Figures in Silk (33 page)

Isabel even thought she saw a gleam of wet on that lined cheek.

There was a cough behind her. “We have a guest,” Isabel said, gathering her wits, surprised she could have forgotten Dorset. He was standing awkwardly in the doorway, clearly not sure whether to go on hunching over his books like an old man but doing it anyway, to be on the safe side.

The silkwomen rose to the occasion with aplomb. No exaggerated respect, no bobs and bows; that wasn’t their way, and wouldn’t have been even if they’d been admirers of the Woodvilles. But once Isabel had explained, they willingly set out bread and cold pork and the leftover dish of greens they hadn’t touched at dinner and a couple of tankards of weak ale, and while Dorset fell on the food like a starving man and Isabel picked at it without really eating, and talked, in a voice higher and faster than usual, they listened.

Alice looked at Dorset with no particular warmth. He was an extra problem she had no relish for solving. “So what do you plan to do next, young man?” she asked, and noted his bewildered shrug with a pursing of her own lips. But she’d already thought of the answer, and, to Isabel’s private joy, it was the same answer she herself had thought of earlier.

“You’d better,” Alice Claver pronounced briskly, “join William’s traveling party.”

William Pratte was going to Bruges for the fair. As well as representing English merchants—an official mission for theGuildhall—he was going to unofficially stand in for Alice and do some of the buying she’d normally do there herself at this time of year. She’d decided not to this year in case Goffredo returned early.

Anne Pratte’s eyes sparkled. Isabel sometimes thought she didn’t understand fear. “You could be his Flemish secretary,” she said, playing with the idea. “William can lend you a set of clothes.”

She stressed the word
lend
—you didn’t want to let noblemen make the mistake they were so prone to, of thinking you wanted to just give your possessions to them. “We’ll sort that out; make you look right. But you’d better wear that smock you’ve got on to come home with me now. We don’t want any nosy questions.”

Gratitude swept through Isabel. They were taking charge of him. She was suddenly bone tired. She wanted nothing more than to go to sleep. Thinking could wait.

Alice Claver was addressing the marquess sternly as she ushered him to the door, practically pushing him forward. “Now you take that bag, please . . . you’re younger and stronger than Mistress Pratte here . . . who is doing you a great service today, as you’ll appreciate . . . and for God’s sake when you get outside don’t forget at any time that you’re supposed to be a foreigner.

Don’t start talking to people, what ever you do. Just look humble and say nothing. Look humble. Can you remember that?”

Yawning, drooping on her bench, Isabel thought: Well, she’s always liked taking people down a peg or two. Isabel couldn’t find it in her to feel too sorry for Dorset. He hadn’t even bothered to thank her for getting him out of Westminster and into safe hands.

And he hadn’t stopped to spare a thought for Jane, either, even though he’d spent all those years publicly sighing for love of her—almost as long as Lord Hastings had.

Isabel jolted upright. Lord Hastings, she thought. And, with fear flooding into her: Jane. Before she knew it, she was on her feet again, flying toward the door to find Alice.

They went to Jane's house first. “Before we know where we are, they’ll be helping themselves to her things,” Alice Claver said sagely. “We might as well safeguard what we can.”

The empty house was a treasure trove of beautiful trinkets and pictures and textiles. Isabel looked round as if to memorize it all, realizing she might never see it again. But they took only jewels and linen and a book of hours and two skirts in modest colors, slipping their armfuls of booty over the road to the back stable at Anne Pratte’s house, which had been empty since a horse that had gone lame had been sold. They made Jane a food bag from her own kitchen. Isabel could see some of the early strawberries her sister loved peeping out of a tub by the stable; she picked a few and put them in a pewter mug, topped with leaves to keep them in. Alice—grimly cutting cheese and cured meat into big coarse slabs that Jane would never eat, and taking half of the great loaf the cook had left on the table before he’d vanished to the safety of Anne Pratte’s—laughed, not very sympathetically, at Isabel’s whimsy. “You’d be better off checking what other valuables there are,” she said. “Hasn’t she got a money box?”

She did have one: a lovely carved oakwood casket, which Isabel saw, when she opened it, was painted inside with pictures of a knight and his lady who had the faces of Jane and Lord Hastings.

She’d thought it was heavy, and now she saw why. It was stuff ed to the brim with gold coins. “There, you see,” Alice Claver said, materializing behind her, with hands on hips, “she’ll thank you more for getting that out of the way than for picking her strawberries. There must be hundreds of pounds in there.”

They lugged it over the road together, panting with the weight of it. They’d been going to come back for the food, but at the last minute Isabel had slung the bag over her shoulder. It was just as well. Before they’d even settled the casket in a dark corner and covered it with mouldy hay, they heard the horses clopping quietly up to stop outside Jane’s gate, the jangle of harness and the creak of leather masking the whispers. “You see?” Alice Claver muttered triumphantly. “They’ll have stripped it bare by morning.”

The two of them walked onto the street, looking straight ahead, acting, like everyone else on Old Jewry, as though the men in leather jackets and metal helmets swarming into Jane’s house didn’t exist. Alice Claver held her head very high and kept a pointed look of disgust on her face until they’d swept round the corner into Cheapside. Isabel’s food bag was too heavy and lopsided for her to maintain the same hauteur. Also, she was too curious; she couldn’t resist sneaking a sideways look. She didn’t know the young gentleman issuing soldiers with sacks before they went in, but she recognized him at once as the villain from Alice’s story. He was tall, fresh- faced, and innocent- looking, with freckles and a shock of straw- colored hair, and he was smiling.

She didn't expect them to, but the men at Ludgate let Isabel upstairs with her bag of food and clothes. They were family men, with tired, kindly faces, and they looked sorry for her. “We’re looking after her, don’t you worry,” the bald one said when he first saw Isabel’s provisions. But then he glanced round, saw his mate nod, and quietly opened the door to the stairs. “Come on,” he said, jerking a thumb upward. “Quick.”

Jane was sitting on the bench, staring at the reddish light on St. Paul’s. She didn’t turn round when the door opened. Isabel was touched to see a little posy of flowers on the window. “It’s me,” she whispered, not wanting to shock her sister. The man shut the door behind her as Jane raised haggard, empty eyes, then stumbled up and into an embrace—the kind of incredulous embrace in which every move and breath and slope of the other person’s shoulder is proof that your worst nightmares haven’t, after all, yet come true.

When they partly disentangled themselves and sat down side by side, with their knees brushing against each other and their hands clasped together and their eyes fastened on each other’s faces, Isabel couldn’t begin to think what needed to be said. Then she looked down and saw the knot of silkwomen still standing there, grinning soppily at the two heads re united in the window.

That might be enough for now.

“Look,” she whispered; and Jane stared down at them, not understanding.

“Are they . . . ?” she murmured eventually, with a glimmer of something like hope.

“They’ve been there all day,” Isabel said gently. “Ever since they stopped the soldiers taking you away.”

Jane went on staring, then raised a tentative hand. There was a murmur, then a few hands waving back from the shadows. Jane managed a melancholy smile. “My army,” she said in a small voice, before the tears came.

She’d heard the heralds. She knew Hastings was dead. After a while, when her tears had settled into a steady flow down a wet face, but when she could listen again, Isabel told her what little more Alice and Anne had gleaned on the streets: about how the Council meeting had turned into a bloodletting; about how Sir Thomas Howard had slipped away from the melee to arrest Jane, while the Duke of Buckingham had gone to Westminster to take little Prince Richard, the Duke of York, from the Woodvilles in sanctuary there. Jane’s expression was passive, her head bowed into a supporting hand. From time to time she nodded. Every now and then she flinched.

She only looked down and shrugged helplessly at the idea of the charges against her. Witchcraft—what was there to say?

“We all know it’s absurd,” Isabel babbled, trying to shut out her picture of Dickon yesterday, naked, with his head thrown back laughing. “Everyone knows that . . . It must be a mistake . . .

The Guildhall is going to raise it with Council, William Pratte says; they’re going to insist that City Freemen and Freewomen can’t be treated like this. . . . It’s not as bad as it looks . . . You’ll be out of here very soon . . . We’ll find a way.” She knew these were faint hopes. Jane had been imprisoned because of something Hastings had been thought guilty enough of to die for. Jane smiled sadly and sighed and said nothing.

Yet she livened up at the news that Dorset was free and on the run—though only enough to look anxious at the idea of him trying to leave the country. “Make sure he has money,” she said, with her eyes darting around the walls as if trying to work out how to make that happen. She squeezed Isabel’s hands. “I’ve got money.

In my box at home. Give him fifty pounds if he needs it. You will, won’t you?”

The door was already opening. The time was up. “I promise,”

Isabel said, and threw herself into her sister’s arms and clung to that fugitive smell of rosewater and sunshine. The man behind was shuffling in an embarrassed way. He was too polite to interrupt.

“I don’t want to get you into trouble,” Jane said, breaking away, turning to her jailer. Even in this cell, in this bad light, she was beautiful. “Thank you for letting my sister in.” And Isabel saw his lines soften in response into an adoring, black- toothed smile.

“It’s not right,” he muttered to Isabel on the stairwell, “and no 2 one thinks it is. A lovely, sweet- natured lady like that. A witch, indeed. The only reason she’s in here is politics. It’s Them Up There fighting for the gubbins, like pigs at a trough, isn’t it? Not her.” Defiantly, he banged open the door and let Isabel out, gesturing at the silkwomen on the cobbles. “I don’t care who hears me, either. We all know what’s really going on.”

The yawning pit in Isabel’s stomach didn’t stop her flinging herself on her bed and sleeping the sleep of the dead as soon as she got home. But she woke up in the middle of the night to find herself sitting up, with her teeth grinding and her eyes staring through the darkness.

It wasn’t just the thought of Jane in her prison cell that had woken her in this panic. It wasn’t just the crazed scurrying of the day that had finished—rushing from one catastrophe to the next, dealing with each one as it arose, with no time to think. It was what Dorset had said in the morning, the words she’d been refusing ever since to let her mind dwell on. Dickon was seizing power.

It was the only explanation that made any sense. He must be going to try and make himself king. Lord Hastings was dead. The little King and Prince Richard were in his control. There’d be no one to stop him.

She thought: Queen Elizabeth Woodville might have been right after all not to leave sanctuary. She almost started worrying about the royal children. But there was too much else to worry about. She kept that door in her mind shut.

She couldn’t believe it. She went through every moment of her time with Dickon yesterday. There had been no sign, no sign.

He’d laughed at the idea of Jane and Hastings together. He’d laughed at the idea of Dorset being disappointed. Something must have come up since he’d seen her, something that changed everything. She’d have known if he had something like this on his mind, wouldn’t she? He’d have told her. He’d have hinted.

He’d have spared Jane, at least. What did Jane have to do with any of this?

Then she thought, remembering his rush to go, remembering the jerky, excited way he’d been moving and talking, his lack of attention: Would he?

And, with a shame that made her cheeks burn and her stomach clutch, she thought: Why would he think I cared about spar-ing Jane, when I’ve always said such hard things about her? When he might easily think I hate her?

The more she agonized, the less she understood, until her mind filled with a jumble of bright still images that didn’t fit together. Dickon laughing. Dorset’s terrified breathing when the herald’s horn blew. Jane, smelling of innocent rosewater, sighing in her cell. Jane’s house being emptied by a young, smiling blond man with soldiers.

And, gradually, a small, sick, hateful thought came to the surface.
She might easily not have known.
What did she really know about Dickon, after all? A smell; the taste of his skin; a set of gestures; a glint of eyes. She’d thought it was a meeting of minds. But she knew nothing that would let her be sure how he might behave in his public life, while he did what ever he considered necessary to protect himself and his kin. Nothing except the street talk everyone knew. That he was a good ruler of the North and a good soldier.

The rumors that he’d done various small cruel acts to the widows and mothers of Lancastrians who couldn’t fight back (but nothing worse than other lords did). What she’d always thought foolish street talk, about him murdering his brother Clarence and old King Henry in the Tower. She’d thought she knew the man within.

The darkness that came over her then was so bleak, so overwhelming, that she drew into a tight ball. Trying to push away 2 each memory of his body as the agony broke over her in another wave of blackness: each low laugh in her ear; each slippery feel of skin on skin; the deep touch that turned a hand on her elbow or a touch on the back of her neck into a caress; the way he’d roll his body up onto one elbow to look at her and run a gentle hand through her hair, afterward, while they talked.