Figures in Silk

‘Just praying,’ she said, with what shreds of dignity she could muster, looking straight back at him, daring him to give her the lie – how was he to know she wasn’t a hungry mystic, in the grip of a tearful vision? – but suddenly aware too of how she must look, with her kerchief pushed back and straggles of hair catching in her streaked wet face and her eyes all puffy and pink and swollen and her skin probably hideously blotched.

He didn’t respond except to go on looking unblinkingly at her, and there was something quizzical on a face she could see was used to weighing up new situations quickly. She raised a hand and wiped firmly at both cheeks, trying to master herself and surprised at finding that gaze was enough to quell her sobs. She even managed a watery smile as she uncurled herself and sat up on her knees, feeling the darkness inside shrink as her back muscles straightened. ‘Well, I was praying,’ she added defensively. ‘I was just crying too, that’s all.’

He smiled, now, and although he had thin lips it was an attractive, straightforward smile; she found her own lips curling briefly up in response, aware of her hands busying themselves in their own ritual of patting and tidying her face and head, trying to restore order to herself.

He didn’t comment on her appearance. She supposed there was nothing he could say without being either gallant, which would have been wrong, or discourteous, which would have been worse. He just carried on looking into her eyes, with the memory of a smile in his and with his body taut and still. She liked the stillness of him. She was aware of the sword buckled to his belt, the plain travelling cloak. He must have something to do with the troop movements, she thought, be a gentleman in someone’s entourage. But his presence was so encouraging that she found herself hoping he wouldn’t hurry away soon.

He didn’t. Eventually he murmured, ‘I’m forgetting that I came here to pray too.’ And he glimmered at her, with the beginning of another smile. ‘Like you. Sometimes your troubles seem so great that nothing but God’s guidance will be enough. And even that…’ He broke off and looked away, and she felt the sadness in him, a helplessness that seemed as great as hers, without needing to understand it. ‘May I pray with you?’ he said, a whisper of velvet bass.

She gestured, caught up in the moment, happy to have him near. He knelt beside her, in one fluid movement, and bent his head over his hands, and closed his eyes.

Isabel shut her eyes too and steepled her own hands, but she had stopped doing more than imitate the appearance of prayer; what she really wanted now was to hear the muttered words coming from the stranger’s lips. She wanted to know what he was praying for. ‘Even so, Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, deign to free me from every tribulation, sorrow and trouble in which I am placed and from the plots of my enemies,’ he was murmuring, a prayer as sombre as hers but not one to enlighten her; ‘and deign to send Michael the Archangel to my aid against them, and deign, Lord Jesus Christ, to bring to nothing the evil plans that they are making or wish to make against me, even as you brought to nothing the counsel of Achitophel who incited Absalom against King David…’

And his voice dropped to a drone of Latin, and then fell altogether silent. When she stole a sideways look at him, his lips were still moving; she thought she saw a tear glistening on his cheek too. He didn’t seem to be aware of it. He was lost to the world.

She went on watching. He was visibly reaching a resolution. His jaw tightened. Then, without warning, he dropped his hands, raised his head and looked round at Isabel, so quickly that she didn’t have time to lower her own curious eyes. Without reproach, his bright gaze held hers; she felt it as a shock right through her body.

‘So shall we both trust God to provide for us?’ he said, and grinned, a bit wolfishly, suddenly looking cheerful and eager to be on the move. He was on his feet, holding a hand out to her. Without thinking, she took it and scrambled up too. His hand was warm and dry with strong fingers. She found herself walking with him. To her surprise, they headed towards the bright arch to the street, feet in step.

As long as I’m out I don’t have to go home, Isabel thought, as the wind flapped at her skirts, with the fuzzy, fleeting contentment born of being caught up in an unexpected adventure. As long as no one sees me here I don’t have to decide what to do. So she followed the stranger obediently into the Bush tavern, a few steps away down Aldersgate, where he headed straight for a table in a vaulted alcove under a window where someone else’s meal, and the game of chess abandoned on a stool, hadn’t yet been cleared away, ordering a jug of claret and whatever cold meat the landlord had as he passed. He stood looking down at the checkered wood, absent-mindedly fingering the pieces left at the side of the board, while a serving girl piled up tankards on one of the greasy boards covered in pork rinds. Isabel edged round the tables and stools towards him, suddenly breathless at her own strange boldness in sitting down to eat with a stranger. But if he was aware of her discomfort he didn’t betray it. He was grinning at some thought of his own; he held one of the carved pieces out to her as she approached, and said lightly: ‘After all, perhaps none of the moves that worry us so much in life are as important as we think’. He popped the piece into its bag. ‘We all end up equal at the bottom of a bag, don’t we?’

Isabel’s nervousness vanished with the chess pieces he was whisking into their leathery resting place. She laughed and sat down. ‘I just don’t want to wait till I die before my problems get solved,’ she answered, wishing she could achieve the same resigned tone. ‘I’m hoping something will sort them out now.’

She wasn’t made to be philosophical. Nor could she quite find it in herself to do what she wanted to – find out more about her vis-à-vis. As soon as the maid had dumped two wooden platters in front of them, and even before he had finished pouring out the wine, Isabel found herself pouring out the whole story of her own troubles instead.

She told him how her father had fallen from grace at the Guildhall for losing his temper at a meeting – so badly he began shouting and blaspheming – while he was trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade the City to support King Edward and his Yorkist army in the wars. John Lambert had thought the rest of the merchants were being hypocritical to give in to the rival Lancastrian army – mad, pitiful King Henry, brought back to fight his last battles after ten years in forced retirement by the Earl of Warwick, who’d been King Edward’s closest friend until they’d fallen out and he’d turned rebel. John Lambert didn’t like the sight of the fierce, treacherous earl masterminding the feeble-minded Henry’s every move. Nor did he have much stomach for Edward’s younger brother, the Duke of Clarence, also in rebellion against his own blood; a lesser traitor hanging on Warwick’s coat-tails, hoping in vain that he might get to be Yorkist king of the Lancastrian rebels. John Lambert had been right, really. It had been ugly. And London was Yorkist to a man, had been for years. Every merchant knew King Edward, who was strong and young and intelligent, and had been on the throne for ten years already, was a better king for supporting their trade than Henry, who had let lawlessness rule the land for more than twenty years before Edward first seized the throne. But the Lancastrian army had been here at the gates, and the consensus of the meeting had been ‘anything for a quiet life’. So John Lambert’s outburst had not only been disregarded but had turned the rest of the merchants against him. They set such store by dignified agreement, they couldn’t forgive a man who could rail and rant the way he had.

She found herself describing her father’s stricken look when the mayor’s men came and took away the striped pole outside the Lambert house – his alderman’s post, his treasured symbol of office, the pole on which aldermen posted their proclamations. She told him how her father had then fixed on the idea of mending his quarrel with the City’s great men by marrying off her and her sister; the way he’d suddenly announced she and Jane were to be betrothed to the outlandish suitors he’d picked for them, as soon as he’d heard King Edward’s army was winning and moving on London, as soon as he could be reasonably sure that the merchants would bow to circumstances and remember they’d been Yorkist all along and open the gates to King Edward; as soon as they might be persuaded to think John Lambert hadn’t been so wrong after all.

Isabel thought her father had been rubbing his nose in his storeroom and plotting the whole thing for months beforehand. Bitterly, she told the stranger how she and her sister were being sacrificed for her father’s ambition. It wasn’t fair, she said. He’d promised his daughters all their lives that, within reason, they’d have the freedom to marry as they chose. But when it came to it, he was breaking that promise.

‘I know it makes sense to him,’ she finished. ‘Half his old friends in the City are coming after him with court cases. They think he’s finished. They’re kicking him while he’s down. And he wants to show them he’s still got the power to make good alliances. He’s imagining a wedding banquet that will put every trading company’s summer feast into the shade – he loves parties; I just know he’s already envisioning those tables groaning with honeyed peacocks and blancmanges of asses’ milk. He wants to try and impress everyone with the idea that the Lamberts are still on top of the world. He thinks a couple of weddings will win them all back.

‘But he doesn’t seem to see it won’t help him. They’ll still remember him as the man who shouted at the mayor. And we’ll be married to those clowns forever. It’s wrong. I’m too young to be married. I’m only fourteen. And anyway, the last person I’d choose, ever, would be Thomas Claver.’

The dark man from the church was easy to talk to. He kept steady eyes on her throughout her passionate monologue. He nodded understandingly when she looked sad and his eyes crinkled in amusement when, in the hope of entertaining him, she started using fanciful turns of phrase she wouldn’t normally have attempted. Yet when she came to a halt, Isabel had the uneasy feeling she’d got it wrong. He didn’t look fired up with any of her indignation. He just looked thoughtful.

He’d been cutting up bits of meat with his knife while she was talking. He looked down at the red squares on his board now she’d fallen silent and seemed almost surprised they were all still there. He speared one and began chewing on it, looking at her again, still reflecting, until, in an agony of self-consciousness, she began to wish she’d kept quiet, or at least asked him more about himself before telling all her woes.

‘I can see why you’re unhappy,’ he said in the end, and she glowed at the warmth in his voice. He wasn’t good-looking, quite. His thin features weren’t as bold and regular and noble as her father’s, say, or the godlike, golden Lynom boys’. This man’s face was thin and serious; made to be worried. If he hadn’t sat so straight and used his wiry body so fluidly, if he wasn’t gazing at her with such unwavering attention, she might have found him ratlike. Mean-looking. But the richness of his voice vibrated through her, making him magical. ‘You’re in a difficult position,’ he was saying. ‘You think your father is making a bad judgement.’

She nodded, and took a sip from her cup of wine to hide the gratitude she could feel staining her face pink.

He leaned forward. Put his elbows on the table. She thought he might be going to touch her, comfort her. She blushed deeper and bent in on herself.

He didn’t. He just joined his hands together, steepling them thoughtfully under his chin, leaning on his thumbs, and went on looking calmly at her. ‘May I offer some advice?’ he asked. His dignified simplicity made her feel ashamed of her own blurting.

Attempting to match his formality, she nodded again, trying not to let the hope shine too obviously on her face that he would hit on some easy way out for her.

‘You have to marry as your circumstances demand,’ he said, so gently she could hardly bear it. ‘I think from what you’ve told me that you know your father loves you. He’s saying he’s trying to do what’s best for your family. And it’s a father’s job to make good alliances for his children. Even if he hasn’t fully understood your feelings, perhaps he knows more about your family’s circumstances than you do.’

‘But,’ she stammered, lost in disappointment. ‘But…’

‘I know,’ he said sadly, ‘it’s not what you wanted to hear.’

He lowered his eyes. So did she; concentrating furiously on the new batch of pork rinds and pink shards of flesh on their own platters; willing away the hotness in her eyes.

‘It can destroy a family if a father doesn’t think about how to marry his children, you know,’ he was saying, somewhere behind the redness of her eyelids. ‘It nearly did mine.’ She glanced up, surprised. His eyes were still on her, though they were unfocused now, far away, not so much looking into her soul as lost in a dark part of his own. ‘He spent his whole life at the war, my father, and he was a good soldier. But when we heard he’d been killed, there we were: a brood of orphans scattered around the country, without a single marriage that would have given us a new protector among the six of us. He never realised that making alliances for his family was just as important as winning battles; that you need friends to defeat your enemies – a strategy for living, not just for dying.’

He laughed, with a tinge of real bitterness. Isabel kept quiet, less because she was artfully drawing him out at last, as she’d imagined she would, than because she didn’t know how to respond. She was realising uncomfortably how little she knew of the world outside the Mercery, of the world where the war was. Trying to imagine what it would be like for your father to die, all that came to her mind was sounds: the snuffles of women weeping; the banging of a hammer, nailing down a coffin lid, nailing shut the door of her home; the chilly quiet of Cheapside by night, for those with nowhere to go; the scuttling of rats. Her mother had died too long ago for Isabel to remember her. But she couldn’t form a picture of a life in which her father wasn’t fretting in the silkroom, nagging a bit more work out of some sunken-eyed shepster, smiling even as he picked at a minutely off-kilter seam with his obsessively clean fingernails; or drawing in a noble client by singing out the beauty of his stock with his green eyes glowing; or counting out his piles of coin later with a sly laugh at how envious the noble client would be if she only realised by how much the servile merchant’s silk profits outweighed her rents and rolling acres. Isabel couldn’t imagine waiting, in some half-closed house in a field, for the rumour, or letter, or servant limping home in bandages, bringing word; those words, whatever this man must have heard. Yet even failing to envision it brought it closer. It had always been enough to know that the war happened to other people; but now she was talking to someone who had been touched by it she felt herself, for the first time, weighed down with nameless possibilities. She didn’t know what the weak flexing in her gut was called, or the darkness seeping through her veins; but she thought it might be fear.

She crossed herself. Filled with a sudden longing to be wiser and older, she thought: it’s ignorant to live in a city that’s about to be entered by a conquering army (King Edward’s army was at St Albans, people said; it would be here any day, and the mayor had already given the order to let the soldiers in) yet be so innocent of disaster. Pig ignorant. I’ve grown up in a land where two families of kings have been fighting each other for the throne for as long as anyone can remember, and I know nothing about it. You don’t if you’re a Londoner. We hardly see it. Still, he’d think me a child if he knew.

He didn’t notice her gesture. ‘Well, we survived. But we’ve been unlucky ever since with our marriage choices,’ he was saying, with a twist to his mouth that made his face look pinched and hard. ‘My eldest brother ran away with a war widow, the stupidest possible love match, just when what family we still had was finally arranging a proper alliance for him. We’re only just seeing the end of the years of hatred that brought. And then a second brother married to spite the eldest brother, deliberately going against his wishes. And that’s meant more trouble…’

He sighed and looked down at the neat meat squares his hands had been cutting as he talked, and pushed one gently towards himself with his knife. Then he stabbed it. Isabel took another sip of rough dark wine as it disappeared into his mouth, wondering which brother he’d been thinking of when he’d made that stabbing movement. ‘I’m glad it’s over now,’ she ventured, glancing up, ‘your family trouble, I mean.’

Perhaps it was the smallness of her voice that made his eyes gentle again.

‘Almost over,’ he corrected, looking properly at her once more. ‘There’s still my marriage to arrange.’

For a second, his voice was so tender that her heart leapt. She caught her breath, leaning eagerly forward behind her cup. Then she felt a sigh ebb out of her as he went on, more harshly: ‘And now it’s my turn there’s nothing I want more than to make a marriage that will be good for my family – but my second brother’s trying to stop me. He’s fighting it so hard that I think even my trying to do the right thing might turn out to be the wrong thing. I’ve found myself thinking I should pull back… to satisfy him.’ His jaw tightened, as it had in church. ‘I’m not going to, though,’ he added firmly. ‘That wouldn’t help either. But I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever stop being orphans at war, wilful children in men’s bodies, destroying each other while we try to sort out the things our father should have decided.’ He sighed. ‘You can see why I believe there’s nothing more important than marrying in the best interests of your family, can’t you?’ he added with more energy. ‘You have to work together, do your duty; or you’re lost.’

‘Oh,’ Isabel muttered lamely. There was another long silence, broken from somewhere behind by a roar of male laughter. The girl cleared away their boards. Isabel noticed that the light was failing. The window was still bright, but his face was falling into shadow. She hadn’t heard the bell; but the markets must be closing.

He was sitting very straight and apparently still on his stool. She felt, rather than saw, the tiny movement of his hand twitching at his sword hilt. She remembered peeping sideways at his hands in the church: they’d been brown and well-made, with thin fingers, with bitten nails.

She wanted to ask: ‘Do you love her?’ But she sensed that was a question girls giggling in silkrooms might ask, and not for him. Instead, she faltered, ‘But don’t you ever wish…?’ and left the question hanging. She didn’t know herself how she’d have finished it.

When his voice came out of the gloom again, it was wistful and there was no flash of eyes; he must be looking down.

‘Ah, wishes…’ he whispered back. ‘If we could live by our wishes… please ourselves: live at peace, kill nothing but dragons… eat buttercups… ride unicorns… who knows what any of us would do?’

She heard a quiet rumble of laughter. She could see the ghost of the evening star through a smeared window pane. She put her cup down and left her hands spread on the table. She looked at the two pale shadows on the dark wood: fingers long and lovely enough to embroider church vestments with, as her father liked to say. The question flashed through her mind – was he looking at them too? – as she thought, all I want is to go on sitting here in this darkness; not to talk; not to think; not to go home.

‘Of course, you don’t have to take my advice,’ he said in the end. When she looked up his eyes were gleaming quizzically at her again over steepled fingers, his long eyes the only clearly visible part of his shadowed form. ‘If you have choices, that is.’

‘Choices?’ she repeated dully, as reality came back like a sour taste in the mouth. Knowing that her father wouldn’t let her run away from marrying Thomas Claver by paying her dowry to a nunnery instead, since she’d never shown the least sign of having a vocation; wondering if she’d have the nerve to risk walking out of his great place, where she’d always been Miss Isabel, daintily perched on wallows of silk, sewing altar cloths, to become a withered, unregarded, unmarried housekeeper in the household of the kind of wealthy wife Jane would become. Knowing she wouldn’t. Aware too that there were other, worse possibilities that her imagination was shying away from. ‘What choices?’

He glanced over at the chessboard and grinned. ‘Strategic choices,’ he said, with a return of the wolfish energy she’d glimpsed as they left the church. ‘You mustn’t think life is a romance; that some knight errant will come along and slay the dragon for you. Knights don’t really sit and pine at lovely ladies’ gates. They fight. That’s reality. War. Chess. All you can do is plan as many steps ahead as you can and position yourself for a good move next time. Know what your powers are and what you can do.’

Briskly, he shook out a couple of pieces. ‘Look. Say I’m a king: I can move in several directions. If the way I want is blocked, there are others open to me. But let’s call you a pawn. You don’t have so many choices. All you can do is move forward, one step at a time. And I’d imagine your only forward movement now is to say yes.’

She glanced up; down, at her fingers, plucking at each other; up again through her eyelashes, seeking his eyes but hiding hers when she met them; not wanting to acquiesce. How could he look so soft, but be so hard? Was that what the war had done to him, or just his nature? She didn’t want to accept that her dilemma could be reduced to this ruthless balancing of possible outcomes; this cold-blooded comparison of disadvantage. All she wanted was to come up with some way of talking her father out of his foolishness, she thought; ready to toss her head like an impatient pony, but restraining herself just in time, with the dawning awareness that there was no place left in her life for petulance. Her father wasn’t going to change his mind.

‘Well?’ the man in front of her murmured. His voice might be soft, but there was no ignoring the challenge in it. ‘Do you have any other choices?’

She shook her head, filling up inside with a darkness that crawled and churned.