Figures in Silk by Vanora Bennett Page A

sanding what he’d written with fluid muscles.
    Alice Claver nodded. “Do it today,” she said.
     
    The Lynom boy brought copies of the documents back two days later, duly registered. Isabel received him, wondering at the discreet sympathy in his eyes until he gave her the other letter he was also carry ing for her.
    It was a cold, brief letter from her father: formal notice that he was rewriting his will to leave his estate to Jane, “my one dutiful daughter.” Isabel could see from Robert Lynom’s expression that he knew what it said.
    She glanced over it. Nodded curtly. Let the hand holding the letter flutter down to her side. Kept the anger and contempt and hurt boiling inside her tightly shut down. She knew what her father would want her to do, but she wasn’t going to weep or run begging to him to change his mind. She wouldn’t let herself be bullied. She was learning not to let her face show her feelings.
    Alice Claver and Anne Pratte swept in. When Alice Claver saw the young lawyer, she held her hand out for the documents she was expecting. He smiled, bowed courteously, and passed them over. She gave them a careful reading, then grunted with satisfaction. She tucked them into her large purse. She didn’t look at Isabel or ask what the letter still held loosely in her apprentice’s hand was.
    Alice fixed Robert Lynom with a sudden, fierce smile. Now the business was done, she had time for conversation. “I hear Lord Hastings has been buying in the selds. In person. From”—she gestured sideways at Isabel without catching her eye—“my new apprentice’s father.”
    Isabel looked away; perhaps she should have told Alice Claver about Lord Hastings’s visit herself, but her quarrel with her father had made her forget it. However, Robert Lynom knew enough to satisfy the silkwoman. He nodded easily. “He has indeed,” he said, including Isabel in his answering smile, putting away his papers in his box. “A cloth of green figured velvet. From Lucca, if I remember rightly. They say he paid a good price for it too.”
    It was natural to discuss this new phenomenon. It was unusual for noblemen to visit the markets themselves. If they were of the blood royal, they usually placed orders through the King’s Wardrobe in Old Jewry, and administrators such as Robert Lynom would find merchants to meet their requirements. Otherwise lords might send representatives to the markets to bargain for luxury goods in their place.
    But unusual things had been happening since King Edward had come back, and Lord Hastings, his closest adviser, was an unusual nobleman anyway. He’d survived the times of exile and poverty by living on his considerable wits; he’d gradually turned the meager estates of his inheritance into a magnate’s fabulous wealth. Now that his lord was back on the throne, Hastings was showing he wasn’t the kind to stand grandly on his aristocratic dignity, willing only to live by the sword. As a mark of the king’s trust, he’d recently been named governor of Calais, and the markets were full of the rumor that he planned not just to run the garrison there but to take a personal interest in the port’s trade as well. There was even talk that Lord Hastings was courting the staplers of Calais, who controlled all the exports of raw wool from England, by becoming a merchant of the staple himself. They said he had the wit and imagination to find common ground with anyone, noble or not. Remembering his merry, kindly eyes from the wedding feast (before he started staring so hungrily at Jane, at least), Isabel could believe it.
    Alice Claver wanted to know more, but she didn’t want to show her envy of John Lambert’s deal too openly. She didn’t ask the price her competitor had charged for his cloth. Instead, she asked casually: “And did his lordship say what he was going to do with the velvet?”
    Isabel was trying to think of nothing more than enjoying the story. She would have time enough later to