Queen of Silks. Vanora Bennett

two silkwomen to explore the damaged riverside zone beyond Cordwainer Lane. She didn't want to be out when Thomas arrived, but Alice Claver gave her a warmish look and said, ‘We'll get back before he does,’ and she gave in. Women were walking along the Strand through summer clouds of gnats, looking in astonishment at the fallen masonry and the burn marks or listening to their dirty, proud men gabbling, very fast and excited, ‘This is where we were when they started shooting’, or ‘This is where I hid from the wildfire’.

      The pirates had been beaten back from London Bridge. They'd gone downriver to Kew and tried to land there. They'd come back. But the defences had held. There was drunken singing everywhere, and a lot of woozy yelling: ‘God Save King Edward!’

      Seeing Isabel glancing around in case Thomas suddenly came out from some corner, Alice Claver told her: ‘It would be unusual for Thomas to come straight home’, and laughed, not unkindly, in the direction of the Tumbling Bear. Isabel tried not to feel disappointed that her husband hadn't rushed back to her side. But, since no one had word of him being hurt, and William Pratte said there'd been surprisingly few men killed, he must just be out drinking somewhere. For the first time, the memory of all those shady men he knew in all those taverns came back to her, replacing the pictures she'd called to mind so often in the darkness that they now seemed threadbare and soiled from overuse: his soft look back at her as he'd slipped out of the door on the day the ships came in; his parting murmur of ‘I want you to be proud of me.’

      ‘I love you,’ she muttered under her breath, to keep her spirits up, as she'd done a million times during the siege. ‘I love you.’ But she could feel doubt creeping in. She knew Thomas found home difficult and work difficult. Perhaps, now he'd discovered the pleasures of fighting, he'd seen a more exciting way of keeping out of his mother's hair than sheltering behind his new wife? Perhaps her novelty had worn off?

      Isabel felt suddenly so alone that she shivered. The heat was going out of the evening air. It was nearly curfew. He wouldn't come tonight. Anne Pratte put her shawl round Isabel's shoulders without comment; Isabel looked gratefully at her.

      ‘We kept our spirits up by turning sheets while you were out there fighting,’ Alice Claver boomed at William Pratte, back at Catte Street, over the evening meal. ‘And Anne kept our spirits up with gossip.’ She turned to Isabel for confirmation. ‘Didn't she?’

      And, seeing those eyes on her again with this new expression of wary near-warmth, it was suddenly clear to Isabel what she had to do before Thomas got home. She didn't want to be enemies with Alice Claver. And tonight, Alice Claver didn't look as though she wanted to be enemies either. There was no need. The half-truce that had set in might just hold if she helped it along. It was Thomas's stubbornness that had made things go wrong. Now was her chance to put things right. If she wanted to be happy as a Claver, she was going to have to get up at dawn and offer to start working for her mother-in-law.

       3

      Alice Claver had the same idea. When she saw Isabel in the morning, she didn't even comment on Thomas's non-appearance. She just said: ‘Shall I show you the storeroom?’

      Isabel nodded, trying to match that matter-of-factness. She'd hardly ever been in her own father's storeroom. It was his holy of holies; too precious for children, he said.

      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