Blythe Gifford – Innocence Unveiled (страница 10)
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
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.
‘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?’