Читать книгу Queen of Silks - Vanora Bennett - Страница 9

‘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 …’

Isabel nodded mutely, looking away; looking down; willing herself not to weep.

‘But, Isabel,’ Jane went on, in the same sweetly reasonable voice. ‘It was just an arranged marriage. Don't you remember? A month ago, you didn't want Thomas Claver for a husband. You can't really believe you're heartbroken enough now to sign away half your life to his mother.’

Isabel flinched. She'd known, really, that Jane wouldn't understand.

‘Even if you really do think now that you'll always feel like this, you must know it will pass,’ Jane said, and now Isabel could hear the familiar patronising big-sister note creeping into the voice in her ears. ‘What if a year goes by and you want to marry again? If you're an apprentice you'll have to wait till you're twenty-four. And you'll be even older before you can have a baby.’

Twenty-four, Isabel thought, before her defences came up against that tone of voice. An eternity. Then, with startling simplicity, it came to her that she didn't want to marry again and become a hostage to someone else's fortune. It wasn't just something to say defiantly to her father. It wasn't just that she had no choice but to apprentice herself to Alice Claver if she were to protect Thomas's memory. This future might actually be for the best. Widows were legally free; their fathers couldn't control them; they could make their own money and spend it as they chose. Alice Claver was robust. She'd used the freedom of widowhood to make a good life. Maybe she'd teach Isabel to do the same thing. With a flash of defiance, Isabel thought: ‘I won't marry again. Not unless I'm free to choose someone who makes me feel …’ She didn't know what she would want to feel; the nearest she could come to it was something like that brief moment, before all this, in the tavern, when the touch of a man who was not Thomas Claver had sparked through her like lightning. So she smiled, tightly, and crossed her arms against her sister, and repeated: ‘No going back.’

Jane sighed. ‘Well,’ she said, rather sadly, ‘I suppose we all find our own escapes.’

Isabel could see her sister had given in. She thought, suddenly, that she might have judged Jane's intervention too harshly. Jane was only doing her best in uncertain circumstances. She hadn't meant to give offence.

Jane started pinning a dark gown from the wardrobe against Isabel. ‘You've lost weight,’ she said, with a mouthful of pins. Then: ‘You must have found something better than you expected in Thomas Claver …’ There was a question in her eyes.

Isabel pressed her lips together and nodded. She felt tears near. To stave them off, she answered with her own question: ‘Doesn't everyone?’ She hadn't even asked Jane how things were turning out with Will Shore, she realised. Hastily, she added: ‘Isn't living with Will better than you expected?’

It seemed a safe question. Jane had given no sign of being unhappy. If anything, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever; her skin glowed gold.

Jane laughed. It was such a joyful laugh that Isabel thought she must be agreeing. It was only later, going back to Catte Street, with one dark gown on her back and another in a basket, that Isabel realised she hadn't paid attention to what Jane Shore's words had been: ‘Will is exactly what I expected.’

It wasn't the glowing endorsement of life with a husband that Jane's air of barely suppressed pleasure in living led you to expect.

Lord Hastings and the Duke of Gloucester were strolling through the Broad Seld after the leisurely meal they'd taken at the Tumbling Bear. They were side by side, talking quietly and occasionally laughing at remarks no one else could hear. Unlike most strangers, who tend to think themselves unobserved when on unfamiliar terrain, not realising how sharply they stood out to everyone else, these two noblemen – soldiers by instinct and experience – were aware of the eyes on their backs; on their swords and spurs. But they didn't mind.

Hastings was saying, with a touch of self-mockery: ‘blonde … sings like a nightingale … witty, too … and dances like thistledown. You should see her dance. And her eyes …’ Then: ‘The same green as that velvet. She'll look beautiful in it. I'll send it to her as soon as I get it.’

His long limbs were made for war, but the troubadour words made his voice sound made for love. The thought of Jane Shore's skin and smile had filled him with sunshine for weeks. He looked cheerfully down at his companion, a few inches shorter than him and twenty years younger: his battle companion, his dearest friend's brother, a boy now grown to manhood and fast becoming a friend in his own right. He wanted them to share the irony of buying a rich cloth from a merchant and giving it to the merchant's lovely daughter.

But Dickon wasn't really listening or meeting Hastings' eyes. There was a polite half-smile on the younger man's thin, sallow face, but his eyes were wandering: from stall to stall, from one white-fingered embroiderer to the next, as if he were looking for someone.

‘Looking for someone?’ Hastings asked lightly; a question not meant to be taken seriously.

Dickon came to; for a moment he looked almost start led. Then he grinned his wolf-grin and shook his head. ‘We're not all hankering after merchants' daughters, Will,’ he said breezily. Then, with his grin turning into a laugh, ‘though enough people seem to be hankering after your one.’

He looked around again (for a second, William Hastings thought he glimpsed the questing look in those narrow dark eyes again), and added, even more breezily: ‘And there are plenty of pretty girls here, of course.’

Dickon's eyes never looked lost. Dickon's decisiveness was one of the qualities Hastings admired in the Duke. Hastings knew there was a fatal softness in his own soul that might, one day, do for him; it made him appreciate the cheerful ruthlessness of Dickon's approach to life even more. Dickon's flintiness had saved him once already, on that night they'd been half-walking, half-running across the Wash after everything had gone so wrong at Doncaster; when the tide had come rushing treacherously in on them and some of his men, with mud and sand gluing their wet boots down, hadn't had the strength to pull up their exhausted legs to sprint to the tussocks of grass that suddenly meant safety. It was the knight right behind Hastings who'd been swept back into the boiling water – Thomas de Teffont, a Wiltshireman; Hastings still remembered the young man's look of terror as he was pulled back, wide eyes and mouth open in a soundless scream, teeth glittering in the moonlight. Hastings had been about to release his own hold on the grasses to stretch back for Teffont, who was hardly more than a boy; who shouldn't die there, when Dickon had stopped him. Dickon, one hand grabbing into the heart of a spindly bush, the other hand hard on Hastings' soaking brigandine. Dickon: a voice as cold as Hell frozen over, grating: ‘Leave him. It's more important to save yourself.’

So Hastings was surprised to find he didn't completely believe in Dickon's breeziness today. The voice of the man who never dissembled didn't, for once, ring quite true; it carried a different message from the one in his eyes. Hastings listened with the beginning of curiosity as the duke went on, still casually, but with hungry eyes: ‘Wasn't Lambert marrying off two daughters, anyway? The blonde one we've been hearing so much about ever since, but another one too – a redhead?’

Hastings nodded, suddenly swept away by the memory of his first sight of Jane Shore in Lambert's great hall at that wedding feast: Edward dancing with her until her cheeks flushed with roses and her teeth flashed in the smile that had swept him away.

Hastings had poured her a goblet of wine as Edward sat her down next to him. He'd leaned forward and given it to her himself, and she'd touched his hand for a fraction longer than she'd needed to, and looked at him with soft, shining eyes.

‘Well,’ Dickon's voice went on, with a hint of impatience, ‘where is she now?’

‘Who?’ Hastings said blankly. Then, with slight embarrassment: ‘Ah – the redhead.’ He spread his arms wide in a parody of bewilderment and shook his head and let his courtier's smile – a smile of great charm – spread over his face. ‘Married,’ he replied, and shrugged a little more. ‘So who can say?’

They walked out into Cheapside. Hastings could hear Dickon humming under his breath.

‘Didn't you want to buy something too?’ he said awkwardly, as they reached their horses. ‘I thought you said …’

Dickon's eyes glinted at him with characteristic dry amusement over the knotted reins, as if relieved Hastings wasn't too love-struck to have noticed his friend had come away empty-handed. ‘Nothing caught my fancy,’ he answered easily.

Isabel wouldn't wait any longer. She knew her father would sulk for months. She was past caring. She called in a notary from Guildhall the very next morning to draw up the apprenticeship agreement, as soon as she'd taken in the two dark robes. She didn't want to be dissuaded. It would be too easy to give in and go home.

The young man who turned up at Catte Street was the younger of the two Lynom boys; the tall, clean-cut sons of Hugh Lynom, silk merchant of Old Jewry, the Prattes' and the Shores' closest neighbour; the boys every girl in the Mercery had always dreamed of marrying. They were twins: so alike Isabel had never been able to tell them apart, though she thought this one was called Robert. But the sight of his eyes (topaz, she remembered Elizabeth Marchpane calling the colour of the Lynom boys' eyes; no, manticore, Anne Hagour had dreamily contradicted her: man-tiger) reminded her of the one definite thing she knew about them: that they'd both chosen not to go into their father's business but to train as lawyers instead. Their father had gone round telling people, with wistfulness in his voice and hurt in his eyes, ‘they say there are opportunities I'm too old to understand in government; they'll see the world and better themselves faster outside the Mercery, they say.’ Thomas had told his father that with all the redistribution of lands and estates that the wars had brought, he'd get richer faster if he went into drawing up property transfer agreements. Robert had told his father he'd get richer faster if he stayed in the City but went into representing City merchants and the Guildhall in negotiations with the Royal Wardrobe. They weren't the only young men to see new horizons beyond the City walls; and everyone knew their father was longing to amass a big enough fortune to buy his way into the gentry anyway; but the fact of both sons leaving the Mercery had aroused comment. The selds had buzzed with it for weeks.

Isabel gritted her teeth. It was just her luck. A Lynom wasn't going to sympathise with her decision to sign up for a ten-year silkworking apprenticeship. If she wasn't careful he might even delay things; let her father know before the papers were signed and sealed.

For once she was grateful for Alice Claver's warhorse ways. ‘Sit down, young man, and take down the terms,’ her mother-in-law rattled out, breaking through the visitor's formal regrets over the death in the family; and the Lynom boy sat obediently at the table and began unpacking his box of pens and parchment. If Isabel hadn't felt certain nothing could make Alice Claver nervous, she might have thought the silkwoman was in even more haste than she was. ‘Term, ten years. Premium, five pounds.’

The Lynom boy's good-humoured eyes were laughing. He could feel her haste too. And he was intrigued. Isabel thought for a moment he must sense a story to tell the selds – at least until she remembered that he'd changed his own life to get away from the selds. Perhaps, she thought, reassured, he was the right person to be making this document after all.

As it turned out, he didn't try to delay. He'd become a lawyer through and through. He wrote the usual promises into the document: that Isabel would cherish her mistress's interests, not waste her goods or trade without her permission, behave well, and not withdraw unlawfully from her service; that Alice Claver would ‘teach, take charge of, and instruct her apprentice’ in her craft, chastise her in meet fashion, and find her footwear, clothing, a bed, and all other suitable necessities.

Alice Claver looked over his shoulder. ‘What's this?’ she said sharply as he carried on writing. He stopped, looking confused, and ran his hand through his tawny-blond hair. He'd started to add the final boilerplate phrase of contracts involving girl apprentices – that Isabel should be treated pulchrior modo, more kindly than a boy. ‘She's my family,’ Alice Claver said brusquely. ‘How else would I treat her?’ She barked with laughter. After a pause, Isabel laughed too. The Lynom boy looked from the older woman to the younger, both in their black gowns. Then he smiled and crossed out the offending line. But Isabel felt his gaze linger curiously on her as he packed up his pens.

‘My fee for drawing up the indentures and registering them with the Mercers' Company clerk is one shilling,’ the Lynom boy said, sanding what he'd written with fluid muscles.

Alice Claver nodded. ‘Do it today,’ she said.

The Lynom boy brought copies of the documents back two days later, duly registered. Isabel received him, wondering at the discreet sympathy in his eyes until he gave her the other letter he was also carrying for her.

It was a cold, brief letter from her father: formal notice that he was rewriting his will to leave his estate to Jane, ‘my one dutiful daughter’. Isabel could see from Robert Lynom's expression that he knew what it said.

She glanced over it. Nodded curtly. Let the hand holding the letter flutter down to her side. Kept the anger and contempt and hurt boiling inside her tightly shut down. She knew what her father would want her to do, but she wasn't going to weep or run begging to him to change his mind. She wouldn't let herself be bullied. She was learning not to let her face show her feelings.

Alice Claver and Anne Pratte swept in. When Alice Claver saw the young lawyer, she held her hand out for the documents she was expecting. He smiled, bowed courteously, and passed them over. She gave them a careful reading, then grunted with satisfaction. She tucked them into her large purse. She didn't look at Isabel or ask what the letter still held loosely in her apprentice's hand was.

Alice fixed Robert Lynom with a sudden, fierce smile. Now the business was done, she had time for conversation. ‘I hear Lord Hastings has been buying in the selds. In person. From’, she gestured sideways at Isabel without catching her eye, ‘my new apprentice's father.’

Isabel looked away; perhaps she should have told Alice Claver about Lord Hastings' visit herself, but her quarrel with her father had made her forget it. However, Robert Lynom knew enough to satisfy the silkwoman. He nodded easily. ‘He has indeed,’ he said, including Isabel in his answering smile, putting away his papers in his box. ‘A cloth of green figured velvet. From Lucca, if I remember rightly. They say he paid a good price for it too.’

It was natural to discuss this new phenomenon. It was unusual for noblemen to visit the markets themselves. If they were of the blood royal, they usually placed orders through the King's Wardrobe in Old Jewry, and administrators such as Robert Lynom would find merchants to meet their requirements. Otherwise lords might send representatives to the markets to bargain for luxury goods in their place.

But unusual things had been happening since King Edward came back, and Lord Hastings, his closest adviser, was an unusual nobleman anyway. He'd survived the times of exile and poverty by living on his considerable wits; he'd gradually turned the meagre estates of his inheritance into a magnate's fabulous wealth. Now that his lord was back on the throne, Hastings was showing he wasn't the kind to stand grandly on his aristocratic dignity, willing only to live by the sword. As a mark of the King's trust, he'd recently been named Governor of Calais, and the markets were full of the rumour that he planned not just to run the garrison there but to take a personal interest in the port's trade as well. There was even talk that Lord Hastings was courting the staplers of Calais, who controlled all the exports of raw wool from England, by becoming a merchant of the staple himself. They said he had the wit and imagination to find common ground with anyone, noble or not. Remembering his merry, kindly eyes from the wedding feast (before he started staring so hungrily at Jane, at least), Isabel could believe it.

Alice Claver wanted to know more, but she didn't want to show her envy of John Lambert's deal too openly. She didn't ask the price her competitor had charged for his cloth. Instead, she asked casually: ‘And did his lordship say what he was going to do with the velvet?’

Isabel was trying to think of nothing more than enjoying the story. She would have time enough later to fret about her father; there was nothing she could do about him anyway. She leaned encouragingly towards Robert Lynom.

‘He didn't,’ the Lynom boy said briefly.

But Anne Pratte knew more. She always did. She'd quietly taken up a seat on a little footstool by the window; she had a piece of work in her hands; but she was following everything like a small bloodhound. She picked up the narrative by piping up, with gusto: ‘But there's talk, of course. They say he sent it as a gift to a lady, don't they?’

At her voice, Robert Lynom suddenly started to look excruciatingly uncomfortable. He stopped; bit his tongue; blushed. Isabel couldn't understand what was going through his head. ‘Well,’ Alice said impatiently. ‘Who to? You must know. You'll have done the paperwork, won't you? Spit it out, man.’

He mumbled something. Even his scalp was on fire. He picked up his box.

Alice Claver planted herself one step in front of him, her smile half a threat.

‘Don't leave us hanging,’ she said, more command than plea. ‘Who was the cloth for?’

He composed himself. Decided upon his choice of who to offend, and made himself smile at Alice Claver. Turning sharply away from Anne Pratte and slightly away from Isabel, he said: ‘They say – though I can't be sure they're right – to your new apprentice's sister, Mistress Shore.’

Alice Claver almost choked. ‘No,’ she said, with a mixture of shock, disbelief, envy and amusement. ‘Really?’ Then, as if remembering Isabel's presence, she clapped a friendly hand on Robert Lynom's back and ushered him out towards the door. Twittering excitedly, Anne Pratte followed; she wasn't an unkind woman usually, but the thrill of that story had eclipsed any worries she might otherwise have had about Isabel's feelings.

Isabel thought he wouldn't dare even glance back at her. He disliked market gossip, and he'd known what was in the letter her father had written her; he'd be miserably aware of having added to her worries about her family with the story they'd bullied out of him.

But he did look back, from the doorway. ‘Good day, Mistress Claver,’ he said bravely; and, in a rush, ‘My apologies. I shouldn't have …’

She met his eyes and nodded, forgiving him. And it was the memory of that moment of mutual bravery, and the gratefulness on his face, that gave her the courage to decide, once she was alone with the letter, not to think about it any more, or rage against her father, or envy Jane's beauty or aristocratic admirers. She was a Claver now. Her life was here.

If Isabel thought she'd be taken straight back to Alice Claver's inner sanctum, the silk storeroom, as soon as she'd apprenticed herself, she was undeceived that night over dinner.

The apprenticeship timetable Alice Claver outlined, with a hard look, had no space in it for musing over the finest luxuries of civilisation, or for planning vast wholesale purchase strategies. It involved mastering all the eye-straining, low-grade, repetitive, menial tasks of retail silkwork first – the jobs Alice Claver put out to the wrinkled, skinny shepster and throwster women who worked from five-foot-wide stalls huddled outside the biggest selling markets, the Crown and Broad Selds, along their frontages on Cheapside and down their side doors on Soper Lane. Not just twisting imported raw silk into threads; but throwing it into yarns ready for use, and spinning, and dyeing, and turning seams. She was to learn every stage of the process from taking the strands of raw silk gathered by Italian reelers from silkworm cocoons to selling manufactured silk, on the street, by the ounce or the pound, as sewing silk, open silk, twine silk or rough web silk, the stuff used to make loops on which to attach warp threads while weaving, so they could be separated into two sets to let the weft thread pass between them. And she wasn't just to learn these humble jobs, but to sit outside in all weathers with the hunched shepsters and throwsters and dyers, learning from them, and about them.

The Prattes sneaked a look at each other. Isabel knew it was a test. Alice Claver must be doing this deliberately. She could imagine her mother-in-law's voice saying, with grim satisfaction, ‘Let's knock the nonsense out of her’. She must think Isabel would protest. Isabel wasn't going to. She kept her eyes humbly down on her untouched food and nodded.

‘It's only for a year,’ Anne Pratte said reassuringly, in her papery little voice, as if trying to soften Alice Claver's blow. ‘The next stage is embroidery. But we already know how good you are at that. So it won't be long before you can move on to the real thing and start learning weaving. Narrow-loom work. Ribbons. Cauls. Laces. London's glory. The finest silk piecework in Christendom. And,’ daringly, flinching from Alice Claver's cold gaze, she leaned forward and patted Isabel's hand, ‘I've asked Alice if I can teach you that.’

Isabel looked up, surprised and touched. Four Pratte eyes were on her, brimming with kindness. The Prattes were both ignoring Alice Claver, still glowering behind them.

She rose in the dark all winter. She went to work holding a candle in chapped, raw hands, like all the other poor girls in brown and grey woollens working in the selds, whose existence she'd never been more than half-aware of until now. Like them, in those clothes, she'd become invisible to everyone from the Mercery's richer, gayer families – even her own father. He walked straight at her in the street – she sometimes felt, as she jumped out of his way, that if she didn't move he'd walk straight through her. The pretty merchants' daughters she'd grown up with didn't mean to snub her. They just wafted by the quiet dun mouse of a girl on their way to sit embroidering at their fathers' stalls in their spring-coloured puffs of satin. They couldn't see her.

Sometimes she felt like a living ghost – transparent to everyone she'd ever known. No one minded nowadays if, while she was throwing or twisting silk or turning a seam, her eyes filled with hot tears that crept down her face until, in the autumn winds, her cheeks became as raw and chapped as her fingers. No one minded, because no one noticed, as long as she turned out the required number of threads or piles of fluffiness or bright twisted yarns, when she would be rewarded with a rough pat, or a grunt, from whichever shabby mistress she was being loaned to for the day. And she found the hotness of her own tears a comfort – a proof to herself that she was there, after all; not quite transparent and emptied of the fluids of life; not quite invisible.

The tears were for Thomas, she told herself. So was the shrivelling pain she always felt under her heart, always, as if her body were being drained away by a tide that was pulling her off into the darkness. But sometimes, as her hands moved through the silk, with a deft life that felt independent of her mind, she thought the tears, and the pain, might after all be just for herself.

She talked to Thomas in her head. Or she tried. Tried to keep him alive; tried to take comfort in remembering his look of fuzzy astonishment when he woke up to find her next to him, his delighted snugglings and the little kisses he'd place, shyly, like acts of worship, on her hands or forehead. But all she had to tell him, apart from how she missed him, missed the warmth of a time when someone needed her, was about the detail of her days drudging in the selds. And what would he have understood of any of that?

Sometimes, when it felt too hard to explain to Thomas why she'd kept submissively quiet when Alice Claver or one of her underlings pulled a piece of work apart and told her to start again, when she couldn't even begin to imagine the look on his face, she'd talk in her head to the man from the church instead. He'd have understood why she gritted her teeth through the cold that went into her bones; took the telling-off and the false starts so patiently. Gradually his became the face she conjured up to talk to in whatever corner she was working in; a stranger, really, but someone who knew about purposefulness, who could coolly plan ahead. ‘He'd be proud of me if he saw me now,’ she thought stoutly sometimes, ‘doing the right thing by Thomas, and helping fate to bring me a better future into the bargain.’ Though at other times, in the moments of despair when her guts felt full of ground glass, when she stopped believing she was anything but a pair of hands twitching outside a grey dress, when the darkness seemed to be going to last forever, she'd sometimes also think: ‘No, he'd be horrified. I've taken the wrong way. I'm lost.’

She came home to Alice Claver's house most nights too tired to think. She was grateful for that. All she had energy to do was to curl up alone on her grand, empty marriage bed, stretching out her cramped muscles, whispering to Thomas as she rubbed warmth back into her blue-white fingers.

With time, though, she found there were consolations. Long after she'd lost one world she realised she'd somehow gained another: the busy, raucous, teeming world of the other hard-working women in browns and greys: the ones who did the jobs other people made fortunes from, the ones she herself had only just begun to notice.

Isabel had grown up at the smart northern end of the Mercery – the roads leading up to Catte Street and the Guildhall beyond: grand Milk Street and Honey Lane and Colechurch Lane; Old Jewry, to the east beyond St Thomas of Acre, where the Prattes and Lynoms and Shores lived, and where the Royal Wardrobe was, the depot for all royal cloth purchases. Now, running errands for Alice Claver taught her every inch of the industrial south side of Cheapside too: the sunless snakings of Popkirtle, Thenwend and Gropecunt Lanes, behind Cordwainer Street; every tenement, warehouse and patch of garden, and every jobbing mercer and silkwoman wife, stallkeeper, denizen, stranger and pieceworker living and working in them.

For anyone willing to listen, those lanes were alive with talk.

The silk workers she was farmed out to quickly forgot to be shy of her. Sometimes Isabel had her ear bent by the forbidding Katherine Dore, the throwster who was taking her ex-apprentice Joan Woulbarowe to court for stealing £12 13s 4d of silk. Sometimes she'd get caught, somewhere in Soper Lane, by gangling, wild-elbowed Joan Woulbarowe, out of jail now, preparing for her next appeal appearance at the Court of Arches while she stayed with her aunt, Rose Trapp, in a tenement in Lad Lane. Joan Woulbarowe said her mistress had wanted to keep her in service once her term was up, and had invented the whole tarradiddle as a way of trapping her to stay on as unpaid help. Isabel never got to the bottom of the story.

Sometimes Isabel learned things about her own Lambert family from the market talk. When Agnes Langton died at Stourbridge Fair, her terrifyingly overbearing mother, Jane Langton, the widow of a saddler, who knew nothing of the silk trade, had swept out from a hitherto unsuspected tenement behind St Benet Sherehog Church and completed Agnes's enormous transaction with two Genoese merchants for silk goods worth £300 15s – then sold the lot on to John Lambert for a cheeky £350, enough to keep her comfortably in her old age, and retired to Norfolk. ‘He doesn't keep his ear to the ground, that John Lambert,’ Agnes Brundyssch the throwster said comfortably. ‘Never did.’

But no one on the street had a bad word to say about Alice Claver. She was the heroine of the markets. Alice Claver was the protector of the poor, because she wrote the petitions every market woman wanted: the Stop the Italians petitions. The grey and brown women hated the Italians, who tried to undercut the delicate small silk goods that they made in London by selling their own countrywomen's imported goods at cut price. Isabel knew that Alice Claver got William Pratte to help her draft the petitions that she and a gaggle of lesser silkwomen presented regularly to Parliament, using proper legal language. But they didn't care about him; he was invisible to them. They believed it was purely thanks to Alice Claver that they'd got four Acts of Parliament through, protecting them from the greedy Lombards, who as everyone knew were worse than the French and Hanse and Flemish put together. ‘You have to be tough to stop the Italians,’ Isabel Fremely said, nodding at Agnes Brundyssch. ‘Mistress Claver's more than a woman. She's a force of nature.’

As winter turned to spring – every now and then a fresh breeze blowing through the stalls with a promise of blossom tomorrow – Isabel sometimes found herself breathing in deep and thinking, ‘I'm still here’ and ‘I've done it.’ And when she did, it was the face of the man in the church that creased into an encouraging wolf-smile in response. Quite what she'd done, beyond surviving the winter, wasn't clear even to herself. But sometimes she thought it was keeping quiet to the market women about her personal sorrows, her times of weakness; sticking with iron-hard determination to her pledge to become a good apprentice to Alice Claver, not to sink into peevish resentments. When she smelled spring coming, and heard the respect of the tough women around her for her mistress, she realised she agreed. She'd learned to share their grudging admiration for Alice Claver's limitless commitment to her work.

Isabel kept out of Jane's way all winter. She didn't know what to say to her. She was mastering the resentment she might have felt for Alice Claver; and she didn't want to have to start struggling to master resentment against her sister. Besides, it would have been excruciating if Jane had started trying to make peace between her and their father, charming him with a flick of golden blondeness or an alluring white hand on his sleeve.

She saw her sister on Sundays, at St Thomas of Acre, and every time Jane appeared in church she'd be dressed in something finer than the last time, and her honey skin would be softer and her eyes brighter than ever before. Throughout the prayers, Isabel would be aware of Jane looking shyly over, sweetly as ever, as if trying to meet her eye. But Isabel kept her own eyes down. And when they did stop to talk on the street afterwards it was hard to know how to take up the old companionship of children who'd shared a bed and squabbled over toys. Jane hardly mentioned Will Shore, who anyway was always off somewhere abroad – Bruges, or Cologne – building up his business. Isabel thought it might be because Jane didn't want to remind her of her own widowed state. If that was Jane's notion of delicacy, she was grateful for it; but she didn't enjoy the small talk about luxurious living that Jane chose to go in for instead. Jane had taken up hawking, she said. She was working on a tapestry of St George killing the dragon. John Lambert was going to take her as his partner to the hunt King Edward had invited him to at Eltham; she was going to have new sleeves made for her yellow silk for the occasion. And her eyes would seek Isabel's out, gently offering to share her pleasure at life, then lower themselves again, with a hint of disappointment, when Isabel failed to respond.

If Alice Claver was aware of the silence growing between Isabel and her sister, or of the breakdown in communications between Isabel and her father, she didn't show it, even though her eyes were always on Isabel, boring into her back in the selds or in the house. She never talked about Thomas, though Isabel longed painfully to hear someone else talking about him with love and pain. It was as if Alice Claver didn't want to share her memories of him with a girl she now treated as an outsider. But her animosity was gone. Isabel couldn't read what was in the quietness that had replaced it.

After church on Sundays, instead of visiting her family or going with Alice Claver to eat with the Prattes, Isabel filled her free hours by working on the embroidered purse she'd started making for Thomas during the siege. The delicate work brought her numb fingers back to life. She sat alone by her window, watching her needle flash up and down, sewing tiny stitches into his initials, trying to think of each stitch as a prayer for her husband's soul, an act of remembrance. She got Agnes Brundyssch to teach her how to make cord for the braid. She got Isabel Fremely to cadge her some leftover Cyprus gold thread from David Galganete, the sharp Genoese merchant she bought from, to make tassels.

She finished the purse in time for Thomas's obit, a year after his death. But by the June morning when she quietly laid her offering on the altar at St Thomas of Acre, under cover of a cloud of incense and the drone of the chantry priest, she knew Jane had been right to say her feelings for Thomas might fade. She was still full of pain, but it had become vague and cloudy, without a source. She could hardly recall his face or voice now. It was as if she'd sewn all her memories into the purse and had nothing left.

Even the purse, which had started as a love token, had become something else. For months now, she'd found herself taking pride in it as a sampler of the fine silkwork she hoped to master. What she wanted most in the world now was for Alice Claver to pick up her work from the altar and admire it enough to send her to Anne Pratte for lessons. Isabel bent her head in prayer as Alice Claver's hand strayed towards the purse.