The Golden Cross Read Online Free PDF

fourteenth year, Cory had decided that he and his family would flee to Batavia, a more settled and less dangerous colony than the wilds of Virginia. Loyalty to the Crown had lured many Londoners to Virginia, but Cory and Lili were Irish, and felt no particular affection for King Charles.
    And so they had boarded a ship … and her father had died a month after they left England behind. With only a trunk and the clothes upon their bodies, Aidan and her mother had been set ashore at Batavia, left to find their own way in the world.
    Well, Lili had found hers, Aidan mused. She turned and leaned her head against the cold wall, where the rough planking prickled her cheek. Despite her protestations, Lili seemed to actually find fulfillment in her role as guardian of the young women who came to Batavia and found themselves in a desperate situation. The tavern was a sort of life raft for women who were uprooted, displaced, or evicted from their former places in society. With no other means of survival, they assumed working nicknames and entered the peculiar wharf-world, where outcasts catered to the needs of seamen far away from home. As brutal and degrading as life in the tavern was, it was far better than starving in the streets.
    And life was not completely hard. Aidan knew her motherheld a certain fondness for Bram. She also took pride in her reputation as the tavern hostess, especially when sailors first arrived in port and walked into the tavern demanding to meet the famous Lady Lili.
    But Aidan was not like her mother. Not much like her father, either, though the passage of six years had clouded her memories of him. He had been an outgoing sort, quick with a joke and of a ready wit, with an Irishman’s love of poetry and song. But though he had no ties to English aristocracy, Cory O’Connor was a gentleman descended from the ruling O’Connors of Ireland, a man who would have been readily accepted into almost any house in London. Even an artist like Schuyler Van Dyck would have touched the brim of his hat in respect as he passed by Cory O’Connor, for he was respectable, a decent man with a fine reputation.
    “Respectable,” Aidan murmured, raking her sleep-touseled hair from her forehead. Respectability was the thing she missed most. No one had looked at her in pity or aversion in London. No one had crossed to the other side of the street as she approached. The fine ladies of Batavia, however, scattered like rats on those rare occasions she happened to leave the immediate area of the wharf and venture into the city beyond.
    Once, at sixteen, she’d left the wharf and encountered the most terrifying nightmare of her life. She was arrested by one of the sheriff’s constables and ordered to serve in the workhouse—and all because Aidan had picked up a child’s fallen purse and tried to give it back. The child’s mother had taken one look at Aidan’s worn dress and flowing hair, then clutched her child to her and screamed for the
baljuwen
. The constable who answered her cry was not one of those assigned to the wharf, and therefore paid to ignore the petty crimes that only injured outsiders. He grasped Aidan by the arm and took her to the workhouse, where she was assigned a mandatory six-week sentence for thieving.
    The workhouse, designed to turn idlers, beggars, and other assorted ne’er-do-wells into industrious members of society, onlyserved to humiliate Aidan. For fourteen hours each day she performed whatever menial labor was assigned her—mostly cutting and binding sheaves of straw which would become brooms for industrious Dutch housewives—while the
ziekentrooster
, or curate of souls, recited daily prayers, catechisms, and instruction in the rudiments of the faith from a lectern in the front of the workroom. For this mindless, grueling work she earned eight and a half stuivers a day, a meager wage that might buy her a loaf of white bread when it was offered on Saturday. But by far the worst aspect of the