Figures in Silk (27 page)

She added, “They say war is like the wind. It brings on the storm clouds, but it brings the silver linings too. You feel more 21 alive in the shadow of death. You seize your chances; you don’t think twice. And things change so fast that, even if everything you thought you had disappears just like that, other dreams come true. If you’re quick on your feet.

“Your Jane’s quick on her feet,” she finished, slipping an arm through Isabel’s. “She’s always had a kind heart. She’s helped you with your dreams. All of us. Maybe this is her time to have her dreams come true.”

Isabel’s head nodded rhythmically as she walked, eyes still fixed ahead; finding the warmth of Anne Pratte’s arm a comfort.

Thinking about dreams coming true.

William Hastings closed his eyes for a moment, shutting out everything but Jane’s mouth gently on his chest and her long hair under his mouth, the astonishing sensation of skin on skin; his arms around her; the quiet that no one now had a right to break.

He’d galloped here all the way from Westminster, his men lost behind him. He was drenched in sweat when he walked through her door, pacing and flashing with the memories of the morning.

He hadn’t said a word as he’d carried her upstairs. But he hadn’t needed to. It was the moment they’d both waited years for.

He opened his eyes. She was still there, soft as swan down.

Not a dream, then, he thought with a brief return of the humor that had deserted him earlier. But that meant the rest of what had happened wasn’t just a nightmare either.

He sat bolt upright, abruptly, bringing her up with him so she was straddling him again, so one of his hands brushed her white-peach thigh, so her hair fell over his shoulders. She made a little sound; somewhere between indrawn breath and giggle. But the eyes she turned on him were serious.

“What is it?” Jane was murmuring now, giving his lips butterfly kisses. She smelled of flowers. “What are you thinking?”

It was all flooding back now: why he was here. He clenched jaw and fists, trying to keep down the tide of fury, or fear, it made no difference which, that was rising in his throat.

The king was dead—the king he’d shared so many battlefields and beds and mistresses and misfortunes with, the red hazes of war and lust, since long before Edward was a king or hoped to be, since Will Hastings, a not very rich distant cousin, had first been made his boyhood gentleman in waiting. His dearest friend.

Worse. Edward’s death threatened the peace that had held for twelve years.

The Prince of Wales—the new King Edward V—was only twelve years old, not a good age for kingship at the best of times.

The boy was at Ludlow, where his separate court on the Welsh border was headquartered. What with all the solemn Masses they’d have to get through in every town they passed, it would take them weeks to get here. And until he reached London, the younger Edward would remain in the clutches of his tutor, Earl Rivers, that sly, prayerful, perfumed man of letters, with his almond eyes and suspiciously elegant turn of phrase: Queen Elizabeth’s brother—and a Woodville.

Woodvilles had already insinuated themselves into every nook and cranny at court. They’d crept in behind their queen, like spiders or scorpions. From now on, they’d be greedier still.

They’d want complete control of the new king, who was young and weak and easily influenced, whose blood ran in their veins.

That could lead only to one thing: a deadly struggle between the relatives of the queen and the relatives of the king—England’s true nobility.

Hastings was the only one of the king’s men in London.

And the entire loathsome swarm of Woodvilles, led by his old enemy Dorset, was here, coming after him. He’d be as loyal to the new King as he’d been to the old; but what if the new king was in the sway of the Woodville Dorset, who wanted him dead? He thought, I’m in danger, then realized he must have said it out loud.

Jane was staring at him. He squeezed her shoulders, added, while trying to keep panic out of his voice: “Considerable danger.”

“What do you mean?” she whispered.

“Woodvilles,” he replied, getting up, squeezing his hands hard over his eyes as if that would stopper up his panic.

Hastings had only called the council session that morning for administrative purposes: to organize how to bury one king and crown the next. But as soon as he’d seen the smug Woodville eyes at the table, glittering in the knowledge that they weren’t just unwanted in- laws anymore, but the new king’s blood relatives, he’d sensed trouble. Dorset’s were most openly full of fight. But even fat little Dr. Morton, who these days was Dowager Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s creature, had strutted to his seat with an impertinent grin. Morton hated Hastings and didn’t bother to hide it.

Morton would never forget that it would have been Hastings’s job to find him guilty of treason after the Warwick rebellion, when Morton had been caught on the losing Lancastrian side. Luckily for Morton, he’d somehow escaped from the Tower and saved himself; and he’d remade himself since as a Woodville fancier.

Hastings had thought, looking grimly at the blob of wobbling malice in priest’s robes in front of him: I should have finished him faster. Another mistake.

Hastings had asked Council to name Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as Protector of England until Edward turned fifteen and could rule in his own right. That would have been right. Dickon was the boy’s uncle; the senior prince of the York blood.

But they’d said no. They’d voted instead for some sort of regency council—controlled by Woodvilles, naturally.

When Hastings kept his temper, Dorset, unnervingly, began to stare at him. Jutting his jaw out. Leaning forward over clenched hands. Trying to stare Hastings down; the stare of a man with death in mind; holding the eye- lock for so long Hastings had thought he might pull out a sword then and there.

All Dorset actually said was: “Now let’s set a date for the coronation.” Then, still eyeballing Hastings: “I propose midsummer. St. John’s Eve.”

“We can’t decide that,” Hastings objected. “Not without Gloucester.”

But Dorset had only glittered malice back at him. Hastings thought the onetime country squire might actually have been pleased to be given the chance to sneer out his ill- bred impertinence. He’d curled his lips back and said, biting off each word:“We are quite important enough to take decisions without the king’s uncle.”

Now Jane was in front of him, peeling his hands off his eyes.

He was surprised to find how tight his muscles were clamped.

He told Jane: “Dorset wants to control the king; and he wants my blood.”

She murmured, uneasily. But she’d chosen him, not Dorset; he could trust her.

He went on: “I shouted at him in Council. I told him he was insolent and vicious. I said the Woodvilles’ blood was too base to rule England. And I walked out.”

Her eyes opened wide.

Hastings didn’t even tell her the worst. He’d been full of rage when he’d slammed the door on the Council meeting. But he’d only felt the prickle of real danger when, in the antechamber, a scrivener quietly showed him the order Dorset had wanted a fair copy of. The document—which Dorset planned to sign, “half brother to the King”—authorized Sir Edward Woodville to take the royal fleet to sea. If a Woodville seized control of the fleet, Hastings would be cut off from his power base at Calais. He’d be lost. “Thank you,” he said to the sweating scribe. He tore up Dorset’s page and dictated his own counter- order to the fleet—
Don’t
leave port
. The man scuttled back to his desk with Hastings’s coin in his hand and a mixture of relief and fear in his eyes. Hastings waited, fiddling with his sword. He signed. Then he took the fastest horse he could, at a gallop, to London, to be near the port.

He’d come here because Jane was here; but he also knew, if he were honest, that he hadn’t wanted to go to his own house on Paul’s Wharf. Even the idea of it made him feel trapped; made his flesh creep. He’d sent his retinue there. He was safer with Jane.

But those weren’t thoughts to share. All he said was, “I can’t fight all of them. I’m alone. I need to send word to Dickon.”

She must feel as alone against enemies without Edward as he did; as willing to jump at shadows. He gazed at her, wishing he could shut the world out and stay here with her forever. The sight of her made him feel suddenly old: tired of office, tired of soldier-ing, tired of caring, tired of the treachery that seemed to shadow anyone born to bear arms. They said there was no good to be found in the service classes; but he’d found the merchants of the staple at Calais to be honest and congenial sorts. And there was no one like Jane. Hastings’s wife, long dead now, had been just a marriage: a girl with good bloodlines and £400 a year, the fifth sister of the Earl of Warwick—a way for him to become Edward’s first cousin by marriage. He hardly remembered her. She hadn’t had hair that shimmered like spun gold, or looked at him with happy emerald eyes. She’d never sung like an angel. Made jokes that amused without hurting. Laughed like a goddess; danced like a lark on the wing. Nor had the other women. Just Jane, his second spring. He wouldn’t have been unhappy if fate had made him the humblest of merchants, he thought, if that had meant he could have married her and been free, for good, of the shadow of the sword.

Softly, Jane said: “I’ll find you paper and pen.” Her voice was steady. He took strength from it. She handed him his linen; slipped hers on too. “You can write your letter now.”

Isabel woke in the night.

The dread that had woken her wouldn’t go away.

She got up. Lit a candle from the embers of her fire. Her fear took shape.

With the king dead, what would happen to the silk- weaving contract? And the house?

Her mind flew north, to wherever Dickon was. If only he were here. If only he could advise her.

Biting her lip, she dropped to her knees.

Isabel went to see Jane early in the morning. Anne Pratte told her to—“She’ll want to see you,” she said, without a hint of the leer that would have made Isabel refuse—and walked with Isabel to Old Jewry again.

Once they were out of the house, Isabel asked, as plainly as she could: “Is our contract with the king still valid now he’s dead?”

Anne Pratte reacted equally calmly. “We don’t know,” she replied, looking ahead. “Alice thinks not.”

So they’d talked about it already, Isabel thought, with unwilling admiration. There were still things she could learn from them; they had the experience she didn’t of living in turmoil.

She felt Anne Pratte’s claw of a hand on her arm. “But no one will stop paying yet,” the soft little voice went on. “Everything will just go on as it is, out of inertia. And once things get settled the new way, if they don’t go our way, you’ve got your relation with Princess Elizabeth now. You can ask her to help. She’s the king’s sister: that’s got to count for something.”

Isabel persisted: “What if Goffredo’s already on his way?”

“Alice wrote to him yesterday; told him not to hurry until things are more settled,” Anne said, with none of the despair Isabel was feeling showing in her voice. “We’ll know better once everyone stops running round like a bunch of headless chickens.”

She squeezed Isabel’s arm. “Have faith,” she said. “I’m always telling you that. And don’t think about it now; there’s too much else to worry about.”

Isabel nodded, partly reassured by Anne’s confidence, more by the private faith she was placing in Dickon. Anyway, Anne was right: she could do nothing about it now.

Making an effort to put it out of her mind, she looked around.

There were too many people in the streets. Even if the markets were open, a lot of people were, like herself and Anne, not at work; instead they were sorting things out so they could face some event they hadn’t foreseen if it came suddenly upon them.

There was an air of purpose in the wet streets: the concentration of minds of house holders thinking what they could eat if there was no fresh food for sale; how many pickled eggs were left from Lent; how much dried fish; how much firewood; how much flour?

Joan Woulbarowe, humping a bag of kindling back to her room, stopped for long enough to hiss at them: “Can you believe it? They say the Woodvilles went into the king’s bedchamber while he was still lying dead on the bed and stole all his money and jewels. The Marquess of Dorset. Filthy carrion.”

“All I can say is, let’s hope the Duke of Gloucester gets here before there’s any more of that,” Anne Pratte said sententiously.

“He’s our best hope now. He’s straight, at least. And properly royal. It’s high time someone banged all their heads together and set things straight.” But Joan had already dived off down a dank alley with her load. Only Isabel—whose nighttime prayers had been for news that Dickon was on his way south—was left to hear. And she said nothing. She just looked hastily away, in case Anne Pratte’s sharp eyes saw the hope that Dickon’s name awoke in her heart.

Jane's door opened before Isabel even had time to knock.

Jane, dressed but with her head bare, looking pale, drew her sister quickly inside. “I’m so happy to see you,” she murmured, and Isabel saw her eyes were full of honey before Jane put her arms around her sister in a tight embrace. “Thank you for coming back.”

Jane clung to her. “Don’t think badly of me,” her voice said, from Isabel’s shoulder, through a hot cloud of hair. “I’ve always loved him. It’s mad; but I’m so happy.”

Isabel kissed the messy beauty of that hair. “I understand,” she whispered.

Jane looked up through it, shyly. “Do you?” she said. She must have seen forgiveness. Then, “Come in,” she added in a more ordinary voice. “Will Hastings is here.”

He was eating bread and cheese in the great hall. His buckler was propped up against the bench. He put his food aside, got up, and bowed when he saw Isabel. He was thinner than she remembered, with a silvering at the temples she hadn’t noticed yesterday. But he didn’t have the look of anger on him that she’d seen yesterday; the look that might also have been fear.

“Mistress Claver,” he said formally.