Figures in Silk Read Online Free Page A

heat of his hand on her skin. Watching his retreating back. Then she braced herself for the evening chill, and walked out into the starlight. She thought she glimpsed him turning back round to watch the door swing shut behind her, but she couldn’t be sure.
    Every step she took back toward her home felt harder. Every dutiful footfall was heavier. That last moment was still with her, mixed up with the wind flapping at her skirts. It stayed with her like the eye’s long memory of flame: the man with the soft eyes and the hard mind looking back at her over a lean shoulder, then moving away so fast that the candles silhouetting his form shrank back as if a dark wind was blowing at them, murmuring good- bye in his black velvet voice. His hand on her back. She didn’t even know his name. She’d never see him again. It would have to be enough that for an instant they’d drawn so close she’d almost felt the heat of his body on hers. Even the possibility of one day feeling that radiance again, of being transformed like a wisp of silk lit up by the sun, might help to sustain her through the drab future her father was planning for her.
     

2
     
     
     
    Isabel married Thomas Claver a week later, on a bright April morning, on the steps of St. Thomas of Acre.
    The little people squinting across Cheapside to the church door smiled at the sight while they filled up their buckets at the water conduit, or popping heads out from one of the many covered markets behind the Mercers’ thoroughfare and the cramped stalls lining the road, where low- ranking silkwomen doing needlework or weaving or throwing or twisting threads craned their failing eyes to watch the world go by as they worked. A couple of crones poked each other and cheered the little pro cession on to the door, with the mocking laughs of the old. But all they probably noticed was John Lambert, in his mercer’s blue velvet livery robes trimmed with fur, looking as magnificent and proud as a prince between the daughters whose future he was settling.
    Isabel’s heart was beating so loud she was breathless with the boom and thud of blood in her ears. It was all she could do to stop her own small, unimpressive, down- covered limbs, so like her dead mother’s had been, from trembling, and her freckled face from showing fear. When she’d looked into her mother’s beaten copper mirror before leaving, the dark blue eyes in the face that had stared back from it had been wiped of their usual intent, good- humored look. There was no sign in that face that its own er was usually chatty and bright and asked inquisitive questions about everything she saw. There was none of the charm in those neat, symmetrical features that often made people look at her with the beginning of a shared smile, even if she wasn’t trying to beguile them. The face looking back at her now didn’t seem pretty: just quiet, even placid. Her red- gold hair was smoothed neatly away under her veil. It was the best display she could manage in the circumstances.
    She couldn’t look at Jane, as slender and golden as ever. Jane was dressed exactly like Isabel in one of the yellow gowns embroidered with silk flowers in which John Lambert had displayed them on his retail stall in the biggest market, the Crown Seld, whenever he made them sit there, embroidering the heavy orphreys that would later border extravagant church vestments.
    (The sight of the two girls, so fresh and pretty, was supposed to draw in passing trade; Isabel had spent her life complaining that she wanted to do more than just sew while she was working in the seld, but her father had always been adamant—embroidering church vestments was the only suitable part of the mercer’s trade for a young lady of her stature.) Jane was her father’s daughter even now, down to the emerald- green eyes and noble profile and air of perfect composure under pressure. Isabel shrank into herself as she peeped at her sister, wished she could look so self-assured.