Free The Traitor's Daughter by Barbara Kyle

wares, making the most of the sudden increase in potential customers. Housewives, servants, gentlemen, shopkeepers—all were cheerfully chattering, common folk and gentlefolk alike enjoying the festive mood.
    In gaps between houses Kate saw sunlight silvering the river and caught the fishy reek of the mudflats as she approached the Old Swan Stairs. There she would take a wherry back to her grandmother’s house and wait for Owen. He had left the alehouse before her, gone to buy a horse for his journey to Sussex.
    â€œThere’s no need to buy one,” Kate had told him. “Take a mount from my grandmother’s stables. I told you, she has accepted you.”
    â€œFor your sake,” he had said pointedly.
    â€œIt’s the same thing.”
    â€œNo, Kate, it’s not. You are her kin. I am charity. And I will not beg.” He patted his doublet where the purse of gold from Matthew lay inside and said with a wry smile, “I’ll visit a bathhouse and barber, too, and a tailor. When Her Ladyship sets eyes on me I shall be presentable, if not transformed.”
    He had said the last words lightly, with a twinkle in his eye and an actor’s flourish of his hand, but Kate knew the truth: Owen hated being without money. Playwriting had hardly paid him enough to maintain his modest house on Monkwell Street, even when he had let out rooms to lodgers. The house was gone now, sold to pay the huge recusancy fine at his arrest. All that, of course—the arrest and fine, the house sale, his incarceration—had been to build the cover for him that he and Matthew had devised, but even when Matthew reimbursed him for the fine he would still be far from well-off. As the fourth son of a Bristol magistrate he’d been given only enough funds to pay for his Oxford education, not to set him up in life.
    Kate thought of the first time she had seen him, during the applause for a performance of his play The Prosperous Apprentice at a playhouse called The Theatre just outside London’s wall. She had come with her cousin Nicolas Valverde, who had acquaintances in this exotic theater world. From their gallery seats Nicolas had pointed out to her the playwright below chatting with friends among the groundlings. Kate’s eyes had taken their fill of the dashing, lanky form and the devil-may-care smile, the tousled black hair and self-assured swagger, but she had also noted his plain serge doublet worn almost threadbare at the elbows and the boots so worn the leather was cracked. The thought had sprung upon her that Owen Lyon was exactly the kind of clever but impoverished young man Matthew had asked her to be on the lookout for: well-educated, open to adventure, and able to move easily between social levels. A playwright, she reasoned, would have a foot in two worlds, the highborn one of his theater company’s patron, the Earl of Leicester, and the shadowy world of actors, masterless men who had empty pockets, but plenty of energy, wit, and verve. Daring to take a risk, she had asked Nicolas to introduce her. And in that moment of meeting, when Owen Lyon’s smiling eyes had fallen on her, she had known the heart-stopping truth of what poets call love at first sight. He had felt it, too, he told her later—a lightning bolt to his heart, he’d said. Kate’s gamble had borne thrilling fruit. She had not only recruited him for the Crown; six months later she had married him.
    But she had not anticipated the fire of ambition she had ignited in him alongside his fire for her. In those six months Matthew had sent him on an intelligence mission to Paris, where Owen had contacts among lawyers at the English embassy, friends from his Oxford days. He had thrown himself into cultivating acquaintances with French officials and reporting any information that concerned threats to England, and had quickly become one of Matthew’s most valuable agents. But he wanted more than the occasional