Figures in Silk (34 page)

She knew already what it meant to have realized this. There would be no more of it. No more winks at the door of the Red Pale; no more sly doffings of hats through windows. No more intoxicating expectation; no more giggles as they flew up the stairs to be re united. No more joy.

The sense of loss made her breathless. But what made her more breathless still was the thought that, if he’d been planning all this yesterday, which he almost certainly must have been, he must have known it would mean the end of Isabel’s trust. He must have thought it would be their last time together. He must have decided it didn’t matter.

No one in the Claver house hold paid any attention to Isabel’s ravaged face or silence in the morning. She was grateful, if not altogether surprised. There was so much else going on that there was no time for talk. Alice Claver only nodded absentmindedly when Isabel said, in a controlled voice, “There’s no point in my going to Westminster for a while, is there?” She couldn’t bear the idea of facing Princess Elizabeth and her sisters, and seeing the mute accusation in their eyes—You were wrong. There’d be no question of sewing coronation gowns now. Dickon wasn’t there. And Jane was here, locked up in the City, because of what-ever it was Dickon was doing.

“You’ll want to go and see your sister today,” Alice said, agreeing with Isabel’s wish to stay in London. “She’ll need new linen.

And you tell her I’m going to the mayor about her, with William; I want this sorted out before William leaves.”

By noon, when she went to the Guildhall with the bag of fifty gold coins she’d counted out for Dorset, Alice and William had already made their petition to the mayor, asking him to negotiate Jane’s release. They were standing in the street, waiting for her. It clearly hadn’t gone well. Alice was fuming. She said they’d been interrupted by a gentleman from the Duke of Buckingham’s house hold with advance word of what the duke planned to tell the Guildhall at the beginning of next week about the events of the previous day. So, squashed into a corner of the mayor’s table by the duke’s delegation, they’d heard the whole speech. “And you’d be hard put to imagine a more disgraceful set of slanders,”

Alice snorted. “When I think how we all went out into the streets and fought for the Yorks, all those years ago, endangering life and limb. The whole of London: Yorkist to a man. When I think of my son . . .” She stopped for a moment; crossed herself; then, in a smaller voice, added, “and your husband,” and, almost apologetically, met Isabel’s eye. Taking a deep breath, and getting back to her strident form, she finished: “All I can say is: it wasn’t for this.”

“What does the speech say?” Isabel asked, strangely warmed by that reluctant aside.

Alice went so red Isabel thought she might have a fit. It was William Pratte who began hesitantly to paraphrase. The speech accused the late King Edward of being a womanizer, he said. It was such a strange accusation that despite herself Isabel almost laughed.

“Well, that’s true enough,” she said, remembering all those other mistresses from Edward’s heyday: the holy harlot and the wise one (one long dead, one in a nunnery); the many, many fly- by- night fancies. “But what does it have to do with any of this?”

Alice snapped, “For no woman was there anywhere, young or old, poor or rich, whom he set eye on, but that he would importunately pursue his appetite and have her, to the great destruction of many a good woman.”

Isabel stared; not because of the older woman’s fluency in quotation, but because of the malice of the thought behind it.

“They’re trying to blacken King Edward’s memory,” William Pratte said, shaking his head. Like most people, he was too cautious to name whomever he thought responsible: the words “the Duke of Gloucester” had not passed his lips. But he added: “His own blood. Edward was the only good king we’ve ever known.”

“And then it went,” Alice stormed on, in her own stream of thought, “something to the effect that he ‘paid more attention to Shore’s wife, a vile and abominable strumpet, than to all the lords in England, except those who made her their protector.’ “

“Hastings?” Isabel queried.

“And Dorset,” William Pratte reminded her quietly.

After that, Alice and William had given up and slinked out.

There was no point in staying near the mayor. They weren’t going to get anywhere for now. “I wouldn’t altogether give up hope, though,” William Pratte said thoughtfully. They looked quickly up; William was their statesman. He went on: “I’d say they’re realizing they won’t get anywhere with this idea they’ve been floating—accusing Jane and Lord Hastings of plotting to cast spells on Richard. It’s already obvious no one’s going to believe it.

Not here, where people know her. It’s too stupid. So they’ll have to let it drop. But they’ll look fools if they just let her walk free. So they’ll have to keep her in jail for a bit; and I’d guess they’ll go on denouncing her as a whore for a while too. It’s an easy enough way to tell the people that whoever becomes king next will be less prone to vicious living than the king we’ve just buried—to make them look good.” He paused, said defiantly: “God rest King Edward’s soul. I’d say the mayor will be minded to help Jane, once things quieten down,” he added, more practically. “I could see the look in his eyes. I know him. He won’t willingly let a Freewoman be dragged into all this.”

In his eyes, Isabel could see the doggedness of every merchant forced to live cheek by jowl with his lords, men who lived by the sword and didn’t fear dying by the sword in pursuit of their ambitions. She sensed the resentment of every Londoner who knew that his peaceable markets and streets and churches just filled up the spaces between the looming city fortresses the lords maintained among all that merchant industry; who was able to do nothing but shrug and lock up his house whenever those lords felt the urge to march through the gates of the City with their armies of horse men, alien beings in armor and weapons who might, at any moment, take it into their heads to turn violent. Seeing the stubborn frown lines between his eyes, she could believe the mayor would share these Londoners’ feelings enough to do his best to keep Jane safe.

“I’m still going to have to go to Bruges,” William Pratte said.

“Especially now, with Dorset to get rid of. You and Jane are going to have to see this through without me. But my advice is: wait a week or so; get my lawyer involved; then go back to the mayor.”

The coup gathered pace. The merchants’ delegation setting off for Bruges delayed their departure until Sunday afternoon, on the strong advice of the mayor, who thought it would be politic for them to hear the sermon to be preached at Paul’s Cross outside the cathedral.

It was a blustery day under curdled yellow skies. There was a vast crowd, muttering and anxious; sullen- looking people waiting to hear the excuses of the powerful for an upheaval they suspected could only damage them, looking for clues as to how their own lives would get worse. Isabel, Alice, and Anne Pratte walked 2 there with the merchant delegation William Pratte would be taking to Bruges later. Knowing there would be many eyes on Isabel, Anne Pratte prudently took it upon herself to link arms with the handsome young Flemish clerk in somber tunic and leggings, whose face was cast down, whose shoulders were nervously hunched. But he couldn’t stop raising his eyes at his first sight of Isabel and smiling slightly; and she had to make a conscious effort not to bow her head in acknowledgment and mutter, “My lord.”

She waited until the bodies were so densely packed around the pulpit that no one could possibly see, then wedged herself next to him and said into his ear, “From Jane, for your travels,” and slipped the money bag into his hand. She could see from Dorset’s face that he was feeling the bag with his fingers; realizing it contained coins; realizing too that Jane had been thinking about providing for his needs even while she was locked up at Ludgate. His eyes widened.

“Thank you,” he mouthed. Then: “Thank her for me.”

She eased; after all, perhaps he wasn’t quite as selfish and un-grateful as she’d thought. Then, after a long internal reflection, which she could see had reached its conclusion from the new resolve dawning in his beautiful eyes: “Or can you help me thank her myself?”

She shook her head in alarm. Then, feeling she’d been hasty—he was well disguised now, after all—slowly nodded. “What time do you set off ?” she asked. The delegation was to take ship for Coventry later that day. “We could walk you down to her window after this. You could wave. She’d see you. She’d like that. Would you have time?”

There was no time for more than a nod; the crowd was stirring. Isabel could hardly see the preacher climbing into the pulpit; at first she could only half hear the shouted words that began to emanate from it. Then, as the gasps and murmurs all around her got louder, she could hardly hear at all.

But she heard enough.

The preacher was saying that England was ruled by a bastard.

Most of the rest of the royal family were illegitimate too. Years of vicious living had so corrupted the blood royal that there was scarcely a man standing worthy of wearing the crown of England.

“Bastard slips shall take no root!” he yelled, and the wind carried that shout to Isabel.

It was too stupefying to take in at once. How had they all so suddenly come to be bastards? Some people as bewildered as she was began obediently yelling the slogan back. Others angrily shushed them. They wanted to hear the reasoning behind this extraordinary claim.

Now the voice was explaining. King Edward’s already scandalous secret marriage to Queen Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid, it said. The grossly promiscuous old king had been secretly betrothed even before that, to Lady Eleanor Butler; and that first betrothal had been binding enough to make any later marriages null and void. It meant that Queen Elizabeth Woodville had never truly been Queen of England, and her children were not fit to be known as princes and princesses. Little King Edward, in the state apartments at the Tower awaiting his coronation, was no more King Edward V than his brother was worthy of the title Prince Richard. They were Edward Bastard and Richard Bastard.

“Edward Bastard!” a few voices cried back. But not many.

Hundreds of indrawn breaths made a new hush as the preacher swept on to still more shocking claims. It wasn’t just the new king who was a bastard, he said. Old King Edward had been one too. So had his brother, the Duke of Clarence. Their mother, the old Duchess of York, had been unfaithful to their father while he was off campaigning in France. Her first two sons—tall, strapping, golden men—had not been the blood of the small, spare, sharp- featured, black- haired duke, even if they’d called him father.

“I can see what’s coming next,” Alice Claver’s voice muttered disgustedly, behind Isabel.

So could the rest of the crowd. When the preacher yelled his triumphant finale into the wind—“Only Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is the rightful son of his father!”—there were no more gasps or shudders, just a sense of anticlimax. Just a few voices calling out, “Richard Gloucester!” and “God Save King Richard!” almost experimentally, over the cautious talk between friends and family members and neighbors, while the rest of the assembly began to eddy away home. There were glum faces everywhere.

So Isabel was surprised when she glanced up at Dorset, to see him grinning. He straightened his face hastily. But his eyes glinted at her with a furtive shadow of the same amusement and explained his thought. “I wouldn’t like to be in Richard Gloucester’s shoes when his mother gets hold of him,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Casting aspersions on her honor. She’s the fiercest woman in Christendom. It’s her Neville blood. She makes even my mother look timid.

It wouldn’t be worth being king if Proud Cis wanted your blood.”

Unwillingly, Isabel found herself starting to like Dorset.

“Ssh,” she said reprovingly, but she let her eyes laugh with him. Then she whispered: “After Bruges, where are you going to go?” She could tell Jane later.

“Britanny,” he said. He’d obviously thought this out. “To Henry Tudor.”

She stared.

She’d heard of Henry Tudor; but only just. He was the Earl of Richmond, and a Lancastrian of sorts; he and his Tudor uncle Jasper had raised Wales for mad old King Henry VI thirteen years earlier, during the Earl of Warwick’s brief restoration of the Lancastrian king. She knew Henry Tudor was the son, from an early marriage, of Lady Margaret Beaufort, the last Lancastrian princess, who was now the wife of Thomas, Lord Stanley, who in turn had been old King Edward’s Lord Steward. She knew all about them, because they were the kind of lords you had to know about in business. She knew Lady Margaret Beaufort had often been at King Edward’s court and sometimes carried Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s train, though she was still viewed with suspicion as the last of the rival royal line. She knew Lord Stanley’s son had married a Woodville niece. But all she knew about Henry Tudor was that he’d escaped to Britanny after Warwick’s attempt at king- making had failed years ago, and stayed there; some people said almost as a prisoner of the Duke of Britanny. He was no one. Why go to him?

Dorset smiled a little sadly at her bafflement. “There’s no one else left,” he said.

She nodded. How helpless they all were. They stood for a long moment under the bilious sky, blown by the wind, jostled by the thinning crowd. His hand was on her arm; for a moment she could imagine the strength he seemed to have gained flowing into her now the worst had happened and he’d survived. “God-speed,” she said. “Be safe.”

And she cut off his muttered thanks to put him into the care of Anne Pratte, and arrange with her that the traveler would walk down to Ludgate to say his hurried good- byes to Jane. There was no time for more.

On the next afternoon, Isabel met the lawyer that William Pratte sent. When the man walked into Alice’s storeroom, stooping to get through the door—he was taller than most of the people who came into this place of women—she found herself staring. Hadn’t this happened before?

“Don’t I know you?” she asked, suddenly uncertain.