‘One thing’s for sure. No one will ever remember about the ring now,’ Thomas said happily, stroking her fine fair hair with one hand, pulling himself up on his other elbow so he could look at her face on the pillow in the morning light. He wasn’t fat, as she’d thought; she knew now that his ox-like body, twice the size of hers, was all heavy muscle and power.
She murmured something indistinct, trying to put aside her embarrassed, happy, sticky memories of the overwhelming things she and he had done in this bed in the dark, to the truly astonishing event of yesterday, the only thing about her wedding that every gossip in the selds would now be discussing – the King’s presence at the feast.
The King of England at her wedding, she thought with sleepy wonder. The newly returned King Edward – who a year ago had been a terrified runaway, chased out of the country by King Henry’s army, forced to take ship for the Low Countries after being routed in some battle at, she thought, Doncaster; and walking through the night, with his brother and his closest friends, across the Wash, while the tide came in and pulled his men, screaming, into the sea they hoped would save them, if they could only reach a port to escape abroad from. No wonder the other merchants had thought, back then, that it would be best to accept King Henry’s army; even if they’d enjoyed the ten years of Edward’s reign before that; even if they remembered the earlier decades of King Henry’s aimless rule as a slide into anarchy, when nothing could stop the pirates and the robber barons, when the wine fleet stopped coming and it was dangerous to cross the Channel with their cargoes. King Edward hadn’t seemed to have a chance, a year ago. But he was a lucky man; a man with skill. He’d never lost a battle. He’d found funds and raised another army and fought his way back to London. And now he was showing how he planned to rule, if he finally defeated the Lancastrian armies still in the Midlands – as a friend of merchants. He’d come to her wedding.
No one had ever heard of such a thing. No other king had ever done anything like coming to a merchant’s feast. But then no other king had had to borrow so much from the City to pay his way in the war he’d seemed fated, until recently, to lose. And there was no one he’d borrowed more from than John Lambert. Isabel thought back to the frantic bobbing and scraping that had taken over the party when King Edward walked through the door. The reverence. The fawning laughter. ‘Oh… my father’s face…’ she recalled, and laughed; not the polite tinkle with which she met the pleasantries of grown-up mercers and their wives, but one of the big deep snorts of mirth she and Jane indulged themselves in, in the Lambert children’s bed, when no one else was listening.
Thomas Claver guffawed with her. ‘And my mother,’ he picked up cheerfully. ‘I could just see her wishing she’d dressed up properly for once. She wasn’t the only one, either. I’d say every woman in that room would have done anything to catch his eye.’ He pulled himself over her, planting a big elbow beside each of her ears, grinning down at her with a confidence that looked new and unfamiliar on him. ‘Even you, maybe. Hmm?’ She shut her eyes, shy at looking at him so close, in daylight, and breathless now his chest was squashing down on her again, his legs pushing between hers. He brushed a strand of her hair mischievously across her eyelids. ‘Tell me. Was the King the man of your dreams?’
She shook her head with her eyes still shut, smiling at the soft brush of hair on skin and the gruff gentleness of his voice. If they were going to go on being this kind to each other it would be easy to stay absorbed in the moment, this one and perhaps many more; to feel lucky at being granted the new pleasure of being with someone who would never criticise her or demand anything of her beyond physical affection and answers to the kind of excitable, puppyish questions he’d been pounding her with since before dawn – ‘What are your three favourite colours?’ ‘… your favourite food?’ ‘… your worst memory?’ ‘… your patron saint?’ But his question reawakened a part of her that was separate from Thomas Claver; a part 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 colours 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.’
Afterwards, 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. 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-favoured 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