Figures in Silk (43 page)

Elizabeth hadn’t settled to the work. She was restless. When she’d seen the silkwoman walk in, she’d just nodded and flown off to her sisters’ bedchambers—the chambers all opened on to the same reception room—chirruping at them from the doorways to come out and finish the work they’d started. Then she’d called to Isabel: “I have a letter to finish; I’ll join you shortly,” and vanished.

Isabel was left alone with the younger girls, who didn’t much like the idea of sewing up panels they were only pretending to have embroidered themselves, but who at least hadn’t altogether lost the habit of confiding. So she sewed. They talked. She listened.

“Our mother is so happy to be back at court . . .”

“She’s even started writing to Uncle Dorset . . .”

“He’s her son . . . our half brother . . . her favorite, we think . . . she misses him . . .”

“She’s told him it’s quite safe here now, after all . . .”

“She wants him to desert Henry Tudor . . .”

“And come home . . .”

“And he’s thinking about it . . .”

“It’s miserable in Britanny, he says . . .”

“Cold and tense . . .”

“So he says he might come . . .”

“And we’re wondering if he’ll be here by Christmas.”

She smiled, for their happiness but also for the shiver of hope in her own heart. Perhaps that was what all the whispering and letters whisked away when she got too close had been about all along; perhaps the plotting had been as innocent as these children’s stories; perhaps there’d been no reason for her to worry. The queen wasn’t dead, for all the gloomy rumors in the markets. Dickon didn’t need a new wife. The queen would get better. The rebels would creep back from abroad, like Dorset. He’d regain his old confidence; get over his grief; lose his fears. She just needed to keep faith.

The children got bored before the work was done. One by one they lisped their excuses and went back to their rooms. Isabel carried on sewing, alone, feeling more peaceful than she had all summer. She just needed faith, she thought; everything would be all right. Have faith, she found herself whispering, in time with her stitches. Have faith.

A shadow moved nearby. Male footsteps stopped a few paces away. She didn’t recognize them; it must be a servant. She didn’t look up.

The footsteps moved quietly away. It wasn’t a servant. The man had spurs that clinked. Looking past her needle at the ground, she saw mud on his boots. The spurs were golden.

With a shock, she realized whose boots these were. This was how they’d first met, wasn’t it? In a church, by candlelight, with the spurs glinting.

There was a silence the length of a held breath. He’d always had the gift of stillness.

Her first instinct, before she even looked up, was to surrender to the tide of happiness flooding over her. She’d been waiting for months to feel his hand on the curve of her back again; the deep, comforting, heel- of- the- hand caress she’d made her life. Concern on his thin, dark face, in his narrow eyes, which needn’t be hard.

The silken bass voice murmuring, “I’ve missed you.” And now he was here.

The things she hadn’t realized she’d been planning to say all summer were on her lips now. She’d say: “I’m sorry.” She’d say: “I took no account of your grief.” She’d say: “I reacted wrongly,” and: “I will always love you.” They never talked of love. She’d say anything to make it right.

The weight she’d been carry ing for so long was miraculously rising from her shoulders. Everything could be mended, she thought blissfully: everything. She looked up.

But none of what she’d imagined happened.

When their eyes did meet, she found him poised, taut and still and dark as ever. But his expression was guarded. His eyes were hooded. There wasn’t even a ghost of a smile on his lips. She thought: He’s embarrassed. She realized, hotly: Embarrassed I’m here.

She realized: He’s come to see Elizabeth first.

He bowed slightly. She’d never seen him in court clothes; in smooth- fitting hose; in a beautifully cut, black velvet tunic with gold embroidery and a jeweled crucifix swinging from it; in an elaborate mulberry hat. He didn’t remove the hat.

“Good day,” he said quietly, but his eyes slid away.

“You’re here,” she said. It sounded stupid. But she didn’t understand. Why hadn’t he sent her a message?

He looked around at all the open doorways. Nodded, rather sadly.

“To see the lady Elizabeth,” he said, in the kind of firm but gentle voice people use when breaking bad news.

Beseechingly, she put a hand out; her eyes were so full of heat and wetness she could hardly see him. She couldn’t bear it.

He caught the hand. Clasped it in both his. “Isabel,” he muttered; and when she somehow managed to open her eyes and look piteously up at him, stripped of every shred of pride and self- respect she’d ever laid claim to, she saw pain in his eyes too.

“I was coming to you, too,” he whispered indecisively. “Truly.”

She could see he didn’t know how to placate her—not here, where anyone might come in at any time.

But he hadn’t come to her first. Her mind kept coming back to that. He always came to the Red Pale before the palace. The only reason he could have to avoid meeting her this time was that he did intend to marry Elizabeth—and, worse, that he loved Elizabeth—and didn’t want to have to explain himself to Isabel.

Isabel knew him too well to be deceived. He must have realized she’d see through him if he tried to lie.

Nothing else made sense.

“It’s not that I don’t want . . . ,” he whispered. He was having trouble getting the next word out. His teeth were clenched. He shut his eyes. “. . . you.” He squeezed her hand till she thought her bones would break. “You know I do. But I need this.”

There was no time for more. Low though their voices were, Elizabeth had heard something. She came dancing out through her doorway with sunshine on her white- peach cheeks and, with more charm than decorum, half ran over the flagstones toward her uncle.

Hastily, Dickon dropped Isabel’s hand at the first sound from the bedchamber. Then he turned to his niece and clasped her hands instead. As he bowed to her, Isabel saw the look he gave Elizabeth—a look of utter, devoted enchantment; nothing like the amused way his eyes crinkled at her. Then it was gone, while he swept his hat down, revealing the rumpled black hair that Isabel wanted, more than ever before, to run her fingers through; the head she knew, in that instant, she’d never touch again.

The princess fluttered, looking beautiful. Turning uncertainly toward Isabel, whose presence she’d just remembered. “This is my . . . embroiderer . . . Mistress Claver,” she murmured to him, as if drawing his attention to the presence of a servant. “His Majesty,” she added, over Isabel’s head.

“Your Majesty,” she said, head down, so no one could see her clenching her teeth. “I was just leaving.”

“No,” the princess said politely, “please stay. Don’t hurry. Fin-ish the work before you go.” She turned to Dickon, and slipped her arm through his. Dully, Isabel watched the two arms, one black, one a gleaming blue- green, twine together. “I was hoping His Majesty might take me for a stroll anyway . . . ?”

He bowed again and walked his niece out. Neither of them looked back. The princess was giggling in a breathy, girlish way.

His head was bowed toward her.

Isabel sat and listened to their footsteps recede until all she could hear was the beat of her own heart. She was remembering those two arms touching each other. She was staring at the roses and pearls on the altar cloth, but her eyes weren’t focused; she could only see a vague whiteness, the color of clouds and shrouds.

She could still feel herself breathing, strangely calm. But she didn’t understand how that could be, since her life had just ended.

No one else was there, so, methodically, obsessively, Isabel searched the rooms for more proof. It didn’t take long. Elizabeth had left a letter out, only half finished, in her private room.

Like a spy, Isabel scanned the page. The princess had been writing to the Duke of Norfolk—Lord Howard’s new title, a reward for helping Dickon take power last year.

In the letter, the princess asked the Duke of Norfolk “to be a mediator for me to the king, on behalf of the marriage pro-pounded between us.”

The princess called Dickon “my only joy and maker in this world.”

The princess wrote that she was the king’s, in heart and thought.

The princess had stopped and scratched out the last line of her draft. But Isabel could still make out what was underneath the petulant stabs of ink. The words Princess Elizabeth had thought better of writing had been: “Winter is on us already, and I fear the queen will never die.”

Feeling blanketed in an otherworldly white cloud, Isabel walked back to the Red Pale, wondering at how ordinary her rhythmic footfalls sounded, how steady her breathing.

“ Forget him,” Will Caxton kept saying. “We all make mistakes. Put it behind you. Let it go.” She could feel his hands patting ineffectually at her heaving shoulders. She could feel the rough wood of his kitchen table against her cheek. He seemed to have been saying the same thing for hours—ever since she’d admitted that, for more than a year, she’d let him believe a falsehood by suggesting her relationship with Dickon was over—and his voice was harder than his hands.

“I can’t,” she sniveled or howled by turns, hating her weakness. She couldn’t imagine a life without Dickon. What would be left?

Seriously, Caxton said: “You must. Don’t think you can play Jane to his Edward and not be scarred. He’s not Edward. Edward might have been a sensualist, but he had a good heart, at least. He honestly loved Jane.”

Isabel was too flayed inside to feel the anger she should at being compared with Jane. She shouldn’t have told Will that Dickon had never said he loved her, had never given her gifts. Perhaps that was why Will looked angry; he was such a soft man. He thought love should be hearts and flowers and frolics. He couldn’t imagine it being the need she felt.

She just muttered, defiantly: “But I don’t want troubadours and trinkets. That’s not why . . . I’m not like Jane. I didn’t want a king. He wasn’t a king when I met him. I didn’t even know who he was. He was just a man, one who showed me how to think, how to plan for success. When I had nothing else; when I was just an apprentice; when my father turned me away; I thought, all the time, for years, what would
he
do in my position? I modeled myself on him . . .” She sniff ed. “And if I lose him, and that, I’d lose what I’ve made myself. What would be left?”

Will said, impatiently, “But you’re not making sense. So what if he taught you chess? You’re certainly not thinking strategically now. You’re blinding yourself to your own needs. You’re letting him hurt you. You’re refusing to see the truth: that even if you love him, he’s cold. Corrupt. Rotten to the core. You must know that. Don’t let him corrupt you too.”

She shook her head, desperate to defend Dickon. “But he’s not,” she stammered. “People say he’s wicked. But he’s not.”

The shadows from the candle flame lent Caxton’s gentle features the sternness of an avenging angel. “Look,” he said, “this isn’t the worst thing he’s done, by a long way. I can see it would hurt you to find out he’s fixing up a marriage to the niece he calls a bastard before his wife’s even dead. But why are you so much more upset about this than anything else? You can’t have just for-3 gotten the rest, surely? Putting your sister in prison. Murdering her lover. Stealing the throne. Killing his nephews.”

“But he didn’t, he didn’t,” she sobbed defiantly. “They’re alive.”

Very gently, he said, “How do you know?”

“Because the princess told me.”

“And how does she know?”

“Because she got a letter from her brother. It’s what made her come out of sanctuary.”

“And who delivered the letter to her?” Caxton asked.

Dickon. She didn’t bother saying the word. She could see Will knew.

He nodded, as if she’d proved his point. “You see,” he said kindly. “If you believe that, he’s corrupted you already.”

Caxton found a scrap of compassion for the princess. “She’d want to believe it—her mother too—because their only chance of becoming royal again is if she marries his crown. But you’re better than that; there’s no need for you to believe a lie. Try and think clearly. It makes no sense to break your heart over whether he’s fallen in love with your princess. What you should be worrying about is what he wants from you. He’s never loved you; he just needed someone to approve of all his schemes and games and maneuverings for power, someone to make him feel he’s not wicked.

He is. He didn’t even care enough about you not to persecute your sister when it suited him. Can’t you see?”

“But—,” she sobbed. It was all true; Will was right; Dickon’s darkness was eating away at her. But she didn’t care, as long as she could see him. Sometimes; somehow. “He’s all I have.”

That made Will angry. He stopped patting her shoulders. He stood up, pushing his stool back. He grabbed her wrists and pulled her up too. The pale eyes looking into hers were furious. She flinched.

“He’s not all you have,” Caxton said loudly and quickly.

“That’s nonsense. Nonsense. You’re the heir to one of the best silk businesses in London. You have your weavers to look after. And you have us, to look after you. There’s a lot in your life. Don’t forget it.”

It would never be enough without Dickon.

But when Will saw the shame in Isabel’s eyes at that thought, he stopped shaking her. He dropped her wrists and let her go back to her hopeless sobbing. She cried herself out.

In the end, in the quiet, he shook his own head. “It’s like a sickness, what you’ve got, isn’t it?” he said. His voice was sad; but cold, too. “Go home. Think about what I’m saying, Isabel. It’s madness for you to love that man. Don’t let him destroy you.”

There was frost on the bushes. The looms were just falling silent when she pushed her own door open. She could hear voices.

Joan Woulbarowe’s Andrea looked up and grinned. He was a wizened nut of a man. His teeth were as black as his bride’s.