Isabel didn't cry when they were loading up the coffins Hamo the innkeeper had ordered for her into the farm carts he'd found to take her cargo to London. She didn't look at the charred wreckage next to the Red Pale while she was settling up with him; just kept her gaze on his big slab of a face. His eyes weren't as bright and twinkling as usual. They were cloudy with sympathy, and he kept hushing himself and patting her shoulder. He was a kind man. She probably wouldn't see him again. She thought he might be expecting her to look sadder. She didn't care.
Will Caxton had retreated to the Prattes' house in Old Jewry as soon as the arrangements were made. He'd said he was tired, but she thought he didn't want to let tears overwhelm him in front of her while she was so dry-eyed. Perhaps he was just shy about his emotions; although she thought he might still be angry with her. He would never forgive her now for letting him see that she'd once thought Alice and Anne and William less important than loving Dickon. She wished she could tell him she was free; she wished she could cry with him, but she couldn't.
She didn't cry when they laid out the coffins in the hall at Catte Street. She nearly laughed when she saw the cart men's faces, hesitating over whether to open the lids. She could see from their expressions that the bodies inside were too terrible to linger over. She knew they weren't all recognisable. Those of Goffredo and one of the weavers had not been found at all; there would be empty coffins. ‘Leave them open,’ she said. She opened her purse, and took out more coins, and sent them to the kitchen for food.
It would be Lady Day tomorrow, she thought, lighting wax tapers at the head of each coffin, averting her eyes, going to and from the storeroom to fetch more as she ran out. Twenty-two coffins. Twenty-two lids. Twenty-two winding sheets. Lady Day: spring already in the chilly evening air. The quarter day; a new year. She didn't want to finish that thought; to have to try and imagine new beginnings. She had so much still to do. She caught her breath. She hadn't remembered to cancel her appointment at the Guildhall for the registration hearing; it had been for the day after Lady Day. She let the breath out; made a conscious effort to relax. The appointment didn't matter any more. It wouldn't do to worry. She needed to keep a clear head for the job to hand now: the bodies. There were no other women in the house. She had to do it. But she couldn't bring herself to start looking in the coffins. All she could think of was the sheets. With so much linen already sent off to Westminster when the weavers came, would there be enough in the house?
She didn't even cry when she heard the first knock on the door. Or when silkwomen she hardly knew began shuffling in, offering to help prepare the bodies for burial. Or when, before she knew it, the room was gentle with female voices humming spinning songs together; lifting buckets; rhythmically pulling apart strips of cloth for winding. There weren't enough sheets; they'd make do. She hovered. Hummed along. It was the first time since it had happened that she'd been surrounded by so much womanly industry. She wondered why she felt so empty. Then she realised. She had nothing left to do.
‘You sit down there, love,’ someone told her. She knew that rasping voice: Rose Trapp. ‘Go on. You look done in. I don't want you looking in them coffins. And I've done my poor Joan. I'll do your folk for you too if you like.’
She nodded. She was so grateful, and so tired. But she couldn't sit down.
Instead, she put her arm through Rose Trapp's and led her out of the room, down the corridor, to the dark storeroom where, she now remembered, the weavers' thirty cloths were stored. Rose Trapp didn't ask questions. She just held the light, which lit her face from below, turning her cheery wrinkles into a witch's mask of shadows. Isabel opened the chest. She picked up a careless armful of preciousness. It didn't matter now if the cloths got crumpled. Not where they were going.
She took the light in her free hand. ‘You take the rest,’ she said, and Rose Trapp scooped them up. The cloths glimmered between those swollen old fingers: spun sky and sea and moonbeams, the wild, tamed and civilised. Rose Trapp's face softened in their reflection. Unexpectedly, she said: ‘Like liquid gold, aren't they.’
They smiled at each other over the flickering light. They both understood the magic.
But then Rose Trapp did ask a question: ‘What are you going to do with them?’ Her voice was abrupt, as if she was waking up from a spell and had come to her senses. Isabel saw the suspicion cross the old woman's face.
‘Use the cloths as winding sheets, of course,’ she said defiantly. ‘Bury them with them.’
Rose Trapp's face went sullen.
Isabel said: ‘Weaving those cloths killed them. And it was my fault. I want to give them a good send-off. I have to. It's a mark of respect … my apology.’
She could hear the pleading note in her own voice.
But Rose Trapp was still shaking her head. ‘What's the point of that?’ she said roughly. ‘It won't help them, being dressed like kings and queens to meet their Maker. It won't bring them back, will it now?’
Isabel sank onto a stool, with the silks rustling around her. Rose knelt next to her, puffing a little as she squatted down. She put a comforting arm around Isabel, and her cloths shimmered away into a forgotten heap on the ground.
‘You want to look out for the living, not the dead, Mistress Isabel,’ Rose rasped, but there was kindness in her voice and on her wizened face. ‘That's what your Mistress Claver would want, not some show to make you feel better. You've got four apprentices in this house; girls who are too scared to come out of their rooms; girls who don't know what to do with themselves or what will become of them next. That's who you should be thinking of. You've got to make provision for them. And there are plenty of other people you could help. The Mercery is full of honest young women without a penny to their names. Women who can't marry or set up a business because they're too poor. Women who've lost their relatives and are facing old age alone. Me, for instance. You know that.’
She stopped and patted Isabel's shoulder, apparently realising it had begun to heave. ‘Now don't go crying on that silk and leaving stains on it,’ Rose Trapp added in a hoarse whisper. ‘You won't get half the price for it … if it's spoiled … when you sell.’
The old woman stood up, took the cloths and began to fold them back into their chest. Isabel put her hands over her face and abandoned herself to her tears.
When they got back to the great hall, it was Rose who broke through the buzzing of voices. She'd brought one of the cloths with her.
‘Girls,’ she croaked. ‘We're going to want you back on Monday. After the funerals. We're going to sell these silk cloths at Mistress Claver's stalls. We're going to need help.’
Isabel nodded obediently, as unsurprised as if she'd agreed this with Rose beforehand. She'd muffled her tears, but she was so full of grief that she could only be dimly aware of the awe that was stealing into the room: the whispers, the lover's touches as the women drew close to the cloth in the colours of the summer about to come that had been Joan Woulbarowe's last work.
When they were finished, when every corpse had been washed and sprinkled with a mixture of rue and rosemary and rose petals, and every still form covered in linen, even their poor blackened faces, the women left as quietly as they'd come. They touched her as they went: on the arm, on the shoulder. Rose Trapp shut the last cloth back in its chest. Then she sat with Isabel and held her while she wept, while the candles and the logs burned down, until there was silence.
Isabel could hear ragged breathing. It was nearly dawn. The last candle was guttering. For a moment it seemed to her that she was fifteen again, sitting in this hall over another corpse, her husband's, watching a younger Alice Claver's face twitch with a mother's grief. Alice was muttering to herself about Thomas when he was little. How he'd howled with laughter when she'd swung him round in her arms. How she should have made more time. But it was already too late for those regrets.
Isabel got up from her stool. It was Rose Trapp snoring in the corner this time.
She could still make out her mother-in-law's familiar bulk, in its coffin, underneath the casing of cloth.
‘Goodbye,’ she whispered, a little experimentally; trying to believe men would come in an hour and nail the lid down over Alice's stillness – over her face – and take the box away. Trying to imagine the quiet rush of panic she'd suppress when that happened. Or what the house would be like without Alice's gruff voice and thump of a walk. Tonight.
She couldn't, any more than she could touch or kiss any of the scented human-sized cocoons on the floor, lost hopes, about to be buried. She felt the beginning of something terrible inside her. But she pinched her fingers hard into her eyes. There was no time now.
The coffins went into the darkness first, a long line of them, wobbling into the church above the thin legs of apprentices. Other boys' faces flickered behind their torches and tapers.
She went next. Then Will Caxton, with the marks of weeping on his face. Then Rose Trapp.
She thought the only other mourners might be the printers. But others came out of the crowds and joined her shuffle to the altar. Her father. Jane. Thomas Lynom. Robert Lynom. A few of the silkwomen, though many more hung respectfully back, too shy to be sure whether they counted as bereaved.
She ignored the eyes. Stuck her chin in the air while the coffins were laid down, with the occasional bump and thump and sweating pallbearer's groan breaking the quiet. She would be calm; dignified.
She had one more thing to do before she could grieve.
So she was almost surprised at the pain, when it came.
‘It's bad,’ Robert Lynom said kindly. ‘I know.’
It had been his arm on her back in church when she was crouching forward, giving herself up utterly to the agony, curling herself into it. His arm holding her up when she stumbled on the way to the graves. His kerchief, then his chest, she'd buried her face in.
Robert Lynom had half-carried her up the Catte Street stairs afterwards, disregarding Rose Trapp's anguished flapping at the height of his elbow and Will Caxton's ineffectual flapping somewhere behind. ‘Let's not worry too much about etiquette right now,’ he'd said reassuringly to Rose, ‘this is just easier for me’, and Rose Trapp had subsided into watchful silence. He'd laid Isabel on the bed, still in her gown. ‘Rest,’ he'd said, putting a big cool hand on her hot head. For a while, there'd just been Rose Trapp in the solar with her, muttering what words of comfort she could, with gnarled hands fussing over laces and hooks as she eased off headdress and gown and kirtle. And then there was just Isabel, in her pale linen, and the coiling, roiling, heaving inside her. Hot eyes. Something steaming on the table. A white sky at the window. And a meagre comfort in the clump of boots downstairs; mourners at the meal Will Caxton had paid his own thirty marks for.
Will and his men were going back to Westminster later. He'd been apologetic about it; but she'd seen the estrangement in his eyes. He didn't think he'd find comfort in being with Isabel. He couldn't wait to get busy; get away from the pointless pain of memory. He'd got timber and tools ordered. They'd start rebuilding his house in the morning.
Tomorrow she would sell the cloths. After that, she'd be alone.
She thought about that for a while. Imagined the white silences, broken only by the two new kitchen men she hardly knew. Days with Alice's apprentices, four pink-faced girls from the provinces whom she'd kept apart from for fear they'd find out too much.
She was still frozen into a kind of calm when she first realised that. But she could feel the fear coming, a great wave of it, rushing at her, about to break.
Then, instead, she heard footsteps. Robert Lynom's unhurried tread on the stairs.
Relief at the prospect of his sensible company brought her back to reality. The fear would wait. Her hands flew to her face for a moment – a reflex action, as if she were about to flirtatiously pat skin and hair back to something like normality. Then she stopped, and even the stopping was a new kind of relief. There was no point. She was past caring. Robert knew. She didn't need to worry with him.
The only thing he could sit on was a tiny stool. He was much too big for it, even curled up with one ankle on the other knee and his big clean hands composedly on the crossed leg. She smiled weakly, and wasn't sure herself whether it was because of him cramped comically on that stool or just because his presence made some of her cares drop away.
Without being asked, he'd ensured she wouldn't be alone. Jane had had to rush back to her baby after church, he said; Julyan was ill after the journey. But he didn't think it was anything serious. The Thomas Lynoms were staying with him (it was familiar territory, after all; he'd bought Jane's confiscated house at Old Jewry, just round the corner). But, all being well, Jane wanted to bring the baby, and the nurse, later, and stay with Isabel instead, as long as Isabel felt up to the commotion. ‘They'll bring their own linen,’ he said. ‘I have plenty.’ He'd even thought of that.
She nodded, too grateful to speak. He'd done more. He'd taken it on himself to pay Rose to stay at the house for a few months, too, he said. Rose could run the household; stop the kitchen men getting carried away; do the marketing. He hoped she didn't mind.
‘You've had bad luck,’ he was saying now; each word a certainty. ‘You don't deserve it.’
She nodded, feeling stronger.
‘It won't last,’ he said. ‘The bad luck; it will pass.’ And his strong face was so full of conviction that she almost believed him.
He looked thoughtfully down at her. ‘Do you mind if I say something now that goes beyond my calling as your lawyer?’ he went on, sounding, for the first time she could remember, a little hesitant. She nodded him on.
‘It's this. There's more to life than trading silk,’ he said carefully. ‘You don't have to spend your days between Cheapside and Soper Lane and Hosiers Lane and Pissing Lane, living cheek by jowl with crowds of other people doing exactly what you do and trying to beat them at it, making it your business to know every detail of their business and private lives while you try to stop them finding out about yours. It's a small place, the Mercery. There's a world outside. I haven't regretted getting out. Nor has Thomas. Nor has Jane. You've given it your all, Isabel. But there might be more for you in life too.’
There was compassion in his voice now. Her eyes asked the question: ‘What?’
He spread his hands, palms up. ‘Happiness. Peace.’
Perhaps her face closed at that. At any rate, he drew back, shaking his head as if mildly surprised that he'd gone so far. In something much more like his usual down-to-earth lawyer's tones, he said: ‘You don't need to worry about money, whatever you decide to do. You have more than enough. Alice has left you a very profitable business. You have the lease on this house. You own the goods in the storeroom; you have contracts, contacts and apprentices. You can keep things just as they are if you want.
You know the business backwards. I would imagine you'll be very successful. But it wouldn't do any harm to remember you could also sell. Retire. Even think of marrying and having children. You have choices.’
He stood up. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘And now, get some sleep.’
She'd dreaded the empty darkness of the coming night, the creaks and scuttles in the silence. But it wasn't going to be like that after all. She had choices. Her blankets felt warm. She snuggled drowsily into them and fell asleep listening to his footsteps on the stairs.
The calm that Robert Lynom's common sense had brought Isabel sustained her through the silent loneliness of the next dawn.
Rose Trapp mustered the four apprentices and the others who trooped in at the back door at first light. They didn't stop to eat. They had a purposeful look in their eyes: the look of women being given an unexpected chance in life and eager to seize it in both hands. Rose Trapp had told them half the proceeds of the sale would go to providing a memorial for Alice and Anne; the other half would be used to give dowries and seed capital for deserving silk-women, and they would be among the first candidates. Two of the four girls Alice had brought down from Derby as apprentices – Annie and Janie, blonde, round-faced sisters – came up to Isabel as Rose supervised the packing of the silk cloths in rough bags, and, silently, nervously, pressed her hand. She nodded, suddenly more grateful than she knew to Rose Trapp; wondering how she hadn't realised for herself that Alice would think it important to set these girls up in life.
Alice's familiar stall was empty. Rose Trapp supervised the laying out of the cloths. Isabel watched in silence at first. She felt numb; she'd be numb until all this was over.
But after a while she shook herself and mustered her reserves of strength. She owed it to Alice Claver to make this sale a success.
She noticed that Rose Trapp was taking great pains to have her Joan's lovely cloth advantageously displayed at the top of the pile, folding and curving it so its summer colours glowed. It was clear that the old woman wanted that cloth to sell for the best price of all. She must hope the proceeds of that sale might be given to her, to fund her own lonely old age.
‘Rose,’ Isabel said. Her voice sounded loud in the silence. The old woman looked up, almost guiltily, caught out in her hope.
‘That cloth is the most beautiful of all of them,’ Isabel said. ‘Isn't it?’ No one would deny that Joan's cloth was a masterpiece. Once the market opened to customers, she knew it would go for a good price: twenty pounds, maybe, or even more – enough for an old woman in a tenement room to live on, frugally, for the rest of her days.
‘So you're right to display it like that,’ she went on. ‘Give it pride of place.’
Rose Trapp waited warily, with the dumb patience of the poor, who can't hope for much and whose small hopes are so often disappointed. Her gnarled hand touched a corner of the green and gold and blue cloth, as if she were memorising its lustrousness; as if she feared that even this might be about to be snatched away from her.
‘It's yours,’ Isabel said reassuringly, and saw the veiny claw relax. ‘I know that. But I'd like to offer to buy it from you. I'll make you a good price. Let's leave it out on display for now; it will help draw in the crowds. But don't let it go for less than’ – she paused; thought how much would make Joan Woulbarowe's old aunt financially secure without making her feel Isabel was offering her charity – ‘fifty pounds,’ she finished – a price verging on the fantastical – and watched the joy come into those cloudy blue eyes. ‘I'll match any offer up to that.’
Rose nodded, lowering her eyes. She was whistling under her breath as she finished setting out cloths and coins.
The word had gone round. Within minutes of the opening bell, the little shop was crowded with visitors eager to see the silk cloths woven by their own London kind. Isabel and Rose had the silkwomen stand round the sides, keeping the throng back; letting in only one or two representatives of the wealthy at a time to feel and discuss the qualities of the cloths, the choice of warp and weft, the number of threads per inch, the weight and thickness of gold thread, the grace of pattern and colour; moving towards a possible purchase. The excited voices of those still waiting grew so loud they had to raise their voices to be heard.
At one point, Isabel shivered. She looked up to see Dr Gigli's fat black velvet paunch only inches away, through the little sales area's window. He was watching her steadily, intently, and nodding his head as if memorising an enemy's surprising strength. The malevolence in his eyes made her flesh creep. But she raised her head proudly, met his gaze, and smiled. He looked away. He'd gone the next time she looked up.
After that, Isabel forgot herself and her troubles in the rush. It was her honey voice they all wanted to hear; her knowledge of an industry they'd all have liked to learn that drew them in. She talked; persuaded; charmed. And she enjoyed the clink of coins falling into Rose Trapp's bag.
John Lambert came and bought a length of tan-and-grey brocade. He'd brought cash. ‘We should have gone into business together, after all,’ he said.
She kissed him and pressed his hands, aware that he'd come as close as he could to apologising, and grateful for it; acknowledging, equally silently, how hard it must have been for him to come back to this market today after he'd been squeezed out of the City; remembering, with a shock of shame, how she'd helped squeeze him out by hiring away his workers. She said: ‘I'm sorry we didn't, too.’
Isabel just shook her head and smiled and politely refused to answer questions about how the fire had started that had destroyed her workshop and killed so many of her colleagues. The only time her flushed, smiling face clouded was when would-be buyers offered prices for Joan Woulbarowe's cloth. ‘Not for sale,’ she said briefly; and, nodding regretfully, the clients moved on to examine the next cloths in the pile.
By the time the crowd thinned and Isabel drew breath and looked round long enough to realise other silk traders were already packing up their stalls, all thirty cloths were sold or pledged. When Rose Trapp lifted the bulging bag of coins from the cash purchases, there was an almost comical look of wonder in her eyes at how much they'd fetched.
It was done. Everything was gone. Isabel's euphoria vanished too. Suddenly she was desperately tired. Her feet hurt from standing. Her face hurt from smiling. She didn't want to be here, with people looking at her. She needed to get away from the eyes.
‘Here,’ Rose Trapp said, as if she knew, pressing the bag and the pile of bills of sale into Isabel's hands. ‘The girls will clear up and wrap up your cloth. I'm taking you home.’
It was the sight of the bills of sale that forced Isabel to recognise reality.
She'd made her last sale in the Mercery. She couldn't, after all, go on operating the Claver silk business. She didn't, after all, have choices. She'd have to sell up.
She walked home, ignoring Rose Trapp, staring at the bills of sale, feeling dazed. The documents in her hand were innocent enough – simple pledges to pay her, at her house in London, by the end of the month, for the single silk cloth being contracted for. But they were also a reminder of the paperwork she needed to make the wholesale, international end of her business work – which she'd never get into place again. She needed to go to the trade fairs of the Low Countries a couple of times a year to buy silk cloths to sell on in London. And, to do that, she needed the banking services of one of the powerful London Lombard families – a wealthy Italian who would write letters of credit, like these bills of sale but for much larger sums, with which she could make purchases abroad. But she'd seen the hatred in Dr Gigli's eyes. She knew no London Italian would underwrite her now, or ever again. And she couldn't buy without money.
She could still try to fight for justice at the Guildhall – get the Italians responsible for the fire named and punished, so that others who came afterwards would lend to her again. But she knew in advance how hopeless that would be.
Her mind darted desperately from faint hope to fading possibility.
She still had half a year's supply of silks in the storehouse, she thought. She could go on trading with them for a while, and hope things would right themselves of their own accord and the Italians would forget their animosity. But she knew even as she clung to that thought that it wouldn't save her. City people were cautious, but they were merciless once they smelled defeat on someone. She'd seen her father cling too long to his City existence, after he lost his aldermanship; she'd seen him battered by lawsuits, a target for opportunists and raiders like herself, before he'd finally accepted defeat and retired to the country. It would be more dignified to go now with her good name intact.
Or, just possibly, she thought, she could sell up and start again later in partnership with her father – using the House of Claver's money to finance a renewed House of Lambert fronted by John Lambert, to whom the Italians might lend.
She sighed. Tried and failed to imagine talking over new strategies with her father. He'd never agree to following up any of her ideas. They'd only fight.
She shook her head. In the morning she'd tell Robert Lynom that she'd decided to sell.
She was so tired.