The Secret of the Rose Read Online Free PDF Page A

suspicious or even interested when I’d told him I’d been sent to buy new clothing for my brother, who was just my height. Now I had breeches of thin brown wool and thick stockings that sagged at the knees and ankles, no matter how tightly I tried to fasten the garters. My own shoes, I thought, were no different from something a boy might wear. Over a plain linen shirt I pulled on a doublet of coarse russet kersey. It was not a wool my father would have allowed in his warehouse, and it was rough and harsh against my skin. I had ripped my old petticoat into strips and wrapped them tightly around my small breasts.
    Now I pulled my hair loose from its pins and gathered it together at the back of my neck. I stood for a long moment with Robin’s knife in my other hand.
    It was a crime I intended to commit, and a sin. I knew that well enough. And soon I would stand once more before my father; what would he say to see his only daughter looking like this?
    But as for crime, was I not already a criminal? And as for sin, I could only hope for forgiveness, since I had no other choice. That was something my father would understand.
    I set my teeth, closed my eyes, and sawed with my knife at the thick hank of hair until it was cut through. Then Idropped it to the ground. Let it lie there. Like my old life and even my old name, it was no part of me any longer.
    I picked up a flat, limp woolen cap, pulled it well down over my ears, and with my arms full of my old clothes, walked back toward the mouth of the alley to meet Robin. When I tapped him on the shoulder, he spun around, and his eyes widened until I thought they’d jump out of his head. “Rosalind,” he whispered, “thou lookst—”
    “Peace!” I hissed at him. “Dost want someone to hear?” I could hardly count up all the laws we were breaking at the moment, and we had no need to call attention to ourselves. “Thou’lt have to call me something else,” I told Robin. “Call me—” Names tumbled through my mind. “Call me Richard.” A plain, simple, commonplace name, unremarkable. No one would think twice about it, if the saints smiled upon us.
    As we walked, I shivered and hugged my armful of clothing tightly. How strange it felt not to have the drag of heavy skirts behind me at each step, the tug of cloth at my waist. My head, relieved of the weight of my hair, seemed light enough to float off into the sky. I was as bare, as vulnerable, as a coney in the midst of a shorn field, with no cover from the dogs or the hunter’s bow.
    Surely every eye would be on me, on my legs, bare except for the thin layer of stockings, on the white skin atthe back of my neck. Surely they would be able to tell, the instant they looked at me, that I was an illusion, a lie walking on two legs.
    But then, hadn’t I been that all my life?
    When we left the second draper’s shop, we were richer by the price of a red bodice and skirt, an embroidered smock, a pair of fine knit stockings, and Robin’s green doublet. We bought him a simpler one of shabby blue kersey to replace it, which still left our purse some few shillings heavier.
    It was not wealth, nothing compared to what had been stolen from us yesterday. But it would buy bread for a few days at least. Perhaps by the end of that time we would have found some work we could do, something simple but honest, enough to keep us from starvation.
    Robin tugged impatiently at the neck of his new doublet. “Can we go now to see Father?” he demanded, as if I had been delaying us on purpose. When I nodded, he set off eagerly along the street. “Wait!” I called after him. “We must ask—”
    At that moment, a man came tearing around the corner at a dead run and knocked us both sprawling.

CHAPTER THREE
    AUGUST 1592
    I found myself flat on the cobblestones with a man’s full weight on top of me and a frantic voice cursing in my ear: “God’s blood, bones, body, and fingernails!” If I had not had all the air crushed out of my lungs