Figures in Silk (51 page)

It was important to do the right things, in the right order. She wrote to the princess, a short letter explaining there’d been a tragedy in her family and that she would be returning to London later in the year to sell up. She’d return the princess’s goods—three emeralds and a piece of green cloth of gold—as soon as she wound up her affairs. But she couldn’t complete the commission, or go on sewing for her.

She didn’t think of Dickon. Her heart was empty.

She didn’t hear from Will Caxton. There was no reply to the two letters she wrote, asking for news of his new house and of Goffredo. In this new, numb, passive mood, she accepted the loss of the printer with the same vague sadness she felt about everything else. He’s buried Goffredo and not wanted to ask me, she realized. He can’t make his peace with me now they’re all gone.

What’s done is done. Perhaps he was right to think I didn’t value my real friends enough while I still had them.

She thought she was numb because she was so idle, caught between worlds.

She knew she was idle because, as spring turned into summer, Jane took to bringing Isabel with her on her rounds of her house hold, and Jane was always busy now. Jane spent her days running the brewing of beer in the brew house and the baking of bread in the bake house and the production of butter and cheese and eggs in the dairy. She supervised the home farm and the spinning of wool from the sheep and the weaving of woolens and the making of clothes. She checked on the apples and pears and quinces in the orchard, and the vines growing against the side of the house. She watched her bees gather nectar from a flower garden filled with marguerites and early roses and lavender bushes just coming into bloom. She tended her herbs, which she used both for medicine and cooking, overseeing the planting of vegetable and salad shoots grown from seed earlier in the year. She watched the baby melons fattening.

Jane chose the meals, did the marketing, and coordinated her underlings. She charmed the gardeners and laborers and dairy-maids and brewers and bakers and cooks and spit boys and servants whose work she oversaw into doing their best. She settled disputes. She hired and fired. She was a businesswoman on a surprisingly impressive scale. When Thomas was away, she was even supposed to deal with legal disputes and draw up wills.

“How did you learn all this?” Isabel asked. Jane had never before done anything more demanding than play the lute and shuffle her pack of cards and look beautiful. The new, bustling, aproned, unflappable, pink- cheeked Jane with dozens of keys at her belt laughed, remembering. “MistressLynom, of course,” she said briskly. “She came from Dorset to teach me. She was brought up there; she’s a gentleman’s daughter. She’s a terror. Still, it isn’t so hard. I enjoy it.”

“But you were always the lazy one.”

“This is nothing,” Jane said, and her cheeks went pinker still.

“It’s quiet now. You should see what it’s like in autumn. I couldn’t believe how busy we were then, when we were killing pigs and salting down meat and curing bacon and smoking out the bees for the honey and making candles and boiling up berries for the jam—as well as all this.”

She leaned forward. Put her hand, rougher now, on Isabel’s arm. Smiled, as though she wanted to draw a confidence out of her sister. “Perhaps, once you’ve sold up, you’ll be doing all this too . . . see for yourself . . . I know Robert’s ready to settle down . . .”

Jane was dropping hints almost every day about Robert, who, in London, was organizing the sale of Isabel’s inheritance. But Isabel only blinked. She couldn’t think of Robert. Not yet.

Avoiding a direct reply about Robert, Isabel said: “But you used to spend your days lolling round on silk cushions, and going hawking . . . Don’t you miss all that?”

Jane shook her head. “Oh no,” she said firmly. “I just didn’t know then how bored I was.”

On the hot august day when Robert finally came to collect her to ride to London and sign the documents selling Alice’s effects to the various buyers he’d found, he brought the first news Isabel had had in months of Dickon.

“You won’t have heard it here, but London’s full of the talk.

They say Henry Tudor’s invaded again; they say his army’s marching on the king’s garrison at Nottingham.”

Isabel couldn’t really take in the idea of armies. Nottingham was so far away. Her mind was on matters closer at hand. She’d tried not to think of this day coming for so long; she’d dreaded the trip to London and the memories it would awaken. But now Robert was actually here, and it was beginning, she found her worries receding. He was so matter- of- fact. He was good- looking, too.

She’d forgotten how elegantly chiseled his features were, under that look of calm amusement; she hadn’t remembered his long, blond ease of movement or his kindness clearly enough.

Jane crossed herself at his news, then clucked at her daughter.

Nottingham was far away from her mind, too; too remote for everyone. Julyan laughed, and pulled at Robert’s hair. Robert cooed at her, catching Isabel’s eye and inviting her to laugh too. There was affection in the look he flashed at his sister- in- law.

Robert was saying something about business, trying to catch Isabel’s eye again. She looked up and smiled at him; he was so kind; she should be as courteous back.

“. . . and I’ve had a letter from Lady Darcey; she says you still have some materials here that you’ve promised to return to the princess,” he said. “She says the princess would like you to deliver them in person on your return. If you like, we could do that on this trip?”

Isabel’s heart sank. But she knew she should. “Of course,” she said, trying to sound warm.

Jane beamed. “Yes, do sort everything out,” she said happily.

“It’s time . . .”

Isabel could predict exactly how the London trip would end.

That was the beauty of the Lynoms: you knew where you stood with them. Robert would reassure her through the painful business of signing. The money would be counted out. Then, once he was sure Isabel knew where she stood in the world, and what her choices were, he would offer her his hand in marriage. Jane had already mentioned the vacant manor near her home at Sutton that Robert might be interested in buying, once he was settled. So Isabel even knew where she’d be living. All she needed to do was let her decorous future unfold.

Most people would consider it a happy ending to make a fortune, marry well, enter the gentry, and live happily ever after.

But Isabel couldn’t quite restrain a sigh.

She took the lead when they got to Westminster. She didn’t want to go through her old streets. Robert was too sensitive to ask why she was taking this unfamiliar route. He knew they’d find a tavern somewhere along this road, too, where he could wait.

Sensing aimlessness, the horses eventually took matters into their own hands and plunged their heads into the first trough they saw. “Let’s stop,” Robert said. There was a tavern opposite.

“That’ll do for us. I’ll order some food while I wait for you.”

It was a sprawl of a building, with overhanging solars and big stables stretching back off the courtyard. Isabel thought she remembered it. She was almost sure she recognized the beefy innkeeper, who was up a ladder with a paintbrush, touching up the sign. The boy with him was holding a bucket of blue paint.

She didn’t understand what they were doing. Her stomach was too full of butterflies at the prospect of seeing the princess again. She didn’t want to think that the princess would know it was Isabel who’d betrayed her secret fear about the king poisoning the queen; she didn’t want Elizabeth to hate her.

Robert understood the repainting straight away. He stepped forward, took off his hat, and asked the innkeeper: “Blue?”

It was only when all other eyes were raised to the sign that hers followed. The innkeeper had painted roughly over the silhouette of a white boar that his sign had shown until an hour before—King Richard’s badge—with blue paint that was still glistening and wet. There were still traces of white showing through the new blue boar’s body. The innkeeper had a splodge of blue paint on his nose.

The innkeeper scratched his head; he had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “The Earl of Oxford’s badge,” he mumbled.

The Earl of Oxford: Henry Tudor’s man. Robert laughed.

“You’ve gone over to the House of Lancaster, then,” he said, and waited.

The man wriggled uneasily on his ladder. But Robert went on looking inquiring. Finally, as if sensing this stranger wouldn’t just go away, but didn’t represent a threat, the innkeeper laughed too, and began getting down, leaving the sign unfinished. “Look, I know I can’t draw,” he said, picking up his ladder. “I’m all thumbs with a paintbrush. This was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment.”

There were no bells ringing, Isabel thought numbly. If this innkeeper wanted to paint over the traces of his earlier loyalty to King Richard and the House of York in such a hurry, with his own clumsy hands, he must have heard something. But if there was news, why weren’t there any bells? Then her head cleared. The messenger would have stopped here, maybe changed horses.

The innkeeper would be the first to know.

Robert cut through her slow thoughts. Still sounding no more than cheerfully interested, he said to the innkeeper: “So there’s been a battle . . .”

“Market Bosworth,” the man answered, readily enough. “Yesterday. A rout. He’s dead. They cut him down. Stripped him naked. Carried his corpse into town on a donkey.”

There was no need to ask who the innkeeper was talking about.

The man spat, but not angrily; just in quiet, all- purpose disgust, his stock- in- trade.

“God’s punishment,” he added reflectively. “It was only a matter of time.”

The bells had started pealing by the time Isabel was shown into the princess’s parlor: a cascade of joy; a new tomorrow.

Elizabeth was standing at the window, listening to the bells.

She was perfectly still.

Isabel had stood outside for several minutes, relieved to be alone but for the sentries’ frightened eyes while the quiet sadness of things lost forever deepened in her. She’d thought she might see a reflection of that softness in Elizabeth. She’d been almost glad they would be together in this moment, to share their loss.

But when Elizabeth did turn round, her green eyes were glittering.

She didn’t mention the bells. She just said: “Come in, come in,” without surprise, and sat down on the cushions of the window seat, patting the place next to her with something close to warmth. “I’ve been hoping you’d come back. I was sad to hear of your loss.”

Isabel bowed acknowledgment. But she couldn’t sit. The young woman in front of her seemed a stranger. Isabel couldn’t imagine what they would talk about.

Awkwardly, Isabel nodded her head at the window, and said:“I’m sorry for your grief now.” The words brought the beginning of shame. Even more awkwardly, she reached down for her big sewing bag and fumbled out the princess’s valuables. They were lying on top of Joan Woulbarowe’s silk cloth, which nearly filled the bag. With her eyes still down, Isabel held out the green cloth and the little purse with the emeralds.

But no one took them.

When Isabel finally looked up, she saw the princess smiling at her, very calmly, and shaking her head. Her hands were folded in her lap.

“No, you keep them,” Elizabeth said. “As a token of my gratitude. You’ve served me well.” She smiled more broadly. “Better than you know, perhaps,” she added. “Are you really selling up and leaving London?”

Isabel nodded. She went on holding the cloth and purse out, as if someone might still relieve her of them. She said, as if wishing her safe future into existence, “I’m going to marry; live in Hertfordshire; at Sutton on Derwent.”

The princess nodded once or twice.

“Well,” she said, after a while. “It’s a pity. I’d hoped you might make my wedding gown.”

The bells rang louder.

“Because it seems . . . ,” the princess added quietly, “from those bells, that Henry’s won.”

She smiled again, a curved, private, self- satisfied cat- smile.

“Or that I have,” she added, and she tinkled with laughter.

Isabel stared. Demurely, the princess explained. “Henry Tudor pledged last Christmas Day, in front of his court, to marry me as soon as he’d defeated my uncle. He’s been my betrothed, in the eyes of God, ever since.”

Isabel stuttered: “Christmas?”

She was counting back. Yes; it was only after Christmas that the princess had told her she was afraid the king was poisoning his wife.

She stared at Elizabeth, too astounded to speak. Was this why?

Elizabeth’s green eyes glittered again. Gently, she nodded.

“Of course, I had to stop my uncle Gloucester trying to marry me in the meantime,” she added. “The match my mother wanted . . .”

“But,” Isabel said. She was imagining Dickon’s body, bloodied and stripped naked, hanging over the back of a donkey. She was remembering his velvet voice saying, long ago, “We all end up equal in the bottom of a bag.” The pity of it overwhelmed her.

There was no point in asking directly whether the princess had just made up the story of the poisoning. Isabel could imagine the elegant shrug, the shoulders turning away.

“But why?” she stammered instead. “When you could have been his queen . . . when he loved you?”

Elizabeth didn’t flicker at the word
love
. Lightly, far too lightly, she said, “Oh, he wanted me all right. But why would I want a husband who’d declared me a bastard? I’d never have escaped that stigma, even if he’d let me wear a crown.”

She laughed.

“Henry, now—Henry’s different. Henry needs me. I never stopped being a royal princess in his eyes: he sees me as the senior surviving member of the House of York. And he’s not so royal himself—he’s just the last man left standing with a drop of Lancastrian blood in his veins. He’ll be grateful to have me.” She looked dreamily up at Isabel: “Yes, it was well worth taking the risk of waiting to be the Tudor queen.”

She stood up. As if surprised that Isabel was still holding out the piece of gold cloth and the bag of emeralds, and not rushing to pack them back into her bag, the princess made a pretty shooing motion with her hands. “So take your gift; go on,” she said, a little impatiently. “I’m grateful to you.”