Figures in Silk. Vanora Bennett

be part of one of the best businesses in the Mercery. If she hadn’t been a trained silkwoman; if she hadn’t married Richard Claver out of the Large household and worked with him on making their business even bigger than Robert Large’s, she’d have been lost too.

      No, I’ve never been afraid of hard work, and it’s made me who I am, she thought complacently, letting her mind dwell with irritation on the lounging, indolent, grinning Shore girl, who’d have been lost if she’d ever been called on to do an honest day’s labour. Who’d never had to do such a thing, like so many children of the London rich. They were all the same: spoiled and idle, thought they were too good for it…

      Alice Claver pulled herself up, feeling those certainties fade as she tried not to think of Thomas. She looked at the smaller, browner sister of that girl, with her face carefully wiped clean of expression; at the scars of work on those younger hands. A girl who hadn’t been brought up to fear the emptiness of birdsong. A girl who’d grown up with expectations of wealth and ease. A girl who’d lost all that and yet taken on Alice Claver’s hard apprenticeship without complaining.

      ‘You’ve learned all you need to know from the markets,’ Alice Claver said, feeling her lower jaw clamped to her head so that it was hard for the words to come out.

      Isabel looked carefully up.

      ‘You can start with Anne tomorrow. It’s time for you to learn to make manufactured goods. Do the skilled work.’

      Isabel looked down again. But Alice Claver had seen the light gleam in her eyes.

      ‘You’ll meet my Venetian supplier this week. Goffredo D’Amico. It’s an important relationship,’ she went on. ‘He and another old friend of mine are staying with the Prattes. They’ll eat here. I’d like you to join us…’

      Alice could see Isabel realise there was more to come. The girl looked up; trying to puzzle out what she’d be asked.

      ‘I wanted to get Thomas’s obit behind us before starting work with D’Amico,’ Alice Claver said. ‘But there’s one thing I’ve already talked over with him. I’ve arranged a loan.’

      She looked almost beseechingly at Isabel. She didn’t want the girl to take this as some sort of apology. ‘For five hundred pounds. The sum your dower would have been.’

      Isabel’s eyebrows were beginning to rise.

      ‘It’s time for us both to take stock.’ Alice Claver hurried over the words. She didn’t want to mention Thomas’s name. Thomas would have sorted himself out if God hadn’t taken him back. She knew that Isabel knew that. ‘There’s no room for shirkers in my house. I’ll need someone who can become a partner, once they’re trained. So I want you to know now that you’re provided for. I’m going to make over the five hundred pounds to you as a dower. If you want to go off to your family, get married, you’re free to. You’ve got the money. I can dissolve our contract. But you can still’, and now she was looking down at her own rough hands, ‘choose to stay.’

      There was a long silence. She plaited her fingers, waiting.

      ‘And work,’ she added gruffly. ‘Hard.’

      When she did dare raise her eyes, there were no embarrassing transports of joy on the little heart-shaped face in front of her. Isabel was looking up at her, very seriously, with her eyes slightly narrowed. It was the look Alice Claver put on her own face when she was considering an offer. With a shock of what she thought might be gratitude, Alice Claver realised Isabel must have learned that look from her.

      She was almost surprised to see Isabel’s lips form the words: ‘I would like to stay.’

      Alice Claver felt the wide grin she reserved for the Prattes and her other old friends break out on her face; she was suddenly strangely short of breath. I’ve got used to having her around, she told herself. That must be why. Somewhere in the confused back-clap that followed, the bustle of sitting down and pouring out two cups and starting to describe tomorrow’s work in something much closer to an everyday voice, then the move to the silk storeroom, Alice Claver felt the beginning of the same comfort she’d drawn from making friends, back in those first days at Catte Street, with Anne and William and the others; the smoothing out of differences, mistakes, flaws in the weave; the tying of bonds that might be strong enough to take the place of family.

      Isabel could see Alice Claver was reassured to be in her storeroom. The diagonals of pink and gold light from the windows made her wares shimmer. They transformed her too. She lost her gruffness. Her eyes sparkled. There was love in her voice.

      She set out a brisk timetable for the rest of Isabel’s voluntary apprenticeship. Two years to learn to sew each of the delicate small items that made manufactured silkwork London’s glory – from transparent cauls for the hair, decorated with jewels and gold thread, to the laces and points needed to fit together the elaborate items of clothing made by the vestment-makers, to tasselled and embroidered and jewelled purses pulled tight by drawstrings and tied to the belt by purse strings, to the heavy strips of glittering embroidery, to orphreys for edging ecclesiastical robes, to ribbons, woven on a miniature narrow-loom, a box so small you could clamp it to the edge of a table – the only piece of equipment more complicated than a needle in English silkwork.

      During those two years Isabel would also accompany Alice Claver to meetings with foreign silk merchants and aristocratic clients; she would go to the Royal Wardrobe when Alice Claver had a contract to supply royalty, and learn how to tender for work and the formalities for delivering it. She would learn some of the faces and the names of the most powerful people in the business. Once the two years were up, she’d start going with Alice Claver to the trade fairs at Bruges and Antwerp. There, she would begin to see how to make the large-scale wholesale deals considered the pinnacle of achievement for a silk merchant – choosing and buying the trade’s greatest luxury, the whole silk cloths woven in the East and in Italy on full- size broadlooms, a skill not known in England. She’d learn how to import these cloths, each worth a substantial portion of a prince’s annual rents, to make garments for the richest people in England.

      ‘Why do we have to go abroad to buy whole silk cloths?’ Isabel ventured, feeling ignorant. ‘Or pay the margins the Italians here take? Can’t they be made in London?’

      Alice Claver darted a bright, intense look at her, as if Isabel had intuited something extraordinary.

      ‘We don’t have the knowledge,’ she answered, after a pause.

      ‘Why?’ Isabel asked. ‘Surely it’s just the same as weaving wool?’

      She felt as she said it that she must be saying something stupid. But her question seemed to have opened the way to Alice Claver’s heart.

      Alice Claver’s eyes were full of enthusiasm, but she shook her head. ‘Far more complicated,’ she said decisively. ‘Finer, for one thing. Venetian export damasks have 9,600 silk threads in a single arm’s-width, a braccio. Even cloth of gold and plain velvets have 7,200 threads. And to get the patterns in the cloth, you need far more than one line of warp threads and one line of wefts; you might have half a dozen of each in a single cloth, each needing something different done to it. Considering what silk costs, no one could afford to just start experimenting. You’d need to know the secret before you even thought of trying to build, or thread up, a full-size loom – as long as two men and as wide as another – with good-quality silk. It would bankrupt a king to start working it out from scratch.

      ‘And it’s not just the number of threads. It’s knowing how to mix the different imports. Look,’ she went on. It was clear she’d thought about this many times. She started pulling out bolts of stuff to show Isabel how threads from different lands could be mixed together in the same piece of silk cloth; how a single bolt could be made of Spanish silk warp and Persian silk weft for a satin; or a Syrian silk warp and Greek silk weft for a damask; how two kinds of silk from different regions could be put together and thrown to form a single thread. She said some silks, such as orsogli, were especially suitable for warp threads; that all types of cloth could use weft threads of Persian leggibenti, catangi or talani;