The Traitor's Daughter (2 page)

Its brash, brawling exuberance had always enthralled her, even as a child. She had been born the year after Queen Elizabeth's coronation and had spent her childhood here in the springtime of Elizabeth's reign. At nine Kate had been torn from England by her mother and her exile had lasted four years. Now, she loved her homeland fiercely, as only an exile can.

She caught the sweet scent of apples drifting from an orchard. Autumn was nearing, and the shortening of days. The harvest would soon be over. In manors throughout England bailiffs would be making out the accounts for the year. Here in London the law courts would mark the beginning of the Michaelmas term.

London Bridge loomed ahead, near enough now that its four-story shops and houses, crammed close together, blocked the sun. Kate looked up at windows where the last candles and lanterns were going out. A flock of sheep on the Southwark side bawled as the farmer waited for the drawbridge to be lifted. The gatehouses on either end of the bridge were closed every night. This was the city's only viaduct, so city-bound travelers who did not make it across in time had to spend the night in one of Southwark's unsavory inns. Southwark was Kate's destination.

The bawling of the sheep was drowned out by the din of water rushing between the bridge's twenty stone arches. There, each tide created a dangerous rapids. When watermen on the roiling water jetted between arches they called it “shooting the bridge.” Kate remembered the thrill of it one brisk spring day when she was a child. Her father, a ship owner and an expert sailor all his life, had taken her and Robert in a boat from Paul's Stairs out to his ship moored off the customs house, and on their way they shot the bridge. Rollicking through the tunnelled arch like a cork in a whirlpool, Kate had squealed in delight, her father holding her hand and grinning, but little Robert sat gripping the gunwale, big-eyed, rigid with fear. He did look rather comical, and Kate and her father had shared a laugh. That carefree time seemed so long ago—before her father became Baron Thornleigh, and long before Kate could ever have imagined the chasm that separated them now. The chasm that had opened with her husband's arrest.

A ghastly sight jerked her out of her thoughts: the heads impaled on the bridge's gatepost. Traitors' heads.

Anger streaked through her, a sad fury that this normal bustle of daily life and commerce around her masked the deep anxiety of Londoners, of all the English people. A struggle for England's soul held the country in a death grip. It was a struggle that had turned friend against friend, parent against child, twisting her countrymen's honest passions into hatred and fear. The first blast had come from Rome with the pope's declaration that it would be no sin for any Catholic to kill Queen Elizabeth. Since then Her Majesty's government had kept up a relentless search for radicals. Assassination plots had been thwarted. Missionary priests preaching allegiance to the pope above the Queen had been captured and hanged. The government's position was rigid, implacable. To be a Catholic in England was to be a traitor.

Kate felt equally implacable as she gazed up at the grisly, withered heads. The blithe springtime of Elizabeth's reign was over.

Shifting her position on the seat, she heard the rustle of the paper in her cloak pocket. The letter from old Master Prowse. A voice from those happy long-gone days would cheer her, she thought. She pulled it out and opened it. It read:

So, he did not know she was married. He must have sent the letter to her father's house and there the boy had been redirected to Lady Thornleigh's. She read on:

Kate looked up with a gasp. Robert—back in England! A physician! She read on hungrily:

“Cock Alley Stairs, my lady,” the wherryman announced.

Kate looked up. They were approaching the wave-splashed steps on the Southwark shore.

 

Southwark was the squalid side of the Thames, known for its unsavory haunts. The Marshalsea prison was minutes south of the river. Making her way along Bankside, Kate could not stop thinking of Robert. What joyful news! She longed to see him. Would she even recognize him? He'd been a child when they'd been separated and he was now a man of twenty! Curiosity burned in her to know about their mother, too. Where had the two of them lived all these years?
How
had they lived? She thanked God that Robert had broken away, had come home, and she was eager to assure him that he could rely on her for whatever help she could give. And yet, what help was that? She had no influence with their father. And a reunion with her might even
worsen
Robert's position. Should she simply let him be? Leave him “in peace” as he'd asked Master Prowse, to make his way alone? That felt heartless—and not at all what she wanted. But which course was better for
him?

At St. Saviour's church she turned south onto the main street. It was strewn with refuse. She sidestepped a scummy heap of cabbage leaves and bones. A skinny dog trotted past her toward the bones. Alehouses, dilapidated inns, and brothels lined both sides. Stewhouses, Londoners called the brothels. The Bishop of Winchester, whose riverside palace was the grandest structure in Southwark, was responsible for maintaining law and order in the area, and because he licensed the prostitutes they were known as Winchester Geese. Kate glanced up at a weathered balcony where a woman in flimsy dress was brushing her hair with tired strokes, her eyes closed to enjoy the sun's warmth on her face.
A weary goose,
Kate thought with a twinge of sympathy as she walked on. A kite flapping its wings above the Tabard Inn descended into an elm tree and alighted on its nest of scavenged shreds of rags. A beast bellowed from the far eastern end of the street. The bear pits and bull pits there regularly drew afternoon crowds.

Kate knew the area. As children she and Robert had come with their father to the yearly Southwark Fair. Again, Robert and memories of those carefree days filled her thoughts. The fair had been such fun, a boisterous event attended by large crowds, both lowborn and high, who came to marvel at the tightrope acrobats and dancing monkeys, to eat and drink too much and, if they were not careful, to have their pockets picked. Now, a bulbous-nosed man lounging in a doorway leered at Kate as she passed. She picked up her pace. Thieves abounded here. Many ended up in one of Southwark's prisons: the Clink, King's Bench, the Borough Compter, the Marshalsea. Conditions in all were appalling, even for the wealthy who paid to live in the Masters section separated from those in the Commons, but Kate feared that the Marshalsea was the worst. Its inmates were entirely at the mercy of the Knight Marshal's deputy. While the master's side had forty to fifty private rooms for rent, Owen had had to endure the common side, nine small rooms into which over three hundred people were locked up from dusk until dawn. It made her shudder.

“Penny for the poor prisoners, my lady?” An earnestly smiling man in shabby clerical black held out his hand for an offering. All prisoners had to pay for their own food, so without charity the poorest often starved. Churchmen begged coins to buy them bread. This fellow, though, looked to Kate more pirate than prelate. The donations he weaseled would likely go to buy himself grog. She ignored him and carried on, but with a knot of dread tightening her stomach. She had paid the marshal's deputy every month to supply her husband with food, but had that food reached him?

She turned the corner at the Queen's Head Inn and the Marshalsea rose before her. Two long mismatched buildings, the gray stone walls slimed with black, the brick ones crumbling in places after more than a century of neglect. The arched double gates of wood were closed, and a small crowd of twenty or so men and women stood waiting for them to open. Kate had made it—the bell of St. Saviour's had not yet chimed eight. Though the gates were a solid barrier, a stench seeped out like swamp fog. A scabby-faced girl hawked rabbit pasties, to no takers. An 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.

“You?” she asked quietly.
He suspects you?

He shook his head. “You.”