Read Online Martyr by Rory Clements - Free Book Online

screwlike grip. Cotton flinched. Piggott’s breath rasped and his coarse black beard, ill-covering his pox-pitted face, scoured Cotton’s cheek as he spoke low into his ear so that Plummer could not hear him, only Cotton.
    Tell our friend this, Father Cotton. Tell him Cogg. Cogg of Cow Lane outside the city wall by Smith Field. Cogg has what he desires, Father Cotton. Cogg will see our friend right.
    Again the proximity of this man made revulsion well up within Cotton, and he wrenched himself free. For a few moments the two men stood eye to eye, until Cotton looked away. He took his leave of Plummer, then left the cell and slammed the door hard without looking again at Piggott. A family of fat rats scuttled ahead as he followed the gaoler once more through the dank corridors to the great door. He was still shaking from his encounter with Piggott as the gaoler clapped him yet again with his giant’s hand and whispered conspiratorially, Pails with lids, Mr. Cotton. Pails with lids.
    He walked over the bridge into London, slipping and sliding through the icy, deserted streets. By the time he arrived at the riverside house where he lodged, he still felt uneasy. Piggott had worried him, and he did not like his message.
    For a few moments he waited at the end of Dowgate, near the Tower, looking around him back down the streets of tall houses with their leaded windows heavily curtained or shuttered. Only the merest flickerings of candlelight were visible. He was looking for movement and shadows, listening for footfalls. When he was sure he had not been followed, he went to a side door of the house and banged twice. The door was opened to him almost immediately and shut again the instant he stepped in.
    It was a large and very new wood-frame house, a work in progress but already part-occupied by its owner, Thomas Woode, a widower in his thirties, and his two young children, Andrew and Grace. Woode’s wife had died of consumption when Grace was little more than a year old and Andrew was three. Now they were four and six and the building of this house was his way of forgetting the past and forging a new future for the family.
    The children’s governess, Catherine Marvell, stood at the door. She was a slender creature with remarkable blue eyes, unblemished skin, and long dark hair, pulled back from her face. It was a face that was now fixed with a look of horror.
    Pax vobiscum , dear Catherine, Cotton said, and held her hands between his own. She was shivering. What is it?
    Have you not heard?
    Heard what, Catherine?
    She spoke low, though there was no one to hear. Blanche is dead, Father. Murdered.
    What?
    Catherine Marvell closed her eyes, as if she would blot out the imagined vision of Blanche that would not leave her mind. By Shoreditch Her body was found most horribly wounded in a burnt-out house. And then she whispered even lower, with urgency, They say she was with child, Father.
    He tried to hold her in his arms, to comfort her like a father would a daughter, but she backed away from him. Cotton understood. The touch of another human being is not always the best remedy for grief and horror. Lady Blanche? Who could or would have done such a thing to so beautiful and loving a woman? Cotton himself had brought her to the Holy Roman Church. Was this a cause of her death? She had never, as far as he knew, harmed a soul.
    They stood awkwardly in the entrance hallway, neither knowing how to deal with such news.
    He tried saying words to console her, but they sounded trite and unworthy. Still, he attempted to soothe her, though he wondered whether it was he that needed the soothing more. Cotton wanted to stroke Catherine’s long dark hair, but he feared his touch would be unwelcome. The Jesuit colleges had removed him from the physical world of human contact, and ofttimes he missed it, the touch of a hand or the brush of a cheek.
    She led him through to the hall, where logs were burning and crackling in a wide, stone-surround