Queen of Silks. Vanora Bennett

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,