Figures in Silk. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ into muttering wakefulness. Luckily the bed curtains were drawn. They lay in each other’s arms in the hot darkness, hardly breathing, listening for clues; bracing for invasion.

      But the footsteps went thudding right past the bed, straight to the window, then fell silent. Alice Claver must be leaning out listening to the street talk, Isabel thought; she wouldn’t hear it from her own room, which looked out on the garden. But why? All she’d hear would be a lot of people setting up their stalls and talking about the maypole dancing later. Thomas raised an eyebrow, giving Isabel the kind of rueful look that she now knew to be an invitation to giggle at his mother’s infuriating ways. She grinned back.

      Yet when Alice Claver did finally stalk over to the bed and twitch back their curtains, her face was so drained of colour and her eyes so full of fear that the sight of it wiped away their guilty smiles in an instant.

      Alice Claver said, in a monotone, ‘They say there are ships attacking from the river,’ and, after a long, expressionless stare at both of them, ‘Get up; quick; we must lock up.’ And she half-ran from the room.

      As the door clapped shut, Isabel and Thomas pulled themselves up on their elbows, both wide awake now, and stared at each other. He looks excited, Isabel thought, and knew his face was reflecting her own expression. Neither of them was really scared. The memory of King Edward’s chivalrous soldiers was too recent for that, and they’d never seen any others.

      ‘I should go out,’ he said, drinking her in hungrily. ‘Join the patrols.’

      ‘No,’ she replied quickly. She put a hand on his arm. I don’t want him doing anything dangerous, she thought. But she also knew she didn’t want to be left alone in this house.

      ‘I must,’ he said, and for the first time she saw what he might look like once his youth had passed: calm and decisive, as if he’d been relieved of all the uncertainties of his youth. It took her breath away. Feeling almost giddy with what she thought must be the first pang of real love, she looked down, feeling ashamed, listening in silence as he went on: ‘I’m a good marksman.’ He looked at her, almost pleadingly. ‘I want you to be proud of me.’

      She nodded, reluctantly accepting his choice. Very tenderly, he raised her face to his.

      He’d gone before she realised she hadn’t remembered to say a prayer over him or whisper a word of love. She set off downstairs alone to face Alice Claver.

      The first rush of closing shutters and barring doors and dragging chests in front of them and drawing water and bringing in all the loaves and cured meat they could lay hands on in the pantries left them breathless and hot. It was only after that, while they sat in the half-dark they were to stay in for the best part of the next two weeks, that the fear set in and they got cold. First it was just Isabel and Alice Claver and three serving girls in the parlour, shivering and hugging themselves despite the summer swelter; but then, a few hours later, Anne Pratte came too, banging at the door to be let in with none of her usual timidity, bringing life back into the room.

      William Pratte was in charge of the Old Jewry patrol. He’d dropped his wife at Catte Street as he set off for the riverside with his muster of amateur archers. ‘Thomas will have joined him, don’t you fret,’ Anne Pratte said comfortably to both Alice Claver and Isabel, settling herself down on a bench with her sewing. Isabel was relieved to see that, just as Thomas’s stock had risen because he’d been so eager to go out and defend his women and his city, her own enemy status was becoming fuzzy in this artificial twilight.

      Anne Pratte’s calm astonished Isabel. Even from the relative safety of Catte Street, well back from the Thames, you could hear the explosions and the crash of riverside buildings falling. The Bastard of Fauconberg’s Lancastrian troops were trying to rescue King Henry from the Tower; the pirates from Kent and Essex with him just wanted to run riot through London with their clubs and pitchforks. Every thudding footstep outside might be the first of them, and you could do nothing about it except pray. Each booming hit sent a shudder through the nearby streets. Not just because of the windows cracking, or the falling pewterware, but because of the dirty black tide of dread that comes over all human flesh at the realisation that it is soft and pink and defenceless against death. Yet even when one of the serving girls began whimpering, and Alice Claver, grey-faced in the grey light, was muttering prayers under her breath, and Isabel had her eyes tight shut, willing herself not to lose her dignity but feeling the dark tide coming close to overwhelming her, Anne Pratte carried on sewing and grumbling. Isabel admired her for it. It somehow helped keep the fear at bay.

      ‘Knights in shining armour indeed,’ Anne Pratte said crossly, early on, biting off a thread as though it were an advancing Lancastrian’s head, so fiercely that her floppy turkey neck quivered. ‘The laws of chivalry, my foot. I don’t care what they say about warfare being a noble art. This is just fighting. Bullies with weapons, and us caught in the middle.’

      Naturally, in the circumstances she spent a lot of those twilit days complaining about the Lancastrians. But she was catholic in her dislikes. She had bad things to say about the Yorks too. King Edward’s womanising got short shrift. So did his grasping queen, Elizabeth Woodville, (‘not a drop of royal blood in her body, that one; but more than enough pure ambition to make up for it… a beauty, of course, but harder than diamonds’) who enjoyed the exercise of power so much that she kept every princess of the blood royal standing for three silent hours at every meal. ‘Just because she can,’ Anne Pratte finished triumphantly.

      She didn’t have much time for King Edward’s brothers either. The Duke of Clarence, who’d gone over to the Earl of Warwick’s side and married his daughter, Isabel Neville, in the misguided hope Warwick would think that reason enough to make him king, was an opportunist and, worse, a ‘nasty little traitor who’s no better than he ought to be’.

      As for the younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester (an eighteen-year-old veteran whom Isabel remembered John Lambert describing with awestruck reverence after seeing him at King Edward’s Mass in April), in Anne Pratte’s view he was an out-and-out thief. He’d kidnapped an elderly noblewoman and forced her to sign away her lands. Anne Pratte had heard the story from Sir John Risley, a Knight of the Body for whom she was making some silk pieces. ‘Sir John says the old countess thought the duke would kill her if she refused. So she did it. Wept a lot, of course. But she had no choice. She’s got nothing any more, Sir John says; she’s taking in sewing to pay the nuns. And when Sir John asked the King the other day whether he thought it would be a good investment for him to buy the house from Gloucester, he said the King just squirmed with embarrassment. “Don’t touch it, Risley,” he said. “Don’t touch it.” He knows his brother stole it all right.’

      She leaned forward to catch Isabel’s eye. She was enjoying the younger woman’s attention. Isabel was imagining the Duke of Gloucester bullying the old countess, and in her mind’s eye the duke was dark and thin, with a scowling face as hard as the man’s she’d met in the church might, perhaps, sometimes be, while the old lady looked like a frightened, thin Alice Claver. Isabel had her sewing with her – a piece of embroidery she planned to turn into a purse for Thomas when he got back, with hearts and flowers in blues and greens, and their initials twined together – though it was so dark in here that she’d hardly touched it. Still, a truce between Isabel and Anne was definitely taking shape on the bench they were sharing, even if Alice Claver, in her own corner, was doing no more than grunt every now and then in response to her friend’s non-stop talk. Isabel knew Alice Claver must be too frightened to reply. She couldn’t feel sorry for her mother-in-law, not after all those rows and glares; even now, even here. But she could see Anne Pratte wanted, tactfully, to comfort her friend.

      Over in the other corner, a throat was cleared. Then Alice Claver’s voice boomed out of the darkness, so loud and so ordinary that Isabel almost jumped: ‘Disgraceful. Almost makes you proud not СКАЧАТЬ