Free Figures in Silk by Vanora Bennett Page B

different. But it was too late to think like that. This was how it was.
    She shook her head again. Stubbornly. Refusing the possibility of sinking back into her childhood life as if this time with Thomas had never been, because what went with that would be waiting to be found a new husband and sent off again like a parcel of cloth. She didn’t want Jane’s smug pity or the servants’ anxious, helpless eyes; not yet. She didn’t want her father rushing to find a new plan. She didn’t want to have to face up to a choice between being a burden on the Lamberts or a burden on Alice Claver.
    There’d be time for that tomorrow, after the funeral. She just wanted to be alone and, later, to sneak downstairs and be alone with Thomas.
    She was grateful when Anne Pratte patted her shoulder and left.
     
    Alice Claver was asleep on a chair drawn up near Thomas.
    Her face was ravaged. She was snoring softly. The candles at his head were low. It was nearly dawn.
    Isabel tiptoed round her and put a stool quietly down on the other side of the two benches they’d laid Thomas on.
    They’d wiped the dust off him, but the smell of death was so strong it turned her stomach. His body was wrapped in sheets.
    They’d left his face uncovered. It was so perfectly still that it seemed somehow flatter and wider than she remembered. She leaned forward, trying not to be frightened, trying to stop retching. She touched his cold cheek, then crouched down over his face and kissed it until it was as wet as hers. But it stayed empty. “I love you,” she muttered, so panicked by the finality of it she couldn’t think of a prayer.
    Alice Claver stirred. Isabel froze into her crouch, hardly breathing, willing her mother- in- law back to sleep.
    But Alice Claver opened swollen eyes and said: “I used to swing him round in the garden until I was dizzy.”
    Isabel wasn’t sure Alice Claver was talking to her. “When he was little,” Alice Claver went on in the same dreamy monotone,“he couldn’t get enough of it. Lay on the grass howling with laughter.”
    She nodded, up and down; remembering. “While Richard was alive . . . ,” she murmured. “When I still had time.”
    A shadow passed across her face. “I should have made more time.”
    She closed her eyes again. But Isabel could see she hadn’t gone back to sleep. Her face was too alive for that: terrible with grief, twitching with memories.
    Isabel hadn’t imagined Alice Claver would feel guilty.
    Wishing she had the courage to show the compassion sweeping through her—to go over and put her arms round the older woman, or pray with her—but knowing she didn’t, Isabel put a last tentative kiss on the lips of the husk of Thomas instead, and slipped away.
    Her last thought before her own twitchy, uneasy sleep took her over was, “I’ll go home.”
     
    It was only after the funeral the next day that she realized she couldn’t go home.
    Not because of her father’s irritating calculations at the plain meal of bread and cheese and beer that the Prattes organized in Alice Claver’s house after the burial—“You’ll be out of mourning in a year; you could marry again at sixteen. With that dower you’ll be able to choose whoever you want”—as if she was really supposed to believe that John Lambert would keep his word and let Isabel choose, any more than he had the first time. Not even because he’d said, with what she thought supreme tactlessness, as if discussing possibilities for her next marriage at her husband’s graveside might cheer her up,“One of the Lynom boys, even. Now that would be a good match.”
    It was the other guests who shut the door home to her: Thomas’s friends from outside the Mercery. One red- nosed shabby man after another—some vaguely familiar, some perfect strangers, but all avoiding her eyes and Alice Claver’s. All shuffling up toWilliam Pratte instead, taking him off into corners for their private chats, searching through pockets and pouches and