Figures in Silk (39 page)

She kept her face tilted down; raised the second eyebrow. As slowly and coolly as she could manage, she raised just her eyes, too, to Elizabeth’s face.

Why are you telling me this? Isabel’s eyes silently beseeched her. But the princess didn’t notice. She’d had no hope for so long.

Now she was full of this possible escape.

The more Isabel heard, the less she liked it. It was a full- blown plot.

Queen Elizabeth Woodville had been approached with the idea of the marriage by the Duke of Buckingham, who’d sent a messenger; and he in turn had been approached by Henry Tudor’s mother on the road to Shrewsbury (Lady Margaret Beaufort was, as she innocently explained, going to pray at the shrine of the Virgin at Worcester).

The idea, at the beginning, had been to resuscitate a marriage plan for Elizabeth and Henry of Richmond that had first been vaguely raised a year earlier, with old King Edward, after Elizabeth’s French marriage had fallen through: a harmless plan that would allow Henry Tudor back to England, return some of his forfeit estates, and let him live quietly in Wales, on his father’s ancestral lands, with his Plantagenet bride.

But it hadn’t taken long for the Dowager Queen, Lady Margaret, and the Duke of Buckingham to realize that the new King Richard was even less likely than his brother to welcome the last Lancastrian imp home. If they hadn’t realized that themselves, it was soon borne in on them once they admitted a fourth person to their counsels: Dr. Morton, the bishop of Ely, the wiliest man in England: a man to spot and iron out the shortcomings in any plot, a man to go for the jugular.

Isabel had heard plenty of talk about Dr. Morton. Lord Hastings had loathed him. Morton had been arrested when Hastings was beheaded. People had said in the summer that he’d somehow escaped from the Tower. But that turned out to be wrong. His friends at Oxford University had lobbied so hard for him to be set free that Dickon had released him into the personal care of the Duke of Buckingham, a dear friend; the man who’d helped Dickon stop the Woodvilles and take control of Edward Bastard.

At the time, Isabel had thought Dickon’s idea of quietly giving the prisoner to Buckingham to lock up in the depths of Wales was foolproof enough. But now, as the princess talked, she realized what a dangerous mistake it had been.

Dickon hadn’t thought the rotund little bishop of Ely would be any trouble at all for the tall, terrifying duke, especially if the two of them were holed up together in remote Brecknock Castle. But he hadn’t thought enough about Morton’s bright little eyes, burning out of his red slab of a face; about his knack for a well- turned joke and a bark of laughter; about the energy and cynicism with which the bishop would turn his talent for talking to saving himself. It hadn’t occurred to him that Harry Buckingham, who had only ever known other tall, tight tornadoes of aristocratic power like himself and was scarcely ever seen off a horse’s back or unarmed, might be so surprised and fascinated by the prelate’s steady stream of sly conversation that, for the first time in his life, he would feel he almost understood what it was to fall in love. That was the miracle Dr. Morton seemed to have achieved. He’d talked his jailer round—making him change sides, and turn to the Woodvilles and Lancastrians.

Now Morton was involved, the nature of the plan had changed.

He opened the two mothers’ eyes to bigger opportunities. There was no more talk of persuading King Richard to allow Princess Elizabeth to marry Henry Tudor. King Richard only figured in the current version of the plan as a corpse. Morton’s idea was that Henry would invade England, seize the throne, kill King Richard, rescue Elizabeth, and marry her.

“Easy,” Isabel said expressionlessly.

The princess paused and gave her the slightly worried look of a raconteur who fears the audience is not getting the point of the story.

Isabel smiled, to put the princess’s mind at rest. But behind her smile she was thinking: I don’t want a new king. I don’t want any more unrest. I don’t want to hide inside my house for weeks, behind bars and shutters, drinking rainwater, listening for footsteps; I don’t want my old folk terrified half to death by Kentish looters. And I certainly don’t want to have to beg for a new license for the silk house from a new king—a stranger—when everything has got so far. I want things to stay as they are.

Loudest of all, her heart was screaming: I don’t want a king who’s not Dickon. She was remembering him warm against her, before he’d set off on his latest travels, pulling her to him at the tavern window to look at the full moon rising, and saying, very quietly, in a voice that sent shivers down her back while her waist and ribs and shoulders were warmed against his flesh: “This is what I do when we’re apart. I come out and look at the full moon and think of you, wherever you are. You don’t feel so far away if I can think you’re looking at the same moon.”

She shook herself. “Well, so . . . what’s he like, your future husband?” she said, trying to look and sound warmer without saying anything overtly treasonous; who knew what the princess might take it into her head to blurt out about this conversation at some later date?

Elizabeth shrugged. “Don’t know,” she said calmly. “Bad teeth, thin hair: that’s what people say. It’s not for me to ask. My mother would think anyone a good catch if they had a chance of being King of England . . . I just obey.”

She said it with complete acceptance. There was even a hint of rueful laughter in her eyes when she looked at Isabel again; as if she knew Isabel was secretly counting the beads of her own memories of Dickon, and giving thanks for each one, and feeling blessed to have been born, not with Elizabeth’s royal blood flowing in her veins, but with all the possibilities of freedom and damnation open to her. As if the princess, for a moment, had become older and wiser than her confidante.

“ They're planning to move on St. Luke’s Day,” Isabel said clearly. It was important to get the detail right. “October the eighteenth. Risings all over southeast England. Kentishmen attacking London. The Duke of Buckingham bringing an army of Welshmen across the Severn. A West Country army meeting him.

Then both armies going to meet Henry Tudor, who’ll be landing in Devon with five thousand soldiers from Britanny. Then all of them marching east to engage you.”

Dickon had covered his face with his hands and turned his back when she’d first said his friend Buckingham was planning to betray him. There’d been a groan from inside the rumpled linen, where his head was. But she’d gone on talking to his one exposed shoulder, with its beloved tawny skin. Feeling righteous. Something had to be done.

He’d turned back round when she’d started giving the military details, though. She’d felt the alert flash of his eyes, sensed his mind fixing on her. He couldn’t have expected her to know this. Now he was eating her up with his stare, weighing every word, almost smiling. When she finished, he did smile. But all he said was: “You’d have made a good soldier.” And they lay in silence for a while, thinking their thoughts.

She hadn’t had a qualm in the end.

After she’d left the princess, she’d gone back to the silk house to think. She’d sat distractedly for a while, watching Joan Woulbarowe grinning rather prettily at her Lombard, Gasparino’s brother Andrea, pulling down her lips to cover her bad teeth, as the first shaky pattern began to appear in the damask they were working on together, and giggling delightedly when the darker, younger man murmured Italian back at her, of which Isabel could only make out basic words, “
Benon, benon
,” but perhaps Joan had already grasped more of the language. Or perhaps she just liked the seductive tone of voice. Isabel thought: Do I protect the princess’s secret? Or do I protect these people? My people?

The answer had been too obvious to worry over. You had to look after your own. It wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it might be to betray the princess’s trust.

Dickon sat up in the bed. The straw in the mattress was fresh and soft and smelled of summer. He was going to make light of it to her.

“Well, what do you think?” he said, his voice higher than usual. “Could they win?”

He kept his eyes turned away.

“I’m no soldier,” she said helplessly.

“You’re my most honest adviser.”

He waited.

She said, doubtfully, thinking of all those armies blundering around different parts of the West Country, trying to meet up.

“Well, it seems . . . messy.”

She didn’t think the armies would beat Dickon’s. Not by themselves. But what if ordinary people were pleased enough at the idea of getting rid of this king that they joined the enemy armies?

There was so much talk, so many people who suspected Dickon had stolen the crown, insulted his mother’s honor, killed his nephews, and who disliked him for it.

He nodded, as if he understood the thought she was hesitating over. The hardness that had always been a possibility in his face was suddenly visible again, in lines round his cheeks and eyes. He was making plans, moving troops in his mind.

She could see he wouldn’t let himself be harmed. What worried her now was the harm he might do while he was making himself safe. She said, hastily: “Dickon.” And when he looked at her, with eyes that were somewhere else, she added, as if the fog she lived in had suddenly cleared: “Please. What ever you do, don’t hurt the princess.”

He didn’t answer straightaway. She wished she could know what was on his mind. He kissed her forehead, and her heart turned over. “Of course,” he said, more gently than she’d expected. “Elizabeth’s not to blame. I’d never hurt her.” After a pause, he added: “I wouldn’t harm any of my kin. And I’d never kill a woman. You know that.”

London only hear the story of how the October rebellion was put down with delays, in dribs and drabs, in taverns and markets, from messengers and heralds, peddlers and gossips, as bitter autumn rain stripped leaves from the trees and life from the streets.

The rain stopped the Duke of Buckingham’s army, as if God were on King Richard’s side. A storm blew Henry Tudor’s little fleet to the wrong place. He never landed. Prudently, he sailed back to Britanny. The various West Country uprisings fizzled out without joining up. Buckingham was caught at Salisbury and beheaded.

Lady Darcey was present at Isabel’s next few sewing sessions.

Isabel avoided the princess’s pink eyes, feeling the dislike that comes naturally for someone you’ve wronged. The uprising was not mentioned. Three needles flashed in silence. The king was away in the West Country for weeks, cleaning up.

No one harmed Princess Elizabeth or her mother or sisters.

Dickon had told the truth about that, at least. None of the street talk even associated them with the foiled plot. People on the street just wondered why the king hadn’t done something worse to Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry Tudor’s mother, who was known to have been raising money in the City for the uprising.

She was under house arrest, but her jailer was her husband, Lord Stanley. There was no accounting for it, they shrugged; she’d only try again. They weren’t softened by the king’s softness.

The person most frightened by the talk of armies, as far as Isabel could see, was Jane. She’d got out of bed at last, and recovered her health enough to go to church every morning and have her daily interrogations conducted, in Alice’s great hall, by the king’s solicitor. ThomasLynom might be a royal bureaucrat, but he seemed a friendly enough man, with his brother’s kindly eyes and good bones. He raised his hat to Isabel and passed the time of day affably enough with her whenever they passed in the hall, and she sensed he was well disposed toward Jane. But when the invasion talk started, Jane, very quiet by day, began grinding her teeth and crying out in her sleep at night. Her thin fingers pulled at things. Whenever Isabel stayed in London, sharing a bed with Jane, she noticed boxes with their silk hinges broken, ripped cushions with their stuffing pulled half out. But she didn’t ask Jane what was troubling her. She couldn’t. It wasn’t her place, if Jane hadn’t confided in her. Isabel stifled the hurt she might have felt that Jane hadn’t done so. She’d hoped that they might become closer, but perhaps it was as well they hadn’t. Isabel didn’t trust herself with other people’s secrets anymore. Her sister might just say something she’d feel compelled to tell Dickon.

But Isabel listened. And one day, as she left the house for the Guildhall, where she was to represent the Clavers at a meeting with Low Country merchants, through the open door of the great hall she overheard Jane’s new, thin, weak voice. “I’m so afraid,” her sister was saying, and she sounded on the verge of tears. “I have nightmares about soldiers . . . I wake up in the night thinking they’re coming for me.”

There was a comforting male rumble.

“But I’m a sitting target,” Jane said, her voice going higher before it did break into sobs. “And it would be so easy for him to do it again. Blame me for all this. Call me a witch. Make a public example of me . . . I’m so afraid, so afraid . . .”

Isabel slipped out. She didn’t want to hear any more.

She didn’t hurry back; she didn’t want to have to face Jane’s terror. But when she did slip in to dinner, late, everything had changed. Alice and Anne weren’t the only people at the table, methodically shoving food into their mouths. ThomasLynom was there too, sitting beside Jane, and there were flowers on the table, and Jane, who’d hardly eaten a thing for days, was looking at her interrogator with shining eyes as he put bits of game pie in her mouth and murmured, to approving laughs from the silkwomen,“Now, eat up, do; you look like a dying bird; it’s time we fattened you up.”

Jane got up when she saw her sister. Shyly, she smiled. “Isabel,” she said, and Isabel was astonished to see her sister’s eyes start batting up and down, in that charmingly flirtatious way she’d had before, from the hands in her lap to Isabel’s face. “I have something to tell you . . .”

Isabel guessed what was coming as soon as she glanced at Thomas, who was blushing to the roots of his dark blond hair, looking a fool but too happy to care.