Figures in Silk (44 page)

“Look, Mistress,” he said, beckoning her over. “It is going very well. This cloth”—he pointed at the loom he’d been examining, where Joan sat bathed in evening light over a blue- green woven marvel of flowers and birds—“is the first we can be proud to sell.”

Isabel couldn’t focus on the cloth. It reminded her of the princess’s sleeve, rubbing against Dickon’s arm. She thought she might be sick if she looked. So she smiled. It was a pale, grim excuse of a smile, but it cost her more effort than she’d have thought possible.

“Good,” she said faintly, feeling proud to be trying. “Good. Good.”

“I am going to finish it with a gold thread in the selvage,” he said importantly, “and the Claver seal. We can put it in the store-house, ready for trading. God willing, we will have twenty or thirty of this quality ready for sale by Passiontide.”

She said, “Good. Good,” a few more times, then stopped.

He looked curiously at her. “I believe we are about to be very successful,” he said.

She mumbled, “Good,” again.

He stared. “Mistress Claver,” he said, “are you feeling well?”

She could feel shivers down her back, aches in her arms and legs. What was she doing in this dark little house, with its walls swaying drunkenly in and out, with this dark little man she hardly knew?

“Not very well,” she muttered. “I think . . . a chill coming on . . . lie down.”

He beckoned to Joan and Agnes, who hurried forward. Anxiously they bundled Isabel upstairs to the women’s room, loosened her robe, and covered her with all the blankets they could find. Someone brought her broth.

She lay glassy- eyed, feeling far away from the bustle, wondering why she’d wanted this—why she’d ever thought weaving silk mattered, or that she’d be happy if she made this business work—when now she understood, with sickening simplicity, that happiness was somewhere quite different, somewhere she’d never go again.

17

It was Goffredo who fetched her back to London the next day. He came toward the end of most weeks anyway, talked over his team’s progress, and took part in a hearty Lombard dinner. But as soon as he arrived on that December Saturday and heard Isabel was unwell, he was up the ladder and poking his head through the trapdoor and rushing over to poke his head through her curtains too.

She heard Will’s voice downstairs, saying, carefully but anxiously, “a chill . . . she’s run down . . .” Will would never enter a woman’s bedroom the way Goffredo was now doing—striding decisively in and taking charge. Will would be too embarrassed; and he was angry with her, in his quiet way.

She was glad it wasn’t Will coming in now. She couldn’t face him yet. She’d confided in him, but he’d only added to her guilt and shame; she wouldn’t be able to look him in the eye until she’d thought how to do as he’d suggested. She needed to think. She was surprised at how relieved she felt to see the worry and affection on Goffredo’s powerful features. Goffredo would cope with everything for her now. She could relax.

He did. He fretted with the sheets for a minute or two, twitching at things, clearing away bowls and water jugs, plumping up her cushions. She lay limply and watched him. Then he twinkled at her from his laughter- lined eyes, and pinched her cheeks. “We need to get some color back in these,” he said briskly. Then he kissed her pinched cheeks. He did it chastely and with great kindness.

“You’ve been working too hard for too long,
cara,
” he said gently. “We’ve all been telling you. You need a proper rest. I’m going to get them to bring you some food up now; and then, when you’ve eaten, we’ll wrap you up warm and take you home to Alice.”

They sat in the wherry, with his arm protectively around her and his cloak around them both. There was snow in the air and black in the water. She was slumped into him—too tired to sit up straight, and quietly enjoying his strength and warmth.

“You should marry me, you know,” he said. “Joking apart. It’s time someone looked after you.”

She was feverish. She let herself think about it. Running the weaving business with Goffredo, openly, from the house in Westminster; in a few months, once they’d registered at the Guildhall and proved they had goods of acceptable quality, defying the Italians and selling cloths in the selds and at the King’s Wardrobe.

Talking over the day’s business together. He’d always be laughing, what ever they were doing. Dropping by to see Will Caxton, the neighbor, her friend again; taking the wherry to London on Sundays to spend the day with Alice and the Prattes. Goffredo was old but kind and funny and, now she came to look at him properly, for the first time in years, still handsome. She couldn’t yet imagine making love with him, although she was trying, but at least the idea didn’t appall her. She probably could. And she’d never care for Goffredo so much that it would hurt.

It was time, after all. She’d be twenty- eight in a few months.

The business would be registered. They could stop living a secret.

Perhaps her life could be this simple. She could be Isabel Lambert Claver D’Amico, running a weavers’ workshop in Westminster with her husband. It would be the same life, almost. She had to at least try to think about it. It might have been what God intended all along.

But it would be utterly different, too: life without Dickon.

She’d never listen out for hooves or boys with messages. The tavern over the road would be just that again—a tavern. The Red Pale’s upstairs room would be just the place the D’Amicos sent overflow guests to sleep in. She’d forget that its plaster and straw and honey sunlight had once meant happiness.

She sighed. The misery came back, the tears too. She wouldn’t forget. “You’re probably right,” she sniff ed into Goffredo’s strong rib cage, grateful for his strength. Her head was pounding. “About marrying.”

She didn’t want to hurt his feelings by crying. She didn’t know whether he’d take that as a possible yes or a probable no. She didn’t even know which she meant. She didn’t know what had got into her. But he just clicked his tongue and said soothingly: “Don’t even think about it now. Later, when you’re better. Let’s get you well first.”

The idea of marrying Goffredo went on bobbing up in Isabel’s mind for weeks afterward. While she lay blacked out in her bed in Catte Street, with the old women bringing her hot drinks and warming- pans and tucking her up; while a muted, expectant Christmas was observed; while she rode, in the last days of December, to Sutton on Derwent with a nervous ThomasLynom, to wait with the astonishingly swollen Jane for her child to be born. During the blood and shouting and panic of the birth.

Afterward, while she watched her sister hold her baby, a wrinkled girl, and noticed the tenderness in Jane’s eyes and voice, a love that turned her bruised eyes and limp sweaty hair and pale skin and bloody linen and flabby stomach back into beauty.

Julyan had just a few fine strands of hair on her head. She had hypnotic round eyes: nothing like Jane’s green color, a paler blue than Thomas’s. But she already had the beautiful profile of her father: a short straight nose, high cheekbones, perfect proportions, a generous mouth. When Thomas held her, he was transformed too.

I could do this too, Isabel would think. Perhaps. She kept experimenting with the thought, trying to find ways of healing herself of the gritty, grinding pain she carried with her. It didn’t stop the blackness altogether to imagine herself married to Goffredo, holding a baby, being a merchant’s wife. But it helped. It lightened her mood, at least, until it was no worse than a cheerless gray. If she did it, then later, much later, after a year, after five, perhaps ten, she might find peace.

The Londoners all came for Candlemas; they were going to take Isabel back to London with them after the holy day. John Lambert, braving the roads despite his gout now he had a living grandchild to hold in his arms, was expected later in the week.

Jane was churched the day before the first guests arrived, on February 1, a month after the birth, so she could receive visitors again.

By then, Isabel wanted to go home. She’d had time to recover.

She’d had time to reflect, too, though instead of taking Will’s advice and trying to reason herself out of what she felt for Dickon, she’d just tried to convince herself she felt nothing. In Jane’s house it was easy enough to make herself think she’d shut down the secret part of herself that dreamed and breathed Dickon; in Jane’s house she slept heavily and woke up calm. But the idleness of her country existence was beginning to bore her. She told herself: I need to be busy. She was longing to talk about work. She wanted to get back to the weavers.

She’d persuaded herself everyone would only want to talk about the weaving project. So she was surprised by the adoring stares, the hush. Even from Alice Claver.

At least Goffredo looked at Isabel long enough to say, “How thin you’ve got.” But she must have looked almost normal because no one else did anything but stare at Julyan. Even after the visitors’ gifts were admired, after the baby’s feeding and sleeping habits had been discussed, after the parents’ happiness had been commented on and praise given to their choice of name, after the mystic of Norwich, Alice and William and Anne and Goffredo still had to be nudged into mentioning the workshop.

Isabel asked Alice directly: “So when is the registration hearing at the Guildhall?” and Alice, rocking the baby, looked up absentmindedly, then back down to where tiny fingers were curling fiercely around her thumb.

“Right after Lady Day,” she said; then, almost whispering,“When my Thomas was born, I couldn’t believe those tiny fingers.”

Late March; seven weeks or so away. Isabel tried to catch Goffredo’s eye, but he was also staring down as if he was about to devour the little scrap of flesh in her soft linen wrapping, flexing her toes. “Goffredo,” she said, and he looked up. “How many cloths will be ready by Lady Day?”

“Oh,” he said, “enough. Thirty?”

He wanted to go on playing with the baby again. “Goffredo,”

she said patiently, and he looked up again, a little guilty. He said, trying to satisfy her properly this time with a thorough answer:“If we stock them at Alice’s shops, if we price them attractively, say half the sale price of Italian cloths, they’ll probably shift fast. Say they take till midsummer—St. John’s Eve. Three months.

We can have thirty more ready by then.”

She nodded, longing to feel brisk and businesslike and in charge of something again. “And we can start taking on more apprentices once we’re registered, too. Get all the looms you’ve brought working.”

“Twenty looms; we’ve been talking about taking on fourteen more women,” he agreed, concentrating on plans with her, not on the baby. “As soon as we have the registration,” he added, “so we can recruit without worrying about the Conterini and Salviati.”

He was looking enthusiastic now; his warmth for the dream they’d all cherished for so long was there on his face again. She sighed with relief: Goffredo, her partner. Willing to humor her even though they both knew she was, childishly, suddenly jealous of her sister’s newborn. He was a good man. He’d probably be a good husband too.

Isabel had thought she wanted to be off . A bleak impatience to get home sustained her through the long, jerky clip- clop back down the Great North Road. But when she saw Moorgate looming up ahead, beyond the butts and the vegetable gardens, and the City rooftops behind, she began to remember what her dread had felt like. Her holiday from heartbreak was over now. She couldn’t lie in bed, pretending to be ill, refusing to face reality.

She’d have to go back to work. To the selds; the Guildhall; the silk house.

She had a headache like a punch in the eyes. She didn’t want to see the tapestries in her room, the expensive bed curtains, the embroidered cushions, the patterns, the gay splashes of lilady and mulberry and applebloom, the scents of lavender and rose. She wanted straw and plain plaster; but, if she was sensible, she’d never have that again.

It was only once she’d walked into that familiar, dusty, claustrophobic bedroom at Catte Street, and been overwhelmed by how overstuff ed it was with pillows and memories, that she realized that now she’d also have to go back to sewing for the Princess.

Go to Westminster. Face Will Caxton’s eyes. Go to the palace.

Where Dickon might be.

The thought didn’t make her weep. She was past that. But she went to the window and stood with her cheek against the cool glass and metal. Burning. Gulping in air.

“Now,” a familiar voice boomed behind her, and Alice Claver swept into the room, without knocking, a tornado trailing draperies. “There’s something I want to ask you.”

Isabel closed her eyes. It was too much. She couldn’t face Alice as well as these feelings.

“Another of these boys has just come,” Alice was saying, and her clever eyes were looking carefully into Isabel’s. “With a message about firewood.”

Isabel opened her eyes.

“What do you mean, another?” she asked, too quickly.

Alice nodded to herself, two or three times, as if her own question had been answered.

“There’ve been a couple, over the winter,” Alice said. “While you’ve been ill, and away. Which is odd, wouldn’t you say? Since we all know Will Caxton’s cook buys the firewood, not you.”

Isabel hung her head. She was ashamed to meet Alice Claver’s eyes. She didn’t know what to say. Nor did she want Alice to see the joy coursing through her, as fierce and stinging as if there was aqua vitae in her veins. He’d sent for her. He’d sent for her.

Alice sat heavily down on the bed. She patted the place next to her for Isabel.

“I’m not going to try to ferret it out of you, you know,” Alice said gruffly. “But I’d be a fool not to know what’s going on.”

Isabel felt hot blood staining her face and neck; but there was relief mixed up in her agony of embarrassment. Alice nodded again. “There,” Isabel’s mistress said, in a not unfriendly voice. “I was right. I’m not just an old fool, am I?”

Isabel even managed to answer. “You were never a fool,” she got out, with reluctant admiration.