Figures in Silk

Isabel danced at the feast. She danced with Thomas, suddenly shy again and avoiding his eyes; aware of the dampness of his hands; holding herself nervously back from his large body. She danced more freely with every mercer who was her father’s or her new mother-in-law’s friend, until the blood came back to her cheeks with the sheer pleasure of movement. She whirled her skirts and flashed her ankles; sufficient unto the day, she thought, with sudden hectic gaiety, draining her cup of wine. Suddenly it felt like an easing of her burden in life to be free of her father. She was nervous about what would come after the dancing, of course; but there’d be time to worry about tonight when tonight came. When the third course was brought in, giant pyramids of blancmanges wobbling in the heat, she let her partner, a bright-eyed old friend of Alice Claver’s called William Pratte, lead her back to his place on the trestles and courteously pass sweet dainties her way.

Thomas brought William Pratte’s wife, Anne, back to the table, then left the room. He half-glanced at Isabel. She caught the nervous look, but was too shy to smile back. It was only after he’d turned uncertainly towards the door that her lips started to curve up. She sat breathlessly quiet among his mother’s friends, feeling grown-up. She couldn’t be unaware of Alice Claver and the plump, knowing, eager Prattes gossiping beside her. They talked in low voices, darting cautious glances all around; but they clearly weren’t trying to hide what they were saying from her.

‘Well of course they fight dirty,’ William Pratte was saying, with a mischievous gleam in his eye. ‘The nobility have never been half as noble as they like to make out. They say King Edward didn’t so much win the last battle as chase the other lot into the millpond and drown them.’

Alice Claver snorted irreverently. ‘Like kittens,’ she said. ‘Well, all I can say is good riddance.’

‘Still. It’s not exactly Camelot, is it?’

John Lambert was leading Jane down the row of raised arms in the centre of the room. He was radiating happiness at having pulled off his plan, skittishly kicking up his heels and smiling at everyone whose eyes he met. Yet he must be able to see the room was only half-full, and mostly with the Clavers’ and Shores’ family connections, not the great and good of the City he’d wanted to attract. Isabel thought: if they’d really forgiven him, the mayor would be here. The aldermen. Her relief at having got the ordeal of the wedding over was so great that the thought almost made her feel sorry for him.

‘Do you think it’s true what they say?’ Anne Pratte was half-whispering, her eyes batting flirtatiously up and down. These people seemed to be much more disrespectful and sharp-tongued than her father, Isabel thought, with a flicker of interest. She’d only ever heard the York royal family discussed in tones of hushed reverence at home. Did they always talk like this? ‘About the youngest brother; the Duke of Gloucester; how he killed…’

She dropped her voice. Isabel sensed she’d hear the same stories again. But for now a movement at the other end of the room was distracting her; a flurry at the door. Thomas? She glanced up.

A crowd was forming over there. She could hear the sounds of hooves and metal outside. There were new people sliding into the room, round the edge of the group; and she could see one of them was Alderman John Brown. At the centre of the crowd was a tawny uncovered head, taller than the rest, with bobbing and bowing going on all around it.

William Pratte was still whispering conspiratorially, getting back to the meaty talk, lifting one hand off his plump knees; including Isabel, to her slight alarm, in his bright-eyed gaze. It was almost as if these middle-aged people, with their knowing ways and cheerfully treasonous talk, hadn’t realised how young and inexperienced Isabel was; if she hadn’t known such a thing to be impossible, she might have thought they were deliberately trying to include her; trying to be friends.

The crowd by the door shifted and cleared, like clouds blown by the wind. For a second, Isabel could see over the three grey heads bent in front of her, and what she seemed to be seeing was her father, down on his knees, grinning like a lunatic at the floor and being patted on the back by a tall man in clothes that seemed to shimmer gold in the heavy afternoon light.

‘Look,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse with surprise.

William Pratte followed her finger. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Alice, look.’

Alice Claver’s head turned, and stayed stuck in a stare directed at the doorway. But Anne Pratte was still caught up in the whispering.

‘But Alice, that’s exactly what they are saying,’ she was muttering happily. And then she looked up, too, saw Alice Claver rising slowly to her feet, still staring, and began to gape like an astonished fish. ‘It’s the King!’ Anne Pratte said foolishly – foolishly, because others were dropping to their knees too now, crowding in: the mayor, suddenly and miraculously present; Will Shore’s parents; the Prattes; Alice Claver (how had she got there so fast?). Now John Lambert was scrambling to his feet to get out of the crush of kneelers, dancing backwards in something close to panic to create a place of honour for the monarch who was gracing his table with this extraordinary visit, and startled apprentices and serving girls, getting the message, were rushing to and fro clearing away the dishes from the tabletop and whisking in fresh dishes and strewing the boards with rose petals. And every bare head was bowed, but every pair of eyes was raised, fixed on King Edward, drinking him in.

‘Well,’ said the King, casually moving through the room towards Isabel’s father and patting him on the back again, and every mouth opened in adoring appreciation of his words, ‘how could I let my best friend in the City of London marry his daughters without coming to wish them well?’

John Lambert was pink with gratification; his smile almost cracking his face in half. He didn’t look handsome and distinguished, for once; his bowed posture and that smile reduced him to servility. He looked as though he was thanking God for having given him the opportunity, over the years, to lend King Edward £1,052 10s, the sum he so often liked to remind his daughters was as much as the Duke of Gloucester himself could hope for in rents in a year and more than most knights could hope to lay their hands on in a lifetime; he looked as though he was thinking that the reward of the King’s presence here, now, was enough to repay those debts even if he never saw a penny of the money again (which he might easily not). Still, no one could look handsome next to this King, whatever they were thinking, Isabel realised. Edward’s golden presence would always diminish everyone else.

The King and his friend – a dark, laughing nobleman almost Edward’s height, who would have been the most striking person in the room if he’d come alone, and whom Anne Pratte identified for Isabel, in a piercing whisper, as Thomas, Lord Hastings, the King’s dearest friend – looked as though they were here to stay. The King ate a slice of beef. He drank a cup of claret. He smiled at Jane till she blushed. He congratulated Will Shore on his bride. He asked the groom’s permission to dance with her. He led Jane, floating like thistledown, through an entire basse dance. Why her, not me? Isabel thought, without really understanding the thought; she knew really that she’d have been terrified to touch the King’s person. But everyone turned to Jane first. ‘There, you see,’ Anne Pratte burbled to Isabel, her face glowing, her disrespectful gossip of a few moments before entirely forgotten, blotted out by the majesty of majesty, ‘your father’s in the good graces of the King, all right… what an honour… can you imagine? I’ve never heard of anything like this before… you’d never have got King Henry mixing with merchants, that sad sack… I’ve always said loyalty deserves to be rewarded.’

Now John Lambert was rushing to Isabel to present her to the King. She was embarrassed by the look of triumph on her father’s face, but she let him take her hand. However fast her heart was beating, she kept her eyes turned down as he pulled her along the side of the table and began muttering ‘Sire’ and ‘May it please your grace’, and bowing and scraping. She made her deepest curtsey and rose, with her eyes still down. She didn’t want to be drawn into the excitement. But it was infectious. ‘Aha, another Lambert beauty,’ the King said. And his voice was so deep and rich and full of unexpected beauty that it surprised her into looking up; for a second it had reminded her of the voice of the stranger she’d met in the church. For a second, as she met this stranger’s eyes, she was disappointed to see a bigger face, fleshier and handsomer. But something kept her gazing into these eyes, full of lazy laughter; aware of his sensual mouth, twitching up at one corner as if starting to laugh at some secret joke he was about to share with her. Perhaps it was the long gold of the afternoon, but in the warmth of that gaze she felt time was suspended. The crowded scene faded. All she was aware of was the man’s eyes holding hers until she felt her own cheeks tingle with pleasure and her mouth widen into a smile. Until, to her surprise, she found she was laughing; a laugh of pure, animal joy.

They were lighting candles at the back of the room, she noticed, coming to, wondering where this immense happiness had come from so suddenly.

Then it was over. No dancing. The King waved his congratulations to Thomas, just coming back into the room, who looked even more startled than everyone else, then alarmed, then scared when he saw his mother’s frown, then almost fell over himself falling to his knees. And John Lambert rushed Isabel away to her table again, still bowing and grinning. All that was left was her exhilaration. As John Lambert settled her back on her stool, fussing around her, unable to contain his excitement, he couldn’t stop muttering: ‘a wonderful man; a king to be proud of; we’re living in fortunate times; you’ve been honoured… honoured…’ As she reached for her cup, she noticed, with a small pang of a sourness she wouldn’t admit might be jealousy, that the King was dancing with Jane again.

‘One thing’s for sure. No one will ever remember about the ring now,’ Thomas said happily, stroking her fine fair hair with one hand, pulling himself up on his other elbow so he could look at her face on the pillow in the morning light. He wasn’t fat, as she’d thought; she knew now that his ox-like body, twice the size of hers, was all heavy muscle and power.

She murmured something indistinct, trying to put aside her embarrassed, happy, sticky memories of the overwhelming things she and he had done in this bed in the dark, to the truly astonishing event of yesterday, the only thing about her wedding that every gossip in the selds would now be discussing – the King’s presence at the feast.

The King of England at her wedding, she thought with sleepy wonder. The newly returned King Edward – who a year ago had been a terrified runaway, chased out of the country by King Henry’s army, forced to take ship for the Low Countries after being routed in some battle at, she thought, Doncaster; and walking through the night, with his brother and his closest friends, across the Wash, while the tide came in and pulled his men, screaming, into the sea they hoped would save them, if they could only reach a port to escape abroad from. No wonder the other merchants had thought, back then, that it would be best to accept King Henry’s army; even if they’d enjoyed the ten years of Edward’s reign before that; even if they remembered the earlier decades of King Henry’s aimless rule as a slide into anarchy, when nothing could stop the pirates and the robber barons, when the wine fleet stopped coming and it was dangerous to cross the Channel with their cargoes. King Edward hadn’t seemed to have a chance, a year ago. But he was a lucky man; a man with skill. He’d never lost a battle. He’d found funds and raised another army and fought his way back to London. And now he was showing how he planned to rule, if he finally defeated the Lancastrian armies still in the Midlands – as a friend of merchants. He’d come to her wedding.

No one had ever heard of such a thing. No other king had ever done anything like coming to a merchant’s feast. But then no other king had had to borrow so much from the City to pay his way in the war he’d seemed fated, until recently, to lose. And there was no one he’d borrowed more from than John Lambert. Isabel thought back to the frantic bobbing and scraping that had taken over the party when King Edward walked through the door. The reverence. The fawning laughter. ‘Oh… my father’s face…’ she recalled, and laughed; not the polite tinkle with which she met the pleasantries of grown-up mercers and their wives, but one of the big deep snorts of mirth she and Jane indulged themselves in, in the Lambert children’s bed, when no one else was listening.

Thomas Claver guffawed with her. ‘And my mother,’ he picked up cheerfully. ‘I could just see her wishing she’d dressed up properly for once. She wasn’t the only one, either. I’d say every woman in that room would have done anything to catch his eye.’ He pulled himself over her, planting a big elbow beside each of her ears, grinning down at her with a confidence that looked new and unfamiliar on him. ‘Even you, maybe. Hmm?’ She shut her eyes, shy at looking at him so close, in daylight, and breathless now his chest was squashing down on her again, his legs pushing between hers. He brushed a strand of her hair mischievously across her eyelids. ‘Tell me. Was the King the man of your dreams?’

She shook her head with her eyes still shut, smiling at the soft brush of hair on skin and the gruff gentleness of his voice. If they were going to go on being this kind to each other it would be easy to stay absorbed in the moment, this one and perhaps many more; to feel lucky at being granted the new pleasure of being with someone who would never criticise her or demand anything of her beyond physical affection and answers to the kind of excitable, puppyish questions he’d been pounding her with since before dawn – ‘What are your three favourite colours?’ ‘… your favourite food?’ ‘… your worst memory?’ ‘… your patron saint?’ But his question reawakened a part of her that was separate from Thomas Claver; a part that knew that this easy sprawl of limbs, and even the first pulses of excitement in her body as he pushed his weight closer, didn’t fill her senses and change the colours of the air in the way they’d been changed, for a few magical seconds, by the man in the tavern who’d told her she had no choice but to marry.

‘No,’ she whispered, laughing, ‘of course he wasn’t.’ And she arched her aching body up invitingly under Thomas Claver’s, and met his lips with hers, and tried to banish that other face – the piercing black eyes, the raised eyebrows like a cross, the dark velvet voice – back to the limbo it belonged in. I’m blessed to have found this much happiness, she told herself; it would be a sin to ask for more.

‘So who is?’ Thomas Claver’s voice interrupted, as he moved his lips across her face to her ear, sounding hoarse now as desire gripped him in earnest, and she breathed the answer he wanted to hear, and almost meant it:

‘You.’

Afterwards, stretching back on the pillows, she shook her head lazily when Thomas said, with a sudden return of anxiety, ‘We should go to breakfast soon; there’s hell to pay if you’re not down by dawn.’

‘We don’t have to do everything they want today; they’ll understand,’ she murmured back, stroking his shoulder, ‘they’d be disappointed if we rushed out to eat this morning.’

She was pleased when his face relaxed back into its previous expression of joy – and then suddenly struck by what might have been the very oddest part of the whole strange day she’d just lived through.

It was Jane. Jane, who was never anything but perfectly sunny as she did the right thing and kept everyone satisfied; Jane, who always looked for something to be happy about in the most miserable of situations; Jane, who’d accepted her father’s choice of husband with so much less fuss than Isabel (‘It can’t be that bad – at least we’ll never have to sit on those horrible stools in the Crown again, blinding ourselves just to trim some old bishop’s robe, with every market boy gawping at us as though they’d never seen a girl before’). Jane, whom she’d expected to become the perfect wife instantly: laughing in the kitchen with the servants and the children; laughing more elegantly at the mayor’s table; charming her husband into high office; magicking contracts out of customers with her wit and lovely limbs.

Jane hadn’t been so graciously dutiful last night. As soon as the King had bowed and asked her husband’s permission to take her as partner in the basse dance, she’d got up, without even waiting for Will Shore’s stammered consent, and swayed off across the room with the King, looking radiant.

An hour later, when Isabel and Thomas left, Jane was still sitting with the King in a pool of golden light, ignoring her husband, deep in a serene conversation quite unrelated to the hubbub of dancing and shadows all around. And, in the darkness beyond their conversation, Isabel now remembered an uneasy play of eyes. John Lambert’s eyes, fixed adoringly on the King. The eyes of the King’s friend, Lord Hastings, fixed hungrily on Jane. And Will Shore’s eyes, dazed and puzzled, looking from one golden head to the other, as if he were wondering whether to feel awestruck by the King’s attention to his new wife, or just left out.

In the end, they only got up in time to join Alice Claver for dinner after eleven in the morning. There was a simple dish of beef and bread and beer, all anyone could manage after yesterday’s excesses. William and Anne Pratte were there with Alice – had they even gone away? Alice wondered. They seemed as familiar with this house as if they lived here, though she knew they had their own home near Jane’s new one on Old Jewry. They were gossiping and grinning, like they had been yesterday, and Anne, on seeing the young couple, immediately launched into a story for them about the excitements they’d missed later last night. About how more courtiers had come to join the king after the couple had left, including the King’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, small and dark, ill-favoured and bad-tempered, and about how Jane had danced with the King practically till the candles had burned down.

Perhaps it was sharing work, in the way of so many Mercery families – the husband doing the wholesale trading while the wives made luxury retail products from their husbands’ silk purchases, sold them, and minded the apprentices – that had made this couple look so like twins. They were both small and tubby and cheerful. William Pratte’s hair was thin and grey, and both pairs of eyes were grey too, but as lively and inquisitive as those of squirrels. They finished each other’s sentences, and Alice Claver’s too. That would never have happened at the decorous, often silent Lambert table; but no one here seemed to mind.

The three of them made such a point of courteously including the newlyweds in their grown-up conversation, and so strenuously avoided reference, even by the smallest untoward smirk or movement of an eyebrow, to the pleasures of the marriage bed, that Isabel spent the entire meal going alternately hot with shame and cold with dread, just in case they were about to start.

Her stomach churned so badly at times that she could only half-hear the harmless gossip they were chewing over from the wedding feast. John Brown, her father’s replacement as alderman: going bald; looking fat; should take more exercise. Her father: looking indecently handsome; what had his robes cost him? (Here three bright pairs of adult eyes turned cautiously towards her, then away.) Gratefully, she felt Thomas’s hand cover hers under the table and squeeze. His hand was damp; his face hangdog; he must feel as nervous as her.

‘You’d never have got King Henry turning up like that at a merchant’s wedding,’ little Anne Pratte whispered confidingly, turning to Alice Claver. Isabel waited for Alice Claver, the head of this household, to look forbiddingly at her; it didn’t do to gossip about kings. But the larger woman just snickered encouragingly and replied, with a disrespect Isabel found startling: ‘No, never; give me a big handsome hero for a king any day, especially if he’s going to take a proper interest in us…’

‘… And stop the Italians cheating us,’ William Pratte butted in hopefully. ‘And knock some sense into the Hanse. Maybe even get the French pirates while he’s about it. I’ll be for the House of York, all right, if King Edward’s going to really stir himself to help the City. No more loafing around while every lord in the land runs wild and our business goes to rack and ruin. I tell you, it’ll be ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Hallelujah!’ every morning at my table if Edward goes on doing better than that…’ He screwed up his face and stuck his tongue out of his mouth, letting it loll like a lunatic’s. The street-boy code for half-wit King Henry.

Isabel stared. She should have been scared of what her father would definitely have called treasonous talk. But there was something about the casual mischief flickering round the table that she thought she was going to like, once she’d had time to get used to it.

‘Well, let’s hope he wins, then,’ Alice Claver said briskly. ‘He still has to catch Warwick.’

‘Now,’ she swept on, turning so suddenly to Isabel and Thomas that the bride hardly had time for her heart to leap into her mouth. ‘You two. Talking of our business going to rack and ruin, isn’t it time to get you to work?’

Alice Claver’s manner might have been brusque, but her eyes twinkled so merrily that Isabel didn’t feel offended. For a moment, at least. Then she realised Thomas, at her side, was bristling with resentment, and thought, falteringly, that perhaps she’d misunderstood the mood.

‘Get your lovely legs into the storeroom, eh, Thomas?’ Alice Claver went on prodding, with the beginning of a rough growl of laughter in her voice. ‘Show Isabel the ropes?’

Isabel looked down at the table, but not before she saw the Prattes giving each other another of their sharp, birdlike looks – enough to show her it wasn’t the first time they’d heard Alice Claver say this sort of thing to her son, and that they didn’t expect a positive outcome. Isabel squeezed Thomas’s hand back. If he felt bullied, she wanted to show her support.

‘Aw, Ma,’ she heard Thomas answer. It was a child’s whine, and there was a cunning look in his eye that she could see meant he had no intention of working today and would say anything to avoid it. Isabel let her hand go soft again. ‘We only got married yesterday.’

Alice Claver looked unimpressed. ‘Well, you’ve had all morning to loll about, haven’t you?’ she said, and there was more roughness and less laughter in her voice now. Isabel blushed. The Prattes glanced at each other again. Visibly restraining her impatience, Alice Claver continued: ‘You know William’s very kindly offering to take you round the selds. Showing you the kind of range of goods you might think of buying to set yourself up. Introducing you to the kind of people at Guildhall who can advise you.’

She paused, as if this would jog Thomas’s memory. But Thomas stayed mulishly quiet.

Anne Pratte piped up, in her fluting little voice: ‘You don’t need to worry about Isabel, Thomas. I’ll look after her for the afternoon. I’m going round Alice’s embroidery suppliers; it would be useful for Isabel to meet them. She can come with me…’

Isabel could see both offers would be helpful if Thomas were to start buying in enough stock to get going as a merchant in his own right, and she needed to learn the names and faces of the silkwomen she’d soon, perhaps, need to commission work from. She squeezed his hand again and looked encouragingly at him from under her lashes, trying to convey that she’d like him to say yes. But Thomas just scowled harder.

‘Ma,’ he repeated, with the elaborate patience of a man talking to an idiot. ‘I just said. We’ve just got married. And Isabel wants to go and see off the King’s army. We were going to take a picnic.’