Queen of Silks. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ water with the cloth sticking out. Anne Pratte composed her features into an expression of still greater patience. ‘Are you … by any chance … ?’ She'd nodded her head. Then she'd paused delicately.

      ‘Oh,’ Isabel had said flatly. ‘With child, you mean. No.’

      Anne had sighed. There was a silence. Then she'd nodded again.

      ‘Shall I send for your sister?’ she'd asked a moment later. ‘Or your father?’

      Isabel could see what Anne Pratte was feeling towards: nudging her back to the Lamberts to save her friend Alice Claver from having to go on sharing her home with an irritant, a girl who'd never settled in and never worked, and whose continued presence now would only remind her of the son she'd lost. If Isabel had been expecting a baby, or if they'd become close, it might have been different. But it was too late to think like that. This was how it was.

      She shook her head again. Stubbornly. Refusing the possibility of sinking back into her childhood life as if this time with Thomas had never been, because what went with that would be waiting to be found a new husband and sent off again like a parcel of cloth. She didn't want Jane's smug pity or the servants' anxious, helpless eyes; not yet. She didn't want her father rushing to find a new plan. She didn't want to have to face up to a choice between being a burden on the Lamberts or a burden on Alice Claver. There'd be time for that tomorrow, after the funeral. She just wanted to be alone and, later, to sneak downstairs and be alone with Thomas.

      She was grateful when Anne Pratte patted her shoulder and left.

      Alice Claver was asleep on a chair drawn up near Thomas. Her face was ravaged. She was snoring softly. The candles at his head were low. It was nearly dawn.

      Isabel tiptoed round her and put a stool quietly down on the other side of the two benches they'd laid Thomas on.

      They'd wiped the dust off him, but the smell of death was so strong it turned her stomach. His body was wrapped in sheets. They'd left his face uncovered. It was so perfectly still that it seemed somehow flatter and wider than she remembered. She leaned forward, trying not to be frightened; trying to stop retching. She touched his cold cheek, then crouched down over his face and kissed it until it was as wet as hers. But it stayed empty. ‘I love you,’ she muttered, so panicked by the finality of it she couldn't think of a prayer.

      Alice Claver stirred. Isabel froze into her crouch, hardly breathing, willing her mother-in-law back to sleep.

      But Alice Claver opened swollen eyes and said: ‘I used to swing him round in the garden until I was dizzy.’

      Isabel wasn't sure Alice Claver was talking to her. ‘When he was little,’ Alice Claver went on in the same dreamy monotone, ‘he couldn't get enough of it. Lay on the grass howling with laughter.’

      She nodded, up and down; remembering. ‘While Richard was alive …’ she murmured. ‘When I still had time.’

      A shadow passed across her face. ‘I should have made more time.’

      She closed her eyes again. But Isabel could see she hadn't gone back to sleep. Her face was too alive for that: terrible with grief; twitching with memories.

      Isabel hadn't imagined Alice Claver would feel guilty.

      Wishing she had the courage to show the compassion sweeping through her – to go over and put her arms round the older woman, or pray with her – but knowing she didn't, Isabel put a last tentative kiss on the lips of the husk of Thomas instead, and slipped away.

      Her last thought before her own twitchy, uneasy sleep took her over was, ‘I'll go home.’

      It was only after the funeral the next day that she realised she couldn't go home.

      Not because of her father's irritating calculations at the plain meal of bread and cheese and beer that the Prattes organised in Alice Claver's house after the burial – ‘You'll be out of mourning in a year; you could marry again at sixteen. With that dower you'll be able to choose whoever you want’ – as if she was really supposed to believe that John Lambert would keep his word and let Isabel choose, any more than he had the first time. Not even because he'd said, with what she thought supreme tactlessness, as if discussing possibilities for her next marriage at her husband's graveside might cheer her up, ‘One of the Lynom boys, even. Now that would be a good match.’

      It was the other guests who shut the door home to her: Thomas's friends from outside the Mercery. One red-nosed shabby man after another; some vaguely familiar, some perfect strangers, but all avoiding her eyes and Alice Claver's. All shuffling up to William Pratte instead, taking him off into corners for their private chats, searching through pockets and pouches and purses for dirty bits of paper to present to him. They wanted to talk to a man.

      William Pratte was well-known as an administrator. He was on the merchant venturers' committee at the Guildhall. He knew how to be correct. Isabel watched him out of the corner of her eye as he gravely thanked each guest for the paper, and folded it away. But his plump face, already sad, got longer every time a new hand tapped him on the shoulder.

      He waited for everyone to leave before he took Isabel into Alice Claver's accounting parlour and told her. She could see the pity in his eyes; hear it in the gentleness of his voice. Thomas had debts. Over the past four years, he'd pledged away every penny and more of the money his mother had settled on him. ‘I had no idea,’ William Pratte said sadly. ‘I just thought he was sowing his wild oats in the taverns.’ He showed her the documents on which Thomas's many half-baked hopes of instant wealth had been set out: a half-share in a failed brewery here; £100 to an absconding Southampton shipper there; £85 for a consignment of Cyprus gold thread that had never materialised; deeds for a tenement in Southwark that had caught fire; and dogs, bears, and tavern bills mounting up to dizzying amounts. He'd even bought Uncle Alexander Marshall a horse. Everyone knew Thomas had expectations; it seemed he'd been easy meat for every trickster in town. William Pratte finished sombrely: ‘This might not be all, either. We'll just have to wait and see what other bills come in.’

      ‘But,’ Isabel stammered, her head reeling, unable to take it in, ‘he can't have spent that much. It's a king's ransom.’

      ‘He must have thought it would be easy to make back the kind of money that would make Alice sit up and take notice,’ William Pratte said, shaking his mild head. ‘At first, anyway. And later he must have realised they'd come after him for payment as soon as word got out that Alice had set him up to start trading properly. No wonder he kept putting off the day, poor boy. I don't like to think how he must have worried.’

      Suddenly Isabel remembered the calm, cleansed look Thomas had given her when he decided to go and fight. ‘I want you to be proud of me,’ he'd said. Pity hit her in the chest like a stab wound. Was this why he'd gone?

      Equally suddenly, she found herself blurting a question she only realised she needed to ask as she heard her own words: ‘My inheritance?’

      But she already knew the answer. Thomas had spent her inheritance.

      ‘I'll call Alice in now,’ William Pratte said, avoiding the question. ‘I wanted to tell you first.’

      When Alice swept in, knowing, as Isabel herself had known a short while before, that William Pratte could only have bad news, Isabel's face was as set as her mother-in-law's. It was so obvious in advance that Alice was going to blame her for Thomas Claver's transgressions that she wasn't even surprised at the narrowing of the older woman's eyes; the furious, accusing glances her way; the white СКАЧАТЬ