The Traitor's Daughter Read Online Free Page A

elderly churchman, this one looking genuine, begged coins to buy food for destitute inmates. A solemn young man with a mustard-colored cap moved through the crowd offering willow crucifixes for a ha’penny. A couple of painted women lounged in the shadowed angle of the wall, awaiting trade. Kate looked up to an unglazed window above the gates. A wild-haired man glared out at the crowd from between iron bars. He spat. Kate looked away.
    A clang behind the gates. A rattling and grating as one of the wooden doors was marched open from inside by a ragged worker. The people surged forward, most of them straight into the prison courtyard. Kate stood still, craning to see beyond the moving heads and backs. Then she saw him, Owen, a head taller than most of the other men. She gasped. How thin he was! And how dirty. And what had happened to his hair?
    He saw her, and his deep-sunk eyes brightened. He strode to her, shouldering past the people streaming the opposite way. She ran to meet him.
    They stopped, face-to-face, hers upturned to his, both of them gazing, the moment too charged for words. Kate was shocked by his hollow cheeks, hollowed eyes. His hair, once a rich black mass of lazy waves, was now so close-cropped it was as thin as a shadow on his skull, with erratic tufts, and nicks in the skin as though a drunken barber had wielded rusty shears. Black stubble bristled his chin, as ill-shaved as his head. His doublet of chestnut-colored wool was rumpled and grease-stained. A rip in his shirt’s collar was so straight it could only have been cut with a blade. He stank.
    Tears sprang to her eyes. “What have they done to you?”
    He gave her a tight, forced smile. “A fine day, wife. Thank you for coming.”
    The words were oddly impassive. His voice strange. So was the look in his eyes, glassy yet intense.
    No, she would not have this! She threw her arms around his neck and went up on her toes and pressed her cheek to his. He held himself rigid. Would he not embrace her? Shocked, she pulled her head back. “Owen, are you ill?”
    His glassy look dissolved in a faint film of tears. He gathered her in his arms and pulled her close. He held her so tightly she could scarcely breathe. “No,” he murmured shakily. “Not ill.”
    She felt a tremor run through his body. She suddenly realized: the formal greeting, the rigid stance—it was to clamp his emotions inside, to forbid himself any show of weakness after his ordeal. Kate’s tears spilled. From love, from pity. Then, quickly, before she could speak any more of her heart, she let him go. She must not undermine his effort. Must not unman him.
    Swiping away her tears, she looked at his shorn scalp and forced a wry smile. “I cannot say I like this new fashion.” She ran her hand over his head and shivered at the stubble sharp as pins.
    He matched her half smile. “Less of a handhold for lice.”
    Warmth rushed through her at his jest. This was the Owen she knew and loved!
    His eyes flicked to the young man selling the willow crucifixes a stone’s throw away, then back to Kate, a clear warning. He said very quietly, eyes still fixed on her, “A disciple of Campion.”
    Edmund Campion, executed last year, the most famous of the priests secretly sent by the Jesuit order in Rome to preach defiance of the Queen. To Catholics, he was a martyr. To Protestants, a traitor. Kate understood what Owen was telling her. We’re being watched.
    â€œYou?” she asked quietly. He suspects you?
    He shook his head. “You.”
    She was not surprised. Because of Father. Yet still, it stung.
    â€œAh, wife,” he said, his voice suddenly loud and sorrowful, loud enough for the spy to hear, “a prison is a grave for burying men alive. It is a little world of woe.”
    His theatrical words were deliberate, Kate knew—a poetic lament that might be expected from a playwright, for until a year ago that was