Figures in Silk. Vanora Bennett

in control of his destiny. ‘You must be pleased about getting into the livery,’ she’d ventured hesitantly, trying to form an alliance, doing her best at an encouraging smile.

      But he’d only scuffed his feet against each other and scowled. ‘Oh, that. It’s just my ma pulling strings,’ he’d said sullenly. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. Doesn’t mean I’ll actually get to do what I want. She’ll have her fingers all over my business from day one, just you wait and see. “Thomas, do this; Thomas, do that; Thomas, don’t do that.”’ He peered up at last, but only to fix her with a look of gloomy malice before turning back down to his scuffing and scowling. ‘And it won’t be long before she starts in on you either.’

      Isabel only knew Alice Claver by reputation. In the markets, the silkwoman was respected and mostly liked as a force of nature; a solid woman in her middle years with a wide face and a wider smile, when she chose, though she wasn’t scared of scowling or talking sharply either. Alice Claver whisked through the covered markets where she kept half a dozen retail stalls and booths and chests, selling whole silk cloths from Italy and silk threads from all over the world and the piecework ribbons and small goods that were made by her workers in London, jollying her own people relentlessly along, sweet-talking the mercers, and selling to clients with such down-to-earth persuasiveness that they hardly knew where they were before they were parting with their money. She hadn’t married again after her husband died, years ago. But she’d kept his business going. And she’d made enough money from carrying on Richard Claver’s trade in luxury goods to go on leasing the palatial great place they’d lived in together from the Mercers for what every silkwoman in the Crown Seld knew to be the princely annual rent of £8 13s 4d. She’d registered to trade in her own name, as a femme sole, taking responsibility for her own debts. She didn’t have John Lambert’s disdain for training girls – she trained younger silkwomen as if they were proper male apprentices, teaching them everything about how trade was conducted. The only thing the trained silkwomen couldn’t do was to join the Mercers’ Company; that was for the men; but they could set themselves up and, if things went well for them, keep themselves in style without depending on a husband. Things had gone well for Alice Claver. She sold fine silk goods to the King’s Wardrobe. She visited textile markets in the Low Countries and bought the finest cloths in quantities that were the envy of many merchants. She’d even organised the other wives of the silk business, and some of the most influential of their mercer husbands, to join her and the unmarried silkwomen in petitioning parliament to protect their trade from foreign competition. And she was the centre of charity around her home. She might not have much physical grace, but she had more energy than most women half her age – enough energy, Isabel thought with another surprised stab of compassion, to overwhelm a son with no great appetite for work.

      So Isabel persevered with her smile. ‘Oh well,’ she said brightly, reminding herself that a soft answer turns away wrath, ‘we’ll see her off, don’t worry.’ She sounded more confident than she felt. Alice Claver would be hard to see off. ‘You’ll soon learn how to run things for yourself. And I can help. At least,’ she corrected herself, smiling a bit ruefully at the thought, ‘I can a bit. My father’s always refused to let the women in his family learn the business. He says it’s because he has his position to think of, and there’s no need now he’s so rich, though we know it’s really because my mother never knew enough about silkwork to teach us herself or hold her own in the selds, and after she died it would have meant losing face to change his ways and let us start learning. Anyway, he doesn’t like training girls too much. So all he’s ever let me do is embroidery. But I’m good at that.’

      She kept her eyes on his face. She felt, rather than saw, him begin to look less lugubrious when she started to laugh gently at her own family.

      So she persisted, willing him to laugh with her: ‘He says, “Lovely ladies with long fingers should embroider church vestments,”’ and she imitated her father’s rolling, mellifluous voice well enough that the corners of his mouth lifted up. ‘It’s the only thing he thinks ladylike enough for us.’

      Suddenly he looked up and stared into her eyes, so straight and so hard and so long that she thought she’d said something to offend. She stared back, astonished. What could it have been? But then she realised he wasn’t offended, just overcoming shyness. Slowly, his face softened. She could see sweetness in his relieved grin. ‘You’re not half as grand as I thought you’d be,’ he’d said. Isabel thought they’d both briefly sensed the possibility of forming an alliance: the young and powerless against the families who controlled them.

      Whether Thomas Claver still felt well-disposed towards her now, at the church door, Isabel couldn’t say. Her eyes were fixed on the nails on the door while the priest mumbled.

      Her father had to nudge her when the time came to exchange rings. She pulled hers off her finger and held it out, still staring at the doornails through the drumbeats in her ears. Her fingers were damp and she could feel prickles on her back. But she didn’t hesitate.

      Thomas was less lucky. She could feel him tug. Nothing happened. He tugged again. This time the ring came off, glittered in the corner of her eye, and flew down towards the cobbles. It bounced twice. It turned like a tiny hoop. She heard, rather than saw, it come to rest at her feet.

      Everyone went quiet. Her father drew in his breath. His mother hissed, ‘Thomas!’ Isabel glanced sideways at him from under her veil. He’d gone bright red. His mortified face was wet, his eyes appalled at his own clumsiness. Alice Claver was poking him in the ribs, pointing down, miming instructions for him to lean forward and pick the ring up. But he was rooted to the spot. Everyone else was frozen too.

      Isabel’s heart swelled with something that made her forget her fear. She bent down, picked up the offending ring herself, and put it on her own finger; then she reached for Thomas Claver’s unresponsive hand, drew it to her, and slipped her ring onto his finger. The group still seemed to have stopped breathing. Taking a deep breath, she raised her eyes slowly along Thomas Claver’s arm until she was looking into his face, and watched his eyes move from an awed consideration of the hand she’d dressed with her ring, up her arm to her face. Behind his obvious terror, whether it was at having broken the forward movement of the ceremony in a way that would be chewed over in the selds as a possible bad omen, or just at having embarrassed his mother with his clumsiness, she could see the dawn of a quiet, desperate hope in those white-ringed eyes, a hope that she might somehow save him.

      Hardly knowing what she was doing, she lifted her face to his, pre-empting the moment in the ceremony when bride and groom were invited to kiss. And when he only stared back at her, as if he had no idea what to do next, she boldly stretched out the hand that now wore his ring to touch the back of his head, stood on tiptoe and kissed him firmly on the lips.

      There was a screech of approving laughter from one of the beldames by the water conduit. Then, even from within that awkward embrace, with her eyes shut and her body held apart from the big, hot frame of her husband, Isabel could feel the Lamberts and Clavers and Shores all relax; breath expelled; bodies moving; little murmurs and eddies of happy sound. When she opened her eyes and stepped back, Thomas Claver went on looking at her in a kind of amazement. He was still pink about the face, and still damp. But he was smiling.

      Isabel danced at the feast. She danced with Thomas, suddenly shy again and avoiding his eyes; aware of the dampness of his hands; holding herself nervously back from his large body. She danced more freely with every mercer who was her father’s or her new mother-in-law’s friend, until the blood came back to her cheeks with the sheer pleasure of movement. She whirled her skirts and flashed her ankles; sufficient unto the day, she thought, with sudden hectic gaiety, draining her cup of wine. Suddenly it felt like an easing of her burden in life to be free of her father. She was nervous about what would come after the dancing, of course; but there’d be time to worry about tonight when tonight came. When the third course was brought in, giant pyramids of blancmanges wobbling in the heat, she let her partner, a bright-eyed old friend of Alice Claver’s called William Pratte, lead her back to his place on the trestles and courteously pass sweet dainties her way.

      Thomas brought William Pratte’s wife, Anne, back to the table, then left the room. He half-glanced at Isabel.