Queen of Silks. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ could hope for in rents in a year and more than most knights could hope to lay their hands on in a lifetime; he looked as though he was thinking that the reward of the King's presence here, now, was enough to repay those debts even if he never saw a penny of the money again (which he might easily not). Still, no one could look handsome next to this King, whatever they were thinking, Isabel realised. Edward's golden presence would always diminish everyone else.

      The King and his friend – a dark, laughing nobleman almost Edward's height, who would have been the most striking person in the room if he'd come alone, and whom Anne Pratte identified for Isabel, in a piercing whisper, as Thomas, Lord Hastings, the King's dearest friend – looked as though they were here to stay. The King ate a slice of beef. He drank a cup of claret. He smiled at Jane till she blushed. He congratulated Will Shore on his bride. He asked the groom's permission to dance with her. He led Jane, floating like thistledown, through an entire basse dance. Why her, not me? Isabel thought, without really understanding the thought; she knew really that she'd have been terrified to touch the King's person. But everyone turned to Jane first. ‘There, you see,’ Anne Pratte burbled to Isabel, her face glowing, her disrespectful gossip of a few moments before entirely forgotten, blotted out by the majesty of majesty, ‘your father's in the good graces of the King, all right … what an honour … can you imagine? I've never heard of anything like this before … you'd never have got King Henry mixing with merchants, that sad sack … I've always said loyalty deserves to be rewarded.’

      Now John Lambert was rushing to Isabel to present her to the King. She was embarrassed by the look of triumph on her father's face, but she let him take her hand. However fast her heart was beating, she kept her eyes turned down as he pulled her along the side of the table and began muttering ‘Sire’ and ‘May it please your grace’, and bowing and scraping. She made her deepest curtsey and rose, with her eyes still down. She didn't want to be drawn into the excitement. But it was infectious. ‘Aha, another Lambert beauty,’ the King said. And his voice was so deep and rich and full of unexpected beauty that it surprised her into looking up; for a second it had reminded her of the voice of the stranger she'd met in the church. For a second, as she met this stranger's eyes, she was disappointed to see a bigger face, fleshier and handsomer. But something kept her gazing into these eyes, full of lazy laughter; aware of his sensual mouth, twitching up at one corner as if starting to laugh at some secret joke he was about to share with her. Perhaps it was the long gold of the afternoon, but in the warmth of that gaze she felt time was suspended. The crowded scene faded. All she was aware of was the man's eyes holding hers until she felt her own cheeks tingle with pleasure and her mouth widen into a smile. Until, to her surprise, she found she was laughing; a laugh of pure, animal joy.

      They were lighting candles at the back of the room, she noticed, coming to, wondering where this immense happiness had come from so suddenly.

      Then it was over. No dancing. The King waved his congratulations to Thomas, just coming back into the room, who looked even more startled than everyone else, then alarmed, then scared when he saw his mother's frown, then almost fell over himself falling to his knees. And John Lambert rushed Isabel away to her table again, still bowing and grinning. All that was left was her exhilaration.

      As John Lambert settled her back on her stool, fussing around her, unable to contain his excitement, he couldn't stop muttering: ‘a wonderful man; a king to be proud of; we're living in fortunate times; you've been honoured … honoured …’ As she reached for her cup, she noticed, with a small pang of a sourness she wouldn't admit might be jealousy, that the King was dancing with Jane again.

      ‘One thing's for sure. No one will ever remember about the ring now,’ Thomas said happily, stroking her fine fair hair with one hand, pulling himself up on his other elbow so he could look at her face on the pillow in the morning light. He wasn't fat, as she'd thought; she knew now that his ox-like body, twice the size of hers, was all heavy muscle and power.

      She murmured something indistinct, trying to put aside her embarrassed, happy, sticky memories of the overwhelming things she and he had done in this bed in the dark, to the truly astonishing event of yesterday, the only thing about her wedding that every gossip in the selds would now be discussing – the King's presence at the feast.

      The King of England at her wedding, she thought with sleepy wonder. The newly returned King Edward – who a year ago had been a terrified runaway, chased out of the country by King Henry's army, forced to take ship for the Low Countries after being routed in some battle at, she thought, Doncaster; and walking through the night, with his brother and his closest friends, across the Wash, while the tide came in and pulled his men, screaming, into the sea they hoped would save them, if they could only reach a port to escape abroad from. No wonder the other merchants had thought, back then, that it would be best to accept King Henry's army; even if they'd enjoyed the ten years of Edward's reign before that; even if they remembered the earlier decades of King Henry's aimless rule as a slide into anarchy, when nothing could stop the pirates and the robber barons, when the wine fleet stopped coming and it was dangerous to cross the Channel with their cargoes. King Edward hadn't seemed to have a chance, a year ago. But he was a lucky man; a man with skill. He'd never lost a battle. He'd found funds and raised another army and fought his way back to London. And now he was showing how he planned to rule, if he finally defeated the Lancastrian armies still in the Midlands – as a friend of merchants. He'd come to her wedding.

      No one had ever heard of such a thing. No other king had ever done anything like coming to a merchant's feast. But then no other king had had to borrow so much from the City to pay his way in the war he'd seemed fated, until recently, to lose. And there was no one he'd borrowed more from than John Lambert. Isabel thought back to the frantic bobbing and scraping that had taken over the party when King Edward walked through the door. The reverence. The fawning laughter. ‘Oh … my father's face …’ she recalled, and laughed; not the polite tinkle with which she met the pleasantries of grown-up mercers and their wives, but one of the big deep snorts of mirth she and Jane indulged themselves in, in the Lambert children's bed, when no one else was listening.

      Thomas Claver guffawed with her. ‘And my mother,’ he picked up cheerfully. ‘I could just see her wishing she'd dressed up properly for once. She wasn't the only one, either. I'd say every woman in that room would have done anything to catch his eye.’ He pulled himself over her, planting a big elbow beside each of her ears, grinning down at her with a confidence that looked new and unfamiliar on him. ‘Even you, maybe. Hmm?’ She shut her eyes, shy at looking at him so close, in daylight, and breathless now his chest was squashing down on her again, his legs pushing between hers. He brushed a strand of her hair mischievously across her eyelids. ‘Tell me. Was the King the man of your dreams?’

      She shook her head with her eyes still shut, smiling at the soft brush of hair on skin and the gruff gentleness of his voice. If they were going to go on being this kind to each other it would be easy to stay absorbed in the moment, this one and perhaps many more; to feel lucky at being granted the new pleasure of being with someone who would never criticise her or demand anything of her beyond physical affection and answers to the kind of excitable, puppyish questions he'd been pounding her with since before dawn – ‘What are your three favourite colours?’ ‘… your favourite food?’ ‘… your worst memory?’ ‘… your patron saint?’ But his question reawakened a part of her that was separate from Thomas Claver; a part that knew that this easy sprawl of limbs, and even the first pulses of excitement in her body as he pushed his weight closer, didn't fill her senses and change the colours of the air in the way they'd been changed, for a few magical seconds, by the man in the tavern who'd told her she had no choice but to marry.

      ‘No,’ she whispered, laughing, ‘of course he wasn't.’ And she arched her aching body up invitingly under Thomas Claver's, and met his lips with hers, and tried to banish that other face – the piercing black eyes, the raised eyebrows like a cross, the dark velvet voice – back to the limbo it belonged in. I'm blessed to have found this much happiness, she told herself; it would be a sin to ask for more.

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