedicating to her one of the books he was now printing full- time on the presses he’d brought home. Not by name—he’d been too timid—but they’d all known who he had in mind when he’d prefaced his Chaucer translation of Boethius in 1478 with the coy phrase “printed at the request of a singular frende & gossip of mine.”