Blythe Gifford - Innocence Unveiled

‘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.

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