Innocence Unveiled
And fomenting revolt might not be as difficult as he had feared. Angry about the dispute that had snatched the thread from their looms and the bread from their tables, the people were like dry kindling. The right spark might ignite a rebellion favourable to Edward and England.
Unwelcome moonlight chased him into the shadows. The man he’d seen outside the house was missing tonight, but he could not afford to be questioned by the watch. He had taken the risk of staying out past curfew, hoping she would be abed when he returned. He must avoid her questions. And her temptation.
Wrinkling his nose at the lingering scent of cabbage soup, he slipped into the kitchen, the familiar weight of his dagger moulded to his palm. The glow of uncovered embers drew him, cautiously, into the front room.
Katrine slept over her account books again. Her wimple askew, a lock of hair, reflecting red from the dying coals, escaped to caress her cheek. An ink blot stained the middle finger of her right hand, protectively stretched on top of the ledger.
He sheathed his dagger and stepped into the room quietly so she would not wake. The fire’s glow left deep shadows in the narrow room’s corners. The house did not stretch far beyond the firelight. Such a small place. King Edward needed more room than this just to pace.
Yet this was all she had. No fields, no vast estates, no serfs toiling for her outside these walls. Only a cherry tree and a bolt of cloth shielded her from starvation.
No wonder she needs the wool. Couldn’t this husband of hers take care of the woman?
He knelt before her, his face dangerously close to hers. Before he could stop them, his fingers slipped past his self-control to touch the lock of hair on her cheek. When he tried to tuck it beneath her wimple, the strands slipped through his fingers like silk.
At his touch, she woke, brown eyes weighed down by a thicket of lashes and a sleepy smile touching her lips.
A matching smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He spoke softly, the Flemish rough in his throat. ‘Do you fall asleep over your accounts every night, mistress?’
She blinked, suddenly awake, and drew away, leaving his fingers empty. ‘The business is all I have. I will do anything I must to keep it.’
He rose, abruptly, wondering what passion she had left for her husband. If she had one.
Suddenly, it seemed important to know. He had negotiated with kings. He could certainly force the truth from a simple weaving woman. ‘And your husband, will he, too, do anything he must?’
Her dark eyes looked huge in her pale face, framed by the rumpled wimple. ‘Of course.’ She hesitated over the words.
He was certain in that moment she had no husband.
The rush of blood throbbed in his loins before he could summon his control. No man possesses her.
Denial struggled with hot, sweet desire.
He clenched his jaw and felt his eyelid flinch, but he refused to break his gaze, glad to be safely towering over her again. He would resist her, but she mustn’t know that. ‘If you will do anything you must, mistress, will you do anything I ask?’ He must keep her off balance, wondering about his intentions.
A delicate flush—anger or shame?—spread beyond her cheek. She bit her lower lip with small white teeth, inflicting enough pain to steady her resolve. He had seen a knight in battle try the same trick, slashing his forearm to create a new, superficial wound to distract him from the mortal blow.
Staring back at him, her defiant eyes did not waver, but he heard the whisper of inheld breath, as if she had recognised the fire in his eyes and was burned by it. ‘What do you ask?’
Longing rushed through his blood like poison. What he would ask had no words, only the vision of wild joining.
He fought the image. Even if he permitted himself careless pleasures of the flesh, he was hiding in the belly of a country that might soon be at war with his. One unmeasured word uttered in passion could be his death. He gritted his teeth against the feeling. ‘I ask for the truth.’
She rose and slipped into the shadows surrounding the loom. Hiding.
He would not let her. ‘And the truth is, you have no husband.’
She whirled to face him, the wool of her skirt crushed in her fist. ‘I have no husband.’ Angry words. ‘Would you have dealt with me, had you known?’
Yes, but he would not tell her that. He shrugged. ‘Then why wear the wimple?’
Her slender arms crossed her chest like a shield. ‘There is little safety on the streets these days. People are more respectful of a married woman.’
‘But you are not on the streets now.’
‘I still need protection.’
‘I thought I was to protect you.’
She smiled. ‘Who will protect me from you?’
She had turned his words back on him. He had thought to keep her off balance, yet he was the one who felt dizzy. He donned a mask of disdain to blot out all traces of attraction. She must not know his weakness for her. ‘What makes you think you need protection from me?’
Her eyes widened and narrowed in an instant, but he saw his insult had hit its mark. For a moment, he was sorry for it.
‘I am glad to hear I do not.’ She patted the wrinkles from her skirt, now all brisk business. ‘When will I see my wool?’
Uneasiness rippled through him. She had recovered faster than he expected. He had thought her a simple burgher mistress but, so far, this woman was nothing that he had expected. ‘I cannot order contraband wool at the market. If it were easy, you would not need me.’
‘How long must I wait?’
‘As long as it takes.’ As long as it would take to turn the people of Flanders to Edward’s side. ‘Weeks, not days, mistress.’
‘I’ve waited months already.’ Urgency shook her voice.
‘Patience is a virtue you don’t possess.’
‘Patience is no virtue when dealing with spinsters and weavers. I have no patience for sloppy work or I will have nothing fit to sell.’
Her words intrigued him. What would it be like to be so pleased with who you were and what you did? ‘You are proud of your work, aren’t you?’
The smile that transformed her face would have, for most women, come at the mention of a paramour. ‘The Mark of the Daisy is known throughout the Low Countries.’
She sounded lovesick, he thought, irritably. ‘And what makes your cloth so special?’
‘I can recognise the best wool by touch. My spinsters deliver seven skeins a day instead of five. When my dyers are finished, the colour is fast. My weavers’ work is so tight we rarely need the fullers’ craft.’
‘Fullers?’ He followed most Flemish words, but sometimes missed the meaning. ‘What do they do?’
She cocked a suspicious eyebrow. ‘How can you deal in wool and know so little of it?’
‘Do I need to know how to grow wheat in order to trade it? Or how to take salt from the mines in order to sell it?’
‘Well, if you knew wool, you would recognise our mark. Even before I was born, we made a special fabric for the Duchess of Brabant.’
A burning numbness filled him, like a blow from a broadside sword. Duchess cloth. A scrap of indigo- dyed wool carefully wrapped around a dagger of German silver. An orphaned bastard’s only inheritance from the princess who had married a duke.
What terrible fate had drawn him to the very shop that had made the cloth his mother had worn? ‘Duchess cloth? You made that?’
‘You know it?’
He clenched his fist behind his back. ‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘I’m surprised. It was so long ago.’
‘I was born in Brabant, remember?’ His throat tightened around the words that jarred against each other. ‘Those who have seen it claim only a miracle of God or the Devil’s witchcraft could produce such an intricate design.’
She laughed. ‘Neither God, nor the Devil. Just Giles de Vos.’
He lowered his voice, afraid that he would shout to make himself heard over the blood pounding in his ears. He must ask the question as if the answer made no difference. ‘So he knew the Duchess?’
He was suddenly hungry to hear of her. No one had spoken of his mother since she had died.
‘The Duchess was a great patroness of his,’ Katrine said. ‘He wove a special length and sent it to her every year until she died twenty years ago.’
‘Nineteen.’
She looked puzzled, but did not ask him how he knew. ‘He never wove it again after that.’
‘Why?’
‘He said there is a craft and an art to weaving, and the art must come from the heart. I think he lost heart for it after she died.’
A woman’s romantic notion. The truth was certainly simpler. De Vos was a merchant. The money had stopped. ‘He didn’t even make some for your mother?’
‘My…my mother?’
‘You say your father only made this cloth for the Duchess. Surely he wove some for his wife.’
She shook her head, flinching as if in pain. ‘My mother’s not…’
Her voice cracked again. He wondered whether she had lost a mother, too.
Chapter Five
Thank you, Saint Catherine, for stopping my flapping tongue.
Renard thought Giles was her father. When he said ‘your mother,’ he meant Giles’s wife. She had almost told him that her mother was dead and her father was a Flemish noble.
In an English jail.
She poked a stick into the fading fire, releasing a flame. Better he think Giles was her father. A dead man would not mind the untruth and he had never had a wife who would be wronged by the tale.
Forgive my sin of omission.
‘No, not even for my mother,’ she repeated. ‘Many asked for it, but Duchess cloth was made only for the Duchess.’
When she turned back, his midnight-blue eyes looked as if they had just stared into the pits of hell. She blinked against the agony, but when she opened her eyes, the pain had been swept clean.
She shook her head to clear her muddled vision. She must have been mistaken. This man had no feelings. And no reason to mourn a dead duchess.
‘Tell me,’ he said, with an expression more serious than the question, ‘about your father.’
She sighed with relief. It would be easy to pretend a daughter’s affection for Giles. ‘He taught me everything he could and left me everything he had.’
‘When did he die?’
‘Two years ago Michaelmas.’
‘You miss him very much.’ His voice felt like an arm draped over her shoulder.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘It cannot be easy for a woman to be a draper.’
She resisted the temptation to rest in his sympathy. Better he not know how difficult it was. He must see her as a business owner, not a woman who might be prey for his passions.
She donned again the voice she used with strangers. ‘The workers respect me. I know my business.’
‘How many times every day must you prove it?’
He heard too much. ‘As many times as I must.’
Renard walked over to the loom, squatting just beyond the firelight.
‘That loom was his,’ she said, watching Renard stroke the uprights, the threads and the batten, as if he were searching for a secret lock. His hands, strong and graceful in all things, seemed awkward only when they neared the loom. ‘He was a weaver before he started dealing in cloth.’
‘But he kept weaving, you said. He wove the Duchess cloth.’
‘He was always experimenting, trying new things, until the stiffness took his hands.’ Joining him by the loom, she rubbed her thumb over wood worn smooth for more than fifty years. ‘He taught me on this loom. He said I must know how to weave in order to supervise weavers.’
‘Show me.’
She stilled her fingers and tried to read his face. A strange request. ‘Why would you want to learn?’
He never moved his gaze from the threads. ‘When you are finished, you have something to show.’
His whispered words seemed a confession. A smuggler’s very life was secret.
‘Perhaps tomorrow.’ In daylight. When the intimacy of the night had passed.
‘Now.’
‘In the dark?’
His silence, thick and heavy, touched her as his fingers had touched the threads. ‘You were the one,’ he said, finally, ‘who told me I needed to know my trade.’
No harm in teaching, she supposed. Good weavers worked by touch anyway, so the dark should not matter. And she could prove to herself that she felt nothing unusual when she shared his space.
Taking a seat on the end of the bench, she patted the wood to her left. ‘Sit.’
He did, his legs so long they nearly overshot the treadles that she could barely reach with a pointed toe. Through the layers of his chausses and her skirt, she felt his leg muscles flex at the unfamiliar movement.
‘These,’ she said, struggling to keep her voice even, ‘are the treadles. Think of them as your stirrups. Your feet ride there to control the loom.’
He placed one foot on each, his knees within a whisper of the cloth on the loom. ‘Are all weavers such small men?’
She smiled. ‘You are a very tall man. And this is an old loom that I’ve adjusted to my size. The newer ones must be worked by two men.’
‘How tall was Giles de Vos?’
He asked the question without looking at her, his fingers running ceaselessly over the loom, stroking the batten, reaching for the heddles, smoothing the warp threads.
The sight of his fingers caressing the loom made her skin tingle. She rubbed her sleeve as if she could scrub away the feeling. ‘Giles was shorter than you. By at least a head.’
He spread his arms to span the loom, easily reaching the width of the cloth. She caught a whiff of soap and skin. He must have visited the bath house today. His scent, the pressure of his leg against hers hidden in the darkness, made her heart trip.
Sweet Saint Catherine, is this what they mean by temptation?
If so, it felt good—warm, cosy, exciting, perhaps a little dangerous and very, very alive.
She felt no answering surge from him. His concentration was all on the wood and the wool.
He said I did not need protection from him. I must indeed be an immodest woman, if I feel like this while he feels nothing.
She slipped off the bench, smoothed her skirt and stood at the corner of the loom, where his scent was fainter and it was easier to fight her shameful urges. ‘I can show you better from here.’
She ran her hands over the loom, checking the tautness of the threads, trying to concentrate. Where could she start? She had learned as a baby to recognise the right-spun threads that must constitute the warp, the left-spun ones that must be used as the weft, to string the threads evenly, not too tight, not too loose.
‘Let me show you how to throw the shuttle.’ She picked up a boat-shaped wooden shuttle, empty of the bobbin thread, but worn smooth by Giles’s fingers. ‘Practise first with an empty one to get the feel of it so you don’t ruin my cloth.’
He watched her, silent and intent. She forced herself to inhale, letting the air fill her chest and calm her fluttering heart. ‘Hold the shuttle in the palm of your hand, then insert the tip between the threads, flick your wrist, and catch it on the other side. Let me show you first.’
Reaching over his shoulder, she felt a chestnut curl tickle her cheek. She flicked her right wrist with the expertise of long practice. The shuttle went skimming across the warp threads and flew out the other side, the pointed prow nearly denting the wooden floor.
‘Why didn’t you catch it?’ she grumbled. Kneeling, she searched under the loom in the darkness.
‘You did not say “catch”, mistress.’ The imperial tone had returned to his voice. ‘Your words were “Let me show you first”.’
Fleece dust clung to her fingers before she found the shuttle. She rubbed her thumb over both pointed ends. Neither was damaged. ‘You might have broken the point or caused a splinter,’ she said, crawling out from under the loom and losing her dignity with a sneeze. ‘Then it would catch on the warp threads. Now you try. Flick your wrist to throw it and catch it with your other hand. Neither your fingers nor the shuttle should touch the threads. Then throw it back the other way. A master weaver can work equally well left to right or right to left.’
He took the shuttle, grasping it like a sword.
‘No, here.’ She cradled her small hand around his large one, placing his index finger on the well-worn wood. A hot flush crept up her arm at his touch, but she refused to let go. ‘Now, flick like this…’ She guided his wrist inthe familiar gesture. ‘Let go next time…and catch.’
The shuttle skimmed partway over the threads and stopped in the middle. She sighed, and reached in to pull it out.
His fingers locked around her wrist. ‘I’ll get it,’ he said.
She pulled her arm away. A bracelet of fire circled her wrist where his hand had been.
She stepped away and watched as he rescued the empty bark. Then, after flexing both wrists, he sent the shuttle skimming through the threads. Again it stopped like an arrow short of the target.
Without a word, he retrieved it. Instead of cursing at the shuttle, or at her, as her uncle did when something went wrong, or at himself, as her father would have, this man calmly threw again.
And again.
On his next try, the little boat shot safely through the threads and into his waiting hand.
Grinning, he waved it in triumph and she clapped with delight, belatedly realising the racket might wake Merkin. ‘You handle the shuttle as if you had weaver’s blood.’
A look of fierce warning wiped out his first genuine smile. He stood, the lesson over. ‘My blood is none of your concern.’
She ignored her hurt and turned to light a candle from the embers. ‘I meant it as a compliment. Particularly since you seem to know nothing of the trade.’ She touched another candle to the flame and handed it to him.
‘It is more important that I know my buyers.’
‘I thought you said the less we know of each other, the better off we both will be,’ she said, surprised to remember his exact words.
He winked again, conveniently hiding his feelings. ‘I should have said the less you know of me. You are my buyer. I must know what you need.’
His words were as tempting as his body. She was tired of lies, tired of being alone, so tired that, for a moment, she wanted to tell him everything.
She took a breath and bit her tongue. Impossible. She had lied about too much. And he was a man to fear, not to trust.
She covered the embers and let darkness hide her. ‘You know what I need. Three sacks of your best wool.’
As she mounted the stairs, leaving him to follow, she remembered the advice of the titmouse wise enough to avoid the jaws of Renard the Fox: ‘I trust none of the lies you tell. If I did, I’d surely burn in Hell.’
* * *
The Bishop of Clare, Henry Billesh, arrived in the city with full pomp and settled into a three-storey stone house near the Friday Market. Renard mingled with the foodsellers and tradesmen, arriving in the Bishop’s solar unnoticed and unannounced. For Edward’s sake, he would put aside his distaste to co-operate with the man.
It would not be easy.
‘Ah, it’s the King’s messenger boy.’ The Bishop extended his ring to be kissed.
The sapphire was bitter on Renard’s lips. ‘I have a report to share. I expect you’ve the same.’
In the midst of a starving city, the Bishop plucked a plump, golden orange from an overflowing basket and picked at the skin with a scrupulously clean, trimmed nail. ‘I can’t think of anything you might know that would interest me.’
‘You can’t be sure until you hear it. And it is the interest of the King that should concern us both.’
‘The King’s interest is mine, Renard. It is you, I understand, who have been given another motive. A bishop’s seat in exchange for Flanders, is it?’
It was Edward’s way to pit the two against each other. Edward would win either way. ‘I would have served my king regardless.’
‘You may be disappointed. When I gain the Count’s allegiance, there will be no need for your devious tricks.’
Renard bowed. ‘So we all hope, your Excellency. But the King is wise to prepare for many possibilities, including your failure.’
The Bishop frowned at the insult. ‘Just remember, even a king cannot turn a bastard into a bishop without help.’ He plucked a section of orange, turned it into the light, found it not to his liking, and discarded the rest of the bitter fruit. ‘My help.’
Renard looked at the glowing sapphire on the Bishop’s hand and wondered how high the price would be for his own. ‘I am aware of my special circumstances.’
The Bishop picked over the fruit in the basket. With the palate of a glutton, he kept the scrawny neck and sunken stomach of a hermit at the end of a forty-day fast by selecting only the choicest morsels. The rest was left for scrap.
‘Well,’ he began, ‘if anything goes wrong with these negotiations, it would be…’ the Bishop paused to examine a date before looking back at Renard ‘…difficult for me to write such a letter.’ He decided the date was worthy and popped it into his mouth.
‘I trust it will not be difficult for us to work together on the King’s behalf.’
He waited.
The silence was punctuated by the mulching sound of the Bishop chewing. ‘Your report then,’ he said, with a weary wave of his hand. ‘Though I don’t know what you could say about the artisans that would be useful. It is not as if they hold any power.’
‘In this city, they do. Direct negotiation with the Count will be less fruitful here than elsewhere.’
The Bishop licked his sticky fingers. ‘Why would that be?’
Renard smiled. ‘Well, first of all, he’s not related to the King by marriage.’
‘The Queen’s many relatives have made my mission more difficult, not less.’
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