Isabel huddled with Caxton and his foreman Wynkyn and the other Dutchmen inside the empty tavern, listening to the shouting as the sky went slowly black.
The rioters looked a sorry enough bunch once they were tied together and herded into the drinking room. They were wet and puffy-eyed and bloody-mouthed and shaking. A dozen low-lifes. One was a wherryman. Two others were dockers for the Conterini. They all stank of ale. They'd got enough money from somewhere earlier on to go on a drinking spree. They admitted nothing.
There was nothing that could be done about Caxton's house. There was a wind. They had to pull down the frame to stop the fire spreading. He helped. They all helped. He was strangely calm. He said: ‘Not till my press is out.’ Four of the Germans brought his press and boxes of type out and put them inside the tavern before they began yanking on the ropes.
There was nothing that could be done about Isabel's house either, even hours later when the flames started to die down. The burned rafters went on glowing; bits of rubble falling; smoke mixing with the mist coming down. The crackling went on too.
‘We have to get them out,’ Isabel kept saying. ‘The others.’ She could hear herself saying it. She wondered why. It was so obvious no one could be alive in there. ‘We have to get them out.’
‘Too dangerous,’ they told her gently, and, ‘They're dead.’ They were going to take the wreckage down in the morning, if they could, and recover the bodies.
In the end she let them put her to bed. Hamo the innkeeper gave them all a place to stay. He sat up himself to keep guard on the embers of Isabel's house. She didn't get Dickon's room, but an unfamiliar set of walls. She was grateful for that. It had pale plain plaster and a straw-filled mattress too. All the rooms did. And this one smelled of smoke.
She'd forgotten she'd been going to meet Dickon here tonight. But he came to her in her dreams.
She dreamed he was lying on the bed asleep. She was going to tiptoe up to his side and lean over the bed and wake him with a kiss.
Except she couldn't. There was no time. She had to go to a funeral. She had to get to London before the Italians did; but the boatmen weren't in their boats. She thought they must be downstairs drinking, but no one would listen. And anyway, there was another head next to Dickon's on the pillow: a woman's head, a tangle of long red hair.
The drizzle by dawn put out the embers. She woke up to the sound of men grunting outside and the shift of rubble. She couldn't look at what they'd be finding. Suddenly desperate for company, she fled downstairs as she was, rumpled, with her eyes full of dust and her hair wild. But the tavern hall was empty, piled up with the trays of type and the half-undone pieces of Will Caxton's press. It was cold, too, in this grey light, with the door open to get rid of the smoke, but with the draught blowing more ash and more of that smell that made your eyes sting into a room that was already full of ghosts.
She'd sat under the tavern arches with Dickon. When they'd just met, for a second time, when her tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of her mouth. When he was trying to teach her chess. Before he kissed her. Her memories were so vivid that the grey shadow stooping over an untouched loaf seemed unreal by comparison. But the shadow was at the next table, looking up anxiously at Isabel out of wild sooty eyes. She said, with a rush of tenderness: ‘Will.’
‘Don't go outside, Isabel,’ he quavered, trying to be protective. ‘I don't want you to see.’
She shook her head gratefully and busied herself with knife and board, cutting bread.
‘They want us to identify the prisoners,’ he said. She passed him some bread.
‘We should say they work for the Conterini,’ he added. ‘Shouldn't we?’
Deliberately she cut another slice for herself. It wouldn't do to be too weak to think straight. No point in tears. She should eat something. And yes, she could imagine the pair of them doing and saying those things before they took the bodies of their friends back to London and organised their funerals. But none of it would do any good.
She didn't need to be a soothsayer to know what would happen when this affray went to the Guildhall. The City would waver and grumble but make peace; men like her father would wring their hands and argue against offending the foreign merchants who were so important to London's economy. They might have been excited about London-made silk cloths a few days ago, when the merchandise was about to come on the market and the Clavers were about to be powerful; but they wouldn't do anything to protect the interests of dead women with a dead industry against the powerful living Lombards. They'd be scared. It was the nature of merchants.
But Isabel would need to get justice for Alice and Anne and William and Goffredo and all the weavers whose bodies were out there. She'd need the help of men of the sword. The Claver house had been under contract to the King. She thought: I need Dickon.
But he hadn't come. She hadn't thought she could feel any bleaker. Her eyes stung.
‘I've got to wash,’ she muttered, and fled out and up the back staircase. She was too ashamed to let Will Caxton see her cry for Dickon now. She didn't go to the room she'd slept in. Her feet took her instead to the door at the end of the corridor. Dickon's door.
She opened it and slipped inside.
She was expecting nothing better than emptiness; a place to be alone; the cold comfort of memory. But Dickon was there, standing at the window in slept-in clothes, looking with vague eyes at the men digging where the burned-out house had been.
Gratitude swept through her; a great simplicity of love. She said: ‘You came,’ and moved her weary limbs towards him. She was so tired. But he was here to comfort her.
Then he raised his eyes to her. And she saw they were empty.
He hadn't noticed what he was looking at outside. He wasn't even seeing the disarray of her dress.
He said, in a hollow, unearthly voice she'd never heard before: ‘Anne has died.’ And he rushed forward, a dark wind, to sweep her up in his arms.
He wanted her to comfort him. He buried his head in her shoulder. She heard his muffled voice saying, disjointedly: ‘I couldn't bear it … when I got the message. She's been dead two nights … I came to you … I have to go back … the bells … they'll have to ring the bells …’
His head was so heavy. She stood straight under its weight; almost having to hold him up. She looked down at the black hair she'd always loved. Now she felt only numbness.
The people she really loved were out there, dead.
She'd let herself get caught up once too often in Dickon's web; sat too late with the Princess, listening to her hints about Dickon; lost herself trying to puzzle out what either of them might really want from her, or each other. If she'd got here an hour earlier, as she'd promised Alice, the silk house might have been empty by the time the men with their torches came. She'd sacrificed Alice Claver to that woman; this man.
She raised Dickon's head. He let it go on hanging heavy in her hands. He still wanted her support. But she couldn't give it. Not to a man who'd said he'd never hurt a woman, but let his doctors slip his wife murderous doses of laudanum. He might only be here now to display his grief so Isabel would naively spread word of it in London later. He might only have arranged this meeting with her after he'd heard news of his wife's death. How could she tell what might really be on his mind? There'd been so many lies, so many tangles, so many manoeuvres. And a man who couldn't stop manoeuvring couldn't feel the simplicity of love. He'd never said he loved her. He didn't know truth. He wasn't the man to get justice for Alice.
The grey light outside was brightening. Isabel blinked, as if waking up at last.
‘Why are you weeping for your wife?’ she whispered. ‘When you poisoned her.’
He shook his head, but weakly. She didn't believe him. Gently, she pushed him away.
‘Go to your new wife,’ she said.
She stopped in the doorway, and turned round. He was standing very still; looking disbelievingly at her. She said, ‘I have always loved you,’ for the first and last time.
She reached the bottom of the stairs and felt the quiet daylight on her skin. Will Caxton would be waiting.
‘I thought … I was so worried,’ Will mumbled, wrapping his bony arms tight around her. He was clinging to her like a mother to a child who's been lost and found. ‘When you rushed off like that …’
‘I'm all right, Will,’ she said. He held her a little further away and looked curiously at her. He must have been reassured by whatever he saw.
Isabel was surprised at how composed she felt.
She hadn't lost quite everything. Will Caxton was still alive. She had Jane and her family. And she had thirty cloths at Catte Street to remember the weavers by. Velvets as soft as fur; damasks whose patterns of birds and lilies and flowers and leaves shimmered like moonlight. The last cloth Joan Woulbarowe wove had been the colours of summer: blue and green and gold.
She'd started just by loving the beauty of the silk. She'd got lost in the more dangerous dream of the power it might bring. She should have stayed making beauty out of silk.
There would be no more cloths now.
She'd have to get justice for her friends, and herself, on her own.
Still, she knew exactly where to begin.
A picture of Dickon flashed into Isabel's mind, sitting in this tavern hall, long ago, with a chess piece in his hand. He was grinning wolfishly, like he used to; he was saying, ‘The aim of the game is to kill the king.’ It had been his idea to teach her to play by his rules. That had amused him once. Isabel wasn't a chess player, or a fighter.
She would never have any weapon but her tongue. But she knew that was a good enough weapon for what she had in mind. She was a Londoner, raised in the markets, where every merchant's worth was measured in gossip, valued in words. She knew how easily people could be destroyed by a rumour.
She didn't have time for much talk as she and Will Caxton trudged round Westminster, formally identifying rioters, then trudged round London, filing depositions at the Guildhall with awkward officials who didn't want to take them – ‘What can the servants of a draper Mayor possibly understand about this?’ Will Caxton said angrily as they came out. Then they went to St Thomas of Acre to arrange for the bodies to be buried and chantry priests to be hired to sing masses for the souls of the dead.
But Isabel spoke to a few friends along the way.
She didn't tell many people that Princess Elizabeth thought the King had poisoned the Queen so he could marry her.
She didn't have to. It only took a few wagging tongues.
The innkeeper's wife said: ‘I wouldn't put it past him. He did away with her brothers, didn't he? Poor little mites. That girl's at his mercy. She must be terrified.’
Katherine Dore said: ‘It can't be by chance that God took his son from him. I'm sure of that. Do you remember how they used to say he murdered Clarence? Drowned him in a barrel of drink in the Tower. And didn't Anne once tell us she'd heard that he kidnapped Lady Oxford and stole her house and land?’
Isabel's father came to Catte Street at once to pay his respects. To Isabel's touched surprise, he held her hand. He looked as distressed for her as if he loved her, which perhaps he did. He invited her to stay for as long as she wanted with him in Somerset. He kept searching her face for visible signs of her distress and seeming surprised by her brittle energy. When she told him of the rumour, he said wisely: ‘Ah … Never trust a man who calls his mother a whore. There's always been bad talk about him. He was at the Tower on the night poor King Henry died, wasn't he? That's what they say.’
And everyone she'd spoken to had a bright-eyed, busy look in their eyes as they rushed off about their daily business, keen to spread the word.
By the time the entire Mercers' Company and their families packed into St Thomas of Acre on Sunday – not for the funerals yet (the bodies were still being assembled, ready to be moved to London) and not even to see the Italians' faces (the Lombards had found reasons to be in Southampton for a while, attending to their shipping contracts), just to watch Isabel and Will Caxton walk in, dignified in their black – all anyone was talking about was Isabel's rumour about the royal poisoning.