The Traitor's Daughter (7 page)

“Stop!” Thornleigh bellowed. “I want him alive!”

Lundy, obeying, hauled on his reins. With a scowl he turned his mount in a tight circle that brought him back to his original position.

The gunman straightened, saved.

“Shoot any of my men, though,” Thornleigh growled, positioning his sword at a threatening slant, “and your head will leave your shoulders the next minute. Lower your weapon, I say. You shall not pass.”

A wild look swept the man's face. It seemed to Kate more like delirium than despair. He spoke in a strangled voice, but his eyes were shining. “Nor shall
you
pass, my lord. I'll send your stinking soul to hell!” He aimed the pistol at him with arm outstretched and cried, “And God will enfold me to His breast!”

Kate's breath stopped. The gun barrel was pointing straight at her father's head. He stiffened, but only to straighten himself in dignity for death. The horrified onlookers made not a sound.

Kate lunged for the nearest bundle of faggots and yanked out a stick. She whipped the mare's reins from the post and with the stick she stabbed its rump. The mare bounded forward in terror and skittered toward the gunman. Lurching, he fumbled the pistol. It fell and clattered at his feet.

In an instant Captain Lundy galloped to him, snatched his collar, and twisted him around like a weather vane as Lundy turned his horse and halted.

Cheers rang out from the crowd.

Thornleigh stared at Kate in surprise. She looked quickly from him to the prisoner to make sure he had not retrieved his pistol. Her father blinked as though recalled to the business at hand. He trotted his mount to Lundy, who still had hold of the disarmed prisoner, and gave him orders to escort the captive to the sheriff of London. Lundy gestured to his men and six horsemen fell in to surround the prisoner.

People swarmed Thornleigh, cheering him and calling his name. A girl fainted. A woman dashed out of a goldsmith's shop calling, “My lord!” and offered him up a goblet of wine. He barely acknowledged the cheers, looking almost angry as his dark eyes turned back to Kate. This time she did not look away. He waved aside the wine and turned to one of his lieutenants. “Harper, move these people on.”

“Aye, my lord.”

The lieutenant barked at the crowd, and Thornleigh coaxed his stallion through them toward Kate. People were already dispersing. The owner of the wagon of firewood climbed aboard and called to his mule with a snap of the reins. The wagon creaked into motion. On the Southwark side a farmer with a small flock of sheep held up by the crisis now drove his flock across. The business of the bridge resumed.

Thornleigh reached his daughter, his expression still stormy. “Kate.”

“Father.”

“How come you to be here?” The steeliness in his voice sounded like suspicion. His eyes flicked to the departing prisoner, then back to her in clear mistrust.

Kate realized how bad it looked, that she had turned up in the very spot the gunman had bolted to in the hope of escape.
He thinks I might be implicated.
Resentment swelled in her.
How can he trust me so little?
“I heard the commotion,” she answered steadily. “I came, like all these people, to see what was amiss.”

“Came from where?”

“Chaloner's. On an errand for my lady grandmother.” The bookbinder's shop on Thames Street was well-known. Kate had in fact taken Chaloner an order only yesterday. The lie, she hoped, would serve.

The hard expression on her father's face melted, and a sad smile took its place. “She tells me you have been a great help in organizing her library.”

“It is my pleasure to help her, sir. She has been kind to me.”

Their eyes locked. Kate knew how unforgiving her words sounded. She had not intended such a blatant accusation. Or had she? His stand in barring her and Owen from his house was an open wound that stung. Yet in her deepest heart she did not blame him. He knew nothing about her secret work, nor Owen's. To him her husband was a convicted Catholic and therefore a threat to Elizabeth. And no man was more loyal to Elizabeth than he was. How could Kate not admire that? Keeping her secret from her father was the hardest thing she had ever done.

Sheep bawled as they passed. Thornleigh swung down from his mount and drew the stallion out of the sheep's path. Here, under the painted sign of a glover's shop, he and Kate were clear of the traffic of carts and people on foot. She watched him as he adjusted the reins in his gauntleted hands. She had always thought of her father as a handsome, hardy man and he was still as fit as a man half his age, but it struck her now that his cares had taken their toll. His dark hair was swept back from his forehead the way he'd worn it for as long as she could remember, but the silver streaks at his temples had widened to swathes and the laugh lines around his eyes had deepened and lost their mirth.

He looked at her. “Thank you,” he said awkwardly. “I believe you saved my life.” He was clearly flustered, as though realizing how absurd his previous moment of suspicion had been.

She said quietly, “As you once saved mine.” She remembered the searing heat of the Brussels house burning around her, the flames, her terror, then her father suddenly lifting her in his arms and rushing her to safety. All her love for him forged in those childhood days came welling up again.

“A father's duty,” he replied. In another man's mouth the words might have sounded cold. Duty, not love? But Kate recognized that warm timbre in his voice. He could no more hide his affection for her than he could take up arms against his queen. She heard something more, too. His anguish at how he'd had to leave his other child behind. Robert. Kate felt the same anguish every time she remembered the smoke and flames separating her from her terrified little brother.

The news burst back into her mind: Robert was back in England. She wanted to tell her father. Wanted to give him that comfort. But Master Prowse's letter had made it clear that her brother was living under another name and wanted none of his family to know he was back. Certainly, he would be suspect if his true identity became known.
But not by me!
she thought with a fierce rush of sympathy. How brave of Robert to break free of their mother and return to make a new life! She longed to visit him, embrace him, offer her support—even, perhaps, persuade him to contact their father in the hope of a reconciliation, but for now she had to honor his wish and keep it to herself. It deepened her misery at the strained relationship with her father.
I am as shut out from Father's life as if iron bars stood between us.
She felt a prisoner of her secrets.

“I must go,” he said, looking in the direction his men had taken the captive. “Must see Martin. I want to be there for the interrogation.”

Sir Richard Martin, the sheriff of London. He would take custody of the gunman. “Who is he?” she asked. “The prisoner.”

He looked at her, this time without a flicker of suspicion. She blessed him for that. “We don't know yet.”

“Was he acting alone?”

“Don't know that, either. Which is why I want to hear him interrogated.”

And tortured if he does not talk, Kate thought. The Queen's men were not gentle. She wanted to ask more about the gunman—Where had he been flushed out? Was her father sure no accomplices had fled the scene?—and she was trying to think how to pose these questions to sound like an ordinary citizen. He'd said he had to go, but had made no move to leave.

“Kate,” he said, anxiety clouding his face. “Is it not today that he'll be released? Your—” He took a breath as though to gird himself to utter the word. “Your husband.”

So, he'd been counting the days as she had! But with the opposite agenda. A knot tightened in her stomach. She dreaded rehashing their quarrel. But there was no hiding the facts. “He was. This morning.”

Hope sparked in his eyes. “You did not go? You have not seen him?”

“Yes, I met him. But he had business to attend to. I will join him at my lady grandmother's house.”

He gripped her elbow and said with sudden fervor. “Don't. I beg you. Don't.”

Wincing, she slid her arm from his hand. It was not his grip that caused her pain, it was hearing his entreaty again. Since Owen's arrest she and her father had battled this out, over and over, until the chasm between them had become too wide to close.

“Kate, come home. I have missed you.”

She looked away. The affection in his voice caused her agony. She said, with all the control she could muster, “I cannot.”

“You can, and you should. If not for my sake, for your stepmother's. She misses you, too. She is still not well, you know. The best medicine for Fenella would be to have you home.”

That was cruel! Her spirited stepmother had always been her friend. And Kate's heart had bled at the news of her latest miscarriage. Her father's second marriage was barren. “Please, tell her she is in my prayers.”

“Tell her yourself,” he urged. “Your place is with us. Come home.”

“A wife's place is with her husband.”

“Not when the husband is a criminal. Possibly a traitor.”

“He is not a—”

“You don't know
what
he is. You married him in haste. You did not know his true character, nor what he might be mixed up in.”

Grandmother said the same thing,
Kate thought. She burned to tell him how wrong he was, how Owen was risking his life to protect the Queen and the realm.
It is you who do not know him!
But she could say none of this. She was sworn to secrecy.

Her pained silence seemed to encourage her father. “But now you've had time to think,” he said, his hope clear. “Six months. And in that time what has
he
done? Consorted with the most militant, most remorseless Catholics in the Marshalsea.”

“You have spies there?” She was shocked despite herself. She should have known.

“Listen to me, Kate. Sever yourself from him. Right now. No one will blame you. You will not be the first wife to leave a criminal spouse.”

“Hear
me,
sir. I will never desert my husband.” She checked her anger, and softened her voice. “Surely you can understand that, you who are so devoted to your wife. You would never desert
her.
”

He looked taken aback, then scowled. She realized in horror the meaning he had taken from her words: that he had deserted his first wife, Kate's mother, and divorced her. Nothing could have been further from Kate's mind, but there was no going back—so she plunged ahead. “Father, I
do
know the man I married. He is a good man and I love him. Please, in the name of love, won't you open your house to him, and open your heart?”

But his face had closed like a door. “I have been patient. When you married a common actor—”

“Playwright.”

“When you married him,” he went on implacably, “I was willing to help him for your sake. I was about to gift him with a manor to set him up. But then he showed how beneath my trust he is. Caught red-handed at a secret mass. And now, consorting with radical Catholics. I ask you one last time. Will you come to your senses and leave this man?”

“Father—”

He raised his hands to forestall her reply. “Do not answer until you know the consequences. You are childless so far, and that is a blessing. But if you return to this man's bed, everything between us changes. I cannot—I will not—bequeath my fortune to the spawn of a Catholic felon.”

She stared at him, incredulous. This was so vile, so utterly beneath him. Anger made her lash out. “Ah yes, your preferred solution, cutting out family. You divorced my mother and disowned my brother, and now you threaten me? At this rate, sir,” she snapped, “beware you don't end your days alone.”

Steel flashed in his eyes. He quickly controlled his fury, but it rang out in his cold, steady command. “Sever yourself from your husband and come home, or from this moment you are dead to me.”

 

Sunset was a wash of harvest gold burnishing the rooftops and church towers of London when Robert reached Lincoln's Inn Fields outside the city walls. Two of these fields—Cup Field and Purse Field—had been a playground for students from nearby Lincoln's Inn for over a hundred years. They had once been leased as pasturage by the Ship Inn on Fleet Street, but had reverted to the Crown in the time of Queen Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, when their owners' estates had been seized.

The third field—Ficket's Field—lay to the south. Too close to London's constables and bailiffs for Robert to feel comfortable as he tethered his horse to an elm behind the Plough Inn, but Walter Townsend had named this as the meeting place. Townsend could not easily venture farther south than London from his home in East Anglia with his landholder father, Sir Thomas. Each of the six young men Robert was in contact with were keeping their heads down for now. That would all change, he thought eagerly, on the day they were called to action. The liberation of England. Then, Robert would lead this cohort of the faithful to ride north on their sacred mission. They would free the celestial Mary from Sheffield while King Philip's troops charged ashore, and Mary would claim her rightful place as England's monarch.

But that action lay frustratingly far in the future. Robert knew he had to focus on the here and now as he swung his booted foot over the stable's waist-high stone wall in an undignified sprawl of his legs, then clomped through horse shit in the stable yard. Water gurgled from a pipe in the shed to his left, no doubt the alewife's brewery. Starlings foraging in the field rose like a spray of black spindrift. Someone among the cottages across the field was noisily sawing wood.