Free Traitor Angels by Anne Blankman

skirts. Today I had donned black breeches, a shirt of white linen, a doublet of black wool, and riding boots. The clothes had belonged to one of Father’s students, from the time when he was a tutor and boarded pupils in his home, before my sisters and I were born. With my braid coiled beneath a broad-brimmed felt hat and the flowing lines of the shirt concealingthe swell of my bosom, I made a passable impression of a boy. I hoped.
    This was the first time I would test my disguise by daylight. For years I had crept at night from our row house in London, praying no one would see me as I darted across the road into Bunhill Fields to meet with Mr. Hade, one of Father’s former students and my fencing instructor. As far as I knew, no one ever had.
    During the year we had lived in Chalfont, I had continued my weapons training, slipping into the thicket of trees along the village outskirts where I strung sacks of straw from the branches and then attacked them. A pitiful substitute for combat with a flesh-and-blood person, but it couldn’t be helped; there was no one in Chalfont whom I trusted to fight me and maintain his silence, and Father insisted on absolute secrecy.
    “Lead the way,” Viviani said, taking his horse’s reins. “You said Oxford was a distance of fourteen leagues?”
    “Yes, a day’s hard riding at least, but since we’ll have to travel across the open countryside, the trip will probably take two days.” I had never been to Oxford, although my mother’s family hailed from the area. Indeed, I wouldn’t have ventured there of my own volition. During the civil war, Oxford had been a royalist stronghold, and my father’s name was one that its residents had cursed.
    “Come,” I said to him, pulling on the reins so my horse turned west. As our animals galloped across the fields, we left the rising sun behind us and raced toward a sky still black with night. I didn’t look back.

Eight
    OUR ROUTE WAS ROUGH AND MONOTONOUS, TAKING us across fields enclosed by hedges or avenues of trees. Of other travelers, we saw few: a handful of men on horseback, a couple of farmers driving a cart packed with chickens, and a stage-wagon crammed with poor riders who couldn’t afford their own carriages.
    When the noon sun beat mercilessly on our heads, we stopped in the shade of a tree to eat. Viviani fed the horses. Sitting cross-legged, I watched him through eyes slitted against the sun’s glare, puzzling over this stranger whom I had tied myself to.
    “Tell me about yourself.” The words whipped out like a command, and I blushed at how hard I sounded. How the devil was I supposed to talk to a boy? Mary would have known how, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of copying the way she laughed behind her hand or looked through her eyelashes.
    Viviani sat down beside me. “And what would you like to know, my lady?”
    “I’m not a lady.” Surely he was mocking me. I looked up, expecting to see a teasing smirk on his lips. But his face was calm as he picked up a linen-wrapped package of bread and cheese. “Tell me about your life in Florence.”
    “It’s a city that inflames your mind and bombards your senses as soon as you enter it.” Half-smiling, he rested his back against the tree. “Noise everywhere: street vendors shouting their wares of fruit and fish, carriage wheels rattling over paving stones, bells ringing from the dozens of churches. Wherever you look, there is bright color—red-tile roofs, olive-green shutters, the sumptuous clothing of fine ladies and gentlemen strolling past. I like to walk the Corso dei Tintori—the avenue of the cloth dyers,” he clarified, evidently forgetting I was well versed in his tongue. “They hang lengths of wool and silk from their windows, and when you walk beneath them, you can see them snapping in the breeze above your head, such an array of colors that your eyes are dazzled. And the smells! A combination of rich scents you can find nowhere else: cinnamon and