The Prattes sneaked a look at each other. Isabel knew it was a test. Alice Claver must be doing this deliberately. She could imagine her mother-in-law’s voice saying, with grim satisfaction, ‘Let’s knock the nonsense out of her’. She must think Isabel would protest. Isabel wasn’t going to. She kept her eyes humbly down on her untouched food and nodded.
‘It’s only for a year,’ Anne Pratte said reassuringly, in her papery little voice, as if trying to soften Alice Claver’s blow. ‘The next stage is embroidery. But we already know how good you are at that. So it won’t be long before you can move on to the real thing and start learning weaving. Narrow-loom work. Ribbons. Cauls. Laces. London’s glory. The finest silk piecework in Christendom. And,’ daringly, flinching from Alice Claver’s cold gaze, she leaned forward and patted Isabel’s hand, ‘I’ve asked Alice if I can teach you that.’
Isabel looked up, surprised and touched. Four Pratte eyes were on her, brimming with kindness. The Prattes were both ignoring Alice Claver, still glowering behind them.
She rose in the dark all winter. She went to work holding a candle in chapped, raw hands, like all the other poor girls in brown and grey woollens working in the selds, whose existence she’d never been more than half-aware of until now. Like them, in those clothes, she’d become invisible to everyone from the Mercery’s richer, gayer families – even her own father. He walked straight at her in the street – she sometimes felt, as she jumped out of his way, that if she didn’t move he’d walk straight through her. The pretty merchants’ daughters she’d grown up with didn’t mean to snub her. They just wafted by the quiet dun mouse of a girl on their way to sit embroidering at their fathers’ stalls in their spring-coloured puffs of satin. They couldn’t see her.
Sometimes she felt like a living ghost – transparent to everyone she’d ever known. No one minded nowadays if, while she was throwing or twisting silk or turning a seam, her eyes filled with hot tears that crept down her face until, in the autumn winds, her cheeks became as raw and chapped as her fingers. No one minded, because no one noticed, as long as she turned out the required number of threads or piles of fluffiness or bright twisted yarns, when she would be rewarded with a rough pat, or a grunt, from whichever shabby mistress she was being loaned to for the day. And she found the hotness of her own tears a comfort – a proof to herself that she was there, after all; not quite transparent and emptied of the fluids of life; not quite invisible.
The tears were for Thomas, she told herself. So was the shrivelling pain she always felt under her heart, always, as if her body were being drained away by a tide that was pulling her off into the darkness. But sometimes, as her hands moved through the silk, with a deft life that felt independent of her mind, she thought the tears, and the pain, might after all be just for herself.
She talked to Thomas in her head. Or she tried. Tried to keep him alive; tried to take comfort in remembering his look of fuzzy astonishment when he woke up to find her next to him, his delighted snugglings and the little kisses he’d place, shyly, like acts of worship, on her hands or forehead. But all she had to tell him, apart from how she missed him, missed the warmth of a time when someone needed her, was about the detail of her days drudging in the selds. And what would he have understood of any of that?
Sometimes, when it felt too hard to explain to Thomas why she’d kept submissively quiet when Alice Claver or one of her underlings pulled a piece of work apart and told her to start again, when she couldn’t even begin to imagine the look on his face, she’d talk in her head to the man from the church instead. He’d have understood why she gritted her teeth through the cold that went into her bones; took the telling-off and the false starts so patiently. Gradually his became the face she conjured up to talk to in whatever corner she was working in; a stranger, really, but someone who knew about purposefulness, who could coolly plan ahead. ‘He’d be proud of me if he saw me now,’ she thought stoutly sometimes, ‘doing the right thing by Thomas, and helping fate to bring me a better future into the bargain.’ Though at other times, in the moments of despair when her guts felt full of ground glass, when she stopped believing she was anything but a pair of hands twitching outside a grey dress, when the darkness seemed to be going to last forever, she’d sometimes also think: ‘No, he’d be horrified. I’ve taken the wrong way. I’m lost.’
She came home to Alice Claver’s house most nights too tired to think. She was grateful for that. All she had energy to do was to curl up alone on her grand, empty marriage bed, stretching out her cramped muscles, whispering to Thomas as she rubbed warmth back into her blue-white fingers.
With time, though, she found there were consolations. Long after she’d lost one world she realised she’d somehow gained another: the busy, raucous, teeming world of the other hard-working women in browns and greys: the ones who did the jobs other people made fortunes from, the ones she herself had only just begun to notice.
Isabel had grown up at the smart northern end of the Mercery – the roads leading up to Catte Street and the Guildhall beyond: grand Milk Street and Honey Lane and Colechurch Lane; Old Jewry, to the east beyond St Thomas of Acre, where the Prattes and Lynoms and Shores lived, and where the Royal Wardrobe was, the depot for all royal cloth purchases. Now, running errands for Alice Claver taught her every inch of the industrial south side of Cheapside too: the sunless snakings of Popkirtle, Thenwend and Gropecunt Lanes, behind Cordwainer Street; every tenement, warehouse and patch of garden, and every jobbing mercer and silkwoman wife, stallkeeper, denizen, stranger and pieceworker living and working in them.
For anyone willing to listen, those lanes were alive with talk.
The silk workers she was farmed out to quickly forgot to be shy of her. Sometimes Isabel had her ear bent by the forbidding Katherine Dore, the throwster who was taking her ex-apprentice Joan Woulbarowe to court for stealing £12 13s 4d of silk. Sometimes she’d get caught, somewhere in Soper Lane, by gangling, wild-elbowed Joan Woulbarowe, out of jail now, preparing for her next appeal appearance at the Court of Arches while she stayed with her aunt, Rose Trapp, in a tenement in Lad Lane. Joan Woulbarowe said her mistress had wanted to keep her in service once her term was up, and had invented the whole tarradiddle as a way of trapping her to stay on as unpaid help. Isabel never got to the bottom of the story.
Sometimes Isabel learned things about her own Lambert family from the market talk. When Agnes Langton died at Stourbridge Fair, her terrifyingly overbearing mother, Jane Langton, the widow of a saddler, who knew nothing of the silk trade, had swept out from a hitherto unsuspected tenement behind St Benet Sherehog Church and completed Agnes’s enormous transaction with two Genoese merchants for silk goods worth £300 15s – then sold the lot on to John Lambert for a cheeky £350, enough to keep her comfortably in her old age, and retired to Norfolk. ‘He doesn’t keep his ear to the ground, that John Lambert,’ Agnes Brundyssch the throwster said comfortably. ‘Never did.’
But no one on the street had a bad word to say about Alice Claver. She was the heroine of the markets. Alice Claver was the protector of the poor, because she wrote the petitions every market woman wanted: the Stop the Italians petitions. The grey and brown women hated the Italians, who tried to undercut the delicate small silk goods that they made in London by selling their own countrywomen’s imported goods at cut price. Isabel knew that Alice Claver got William Pratte to help her draft the petitions that she and a gaggle of lesser silkwomen presented regularly to Parliament, using proper legal language. But they didn’t care about him; he was invisible to them. They believed it was purely thanks to Alice Claver that they’d got