Figures in Silk

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.’

Suddenly Isabel remembered the calm, cleansed look Thomas had given her when he decided to go and fight. ‘I want you to be proud of me,’ he’d said. Pity hit her in the chest like a stab wound. Was this why he’d gone?

Equally suddenly, she found herself blurting a question she only realised she needed to ask as she heard her own words: ‘My inheritance?’

But she already knew the answer. Thomas had spent her inheritance.