Figures in Silk (47 page)

38

“My mother is delighted,” the princess said, with composure. “Of course.” Then she let a shadow cross the smooth perfection of her brow. “Though naturally my own conscience won’t let me even contemplate such a thing while the queen is alive,” she added. She crossed herself virtuously. She was still smiling a little.

“Because it seems to me that the queen’s will to live must be much stronger than any of us realize,” Elizabeth went on, with her eyes boring harder than ever into Isabel’s above her smile.

“She’s so weak . . . Yet she’s hung on for so long . . . even with all the laudanum they give her, poor thing.”

I’m not better, after all, Isabel thought, feeling as paralyzed as a rabbit staring at the fox advancing on it with open jaws. It wasn’t enough to sense danger, unless you reacted. But she couldn’t work out how Elizabeth expected her to respond.

“Laudanum?” she repeated, stupidly.

But Elizabeth only shook her head (though her smile deepened, as though she’d caught a fish on her line). “I probably shouldn’t even have mentioned it,” she said sweetly. “Though it does worry me. Huge doses . . . enough to knock out a grown man, let alone the walking skeleton they say she’s become. But they say she goes wild without it. And I suppose the doctors probably do know best . . .”

And she lapsed into a pink and white and gold silence.

Isabel’s head was spinning. She’d been away too long. She’d lost her old knack for teasing the one strand of truth out of a confused rumor; she wasn’t sure anymore that she knew how to tell reality from a web of lies.

So she went quiet too; she sewed and thought. Why would the princess be hinting that the queen was being poisoned? Why take that risk, when it would be so easy, and tempting, for Isabel to pass on the word in the City, and spread a devastating rumor 38 that could stop the marriage the princess must be relying on? The only real reason Isabel could think of was that the princess wanted to warn her off Dickon: to plant the idea in Isabel’s head that Dickon was too dangerous for a humble silkwoman to handle.

She was almost encouraged by that conclusion. If the princess felt so urgently that she needed to frighten Isabel off , she couldn’t have been laughing cruelly with Dickon over Dickon’s grubby affair with a merchant woman from the City. She must have a sense that Isabel had a claim on Dickon’s heart, too; that, common though she was, she might be a rival. But she’d have had that thought alone—without any help from Dickon.

Isabel squared her jaw. Well, she wouldn’t be scared away.

The silence continued until the end of the appointed sewing hour. Isabel got up and began to pack away her bag, with the three emeralds folded inside the valuable cloth. She couldn’t be late to night.

But the princess didn’t let her go straightaway. Instead, she said, as if it was something she’d been musing on all the while, “I feel so sorry for her . . . Queen Anne Neville.” And her eyes were caressing Isabel, inviting her to stay.

Isabel hadn’t ever felt sorry for Queen Anne Neville. But she was used to feeling matter- of- fact about Dickon’s wife; she’d so often heard him say, a little dismissively, “It’s a good marriage. It’s made me rich,” that she’d never felt the need for real jealousy.

And the daughter of the Earl of Warwick wasn’t the kind of person you did feel sorry for if you were a merchant. She was too rich, too remote.

But something about the princess’s murmurings today made Isabel able to see the queen as a tragic, helpless victim of many misfortunes. Her father’s rebellion against the king had failed.

Her first husband, a Lancastrian prince, had been killed. She’d been kidnapped by Dickon’s brother Clarence to stop Dickon 38 marrying her. Her son had died. She’d hardly seen her husband for years. And now he was waiting for her death.

“He did love her at first,” the princess was murmuring. “He told me so.”

Elizabeth paused to let Isabel absorb that blow.

“He’d grown up with her, after all . . . When she ran away from Clarence, he came to London to find her.”

London. Dickon had never told Isabel this story. But she could tell when it would have been: the most important moment in her own life, when everything had changed forever. When she’d been fourteen and had first come across Dickon, praying at St.

Martin- le- Grand on an April morning, with King Edward’s army at the gates of London. When she’d still thought he was just a gentleman from the army. He’d been wearing black, with no insignia—the anonymous way he liked to travel. He’d bought her dinner at a tavern at Aldersgate, outside the familiar Mercery—the Bush, she thought it had been called. He’d eaten pork and said she should marry Thomas Claver. He’d said he was going to make a marriage that would be in his family’s interests; she remembered that too. But what she remembered best was that she’d known she loved him before he’d said two words. Even now, it was a memory she treasured. Uneasily she thought: I never found out exactly why he was in London, by himself, two days before the army came in.

She’d leave in a minute. Alice would wait. Isabel had to hear the princess out first.

“He searched every sanctuary in London,” the girlish voice of the princess was saying.

Isabel remembered now—they’d said back then that the sanctuary at St. Martin- le- Grand was packed with Yorkists, waiting for King Edward to come. Thousands of them; not just at St. Martin’s, but in every other sanctuary in London too.

Had Dickon really been looking for Anne Neville?

38 The princess said: “He got more and more desperate. She didn’t seem to be anywhere. He found her by chance in the end—in a tavern on Aldersgate, scrubbing out pans.”

Isabel felt as though her breathing had stopped. Aldersgate.

“The Bush . . . ,” she muttered, and the princess nodded. “A name like that.”

“He says it seemed like a miracle,” the princess added sentimentally. “It was almost dark. It was coming on to rain. But he ran to the church down the road with her and found a priest, and married her then and there. They spent the night in the tavern where he’d found her. By the time my father’s army came into London a day or two later, they were man and wife and there was nothing anyone could do about it.”

Isabel felt sorry for her own fourteen- year- old self, swooning over how Dickon’s hand had felt on her back, over how close he’d stood, over how nearly he’d kissed her. Believing her and Dickon’s shared destiny was being revealed to her, while all along he’d been paying a priest to marry him to someone else. Someone he’d told this girl, years later, who he’d loved. It was almost funny. Isabel hadn’t counted, even back then.

“It’s a lovely story, isn’t it?” the princess whispered.

Isabel swayed. “Lovely,” she replied faintly. Then, “You know, you were right. I don’t feel well.”

She hurried through the thickening afternoon toward the silk house. They’d be worried. They’d be waiting. She was so late. She’d stopped noticing the time. She didn’t know anymore what she was thinking or feeling. All she could think of was what happened when a silk cloth got so old and brittle and thin that the lavender you tried to preserve it with stopped working. The way it disintegrated into shards and dust.

3It was chilly already. There was a touch of river fog in the air.

She thought she could smell burning, as if people were lighting fires even before darkness fell. She shivered. Behind the Almonry she could see smoke drifting up from the dancing orange of what must be a bonfire.

She looked harder. It was too big for a bonfire. There was too much noise. She started to walk faster.

She knew the sounds of a mob.

She turned the corner. She already knew it was her house on fire. She was close enough to see the flames crackling and raging now, rushing under eaves and tiles, blossoming shockingly through windows. And she was close enough to see the shadows dancing round in the smoke too. Terrifying strangers. Londoners, not Lombards, by their voices; or nearly Londoners; they had the rough rasp of the river villages out east in their throats. They were smashing windows. Waving sticks. Jeering at the flickering, twisting human shapes that you could half make out inside the windows: “Whore-son Lombards” and “Thought you could lick the fat off our beards, did you?” and “Well, we’ll fry the fat off yours.”

She crossed herself. Everyone she loved was in that house.

She made her legs move. Ran for the tavern. But before she could throw herself through the doors and yell for help, they burst open of their own accord and more men came rushing into the confused shadows. They brought a pocket of clear air with them. She saw the innkeeper. She saw a dozen patrolmen in sallets. A couple of them had buckets. A couple had ropes. Most had sticks. Then the stinging smoke enveloped them all again, and there was just grunting, and shouting, and the slap and clang of leather and metal and wood and flesh connecting, and the hum of prayer in her head.

She stood in the shadow of the tavern, crying and shivering and coughing.

It was only when the biggest crash of all lit the sky with a glorious shower of sparks, as two halves of a roof split and reared up into the darkness—and frightened her into screaming—that she realized she wasn’t alone with a howling mob.

The mob surged in fear. She screamed again and jumped back, before she heard.

“Isabel,” the voice was yelling back, “you’re safe.”

There was a blackened face staring into hers: white eyes, a mouth opening and shutting. Then she collapsed against Will Caxton’s blotchy tunic as her legs gave way.

18

Isabel huddled with Caxton and his foreman Wynkyn and the other Dutchmen inside the empty tavern, listening to the shouting as the sky went slowly black.

The rioters looked a sorry enough bunch once they were tied together and herded into the drinking room. They were wet and puff y- eyed and bloody- mouthed and shaking. A dozen lowlifes.

One was a wherryman. Two others were dockers for the Conterini. They all stank of ale. They’d got enough money from somewhere earlier on to go on a drinking spree. They admitted nothing.

There was nothing that could be done about Caxton’s house.

There was a wind. They had to pull down the frame to stop the fire spreading. He helped. They all helped. He was strangely calm.

He said: “Not till my press is out.” Four of the Germans brought his press and boxes of type out and put them inside the tavern before they began yanking on the ropes.

There was nothing that could be done about Isabel’s house either, even hours later when the flames started to die down. The burned rafters went on glowing; bits of rubble falling, smoke mixing with the mist coming down. The crackling went on too.

“We have to get them out,” Isabel kept saying. “The others.”

She could hear herself saying it. She wondered why. It was so obvious no one could be alive in there. “We have to get them out.”

“Too dangerous,” they told her gently, and, “They’re dead.”

They were going to take the wreckage down in the morning, if they could, and recover the bodies.

In the end she let them put her to bed. Hamo the innkeeper gave them all a place to stay. He sat up himself to keep guard on the embers of Isabel’s house. She didn’t get Dickon’s room, but an unfamiliar set of walls. She was grateful for that. It had pale plain plaster and a straw- filled mattress too. All the rooms did. And this one smelled of smoke.

She'd forgotten she’d been going to meet Dickon hereto night. But he came to her in her dreams.

She dreamed he was lying on the bed asleep. She was going to tiptoe up to his side and lean over the bed and wake him with a kiss.

Except she couldn’t. There was no time. She had to go to a funeral. She had to get to London before the Italians did; but the boatmen weren’t in their boats. She thought they must be downstairs drinking, but no one would listen. And anyway, there was another head next to Dickon’s on the pillow: a woman’s head, a tangle of long red hair.

Th e d r i z z l e b y d aw n p u t out the embers. She woke up to the sound of men grunting outside and the shift of rubble. She couldn’t look at what they’d be finding. Suddenly desperate for company, she fled downstairs as she was, rumpled, with her eyes full of dust and her hair wild. But the tavern hall was empty, piled up with the trays of type and the half- undone pieces of Will Caxton’s press. It was cold, too, in this gray light, with the door open to get rid of the smoke, but with the draught blowing more ash and more of that smell that made your eyes sting into a room that was already full of ghosts.

She’d sat under the tavern arches with Dickon. When they’d just met, for a second time, when her tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of her mouth. When he was trying to teach her chess.

Before he kissed her. Her memories were so vivid that the gray shadow stooping over an untouched loaf seemed unreal by comparison. But the shadow was at the next table, looking up anxiously at Isabel out of wild sooty eyes. She said, with a rush of tenderness: “Will.”

“Don’t go outside, Isabel,” he quavered, trying to be protective. “I don’t want you to see.”

She shook her head gratefully and busied herself with knife and board, cutting bread.

“They want us to identify the prisoners,” he said. She passed him some bread.

“We should say they work for the Conterini,” he added.

“Shouldn’t we?”

Deliberately she cut another slice for herself. It wouldn’t do to be too weak to think straight. No point in tears. She should eat something. And yes, she could imagine the pair of them doing and saying those things before they took the bodies of their friends back to London and organized their funerals. But none of it would do any good.

She didn’t need to be a soothsayer to know what would happen when this affray went to the Guildhall. The City would waver and grumble but make peace; men like her father would wring their hands and argue against off ending the foreign merchants who were so important to London’s economy. They might have been excited about London- made silk cloths a few days ago, when the merchandise was about to come on the market and the Clavers were about to be powerful, but they wouldn’t do anything to protect the interests of dead women with a dead industry against the powerful living Lombards. They’d be scared. It was the nature of merchants.