Figures in Silk by Vanora Bennett Page B

fret about her father; there was nothing she could do about him anyway. She leaned encouragingly toward Robert Lynom.
    “He didn’t,” the Lynom boy said briefly.
    But Anne Pratte knew more. She always did. She’d quietly taken up a seat on a little footstool by the window; she had a piece of work in her hands; but she was following everything like a small bloodhound. She picked up the narrative by piping up, with gusto: “But there’s talk, of course. They say he sent it as a gift to a lady, don’t they?”
    At her voice, Robert Lynom suddenly started to look excruciatingly uncomfortable. He stopped, bit his tongue, blushed. Isabel couldn’t understand what was going through his head. “Well,”
    Alice said impatiently. “Who to? You must know. You’ll have done the paperwork, won’t you? Spit it out, man.”
    He mumbled something. Even his scalp was on fire. He picked up his box.
    Alice Claver planted herself one step in front of him, her smile half a threat.
    “Don’t leave us hanging,” she said, more command than plea.
    “Who was the cloth for?”
    He composed himself. Decided upon his choice of who to offend, and made himself smile at Alice Claver. Turning sharply away from Anne Pratte and slightly away from Isabel, he said:“They say—though I can’t be sure they’re right—to your new apprentice’s sister, Mistress Shore.”
    Alice Claver almost choked. “No,” she said, with a mixture of shock, disbelief, envy, and amusement. “Really?” Then, as if remembering Isabel’s presence, she clapped a friendly hand on Robert Lynom’s back and ushered him out toward the door.
    Twittering excitedly, Anne Pratte followed; she wasn’t an unkind woman usually, but the thrill of that story had eclipsed any worries she might otherwise have had about Isabel’s feelings.
    Isabel thought he wouldn’t dare even glance back at her. He disliked market gossip, and he’d known what was in the letter her father had written her; he’d be miserably aware of having added to her worries about her family with the story they’d bullied out of him.
    But he did look back, from the doorway. “Good day, Mistress Claver,” he said bravely; and, in a rush, “My apologies. I shouldn’t have . . .”
    She met his eyes and nodded, forgiving him. And it was the memory of that moment of mutual bravery, and the gratefulness on his face, that gave her the courage to decide, once she was alone with the letter, not to think about it anymore, or rage against her father, or envy Jane’s beauty or aristocratic admirers.
    She was a Claver now. Her life was here.
     
    If Isabel thought she'd be taken straight back to Alice Claver’s inner sanctum, the silk storeroom, as soon as she’d apprenticed herself, she was undeceived that night over dinner.
    The apprenticeship timetable Alice Claver outlined, with a hard look, had no space in it for musing over the finest luxuries of civilization, or for planning vast wholesale purchase strategies. It involved mastering all the eye- straining, low- grade, repetitive, menial tasks of retail silkwork first—the jobs Alice Claver put out to the wrinkled, skinny shepster and throwster women who worked from five- foot- wide stalls huddled outside the biggest selling markets, the Crown and Broad Selds, along their frontages on Cheapside, and down their side doors on Soper Lane. Not just twisting imported raw silk into threads; but throwing it into yarns ready for use, and spinning, and dyeing, and turning seams. She was to learn every stage of the process from taking the strands of raw silk gathered by Italian reelers from silkworm cocoons to selling manufactured silk, on the street, by the ounce or the pound, as sewing silk, open silk, twine silk, or rough web silk, the stuff used to make loops on which to attach warp threads while weaving, so they could be separated into two sets to let the weft thread pass between them. And she wasn’t just to learn these humble jobs, but to sit outside