Figures in Silk (15 page)

Honest as the day is long. And he knows more about silk than anyone I’ve come across; a master.”

Pleased at being let down so lightly, Goffredo bowed his head.

Caxton went on: “He knows how to make money, too. Wooh!”

He puff ed air out through his pale lips, making them both laugh with relief. “Hand over fist. I’m relying on him for money myself,” he added. But he didn’t rush to explain. He just nodded at Isabel with what might be an offer of friendship in his eyes and began setting out the pieces on the chessboard, quietly and neatly.

When Goffredo’s eyes began to sparkle, under their big dark brows, at the prospect of a game, Caxton clicked his tongue at the Venetian and said, “Nothing I can teach you, my friend. But I think it’s time our young colleague here”—and he nodded in avuncular fashion at Isabel—“learned some strategy.”

“I’ll teach her,” Goffredo offered, eager again. “I was just about to.”

Caxton only laughed. Not unkindly, he answered: “You? What, and let her end up thinking the pieces are called Regard, and Desire, and Disdain?”

Gracefully, Goffredo gave in. He laughed and got up. “All right, all right,” he said, and Isabel liked the ease with which he accepted defeat more than anything she’d seen of him till now.

“I’ll go and find Alice.”

She concentrated as hard as she could on Will Caxton’s explanations. She wanted to please him, and he was easy to learn from. He seemed to be telling her more than the specific rules—that the auphin always moved sideways, for instance. (“The name means elephant, but think of it as a bishop, the kind of sneaky priest who can’t tell the truth straight but approaches everything deviously, at an oblique angle, and you won’t forget,” he twinkled.) She felt he was conveying general principles, too: how to think clearly, how to understand other people’s stratagems, and how to get your own way—things she needed to know to succeed.

It was getting dark. As he leaned forward to light the nearest candle, she suddenly found herself remembering another twilight under the arches of a tavern, and the man in the church laughing to himself as he bagged up leftover chessmen.

“Someone once told me,” she said thoughtfully, and, although her voice was so quiet she might have been talking to herself, Will Caxton looked up at once. Encouraged, she went on: “. . . a joke about chess. Well, a kind of joke. He was putting the pieces away. And he said, ‘We all spend our lives trying to win, but we all end up equal in the bottom of the bag.’ “

The corners of Caxton’s mouth turned up, though he didn’t look as amused as she’d hoped. “Ah,” he said, “true enough—though there’s more to life than playing games.”

He sat down and looked at the board, but she could see from the pale blue distance in his eyes that he’d begun thinking of something else. She kept respectfully still.

“Mind you,” he said after a while, into the silence, “there’s plenty of writing about chess these days. It’s not just a game of strategy for knights anymore; a lot of people play it. When you’re living overseas, you see a lot of books—like the one Goffredo was quoting just now—which draw on chess. It’s an allegory for war; it’s an allegory for love.” He was musing now. She held her breath.

“I could translate something . . . it might sell.”

Translate? Sell?

He laughed when he finally noticed her bewilderment. He patted her hand. “There, I’m running on like an old fool,” he said ruefully. “And you’ve no idea what the old fool’s talking about, have you? Well, how could you? You should have stopped me and asked me what I meant. I wouldn’t mind.”

Isabel grinned, and, feeling suddenly confident, said, with a pertness she judged he’d given permission for, “Well then, what
did
you mean?”

Caxton had none of the tight- lipped caution of the common run of merchants, which surprised Isabel, since she’d found out, by careful listening in the past few days, that he’d once been the governor of the English at Bruges, and was still an important mercer and venturer now he’d based himself at Cologne. There was no pretension in him. His crinkly eyes were full of hope; his mind full of a young man’s big ideas.

Hugging her new knowledge of Goffredo’s business acumen to herself, Isabel listened carefully as the sandy Kentishman began telling her his dream of setting up an entirely new business in London—a dream Goffredo had helped to back. Ever since Bruges, where book- learning was fashionable and every knight and squire kept a library, Caxton had been fascinated by the printing machines he’d seen, invented by the German, Johannes Gutenberg. He’d bought his own printing machine, in Cologne, using Goffredo’s loan, and learned how to put the tiny metal blocks of type, each containing a letter, into a composing stick; how to bolt completed lines together into a block that represented a page of writing; how to ink the forms and work the press and transfer inky copies of the block onto paper made of shredded, fermented rags. “They call it the black art in Germany,” Caxton said with a resigned grin down at his hands—which she noticed, for the first time, were stained with shadowy blue, like a dyer’s—“it does for your hands.” He’d already started importing books to London, in the same barrels that carried the cloth purchases he resold in the Mercery. But he was itching to make his own books too: choose texts, translate them, print them, sell them. He wanted to come back to London soon, he said, and settle here again; bring his press and his workers. William Pratte was paving the way for him with the Guildhall; he was hoping to raise money from the City. His eyes widened joyfully at the idea.

Jane had three printed French romances, Isabel recalled: luxuries, each worth several years of her own apprentice’s pay, but still many times cheaper than a hand- copied book in the old style.

“You’ll be richer than ever, soon enough, then,” she said, in as sophisticated a tone as she could, half wondering why a man so established in his trade would want to throw it all away to chase moonbeams, but half admiring his courage.

But Caxton only shook his head. “Rich would be good,” he said, but without the answering enthusiasm she’d been expecting,“but I don’t know if it’s realistic. Gutenberg never made much from his press. And it would take years to get going here. Anyway, that’s not really why . . .” His voice trailed away; he was thinking again. “It’s just that I’ve seen so many extraordinary books on my travels. Extraordinary stories; extraordinary ideas; the sheer
beauty
of them . . .” He shook his head, as if knowing he’d never manage to convey his feelings. “I think there are many more people who’d be as impressed as I am, if only they could see them . . .” Another shake of the head. Then, suddenly, he grinned. “You must forgive me. I’m off again. I get carried away too easily. That’s the trouble with dreams—they’re so prone to making a fool of you.”

Isabel was daydreaming as her fingers passed expertly over the fingerloop braid. She’d mastered the technique now. She could let her thoughts wander as the braid grew in length, and she shuffled her stool gradually farther and farther back from the nail on the wall to which its first end was attached.

Where her thoughts were wandering to was Goffredo’s description of the foreign noblemen and princes who sent the agents to Venice to buy large amounts of the most expensive types of the finest silk fabrics in Eu rope for their wardrobes and palaces at silent, dignified, street exhibitions known as
parangons
. She was fascinated by the procedure, as remarkably elaborate and dignified as the cloths themselves.

The finest cloths, which in Venice and Genoa were those velvets most intricately interwoven with gold and silver, those judged by six silk supervisors to be worthy of export to the rest of the world, were displayed once a week near the Silk Office and theshops of the wealthiest
setaioli,
or silk merchants, at the Capella dei Veruzzi in the Parish of San Bartolomeo, and were called
drappi da parangon.
(All other cloths were coarser and cheaper, whether they were classified as
drappi domestici
for the hangings and clothing of Venice’s own families, or
mezzani
for sale in city shops, sealed with the lion of Saint Mark, or inferior cloths woven specially for trade with par tic u lar areas—
da navegar
for the Le-vant and
da fontego
for German merchants.) After the
parangon
cloths had been preselected for exhibition because of their exquisite design and pure dyes, their selvages were wire drawn with gold and they were marked at each end with a seal bearing the symbol of a crown by the Venetian Sen-ate’s permanent commission of experts in the silk craft. Any fraud uncovered by these experts would mean the silk- maker was fined by the city government and his cloths confiscated. Then, once every fabric had been labeled with a number and the name of its maker, the exhibitors would withdraw to one side of the
parangon
—the name came from the Venetian word for exhibiting; the cloths were, literally, “show- off ” cloths—and wait silently for customers. (Isabel couldn’t imagine a market in which the organizers managed to stop the salesmen shouting the virtues of their wares; but Goffredo said that in Venice these
cridori
were considered
modi disonesti
of selling.) The virtue of the fabric should speak for itself. The buyers would pass through the two rows of stalls, with the
parangon
supervisors, a train of advisers, brokers, tailors, and artisans, to judge the cloth. When they’d chosen what to buy, the supervisor would identify the name of the producer from the numbers attached to the bolts of cloth and call them, one by one, to negotiate a sale price with the customers. As soon as a deal was cut, the advisers were asked to leave, and the cutting of the cloths began under the eye of the supervisor. Once the buyers finished, they left too. The exhibitors, standing back in silence, could collect merchandise and dismantle the
parangon
until the next week.

Now that, with Will Caxton’s help, Isabel had got Goffredo’s flirtatiousness under control, she was enjoying asking the Venetian about his business world more than she ever had receiving his lavish compliments. He knew so many things that would be useful to her; she wanted to be able to find out about them without worrying about whether he’d try to hold her hand as he told her. She thought he might be secretly relieved, too, now he’d stopped plying her with hippocras and dates; he must be realizing what a fortune he’d been frittering away on them. And why bother, now he could see that it was his stories about the way the silk trade operated at its European heart that could be relied on to make her eyes open wide in wonder? He was working that out, telling her more and more, enjoying her appreciation. He rolled his eyes and his R’s and exaggerated every gesture as he talked up the virtues of silk.

“Is it not clear that silk adorns everything?” he’d said last night.

“Is it not silk that adorns the coaches, the carriages, the litters, the maritime gondolas, the horses of the princes, with trappings, with 1 outfits, with tassels, with fringes, with cords, with cushions, with cloths, and a thousand other beautiful things? Does not silk adorn the banners, the standards, the insignia, the halberds trimmed with brocaded velvet and fringes, the sheathed pikes, the bandoliers, the trumpets, the uniforms of the soldiers at war? Does not silk adorn the umbrellas, the canopies, the chasubles, the copes, the pictures, the palliums, the sandals, the cassocks, the dalmatics, the gloves, the maniples, the stoles, the burses, the veils for chalices, the lining of tabernacles, the cushions, the pulpits, and all other things of the Church?”

If he was parodying the importance of his trade, and his own adoration of it, it was only a slight exaggeration. Even here in London, she knew silk to be the ultimate mea sure of wealth: silk clothes for well- off families, or silk hung on walls with the family coat of arms embroidered on it in gold and silver, or silk cloths sewn together to form baldachins, mosquito curtains, coverlets, sheets, or used as linings and covers for cases, chests, books, chairs, mirrors.

She was falling in love; but it wasn’t the kind that Alice Claver had briefly worried about. The passion growing in her was the same love that consumed Alice Claver, the Prattes, Will Caxton, and Goffredo: the love of the glowing, magical stuff that symbolized success and dignity and order and happiness and civilization; men’s (and women’s) ability to create the highest forms of beauty from something as humble as the thread spun by a worm.

The excitement of it was almost enough to make her forget her lowly place in the house hold, but not quite. Goffredo might have brought her into Alice Claver’s evening circle, and her own resourcefulness—as well as Will Caxton’s help—might have tamed the Italian and consolidated her own hold on these powerful allies, but by day she was still just an apprentice, and a very junior one at that. She’d seen Alice Claver’s wary glances in the past few days—her mistress didn’t look altogether happy about Isabel’s growing camaraderie with the most respected silk merchants in London. So, when Alice was in the room, Isabel kept her eyes down and did everything she could to show, mutely, that she wasn’t getting above herself. Alice, in her turn, did everything she could to remind her apprentice that she was good with her fingers but too junior to be noticed unless she was being taught something or an errand needed running.

Now, for instance: Goffredo was flinging open the storeroom door and bowing Alice into her domain. Alice knew that Anne had been showing Isabel braiding there all morning, but all she said, before moving away to her table, was a single expressionless word of greeting, and it was: “Anne.”

Goffredo glanced over at Isabel. He winked, but only over his shoulder. Then he too moved off to start staring at Alice’s ledgers.

Isabel always tried to hear what they talked about when they talked big business. But they always seemed to be murmuring just too softly for her to catch the words.

Anne Pratte was looking approvingly over at Isabel’s braid and nodding. In the singsong, rhythmic voice of someone half hypnotized by the drawing together of threads, she said, “Yes . . . you just needed time. The tension was all wrong at first. Much too tight. But you’ve got the hang of it now.”