CHAPTER THIRTEEN #4
"If I may," Isabel said, before the conversation could grow any more dangerous.
"If Ellyn could be spared - perhaps she may accompany me?
Or Bridget? They both may serve as guarantor for my conduct and my swift return.
" Oh, how she wished she were free to laugh at the idea of it - Bridget or Ellyn, both unmarried girls hardly old enough to manage a kitchen, sent to chaperone a woman twice their age who had been wed and widowed already.
Neither girl held any sort of authority to keep her in check, but that wasn't the point.
The point was to ensure that Isabel remembered whose will governed her days and her friendships and her life.
"And we may stop at the market to fetch anything you require," she added.
It wouldn't do to seem too eager, but she could at least sweeten the pot.
Hilda tapped one foot against the floor, apparently considering. Then she seemed to come to a decision. "Ellyn!" she shouted, turning to face the passageway that led to the kitchen. "Ellyn, come here!"
Ellyn appeared within minutes, her expression surly as always. It only grew darker when she saw Isabel. "What is it?"
"You are to accompany Isabel to Master Rykener's tailoring shop and back," Hilda rapped out. "I expect you to stay by her side all the while she is there, and that you will both return directly. Understood?"
Ellyn heaved a lengthy sigh, but she was already untying her apron strings. "As you wish, Mistress."
"Good. And you -" Hilda pointed to Isabel. "I expect you to be gone no more than a half-hour, or I will know the reason why."
Isabel ducked her head, the better to keep Hilda from seeing her expression. "Of course."
She was permitted to run upstairs and fetch the embroidery - thank Christ and all his angels, she had an old piece tucked away in her basket that could serve as a pretext for the visit - then descended again to be waved out the door along with Jack and Ellyn.
Ellyn stumped along beside them for a few steps, but seemed to find their pace too grueling, and quickly fell to dawdling behind them.
As soon as she was out of earshot, Jack leaned in close to Isabel.
"Is everything all right? Constance said -"
She could not bear to hear what Constance had said. "You should not have come," Isabel said, and marched ahead before he had the chance to reply. She had the distinct sense of a prisoner walking to the executioner's block.
# # #
"Like this?" Margery held her latest effort up for Constance to examine.
"Almost," Constance said, taking the button from her niece's hand and examining it.
"You've got the shape right, and the stitches are neat, but it needs more stuffing.
It'll collapse elsewise, look -" She squeezed the little ball of fabric between her thumb and forefinger, and it flattened in her grasp.
Margery sighed, taking the button back from her. "This is dull. I'd rather be embroidering."
"It's dull, but it's needful," Constance said. "How else will you close up your sleeves?"
"With laces." Margery was already stuffing scraps of fabric into a fresh button.
Constance had to admit, it was dull work - dull and fiddly, two things that had never appealed either to her or to Margery.
But if Margery had any interest in tailoring - which was, after all, the nominal purpose of her afternoon's visit - then she needed to learn how to do it properly.
"Laces work well," Constance conceded, "but more and more fine ladies are looking to button their kirtles, and if you wish to have their custom, then you must offer what it is they want. As to the embroidery, you may ask Isabel to teach you when she next visits. God knows I've no knack for it."
The sentence, when she next visits pulled at her heartstrings, and she turned away from Margery so she would not see the worry writ in her face.
Isabel had other responsibilities, she knew, and it was entirely possible that some calamity had arisen that required her attention at home.
But something about her absence struck Constance as wrong.
It was one thing for her to be busy; it was another for her not to send any word, especially after the night they had spent together.
She had thought, at the time, that they had been of one mind as to what it meant.
But if Isabel had found herself regretting it after she left that day, then perhaps . . .
"Oh, good!" Constance had been so lost in her thoughts, she had taken no notice of the door opening: it was only Margery jumping down from her stool that drew her attention. "We were just speaking of you. Aunt Constance says I may learn embroidery if you offer to teach me, and I -"
"Margery," Constance said, and her niece fell silent.
In the doorway stood Isabel, with Jack and a girl Constance did not recognize standing behind her.
The girl could be Hilda, Constance supposed, but she doubted it - she was of an age with Margery, if she had to guess, not old enough to be wed and mistress of her own household.
Of greater concern to her was the frozen look on Isabel's face, and the grimace she could see on Jack's over her shoulder.
She had seen Isabel look like this before, on the afternoon they'd first met, but that look had been absent for weeks, now. What had prompted its return?
"I'll be off," Jack said. "Master Thorel will be wanting me back at the cooper's. I only stopped by to deliver your message." He gave Constance a look that was clearly full of meaning, but she could not decipher it: the only emotion she could make out was pity. Her stomach dropped.
"Will you come and be seated, then?" Constance said to Isabel, then "forgive me, I think I've not made your acquaintance." This, she directed to the girl at Isabel's shoulder, who scowled in response. Perhaps she was Hilda, then.
"This is Ellyn," Isabel said, taking a step further into the room, "she is employed in my - in the kitchens.
Hilda requested that she accompany me this afternoon.
" She reached into the basket hanging from her arm and produced a piece of cloth, which she held out to Constance. "The embroidery you asked for."
Constance had asked for no such thing, but she stepped around the table and took it from Isabel's hand anyway.
Isabel's eyes kept darting to Ellyn, then back to Constance with a look Constance could read all too well: they could not speak freely in Ellyn's presence, even less so than they might have with just Margery in the room.
"Margery, will you take Ellyn into the kitchen?" she said. "I'm sure we've honey cakes left over from dinner."
Margery, bless her, did not argue. She took a step towards Ellyn, smiling, but the other girl only shook her head. "Mistress Marillac said I'm to stay with her all the while she's here, so's she behaves herself."
Constance could not have accounted for what her face did just then. Beside her, Margery gawped openly. "Behaves herself how?"
"Never mind it, Margery," Isabel said. If the look on Isabel’s face had not been enough to convince Constance that something was dreadfully wrong, the sound of her voice would have done it.
It was flat and colourless, and Constance was familiar enough with Isabel by now to know what it meant: it was the way Isabel spoke when she had gone beyond fear or anger, and had numbed herself entirely to her surroundings.
Constance tucked the embroidery Isabel had given her into her apron pocket, the better to give herself a moment to collect her thoughts. "Will you be staying for supper, at least?" she asked. "Your presence would be welcome, and there is more than enough to go around."
"Thank you, no," Isabel said in that awful voice.
Constance was torn between a desire to take Isabel in her arms, and an equally fervent need to simply shake her until she broke out of her trance.
She did not know which would work, if either of them would.
"I am not permitted to stay long. I only came to tell you that I may not return.
Mistress Marillac requires that I remain at home from this day forward. "
It was a piece of good fortune that Constance was already standing with her knees locked, or else they would have given out underneath her. "What? Why?"
"Of account of your brother," the girl, Ellyn said from behind Isabel. "On account of how she's been spreading her legs for him. My mistress won't have it any longer."
Margery's mouth dropped open. Constance made a choking sort of noise in her throat. Isabel did not outwardly react, except for a slight tremor around her mouth. "Mistress Marillac would not appreciate you speaking so coarsely, Ellyn."
"'S what she said," Ellyn said with a shrug, and went back to examining her nails.
"She did not use those words, so far as I know," Isabel said.
"But she is of the opinion that your brother and I have been -" She swallowed with a click, "- conducting ourselves lewdly, and that I must forsake his company or else leave her household.
A woman engaging in such behaviour is no fit guardian for a child, after all, and she is very concerned regarding Walter's well-being.
" The mention of her son's name provoked the first outward show of emotion Constance had seen from Isabel since she entered the shop that day: just the slightest twitch of her lips, there and gone in a flash. But it had been there.