Figures in Silk by Vanora Bennett Read Free Book Online

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 colors 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.
    “So who is?” Thomas Claver’s voice interrupted, as he moved his lips across her face to her ear, sounding hoarse now as desire gripped him in earnest, and she breathed the answer he wanted to hear, and almost meant it:“You.”
    Afterward, stretching back on the pillows, she shook her head lazily when Thomas said, with a sudden return of anxiety, “We should go to breakfast soon; there’s hell to pay if you’re not down by dawn.”
    “We don’t have to do everything they want today; they’ll understand,” she murmured back, stroking his shoulder. “They’d be disappointed if we rushed out to eat this morning.”
    She was pleased when his face relaxed back into its previous expression of joy—and then suddenly struck by what might have been the very oddest part of the whole strange day she’d just lived through.
    It was Jane. Jane, who was never anything but perfectly sunny as she did the right thing and kept everyone satisfied; Jane, who always looked for something to be happy about in the most miserable of situations; Jane, who’d accepted her father’s choice of husband with so much less fuss than Isabel (“It can’t be that bad—at least we’ll never have to sit on those horrible stools in the Crown again, blinding ourselves just to trim some old bishop’s robe, with every market boy gawping at us as though they’d never seen a girl before”). Jane, whom she’d expected to become the perfect wife instantly: laughing in the kitchen with the servants and the children; laughing more elegantly at the mayor’s table; charming her husband into high office; magicking contracts out of customers with her wit and lovely limbs.
    Jane hadn’t been so graciously dutiful last night. As soon as the king had bowed and asked her husband’s permission to take her as partner in the basse dance, she’d got up, without even waiting for Will Shore’s stammered consent, and swayed off across the room with the king, looking radiant.
    An hour later, when Isabel and Thomas left, Jane was still sitting with the king in a pool of golden light, ignoring her husband, deep in a serene conversation quite unrelated to the hubbub of dancing and shadows all around. And, in the darkness beyond their conversation, Isabel now remembered an uneasy play of eyes. John Lambert’s eyes, fixed adoringly on the king. The eyes of the king’s friend, Lord Hastings, fixed hungrily on Jane. And Will Shore’s eyes, dazed and puzzled, looking from one golden head to the other, as if he were wondering whether to feel awestruck by the king’s attention to his new wife, or just left out.
     
    In the end, they only got up in time to join Alice Claver for dinner after eleven in the morning. There was a simple dish of beef and bread and beer, all anyone could manage after yesterday’s excesses. William and Anne Pratte were there with Alice—had they even gone away? Alice wondered. They seemed as familiar with this house as if they lived here, though she knew they had their own home near Jane’s new one on Old Jewry. They were gossiping and grinning, like they had been yesterday, and Anne, on seeing the young couple, immediately launched into a story for them about the excitements they’d missed later last night.