Figures in Silk by Vanora Bennett Read Free Book Online Page A

About how more courtiers had come to join the king after the couple had left, including the king’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, small and dark,ill-favored and bad-tempered, and about how Jane had danced with the king practically till the candles had burned down.
    Perhaps it was sharing work, in the way of so many Mercery families—the husband doing the wholesale trading while the wives made luxury retail products from their husbands’ silk purchases, sold them, and minded the apprentices—that had made this couple look so like twins. They were both small and tubby and cheerful. William Pratte’s hair was thin and gray, and both pairs of eyes were gray too, but as lively and inquisitive as those of squirrels. They finished each other’s sentences, and Alice Claver’s too. That would never have happened at the decorous, often silent Lambert table, but no one here seemed to mind.
    The three of them made such a point of courteously including the newlyweds in their grown- up conversation, and so strenuously avoided reference, even by the smallest untoward smirk or movement of an eyebrow, to the pleasures of the marriage bed, that Isabel spent the entire meal going alternately hot with shame and cold with dread, just in case they were about to start.
    Her stomach churned so badly at times that she could only half hear the harmless gossip they were chewing over from the wedding feast. John Brown, her father’s replacement as alderman: going bald; looking fat; should take more exercise. Her father: looking indecently handsome; what had his robes cost him? (Here three bright pairs of adult eyes turned cautiously toward her, then away.) Gratefully, she felt Thomas’s hand cover hers under the table and squeeze. His hand was damp, his face hangdog; he must feel as nervous as her.
    “You’d never have got King Henry turning up like that at a merchant’s wedding,” little Anne Pratte whispered confidingly, turning to Alice Claver. Isabel waited for Alice Claver, the head of this house hold, to look forbiddingly at her; it didn’t do to gossip about kings. But the larger woman just snickered encouragingly and replied, with a disrespect Isabel found startling: “No, never; give me a big handsome hero for a king any day, especially if he’s going to take a proper interest in us . . .”
    “. . . And stop the Italians cheating us,” William Pratte butted in hopefully. “And knock some sense into the Hanse. Maybe even get the French pirates while he’s about it. I’ll be for the House of York, all right, if King Edward’s going to really stir himself to help the City. No more loafing around while every lord in the land runs wild and our business goes to rack and ruin. I tell you, it’ll be‘God Save the King’ and ‘Hallelujah!’ every morning at my table if Edward goes on doing better than that . . .” He screwed up his face and stuck his tongue out of his mouth, letting it loll like a lunatic’s. The street- boy code for half- wit King Henry.
    Isabel stared. She should have been scared of what her father would definitely have called treasonous talk. But there was something about the casual mischief flickering round the table that she thought she was going to like, once she’d had time to get used to it.
    “Well, let’s hope he wins, then,” Alice Claver said briskly. “He still has to catch Warwick.”
    “Now,” she swept on, turning so suddenly to Isabel and Thomas that the bride hardly had time for her heart to leap into her mouth. “You two. Talking of our business going to rack and ruin, isn’t it time to get you to work?”
    Alice Claver’s manner might have been brusque, but her eyes twinkled so merrily that Isabel didn’t feel off ended. For a moment, at least. Then she realized Thomas, at her side, was bristling with resentment, and thought, falteringly, that perhaps she’d mis-understood the mood.
    “Get your lovely legs into the storeroom, eh, Thomas?” Alice Claver went on prodding,