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‘You’re young,’ she heard him add. She thought she heard sympathy. ‘Take the long view. This is only your first move. You’ll get more chances later.’
The serving girl was lighting candles in the back vaults; people were crowding in from the markets. She couldn’t bring herself even to nod. Forever yawned ahead of her fourteen-year-old mind like a pit. She got up. Wished she had a cloak to wrap carefully around herself. It would be cold outside. There was nowhere to go but home.
‘Thank you for your company,’ she muttered, staring at her feet, and turned to the door.
He was on his feet in a dark whirl; beside her, a hand on her back. ‘It’s not easy, I know,’ he whispered. ‘I was lucky we met today: you’ve helped me see what I should do. So thank you. And good luck. I hope I’ve helped you do the right thing too.’
She was aware of his downturned face just above hers. From very close, she became conscious of his arm stretching around behind her; of long lean muscle and the dizzy moving together of bodies. Or did she misunderstand? Before she quite knew what was happening, it wasn’t happening any more. He was striding off very fast towards the serving girl, in her pool of candlelight, feeling down his leg for a purse; glancing briefly back at her, still with those half-closed, intent eyes; muttering, ‘Goodbye, Isabel.’
She stood there for a moment more. Astonished; still feeling the heat of his hand on her skin. Watching his retreating back. Then she braced herself for the evening chill, and walked out into the starlight. She thought she glimpsed him turning back round to watch the door swing shut behind her, but she couldn’t be sure.
Every step she took back towards her home felt harder. Every dutiful footfall was heavier. That last moment was still with her, mixed up with the wind flapping at her skirts. It stayed with her like the eye’s long memory of flame: the man with the soft eyes and the hard mind looking back at her over a lean shoulder, then moving away so fast that the candles silhouetting his form shrank back as if a dark wind was blowing at them, murmuring goodbye in his black velvet voice. His hand on her back. She didn’t even know his name. She’d never see him again. It would have to be enough that for an instant they’d drawn so close she’d almost felt the heat of his body on hers. Even the possibility of one day feeling that radiance again, of being transformed like a wisp of silk lit up by the sun, might help to sustain her through the drab future her father was planning for her.
2 (#u34cf85bc-f9b0-57a1-bac7-6bd0ab41d828)
Isabel married Thomas Claver a week later, on a bright April morning, on the steps of St Thomas of Acre. The little people squinting across Cheapside to the church door smiled at the sight while they filled up their buckets at the water conduit, or popping heads out from one of the many covered markets behind the Mercers’ thoroughfare and the cramped stalls lining the road, where low-ranking silkwomen doing needlework or weaving or throwing or twisting threads craned their failing eyes to watch the world go by as they worked. A couple of crones poked each other and cheered the little procession on to the door, with the mocking laughs of the old. But all they probably noticed was John Lambert, in his mercer’s blue velvet livery robes trimmed with fur, looking as magnificent and proud as a prince between the two young female forms whose future he was settling.
Isabel’s heart was beating so loud she was breathless with the boom and thud of blood in her ears. It was all she could do to stop her own small, unimpressive, down-covered limbs, so like her dead mother’s had been, from trembling, and her freckled face from showing fear. When she’d looked into her mother’s beaten copper mirror before leaving, the dark blue eyes in the face that had stared back from it had been wiped of their usual intent, good-humoured look. There was no sign in that face that its owner was usually chatty and bright and asked inquisitive questions about everything she saw. There was none of the charm in those neat, symmetrical features that often made people look at her with the beginning of a shared smile, even if she wasn’t trying to beguile them. The face looking back at her now didn’t seem pretty: just quiet, even placid. Her red-gold hair was smoothed neatly away under her veil. It was the best display she could manage in the circumstances.
She couldn’t look at Jane, as slender and golden as ever. Jane was dressed exactly like Isabel in one of the yellow gowns embroidered with silk flowers in which John Lambert had displayed them on his retail stall in the biggest market, the Crown Seld, whenever he made them sit there, embroidering the heavy orphreys that would later border extravagant church vestments. (The sight of the two girls, so fresh and pretty, was supposed to draw in passing trade; Isabel had spent her life complaining that she wanted to do more than just sew while she was working in the seld, but her father had always been adamant – embroidering church vestments was the only suitable part of the mercer’s trade for a young lady of her stature.) Jane was her father’s daughter even now, down to the emerald-green eyes and noble profile and air of perfect composure under pressure. Isabel shrank into herself as she peeped at her sister, wished she could look so self-assured. Isabel couldn’t look at the bridegrooms – Will Shore, somewhere over there on the edge of her field of vision, behind Jane, a shy beanpole in violet hose, and Thomas Claver, thick-set and reddish-haired, next to her. In Thomas’s case, though, she was at least aware of his eyes darting between the watchers and her father and his own tub of a mother, whose reddish face was cheerful above her serviceable dark clothes. John Lambert had wondered aloud more than once in the past few days whether Alice Claver – who was famously not one for ceremony – would have the decency to dress appropriately for the occasion. She’d lived down to his expectations, wearing only her usual market clothes with a bright blue cloak wrapped over them, as if she’d hastily borrowed some of her stock for the day, or was expecting rain. If anything in the assembly of people Isabel couldn’t look at now gave her comfort, it was Alice Claver looking scratchy and uncomfortable in that dressed-up cloak.
There hadn’t been much time for Isabel to get used to her situation, what with King Edward’s army entering the City and the curfew being moved to before sunset, just in case, and her father being called on to head one of the city patrols watching the soldiers to prevent outrages against the citizens. At the end of the first day, when people had begun to relax a little, as they saw this army, now mostly camped outside the walls in Moorfields (with just a few hundred lodged in Baynard’s Castle, the riverside family home of the dukes of York), was not going to make trouble, and as eager vintners and fishmongers rushed to make contracts to supply the soldiers until they left to march north again, an agitated John Lambert had got the call to join the King and his generals at the thanksgiving Mass they were holding at St Paul’s. His delight at that almost compensated for being left out of the farewell banquet at Baynard’s Castle last night, at which the mayor had been allowed to serve the King’s wine. And his preparations for being briefly in sight of the court had overshadowed the planning for the weddings.
With so much going on, John Lambert had only had time to take Isabel once to the Claver house on Catte Street, a great place whose airy halls and parlours put to shame even the substantial Lambert family home round the corner on Milk Street, even if it wasn’t decorated with half so many tapestries and carpets as the Lambert house. It was in the morning of the day the gates were opened to the army. He was already in his harness ready to ride out with the patrol. He’d hastily sorted out the business side of the marriage with Alice Claver, at one end of the great hall, in the space of an hour, while the betrothed couple had been given a brief chance to get to know each other, sitting awkwardly on benches drawn up across from each other, at the other end of the room.
It had taken Isabel what seemed an eternity to find the strength to raise her eyes. When she did, she’d been astonished by the picture the young man opposite her presented. He wasn’t slurping at the cup of wine his mother had left by his side before tactfully drawing away. He was slumped on his bench, with his pink face in shadow under hair that wouldn’t lie down. He was staring at his feet, pulling at the purse dangling down his leg with busy fingers, and biting his lip.
He looks scared to death, Isabel had thought suddenly, sitting up straighter with the realisation. More scared than me. He’d probably never succeeded in touching any of the tavern girls she’d seen him leering over in the Tumbling Bear and the Lion, she realised with a flash of intuition. This indulged only child of a rich widow, who’d never been sent to start an apprenticeship in another household, who’d been allowed to avoid learning his mother’s trade in her own house, was looking like a large child on the brink of tears. He’d almost certainly never been alone with a female of his own age. And now it was all catching up with him. She’d been surprised to find herself feeling something close to pity.
She’d leaned forward, wanting so much to comfort him that she very nearly patted his hand. But the only subject she could think of to break the ice was business. Her father had said Alice Claver was planning to buy her son into the livery and give him one thousand pounds’ worth of goods so he could bypass apprenticeship altogether – the ten years of study most boys did – and start trading on his own account as soon as he was married. They’d still have to live with his mother while he was setting himself up; but Alice Claver’s home contained so many leagues of rooms and halls that it would be no hardship. Perhaps Thomas Claver would be reassured by being reminded of his prospects, so glorious compared to the ten pounds here and five pounds there that so many young bachelors cadged from wherever they could to scrape together the stock they needed to start trading for themselves. It might make him feel in control of his destiny. ‘You must be pleased about getting into the livery,’ she’d ventured hesitantly, trying to form an alliance, doing her best at an encouraging smile.
But he’d only scuffed his feet against each other and scowled. ‘Oh, that. It’s just my ma pulling strings,’ he’d said sullenly. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. Doesn’t mean I’ll actually get to do what I want. She’ll have her fingers all over my business from day one, just you wait and see. “Thomas, do this; Thomas, do that; Thomas, don’t do that.”’ He peered up at last, but only to fix her with a look of gloomy malice before turning back down to his scuffing and scowling. ‘And it won’t be long before she starts in on you either.’
Isabel only knew Alice Claver by reputation. In the markets, the silkwoman was respected and mostly liked as a force of nature; a solid woman in her middle years with a wide face and a wider smile, when she chose, though she wasn’t scared of scowling or talking sharply either. Alice Claver whisked through the covered markets where she kept half a dozen retail stalls and booths and chests, selling whole silk cloths from Italy and silk threads from all over the world and the piecework ribbons and small goods that were made by her workers in London, jollying her own people relentlessly along, sweet-talking the mercers, and selling to clients with such down-to-earth persuasiveness that they hardly knew where they were before they were parting with their money. She hadn’t married again after her husband died, years ago. But she’d kept his business going. And she’d made enough money from carrying on Richard Claver’s trade in luxury goods to go on leasing the palatial great place they’d lived in together from the Mercers for what every silkwoman in the Crown Seld knew to be the princely annual rent of £8 13s 4d. She’d registered to trade in her own name, as a femme sole, taking responsibility for her own debts. She didn’t have John Lambert’s disdain for training girls – she trained younger silkwomen as if they were proper male apprentices, teaching them everything about how trade was conducted. The only thing the trained silkwomen couldn’t do was to join the Mercers’ Company; that was for the men; but they could set themselves up and, if things went well for them, keep themselves in style without depending on a husband. Things had gone well for Alice Claver. She sold fine silk goods to the King’s Wardrobe. She visited textile markets in the Low Countries and bought the finest cloths in quantities that were the envy of many merchants. She’d even organised the other wives of the silk business, and some of the most influential of their mercer husbands, to join her and the unmarried silkwomen in petitioning parliament to protect their trade from foreign competition. And she was the centre of charity around her home. She might not have much physical grace, but she had more energy than most women half her age – enough energy, Isabel thought with another surprised stab of compassion, to overwhelm a son with no great appetite for work.
So Isabel persevered with her smile. ‘Oh well,’ she said brightly, reminding herself that a soft answer turns away wrath, ‘we’ll see her off, don’t worry.’ She sounded more confident than she felt. Alice Claver would be hard to see off. ‘You’ll soon learn how to run things for yourself. And I can help. At least,’ she corrected herself, smiling a bit ruefully at the thought, ‘I can a bit. My father’s always refused to let the women in his family learn the business. He says it’s because he has his position to think of, and there’s no need now he’s so rich, though we know it’s really because my mother never knew enough about silkwork to teach us herself or hold her own in the selds, and after she died it would have meant losing face to change his ways and let us start learning. Anyway, he doesn’t like training girls too much. So all he’s ever let me do is embroidery. But I’m good at that.’
She kept her eyes on his face. She felt, rather than saw, him begin to look less lugubrious when she started to laugh gently at her own family.
So she persisted, willing him to laugh with her: ‘He says, “Lovely ladies with long fingers should embroider church vestments,”’ and she imitated her father’s rolling, mellifluous voice well enough that the corners of his mouth lifted up. ‘It’s the only thing he thinks ladylike enough for us.’
Suddenly he looked up and stared into her eyes, so straight and so hard and so long that she thought she’d said something to offend. She stared back, astonished. What could it have been? But then she realised he wasn’t offended, just overcoming shyness. Slowly, his face softened. She could see sweetness in his relieved grin. ‘You’re not half as grand as I thought you’d be,’ he’d said. Isabel thought they’d both briefly sensed the possibility of forming an alliance: the young and powerless against the families who controlled them.
Whether Thomas Claver still felt well-disposed towards her now, at the church door, Isabel couldn’t say. Her eyes were fixed on the nails on the door while the priest mumbled.
Her father had to nudge her when the time came to exchange rings. She pulled hers off her finger and held it out, still staring at the doornails through the drumbeats in her ears. Her fingers were damp and she could feel prickles on her back. But she didn’t hesitate.
Thomas was less lucky. She could feel him tug. Nothing happened. He tugged again. This time the ring came off, glittered in the corner of her eye, and flew down towards the cobbles. It bounced twice. It turned like a tiny hoop. She heard, rather than saw, it come to rest at her feet.
Everyone went quiet. Her father drew in his breath. His mother hissed, ‘Thomas!’ Isabel glanced sideways at him from under her veil. He’d gone bright red. His mortified face was wet, his eyes appalled at his own clumsiness. Alice Claver was poking him in the ribs, pointing down, miming instructions for him to lean forward and pick the ring up. But he was rooted to the spot. Everyone else was frozen too.
Isabel’s heart swelled with something that made her forget her fear. She bent down, picked up the offending ring herself, and put it on her own finger; then she reached for Thomas Claver’s unresponsive hand, drew it to her, and slipped her ring onto his finger. The group still seemed to have stopped breathing. Taking a deep breath, she raised her eyes slowly along Thomas Claver’s arm until she was looking into his face, and watched his eyes move from an awed consideration of the hand she’d dressed with her ring, up her arm to her face. Behind his obvious terror, whether it was at having broken the forward movement of the ceremony in a way that would be chewed over in the selds as a possible bad omen, or just at having embarrassed his mother with his clumsiness, she could see the dawn of a quiet, desperate hope in those white-ringed eyes, a hope that she might somehow save him.
Hardly knowing what she was doing, she lifted her face to his, pre-empting the moment in the ceremony when bride and groom were invited to kiss. And when he only stared back at her, as if he had no idea what to do next, she boldly stretched out the hand that now wore his ring to touch the back of his head, stood on tiptoe and kissed him firmly on the lips.
There was a screech of approving laughter from one of the beldames by the water conduit. Then, even from within that awkward embrace, with her eyes shut and her body held apart from the big, hot frame of her husband, Isabel could feel the Lamberts and Clavers and Shores all relax; breath expelled; bodies moving; little murmurs and eddies of happy sound. When she opened her eyes and stepped back, Thomas Claver went on looking at her in a kind of amazement. He was still pink about the face, and still damp. But he was smiling.
Isabel danced at the feast. She danced with Thomas, suddenly shy again and avoiding his eyes; aware of the dampness of his hands; holding herself nervously back from his large body. She danced more freely with every mercer who was her father’s or her new mother-in-law’s friend, until the blood came back to her cheeks with the sheer pleasure of movement. She whirled her skirts and flashed her ankles; sufficient unto the day, she thought, with sudden hectic gaiety, draining her cup of wine. Suddenly it felt like an easing of her burden in life to be free of her father. She was nervous about what would come after the dancing, of course; but there’d be time to worry about tonight when tonight came. When the third course was brought in, giant pyramids of blancmanges wobbling in the heat, she let her partner, a bright-eyed old friend of Alice Claver’s called William Pratte, lead her back to his place on the trestles and courteously pass sweet dainties her way.
Thomas brought William Pratte’s wife, Anne, back to the table, then left the room. He half-glanced at Isabel. She caught the nervous look, but was too shy to smile back. It was only after he’d turned uncertainly towards the door that her lips started to curve up. She sat breathlessly quiet among his mother’s friends, feeling grown-up. She couldn’t be unaware of Alice Claver and the plump, knowing, eager Prattes gossiping beside her. They talked in low voices, darting cautious glances all around; but they clearly weren’t trying to hide what they were saying from her.
‘Well of course they fight dirty,’ William Pratte was saying, with a mischievous gleam in his eye. ‘The nobility have never been half as noble as they like to make out. They say King Edward didn’t so much win the last battle as chase the other lot into the millpond and drown them.’
Alice Claver snorted irreverently. ‘Like kittens,’ she said. ‘Well, all I can say is good riddance.’
‘Still. It’s not exactly Camelot, is it?’
John Lambert was leading Jane down the row of raised arms in the centre of the room. He was radiating happiness at having pulled off his plan, skittishly kicking up his heels and smiling at everyone whose eyes he met. Yet he must be able to see the room was only half-full, and mostly with the Clavers’ and Shores’ family connections, not the great and good of the City he’d wanted to attract. Isabel thought: if they’d really forgiven him, the mayor would be here. The aldermen. Her relief at having got the ordeal of the wedding over was so great that the thought almost made her feel sorry for him.
‘Do you think it’s true what they say?’ Anne Pratte was half-whispering, her eyes batting flirtatiously up and down. These people seemed to be much more disrespectful and sharp-tongued than her father, Isabel thought, with a flicker of interest. She’d only ever heard the York royal family discussed in tones of hushed reverence at home. Did they always talk like this? ‘About the youngest brother; the Duke of Gloucester; how he killed…’
She dropped her voice. Isabel sensed she’d hear the same stories again. But for now a movement at the other end of the room was distracting her; a flurry at the door. Thomas? She glanced up.
A crowd was forming over there. She could hear the sounds of hooves and metal outside. There were new people sliding into the room, round the edge of the group; and she could see one of them was Alderman John Brown. At the centre of the crowd was a tawny uncovered head, taller than the rest, with bobbing and bowing going on all around it.
William Pratte was still whispering conspiratorially, getting back to the meaty talk, lifting one hand off his plump knees; including Isabel, to her slight alarm, in his bright-eyed gaze. It was almost as if these middle-aged people, with their knowing ways and cheerfully treasonous talk, hadn’t realised how young and inexperienced Isabel was; if she hadn’t known such a thing to be impossible, she might have thought they were deliberately trying to include her; trying to be friends.
The crowd by the door shifted and cleared, like clouds blown by the wind. For a second, Isabel could see over the three grey heads bent in front of her, and what she seemed to be seeing was her father, down on his knees, grinning like a lunatic at the floor and being patted on the back by a tall man in clothes that seemed to shimmer gold in the heavy afternoon light.
‘Look,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse with surprise.
William Pratte followed her finger. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Alice, look.’
Alice Claver’s head turned, and stayed stuck in a stare directed at the doorway. But Anne Pratte was still caught up in the whispering.
‘But Alice, that’s exactly what they are saying,’ she was muttering happily. And then she looked up, too, saw Alice Claver rising slowly to her feet, still staring, and began to gape like an astonished fish. ‘It’s the King!’ Anne Pratte said foolishly – foolishly, because others were dropping to their knees too now, crowding in: the mayor, suddenly and miraculously present; Will Shore’s parents; the Prattes; Alice Claver (how had she got there so fast?). Now John Lambert was scrambling to his feet to get out of the crush of kneelers, dancing backwards in something close to panic to create a place of honour for the monarch who was gracing his table with this extraordinary visit, and startled apprentices and serving girls, getting the message, were rushing to and fro clearing away the dishes from the tabletop and whisking in fresh dishes and strewing the boards with rose petals. And every bare head was bowed, but every pair of eyes was raised, fixed on King Edward, drinking him in.
‘Well,’ said the King, casually moving through the room towards Isabel’s father and patting him on the back again, and every mouth opened in adoring appreciation of his words, ‘how could I let my best friend in the City of London marry his daughters without coming to wish them well?’
John Lambert was pink with gratification; his smile almost cracking his face in half. He didn’t look handsome and distinguished, for once; his bowed posture and that smile reduced him to servility. He looked as though he was thanking God for having given him the opportunity, over the years, to lend King Edward £1,052 10s, the sum he so often liked to remind his daughters was as much as the Duke of Gloucester himself could hope for in rents in a year and more than most knights could hope to lay their hands on in a lifetime; he looked as though he was thinking that the reward of the King’s presence here, now, was enough to repay those debts even if he never saw a penny of the money again (which he might easily not). Still, no one could look handsome next to this King, whatever they were thinking, Isabel realised. Edward’s golden presence would always diminish everyone else.
The King and his friend – a dark, laughing nobleman almost Edward’s height, who would have been the most striking person in the room if he’d come alone, and whom Anne Pratte identified for Isabel, in a piercing whisper, as Thomas, Lord Hastings, the King’s dearest friend – looked as though they were here to stay. The King ate a slice of beef. He drank a cup of claret. He smiled at Jane till she blushed. He congratulated Will Shore on his bride. He asked the groom’s permission to dance with her. He led Jane, floating like thistledown, through an entire basse dance. Why her, not me? Isabel thought, without really understanding the thought; she knew really that she’d have been terrified to touch the King’s person. But everyone turned to Jane first. ‘There, you see,’ Anne Pratte burbled to Isabel, her face glowing, her disrespectful gossip of a few moments before entirely forgotten, blotted out by the majesty of majesty, ‘your father’s in the good graces of the King, all right… what an honour… can you imagine? I’ve never heard of anything like this before… you’d never have got King Henry mixing with merchants, that sad sack… I’ve always said loyalty deserves to be rewarded.’
Now John Lambert was rushing to Isabel to present her to the King. She was embarrassed by the look of triumph on her father’s face, but she let him take her hand. However fast her heart was beating, she kept her eyes turned down as he pulled her along the side of the table and began muttering ‘Sire’ and ‘May it please your grace’, and bowing and scraping. She made her deepest curtsey and rose, with her eyes still down. She didn’t want to be drawn into the excitement. But it was infectious. ‘Aha, another Lambert beauty,’ the King said. And his voice was so deep and rich and full of unexpected beauty that it surprised her into looking up; for a second it had reminded her of the voice of the stranger she’d met in the church. For a second, as she met this stranger’s eyes, she was disappointed to see a bigger face, fleshier and handsomer. But something kept her gazing into these eyes, full of lazy laughter; aware of his sensual mouth, twitching up at one corner as if starting to laugh at some secret joke he was about to share with her. Perhaps it was the long gold of the afternoon, but in the warmth of that gaze she felt time was suspended. The crowded scene faded. All she was aware of was the man’s eyes holding hers until she felt her own cheeks tingle with pleasure and her mouth widen into a smile. Until, to her surprise, she found she was laughing; a laugh of pure, animal joy.
They were lighting candles at the back of the room, she noticed, coming to, wondering where this immense happiness had come from so suddenly.
Then it was over. No dancing. The King waved his congratulations to Thomas, just coming back into the room, who looked even more startled than everyone else, then alarmed, then scared when he saw his mother’s frown, then almost fell over himself falling to his knees. And John Lambert rushed Isabel away to her table again, still bowing and grinning. All that was left was her exhilaration. As John Lambert settled her back on her stool, fussing around her, unable to contain his excitement, he couldn’t stop muttering: ‘a wonderful man; a king to be proud of; we’re living in fortunate times; you’ve been honoured… honoured…’ As she reached for her cup, she noticed, with a small pang of a sourness she wouldn’t admit might be jealousy, that the King was dancing with Jane again.
‘One thing’s for sure. No one will ever remember about the ring now,’ Thomas said happily, stroking her fine fair hair with one hand, pulling himself up on his other elbow so he could look at her face on the pillow in the morning light. He wasn’t fat, as she’d thought; she knew now that his ox-like body, twice the size of hers, was all heavy muscle and power.
She murmured something indistinct, trying to put aside her embarrassed, happy, sticky memories of the overwhelming things she and he had done in this bed in the dark, to the truly astonishing event of yesterday, the only thing about her wedding that every gossip in the selds would now be discussing – the King’s presence at the feast.
The King of England at her wedding, she thought with sleepy wonder. The newly returned King Edward – who a year ago had been a terrified runaway, chased out of the country by King Henry’s army, forced to take ship for the Low Countries after being routed in some battle at, she thought, Doncaster; and walking through the night, with his brother and his closest friends, across the Wash, while the tide came in and pulled his men, screaming, into the sea they hoped would save them, if they could only reach a port to escape abroad from. No wonder the other merchants had thought, back then, that it would be best to accept King Henry’s army; even if they’d enjoyed the ten years of Edward’s reign before that; even if they remembered the earlier decades of King Henry’s aimless rule as a slide into anarchy, when nothing could stop the pirates and the robber barons, when the wine fleet stopped coming and it was dangerous to cross the Channel with their cargoes. King Edward hadn’t seemed to have a chance, a year ago. But he was a lucky man; a man with skill. He’d never lost a battle. He’d found funds and raised another army and fought his way back to London. And now he was showing how he planned to rule, if he finally defeated the Lancastrian armies still in the Midlands – as a friend of merchants. He’d come to her wedding.
No one had ever heard of such a thing. No other king had ever done anything like coming to a merchant’s feast. But then no other king had had to borrow so much from the City to pay his way in the war he’d seemed fated, until recently, to lose. And there was no one he’d borrowed more from than John Lambert. Isabel thought back to the frantic bobbing and scraping that had taken over the party when King Edward walked through the door. The reverence. The fawning laughter. ‘Oh… my father’s face…’ she recalled, and laughed; not the polite tinkle with which she met the pleasantries of grown-up mercers and their wives, but one of the big deep snorts of mirth she and Jane indulged themselves in, in the Lambert children’s bed, when no one else was listening.
Thomas Claver guffawed with her. ‘And my mother,’ he picked up cheerfully. ‘I could just see her wishing she’d dressed up properly for once. She wasn’t the only one, either. I’d say every woman in that room would have done anything to catch his eye.’ He pulled himself over her, planting a big elbow beside each of her ears, grinning down at her with a confidence that looked new and unfamiliar on him. ‘Even you, maybe. Hmm?’ She shut her eyes, shy at looking at him so close, in daylight, and breathless now his chest was squashing down on her again, his legs pushing between hers. He brushed a strand of her hair mischievously across her eyelids. ‘Tell me. Was the King the man of your dreams?’
She shook her head with her eyes still shut, smiling at the soft brush of hair on skin and the gruff gentleness of his voice. If they were going to go on being this kind to each other it would be easy to stay absorbed in the moment, this one and perhaps many more; to feel lucky at being granted the new pleasure of being with someone who would never criticise her or demand anything of her beyond physical affection and answers to the kind of excitable, puppyish questions he’d been pounding her with since before dawn – ‘What are your three favourite colours?’ ‘… your favourite food?’ ‘… your worst memory?’ ‘… your patron saint?’ But his question reawakened a part of her that was separate from Thomas Claver; a part that knew that this easy sprawl of limbs, and even the first pulses of excitement in her body as he pushed his weight closer, didn’t fill her senses and change the colours of the air in the way they’d been changed, for a few magical seconds, by the man in the tavern who’d told her she had no choice but to marry.
‘No,’ she whispered, laughing, ‘of course he wasn’t.’ And she arched her aching body up invitingly under Thomas Claver’s, and met his lips with hers, and tried to banish that other face – the piercing black eyes, the raised eyebrows like a cross, the dark velvet voice – back to the limbo it belonged in. I’m blessed to have found this much happiness, she told herself; it would be a sin to ask for more.
‘So who is?’ Thomas Claver’s voice interrupted, as he moved his lips across her face to her ear, sounding hoarse now as desire gripped him in earnest, and she breathed the answer he wanted to hear, and almost meant it:
‘You.’
Afterwards, stretching back on the pillows, she shook her head lazily when Thomas said, with a sudden return of anxiety, ‘We should go to breakfast soon; there’s hell to pay if you’re not down by dawn.’
‘We don’t have to do everything they want today; they’ll understand,’ she murmured back, stroking his shoulder, ‘they’d be disappointed if we rushed out to eat this morning.’
She was pleased when his face relaxed back into its previous expression of joy – and then suddenly struck by what might have been the very oddest part of the whole strange day she’d just lived through.
It was Jane. Jane, who was never anything but perfectly sunny as she did the right thing and kept everyone satisfied; Jane, who always looked for something to be happy about in the most miserable of situations; Jane, who’d accepted her father’s choice of husband with so much less fuss than Isabel (‘It can’t be that bad – at least we’ll never have to sit on those horrible stools in the Crown again, blinding ourselves just to trim some old bishop’s robe, with every market boy gawping at us as though they’d never seen a girl before’). Jane, whom she’d expected to become the perfect wife instantly: laughing in the kitchen with the servants and the children; laughing more elegantly at the mayor’s table; charming her husband into high office; magicking contracts out of customers with her wit and lovely limbs.
Jane hadn’t been so graciously dutiful last night. As soon as the King had bowed and asked her husband’s permission to take her as partner in the basse dance, she’d got up, without even waiting for Will Shore’s stammered consent, and swayed off across the room with the King, looking radiant.
An hour later, when Isabel and Thomas left, Jane was still sitting with the King in a pool of golden light, ignoring her husband, deep in a serene conversation quite unrelated to the hubbub of dancing and shadows all around. And, in the darkness beyond their conversation, Isabel now remembered an uneasy play of eyes. John Lambert’s eyes, fixed adoringly on the King. The eyes of the King’s friend, Lord Hastings, fixed hungrily on Jane. And Will Shore’s eyes, dazed and puzzled, looking from one golden head to the other, as if he were wondering whether to feel awestruck by the King’s attention to his new wife, or just left out.
In the end, they only got up in time to join Alice Claver for dinner after eleven in the morning. There was a simple dish of beef and bread and beer, all anyone could manage after yesterday’s excesses. William and Anne Pratte were there with Alice – had they even gone away? Alice wondered. They seemed as familiar with this house as if they lived here, though she knew they had their own home near Jane’s new one on Old Jewry. They were gossiping and grinning, like they had been yesterday, and Anne, on seeing the young couple, immediately launched into a story for them about the excitements they’d missed later last night. About how more courtiers had come to join the king after the couple had left, including the King’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, small and dark, ill-favoured and bad-tempered, and about how Jane had danced with the King practically till the candles had burned down.
Perhaps it was sharing work, in the way of so many Mercery families – the husband doing the wholesale trading while the wives made luxury retail products from their husbands’ silk purchases, sold them, and minded the apprentices – that had made this couple look so like twins. They were both small and tubby and cheerful. William Pratte’s hair was thin and grey, and both pairs of eyes were grey too, but as lively and inquisitive as those of squirrels. They finished each other’s sentences, and Alice Claver’s too. That would never have happened at the decorous, often silent Lambert table; but no one here seemed to mind.
The three of them made such a point of courteously including the newlyweds in their grown-up conversation, and so strenuously avoided reference, even by the smallest untoward smirk or movement of an eyebrow, to the pleasures of the marriage bed, that Isabel spent the entire meal going alternately hot with shame and cold with dread, just in case they were about to start.
Her stomach churned so badly at times that she could only half-hear the harmless gossip they were chewing over from the wedding feast. John Brown, her father’s replacement as alderman: going bald; looking fat; should take more exercise. Her father: looking indecently handsome; what had his robes cost him? (Here three bright pairs of adult eyes turned cautiously towards her, then away.) Gratefully, she felt Thomas’s hand cover hers under the table and squeeze. His hand was damp; his face hangdog; he must feel as nervous as her.
‘You’d never have got King Henry turning up like that at a merchant’s wedding,’ little Anne Pratte whispered confidingly, turning to Alice Claver. Isabel waited for Alice Claver, the head of this household, to look forbiddingly at her; it didn’t do to gossip about kings. But the larger woman just snickered encouragingly and replied, with a disrespect Isabel found startling: ‘No, never; give me a big handsome hero for a king any day, especially if he’s going to take a proper interest in us…’
‘… And stop the Italians cheating us,’ William Pratte butted in hopefully. ‘And knock some sense into the Hanse. Maybe even get the French pirates while he’s about it. I’ll be for the House of York, all right, if King Edward’s going to really stir himself to help the City. No more loafing around while every lord in the land runs wild and our business goes to rack and ruin. I tell you, it’ll be ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Hallelujah!’ every morning at my table if Edward goes on doing better than that…’ He screwed up his face and stuck his tongue out of his mouth, letting it loll like a lunatic’s. The street-boy code for half-wit King Henry.
Isabel stared. She should have been scared of what her father would definitely have called treasonous talk. But there was something about the casual mischief flickering round the table that she thought she was going to like, once she’d had time to get used to it.
‘Well, let’s hope he wins, then,’ Alice Claver said briskly. ‘He still has to catch Warwick.’
‘Now,’ she swept on, turning so suddenly to Isabel and Thomas that the bride hardly had time for her heart to leap into her mouth. ‘You two. Talking of our business going to rack and ruin, isn’t it time to get you to work?’
Alice Claver’s manner might have been brusque, but her eyes twinkled so merrily that Isabel didn’t feel offended. For a moment, at least. Then she realised Thomas, at her side, was bristling with resentment, and thought, falteringly, that perhaps she’d misunderstood the mood.
‘Get your lovely legs into the storeroom, eh, Thomas?’ Alice Claver went on prodding, with the beginning of a rough growl of laughter in her voice. ‘Show Isabel the ropes?’
Isabel looked down at the table, but not before she saw the Prattes giving each other another of their sharp, birdlike looks – enough to show her it wasn’t the first time they’d heard Alice Claver say this sort of thing to her son, and that they didn’t expect a positive outcome. Isabel squeezed Thomas’s hand back. If he felt bullied, she wanted to show her support.
‘Aw, Ma,’ she heard Thomas answer. It was a child’s whine, and there was a cunning look in his eye that she could see meant he had no intention of working today and would say anything to avoid it. Isabel let her hand go soft again. ‘We only got married yesterday.’
Alice Claver looked unimpressed. ‘Well, you’ve had all morning to loll about, haven’t you?’ she said, and there was more roughness and less laughter in her voice now. Isabel blushed. The Prattes glanced at each other again. Visibly restraining her impatience, Alice Claver continued: ‘You know William’s very kindly offering to take you round the selds. Showing you the kind of range of goods you might think of buying to set yourself up. Introducing you to the kind of people at Guildhall who can advise you.’
She paused, as if this would jog Thomas’s memory. But Thomas stayed mulishly quiet.
Anne Pratte piped up, in her fluting little voice: ‘You don’t need to worry about Isabel, Thomas. I’ll look after her for the afternoon. I’m going round Alice’s embroidery suppliers; it would be useful for Isabel to meet them. She can come with me…’
Isabel could see both offers would be helpful if Thomas were to start buying in enough stock to get going as a merchant in his own right, and she needed to learn the names and faces of the silkwomen she’d soon, perhaps, need to commission work from. She squeezed his hand again and looked encouragingly at him from under her lashes, trying to convey that she’d like him to say yes. But Thomas just scowled harder.
‘Ma,’ he repeated, with the elaborate patience of a man talking to an idiot. ‘I just said. We’ve just got married. And Isabel wants to go and see off the King’s army. We were going to take a picnic.’
The eyes all turned on Isabel, making her face burn. She’d been acutely embarrassed by Thomas’s tone of voice. However informal people were in this household, it surely couldn’t be right to talk back to your mother like that. Besides, she’d made no plan for a picnic or a trip to see the army leave Moorfields; if anyone had asked her, she’d have said no. She knew nothing about soldiers except that they were dangerous. Why court trouble? And she certainly didn’t want to be Thomas’s alibi for shirking an arrangement his mother had made for him. It would only make Alice Claver dislike her, and she didn’t want that either.
But she was Thomas’s wife now. It was her duty to stand by him. And she didn’t like the way Alice Claver was using the Prattes as an audience to try to shame Thomas publicly. She’d have to find a way to sweet-talk him into doing what his mother wanted, privately, later. For now, all she could do was brazen out Alice Claver’s accusing stare, try to smile light-heartedly, as if nothing were amiss, and pray that the hot tide of blood staining her face red right to the roots of her hair would recede.
There was a long, frustrated pause.
‘Well, if that’s what Isabel wants,’ Alice Claver said coldly, turning away. She didn’t finish the sentence. No one else finished it for her this time, either.
‘Come on, Isabel,’ Thomas said, getting up and pulling her along behind him.
Isabel glanced back from the doorway. The Prattes were quietly shaking their heads at each other. But Alice Claver was still staring straight at her, and there was a cold anger in her eyes. With a sinking heart, Isabel realised she’d made an enemy.
Like every other Londoner who’d gone to gawp gratefully at the soldiers who’d come into their city without robbing or raping them, when it came to it, Isabel and Thomas Claver were too nervous of the men at arms camping outside the walls to go very near. Instead they joined the crowd lurking cautiously under the fruit trees that the city people grew on their vegetable patches, munching bread, trampling people’s beans and peas, knocking over archery butts – enjoying the muted thrill of threat from the peace of the dappled shade, but not wanting to enter that vast, gleaming, sunlit tapestry of horsemen and sharp blades. We’re like cows chewing our cud, she thought, lulled into a half-dream by the drone of insects and the buzz of the crowd and the warmth of Thomas Claver’s arm around her waist, not knowing whether to feel proud or ashamed of the prudence of her own city sort. And, watching the fighters clean their harnesses and weapons – the word was that all these knights and squires and countrymen and cut-throats would be marching north tomorrow to find the Earl of Warwick and finish him off – she also thought, and they’re like wolves.
She and Thomas hadn’t spoken since leaving the house, just walked with the sun on their backs in companionable silence. The rhythm of the walk had helped diminish Isabel’s sense of unease. Once Thomas had calmed down, she thought, she’d find a way to talk about work and make it easy for him to agree to do as his mother asked. But not just yet.
‘You’re so tiny,’ Thomas Claver muttered suddenly, pulling her round into his arms, staring softly down at her. She hardly reached his big shoulders.
He nuzzled her ear with his lips.
‘Thomas,’ she murmured, turning her face up to his, but not knowing quite how to go on; wishing she’d had more practice at persuading people to do things.
He put his lips above her eyes. ‘Kissing away your frown,’ he whispered.
She smiled uncertainly. Then, not able to think of a clever way of raising the subject, she plunged ahead. Better to get it over, she told herself. ‘We will start work tomorrow, won’t we?’ she said anxiously. ‘I don’t want your mother to think I’m a bad influence on you.’
He smiled back, but his eyes shifted sideways.
‘I just want a few days alone with you,’ he said softly. ‘That’s not too much to ask, is it?’ Then, with a show of what he clearly hoped was nonchalance, he went on: ‘We’ll get that out of my ma without too much trouble. Don’t worry about her. She’s a tough old bird, but I know how to handle her.’ He put his lips on hers. She closed her eyes and let him sweep her up almost off her feet into a kiss.
But even as her body responded her mind was filling with difficult questions. Was this kiss just his way of stopping her from talking? And how long was he planning to spin out those ‘few days’ of idleness?
‘We’ll start after May Day,’ Thomas said. ‘That’s quite soon enough.’ He shut his mouth as tight as a trap. He’d said the same thing every day, at every meal, for a week.
