Queen of Silks

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.

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.

3

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.