Queen of Silks

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.

‘I'll call Alice in now,’ William Pratte said, avoiding the question. ‘I wanted to tell you first.’

When Alice swept in, knowing, as Isabel herself had known a short while before, that William Pratte could only have bad news, Isabel's face was as set as her mother-in-law's. It was so obvious in advance that Alice was going to blame her for Thomas Claver's transgressions that she wasn't even surprised at the narrowing of the older woman's eyes; the furious, accusing glances her way; the white flared nostrils; the horse-snorts of breath. Isabel just stared at her feet and tried not to hear Alice Claver growl, at first disbelievingly, then with a rage she didn't want to see, ‘Thomas was an innocent for his own good’, and then, ‘He'd never have thought of any of that by himself’. If Alice Claver chose to think the question of Thomas's debts through, she'd realise it would have been impossible for him to have spent that vast fortune in the few short weeks of his marriage. But Isabel could see that Thomas's thrifty mother couldn't bring herself to consider how a sum of money equivalent to the King's loans from John Lambert could possibly have been lost so lightly. It happened all the time; the sons of the rich didn't always value the hard-earned wealth their parents had amassed. But facts were too difficult for her right now. Easier to look at the bowed girl's head in front of her and puff and glare; easier to say to herself, ‘She led him astray.’

The unfairness of it cut at Isabel's heart. The child in her wanted to wail, as she'd always wailed when Jane got off without punishment while she was beaten for some shared misdemeanour, that the grown-ups had got it terribly wrong. But she was grown up herself now. She scuffed one toe against another and pursed her lips.

She stayed in her room that evening. The Prattes stayed downstairs with Alice Claver.

She sat very straight, not moving, intent on working out what to do and how. Even when she remembered Thomas, lying on the bed watching her think something out before, laughing and saying, ‘You've gone like a cat watching a mouse; are you going to pounce?’ she wouldn't let the thought in or the tears out. This wasn't the time for crying.

He'd wanted her to be proud of him. And if he hadn't been killed he'd have sorted his troubles out somehow, so she could have been. But she could still protect his memory.

So much of what was on her mind was so painful that it was a relief, from time to time, to let her thoughts wander back to the dark man in the church, with his soft eyes and hard-nosed advice. There was no point in dreaming of that man; no point in taking refuge in girlish musings about how, if she'd been married to someone with that man's capacity for clearly understanding a problem, she'd never have been in this trouble in the first place. She just had to take the best from that memory. He'd had more foresight than she'd realised when he'd said, ‘This is just your first move. There'll be others later.’ She hadn't expected the next move to come within weeks. But now it was here. And she had to make it a good one. She had to think it through as carefully as a general planning a battle.

By morning, she'd worked out the best thing to do in the circumstances. It wasn't going to be easy. But it would be right. She thought the man in the church would approve.

She rose early enough to clean her face of its stains, dress soberly, and catch her mother-in-law alone, heading out to Mass with a terrible loneliness on her face.

Lonely or not, she could see Alice Claver would rather go without her. But she didn't give her the opportunity. ‘May I come with you?’ she asked, and determinedly linked arms. After a moment's rigid surprise, she felt her mother-in-law's arm relax.

Alice Claver didn't seem to notice the tears running down Isabel's cheeks in the chapel. She came out calm and quiet; cleansed. But she didn't say a word to Isabel.

Isabel waited till they'd got back into the great hall. She settled Alice Claver onto a bench. Fetched her leftover bread and cheese. Set it out neatly. Her heart was thumping.

Alice Claver was staring unseeingly out of the window. Her expression wasn't promising.

‘I wanted to ask,’ Isabel began, hesitantly.

Those dark eyes came reluctantly to rest on her. It struck Isabel, for the first time, that Alice Claver was too uneasy with her. She couldn't really go on choosing to blame Isabel for leading her son astray; not for long. It was just possible, instead, that Alice Claver was feeling embarrassed at Isabel being left a penniless widow as a result of marrying a Claver. The thought gave her courage.

‘… I want to stay here,’ she finished. ‘Live with you.’

Now she had Alice Claver's attention. Hostile attention, perhaps; but that was better than nothing.

‘Why?’ the older woman barked.

‘I can't go home,’ Isabel said, rushing into her argument. ‘My father will want to marry me again. But I won't have a dower now. And I don't want them to find out why.’

She paused to let the idea sink in. The older woman turned away. Isabel could see her thinking. Alice Claver didn't want the Lamberts to find out there was no dower either. They could both imagine the destructive buzz in the markets. It would ruin Isabel's chances of marrying again, if she ever wanted to, but it would also blacken Thomas's name forever. It wouldn't be good for Alice's business, either.

‘I don't want people to think badly of Thomas,’ Isabel went on, as persuasively as she knew how. ‘And if I stayed with you, there'd be no need for anyone to know what he left me. Not unless I were to get married again, anyway.’

She could feel Alice Claver softening. She knew the woman was a swift weigher-up of realities, so must understand that Isabel was offering her a chance to save face. The next answer, another bark, was less fierce. ‘You'd have to work, you know. There's no room for merry widows here. You can't just sit around having picnics all your life.’

Isabel nodded, refusing to be nettled; she knew she was winning. ‘Oh, I'll work all right,’ she replied, with all the enthusiasm she could muster. ‘You know I will. I'll need to, now; I have a dower to earn back’, and although she kept her voice soft she felt a quiver from the older woman that she hoped might be shame at her own ungraciousness. ‘I've thought it all out. You don't even have to take my word for it. We could make a contract if you'd rather. You could take me on as a proper apprentice.’

Alice Claver nearly stared. An apprentice? She'd be getting ten years of unpaid labour out of a deal like that.

Isabel knew it was a good offer. But Alice Claver was too canny a market woman to show surprise. Raising a hand to her mouth to cover her expression, she said, deadpan: ‘I could.’ And, several seconds later, ‘I suppose.’

Isabel could hardly contain her impatience.

‘So … will you?’ she said.

Alice Claver dragged out her pause for longer than Isabel would have thought possible. But when, finally, making a show of reluctance, she did nod agreement – then leaned forward, with a shadow of her usual market manner, and shook Isabel's hand as if to close the deal – Isabel thought she could see a gleam of satisfaction in those puffy dark eyes.

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‘But I want to stay with her,’ Isabel said wearily. The conversation seemed to have gone on for hours.

‘But you can't,’ her father said again. ‘Not as an apprentice.’

She knew his style of argument. It was merchant style: repeating himself, without raising his voice, until the sheer boredom of the discussion wore whoever he was arguing with into reluctant agreement. He called it consensus. And what he'd been saying today was: You could marry anyone in the City with your dower. And: No daughter of mine need ever work; I've given you the best opportunities in life; what will people think? And: Just look at your hands; lady's hands; think what they're going to look like once your new (eyebrows raised, shoulders raised) mistress gets you throwing raw silk or dunking yarn into pots of dye.

John Lambert glanced round his great hall, as if trying to draw inspiration from his lavish tapestries and his cupboard full of gleaming silverware. He was visibly longing to go back to their more pleasurable earlier conversation, in which he'd been able to boast that Lord Hastings and the Duke of Gloucester had paid him a personal visit at the Crown Seld that morning – ‘Just sauntered in; His Grace was gracious enough to remember me from the Lord Mayor's banquet; two of the greatest men in the land …’ – and they'd looked at his imported Italian silk cloths, and Hastings had ended up shaking hands on a promise to buy a length of green figured velvet. He poked at the remains of his meal.

‘Look,’ Isabel said impatiently, ‘I didn't want to marry a Claver in the first place, but you insisted. You said it would be good for your business to make a relationship with the Clavers. Now I want to stay; but you're saying I shouldn't. It's only a month later. Tell me this: what's changed?’

‘That was a marriage,’ her father said, sounding impatient at last. ‘This is …’ he wrinkled his nose, ‘business. And an unsuitable business for a young lady of your accomplishments, if I may say so. A waste of your French … your Latin … your lute playing.’

Isabel bared her teeth at him in a grin so angry it felt almost like a snarl. ‘Well, why shouldn't I learn the business?’ she said. ‘You do it; and a lot of girls I know learn it too. We Lamberts are the only ones who think we're too grand. But what's wrong with doing something useful? What if I actually want to be a silkwoman? What if I want to be’, she lingered, ‘independent? Of other people's whims?’

‘You can't do it,’ he said hotly. Both hands clutched at the table edge.

‘Why?’ she replied, eyeing him insolently back.

‘Because I forbid you to!’ he yelled, startling her as he leapt to his feet. ‘I forbid you to humiliate the Lamberts, and drag our family name down!’

‘You can't forbid me to!’ she cried back, standing up too. ‘I don't have to obey you any more! I'm a widow! Widows are legally responsible for themselves! I'm not a Lambert now – I'm a Claver! And I can choose my own future!’

They eyeballed each other like fighting dogs. There was a long, ominous silence. She'd never disobeyed him before; not like this. He didn't look as though he'd forgive her easily for betraying him into this undignified shouting match – for losing his temper again, like he had at the Guildhall.

He turned and walked out, without a backwards glance.

Isabel had thought Jane would be contemptuous of the idea of working in the markets. But when she first told her older sister, Jane was endearingly practical. ‘Ten years,’ she said gently, wrinkling her nose but trying to understand; not sneering. ‘That's a long time. What if you hate it in a month?’

Isabel nearly cried at her sister's sympathetic tone. She was moments away from confiding in Jane; but she couldn't. She didn't know if Jane – who was glowing even more beautifully than before now she was married – would tell her husband; if word would get out. So she shrugged and tried to look unconcerned.

‘There'd be no going back,’ she said laconically.

Jane tried again. She put a hand on Isabel's arm and looked very sweetly into her eyes.

‘I know you're in mourning,’ she murmured. ‘I can imagine how terrible it must feel …’