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 words, whatever this man must have heard. Yet even failing to envision it brought it closer. It had always been enough to know that the war happened to other people; but now she was talking to someone who had been touched by it she felt herself, for the first time, weighed down with nameless possibilities. She didn't know what the weak flexing in her gut was called, or the darkness seeping through her veins; but she thought it might be fear.
She crossed herself. Filled with a sudden longing to be wiser and older, she thought: it's ignorant to live in a city that's about to be entered by a conquering army (King Edward's army was at St Albans, people said; it would be here any day, and the mayor had already given the order to let the soldiers in) yet be so innocent of disaster. Pig ignorant. I've grown up in a land where two families of kings have been fighting each other for the throne for as long as anyone can remember, and I know nothing about it. You don't if you're a Londoner. We hardly see it. Still, he'd think me a child if he knew.
He didn't notice her gesture. ‘Well, we survived. But we've been unlucky ever since with our marriage choices,’ he was saying, with a twist to his mouth that made his face look pinched and hard. ‘My eldest brother ran away with a war widow, the stupidest possible love match, just when what family we still had was finally arranging a proper alliance for him. We're only just seeing the end of the years of hatred that brought. And then a second brother married to spite the eldest brother, deliberately going against his wishes. And that's meant more trouble …’
He sighed and looked down at the neat meat squares his hands had been cutting as he talked, and pushed one gently towards himself with his knife. Then he stabbed it. Isabel took another sip of rough dark wine as it disappeared into his mouth, wondering which brother he'd been thinking of when he'd made that stabbing movement. ‘I'm glad it's over now,’ she ventured, glancing up, ‘your family trouble, I mean.’
Perhaps it was the smallness of her voice that made his eyes gentle again.
‘Almost over,’ he corrected, looking properly at her once more. ‘There's still my marriage to arrange.’
For a second, his voice was so tender that her heart leapt. She caught her breath, leaning eagerly forward behind her cup. Then she felt a sigh ebb out of her as he went on, more harshly: ‘And now it's my turn there's nothing I want more than to make a marriage that will be good for my family – but my second brother's trying to stop me. He's fighting it so hard that I think even my trying to do the right thing might turn out to be the wrong thing. I've found myself thinking I should pull back … to satisfy him.’ His jaw tightened, as it had in church. ‘I'm not going to, though,’ he added firmly. ‘That wouldn't help either. But I sometimes wonder if we'll ever stop being orphans at war, wilful children in men's bodies, destroying each other while we try to sort out the things our father should have decided.’ He sighed. ‘You can see why I believe there's nothing more important than marrying in the best interests of your family, can't you?’ he added with more energy. ‘You have to work together, do your duty; or you're lost.’
‘Oh,’ Isabel muttered lamely. There was another long silence, broken from somewhere behind by a roar of male laughter. The girl cleared away their boards. Isabel noticed that the light was failing. The window was still bright, but his face was falling into shadow. She hadn't heard the bell; but the markets must be closing.
He was sitting very straight and apparently still on his stool. She felt, rather than saw, the tiny movement of his hand twitching at his sword hilt. She remembered peeping sideways at his hands in the church: they'd been brown and well-made, with thin fingers, with bitten nails.
She wanted to ask: ‘Do you love her?’ But she sensed that was a question girls giggling in silkrooms might ask, and not for him. Instead, she faltered, ‘But don't you ever wish … ?’ and left the question hanging. She didn't know herself how she'd have finished it.
When his voice came out of the gloom again, it was wistful and there was no flash of eyes; he must be looking down.
‘Ah, wishes …’ he whispered back. ‘If we could live by our wishes … please ourselves: live at peace, kill nothing but dragons … eat buttercups … ride unicorns … who knows what any of us would do?’
She heard a quiet rumble of laughter. She could see the ghost of the evening star through a smeared window pane. She put her cup down and left her hands spread on the table. She looked at the two pale shadows on the dark wood: fingers long and lovely enough to embroider church vestments with, as her father liked to say. The question flashed through her mind – was he looking at them too? – as she thought, all I want is to go on sitting here in this darkness; not to talk; not to think; not to go home.
‘Of course, you don't have to take my advice,’ he said in the end. When she looked up his eyes were gleaming quizzically at her again over steepled fingers, his long eyes the only clearly visible part of his shadowed form. ‘If you have choices, that is.’
‘Choices?’ she repeated dully, as reality came back like a sour taste in the mouth. Knowing that her father wouldn't let her run away from marrying Thomas Claver by paying her dowry to a nunnery instead, since she'd never shown the least sign of having a vocation; wondering if she'd have the nerve to risk walking out of his great place, where she'd always been Miss Isabel, daintily perched on wallows of silk, sewing altar cloths, to become a withered, unregarded, unmarried housekeeper in the household of the kind of wealthy wife Jane would become. Knowing she wouldn't. Aware too that there were other, worse possibilities that her imagination was shying away from. ‘What choices?’
He glanced over at the chessboard and grinned. ‘Strategic choices,’ he said, with a return of the wolfish energy she'd glimpsed as they left the church. ‘You
