She found herself describing her father’s stricken look when the mayor’s men came and took away the striped pole outside the Lambert house – his alderman’s post, his treasured symbol of office, the pole on which aldermen posted their proclamations. She told him how her father had then fixed on the idea of mending his quarrel with the City’s great men by marrying off her and her sister; the way he’d suddenly announced she and Jane were to be betrothed to the outlandish suitors he’d picked for them, as soon as he’d heard King Edward’s army was winning and moving on London, as soon as he could be reasonably sure that the merchants would bow to circumstances and remember they’d been Yorkist all along and open the gates to King Edward; as soon as they might be persuaded to think John Lambert hadn’t been so wrong after all.
Isabel thought her father had been rubbing his nose in his storeroom and plotting the whole thing for months beforehand. Bitterly, she told the stranger how she and her sister were being sacrificed for her father’s ambition. It wasn’t fair, she said. He’d promised his daughters all their lives that, within reason, they’d have the freedom to marry as they chose. But when it came to it, he was breaking that promise.
‘I know it makes sense to him,’ she finished. ‘Half his old friends in the City are coming after him with court cases. They think he’s finished. They’re kicking him while he’s down. And he wants to show them he’s still got the power to make good alliances. He’s imagining a wedding banquet that will put every trading company’s summer feast into the shade – he loves parties; I just know he’s already envisioning those tables groaning with honeyed peacocks and blancmanges of asses’ milk. He wants to try and impress everyone with the idea that the Lamberts are still on top of the world. He thinks a couple of weddings will win them all back.
‘But he doesn’t seem to see it won’t help him. They’ll still remember him as the man who shouted at the mayor. And we’ll be married to those clowns forever. It’s wrong. I’m too young to be married. I’m only fourteen. And anyway, the last person I’d choose, ever, would be Thomas Claver.’
The dark man from the church was easy to talk to. He kept steady eyes on her throughout her passionate monologue. He nodded understandingly when she looked sad and his eyes crinkled in amusement when, in the hope of entertaining him, she started using fanciful turns of phrase she wouldn’t normally have attempted. Yet when she came to a halt, Isabel had the uneasy feeling she’d got it wrong. He didn’t look fired up with any of her indignation. He just looked thoughtful.
He’d been cutting up bits of meat with his knife while she was talking. He looked down at the red squares on his board now she’d fallen silent and seemed almost surprised they were all still there. He speared one and began chewing on it, looking at her again, still reflecting, until, in an agony of self-consciousness, she began to wish she’d kept quiet, or at least asked him more about himself before telling all her woes.
‘I can see why you’re unhappy,’ he said in the end, and she glowed at the warmth in his voice. He wasn’t good-looking, quite. His thin features weren’t as bold and regular and noble as her father’s, say, or the godlike, golden Lynom boys’. This man’s face was thin and serious; made to be worried. If he hadn’t sat so straight and used his wiry body so fluidly, if he wasn’t gazing at her with such unwavering attention, she might have found him ratlike. Mean-looking. But the richness of his voice vibrated through her, making him magical. ‘You’re in a difficult position,’ he was saying. ‘You think your father is making a bad judgement.’
She nodded, and took a sip from her cup of wine to hide the gratitude she could feel staining her face pink.
He leaned forward. Put his elbows on the table. She thought he might be going to touch her, comfort her. She blushed deeper and bent in on herself.
He didn’t. He just joined his hands together, steepling them thoughtfully under his chin, leaning on his thumbs, and went on looking calmly at her. ‘May I offer some advice?’ he asked. His dignified simplicity made her feel ashamed of her own blurting.
Attempting to match his formality, she nodded again, trying not to let the hope shine too obviously on her face that he would hit on some easy way out for her.
‘You have to marry as your circumstances demand,’ he said, so gently she could hardly bear it. ‘I think from what you’ve told me that you know your father loves you. He’s saying he’s trying to do what’s best for your family. And it’s a father’s job to make good alliances for his children. Even if he hasn’t fully understood your feelings, perhaps he knows more about your family’s circumstances than you do.’
‘But,’ she stammered, lost in disappointment. ‘But…’
‘I know,’ he said sadly, ‘it’s not what you wanted to hear.’
He lowered his eyes. So did she; concentrating furiously on the new batch of pork rinds and pink shards of flesh on their own platters; willing away the hotness in her eyes.
‘It can destroy a family if a father doesn’t think about how to marry his children, you know,’ he was saying, somewhere behind the redness of her eyelids. ‘It nearly did mine.’ She glanced up, surprised. His eyes were still on her, though they were unfocused now, far away, not so much looking into her soul as lost in a dark part of his own. ‘He spent his whole life at the war, my father, and he was a good soldier. But when we heard he’d been killed, there we were: a brood of orphans scattered around the country, without a single marriage that would have given us a new protector among the six of us. He never realised that making alliances for his family was just as important as winning battles; that you need friends to defeat your enemies – a strategy for living, not just for dying.’
He laughed, with a tinge of real bitterness. Isabel kept quiet, less because she was artfully drawing him out at last, as she’d imagined she would, than because she didn’t know how to respond. She was realising uncomfortably how little she knew of the world outside the Mercery, of the world where the war was. Trying to imagine what it would be like for your father to die, all that came to her mind was sounds: the snuffles of women weeping; the banging of a hammer, nailing down a coffin lid, nailing shut the door of her home; the chilly quiet of Cheapside by night, for those with nowhere to go; the scuttling of rats. Her mother had died too long ago for Isabel to remember her. But she couldn’t form a picture of a life in which her father wasn’t fretting in the silkroom, nagging a bit more work out of some sunken-eyed shepster, smiling even as he picked at a minutely off-kilter seam with his obsessively clean fingernails; or drawing in a noble client by singing out the beauty of his stock with his green eyes glowing; or counting out his piles of coin later with a sly laugh at how envious the noble client would be if she only realised by how much the servile merchant’s silk profits outweighed her rents and rolling acres. Isabel couldn’t imagine waiting, in some half-closed house in a field, for the rumour, or letter, or servant limping home in bandages, bringing word; those