CHAPTER TEN
"Isabel," Petronilla said, "You're meant to be instructing us." She had not quite mastered her mother's scold or her sister's whine, but she was clearly striving to.
"Do you need instruction?" Isabel asked, not raising her eyes from her work.
They were sitting in the solar – her, Aline, and Petronilla – all working on their own pieces of embroidery.
Instructing the girls in needlework was one of the tasks Hilda had given her upon her family's arrival in the household, and she found it less onerous by far than the hours spent waiting on them.
Both were skilled enough, if lazy, but Hilda would never say anything to suggest that their work was less than exquisite.
To criticize Isabel's teaching was to admit some deficiency in what her pupils produced, and while she would surely never bring herself to praising anything Isabel did, she would not malign it either. Small mercies.
Petronilla's lower lip jutted out in a pout. "How am I to know if it's done properly if you don't tell me?"
Isabel set her own work – a veil for Leah, embroidered with a border of acorn leaves to match her wedding dress - and held a hand out. "Let me see it, then."
Petronilla passed the work over, and Isabel held it up to the light to examine it.
It was a simple enough project – a cloth cover for what would eventually be Petronilla's psalter – and an easy design, an angel surrounded by fleur-de-lis.
What Petronilla had produced so far was not especially impressive, but neither was it noticeably flawed. It would serve for what it was.
"Smaller couching stitches, and closer together," she said, passing the work back to her charge. "If they're too big or too few, the threads will come loose."
Petronilla heaved an exaggerated sigh and looked around the room – searching for something to distract from the task at hand, Isabel assumed. She found it when her eyes fell on the veil spread across Isabel's lap. "What are you making?"
Isabel smoothed a hand over the stitches she had just put down. "A veil," she said. "For a bride."
Petronilla frowned. "Are you going to marry again?"
On her other side, Aline snorted. "Who'd marry her?"
"It isn't for me," Isabel said, judging it best to ignore Aline entirely. "It's for – a friend. A young bride." That, at least, seemed safe to say.
Petronilla's frown shifted to something more lazily malicious. "You haven't got friends," she said, her voice a sing-song. "Everyone knows."
The remark might have stung, had Petronilla timed it better: a few months earlier, it would more or less have been true.
Now, though, Isabel simply let the remark pass without comment, keeping her eyes on her work.
It was the last piece of work she would be doing for Leah – a relatively late addition, for Leah had suggested it when she last came to try the dress on, and her father had agreed to pay extra to have it done in time for the wedding.
Constance had deferred to Isabel on the matter, and Isabel – knowing the state of Constance's finances – had not had the heart to refuse.
Besides, it was an easy job – the sort that she could easily complete in a single afternoon, if no distractions presented themselves.
"I'll have a dress of cloth of gold when I'm married," Aline announced.
Ordinarily, Isabel might have expected her to join in her sister's teasing, but the lure of talking about herself was clearly more powerful than her urge to poke and prod.
"With bliaut sleeves and silk slippers to match.
And I'll have a gold net for my hair all strung with rubies. "
"I don't know that Master Picot has enough money for rubies," Petronilla said, her voice doubtful. "He's not a lord."
"He trades in silk, that's better than being a lord," her sister snapped. "And once we're wed, he'll take me to Flanders and we'll dine on good pork every night."
"Who is Master Picot?" Isabel asked, curious. She had the vague idea that she'd heard the name before, but she could not recall when or where.
"The man I'm going to marry," Aline said, with the air of a tutor explaining something to an especially stupid pupil.
"We went to meet him in Oxford last month, and he said I was the loveliest lady he had ever met, and if I were at court, the bards would be writing songs for me.
But we're not at court." Judging by the look on her face, it was something of a sore spot.
"Father would have had us wed already, but Mother says I ought to wait two more years at least. But we are betrothed.
He and Father signed an agreement to say so, and his brother was there to witness. "
Two more years. Aline was just barely thirteen: in two years, she would be Margery's age.
Isabel smoothed a hand over her embroidery again, swallowing against an unpleasant pressure in her throat.
Margery was kicking and screaming against a fate that Aline was running towards, but did either of them have any conception what it would mean?
Isabel had been wedded and bedded at the same age, and she hadn't known.
She'd taken it on herself, while Aline and Margery both had parents arranging matters for them, but what use was that once the ink on the contract had dried?
Once a girl had passed into her husband's keeping, no mother's love could keep her safe.
Especially not if, as Aline said, her husband meant to take her all the way to Flanders.
Perhaps both men were good and kind and would treat their young brides well, but if they didn't, who would notice or care?
"I'll wear silk when I'm married," Petronilla announced, not one to let her sister's boasts go unchallenged. "Green, to match my eyes."
Aline scoffed. "Your husband won't have money for silk, he'll be a butcher or a carpenter. No wealthy man wants a second daughter, especially one with a pointy nose and a squint."
"I've the same nose as you, and I don't squint!"
"Mine looks better because my face isn't so round," Aline said, a smug smile playing about her lips. "And you do squint, and have small eyes besides. You look like a shrew in a hedgerow."
Petronilla balled up her fists. "Well you look like a horse with all its teeth sticking out.
" It was a weak insult, not least which because everyone in the room knew it wasn't true.
"And Flanders is all filled with coarse people anyhow.
I suppose you'll fit in amongst them all, in your ugly dress with its silly sleeves. "
"Flanders is where all the cleverest people live, so you'd have a dreadful time there," Aline shot back.
"But it won't matter anyhow, because the only man Mother and Father will be able to find for you will be an old widower with no teeth and ten children who needs a nursemaid for them.
It's the only reason he'd look past your face. "
"Enough, both of you," Isabel said wearily, just as Petronilla drew breath to lob an insult back – what sort of insult, Isabel didn't care to contemplate.
Both girls were very red in the face. A childish quarrel, the sort to be expected from girls of their age.
And in a few years, they would be brides.
"What are you doing?" At the sound of Hilda's voice, Isabel sat up straight in her chair, and the girls did likewise. Hilda was standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips. "And where's Walter? I keep you on to take care of him, and you can't even keep him close to hand?"
"He's in the nursery, asleep," Isabel said. Though it was likely he'd be awake by now – he never napped for more than an hour at a time. "Do you have need of him?"
"Don't talk nonsense, of course I don't," Hilda snapped.
"I've need of you to go to market and fetch fresh beef for supper tonight.
You ought to have been on your way already, but I suppose it's too much to expect that you carry out your duties without me always at your shoulder.
As if I haven't responsibilities enough already. "
Isabel felt it prudent not to point out that this was the first she was hearing of the need for a trip to the market, or that she was sitting with the girls on Hilda's own instructions.
She got to her feet, laying her work – which she had, unfortunately, not managed to finish that morning; she'd have to sit up with it after supper to make sure it was done on time – in its basket.
"I'll fetch Walter and dress him, then," she said, "and we'll be on our way.
" If Hilda wished to offer her an excuse to escape the house – whatever her motivations – Isabel was certainly not going to gainsay her.
# # #
"Oh, it's wonderful!" Leah spun in a circle, her arms flung wide.
Her skirts - which Isabel had cut wide, the better to suit the train - swung out around her, the embroidery catching the early afternoon light as she did so.
But even the gold thread did not shine so brightly as Leah's smile: she was beaming so widely, Isabel was almost surprised her face did not split in two.
Her mother stood by, watching her with a fond expression tinged faintly with sadness.
Isabel could not blame her: to see one's child happy was a blessing, but her happiness also occasioned her marrying and leaving home.
Isabel could well imagine the grief she would feel when Walter was grown and had no further need of her; she could not imagine how the same grief would redouble at the loss of a daughter, who would face such peril as a wife.
Leah was not Isabel - she seemed, from all that Isabel had seen and heard, to be marrying a young man who loved her.
But Isabel looked at her mother and saw her own fears echoed: not that something would go wrong, but that if it did, she would be powerless to protect her child.