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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.
The Prattes eyed each other.
Alice Claver gave Isabel her by now habitual look of loathing. When she was angry her round face went a duller red. Her eyes went almost black. Her lips became a sneering slit.
Isabel eyed her defiantly back. What's the point of you all blaming me? she thought helplessly. He's never worked. You've never made him. It's not my fault if he won't now.
She could hardly remember the gossipy charm of that first dinner. The atmosphere in the house had become so poisonous that she was almost relieved to be out with Thomas after every morning row. Boating. Fishing. Watching him at the archery butts. Dining in taverns farther from the Mercery than she'd ever been: in Westminster, in riverside villages as far away as Kew, or in the wilds of Haringey Park. She'd learned so minutely in these days of startling physical closeness how his face and hair and thickly muscled limbs would move at any given moment, that she felt they'd become close. She'd almost stopped comparing his body with her memory of the man in the church; that quick darkness. But these trips, in which aspects of Thomas's life that she'd never have seen in Catte Street were revealed every day, were an unsettling reminder of how little she really knew him. It seemed as though Thomas must know tavern keepers and shifty drunks across half of England. Everywhere they went, men sidled up to him, grinning. ‘My wife,’ he'd say, proudly; and they'd give her the kind of measuring looks that made her blush, or they'd guffaw and nudge him. ‘Making good, are you, Tommy boy?’ one old villain with a broken nose asked him merrily. ‘Well, it's high time you settled down.’
Whatever Thomas said, she didn't for a moment believe he would knuckle down to learning his trade after May Day. He'd find another excuse to postpone it. She thought he must be scared of admitting how much he had to learn; she also thought his mother wasn't making it any easier by bullying him in front of the Prattes, who were always dropping in because Anne Pratte worked with Alice. It can't go on like this, Isabel thought sometimes. Thomas will have to start work soon. But she'd begun to accept her dreamlike, aimless new existence. She was feeling more defiant every time Alice Claver froze her with one of her stares. Anything was better than being at Catte Street with those frightening looks.
When Isabel was woken up at dawn on May Day by the door of her chamber banging open, and Alice Claver's familiar, heavy footsteps storming in, her first sleepy, confused thought was that her mother-in-law must finally have got so angry that she'd resolved to pull them out of bed by force and put the pair of them to work right now, feast day or not.
Quickly, she pulled the sheet over her head and prodded Thomas into muttering wakefulness. Luckily the bed curtains were drawn. They lay in each other's arms in the hot darkness, hardly breathing, listening for clues; bracing for invasion.
But the footsteps went thudding right past the bed, straight to the window, then fell silent. Alice Claver must be leaning out listening to the street talk, Isabel thought; she wouldn't hear it from her own room, which looked out on the garden. But why? All she'd hear would be a lot of people setting up their stalls and talking about the maypole dancing later. Thomas raised an eyebrow, giving Isabel the kind of rueful look that she now knew to be an invitation to giggle at his mother's infuriating ways. She grinned back.
Yet when Alice Claver did finally stalk over to the bed and twitch back their curtains, her face was so drained of colour and her eyes so full of fear that the sight of it wiped away their guilty smiles in an instant.
Alice Claver said, in a monotone, ‘They say there are ships attacking from the river,’ and, after a long, expression less stare at both of them, ‘Get up; quick; we must lock up.’ And she half-ran from the room.
As the door clapped shut, Isabel and Thomas pulled themselves up on their elbows, both wide awake now, and stared at each other. He looks excited, Isabel thought, and knew his face was reflecting her own expression. Neither of them was really scared. The memory of King Edward's chivalrous soldiers was too recent for that, and they'd never seen any others.
‘I should go out,’ he said, drinking her in hungrily. ‘Join the patrols.’
‘No,’ she replied quickly. She put a hand on his arm. I don't want him doing anything dangerous, she thought. But she also knew she didn't want to be left alone in this house.
‘I must,’ he said, and for the first time she saw what he might look like once his youth had passed: calm and decisive, as if he'd been relieved of all the uncertainties of his youth. It took her breath away. Feeling almost giddy with what she thought must be the first pang of real love, she looked down, feeling ashamed, listening in silence as he went on: ‘I'm a good marksman.’ He looked at her, almost pleadingly. ‘I want you to be proud of me.’
She nodded, reluctantly accepting his choice. Very tenderly, he raised her face to his.
He'd gone before she realised she hadn't remembered to say a prayer over him or whisper a word of love. She set off downstairs alone to face Alice Claver.
The first rush of closing shutters and barring doors and dragging chests in front of them and drawing water and bringing in all the loaves and cured meat they could lay hands on in the pantries left them breathless and hot. It was only after that, while they sat in the half-dark they were to stay in for the best part of the next two weeks, that the fear set in and they got cold. First it was just Isabel and Alice Claver and three serving girls in the parlour, shivering and hugging themselves despite the summer swelter; but then, a few hours later, Anne Pratte came too, banging at the door to be let in with none of her usual timidity, bringing life back into the room.
William Pratte was in charge of the Old Jewry patrol. He'd dropped his wife at Catte Street as he set off for the riverside with his muster of amateur archers. ‘Thomas will have joined him, don't you fret,’ Anne Pratte said comfortably to both Alice Claver and Isabel, settling herself down on a bench with her sewing. Isabel was relieved to see that, just as Thomas's stock had risen because he'd been so eager to go out and defend his women and his city, her own enemy status was becoming fuzzy in this artificial twilight.
Anne Pratte's calm astonished Isabel. Even from the relative safety of Catte Street, well back from the Thames, you could hear the explosions and the crash of riverside buildings falling. The Bastard of Fauconberg's Lancastrian troops were trying to rescue King Henry from the Tower; the pirates from Kent and Essex with him just wanted to run riot through London with their clubs and pitchforks. Every thudding footstep outside might be the first of them, and you could do nothing about it except pray. Each booming hit sent a shudder through the nearby streets. Not just because of the windows cracking, or the falling pewterware, but because of the dirty black tide of dread that comes over all human flesh at the realisation that it is soft and pink and defenceless against death. Yet even when one of the serving girls began whimpering, and Alice Claver, grey-faced in the grey light, was muttering prayers under her breath, and Isabel had her eyes tight shut, willing herself not to lose her dignity but feeling the dark tide coming close to overwhelming her, Anne Pratte carried on sewing and grumbling. Isabel admired her for it. It somehow helped keep the fear at bay.
‘Knights in shining armour indeed,’ Anne Pratte said crossly, early on, biting off a thread as though it were an advancing Lancastrian's head, so fiercely that her floppy turkey neck quivered. ‘The laws of chivalry, my foot. I don't care what they say about warfare being a noble art. This is just fighting. Bullies with weapons, and us caught in the middle.’
Naturally, in the circumstances she spent a lot of those twilit days complaining about the Lancastrians. But she was catholic in her dislikes. She had bad things to say about the Yorks too. King Edward's womanising got short shrift. So did his grasping queen, Elizabeth Woodville, (‘not a drop of royal blood in her body, that one; but more than enough pure ambition to make up for it … a beauty, of course, but harder than diamonds’) who enjoyed the exercise of power so much that she kept every princess of the blood royal standing for three silent hours at every meal. ‘Just because she can,’ Anne Pratte finished triumphantly.
She didn't have much time for King Edward's brothers either. The Duke of Clarence, who'd gone over to the Earl of Warwick's side and married his daughter, Isabel Neville, in the misguided hope Warwick would think that reason enough to make him king, was an opportunist and, worse, a ‘nasty little traitor who's no better than he ought to be’.
As for the younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester (an eighteen-year-old veteran whom Isabel remembered John Lambert describing with awestruck reverence after seeing him at King Edward's Mass in April), in Anne Pratte's view he was an out-and-out thief. He'd kidnapped an elderly noblewoman and forced her to sign away her lands. Anne Pratte had heard the story from Sir John Risley, a Knight of the Body for whom she was making some silk pieces. ‘Sir John says the old countess thought the duke would kill her if she refused. So she did it. Wept a lot, of course. But she had no choice. She's got nothing any more, Sir John says; she's taking in sewing to pay the nuns. And when Sir John asked the King the other day whether he thought it would be a good investment for him to buy the house from Gloucester, he said the King just squirmed with embarrassment. “Don't touch it, Risley,” he said. “Don't touch it.” He knows his brother stole it all right.’
She leaned forward to catch Isabel's eye. She was enjoying the younger woman's attention. Isabel was imagining the Duke of Gloucester bullying the old countess, and in her mind's eye the duke was dark and thin, with a scowling face as hard as the man's she'd met in the church might, perhaps, sometimes be, while the old lady looked like a frightened, thin Alice Claver. Isabel had her sewing with her – a piece of embroidery she planned to turn into a purse for Thomas when he got back, with hearts and flowers in blues and greens, and their initials twined together – though it was so dark in here that she'd hardly touched it. Still, a truce between Isabel and Anne was definitely taking shape on the bench they were sharing, even if Alice Claver, in her own corner, was doing no more than grunt every now and then in response to her friend's non-stop talk. Isabel knew Alice Claver must be too frightened to reply. She couldn't feel sorry for her mother-in-law, not after all those rows and glares; even now, even here. But she could see Anne Pratte wanted, tactfully, to comfort her friend.
Over in the other corner, a throat was cleared. Then Alice Claver's voice boomed out of the darkness, so loud and so ordinary that Isabel almost jumped: ‘Disgraceful. Almost makes you proud not to be one of them, doesn't it? Men of honour, my eye.’
There was triumph in Anne Pratte's eyes at having brought her friend back from the darkness. ‘Yes, indeed, dear,’ she answered gently. ‘I always say all the fighting these great lords enjoy so much is really just an excuse to go out and grab someone else's land, isn't it?’
Alice Claver began to laugh. A single hoot at first, then more hoots; then gales of relief. It was infectious. Before Isabel knew where she was, she and the others had joined in too. When she turned round somewhere in the middle of a gust of laughter, and met Alice Claver's creased, weeping eyes for the first time in a long time, she realised the black, hateful look had gone from them. From relief as much as anything else, she started laughing even harder, until she, like Alice Claver, was holding her sides and groaning with it.
‘Ooh,’ Alice Claver said, what seemed like much later; sounding almost her usual self. Anne Pratte was watching her from over her flashing needle with quiet satisfaction. ‘It hurts. I tell you what, Anne. You'd better give us all some of your sewing to do. It's keeping you calmer than the rest of us put together.’
All Anne Pratte had in her pile was sheets for turning. Nothing you needed strong light to see. Alice Claver got up, took one off the pile and sat down again to thread a needle.
She turned and looked at Isabel with triumph, as if she'd hit on a new reason to find fault with her. ‘Don't just sit there,’ she snapped. ‘Get yourself a sheet too. Do some work. Go on.’
She must be feeling better. She was turning nasty again. Isabel blinked away the tears prickling behind her eyes. Hadn't Alice Claver seen she already had work in her lap? Silently, with as much dignity as she could muster, she held up her little rectangle of silk embroidery in self-defence.
Alice Claver got up and with a single dark swoop snatched it away and pushed a sheet at her instead. ‘Waste of silk,’ she said gruffly. ‘You'll only make a mess of it in this light.’
Isabel lowered her head. Without comment, as if she were also a little frightened of her friend's rage, Anne Pratte passed Isabel a needle.
But, as Alice Claver sat down, Isabel was aware of her mother-in-law looking closely at the confiscated piece of embroidery as if to find something in it to sneer at; then peering closer, then holding it up to the light. She could almost swear Alice Claver looked surprised. Well, she was good at embroidery. Everyone had always said so. She kept her eyes firmly on the needle she was threading, her back tense, waiting for a new attack once Alice Claver had worked out what to say. But it didn't come. They sewed in silence.
‘He wasn't with me,’ William Pratte said. ‘I never saw him.’
William Pratte was filthier than Isabel could have imagined. But he looked happy and healthy too, leaner and more muscled than he'd been a fortnight before, with his bald patch freckled a pinky brown and the sun still warm on his cheeks.
The relief of knowing it was over, and the Bastard's head, along with those of the Mayor of Canterbury and the pirate captains, was safely on London Bridge, was making everyone feel drunk with the pleasure of being alive. The serving girls were opening the shutters, letting air and sun in with a series of joyful bangs. After a twirling embrace with her husband, Anne Pratte had rushed straight out to the garden to see what salad leaves there were. ‘I've been thinking for days, I could murder a nice dish of sorrel,’ she'd shrilled, waving her arms.
‘Perhaps he went with your father,’ William Pratte said, scratching himself. Isabel breathed: ‘Did you see him?’ He nodded kindly. ‘Oh yes, don't worry about him, I saw him on Tower Hill just yesterday. He had Will Shore with him. Hugh Wyche. The Chigwells. I didn't see Thomas. Then again, I didn't stop to ask. Just waved. But Thomas will be somewhere.’
Alice Claver was beaming so hard at being let out of the darkness that nothing could dash her spirits. ‘Well, all I can say is thank God we have the daylight back,’ she said happily, including Isabel in her smile. ‘Thomas has always been a law unto himself. He'll turn up in his own good time. And we'd better get you bathed before he does, William. I've never seen so much dirt on one body.’
No one worried too much when Thomas didn't show up that night either. Half the patrols were still out celebrating. The taverns were heaving.
A little hesitantly, Isabel went along when, just before sunset, William Pratte took the two silkwomen to explore the damaged riverside zone beyond Cordwainer Lane. She didn't want to be out when Thomas arrived, but Alice Claver gave her a warmish look and said, ‘We'll get back before he does,’ and she gave in. Women were walking along the Strand through summer clouds of gnats, looking in astonishment at the fallen masonry and the burn marks or listening to their dirty, proud men gabbling, very fast and excited, ‘This is where we were when they started shooting’, or ‘This is where I hid from the wildfire’.
The pirates had been beaten back from London Bridge. They'd gone downriver to Kew and tried to land there. They'd come back. But the defences had held. There was drunken singing everywhere, and a lot of woozy yelling: ‘God Save King Edward!’
Seeing Isabel glancing around in case Thomas suddenly came out from some corner, Alice Claver told her: ‘It would be unusual for Thomas to come straight home’, and laughed, not unkindly, in the direction of the Tumbling Bear. Isabel tried not to feel disappointed that her husband hadn't rushed back to her side. But, since no one had word of him being hurt, and William Pratte said there'd been surprisingly few men killed, he must just be out drinking somewhere. For the first time, the memory of all those shady men he knew in all those taverns came back to her, replacing the pictures she'd called to mind so often in the darkness that they now seemed threadbare and soiled from overuse: his soft look back at her as he'd slipped out of the door on the day the ships came in; his parting murmur of ‘I want you to be proud of me.’
‘I love you,’ she muttered under her breath, to keep her spirits up, as she'd done a million times during the siege. ‘I love you.’ But she could feel doubt creeping in. She knew Thomas found home difficult and work difficult. Perhaps, now he'd discovered the pleasures of fighting, he'd seen a more exciting way of keeping out of his mother's hair than sheltering behind his new wife? Perhaps her novelty had worn off?
Isabel felt suddenly so alone that she shivered. The heat was going out of the evening air. It was nearly curfew. He wouldn't come tonight. Anne Pratte put her shawl round Isabel's shoulders without comment; Isabel looked gratefully at her.
‘We kept our spirits up by turning sheets while you were out there fighting,’ Alice Claver boomed at William Pratte, back at Catte Street, over the evening meal. ‘And Anne kept our spirits up with gossip.’ She turned to Isabel for confirmation. ‘Didn't she?’
And, seeing those eyes on her again with this new expression of wary near-warmth, it was suddenly clear to Isabel what she had to do before Thomas got home. She didn't want to be enemies with Alice Claver. And tonight, Alice Claver didn't look as though she wanted to be enemies either. There was no need. The half-truce that had set in might just hold if she helped it along. It was Thomas's stubbornness that had made things go wrong. Now was her chance to put things right. If she wanted to be happy as a Claver, she was going to have to get up at dawn and offer to start working for her mother-in-law.
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Alice Claver had the same idea. When she saw Isabel in the morning, she didn't even comment on Thomas's non-appearance. She just said: ‘Shall I show you the storeroom?’
Isabel nodded, trying to match that matter-of-factness. She'd hardly ever been in her own father's storeroom. It was his holy of holies; too precious for children, he said.
She padded down the corridor behind her mother-in-law, secretly impressed; willing Alice Claver, now fiddling with keys at the door, to learn to like her.
Alice Claver's warehouse stretched all the way along the side of her house: a vast barn of a place, its high rafters lit up by slanting early sunlight from window slits.
It took a few moments for Isabel's eyes to adjust. Then she gasped.
She'd never seen so much luxury in one place. It was as if she was in the middle of a snowfall, but an unimaginably lovely and costly snowfall that gleamed and glowed in every rich colour possible. There were wafts and drifts of it wherever she looked, piled up against walls, soft on the stone floor. She glided forward, swept away by the magic of it, to touch as well as look. She'd seen plenty of velvets like these, in the dark colours of Lucca or the brighter hues of Siena; but never anything like the piece glittering stiffly with gold embroidery under her hand, or the green silk cloth underneath it, figured with peacocks shimmering blue and purple, or the unicorns and leaping harts prancing across the red and gold satins and damasks and taffetas. Nothing like this.
She twirled and turned in the dusty shafts of light, pulling at one bale, holding up another. Lost in the moment. Astonished.
She only remembered Alice Claver was there when she became aware of the older woman looking at her, with a slow half-smile on her lips, as if she understood Isabel's enchantment. She must feel it herself. In this shadow world, lit up by one of the sideways rays of light from on high, with the ground around her a tumbling mass of scarlets and purples and silvers, Alice Claver had stopped looking as barrel-like and brutally commonsensical as she did elsewhere; she seemed suddenly taller and more mysterious, like an angel in a halo of gold, or a rustic wise woman summoning spirits from the woods.
Now Alice Claver was sweeping Isabel around, poking into corners, pulling things out, energetically talking. The silkwoman poured out information at a speed Isabel could hardly keep up with, giving her stern looks if she felt Isabel's attention flagging. Isabel nodded, and tried to absorb as much of the flood of knowledge as she could. She was learning more in her first hour in this storeroom than she had in a lifetime as John Lambert's daughter. It was exhausting. But it was exhilarating too; so absorbing it kept her returning thud of anxiety – ‘Where is Thomas?’ – at bay.
Alice started with reels and skeins and loops of silk threads: dyed, twined, thrown, boiled, raw; all glowing with the sun and scents of faraway places Isabel could hardly imagine. She learned that Persian silk came from the mysterious regions near the Caspian Sea: Ghilan, Shilan, Azerbaijan; that since Constantinople had fallen to the Turks Venetian merchants hadn't been able to buy in their old Black Sea markets, but that the Persians were sending more and more silk – both cloth and threads – by caravan to Syria, outside the control of the Turks, and that the Venetians were now getting their Persian silk supplies in from the markets of Damascus and Aleppo. She saw Persian silk threads called ablaca, ardassa, and rasbar. She saw Syrian silk threads called castrovana, decara, and safetina. She saw Romanian silk threads called belgrado, belladonna and fior di morea. (‘Most of my supplies come from Venice,’ Alice Claver said by way of explanation of the Lombard-sounding names, ‘it's still the greatest centre in the world, where East meets West … and the quickest way for you to pick up some Italian, which you'll need to do – and Flemish, of course, that's vital too – is going to be by learning these Venetian names.’) She rolled the names on her tongue as though they were poems; Isabel imitated her as best she could. Spanish silk threads: spagnola, cattalana. Threads from southern Italy: napoletana, abruzzese, pugliese, calabrese, messinese. The home-grown silks from the forests of mulberry trees cultivated by old ladies in black in Tuscany: nostrale. The home-grown silks from the forests of mulberry trees cultivated by old ladies in black in Venice's own Terraferma hinterland: nostrane.
They were both so absorbed that they jumped when Anne Pratte's round face came into view at the door. She was illuminated by the sunlight, too, but she had none of the skittish cheerfulness of yesterday. She looked grey; stricken. ‘Alice,’ she said quietly to her friend. She didn't even seem to notice Isabel. ‘Alice. I'm sorry. They've found Thomas.’
Isabel didn't understand the look, but she felt faint with foreboding. She stole a timid glance at Alice, looking for guidance. Alice was clutching very hard at the skein of stuff she'd been showing her daughter-in-law. It was indigo-coloured, Isabel remembered afterwards, the darkness of widow's weeds, and now it had tightened painfully against Alice's blotchy hands. Alice wasn't one to waste words, and she could see that Anne's face made it pointless to ask whether Thomas was alive.
‘Where?’ Alice asked.
He hadn't gone far. He'd been trapped under what must have been one of the first falls of masonry on Thames Street on his way to find the fighting. The men digging him out had just seen his name stitched into his purse and come to the house to bring word. When they'd arrived at the door, Anne had already been walking in. She'd rushed straight back to Alice to break the news more gently than they could.
Wordlessly, Alice held her hand out for the purse. Feel the goods for yourself; take nothing on trust: market laws. The indigo silk dropped away, leaving a red weal across her index finger and palm. But Anne shook her head, and now even Isabel, whose mother had died before she remembered, who hadn't known death, could understand that there was no comfort in that look, no possibility of error. ‘It's his,’ Anne said gently; bleakly. ‘I saw it.’
‘I sewed that purse myself,’ Alice Claver said with unnatural calm. ‘I thought it would help if he passed out in a tavern somewhere. Having his name so clear on it.’ Then her body began to heave. The sound that started coming from her was not unlike her laughter in the dark parlour a few days earlier: a harsh, dry sucking in of breath; a snort of something loud and unmelodious. It took Isabel – standing utterly still at her mother-in-law's side as if she'd been turned to stone – what felt like an eternity to realise that this strange braying noise must be crying.
‘There, dear, there,’ Anne Pratte was murmuring, as her larger friend heaved towards her in an ungainly mess of arms.
No one acknowledged Isabel's presence. It was as if she wasn't there; didn't exist; hadn't been married to Alice Claver's son; hadn't just been trying to learn Alice Claver's work. Neither of the older women even saw her leave.
‘You're well-provided for, at least,’ Anne Pratte said, dabbing at Isabel's face. ‘You won't have to worry. You get half the thousand pounds Alice settled on Thomas for the marriage. Quite a dower. Your father will welcome you back with open arms with all that.’
Why would I go back to my father? Isabel wondered, but she kept the thought to herself.
Anne Pratte had come up as dusk fell with a bowl of water. She'd murmured, ‘Oh, your poor eyes’ and ‘Alice is sitting with him; they've laid him out in the hall; would you like to join her?’ and just sighed when Isabel shook her head. She appreciated being remembered by Anne Pratte, who had a kind heart. But she'd wait. She couldn't face Alice Claver now.
‘I know. It hasn't been easy,’ Anne Pratte had said sadly. She'd had the grace to stop there.
She'd waited a few more moments, patting and dabbing at eyes and shoulders, before clearing her throat and asking, ‘Forgive me, dear, but I know you'll understand why I …’ and giving Isabel something like her usual bright, inquisitive look. Isabel had stared back, not understanding. Anne Pratte had looked harder at her and raised her eyebrows. Her expression was encouraging, as if she were trying, wordlessly, to discover some secret only Isabel knew. Isabel knew she must be being stupid not to understand. She looked down at the bowl of water with the cloth sticking out. Anne Pratte composed her features into an expression of still greater patience. ‘Are you … by any chance … ?’ She'd nodded her head. Then she'd paused delicately.
‘Oh,’ Isabel had said flatly. ‘With child, you mean. No.’
Anne had sighed. There was a silence. Then she'd nodded again.
‘Shall I send for your sister?’ she'd asked a moment later. ‘Or your father?’
Isabel could see what Anne Pratte was feeling towards: nudging her back to the Lamberts to save her friend Alice Claver from having to go on sharing her home with an irritant, a girl who'd never settled in and never worked, and whose continued presence now would only remind her of the son she'd lost. If Isabel had been expecting a baby, or if they'd become close, it might have been different. But it was too late to think like that. This was how it was.
She shook her head again. Stubbornly. Refusing the possibility of sinking back into her childhood life as if this time with Thomas had never been, because what went with that would be waiting to be found a new husband and sent off again like a parcel of cloth. She didn't want Jane's smug pity or the servants' anxious, helpless eyes; not yet. She didn't want her father rushing to find a new plan. She didn't want to have to face up to a choice between being a burden on the Lamberts or a burden on Alice Claver. There'd be time for that tomorrow, after the funeral. She just wanted to be alone and, later, to sneak downstairs and be alone with Thomas.
She was grateful when Anne Pratte patted her shoulder and left.
Alice Claver was asleep on a chair drawn up near Thomas. Her face was ravaged. She was snoring softly. The candles at his head were low. It was nearly dawn.
Isabel tiptoed round her and put a stool quietly down on the other side of the two benches they'd laid Thomas on.
They'd wiped the dust off him, but the smell of death was so strong it turned her stomach. His body was wrapped in sheets. They'd left his face uncovered. It was so perfectly still that it seemed somehow flatter and wider than she remembered. She leaned forward, trying not to be frightened; trying to stop retching. She touched his cold cheek, then crouched down over his face and kissed it until it was as wet as hers. But it stayed empty. ‘I love you,’ she muttered, so panicked by the finality of it she couldn't think of a prayer.
Alice Claver stirred. Isabel froze into her crouch, hardly breathing, willing her mother-in-law back to sleep.
But Alice Claver opened swollen eyes and said: ‘I used to swing him round in the garden until I was dizzy.’
Isabel wasn't sure Alice Claver was talking to her. ‘When he was little,’ Alice Claver went on in the same dreamy monotone, ‘he couldn't get enough of it. Lay on the grass howling with laughter.’
She nodded, up and down; remembering. ‘While Richard was alive …’ she murmured. ‘When I still had time.’
A shadow passed across her face. ‘I should have made more time.’
She closed her eyes again. But Isabel could see she hadn't gone back to sleep. Her face was too alive for that: terrible with grief; twitching with memories.
Isabel hadn't imagined Alice Claver would feel guilty.
Wishing she had the courage to show the compassion sweeping through her – to go over and put her arms round the older woman, or pray with her – but knowing she didn't, Isabel put a last tentative kiss on the lips of the husk of Thomas instead, and slipped away.
Her last thought before her own twitchy, uneasy sleep took her over was, ‘I'll go home.’
It was only after the funeral the next day that she realised she couldn't go home.
Not because of her father's irritating calculations at the plain meal of bread and cheese and beer that the Prattes organised in Alice Claver's house after the burial – ‘You'll be out of mourning in a year; you could marry again at sixteen. With that dower you'll be able to choose whoever you want’ – as if she was really supposed to believe that John Lambert would keep his word and let Isabel choose, any more than he had the first time. Not even because he'd said, with what she thought supreme tactlessness, as if discussing possibilities for her next marriage at her husband's graveside might cheer her up, ‘One of the Lynom boys, even. Now that would be a good match.’
It was the other guests who shut the door home to her: Thomas's friends from outside the Mercery. One red-nosed shabby man after another; some vaguely familiar, some perfect strangers, but all avoiding her eyes and Alice Claver's. All shuffling up to William Pratte instead, taking him off into corners for their private chats, searching through pockets and pouches and purses for dirty bits of paper to present to him. They wanted to talk to a man.
William Pratte was well-known as an administrator. He was on the merchant venturers' committee at the Guildhall. He knew how to be correct. Isabel watched him out of the corner of her eye as he gravely thanked each guest for the paper, and folded it away. But his plump face, already sad, got longer every time a new hand tapped him on the shoulder.
He waited for everyone to leave before he took Isabel into Alice Claver's accounting parlour and told her. She could see the pity in his eyes; hear it in the gentleness of his voice. Thomas had debts. Over the past four years, he'd pledged away every penny and more of the money his mother had settled on him. ‘I had no idea,’ William Pratte said sadly. ‘I just thought he was sowing his wild oats in the taverns.’ He showed her the documents on which Thomas's many half-baked hopes of instant wealth had been set out: a half-share in a failed brewery here; £100 to an absconding Southampton shipper there; £85 for a consignment of Cyprus gold thread that had never materialised; deeds for a tenement in Southwark that had caught fire; and dogs, bears, and tavern bills mounting up to dizzying amounts. He'd even bought Uncle Alexander Marshall a horse. Everyone knew Thomas had expectations; it seemed he'd been easy meat for every trickster in town. William Pratte finished sombrely: ‘This might not be all, either. We'll just have to wait and see what other bills come in.’
‘But,’ Isabel stammered, her head reeling, unable to take it in, ‘he can't have spent that much. It's a king's ransom.’
‘He must have thought it would be easy to make back the kind of money that would make Alice sit up and take notice,’ William Pratte said, shaking his mild head. ‘At first, anyway. And later he must have realised they'd come after him for payment as soon as word got out that Alice had set him up to start trading properly. No wonder he kept putting off the day, poor boy. I don't like to think how he must have worried.’
